Ivory and the Horn (29 page)

But all I can focus on is that fact that his daughter’s lost to the world now, locked up inside her own head, and I put her there. I tried to help, but I all I did was make things worse.

“You can’t beat yourself over this,” Chris said the one time I let him find me. “It’s unfortunate what happened to the girl—an awful, terrible thing—but there’s still a war going on. The freaks are still out there.

“You can’t walk away from the fight now.”

He thinks I’m scared, but that’s not it. I’m not anything. All I can think of is that little girl and what I put her through, what I made her see.

Susan Newman didn’t just lose her innocence. She had any hope of a normal life torn away.

“Do you need anything?” Chris asks. “Money? Food? A place to stay?”

I shake my head.

“Give this a little time,” he says. “You’re suffering from trauma too, you know.”

I let him talk on, but I stop listening. I’ve regained my strength. I can leap tall buildings with a single bound again—or at least spider my way up their walls—but I don’t have the heart for it anymore. I don’t have the heart to step into anybody’s dreaming place and then shut him down. And I certainly can’t see myself killing someone again—I don’t care how much he deserves it.

After a while, Chris stops talking and I walk away. He starts to follow, but finally gives up when I keep increasing the distance between us.

I don’t wear my bodysuit anymore; I don’t look like some dimestore ninja. I just look like any other homeless person, wandering around the street in clothes that are more than a few weeks away from clean, looking for handouts at the shelters, cadging spare change from passersby.

A month goes by, maybe two. I don’t know. I just know it’s getting really cold at night. Then late one afternoon I’m standing over a grating by a used bookstore, trying to get warm, and I see, in amongst the motley selection of titles that crowd the display window, a familiar cover and byline.

When the Desert Dreams,
by Anne Bourke.

I’ve got two dollars and eighty cents in my pocket. I’m planning to use it to get something to eat later, but I go into the bookstore. The guy behind the counter takes pity on me and sells me the book for what I’ve got, even though there’s a price of fifteen bucks penciled in on the right-hand corner of the front endpaper.

I leave, holding the book to my chest, and I walk around like that all night, from one side of the city to the other. I don’t need to read the stories. I was there when they were written—almost a lifetime ago.

Finally, I start walking up Williamson Street, just trudging on and on until the downtown stores give way to more residential blocks, which give way to drive-in fast-food joints and malls and the ‘burbs, and then I’m finally out of the city. The sun’s up for about an hour when I stick out my thumb.

It’s a long time before someone stops, but when this guy does, he’s going my way. He can take me right up into the mountains. I find myself wanting to apologize for the way I look, for the way I smell, but I don’t say anything. I know if I try to say anything more than where I’m going, I’m just going to break down and cry. So I sit there and hold my book. I nod and try to smile as the guy talks to me. Mostly, I just look ahead through the windshield.

I don’t know what I’m expecting or hoping to find when I get there. I don’t even know why I’m going. I just know that I’ve run out of other options.

Without Annie, I don’t know where to turn. Only she’d be able to comfort me, only she’d be able to help me reclaim my dreaming place. I’ve had to shut myself off from what’s inside me, because when I step into my private place, I get no solace now; when I dream, I have only nightmares.

What was my only haven is home to monsters now.

9

“Are you sure this is where you want out?” my ride asks.

There’s something in the tone of his voice that tells me he doesn’t think it’s exactly the greatest idea. I don’t blame him. We’re out in the middle of nowhere, and Betsy’s trailer looks deserted. The lawn’s overgrown and thick with leaves. Her vegetable and flower gardens are a jungle of weeds. The trailer itself was never in the greatest shape, but now shutters are hanging loose and the door stands ajar. From the road we can see that a thick carpet of forest debris has already worked its way inside.

I guess I’m not really surprised. Betsy was an old woman. It’s been over a year since I was here with Annie, and anything could have happened to her in that time. She could have moved. Or died.

I don’t like to think of her as dead. There are some people who deserve to live forever, and although I only met her that one afternoon, I knew that Betsy was one of them. Eternal spirits, trapped in far too transient flesh.

Like Annie.

My ride clears his throat in case I didn’t hear him. This guy’s so polite. I was lucky it was him that stopped for me and not some loser who thinks with his dick instead of his heart.

Or maybe, considering, it was lucky for those losers. I’ve still got the anima’s gifts; I just don’t use them anymore.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” I tell him and get out. “Thanks for the ride.”

I stand by the end of Betsy’s overgrown driveway and watch the car until it’s out of sight. There’s something in the air that calms me, smoothing all my nervous edges. No longer summer, not quite winter, everything just hanging between the two. I take it all in until I hear another vehicle coming up the road, then I dart into the woods, Annie’s book clutched to my chest.

The glade doesn’t look anything like I remembered it, either, but I know it’s just because I’m here in a different season. The surrounding trees have all lost their leaves and everything’s faded and brown. Except for the fairy ring. The toadstools still stand in their circle, the grass is still a deep green, and there’s not a leaf or twig lying within the circle.

I know there’s probably a sound, scientific reason why this is so, but I don’t have access to the paper’s morgue anymore to look it up, and besides, I’ve seen the anima. I’m more likely to believe that fairies are keeping the ring raked and tidy.

I stand there, looking at it for a long time, before I finally step into the ring. I lay Annie’s book in the middle and sit down on the grass.

I don’t know what I’m doing here. Maybe I thought I could call up the anima. Or Annie’s ghost. But now that I’m here, none of that matters. All the confusion and pain that’s sent my life into its downward spiral after I killed Newman just fades away. My pulse takes on the slow heartbeat of the forest. I close my eyes and let myself go. I can feel myself drifting, edging up on that dreaming place inside me that I haven’t been able to visit for months because I know the monsters are waiting for me there.

I’m just starting to get convinced that maybe there is a way to regain one’s innocence when I realize that I’m no longer alone.

It’s neither the animal-headed fairy women nor Annie’s ghost that I find watching me from the edge of the ring, but Betsy. I think for a minute that maybe she’s a ghost, or a fairy woman, but then I see how frail she is, the cane she’s used to get here, how her face is red from the effort she’s made and her breathing is way too fast. She’s as real as I am—maybe more so, because I don’t know where I’ve been these last few months.

We don’t say anything for a long time. I watch her lean on her cane and slowly catch her breath. The flush leaves her face.

“I read about your friend,” she says finally. “That must have been hard for you.”

Tears well in my eyes and I can’t seem to find my voice. I manage a nod.

“It’s always hardest for those of us who get left behind,” she says, filling the silence that grows up between us. “I know.”

“You… you’ve lost someone close to you?” I ask.

Betsy gives me this sad smile. “At my age, girl, I’ve just about lost them all.” She pauses for a heartbeat, then asks, “You and your friend—you were… lovers?”

“Does that shock you?”

“Land’s sake, no. I left my own husband for a woman— though that was years ago. Folks didn’t look on it with much understanding back then.”

They still don’t, I think.

“I think it makes it that much harder when you love someone folks don’t think you’re supposed to and she dies. You don’t get a period of mourning. Folks are just relieved that the situation’s gone and fixed itself.”

“But you still mourn,” I say.

“Oh yes. But you have to do your crying on the inside.”

My eyes fill again, not just for Annie and me now, but for Betsy and her long-gone lover. Betsy looks like she’s about to lose it too; her eyes are all shiny, and the flush is returning to her cheeks, but then she wipes her eyes on her sleeve and straightens her back.

“So,” she says, trying to sound cheery. “What brings you back? Another story for your newspaper?”

I shake my head even though I know she’s only being kind. She can see the state I’m in—I look like the homeless person I’ve become, not the reporter I was.

“Remember when you were telling me about fairy gifts?” I say.

She nods slowly.

I want to tell her about the anima and what they gave me. I want to tell her about the ninja suit and climbing walls and leaping from rooftop to rooftop, looking for prey. I want to tell her about the dreaming places, and what I did to Newman when I pulled him into mine. I want to ask what the fairy women gave her. But none of it will come out.

Instead I just say, “I liked the idea of it.”

“You did a lovely job writing it all up in your article,” Betsy tells me. “It had a different… ring to it.”

“As opposed to the stories
The Examiner
usually runs,” I say dryly.

Betsy smiles. “I’ve still got it in my scrapbook.”

That reminds me.

“I didn’t think you—” were still alive. “—Still lived around here,” I say. “When I saw the trailer…”

“After I had my stroke,” she says, “I went to live across the road with my friend Alice.”

I don’t remember there being a place across the road from hers, but when she invites me back for tea, I see that it’s because the evergreens hide it so well. As we walk up the little dirt track leading to it, Betsy tells me how it’s a step up for her. I look from the run-down log cabin to her, the question plain in my eyes.

“It doesn’t have wheels,” she explains.

I never do any of the things that might have brought me up here. I don’t talk about the anima to Betsy or what their coming into my life has done to me. I don’t talk about how they might have affected her, I don’t meet the anima again; I don’t see Annie’s ghost. But when Alice’s daughter drives me back to the outskirts of the city where I can catch a bus, I realize the trip was still worthwhile, because I brought away with me something I hadn’t had for so long I’d forgotten it had ever existed.

I brought away some human contact.

10

In Frank Estrich’s private place there’s a small dog, trembling in the weeds that grow up along the dirt road where Frank’s walking. The dog is just a mutt, lost and scared. You see them far too often in the country—some poor animal that’s outlived its welcome in a city home, so it gets taken for a ride, the car slows down, the animal’s tossed out—”returned to nature”—and the problem’s solved.

Frank found a stray the summer before, but his dad killed it when Frank brought it home and tried to hide it in the barn. And then his dad took the belt to Frank. His dad does that a lot, most of the time for no other reason than because he likes to do it.

Frank always feels so helpless. Everybody’s bigger than him: his father, his uncles, his brothers, the other kids. Everybody can rag on him and there’s not a thing he can do about it. But this dog’s not bigger than him.

Frank knows it’s wrong, he knows he should feel sorry for the little fella because the dog’s as unwanted as Frank feels he is most of the time, but I can see in his head that he’s thinking of getting his own back. And if he can’t do it to those that are hurting him, then maybe he’ll just do it to the dog.

Doesn’t matter how it cringes down on its belly as he approaches it, eyes hopeful, body shaking. All Frank can think of is the beating he got earlier tonight. Dad took him out to the barn, made him take down his pants, made him bend over a bale of hay as he took off his belt….

I’ve already dealt with the father, but I know now how that’s not enough. The seed’s still lying inside the victim.

Maybe it’ll turn Frank into what his father calls a “sissy-boy,” scared of his own shadow; more likely it’ll make Frank grow up no different from his father, one more monster in a world that’s got too many already.

So I have to teach Frank about right and wrong—not like his father did; not with arbitrary rules and punishments, but in a way that doesn’t leave Frank feeling guilty for what was done to him, in a way that lets him understand that self-empowerment has got nothing to do with what you can do to someone else.

It’s a long, slow process of healing that’s as hard for me to put into words as it is for me to explain how I can step into other people’s dreaming places. But it’s worth it. Not just for the victims like Frank that I get to help, but for myself as well.

What happened to me before was that I was wearing myself out. I was putting so much out, but getting nothing back. I was living only in the shadows, living there so long that I almost forgot there was such a thing as sunlight.

That’s what I do, I guess. I still step into the monsters’ heads and turn them off, but then I visit the dreaming places of their victims and show them how to get back into the sunlight. The funny thing is, that when I’m with someone like Frank and he finally gets out of the shadows, I don’t leave anything of myself behind. But they leave something in me.

Dried blood and rose petals.

Bird bones and wood ash.

It’s all just metaphor for spirit—that’s what Annie would say. I don’t know. I don’t need to put a name to it. I just use it all to reclaim my own dreaming place and keep it free of shadows.

A
T
EMPEST IN
H
ER
E
YES