Someplace to Be Flying (37 page)

I remembered the name of a friend of my grandma’s who lived in Newford and I took a chance in calling her up and seeing if she’d help. That was Chloë. I dialed information and got her number and then before I could lose my nerve, I phoned her. She was so nice. She’s the one who set me up in the apartment, got me registered at Butler even though I don’t have regular high school credentials. And here I am.

“Jesus,” Rory said. “That’s all so horrible. Your parents kept you in there for
ten
years?”

Kerry nodded. Once she’d started, the old history had gushed out of her. At first it had given her a great sense of release, but now she was feeling embarrassed by the shared intimacy, Rory’s sympathy notwithstanding. She’d never told anybody the whole story and while she was gratified that someone else could finally see the injustice of what had happened to her, at the same time it left her feeling so pathetic. By her age, most people had done and experienced all sorts of things. All she had to show for her life to date was ten years locked in a zombie zone.

“I mean, you can sort of understand their wanting you to get help with the invisible-sister business,” he went on, “but what they did to you was no way to deal with the problem.”

Kerry’s heart sank. He didn’t believe her either. But then why should he be any different? Even she knew that a sister who’d never been born couldn’t be real. Not really. All that had been real was the small fossilized fetus, and the doctors had removed that from her side twelve years ago. But there were so many times when logic wouldn’t take hold in her, when it slipped and slid away and instead, she saw her twin, heard her voice… .

I want it to be true, she thought. She folded her hands on her lap and looked across the stretch of? lawn that lay between them and the river. That was why she couldn’t let it go. She wanted to have a sister, even if nobody else could see her.

“You believe she was real, don’t you?” Rory said.

She turned to find him looking at her. She couldn’t read his expression at all. Not wany, exactly, but worried maybe. A dash of pity. She couldn’t blame him.

“Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t,” she said. “Mostly I don’t know. But there’s so much that can’t be explained otherwise.”

“Was that you playing the piano in your apartment the other night?” Rory asked.

“You heard that?”

He nodded. “It was beautiful.”

“Katy always played beautifully. She learned everything by ear. All she had to do was hear it once.”

Rory looked uncomfortable.

“Go ahead,” Kerry said. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“Well, I’m just wondering … is it possible that you were the one at the piano but you just don’t … remember it?”

“You think I’m one of those multiple personalities.”

“I’m no psychiatrist.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know, would I?” Kerry said. “I mean, if? another personality was to take over, I wouldn’t be aware that it was happening.”

She’d seen it at Baumert with a girl named Wendy. Sometimes the personalities went flickering through her so fast it was like someone was holding a remote and surfing through the channels. Wendy never knew it was happening at all. She just lost time, like the epileptics did when they had a seizure.

“I guess not,” Rory said.

Kerry sighed. “Except, I’m me when it happens. Katy manifests externally. I mean, if she exists. If I’m not just making her up.”

“I didn’t say—”

“You don’t have to. Nothing else makes sense.”

An akward silence fell between them. Kerry looked for the crow girls but they seemed to have wandered
off.
Unless that pale-skinned punk with the wild black hair sitting a few benches down was one of them in a new disguise. She couldn’t tell if the androgynous figure was a boy or girl. Her gaze moved on.

“I guess they got bored and left,” Kerry said.

Rory nodded. “They don’t exactly have the longest attention spans.”

He shaded his eyes as he searched the lawn for the pair, but Kerry had already stopped looking. Her attention was now on the gray stone buildings of Butler University on the far side of the river. Weird to think she’d be going there tomorrow morning. One thing she vowed. She wouldn’t tell anyone anything about Baumert or Katy when she was on campus. She was going to pretend she was normal and just hope that if she pretended hard enough, it would come true.

“What happened this morning with Maida?” Rory asked.

Kerry turned back to him. She had to think for a moment before she remembered what it was that had started this whole sorry monologue of hers This morning already felt like weeks ago. She knew she could let it slide. While Rory might not believe in Katy, he seemed like a nice guy and she didn’t think he’d press her. But she figured she might as well finish it now. Closure and all, as Dr. Stiles would have put it.

“I fall to pieces really easily,” she said, letting her gaze drift back to Butler U. “Anything can set me off because I’m so unsure of myself. It’s like I walk this narrow balancing act between being crazy and being normal, only being normal’s like a really thin wire and it’s so easy to fall off.”

She could feel his gaze on her but she couldn’t look at him because her story was wandering back into the territory that on old maps would carry the legend “Here there be dragons.”

“That’s what happened to me this morning,” she said. “I fell off the wire, only this time Maida was there to catch me. She licked her fingers and put them against my forehead and just like that, everything was clear.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know how to explain it better than that. I guess, it’s just that I walk around scared all the time and I don’t feel that way anymore—not after this morning. What happened with that red-haired man … any other time and I’d have been back in bed for the rest of the week, just trying to deal with it.”

“I hate it when people sell themselves short,” Rory said.

“I’m not. But I know my limitations. I’ve lived with them for long enough. Maida did something to me. She worked a piece of magic. That’s all I can call it.”

“Magic.”

Kerry smiled. “You’re uncomfortable with the idea, aren’t you?”

“You’re not?”

She shook her head. “No. I find it kind of liberating, actually.”

“But—”

“And it makes me feel better about Katy, too. Because while we both know that logically she can’t have existed, how do you explain the things she told me that 1 couldn’t have known otherwise? Like how my parents were paying Dr. Stiles to keep me doped up in Baumert so that they could blow my inheritance? An inheritance I didn’t even know I had.”

“I can’t,” Rory said. “But that doesn’t mean it can’t be explained.”

Kerry licked two fingers and pressed them against the air in front of her.

“And Maida’s miracle cure?” she asked.

Rory laughed, then caught himself. “Sorry. It’s just that nothing the crow airls do ever makes much sense to me.”

“That’s because you only see things from outside of their point of reference.”

He nodded slowly. “Fair enough.”

“While I prefer to believe that they’re magic.”

“But that’s only because …” His voice trailed off.

“It allows me the option that I’m not crazy,” she finished for him.

“I wouldn’t have put it quite like that.”

She shrugged. “You don’t have to be delicate. We all knew we were lunatics in Baumert.”

“Just because you were undergoing—”

“You can’t have it both ways,” she said, cutting him off. “Either I’m crazy, or I’m not. And if I’m not, then Katy’s real and the crow girls are magic. I have old blood, you have old blood, and we live in a house full of corbæ.”

Rory shook his head. “I’ve lived there for nine years. Don’t you think I would have seen something in all that time?”

“Depends. A lot of people live in a place and never really see it. Never pay attention at all. They’re not completely disassociative, but you can’t say they’re completely aware either.”

She could see he didn’t like that, but too bad. Let somebody else be in the hot seat for once. Let somebody else have to wonder what was real and what wasn’t.

“And besides,” she added. “Didn’t you tell me that the crow girls have looked around fourteen in all the years you’ve known them?”

“There’s that,” he agreed. “But that doesn’t mean they’re magic.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t suppose it means anything at all, does it?”

And suddenly she felt very tired. Not “I have to lie down until the world stops spinning” tired, but drained all the same. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d talked this much—and never with so much emotional baggage in tow.

She stood up. “We should go back. I’ve got a big day ahead of me tomorrow and I haven’t done anything to prepare for it yet.”

He quickly rose to join her. “Look, I didn’t mean to seem unsympathetic. It’s just …”

“I understand,” she said. “Really I do. I wish I could be as sure of things as you are. It must be so much easier to go through life knowing that this is the way things are, this is real, this isn’t, and anything that deviates from that concrete reality is simply an anomaly that you haven’t found an explanation for yet.”

“You make it sound so calculated and cold.”

Kerry gave him a sad smile. “But the world is cold. For me the warm places are few and far between. That’s why I treasure something like the crow girls so much.” She raised a hand to her brow. “They warm the lonely cold in me.”

She started to walk back toward Stanton Street and he fell in step with her.

“I really don’t blame you for not believing,” she went on. “And you’ve listened with more patience to me than anyone else ever has.”

Rory didn’t say anything for at least half a block. Kerry listened to the sound of their footsteps on the pavement. It was so hot and still that everything seemed to be hushed, the whole city on hold. It was all slow motion and lazy the passing cars, the other pedestrians, people sitting on their front stoops. She knew how they felt. She was used to the drier heat of California. Her shirt was damp, sticking to her back, and she wished she were wearing shorts instead of jeans, but she didn’t have a pair in her minuscule wardrobe.

“Have you ever told anybody everything you’ve told me?” Rory asked suddenly.

She shook her head. “No. The doctors usually stopped listening the moment I brought up Katy.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that.”

“Don’t feel guilty,” she told him.

“Right.”

“No, honest. You’ve been very kind and I really appreciate it. You and Annie both. I was sort of surprised at how brusque Chloë was this morning. She was so nice to me on the phone.”

“Oh, that’s just Chloë,” Rory said. “She’s never been one to hang out and gab. I mean, I don’t know about magic, but everybody in the Rookery is seriously eccentric. I won’t say Chloë‘s the strangest of the lot, but when you think of how she’ll sit out on the roof the way she does …”

Kerry let him talk, happy that she’d been able to get them onto a different topic of conversation. But later, when she was alone again in her own apartment, it was hard not to feel lonely, to know that no one understood.

She made herself concentrate on her preparations for school tomorrow, stood in front of her closet and tried to decide what to wear, had a supper of cheese on toast, but the loneliness wouldn’t go away. At one point, she almost went downstairs to knock on Rory’s door, but she thought she’d bothered him enough for one day. The crow girls were noticeable for their absence and she felt everybody else had been a little too distant the last time she’d seen them for her to be able to approach them now.

Finally she sat in her chair and looked out at the big elm tree. She had her window wide open to let in the cooler air that had come with the fall of night. Magic was on her mind. The touch of Maida’s fingers. The mystery of a house full of corbæ
.
She only half-understood what that meant, but it reminded her of her grandmother, so instead of worrying over meanings, she simply held on to the hope that there really was magic in the world and she wasn’t crazy. Rather, she was lucky that pieces of it had come her way.

After awhile, she picked up Dog and Cowslip and cuddled the two stuffed animals against her chest.

“Katy,” she found herself saying. “If you’re out there, come see me.” But there was no response.

Rory sat at his kitchen table, doodling intricate fur-and-feathers details onto the various jewelry designs he’d sketched earlier in the day, his mind a thousand miles away from what the pencil in his hand was doing.

First Lily, he thought, and now Kerry. What was happening to the world? Maybe all those years of watching shows like
The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits,
and now
The X-Files
were finally taking their toll. People weren’t only accepting that the impossible was possible—if not in their hometown, then
somewhere.
They were now convincing themselves that they’d experienced these kinds of things as well, complete with special effects and all. Alien abductions, Bigfoot in the piney wood hills, faeries skipping through downtown streets, goblins in the sewers. No wonder Christy’s books did so well—though, of course, he was a believer, too.

It wasn’t hard to tell that the millennium was approaching. What was hard was maintaining one’s own equilibrium when everything else seemed unbalanced, or leaning that way.

He found himself writing words along the bottom of one his sketches: “There’s no such thing as fiction. If you can imagine something, then it’s happened.”

It took him a moment to remember who’d told him that. Annie. Annie who’d been in fine mysterious form this morning with her cryptic comments about mirrors and Jack’s stories.

And then there was the business with the crow girls.

The worst thing about all of this was that there were pieces of Kerry’s story that seemed to fit into the jigsaw puzzle of what Lily had been talking about before she’d left for Tucson last week. Especially when he added in the odd behavior of the crow girls this morning. They’d seemed genuinely menacing— Zia with that switchblade in her hand—until the red-haired stranger finally drove away. So why had he been so quick to dismiss Kerry? Worse still, why did he dismiss Lily’s story when he knew she’d never lie to him?