Dreams Underfoot: A Newford Collection (47 page)

“I ... I don’t know,” she said. “I was just crossing a bridge on my way home and the next thing I knew I was ... here. Wherever here is. I—look. I just want to go home. I don’t want any of this to be real.”

“It’s very real,” Diane said.

“Wonderful.”

“She wants to help the unhappy,” Jack offered, “but they just run away from her.”

Moira shot him a dirty look.

“Do be still,” Diane told him, frowning as she spoke. She re-turned her attention to Moira. “Why don’t you go home?”

“I—I don’t know
how
to. The bridge that brought me here ... when I went to go back across it, its roadway was gone.”

Diane nodded. “What has my brother told you?”

Nothing that made sense, Moira wanted to say, but she related what she remembered of her conversations with Jack.

“And do you despair?” Diane asked.

Moira hesitated. She thought of the hopeless, dejected people she’d passed on the way to this rooftop.

“Not really, I guess. I mean, I’m not happy or anything, but ...”

“You have hope? That things will get better for you?”

A flicker of faces passed through her mind. Ghosts from the distant and recent past. Boys from high school. Eddie. She heard Eddie’s voice.

Either you come across, or you walk ....

She just wanted a normal life. She wanted to find something to enjoy in it. She wanted to find somebody she could have a good relationship with, she wanted to enjoy making love with him with-out worrying about people thinking she was a tramp. She wanted him to be there the next morning. She wanted there to be more to what they had than just a roll in the hay.

Right now, none of that seemed very possible.

“I don’t know,” she said finally. “I want it to. I’m not going to give up, but ...”

Again, faces paraded before her—this time they belonged to those lost souls of the city. The despairing.

“I know there are people a lot worse off than I am,” she said. “I’m not sick, I’ve got the use of my body and my mind. But I’m missing something, too. I don’t know how it is for other people—maybe they feel the same and just handle it better—but I feel like there’s a hole inside me that I just can’t fill. I get so lonely ...”

“You see,” Jack said then. “She’s mine.”

Moira turned to him. “What are you talking about?”

It was Diane who answered. “He’s laying claim to your unhappi-ness,” she said.

Moira looked from one to the other. There was something going on here, some undercurrent, that she wasn’t picking up on. “What are you
talking
about?” she asked.

“This city is ours,” Diane said. “My brother’s and mine. We are two sides to the same coin. In most people, that coin lies with my face up, for you are an optimistic race. But optimism only carries some so far. When my brother’s face lies looking skyward, all hope is gone.”

Moira centered on the words, “you are an optimistic race,” realizing from the way Diane spoke it was as though she and her brother weren’t human. She looked away, across the cityscape of bridges and tilting buildings. It was a dreamscape—not exactly a nightmare, but not at all pleasant either. And she was trapped in it; trapped in a dream.

“Who are you people?” she asked. “I don’t buy this ‘Jack and Diane’ bit—that’s like out of that John Mellencamp song. Who are you
really?
What is this place?”

“I’ve already told you,” Jack said.

“But you only gave her half the answer,” Diane added. She turned to Moira. “We are Hope and Despair,” she said. She touched a hand to her breast. “Because of your need for us, we are no longer mere allegory, but have shape and form. This is our city.”

Moira shook her head. “Despair I can understand—this place reeks of it. But not Hope.”

“Hope is what allows the strong to rise above their despair,” Diane said. “It’s what makes them strong. Not blind faith, not the certain knowledge that someone will step in and help them, but the understanding that through their own force of will they cannot merely survive, but succeed. Hope is what tempers that will and gives it the strength to carry on, no matter what the odds are ranked against them.”

“Don’t forget to tell her how too much hope will turn her into a lazy cow,” her brother said.

Diane sighed, but didn’t ignore him. “It’s true,” she said. “Too much hope can also be harmful.

Remember this: Neither hope nor despair have power of their own; they can only provide the fuel that you will use to prevail or be defeated.”

“Pop psychology,” Moira muttered.

Diane smiled. “Yet, like old wives’ tales, it has within it a kernel of truth, or why would it linger?”

“So what am I doing here?” Moira asked. “I never gave up. I’m still trying.”

Diane looked at her brother. He shrugged his shoulders. “I admit defeat,” he said. “She is yours.”

Diane shook her head. “No. She is her own. Let her go.” Jack turned to Moira, the look of a petulant child marring his strong features before they started to become hazy.

“You’ll be back,” he said. That dry voice was like a desert wind, its fine sand filling her heart with an aching forlornness. “Hope is sweet, I’ll admit that readily, but once Despair has touched you, you can never be wholly free of its influence.”

A hot flush ran through Moira. She reeled, dizzy, vision blurring, only half hearing what was being said. Her head was thick with a heavy buzz of pain.

But Hope is stronger.

Moira wasn’t sure if she’d actually heard that, the sweet scent of blossoms clearing her heart of Despair’s dust, or if it came from within herself—something she wanted—had to believe. But it over-rode Despair’s dry voice. She no longer fought the vertigo, but just let it take her away.

Moira was suddenly aware that she was on her hands and knees, with dirty wood under her. Where

... ?

Then she remembered: Walking across the covered bridge. The city. Hope and Despair.

She sat back on her haunches and looked around herself. She was back in her own world. Back—if she’d ever even gone anywhere in the first place.

A sudden roaring filled her head. Lights blinded her as a car came rushing up on the far side of the bridge. She remembered Eddie, her fear of some redneck hillbillies, but there was nowhere to run to. The car screeched to a halt on the wood, a door opened. A man stepped out onto the roadway of the bridge and came towards her.

Backlit by the car’s headbeams, he seemed huge—a monstrous shape. She wanted to bolt. She wanted to scream. She couldn’t seem to move, not even enough to reach into her purse for her switch-blade.

“Jesus!” the stranger said. “Are you okay?”

He was bent down beside her now, features pulled tight with concern.

She nodded slowly. “I just ... felt dizzy, I guess.”

“Here. Let me help you up.”

She allowed him to do that. She let him walk her to his car. He opened up the passenger’s door and she sank gratefully onto the seat. The man looked down to the end of the bridge by which she’d entered it what seemed like a lifetime ago.

“Did you have some car trouble?” the man asked.

“You could say that,” she said. “The guy I was with dumped me from his car a few miles back.”

“Are you hurt?”

She shook her head. “Just my feelings.”

“Jesus. What a crappy thing to do.”

“Yeah. Thanks for stopping.”

“No problem. Can I give you a lift somewhere?”

Moira shook her head. “I’m going back to Newford. I think that’s a little far out of your way.”

“Well, I’m not just going to leave you here by yourself.” Before she could protest, he closed the door and went back around to the driver’s side.

“Don’t worry,” he said as he got behind the wheel. “After what you’ve been through, a guy’d have to be a real heel to—well, you know.”

Moira had to smile. He actually seemed embarrassed.

“We’ll just drive to the other side of the bridge and turn around and then—”

Moira touched his arm. She remembered what had happened the last time she’d tried to go through this bridge.

“Do me a favor, would you?” she asked. “Could you just back out instead?”

Her benefactor gave her a funny look, then shrugged. Putting the car into reverse, he started backing up. Moira held her breath until they were back out on the road again. There were pines and cedars pushing up against the verge, stars overhead. No weird city. No bridges.

She let out her breath.

“What’s your name?” she asked as he maneuvered the car back and forth on the narrow road until he had its nose pointed towards Newford.

“John—John Fraser.”

“My name’s Moira.”

“My grandmother’s name was Moira,” John said.

“Really?”

He nodded.

He seemed like a nice guy, Moira thought. Not the kind who’d try to pull anything funny.

The sweet scent of blossoms came to her for just a moment, then it was gone.

John’s showing up so fortuitously as he had—that had to be Hope’s doing, she decided. Maybe it was a freebie of good luck to make up for her brother’s bad manners. Or maybe it was true: if you had a positive attitude, you had a better chance that things would work out.

“Thanks,” she said. She wasn’t sure if Hope could hear her, but she wanted to say it all the same.

“You’re welcome,” John said from beside her.

Moira glanced at him, then smiled.

“Yeah,” she said. “You, too.”

His puzzled look made her smile widen.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

She just shrugged and settled back into her seat. “It’s a long weird story and you wouldn’t believe me anyway.”

“Try me.”

“Maybe some other time,” she said.

“I might just hold you to that,” he said.

Moira surprised herself with the hope that maybe he would.

Our Lady Of The Harbour

People don’t behave the way they should; they behave the way they do.

—Jim Beaubien and Karen Caesar

She sat on her rock, looking out over the lake, her back to the city that reared up behind her in a bewildering array of towers and lights. A half mile of water separated her island from Newford, but on a night such as this, with the moon high and the water still as glass, the city might as well have been on the other side of the planet.

Tonight, an essence of
Marchen
prevailed in the darkened groves and on the moonlit lawns of the island.

For uncounted years before Diederick van Yoors first settled the area in the early part of the nineteenth century, the native Kickaha called the island Myeengun. By the turn of the century, it had become the playground of Newford’s wealthy, its bright facade first beginning to lose its luster with the Great Depression when wealthy landowners could no longer keep up their summer homes; by the end of the Second World War it was an eyesore. It wasn’t turned into a park until the late 1950s. Today most people knew it only by the anglicized translation of its Kickaha name: Wolf Island.

Matt Casey always thought of it as
her
island.

The cast bronze statue he regarded had originally stood in the garden of an expatriate Danish businessman’s summer home, a faith-ful reproduction of the well-known figure that haunted the water-front of the Dane’s native Copenhagen. When the city expropriated the man’s land for the park, he was generous enough to donate the statue, and so she sat now on the island, as she had for fifty years, looking out over the lake, motionless, always looking, the moon-light gleaming on her bronze features and slender form.

The sharp blast of a warning horn signaling the last ferry back to the city cut through the night’s contemplative mood. Matt turned to look to the far side of the island where the ferry was docked. As he watched, the lights on the park’s winding paths winked out, followed by those in the island’s restaurant and the other buildings near the dock. The horn gave one last blast. Five minutes later, the ferry lurched away from the dock and began the final journey of the day back to Newford’s harbour.

Now, except for a pair of security guards who, Matt knew, would spend the night watching TV and sleeping in the park’s offices above the souvenir store, he had the island to himself. He turned back to look at the statue. It was still silent, still motionless, still watching the unfathomable waters of the lake.

He’d been here one afternoon and watched a bag lady feeding gulls with bits of bread that she probably should have kept for herself. The gulls here were all overfed. When the bread was all gone, she’d walked up to the statue.

“Our Lady of the Harbour,” she’d said. “Bless me.”

Then she’d made the sign of the cross, as though she was a Catholic stepping forward into the nave of her church. From one of her bulging shopping bags, she took out a small plastic flower and laid it on the stone by the statue’s feet, then turned and walked away.

The flower was long gone, plucked by one of the cleaning crews no doubt, but the memory remained.

Matt moved closer to the statue, so close that he could have laid his palm against the cool metal of her flesh.

“Lady,” he began, but he couldn’t go on.

Matt Casey wasn’t an easy man to like. He lived for one thing, and that was his music. About the only social intercourse he had was with the members of the various bands he had played in over the years, and even that was spotty. Nobody he ever played with seemed willing to just concentrate on the music; they always wanted to hang out together as though they were all friends, as though they were in some kind of social club.