Besides, a general air of community seemed to have taken over the city, with everybody lending a hand to their neighbors, and even to strangers. There were stories about generators going missing, of lowlifes stealing from people they were pretending to help, but the numbers were far fewer than one might have expected in the chaos left behind the storm.
Most of the street people still weren’t interested in the shelters, never mind the severe turn the weather had taken, but even they appeared to have acquired more of a Good Samaritan spirit. She found them actively keeping tabs on each other, steering her to people who needed help, and a couple of times she’d had a half-dozen of them pushing the van back onto the streets when she’d gotten stuck.
Not having to see her friends helped a lot. And even when she did, it was easy to put the haunted look in her eyes down to simple weariness.
“You okay?” Jilly asked her one afternoon when they were working side by side, washing up dishes in the makeshift soup kitchen that had been set up in the basement of St. Paul’s. “You’ve got a look…”
If anyone could listen to her story with an open ear, it would be Jilly, and at some point Ellie knew she would talk to her about what she’d experienced, but she wasn’t ready to do it yet.
“I’m just tired,” she said.
Jilly nodded. “Tell me about it. I usually make do on four or five hours of sleep a night myself, but I’m not even getting that these days.”
Ellie only smiled in response.
In the end, she’d done such a good job of putting aside the weird turn her life had taken prior to the ice storm that she was startled to get a call from Hunter that Wednesday afternoon when she was in the office on Grasso Street, putting together a new load of supplies for the evening’s run in the van. Startled, but pleased, especially when she found out he was calling to ask if he could lend a hand after he’d closed the store that day.
“I could use some company in the van tonight,” she told him.
“Okay. Sounds like a plan. Where should I meet you?”
“I’ll pick you up at the store. What time do you close?”
“Six.”
“I’ll see you then.”
“Great.” She could almost feel his smile through the phone line as he added, “So is this, like, another one of our dates?”
She laughed. “Dress warm,” she told him. “The van’s heater is pretty much a rumor.”
She was surprised at how happy she was to see him waiting for her when she pulled up in front of Gypsy Records at a little after six that evening, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his parka, hood up against the wind. The temperature had dropped even more this evening. Coupled with a fierce wind that had already rocked the van a few times on the drive over, it was serious frostbite weather out there tonight.
“Hey,” Hunter said as he got in on the passenger’s side and fastened his seat belt. “It’s great to see you.”
“You, too.”
“I tried calling you a bunch of times, but there was never any answer at your place.”
“I’ve been working kind of non-stop with Angel since we got back.”
Hunter nodded. “That’s what I finally figured out. So I looked up Angel’s office number.”
“I’m glad you did.”
And she was. She didn’t know how committed he was to the work that she was doing for Angel—it was pretty obvious that he’d offered to help out with the Outreach program as an excuse to see her—but she was flattered by the attention and couldn’t really blame him. She hadn’t exactly made herself available to anybody since she’d gotten back.
Hunter dug in his pocket and pulled out a cassette.
“Here,” he said, handing it to her. “I made this for you.”
Ellie smiled. “Jilly’s told me about this—it’s like a record store guy thing, right?”
“I guess. Though Fiona makes them, too.”
She looked at the label he’d made up for the cassette and started reading some of the names of the artists. “Ani DiFranco. Sonny Rollins. Solas. The Walkabouts. John Coltrane.” She glanced at him. “This is… eclectic.”
“Actually,” Hunter said, “it’s kind of a Miki tape. I got the feeling that you knew Donal a lot better than you did her and I thought maybe you’d understand her better if you could listen to some of the stuff she loves.”
“More record store guy stuff.”
“Well, you can tell a lot from the music a person listens to.”
She smiled and put the cassette into the player. They listened to the first song, DiFranco singing against the minimal accompaniment of drums and a bass guitar. The song started and ended with:
i’m a pixie
i’m a paper doll
i’m a cartoon
i’m a chipper cheerful for all
and i light up a room
i’m the color me happy girl
miss live and let live
and when they’re out for blood
i always give
When the song segued into Sonny Rollins blowing his horn, Ellie turned to Hunter.
“Everybody sees Miki like that, too,” she said.
Hunter nodded. “She used to hide it well. She just compartmentalized all the crap and really did wake up to each day like it was, well, the first day of the rest of her life. But now…”
“Is she still going away?”
On the walk out of the otherworld, Miki had told them that as soon as she could, she was leaving town.
“She’s already gone. She left this morning for Chicago in Donal’s old VW minibus. Some booking agent she contacted had a band cancel out of this Irish club and she was in. She got a couple of her cohorts from Fall Down Dancing to go up with her and she’s dead-serious about starting up a touring band.”
“It seems so sudden,” Ellie said.
“Well, she’s leaving friends behind, but what else was left for her here? Everything she owns was trashed by the Gentry, Donal’s… gone, and all’s that left are a lot of weird memories.”
“I don’t know that running away’s ever the best answer.”
Hunter shook his head. “I think she’s more running to something. She should have done this a long time ago. The difference now is she’s traveling with a borrowed accordion and the handful of personal belongings she was able to buy with the money I fronted her, instead of also having to keep up a place back here.”
“You really care about her, don’t you?”
“Like a brother,” Hunter said. “No, scratch that. Like a normal brother.”
Ellie sighed. She hadn’t even begun to deal with what all of this meant to her memories of her own relationship with Donal. She missed him terribly, but whenever she thought of him, all the horrors came flooding back into her head.
“Something like what happened to us all changes you big-time,” Hunter said.
Ellie nodded. “I’m just trying not to think of it. For now.”
“I can’t do anything but. That’s what I’m doing here with you tonight.”
“How so?”
It was hard to tell with only the light from streetlamps coming into the van, but when she glanced at him, she’d swear he was blushing.
“I guess it taught me that life is short,” he said, “so you’d better do something with it. I want to take chances. Do more with my life. Get out of the record store more often. Do things like this, where it makes a difference to other people.”