Charles De Lint - Dreams Underfoot

I get so confused. I’ve been so many people; some I didn’t like at all. I wonder that anyone could.

Victim, hooker, junkie, liar, thief But without them, I wouldn’t be who I am today. I’m no one special, but I like who I am, lost childhood and all.

Did I have to be all those people to become the person I am today? Are they still living inside me, hiding in some dark corner of my mind, waiting for me to slip and stumble and fall and give them life again?

I tell myself not to remember, but that’s wrong, too. Not remembering makes them stronger.

2

The morning sun came in through the window of Jilly Coppercorn’s loft, playing across the features of her guest. The girl was still asleep on the Murphy bed, sheets all tangled around her skinny limbs, pulled tight and smooth over the rounded swell of her abdomen. Sleep had gentled her features. Her hair clouded the pillow around her head. The soft morning sunlight gave her a Madonna quality, a nimbus ofBotticelli purity that the harsher light of the later day would steal away once she woke.

She was fifteen years old. And eight months pregnant.

Jilly sat in the windowseat, feet propped up on the sill, sketchpad on her lap. She caught the scene in charcoal, smudging the lines with the pad of her middle finger to soften them. On the fire escape outside, a stray cat climbed up the last few metal steps until it was level with where she was sitting and gave a plaintive meow.

Jilly had been expecting the black and white tabby. She reached under her knees and picked up a small plastic margarine container filled with dried kibbles, which she set down on the fire escape in front of the cat. As the tabby contentedly crunched its breakfast, Jilly returned to her portrait.

“My name’s Annie,” her guest had told her last night when she stopped Jilly on Yoors Street just a few blocks south of the loft. “Could you spare some change? I really need to get some decent food. It’s not so much for me ....”

She put her hand on the swell of her stomach as she spoke. Jilly had looked at her, taking in the stringy hair, the ragged clothes, the unhealthy color of her complexion, the toothin body that seemed barely capable of sustaining the girl herself, little say nourishing the child she carried.

“Are you all on your own?” Jilly asked.

The girl nodded.

Jilly put her arm around the girl’s shoulder and steered her back to the loft. She let her take a shower while she cooked a meal, gave her a clean smock to wear, and tried not to be patronizing while she did it all.

The girl had lost enough dignity as it was and Jilly knew that dignity was almost as hard to recover as innocence. She knew all too well.

3

Stolen Childhood, by Sophie Etoile. Copperplate engraving. Five Coyotes Singing Studio, Newford, 1988.

A child in a ragged dress stands in front of a ramshackle farmhouse. In one hand she holds a doll—a stick with a ball stuck in one end and a skirt on the other. She wears a lost expression, holding the doll as though she doesn’t quite know what to do with it.

A shadowed figure stands behind the screen door, watching her.

I guess I was around three years old when my oldest brother started molesting me. That’d make him eleven. He used to touch me down between my legs while my parents were out drinking or sobering up down in the kitchen. I tried to fight him off, but I didn’t really know that what he was doing was wrong—even when he started to put his cock inside me.

I was eight when my mother walked in on one of his rapes and you know what she did? She walked right out again until my brother was finished and we both had our clothes on again. She waited until he’d left the room, then she came back in and started screaming at me.

“You little slut! Why are you doing this to your own brother?”

Like it was my fault. Like I wanted him to rape me. Like the threeyear-old I was when he started molesting me had any idea about what he was doing.

I think my other brothers knew what was going on all along, but they never said anything about it—they didn’t want to break that macho codeof-honor bullshit. When my dad found out about, he beat the crap out of my brother, but in some ways it just got worse after that.

My brother didn’t molest me anymore, but he’d glare at me all the time, like he was going to pay me back for the beating he got soon as he got a chance. My mother and my other brothers, every time I’d come into a room, they’d all just stop talking and look at me like I was some kind of bug.

I think at first my dad wanted to do something to help me, but in the end he really wasn’t any better than my mother. I could see it in his eyes: he blamed me for it, too. He kept me at a distance, never came close to me anymore, never let me feel like I was normal.

He’s the one who had me see a psychiatrist. I’d have to go and sit in his office all alone, just a little kid in this big leather chair. The psychiatrist would lean across his desk, all smiles and smarmy understanding, and try to get me to talk, but I never told him a thing. I didn’t trust him. I’d already learned that I couldn’t trust men. Couldn’t trust women either, thanks to my mother. Her idea of working things out was to send me to confession, like the same God who let my brother rape me was now going to make everything okay so long as I owned up to seducing him in the first place.

What kind of a way is that for a kid to grow up?

4

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I let my brother ...”

5

Dilly laid her sketchpad aside when her guest began to stir. She swung her legs down so that they dangled from the windowsill, heels banging lightly against the wall, toes almost touching the ground. She pushed an unruly lock of hair from her brow, leaving behind a charcoal smudge on her temple.

Small and slender, with pixie features and a mass of curly dark hair, she looked almost as young as the girl on her bed. Jeans and sneakers, a dark Tshirt and an oversized peachcolored smock only added to her air of slightness and youth. But she was halfway through her thirties, her own teenage years long gone; she could have been Annie’s mother.

“What were you doing?” Annie asked as she sat up, tugging the sheets up around herself.

“Sketching you while you slept. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Can I see?”

Jilly passed the sketchpad over and watched Annie study it. On the fire escape behind her, two more cats had joined the black and white tabby at the margarine container. One was an old alleycat, its left ear ragged and torn, ribs showing like so many hills and valleys against the matted landscape of its fur. The other belonged to an upstairs neighbor; it was making its usual morning rounds.

“You made me look a lot better than I really am,” Annie said finally.

Jilly shook her head. “I only drew what was there.”

“Yeah, right.”

Jilly didn’t bother to contradict her. The selfworth speech would keep.

“So is this how you make your living?” Annie asked. “Pretty well. I do a little waitressing on the side.”

“Beats being a hooker, I guess.”

She gave Jilly a challenging look as she spoke, obviously anticipating a reaction.

Jilly only shrugged. “Tell me about it,” she said.

Annie didn’t say anything for a long moment. She looked down at the rough portrait with an unreadable expression, then finally met Jilly’s gaze again.

“I’ve heard about you,” she said. “On the street. Seems like everybody knows you. They say ...”

Her voice trailed off

Jilly smiled. “What do they say?”

“Oh, all kinds of stuff.” She shrugged. “You know. That you used to live on the street, that you’re kind of like , a onewoman social service, but you don’t lecture. And that you’re—” she hesitated, looked away for a moment “—you know, a witch.”