Dreams Underfoot: A Newford Collection (57 page)

I don’t know what Jilly was thinking about, but I was going over what she’d told me earlier. I kept thinking about wheels and how they turned.

Once past the City Commission’s lawns on the far side of the river, the land starts to climb. It’s just a lot of rough scrub on this side of the hills that make up the Beaches and every summer some of the hoboes and other homeless people camp out in it. The cops roust them from time to time, but mostly they’re left alone, and they keep to themselves.

Going in there I was more nervous than Jilly; I don’t think she’s scared of anything. The sun had gone down behind the hills, and while it was twilight in the city, here it was already dark. I know a lot of the street people and get along with them better than most—everyone likes a good fiddle tune—but some of them could look pretty rough, and I kept anticipating that we’d run into some big wild-eyed hillbilly who’d take exception to our being there.

Well, we did run into one, but—like ninety percent of the street people in Newford—he was somebody that Jilly knew. He seemed pleased, if a little surprised to find her here, grinning at us in the fading light. He was a tall, big-shouldered man, dressed in dirty jeans and a flannel shirt, with big hobnailed boots on his feet and a shock of red hair that fell to his neck and stood up on top of his head in matted tangles. His name, appropriately enough, was Red. The smell that emanated from him made me want to shift position until I was standing upwind.

He not only knew where Paperjack’s camp was, but took us there, only Paperjack wasn’t home.

The place had Paperjack stamped all over it. There was a neatly rolled bedroll pushed up against a knapsack which probably held his changes of clothing. We didn’t check it out, because we weren’t there to go through his stuff: Behind the pack was a food cooler with a Coleman stove sitting on top of it, and everywhere you could see small origami stars that hung from the tree branches. There must have been over a hundred of them. I felt as if I were standing in the middle of space with stars all around me.

Jilly left a note for Paperjack, then we followed Red back out to Lakeside Drive. He didn’t wait for our thanks. He just drifted away as soon as we reached the mown lawns that bordered the bush.

We split up then. Jilly had work to do—some art for Newford’s entertainment weekly,
In the
City—and I didn’t feel like tagging along to watch her work at her studio. She took the subway, but I decided to walk. I was bone-tired by then, but the night was one of those perfect ones when the city seems to be smiling. You can’t see the dirt or the grime for the sparkle over everything. After all I’d been through today, I didn’t want to be cooped up inside anywhere. I just wanted to enjoy the night.

I remember thinking about how Sam would’ve loved to be out walking with me on a night like this—the old Sam I’d lost, not necessarily the one she’d become. I didn’t know that Sam at all, and I still wasn’t sure I wanted to, even if I could track her down.

When I reached St. Paul’s, I paused by the steps. Even though it was a perfect night to be out walking, something drew me inside. I tried the door, and it opened soundlessly at my touch. I paused just inside the door, one hand resting on the back pew, when I heard a cough.

I froze, ready to take flight. I wasn’t sure how churches worked. Maybe my creeping around here at this time of night was ... I don’t know, sacrilegious or something.

I looked up to the front and saw that someone was sitting in the foremost pew. The cough was repeated, and I started down the aisle.

Intuitively, I guess I knew I’d find him here. Why else had I come inside?

Paperjack nodded to me as I sat down beside him on the pew. I laid my fiddlecase by my feet and leaned back. I wanted to ask after his health, to tell him how worried Jill was about him, but my day caught up with me in a rush. Before I knew it, I was nodding off.

I knew I was dreaming when I heard the voice. I had to be dreaming, because there was only Paperjack and I sitting on the pew, and Paperjack was mute. But the voice had the sound that I’d always imagined Paperjack’s would have if he could speak. It was like the movement of his fingers when he was folding origami—quick, but measured and certain. Resonant, like his finished paper sculptures that always seemed to have more substance to them than just their folds and shapes.

“No one in this world views it the same,” the voice said. “I believe that is what amazes me the most about it. Each person has his or her own vision of the world, and whatever lies outside that worldview becomes invisible. The rich ignore the poor. The happy can’t see those who are hurting.”

“Paperjack ... ?” I asked.

There was only silence in reply.

“I ... I thought you couldn’t talk.”

“So a man who has nothing he wishes to articulate is considered mute,” the voice went on as though I hadn’t interrupted. “It makes me weary.”

“Who ... who are you?” I asked.

“A mirror into which no one will look. A fortune that remains forever unread. My time here is done.”

The voice fell silent again.

“Paperjack?”

Still silence.

It was just a dream, I told myself I tried to wake myself from it. I told myself that the pew was made of hard, unyielding wood, and far too uncomfortable to sleep on. And Paperjack needed help. I remembered the cough and Jilly’s worries.

But I couldn’t wake up.

“The giving itself is the gift,” the voice said suddenly. It sounded as though it came from the back of the church, or even farther away. “The longer I remain here, the more I forget.”

Then the voice went away for good. I lost it in a dreamless sleep.

I woke early, and all my muscles were stiff. My watch said it was ten to six. I had a moment’s disorientation—where the hell
was
I?—and then I remembered. Paperjack. And the dream.

I sat up straighter in the pew, and something fell from my lap to the floor. A piece of folded paper. I bent stiffly to retrieve it, turning it over and over in my hands, holding it up to the dim grey light that was creeping in through the windows. It was one of Paperjack’s Chinese fortune-tellers.

After awhile I fit my fingers into the folds of the paper and looked down at the colors. I chose blue, same as I had the last time, and spelled it out, my fingers moving the paper back and forth so that it looked like a flower speaking soundlessly to me. I picked numbers at random, then unfolded the flap to read what it had to say.

“The question is more important than the answer,” it said.

I frowned, puzzling over it, then looked at what I would have gotten if I’d picked another number, but all the other folds were blank when I turned them over. I stared at it, then folded the whole thing back up and stuck it in my pocket. I was starting to get a serious case of the creeps.

Picking up my fiddlecase, I left St. Paul’s and wandered over to Chinatown. I had breakfast in an all-night diner, sharing the place with a bunch of blue-collar workers who were all talking about some baseball game they’d watched the night before. I thought of calling Jilly, but knew that if she’d been working all night on that In
the
City assignment, she’d be crashed out now and wouldn’t appreciate a phone call.

I dawdled over breakfast, then slowly made my way up to that part of Foxville that’s called the Rosses. That’s where the Irish immigrants all lived in the forties and fifties. The place started changing in the sixties when a lot of hippies who couldn’t afford the rents in Crowsea moved in, and it changed again with a new wave of immigrants from Vietnam and the Caribbean in the following decades. But the area, for all its changes, was still called the Rosses. My apartment was in the heart of it, right where Kelly Street meets Lee and crosses the Kickaha River. It’s two doors down from The Harp, the only real Irish pub in town, which makes it convenient for me to get to the Irish music sessions on Sunday afternoons.

My phone was ringing when I got home. I was half-expecting it to be Jilly, even though it was only going on eight, but found myself talking to a reporter from
The Daily Journal
instead. His name was Ian Begley, and it turned out he was a friend of Jilly’s. She’d asked him to run down what information he could on the Dickensons in the paper’s morgue.

“Old man Dickenson was the last real businessman of the family,” Begley told me. “Their fortunes started to decline when his son Tom took over—he’s the one who married the woman that Jilly said you were interested in tracking down. He died in 1976. I don’t have an obit on his widow, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s still alive. If she moved out of town, the paper wouldn’t have an obit for her unless the family put one in.”

He told me a lot of other stuff, but I was only half listening. The business with Paperjack last night and the fortune-telling device this morning were still eating away at me. I did take down the address of Sam’s granddaughter when it came up. Begley ran out of steam after another five minutes or so.

“You got enough there?” he asked.

I nodded, then realized he couldn’t see me. “Yeah. Thanks a lot.”

“Say hello to Jilly for me and tell her she owes me one.”

After I hung up, I looked out the window for a long time. I managed to shift gears from Paperjack to thinking about what Beg-ley had told me, about wheels, about Sam. Finally I got up and took a shower and shaved. I put on my cleanest jeans and shirt and shrugged on a sports jacket that had seen better days before I bought it in a retro fashion shop. I thought about leaving my fiddle behind, but knew I’d feel naked without it—I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gone somewhere without it. The leather handle felt com-forting in my hand as I hefted the case and went out the door.

All the way over to the address Begley had given me I tried to think of what I was going to say when I met Sam’s granddaughter. The truth would make me sound like I was crazy, but I couldn’t seem to concoct a story that would make sense.

I remember wondering—where was my brother when I needed him? Christy was never at a loss for words, no matter what the situation.

It wasn’t until I was standing on the sidewalk in front of the house that I decided to stick as close to the truth as I could—I was an old friend of her grandmother’s, could she put me in touch with her?—and take it from there. But even my vague plans went out the door when I rang the bell and stood face-to-face with Sam’s granddaughter.

Maybe you saw this coming, but it was the last thing I’d expected. The woman had Sam’s hair, Sam’s eyes, Sam’s face ... to all intents and purposes it
was
Sam standing there, looking at me with that vaguely uncertain expression that most of us wear when we open the door to a stranger standing on our steps.

My chest grew so tight I could barely breathe, and suddenly I could hear the sound of rain in my memory—it was always raining when Sam saw the ghost; it was raining the night he stole her away into the past.

Ghosts. I was looking at a ghost.

The woman’s expression was starting to change, the uncertainty turning into nervousness. There was no recognition in her eyes. As she began to step back—in a moment she’d close the door in my face, probably call the cops—I found my voice. I knew what I was going to say—I was going to ask about her grandmother—but all that came out was her name: “Sam.”

“Yes?” she said. She looked at me a little more carefully. “Do I know you?”

Jesus, even the name was the same.

A hundred thoughts were going through my head, but they all spiraled down into one mad hope: this was Sam. We could be together again. Then a child appeared behind the woman. She was a little girl no more than five, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, just like her mother—just like her
mother’s
grandmother.

Reality came crashing down around me.

This Sam wasn’t the woman I knew. She was married, she had children, she had a life.

“I ... I knew your grandmother,” I said. “We were ... we used to be friends.”

It sounded so inane to my ears, almost crazy. What would her grandmother—a woman maybe three times my age if she was still alive—have to do with a guy like me?

The woman’s gaze traveled down to my fiddlecase. “Is your name Geordie? Geordie Riddell?”

I blinked in surprise, then nodded slowly.

The woman smiled a little sadly, mostly with her eyes.

“Granny said you’d come by,” she said. “She didn’t know when, but she said you’d come by one day.” She stepped away from the door, shooing her daughter down the hall. “Would you like to come in?”

“I ... uh, sure.”

She led me into a living room that was furnished in mismatched antiques that, taken all together, shouldn’t have worked, but did.

The little girl perched in a Morris chair and watched me curiously as I sat down and set my fiddlecase down by my feet. Her mother pushed back a stray lock with a mannerism so like Sam’s that my chest tightened up even more.

“Would you like some coffee or tea?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I don’t want to intrude. I I ...” Words escaped me again.

“You’re not intruding,” she said. She sat down on the couch in front of me, that sad look back in her eyes. “My grandmother died a few years ago—she’d moved to New England in the late seventies, and she died there in her sleep. Because she loved it so much, we buried her there in a small graveyard overlooking the sea.”