Charles De Lint - Dreams Underfoot

“Not elves—but we are good neighbors. Would you like some breakfast?”

A year and three days later, the memory of that first meeting brought a touch of warmth to Jilly where she stood shivering in the mouth of the alleyway. Gemmin. She’d always liked the taste of words and that one had sounded just right for Babe and her companions. It reminded Jilly of gummy bears, thick cotton quilts and the sound that the bass strings of Geordie’s fiddle made when he was playing a fast reel. It reminded her of tiny bunches of fresh violets, touched with dew, that still couldn’t hope to match the incandescent hue of Babe’s eyes.

She had met the gemmin at a perfect time. She was in need of something warm and happy just then, being on the wrong end of a threemonth relationship with a guy who, throughout the time they’d been together, turned out to have been married all along. He wouldn’t leave his wife, and Jilly had no taste to be someone’sanyone’s—mistress, all of which had been discussed in increasingly raised voices in The Monkey Woman’s Nest the last time she saw him. She’d been mortified when she realized that a whole restaurant full of people had been listening to their breakingup argument, but unrepentant.

She missed Jeff—missed him desperately—but refused to listen to any of the subsequent phonecalls or answer any of the letters that had deluged her loft over the next couple of weeks, explaining how they could “work things out.” She wasn’t interested in working things out. It wasn’t just the fact that he had a wife, but that he’d kept it from her. The thing she kept asking her friend Sue was: having been with him for all that time, how could she not have known?

So she wasn’t a happy camper, traipsing aimlessly through the Tombs that day. Her normally highspirited view of the world was overhung with gloominess and there was a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach that just wouldn’t go away.

Until she met Babe and her friends.

Gemmin wasn’t a name that they used; they had no name for themselves. It was Frank Hodgers who told Jilly what they were.

Breakfast with the gemmin on that long gone morning was ... odd. Jilly sat behind the driver’s wheel of the Buick, with the door propped open and her feet dangling outside. Babe sat on a steel drum set a few feet from the car, facing her. Four of the other gemmin were crowded in the back seat; the fifth was beside Jilly in the front, her back against the passenger’s door. The eggs were tasty, flavored with herbs that Jilly couldn’t recognize; the tea had a similarly odd tang about it. The bacon was fried to a perfect crisp. The toast was actually muffins, neatly sliced in two and toasted on coat hangers rebent into new shapes for that purpose.

The gemmin acted like they were having a picnic. When Jilly introduced herself, a chorus of odd names echoed back in reply: Nita, Emmie, Callio, Yoon, Purspie. And Babe.

“Babe?” Jilly repeated.

“It was a present—from Johnny Defalco.”

Jilly had seen Defalco around and talked to him once or twice. He was a hash dealer who’d had himself a squat in the Clark Building up until the end of the summer when he’d made the mistake of selling to a narc and had to leave the city just one step ahead of a warrant. Somehow, she couldn’t see him keeping company with this odd little gaggle of street girls. Defalco’s taste seemed to run more to what her bouncer friend Percy called the three B’s—bold, blonde and built—or at least it had whenever she’d seen him in the clubs.

“He gave all of you your names?” Jilly asked.

Babe shook her head. “He only ever saw me, and whenever he did, he’d say, ‘Hey Babe, how’re ya doin’?’”

Babe’s speech patterns seemed to change the longer they talked, Jilly remembered thinking later. She no longer sounded like a foreigner struggling with the language; instead, the words came easily, sentences peppered with conjunctions and slang.

“We miss him,” Purspie—or perhaps it was Nita—said. Except for Babe, Jilly was still having trouble telling them all apart.

“He talked in the dark.” That was definitely Emmie—her voice was slightly higher than those of the others.

“He told stories to the walls,” Babe explained, “and we’d creep close and listen to him.”

“You’ve lived around here for awhile?” Jilly asked.

Yoon—or was it Callio?—nodded. “All our lives.”

Jilly had to smile at the seriousness with which that line was delivered. As though, except for Babe, there was one of them older than thirteen.

She spent the rest of the morning with them, chatting, listening to their odd songs, sketching them whenever she could get them to sit still for longer than five seconds. Thanks goodness, she thought more than once as she bent over her sketchbook, for life drawing classes and Albert Choira, one of her arts instructor at Butler U., who had instilled in her and every one of his students the ability to capture shape and form in just a few quick strokes of charcoal.

Her depression and the sick feeling in her stomach had gone away, and her heart didn’t feel nearly so fragile anymore, but all too soon it was noon and time for her to go. She had Christmas presents to deliver at St. Vincent’s Home for the Aged, where she did volunteer work twice a week. Some of her favorites were going to stay with family during the holidays and today would be her last chance to see them.

“We’ll be going soon, too,” Babe told her when Jilly explained she had to leave.

“Going?” Jilly repeated, feeling an odd tightness in her chest. It wasn’t the same kind of a feeling that Jeff had left in her, but it was discomforting all the same.

Babe nodded. “When the moon’s full, we’ll sail away.”

“Away, away, away,” the others chorused.

There was something both sweet and sad in the way they half spoke, half chanted the words. The tightness in Jilly’s chest grew more pronounced. She wanted to ask, Away to where?, but found herself only saying, “But you’ll be here tomorrow?”

Babe lifted a delicate hand to push back the unruly curls that were forever falling in Dilly’s eyes.

There was something so maternal in the motion that it made Jilly wish she could just rest her head on Babe’s breast, to be protected from all that was fierce and mean and dangerous in the world beyond the enfolding comfort that that motherly embrace would offer.

“We’ll be here,” Babe said.

Then, giggling like schoolgirls, the little band ran off through the ruins, leaving Jilly to stand alone on the deserted street. She felt giddy and lost, all at once. She wanted to run with them, imagining Babe as a kind of archetypal Peter Pan who could take her away to a place where she could be forever young.

Then she shook her head, and headed back downtown to St. Vincent’s.

She saved her visit with Frank for last, as she always did. He was sitting in a wheelchair by the small window in his room that overlooked the alley between St. Vincent’s and the office building next door. It wasn’t much of a view, but Frank never seemed to mind.

“I’d rather stare at a brick wall, anytime, than watch that damn TV in the lounge,” he’d told Jilly more than once. “That’s when things started to go wrong—with the invention of television. Wasn’t till then that we found out there was so much wrong in the world.”

Jilly was one of those who preferred to know what was going on and try to do something about it, rather than pretend it wasn’t happening and hoping that, by ignoring what was wrong, it would just go away. Truth was, Jilly had long ago learned, trouble never went away. It just got worse—unless you fixed it. But at eightyseven, she felt that Frank was entitled to his opinions.