We don't say anything for along time. I watch her lean on her cane and slowly catch her breath. The flush leaves her face.
"I read about your friend," she says finally. "That must have been hard for you."
Tears well in my eyes and I can't seem to find my voice. I manage a nod.
"It's always hardest for those of us who get left behind," she says, filling the silence that grows up between us. "I know."
"You... you've lost someone close to you?" I ask.
Betsy gives me this sad smile. "At my age, girl, I've just about lost them all." She pauses for a heartbeat, then asks, "You and your friend— you were... lovers?"
"Does that shock you?"
"Land's sake, no. I left my own husband for a woman— though that was years ago. Folks didn't look on it with much understanding back then."
They still don't I think.
"I think it makes it that much harder when you love someone folks don't think you're supposed to and she dies. You don't get a period of mourning. Folks are just relieved that the situation's gone and fixed itself."
"But you still mourn," I say.
"Oh yes. But you have to do your crying on the inside,"
My eyes fill again, not just for Annie and me now, but for Betsy and her long-gone lover. Betsy looks like she's about to lose it too; her eyes are all shiny, and the flush is returning to her cheeks, but then she wipes her eyes on her sleeve and straightens her back.
"So," she says, trying to sound cheery. "What brings you back? Another story for your newspaper?"
I shake my head even though I know she's only being kind. She can see the state I'm in— I look like the homeless person I've become, not the reporter I was.
"Remember when you were telling me about fairy gifts?" I say.
She nods slowly.
I want to tell her about the anima and what they gave me. I want to tell her about the ninja suit and climbing walls and leaping from rooftop to rooftop, looking for prey. I want to tell her about the dreaming places, and what I did to Newman when I pulled him into mine. I want to ask what the fairy women gave her. But none of it will come out.
Instead I just say, "I like the idea of it."
"You did a lovely job writing it all up in your article," Betsy tells me. "It had a different... ring to it."
"As opposed to the stories The Examiner usually runs," I say dryly.
Betsy smiles. "I've still got it in my scrapbook."
That reminds me.
"I didn't think you—" were still alive. "— Still lived around here," I say. "When I saw the trailer..."
"After I had my stroke?" she says, "I went to live across the road with my friend Alice."
I don't remember there being a place across the road from hers, but when she invites me back for tea, I see that it's because the evergreens hide it so well. As we walk up the little dirt track leading to it, Betsy tells me how it's a step up for her. I look from the run-down log cabin to her, the question plain in my eyes.
"I doesn't have wheels," she explains.
I never do any of the things that might have brought me up here. I don't talk about the anima to Betsy or what their coming into my life has done to me. I don't talk about how they might have affected her. I don't meet the anima again; I don't see Annie's ghost. But when Alice's daughter drives me back to the outskirts of the city where I can catch a bus, I realize the trip was still worthwhile, because I brought away with me something I hadn't had for so long I'd forgotten it had ever existed.
I brought away some human contact.
10
In Frank Estrich's private place there's a small dog, trembling in the weeds that grow up along the dirt road where Frank's walking. The dog is just a mutt, lost and scared. You see them far too often in the country— some poor animal that's outlived its welcome in a city home, so it gets taken for a ride, the car slows down, the animal's tossed out—"returned to nature"— and the problem's solved.
Frank found a stray the summer before, but his dad killed it when Frank brought it home and tried to hide it in the barn. And then his dad took the belt to Frank. His dad does that a lot, most of the time for no other reason than because he likes to do it.
Frank always feels so helpless. Everybody's bigger than him: his father, his uncles, his brothers, the other kids. Everybody can rag on him and there's not a thing he can do about it. But this dog's not bigger than him.
Frank knows it's wrong, he knows he should feel sorry for the little fella because the dog's as unwanted as Frank feels he is most of the time, but I can see in his head that he's thinking of getting his own back. And if he can't do it to those that are hurting him, then maybe he'll just do it to the dog.
Doesn't matter how it cringes down on its belly as he approaches it, eyes hopeful, body shaking. All Frank can think of is the beating he got earlier tonight. Dad took him out to the barn, made him take down his pants, made him bend over a bale of hay as he took off his belt...
I've already dealt with the father, but I know now how that's not enough. The seed's still lying inside the victim. Maybe it'll turn Frank into what his father calls a "sissy-boy," scared of his own shadow; more likely it'll make Frank grow up no different from his father, one more monster in a world that's got too many already.
So I have to teach Frank about right and wrong— not like his father did; not with arbitrary rules and punishments, but in a way that doesn't leave Frank feeling guilty for what was done to him, in a way that lets him understand that self-empowerment has got nothing to do with what you can do to someone else.
It's a long, slow process of healing that's as hard for me to put into words as it is for me to explain how I can step into other people's dreaming places. But it's worth it. Not just for the victims like Frank that I get to help, but for myself as well.
What happened to me before was that I was wearing myself out. I was putting so much out, but getting nothing back. I was living only in the shadows, living there so long that I almost forgot there was such a thing as sunlight.
That's what I do, I guess. I still step into the monsters' heads and turn them off, but then I visit the dreaming places of their victims and show them how to get back into the sunlight. The funny thing is, that when I'm with someone like Frank and he finally gets out of the shadows, I don't leave anything of myself behind. But they leave something in me.
Dried blood and rose petals.
Bird bones and wood ash.
It's all just metaphor for spirit— that's what Annie would say. I don't know. I don't need to put a name to it. I just use it all to reclaim my own dreaming place and keep it free of shadows.
A Tempest in Her Eyes
Remember all is but a poet's dream,
The first he had in Phoebus' holy bower,
But not the last, unless the first displease.
1
I've heard it said that there are always two sides to a story: There's the official history, the version that's set onto the page, then flied away in the archives where it waits for when the librarian comes to retrieve the facts to footnote some learned paper or discourse. Then there's the way an individual remembers the event; that version sits like an old woman on a lonely porch, creaking back and forth in her wicker rocker as she waits for a visitor.
I think there's a third version as welclass="underline" that of the feral child, escaping from between the lines, from between how it's said the story went and how it truly took place.