Newford Stories (14 page)

She fell silent again, head bowed, unable to
look at what she thought was the ghost of her daughter.

Zia turned and glanced at where I was
peering at her from the crack I’d made with the closet door. I knew
her well enough to know what she was thinking. It was never hard.
All I had to do was imagine I was in her shoes, and consider what I
would say or do or think.

I turned to Donald.

“Is there anything you want to tell your
mother?” I whispered.

He gave me a slow nod.

“Then just tell Zia and she’ll pass it on to
your mother.”

He gave me another nod, but he still didn’t
speak.

“Donald?” I said.

“I don’t know what to say. I mean, there’s a
million things I could say, but none of them seem to matter
anymore. She’s beating herself up way more than any hurt I could
have wished upon her.”

I reached out a comforting hand, but of
course I couldn’t touch him. Still, he understood the gesture. I
think he even appreciated it.

“And I don’t even wish it on her anymore,”
he added. “But then…while I feel bad about what she’s going
through, at the same time I still feel hurt for the way she ignored
me.”

I opened the door a little more, enough to
catch Zia’s eye. She inclined her head to show that she
understood.

“I’ve talked to Donnie,” Zia said. “In the,
you know. The hereafter. Before he went on.”

The old woman lifted her head and looked Zia
in the eye.

“You…you have?”

Zia nodded. “He understands, but he really
wishes you’d celebrate his life the way you do mine. It…hurts him
to think that you never think of him.”

“Oh, God, there’s not a day goes by that I
don’t think of him.”

“He knows that now.”

Zia’s gaze went back to me and I made a
continuing motion with my hand.

“And he wants,” she went on, then caught
herself. “He wanted you to know that he’ll always love you. That he
never held you to blame for what happened to him.”

The old woman put her arms around Zia.

“Oh, my boy,” she said. “My poor, poor
boy.”

“He wants you to be happy,” Zia said. “We
both do.”

The woman shook her head against Zia’s
shoulder.

“I don’t even know the meaning of the word
anymore,” she said.

“Will you at least try?”

The old woman sat up and dabbed at her eyes
with the sleeve of her housecoat.

“How does one even begin?” she said.

“Well, sometimes, if you pretend you’re
happy, you can trick yourself into at least feeling better.”

“I don’t think I could do that.”

“Try by celebrating our lives,” Zia said.
“Remember both your children with love and joy. There’ll always be
sadness, but try to remember that it wasn’t always that way.”

“No,” the old woman said slowly. “You’re
right. It wasn’t. I don’t know if you can even remember, but we
were once a happy family. But then Ted left and I had to go back to
work, and you children…you were robbed of the life you should have
had.”

“It happens,” Zia said—a touch too
matter-of-factly for the ghost of a dead girl, I thought, but the
old woman didn’t appear to notice.

“It’s time for me to go, Mama,” Zia added.
“Will you let me go?”

“Can’t you stay just a little longer?”

“No,” Zia said. “Let me walk you back to
your bed.”

She got up and the two of them left the
room, the old woman leaning on Zia.

“I’m going to wake up in the morning,” I
heard the old woman say from the hall, “and this will all have just
been a dream.”

“Not if you don’t want it to,” Zia told her.
“You’ve got a strong will. Look how long you kept me from moving
on. You can remember this—everything we’ve talked about—for what it
really was. And if you try hard, you can be happy again.”

* * *

Donald and I waited in the bedroom until Zia
returned.

“Is she asleep?” I asked.

Zia nodded. “I think all of this exhausted
her.” She turned to Donald. “So, how do you feel now?”

“I feel strange,” he said. “Like there’s
something tugging at me…trying to pull me away.”

“That’s because it’s time for you to move
on,” I told him.

“I guess.”

“You’re remembered now,” Zia said. “That’s
what was holding you back before.”

He gave a slow nod. “Listening to her…it
didn’t make me feel a whole lot better. I mean, I understand now,
but…”

“Life’s not very tidy,” Zia said, “so I
suppose there’s no reason for death to be any different.”

“I…”

He was harder to hear. I gave him a careful
study and realized he’d grown much more insubstantial.

“It’s hard to hold on,” he said. “To stay
here.”

“Then don’t,” Zia told him.

I nodded. “Just let go.”

“But I’m…scared.”

Zia and I looked at each other.

“We were here at the beginning of things,”
she said, turning back to him, “before Raven pulled the world out
of that old pot of his. We’ve been in the great beyond that lies on
the other side of the long ago. It’s…”

She looked at me.

“It’s very peaceful there,” I finished for
her.

“I don’t want to go to Hell,” he said. “What
if I go to Hell?”

His voice was very faint now and I could
hardly make him out in the gloom of the room.

“You won’t go to Hell,” I said.

I didn’t know if there was a Heaven or a
Hell, or
what
lay on the other side of living. Maybe
nothing. Maybe everything. But there was no reason to tell him
that. He wanted certainty.

“Hell’s for bad people,” I told him, “and
you’re just a poor kid who got stung by a bee.”

I saw the fading remnants of his mouth
moving, but I couldn’t make out the words. And then he was
gone.

I looked at Zia.

“I don’t feel any better,” I said. “Did we
help him?”

“I don’t know. We must have. We did what he
wanted.”

“I suppose.”

“And he’s gone on now.”

She linked her arm in mine and walked me
into the between.

“I had this idea for a store,” she said.

“I know. Where you don’t sell anything.
Instead people just bring you stuff.”

She nodded. “It was a pretty dumb idea.”

“It wasn’t that bad. I’ve had worse.”

“I know you have.”

We stepped out of the between onto the fire
escape outside the apartment. I looked across the city. Dawn was
still a long way off, but everywhere I could see the lights of the
city, the headlights of cars moving between the tall canyons of the
buildings.

“I think we need to go somewhere and make a
big happy noise,” Zia said. “We have to go mad and dance and sing
and do cartwheels along the telephone wires like we’re famous
trapeze artists.”

“Because…?”

“Because it’s better than feeling sad.”

So we did.

And later we returned to the Rookery and
woke up all the cousins until every black bird in every tree was
part of our loud croaking and raspy chorus. I saw Lucius open the
window of his library and look out. When he saw Zia and me leading
the cacophony from our high perch in one of the old oak trees in
the backyard, he just shook his head and closed the window
again.

But not before I saw him smile to
himself.

* * *

I went back to the old woman’s apartment a
few weeks later to see if the ghost boy was really gone. I meant to
go sooner, but something distracting always seemed to come up
before I could actually get going.

Zia might tell me about a hoard of Mardi
Gras beads she’d found in a dumpster, and then off we’d have to go
to collect them all, bringing them back to the Rookery where we
festooned the trees with them until Lucius finally asked us to take
them down, his voice polite, but firm, the way it always got when
he felt we’d gone the step too far.

Or Chlöe might call us into the house
because she’d made us each a sugar pie, big fat pies with much more
filling than crust because we liked the filling the best. We didn’t
even need the crust, except then it would just be pudding, which we
also liked, but it wasn’t pie, now, was it?

Once we had to go into the faraway to help
our friend Jilly, because we promised we would if she ever called
us. So when she did, we went to her. That promise had never been
like a chain dangling from our feet when we flew, but it still felt
good to be done with it.

But finally I remembered the ghost boy and
managed to not get distracted before I could make my way to his
mother’s apartment. When I got there, they were both gone, the old
woman and her dead son. Instead, there was a young man I didn’t
recognize sitting in the kitchen when I stepped out of the between.
He was in the middle of spooning ice cream into a bowl.

“Do you want some?” he asked.

He was one of those people who didn’t seem
the least bit surprised to find me appearing out of thin air in the
middle of his kitchen. Tomorrow morning, he probably wouldn’t even
remember I’d been here.

“What flavour is it?” I asked.

“Chocolate swirl with bits of Oreo cookies
mixed in.”

“I’d love some,” I told him and got myself a
bowl from the cupboard.

He filled my bowl with a generous helping
and we both spent a few moments enjoying the ice cream. I looked
down the hall as I ate and saw all the cardboard boxes. My gaze
went back to the young man’s face.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

“Nels.”

He didn’t ask me my name, but I didn’t
mind.

“This is a good invention,” I said holding
up a spoonful of ice cream. “Chocolate and ice cream and cookies
all mixed up in the same package.”

“It’s not new. They’ve had it for ages.”

“But it’s still good.”

“Mmm.”

“So what happened to the old woman who lived
here?” I asked.

“I didn’t know her,” he told me. “The
realtor brought me by a couple of days ago and I liked the place,
so I rented it. I’m pretty sure he said she’d passed away.”

So much for her being happy. But maybe there
was something else on the other side of living. Maybe she and her
ghost boy and her daughter were all together again and she
was
happy.

It was a better ending to the story than
others I could imagine.

“So,” I asked Nels, “are you happy?”

He paused with a spoonful of ice cream
halfway to his mouth. “What?”

“Do you have any ghosts?”

“Everybody’s got ghosts.”

“Really?”

He nodded. “I suppose one of the measures of
how you live your life is how well you make your peace with
them.”

My bowl was empty, but I didn’t fill it up
again. I stood up from the table.

“Do you want some help unpacking?” I
asked.

“Nah. I’m good. Are you off?”

“You know me,” I said, although of course he
didn’t. “Places to go, people to meet. Things to do.”

He smiled. “Well, don’t be a stranger. Or at
least not any stranger than you already are.”

I laughed.

“You’re a funny man, Nels,” I said.

And then I stepped away into the between. I
stood there for a few moments, watching him.

He got up from the table, returned the ice
cream to the freezer and washed out the bowls and utensils we’d
used. When he was done, he walked into the hall and picked up a
box, which he took into the living room, out of my sight.

I could tell that he’d already forgotten
me.

“Goodbye, Nels,” I said, though he couldn’t
hear me. “Goodbye, Ghost Boy. Goodbye, old lady.” I knew they
couldn’t hear me, either.

Then I stepped from the between, out onto
the fire escape. I unfolded black wings and flew back to the
Rookery, singing loudly all the way.

At least I thought of it as singing.

As I got near Stanton Street, a man waiting
for his dog to relieve itself looked up to see me go by.

“Goddamned crows,” he said.

He took a plastic bag out of his pocket and
deftly bagged his dog’s poop.

I sang louder, a laughing arpeggio of
croaking notes.

Being happy was better than not, I decided.
And it was certainly better than scooping up dog poop. If I was
ever to write a story, the way that Christy did, it would be very
short. And I’d only have the one story because after it, I wouldn’t
need any more.

It would go like this:

Once upon a time, they all lived happily
ever after. The end.

That’s a much better sort of story than the
messy ones that make up our lives. At least that’s what I
think.

But I wouldn’t want to live in that story
because that would be too boring. I’d rather be caught up in the
clutter of living, flying high above the streets and houses, making
a joyful noise.

###

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Even if it’s just a sentence or two. It would make all the
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You can read more about the crow girls and
other corbae in
Someplace to Be Flying
. Here’s an
excerpt
.

###

Afterword

There’s a truism when it comes to the
creative arts: If you put the work in every day, from time to time
the universe will give you a gift. It doesn’t happen often, but
when it does it really does feel special. It’s when the song comes
to you—melody and words all at once. When a story flows through you
and you hardly need to change a word. Sometimes it’s a character
who just steps into your head and everything about them has the
weight of reality—you just
know
them.