Charles De Lint - Dreams Underfoot

She’s kind of shy around Angel and some of my other friends—I guess they’re all too old for her or something—but she gets along really well with Sophie and me. Probably because, whenever you put Sophie and me together in the same room for more than two minutes, we just start giggling and acting about half our respective ages, which would make us, mentally at least, just a few years Annie’s senior.

“You two could be sisters,” Annie told me one day when we got back from Sophie’s studio. “Her hair’s lighter, and she’s a little chestier, and she’s definitely more organized than you are, but I get a real sense of family when I’m with the two of you. The way families are supposed to be.”

“Even though Sophie’s got faerie blood?” I asked her. She thought I was joking.

“If she’s got magic in her,” Annie said, “then so do you. Maybe that’s what makes you seem so much like sisters.”

“I just pay attention to things,” I told her. “That’s all.”

“Yeah, right.”

The baby came right on schedule—threethirty, Sunday morning. I probably would’ve panicked if Annie hadn’t been doing enough of that for both of us. Instead I got on the phone, called Angel, and then saw about helping Annie get dressed.

The contractions were really close by the time Angel arrived with the car. But everything worked out fine. Jillian Sophia Mackle was born two hours and fortyfive minutes later at the Newford General Hospital. Six pounds and five ounces of redfaced wonder. There were no complications.

Those came later.

11

The last week before the show was simple chaos. There seemed to be a hundred and one things that none of them had thought of, all of which had to be done at the last moment. And to make matters worse, Jilly still had one unfinished canvas haunting her by Friday night.

It stood on her easel, untitled, barelysketched in images, still in monochrome. The colors eluded her.

She knew what she wanted, but every time she stood before her easel, her mind went blank. She seemed to forget everything she’d ever known about art. The inner essence of the canvas rose up inside her like a ghost, so close she could almost touch it, but then fled daily, like a dream lost upon waking. The outside world intruded. A knock on the door. The ringing of the phone.

The show opened in exactly seven days.

Annie’s baby was almost two weeks old. She was a happy, satisfied infant, the kind of baby that was forever making contented little gurgling sounds, as though talking to herself; she never cried. Annie herself was a nervous wreck.

“I’m scared,” she told Jilly when she came over to the loft that afternoon. “Everything’s going too well. I don’t deserve it.” They were sitting at the kitchen table, the baby propped up on the Murphy bed between two pillows. Annie kept fidgeting. Finally she picked up a pencil and started drawing stick figures on pieces of paper.

“Don’t say that,” Jilly said. “Don’t even think it.”

“But it’s true. Look at me. I’m not like you or Sophie. I’m not like Angel. What have I got to offer my baby? What’s she going to have to look up to when she looks at me?”

“A kind, caring mother.”

Annie shook her head. “I don’t feel like that. I feel like everything’s sort of fuzzy and it’s like pushing through cobwebs to just to make it through the day.”

“We’d better make an appointment with you to see a doctor.”

“Make it a shrink,” Annie said. She continued to doodle, then looked down at what she was doing.

“Look at this. It’s just crap.”

Before Jilly could see, Annie swept the sheaf of papers to the floor.

“Oh, jeez,” she said as they went fluttering all over the place. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”

She got up before Jilly could and tossed the lot of them in the garbage container beside the stove.

She stood there for a long moment, taking deep breaths, holding them, slowly letting them out.

“Annie ... ?”

She turned as Jilly approached her. The glow of motherhood that had seemed to revitalize her in the month before the baby was born had slowly worn away. She was pale again. Wan. She looked so lost that all Jilly could do was put her arms around her and offer a wordless comfort.

“I’m sorry,” Annie said against Jilly’s hair. “I don’t know what’s going on. I just ... I know I should be really happy, but I just feel scared and confused.” She rubbed at her eyes with a knuckle. “God, listen to me. All it seems I can do is complain about my life.”

“It’s not like you’ve had a great one,” Jilly said.

“Yeah, but when I compare it to what it was like before I met you, it’s like I moved up into heaven.”

“Why don’t you stay here tonight?” Jilly said.

Annie stepped back out of her arms. “Maybe I will—if you really don’t mind ... ?”

“I really don’t mind.”

“Thanks.”

Annie glanced towards the bed, her gaze pausing on the clock on the wall above the stove.

“You’re going to be late for work,” she said.

“That’s all right. I don’t think I’ll go in tonight.”

Annie shook her head. “No, go on. You’ve told me how busy it gets on a Friday night.”

Jilly still worked parttime at Kathryn’s Cafe on Battersfield Road. She could just imagine what Wendy would say if she called in sick. There was no one else in town this weekend to take her shift, so that would leave Wendy working all the tables on her own.

“If you’re sure,” Jilly said.

“We’ll be okay,” Annie said. “Honestly.”

She went over to the bed and picked up the baby, cradling her gently in her arms.

“Look at her,” she said, almost to herself. “It’s hard to believe something so beautiful came out of me.” She turned to Jilly, adding before Jilly could speak, “That’s a kind of magic all by itself, isn’t it?”

“Maybe one of the best we can make,” Jilly said.

12

How Can You Call This Love? by Claudia Feder. Oils. Old Market Studio, Newford, 1990.

A fat man sits on a bed in a cheap hotel room. He’s removing his shirt. Through the ajar door of the bathroom behind him, a thin girl in bra and panties can be seen sitting on the toilet, shooting up.

She appears to be about fourteen.

I just pay attention to things, I told her. I guess that’s why, when I got off my shift and came back to the loft, Annie was gone. Because I pay such good attention. The baby was still on the bed, lying between the pillows, sleeping. There was a note on the kitchen table: I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I just keep wanting to hit something. I look at little Jilly and I think about my mother and I get so scared. Take care of her for me. Teach her magic.

Please don’t hate me.

I don’t know how long I sat and stared at those sad, piteous words, tears streaming from my eyes.

I should never have gone to work. I should never have left her alone. She really thought she was just going to replay her own childhood. She told me, I don’t know how many times she told me, but I just wasn’t paying attention, was I?

Finally I got on the phone. I called Angel. I called Sophie. I called Lou Fucceri. I called everybody I could think of to go out and look for Annie. Angel was at the loft with me when we finally heard. I was the one who picked up the phone.

I heard what Lou said: “A patrolman brought her into the General not fifteen minutes ago, ODing on Christ knows what. She was just trying to selfdestruct, is what he said. I’m sorry, Jilly. But she died before I got there.”

I didn’t say anything. I just passed the phone to Angel and went to sit on the bed. I held little Jilly in my arms and then I cried some more.