Widdershins (34 page)

“This is very serious, Jillian,” he told me. “We’re going to have to pray hard and long together to make things better between you and the Lord.”

Who knew that “praying” was just Father Cleary’s euphemism for dealing with something else that was hard and long? Not the little kid I was. Not until we were in his office later. Not until he closed the door and started to unzip his pants.

Del was waiting for me outside the church to walk me home. I don’t know if he was psychic, or if it showed all over my face, but he knew right away what had happened. He slapped me hard across the back of the head, just like Mama always did, and told me I was going to pay for this.

I guess he didn’t like to share his toys.

That night when I was asleep he scattered broken glass on the floor beside my bed, like my water glass had fallen over, and when I got out of bed in the morning, I stepped right on it with my bare feet.

Oh, it was a mess, me bawling my head off, blood all over the bottoms of my feet and dripping on the floor. It hurt so bad.

Mama came in and started yelling at me about how could I be so stupid as to not clean up my glass when it broke last night. I saw my younger brothers, Jimmy and Robbie, standing in the doorway, eyes wide. Del was in the hallway behind them, just grinning away and we both knew why.

Mama threw a rag at me.

“Now, you just clean that up, missy,” she told me. “And don’t you go tracking blood all over the floors, neither.”

I was hobbling around for days, my feet wrapped in rags, trying not to cry with every step I had to take as I did my chores. But I learnt my lesson. I didn’t go tell anybody else. And I knew there was no god. Or at least, if there was, I hated him for letting this happen to me.

After that, I expected people to betray me. So I wasn’t surprised when I got abused again in one of the foster homes I was put in after I ran away from home. I wasn’t surprised when my boyfriend Rob—another runaway like me—got me strung out on junk and started me turning tricks.

By the time Lou—who was a patrolman at the time—got me off the streets and into his girlfriend Angel’s recovery program for kids like me, I’d been betrayed so many times I don’t know how I ever learned to trust again.

I guess Lou and Angel started the process with—when I look back on it—their infinite patience.

Sophie and Wendy made it real, befriending me, teaching me what it could mean to have people in your life that you can count on.

And Geordie . . . Geordie was the first guy I ever met who didn’t betray me, who wouldn’t even
think
of betraying me. I mean a guy my age, because Lou’d already proven to me there were decent men in the world.

But they’re not here. Lou and Angel. Sophie and Wendy. My dear lad Geordie.

There’s only a made-up girl and her monstrous bear who hate me.

Del, and it looks like the priest.

Maybe Rob and Adrian L. Brewer, the pasty-faced freak from the last foster home I was in. I remember him the best because he was the worst that child services sent me to.

Maybe they’re all living together in the house, all my enemies under one roof.

If I had a can of gasoline, I could burn it down with them in it.

I sigh. No, I couldn’t. Oh, I could burn the house down, no question, but I wouldn’t want the deaths of even such monsters weighing down my soul.

It’s funny. Whenever I talk about this kind of thing—in my art, in out-reach programs like Angel runs—you get these people saying things like how it’s all old hat, movie-of-the-week, tearjerker crap. They’re tired of it and wish that people would just shut up and get on with their lives instead of going on and on about it. Well, we’re tired of it, too, those of us unfortunate enough to be Children of the Secret. But that didn’t stop it from happening to us and screwing up our lives. Way too many of us weren’t lucky enough to find support like I got to help me pick up the pieces of my life again.

And as being here makes it all too clear, the reality of it never really goes away, does it? It’s always there inside us, an unhappy ache that we can’t completely ease no matter how deeply we bury it.

It’s not something I think about all the time or anything, but I still wake up sweating from bad dreams where I’m that kid again, trapped in an endless cycle of being hurt. Or something I see or hear will trigger a rush of panic before I remember that I’m not there anymore.

Something like the beat-up old house sitting down there on the other side of a county road that, in this world, probably goes from nowhere to nowhere.

I have to look away. I have to get away, but I don’t know what to do, where to go, until I remember the tree. My magic tree that listened to all my stories and gifted me with her light. The one that Raylene burned down in the World As It Is.

Maybe it’s still standing, here in this world inside my head.

That’s where the magic started for me, I guess. Not in a book, because I didn’t know what I was creating from its pages. I thought I was only taking comfort from those fairy tales and Wentworth’s illustrations, not creating a walking, talking version of Mattie, full of hurt and pain.

That tree and Raylene are the only good things I remember from Hillbilly Holler. In the World As It Is, one’s burned down, and the other tried to kill me before we made our peace. But maybe it’ll be different here. Maybe, even with everything else that’s so awful here, the tree will at least be here.

I circle around through the woods because the tree’s in the fields behind the house, and I don’t want anybody to see me making my way toward it. It was always a private place before and maybe my enemies don’t know about it.

I’m in a curious state of mind as I walk, weaving my way through the underbrush. I start at every sound, my nerves all a-twitch. Anticipation’s running high that I’m going to see the tree again. But I’m also dreading that it’ll be like it was the last time I saw it: nothing more than a charred ruin of a stump. Overgrown. Dead. Gone.

When I finally get to the field where the old tree stands, I let out a breath I wasn’t aware I was holding. It’s still here, as big as ever. I thought it might be smaller than I remembered, the way the things from your past usually seem, but it’s still huge. It’d take three or four of me to touch hands reaching around the base of its trunk, and the canopy has an enormous spread, bigger than any of the oversized infill housing that started to appear in Lower Crowsea during the mid-nineties. They’d jam these monster homes onto a tiny lot with no regard for the look of the neighbourhood.

But the neighbourhood here is just fine. That old oak. The apple trees at the other end of the field, growing up out of a mess of thorny thickets. The field itself, grasses and weeds swaying in the light breeze that’s coming from the woods behind me.

I take the time to study the edge of the forest surrounding the field, longer still to check out the second field that runs up to the back of the old house. I can’t see anybody. And I can’t stop grinning as I walk slowly through the tall grass and weeds to where the tree’s waiting for me.

I wonder if she’s here, that aspect of the White Deer Woman who told me she used to listen to my stories when I sat under its branches and poured out my heart. Or if she’s not here . . . well, maybe I can call her to me through the connection we have to the tree. Because
she
found a way out of this world inside my head. If I call her back, maybe she can take me out of here, too.

I don’t sense her presence when I’m under the tree, but then I never sensed it when I was a kid, either. Or rather, I sensed something peaceful and comforting, but it’s what I always feel in a place like this.

I lay a hand on the trunk.

“I’m sorry about Raylene,” I say. “She was getting back at me, and you shouldn’t have had to suffer because of that.”

Sometimes it feels like that’s always going to be the way of the world. The innocent get hurt, and no one really pays any attention unless it happens right in their face and they can’t possibly ignore it. But even then they manage to forget pretty damn fast.

Why does it have to be like that? Why does wishing we could all just get along and take care of each other have to be a naive, innocent hope instead of something we could all actually work toward?

I guess I’ll never know. Because the people who do the hurting don’t care, and they’re not about to explain themselves in terms that would make any kind of sense to a normal person.

I still have my hand on the rough bark of the tree. I move closer and hug it, the bark scratchy against my cheek and catching in the tangles of my hair. I can’t possibly get my arms all around it, but it feels good to stand here, holding onto something this full of comfort.

I don’t know how long I would have stood there—looking, I’m sure, like some bad editorial cartoon of a die-hard environmentalist—but there’s a sudden crash in the branches above me. I look up and see a woman and a pony. Impossibly, a woman riding a pony has suddenly
appeared
in the branches above me, but I don’t get the time to puzzle it out. The woman manages to grab onto a branch, but the pony comes barreling down toward me, changing into a little man along the way.

I jump aside and he just misses me—all little man now, nothing of the pony left except that his dreadlocks are the same colour as was the pony’s mane. He lands on his feet like a cat, expelling a sharp
whuft
of air from between his lips, and we stare at each other. He looks as ready to bolt as I am.

“Some help up here,” a voice calls down from above.

We both look up.

After all I’ve been through in the past little while, I would have said that nothing could surprise me anymore. But I would have been wrong.

“Lizzie?” I find myself saying. “What are
you
doing in this world?”

Her familiar face looks down at me from where she’s clinging to a branch as fat around as her own torso.

“So,” she says, “I’m guessing this isn’t Kansas, or even Sweetwater.”

I shake my head.

“Great. And here I am, stuck up in a tree.”

“Just let go,” the little man beside me tells her.

“Oh, right. Like I’m going to do that and break my neck. I’m neither cat nor doonie.”

“It will be fine,” he tells her. “I’ll take your weight.”

“Nope.”

“Trust me.”

She gives me a look but I have no words. I’m still trying to process the fact that she’s here with a little man who can turn into a pony.

“Oh, crap,” she says and lets go where I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have.

But instead of falling, she comes floating down. I shoot the little man a look and see that he’s got this serious look of concentration on his face. I guess by taking her weight he didn’t mean he was going to catch her, but that he was going to literally take her weight so that she doesn’t tip the scales more than a leaf.

When Lizzie’s feet touch the ground, she loses her balance and I catch her arm.

“You see?” the little man says.

She gives me a quick smile of thanks and puts a hand out to steady herself against the tree. Then she looks at the little man and shakes her head.

“I saw all too well,” she says. “What did you do? Talk to my fat cells and ask them to be air for a few moments?”

“Something like that, although you’re hardly fat.”

I have no idea what they’re talking about.

“What are you
doing
here?” I ask.

“Same as you,” she says. “Bogans kidnapped me into the otherworld—or at least some part of the otherworld. The forest where we were was a lot darker and scarier than it is here. You did say this is the otherworld, didn’t you?”

I nod. “It’s sort of the otherworld, except bogans didn’t bring me. I just kind of appeared here.”

“And look at you—you’re like twenty years old and all, you know . . . healthy and everything.”

I give her another nod. “Apparently the way we appear here has everything to do with how we perceive ourselves to be.”

“Sweet.”

I look from her to the little man.

“Oh, this is Timony Twotot,” Lizzie says. “And this is Jilly,” she adds for his benefit.

The little man and I regard each other. Then he sticks out a little brown hand, and we shake like we’re meeting at an art show opening or something.

“Pleased to meet you,” he says.

I nod, but before I can say anything, Lizzie’s talking again.

“So then, where exactly
are
we? Timony told me to concentrate on somewhere safe, so naturally I thought of you because you know all about this kind of thing, right?”

“Not really.”

“Just tell me there isn’t some pack of bogans waiting around the corner.”

“None that I know of, but—”

“I thought we’d end up back at the hotel, but obviously
that
didn’t work out.” Then she gets a worried look. “What did you mean it’s sort of the otherworld?”

“It’s complicated,” I tell her. “I think we’re in a world that’s inside my head.”

She just looks at me.

“I know. I can’t really explain it myself.”

“I can,” Timony says. “We’re not exactly in your head. We’re in your
croi baile
—your heart home.”

“My what?”

“Croibaile,”
he repeats. “Everyone has a place like this in the otherworld, but most people only visit it when they’re sleeping or dreaming. It’s a place personal to just you.”

“Like some kind of pocket world?” I ask.

Joe’s told me about them, but all I can remember is the term ‘pocket world,’ none of the details. It’s like the place that Geordie’s sister Christiana has in the between, though I guess she’s not really his sister. Or at least she wasn’t born his sister.

I shake my head and concentrate on what Timony’s saying.

“. . . a term as any. They’re often set up so that only you can visit them. Anyone else needs a specific invitation.”

“But I didn’t invite . . .” I start to say.

But then I realize I did invite them. Not them in particular, perhaps, but I was desperately wanting
someone
to be here with me.