Dreams Underfoot: A Newford Collection (39 page)

And then I wake up, back home again.

I lie there in my bed and look out the window, but it’s still the dark of the moon in our world. The streets are quiet outside, there’s a hush over the whole city, and I’m lying here with a hazel twig in my hand, a stone in my mouth, pushed up into one cheek, and a warm burning glow deep inside.

I sit up and spit the stone out into my hand. I walk over to the window. I’m not in some magical dream now; I’m in the real world. I know the lighted moon glows with light borrowed from the sun. That she’s still out there in the dark of the moon, we just can’t see her tonight because the earth is between her and the sun.

Or maybe she’s gone into some other world, to replenish her lantern before she begins her nightly trek across the sky once more.

I feel like I’ve learned something, but I’m not sure what. I’m not sure what any of it means.

11

“How can you say that?” Jilly said. “God, Sophie, it’s so obvious. She really
was
your mother and you really
did
save her. As for Jeck, he was the bird you rescued in your first dream. Jeck Crow—don’t you get it? One of the bad guys, only you won him over with an act of kindness. It all makes perfect sense.”

Sophie slowly shook her head. “I suppose I’d like to believe that, too,” she said, “but what we want and what really is aren’t always the same thing.”

“But what about Jeck? He’ll be waiting for you. And Granny Weather? They both knew you were the Moon’s daughter all along. It all means something.”

Sophie sighed. She stroked the sleeping cat on her lap, imagining for a moment that it was the soft dark curls of a crow that could be a man, in a land that only existed in her dreams.

“I guess,” she said, “it means I need a new boyfriend.”

12

July’s a real sweetheart, and I love her dearly, but she’s naive in some ways. Or maybe it’s just that she wants to play the ingenue. She’s always so ready to believe anything that anyone tells her, so long as it’s magical.

Well, I believe in magic, too, but it’s the magic that can turn a caterpillar into a butterfly, the natural wonder and beauty of the world that’s all around me. I can’t believe in some dreamland being real. I can’t believe what Jilly now insists is true: that I’ve got faerie blood, because I’m the daughter of the Moon.

Though I have to admit that I’d like to.

I never do get to sleep that night. I prowl around the apartment, drinking coffee to keep me awake.

I’m afraid to go to sleep, afraid I’ll dream and that it’ll all be real.

Or maybe that it won’t.

When it starts to get light, I take a long cold shower, because I’ve been thinking about Jeck again. I guess if my making the wrong decision in a dream would’ve had ramifications in the waking world, then there’s no reason that a rampaging libido shouldn’t carry over as well.

I get dressed in some old clothes I haven’t worn in years, just to try to recapture a more innocent time. White blouse, faded jeans, and hightops with this smoking jacket overtop that used to belong to my dad. It’s made of burgundy velvet with black satin lapels. A black hat, with a flat top and a bit of a curl to its brim, completes the picture.

I look in the mirror and I feel like I’m auditioning to be a stage magician’s assistant, but I don’t much care.

As soon as the hour gets civilized, I head over to Christy Riddell’s house. I’m knocking on his door at nine o’clock, but when he comes to let me in, he’s all sleepy-eyed and disheveled and I realize that I should’ve given him another couple of hours. Too late for that now.

I just come right out with it. I tell him that Jilly said he knew all about lucid dreaming and what I want to know is, is any of it real—the place you dream of, the people you meet there?

He stands there in the doorway, blinking like an owl, but I guess he’s used to stranger things, because after a moment he leans against the door jamb and asks me what I know about consensual reality.

It’s where everything that we see around us only exists because we all agree it does, I say.

Well, maybe it’s the same in a dream, he replies. If everyone in the dream agrees that what’s around them is real, then why shouldn’t it be?

I want to ask him about what my dad had to say about dreams trying to escape into the waking world, but I decide I’ve already pushed my luck.

Thanks, I say.

He gives me a funny look. That’s it? he asks.

I’ll explain it some other time, I tell him.

Please do, he says without a whole lot of enthusiasm, then goes back inside.

When I get home, I go and lie down on the old sofa that’s out on my balcony. I close my eyes. I’m still not so sure about any of this, but I figure it can’t hurt to see if Jeck and I can’t find ourselves one of those happily-ever-afters with which fairy tales usually end.

Who knows? Maybe I really am the daughter of the Moon. If not here, then someplace.

In The House Of My Enemy

We have not inherited the earth from our fathers, we are borrowing it from our children.

—
Native American saying

1

The past scampers like an alleycat through the present, leaving the pawprints of memories scattered helter-skelter—here ink is smeared on a page, there lies an old photograph with a chewed corner, elsewhere still, a nest has been made of old newspapers, the headlines running one into the other to make strange declarations. There is no order to what we recall, the wheel of time follows no straight line as it turns in our heads. In the dark attics of our minds, all times mingle, sometimes literally.

I get so confused. I’ve been so many people; some I didn’t like at all. I wonder that anyone could.

Victim, hooker, junkie, liar, thief But without them, I wouldn’t be who I am today. I’m no one special, but I like who I am, lost childhood and all.

Did I have to be all those people to become the person I am today? Are they still living inside me, hiding in some dark corner of my mind, waiting for me to slip and stumble and fall and give them life again?

I tell myself not to remember, but that’s wrong, too. Not remem-bering makes them stronger.

2

The morning sun came in through the window of Jilly Copper-corn’s loft, playing across the features of her guest. The girl was still asleep on the Murphy bed, sheets all tangled around her skinny limbs, pulled tight and smooth over the rounded swell of her abdo-men. Sleep had gentled her features. Her hair clouded the pillow around her head. The soft morning sunlight gave her a Madonna quality, a nimbus ofBotticelli purity that the harsher light of the later day would steal away once she woke.

She was fifteen years old. And eight months pregnant.

Jilly sat in the windowseat, feet propped up on the sill, sketchpad on her lap. She caught the scene in charcoal, smudging the lines with the pad of her middle finger to soften them. On the fire escape outside, a stray cat climbed up the last few metal steps until it was level with where she was sitting and gave a plaintive meow.

Jilly had been expecting the black and white tabby. She reached under her knees and picked up a small plastic margarine container filled with dried kibbles, which she set down on the fire escape in front of the cat. As the tabby contentedly crunched its breakfast, Jilly returned to her portrait.

“My name’s Annie,” her guest had told her last night when she stopped Jilly on Yoors Street just a few blocks south of the loft. “Could you spare some change? I really need to get some decent food. It’s not so much for me ....”

She put her hand on the swell of her stomach as she spoke. Jilly had looked at her, taking in the stringy hair, the ragged clothes, the unhealthy color of her complexion, the too-thin body that seemed barely capable of sustaining the girl herself, little say nourishing the child she carried.

“Are you all on your own?” Jilly asked.

The girl nodded.

Jilly put her arm around the girl’s shoulder and steered her back to the loft. She let her take a shower while she cooked a meal, gave her a clean smock to wear, and tried not to be patronizing while she did it all.

The girl had lost enough dignity as it was and Jilly knew that dignity was almost as hard to recover as innocence. She knew all too well.

3

Stolen Childhood,
by Sophie Etoile. Copperplate engraving. Five Coyotes Singing Studio,
Newford, 1988.

A child in a ragged dress stands in front of a ramshackle farmhouse. In one hand she holds a
doll—a stick with a ball stuck in one end and a skirt on the other. She wears a lost expression,
holding the doll as though she doesn’t quite know what to do with it.

A shadowed figure stands behind the screen door, watching her.

I guess I was around three years old when my oldest brother started molesting me. That’d make him eleven. He used to touch me down between my legs while my parents were out drinking or sobering up down in the kitchen. I tried to fight him off, but I didn’t really know that what he was doing was wrong—even when he started to put his cock inside me.

I was eight when my mother walked in on one of his rapes and you know what she did? She walked right out again until my brother was finished and we both had our clothes on again. She waited until he’d left the room, then she came back in and started screaming at me.

“You little slut! Why are you doing this to your own brother?”

Like it was my fault. Like I
wanted
him to rape me. Like the three-year-old I was when he started molesting me had any idea about what he was doing.

I think my other brothers knew what was going on all along, but they never said anything about it—they didn’t want to break that macho code-of-honor bullshit. When my dad found out about, he beat the crap out of my brother, but in some ways it just got worse after that.

My brother didn’t molest me anymore, but he’d glare at me all the time, like he was going to pay me back for the beating he got soon as he got a chance. My mother and my other brothers, every time I’d come into a room, they’d all just stop talking and look at me like I was some kind of bug.

I think at first my dad wanted to do something to help me, but in the end he really wasn’t any better than my mother. I could see it in his eyes: he blamed me for it, too. He kept me at a distance, never came close to me anymore, never let me feel like I was normal.

He’s the one who had me see a psychiatrist. I’d have to go and sit in his office all alone, just a little kid in this big leather chair. The psychiatrist would lean across his desk, all smiles and smarmy under-standing, and try to get me to talk, but I never told him a thing. I didn’t trust him. I’d already learned that I couldn’t trust men. Couldn’t trust women either, thanks to my mother. Her idea of working things out was to send me to confession, like the same God who let my brother rape me was now going to make everything okay so long as I owned up to seducing him in the first place.

What kind of a way is that for a kid to grow up?

4

“F

9)

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I let my brother ...

5

Dilly laid her sketchpad aside when her guest began to stir. She swung her legs down so that they dangled from the windowsill, heels banging lightly against the wall, toes almost touching the ground. She pushed an unruly lock of hair from her brow, leaving behind a charcoal smudge on her temple.

Small and slender, with pixie features and a mass of curly dark hair, she looked almost as young as the girl on her bed. Jeans and sneakers, a dark T-shirt and an oversized peach-colored smock only added to her air of slightness and youth. But she was halfway through her thirties, her own teenage years long gone; she could have been Annie’s mother.

“What were you doing?” Annie asked as she sat up, tugging the sheets up around herself.

“Sketching you while you slept. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Can I see?”

Jilly passed the sketchpad over and watched Annie study it. On the fire escape behind her, two more cats had joined the black and white tabby at the margarine container. One was an old alleycat, its left ear ragged and torn, ribs showing like so many hills and valleys against the matted landscape of its fur. The other belonged to an upstairs neighbor; it was making its usual morning rounds.

“You made me look a lot better than I really am,” Annie said finally.

Jilly shook her head. “I only drew what was there.”

“Yeah, right.”

Jilly didn’t bother to contradict her. The self-worth speech would keep.

“So is this how you make your living?” Annie asked. “Pretty well. I do a little waitressing on the side.”

“Beats being a hooker, I guess.”

She gave Jilly a challenging look as she spoke, obviously anticipat-ing a reaction.

Jilly only shrugged. “Tell me about it,” she said.

Annie didn’t say anything for a long moment. She looked down at the rough portrait with an unreadable expression, then finally met Jilly’s gaze again.

“I’ve heard about you,” she said. “On the street. Seems like everybody knows you. They say ...”

Her voice trailed off

Jilly smiled. “What do they say?”

“Oh, all kinds of stuff.” She shrugged. “You know. That you used to live on the street, that you’re kind of like , a one-woman social service, but you don’t lecture. And that you’re—” she hesi-tated, looked away for a moment “—you know, a witch.”