Moonlight & Vines (38 page)

“Whatcha looking at?” Zia asks.

They don't know whose house they're in. Walking along on the street, trying to catch snowflakes on their tongues, one or the other of them suddenly got the urge to come inside. Upstairs, the family sleeps.

Maida shows her the photo album. “Look,” she says. “It's the same people, but they keep changing. See, here's she's a baby, then she's a little girl, then a teenager.”

“Everything changes,” Zia says. “Even we get old. Look at Crazy Crow.”

“But it happens so fast with them.”

Zia sits down beside her and they pore over the pictures, munching on apples they found earlier in a cold cellar in the basement.

Upstairs, a father wakes in his bed. He stares at the ceiling, wondering what woke him. Nervous energy crackles inside him like static electricity, a sudden spill of adrenaline, but he doesn't know why. He gets up and checks the children's rooms. They're both asleep. He listens for intruders, but the house is silent.

Stepping back into the hall, he walks to the head of the stairs and looks down. He thinks he sees something in the gloom, two dark-haired girls sitting on the sofa, looking through a photo album. Their gazes lift to
meet his and hold it. The next thing he knows, he's on the sofa himself, holding the photo album in his hand. There are no strange girls sitting there with him. The house seems quieter than it's ever been, as though the fridge, the furnace, and every clock the family owns are holding their breath along with him.

He sets the album down on the coffee table, walks slowly back up the stairs and returns to his bed. He feels like a stranger, misplaced. He doesn't know this room, doesn't know the woman beside him. All he can think about is the first girl he ever loved and his heart swells with a bittersweet sorrow. An ache pushes against his ribs, makes it almost impossible to breathe.

What if, what if. . .

He turns on his side and looks at his wife. For one moment her face blurs, becomes a morphing image that encompasses both her features and those of his first true love. For one moment it seems as though anything is possible, that for all these years he could have been married to another woman, to that girl who first held, then unwittingly, broke his heart.

“No,” he says.

His wife stirs, her features her own again. She blinks sleepily at him.

“What. . . ?” she mumbles.

He holds her close, heartbeat drumming, more in love with her for being who she is than he has ever been before.

Outside, the crow girls are lying on their backs, making snow angels on his lawn, scissoring their arms and legs, shaping skirts and wings. They break their apple cores in two and give their angels eyes, then run off down the street, holding hands. The snow drifts are undisturbed by their weight. It's as though they, too, like the angels they've just made, also have wings.

“This is so cool,” Casey tells her mother. “It really feels like Christmas. I mean, not like Christmases we've had, but, you know, like really being part of Christmas.”

Heather nods. She's glad she brought the girls down to the soup kitchen to help Jilly and her friends serve a Christmas dinner to those less fortunate than themselves. She's been worried about how her daughters would take the break from tradition, but then realized, with Peter gone, tradition was already broken. Better to begin all over again.

The girls had been dubious when she first broached the subject with
them—”I don't want to spend Christmas with
losers,”
had been Casey's first comment. Heather hadn't argued with her. All she'd said was, “I want you to think about what you just said.”

Casey's response had been a sullen look—there were more and more of these lately—but Heather knew her own daughter well enough. Casey had stomped off to her room, but then come back half an hour later and helped her explain to Janice why it might not be the worst idea in the world.

She watches them now, Casey having rejoined her sister where they are playing with the homeless children, and knows a swell of pride. They're such good kids, she thinks as she takes another sip of her cider. After a couple of hours serving coffee, tea and hot cider, she'd really needed to get off her feet for a moment.

“Got something for you,” Jilly says, sitting down on the bench beside her.

Heather accepts the small, brightly-wrapped parcel with reluctance. “I thought we said we weren't doing Christmas presents.”

“It's not really a Christmas present. It's more an everyday sort of a present that I just happen to be giving you today.”

“Right.”

“So aren't you going to open it?”

Heather peels back the paper and opens the small box. Inside, nestled in a piece of folded Kleenex, are two small silver earrings cast in the shapes of crows. Heather lifts her gaze.

“They're beautiful.”

“Got them at the craft show from a local jeweler. Rory Crowther. See, his name's on the card in the bottom of the box. They're to remind you—”

Heather smiles. “Of crow girls?”

“Partly. But more to remember that this—” Jilly waves a hand that could be taking in the basement of St. Vincent's, could be taking in the whole world. “It's not all we get. There's more. We can't always see it, but it's there.”

For a moment, Heather thinks she sees two dark-haired slim figures standing on the far side of the basement, but when she looks more closely they're only a baglady and Geordie's friend Tanya, talking.

For a moment, she thinks she hears the sound of wings, but it's only the murmur of conversation. Probably.

What she knows for sure is that the grey landscape inside her chest is shrinking a little more, every day.

“Thank you,” she says.

She isn't sure if she's speaking to Jilly or to crow girls she's only ever seen once, but whose presence keeps echoing through her life. Her new life. It isn't necessarily a better one. Not yet. But at least it's on the way up from wherever she'd been going, not down into a darker despair.

“Here,” Jilly says. “Let me help you put them on.”

Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.

—Ovid

The horses run the empty length of the lake shore, strung out like a long ragged necklace, perfect in their beauty. They run wild. They run like whitecaps in choppy water, their unshod hooves kicking up sand and spray. The muffled sound of their galloping is a rough music, pure rhythm. Palominos. Six, seven . . . maybe a dozen of them. Their white manes and tails flash, golden coats catch the sunlight and hold it under the skin the way mine holds a drug.

The city is gone. Except for me, transfixed by the sight of them, gaze snared by the powerful motion of their muscles propelling them forward, the city is gone, skyline and dirty streets and dealers and the horse that comes in a needle instead of running free along a beach. All gone.

And for a moment, I'm free, too.

I run after them, but they're too fast for me, these wild horses, can't be tamed, can't be caught. I run until I'm out of breath and stumble and fall and when I come to, I'm lying under the overpass where the freeway cuts through Squatland, my works lying on my coat beside me, empty now. I
look out across a landscape of sad tenements and long-abandoned factories and the only thing I can think is, I need another hit to take me back. Another hit, and this time I'll catch up to them.

I know I will. I have to.

There's nothing for me here.

But the drugs don't take me anywhere.

Cassie watched the young woman approach. She was something, sleek and pretty, newly shed of her baby fat. Nineteen, maybe; twenty-one, twenty-two, tops. Wearing an old sweater, raggedy jeans and sneakers—nothing fancy, but she looked like a million dollars. Bottle that up, Cassie thought, along with the long spill of her dark curly hair, the fresh-faced, perfect complexion, and you'd be on easy street. Only the eyes hinted at what must have brought her here, the lost, hopeful look in their dark depths. Something haunted her. You didn't need the cards to tell you that.

She was out of place—not a tourist, not part of the bohemian coterie of fortune-tellers, buskers, and craftspeople who were set up along this section of the Pier either. Cassie tracked her gaze as it went from one card table to the next, past the palmist, the other card readers, the Gypsy, the lovely Scottish boy with his Weirdin discs, watched until that gaze met her own and the woman started to walk across the boards, aimed straight for her.

Somebody was playing a harp, over by one of the weavers' tables. A sweet melody, like a lullaby, rose above the conversation around the tables and the sound of the water lapping against the wooden footings below. It made no obvious impression on the approaching woman, but Cassie took the music in, letting it swell inside her, a piece of beauty stolen from the heart of commerce. The open-air market and sideshow that sprawled along this section of the Pier might look alternative, but it was still about money. The harper was out to make a buck, and so was Cassie.

She had her small collapsible table set up with a stool for her on one side, its twin directly across the table for a customer. A tablecloth was spread over the table, hand-embroidered with ornate hermetic designs.
On top of the cloth, a small brass change bowl and her cards, wrapped in silk and boxed in teak.

The woman stood behind the vacant stool, hesitating before she finally sat down. She pulled her knapsack from her back and held it on her lap, arms hugging it close to her chest. The smile she gave Cassie was uncertain.

Cassie gave her a friendly smile back. “No reason to be nervous, girl. We're all friends here. What's your name?”

“Laura.”

“And I'm Cassandra. Now what sort of a reading were you looking for?”

Laura reached out her hand, not quite touching the box with its cards. “Are they real?” she asked.

“How do you mean, real?”

“Magic. Can you work magic with them?”

“Well, now. . .”

Cassie didn't like to lie, but there was magic and there was magic. One lay in the heart of the world and was as much a natural part of how things were as it was deep mystery. The other was the thing people were looking for to solve their problems with and it never quite worked the way they felt it should.

“Magic's all about perception,” she said. “Do you know what I mean?”

Laura shook her head. She'd drawn her hand back from the cards and was hugging her knapsack again. Cassie picked up the wooden box and put it to one side. From the inside pocket of her matador's jacket, she pulled out another set of cards. These ones were tattered around the edges, held together by an elastic band. When she placed them on the tablecloth, the woman's gaze went to the top card and was immediately caught by the curious image on it. The card showed the same open-air market they were sitting in, the crowds of tourists and vendors, the Pier, the lake behind.

“Those . . . are those regular cards?” Laura asked.

“Do I look like a regular reader?”

The question was academic. Cassie didn't look like a regular anything, not even on the Pier. She was in her early thirties, a dark-eyed woman with coffee-colored skin and hair that hung in a hundred tiny beaded
braids. Today she wore tight purple jeans and yellow combat boots; under her black matador's jacket was a white T-shirt with the words
DON'T! BUY! THAI
! emblazoned on it. Her ears were festooned with studs, dangling earrings, and simple hoops. On each wrist she had a dozen or so plastic bracelets in a rainbow palette of Day-Glo colors.

“I guess not,” the woman said. She leaned a little closer. “What does your T-shirt mean? I've seen that slogan all over town, on T-shirts, spray-painted on walls, but I don't know what it means.”

“It's a boycott to try to stop the child-sex industry in Thailand.”

“Are you collecting signatures for a petition or something?”

Cassie shook her head. “You just do like the words say. Check out what you're buying and if it's made in Thailand, don't buy it and explain why.”

“Do you really think it'll help?”

“Well, it's like magic,” Cassie said, bringing the conversation back to what she knew Laura really wanted to talk about. “And like I said, magic's about perception, that's all. It means anything is possible. It means taking the way we usually look at a thing and making people see it differently. Or, depending on your viewpoint, making them see it properly for the first time.”

“But—”

“For instance, I could be a crow, sitting on this stool talking to you, but I've convinced everybody here that I'm Cassandra Washington, card reader, so that's what you all see.”

Laura gave her an uneasy look that Cassie had no trouble reading: Pretty sure she was being put on, but not entirely sure.

Cassie smiled. “The operative word here is
could
. But that's how magic works. It's all about how we perceive things to be. A good magician can make anything seem possible and pretty soon you've got seven-league boots and people turning invisible or changing into wolves or flying—all sorts of fun stuff.”

“You're serious, aren't you?”

“Oh, yeah. Now fortune-telling—that's all about perception, too, except it's looking inside yourself. It works best with a ritual because that allows you to concentrate better—same reason religion and church works so well for some people. Makes them all pay attention and focus and the next thing you know they're either looking inside themselves and working out their problems, or making a piece of magic.”

She picked up the cards and removed the elastic band. Shuffled them. “Think of these as a mirror. Pay enough attention to them and they'll lay out a pattern that'll take you deep inside yourself.”