Dreams Underfoot

Winter Was Hard

It was the coldest December since they’d first started keeping records at the turn of the century, though warmer, Jilly thought, than it must have been in the ice ages of the Pleistocene. The veracity of that extraneous bit of trivia gave her small comfort, for it did nothing to lessen the impact of the night’s bitter weather. The wind shrieked through the tunnellike streets created by the abandoned buildings of the Tombs, carrying with it a deep, arctic chill. It spun the granular snow into dervishing whirligigs that made it almost impossible to see at times and packed drifts up against the sides of the buildings and derelict cars.

Jilly felt like a little kid, bundled up in her boots and parka, with longjohns under her jeans, a woolen cap pushing down her unruly curls and a long scarf wrapped about fifty times around her neck and face, cocooning her so completely that only her eyes peered out through a narrow slit. Turtlelike, she hunched her shoulders, trying to make her neck disappear into her parka, and stuffed her mittened hands deep in its pockets.

It didn’t help. The wind bit through it all as though unhindered, and she just grew colder with each step she took as she plodded on through the deepening drifts. The work crews were already out with their carnival of flashing blue and amber lights, removing the snow on Gracie Street and Williamson, but here in the Tombs it would just lie where it fell until the spring melt. The only signs of humanity were the odd little trails that the derelicts and other inhabitants of the Tombs made as they went about their business, but even those were being swallowed by the storm.

Only fools or those who had no choice were out tonight. Jilly thought she should be counted among the latter, though Geordie had called her the former when she’d left the loft earlier in the evening.

“This is just craziness, Jilly,” he’d said. “Look at the bloody weather.”

“I’ve got to go. It’s important.”

“To you and the penguins, but nobody else.”

Still, she’d had to come. It was the eve of the solstice, one year exactly since the gemmin went away, and she didn’t feel as though she had any choice in the matter. She was driven to walk the Tombs tonight, never mind the storm. What sent her out from the warm comfort of her loft was like what Professor Dapple said they used to call a gear in the old days—something you just had to do.

So she left Geordie sitting on her Murphy bed, playing his new Copeland whistle, surrounded by finished and unfinished canvases and the rest of the clutter that her motley collection of possessions had created in the loft, and went out into the storm.

She didn’t pause until she reached the mouth of the alley that ran along the south side of the old Clark Building. There, under the suspicious gaze of the building’s snowswept gargoyles, she hunched her back against the storm and pulled her scarf down a little, widening the eyeslit so that she could have a clearer look down the length of the alley. She could almost see Babe, leaning casually against the side of the old Buick that was still sitting there, dressed in her raggedy Tshirt, black body stocking and raincoat, Doc Martin’s dark against the snow that lay underfoot. She could almost hear the high husky voices of the other gemmin, chanting an eerie version of a rap song that had been popular at the time.

She could almost

But no. She blinked as the wind shifted, blinding her with snow. She saw only snow, heard only the wind. But in her memory ...

By night they nested in one of those abandoned cars that could be found on any street or alley of the Tombs—a handful of gangly teenagers burrowed under blankets, burlap sacks and tattered jackets, bodies snugly fit into holes that seemed to have been chewed from the ragged upholstery. This morning they had built a fire in the trunk of the Buick, scavenging fuel from the buildings, and one of them was cooking their breakfast on the heated metal of its hood.

Babe was the oldest. She looked about seventeen—it was something in the way she carried herself—but otherwise had the same thin androgynous body as her companions. The other gemmin all had dark complexions and feminine features, but none of them had Babe’s short mauve hair, nor her luminous violet eyes. The hair coloring of the others ran more to various shades of henna red; their eyes were mostly the same electric blue that Jilly’s were.

That December had been as unnaturally warm as this one was cold, but Babe’s open raincoat with the thin Tshirt and body stocking underneath still made Jilly pause with concern. There was such a thing as carrying fashion too far, she thought—had they never heard of pneumonia?—but then Babe lifted her head, her large violet eyes fixing their gaze as curiously on Jilly as Jilly’s did on her. Concern fell by the wayside, shifting into a sense of frustration as Jilly realized that all she had in the pocket of her coat that day was a stub of charcoal and her sketchbook instead of the oils and canvas which was the only medium that could really do justice in capturing the startling picture Babe and her companions made.

For long moments none of them spoke. Babe watched her, a halfsmile teasing one corner of her mouth. Behind her, the cook stood motionless, a makeshift spatula held negligently in a delicate hand.

Eggs and bacon sizzled on the trunk hood in front of her, filling the air with their unmistakable aroma. The other gemmin peered up over the dash of the Buick, supporting their narrow chins on their folded arms.

All Jilly could do was look back. A kind of vertigo licked at the edges of her mind, making her feel as though she’d just stepped into one of her own paintings—the ones that made up her last show, an urban faerie series: twelve enormous canvases, all in oils, one for each month, each depicting a different kind of mythological being transposed from its traditional folkloric rural surroundings onto a cityscape.

Her vague dizziness wasn’t caused by the promise of magic that seemed to decorate the moment with a sparkling sense of impossible possibilities as surely as the bacon filled the air with its comehither smell. It was rather the unexpectedness of coming across a moment like this—in the Tombs, of all places, where winos and junkies were the norm.

It took her awhile to collect her thoughts.

“Interesting stove you’ve got there,” she said finally.

Babe’s brow furrowed for a moment, then cleared as a radiant smile first lifted the corners of her mouth, then put an infectious humor into those amazing eyes of hers.

“Interesting, yes,” she said. Her voice had an accent Jilly couldn’t place and an odd tonality that was at once both husky and highpitched. “But we—” she frowned prettily, searching for what she wanted to say “—make do.”

It was obvious to Jilly that English wasn’t her first language. It was also obvious, the more Jilly looked, that while the girl and her companions weren’t at all properly dressed for the weather, it really didn’t seem to bother them. Even with the fire in the trunk of the Buick, and mild winter or not, they should still have been shivering, but she couldn’t spot one goosebump.

“And you’re not cold?” she asked.

“Cold is ... ?” Babe began, frowning again, but before Jilly could elaborate, that dazzling smile returned. “No, we have comfort. Cold is no trouble for us. We like the winter; we like any weather.”

Jilly couldn’t help but laugh.

“I suppose you’re all snow elves,” she said, “so the cold doesn’t bother you?”

“Not elves—but we are good neighbors. Would you like some breakfast?”

A year and three days later, the memory of that first meeting brought a touch of warmth to Jilly where she stood shivering in the mouth of the alleyway. Gemmin. She’d always liked the taste of words and that one had sounded just right for Babe and her companions. It reminded Jilly of gummy bears, thick cotton quilts and the sound that the bass strings of Geordie’s fiddle made when he was playing a fast reel. It reminded her of tiny bunches of fresh violets, touched with dew, that still couldn’t hope to match the incandescent hue of Babe’s eyes.

She had met the gemmin at a perfect time. She was in need of something warm and happy just then, being on the wrong end of a threemonth relationship with a guy who, throughout the time they’d been together, turned out to have been married all along. He wouldn’t leave his wife, and Jilly had no taste to be someone’sanyone’s—mistress, all of which had been discussed in increasingly raised voices in The Monkey Woman’s Nest the last time she saw him. She’d been mortified when she realized that a whole restaurant full of people had been listening to their breakingup argument, but unrepentant.

She missed Jeff—missed him desperately—but refused to listen to any of the subsequent phonecalls or answer any of the letters that had deluged her loft over the next couple of weeks, explaining how they could “work things out.” She wasn’t interested in working things out. It wasn’t just the fact that he had a wife, but that he’d kept it from her. The thing she kept asking her friend Sue was: having been with him for all that time, how could she not have known?

So she wasn’t a happy camper, traipsing aimlessly through the Tombs that day. Her normally highspirited view of the world was overhung with gloominess and there was a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach that just wouldn’t go away.

Until she met Babe and her friends.

Gemmin wasn’t a name that they used; they had no name for themselves. It was Frank Hodgers who told Jilly what they were.

Breakfast with the gemmin on that long gone morning was ... odd. Jilly sat behind the driver’s wheel of the Buick, with the door propped open and her feet dangling outside. Babe sat on a steel drum set a few feet from the car, facing her. Four of the other gemmin were crowded in the back seat; the fifth was beside Jilly in the front, her back against the passenger’s door. The eggs were tasty, flavored with herbs that Jilly couldn’t recognize; the tea had a similarly odd tang about it. The bacon was fried to a perfect crisp. The toast was actually muffins, neatly sliced in two and toasted on coat hangers rebent into new shapes for that purpose.

The gemmin acted like they were having a picnic. When Jilly introduced herself, a chorus of odd names echoed back in reply: Nita, Emmie, Callio, Yoon, Purspie. And Babe.

“Babe?” Jilly repeated.

“It was a present—from Johnny Defalco.”

Jilly had seen Defalco around and talked to him once or twice. He was a hash dealer who’d had himself a squat in the Clark Building up until the end of the summer when he’d made the mistake of selling to a narc and had to leave the city just one step ahead of a warrant. Somehow, she couldn’t see him keeping company with this odd little gaggle of street girls. Defalco’s taste seemed to run more to what her bouncer friend Percy called the three B’s—bold, blonde and built—or at least it had whenever she’d seen him in the clubs.

“He gave all of you your names?” Jilly asked.

Babe shook her head. “He only ever saw me, and whenever he did, he’d say, ‘Hey Babe, how’re ya doin’?’”

Babe’s speech patterns seemed to change the longer they talked, Jilly remembered thinking later. She no longer sounded like a foreigner struggling with the language; instead, the words came easily, sentences peppered with conjunctions and slang.

“We miss him,” Purspie—or perhaps it was Nita—said. Except for Babe, Jilly was still having trouble telling them all apart.

“He talked in the dark.” That was definitely Emmie—her voice was slightly higher than those of the others.

“He told stories to the walls,” Babe explained, “and we’d creep close and listen to him.”

“You’ve lived around here for awhile?” Jilly asked.

Yoon—or was it Callio?—nodded. “All our lives.”

Jilly had to smile at the seriousness with which that line was delivered. As though, except for Babe, there was one of them older than thirteen.

She spent the rest of the morning with them, chatting, listening to their odd songs, sketching them whenever she could get them to sit still for longer than five seconds. Thanks goodness, she thought more than once as she bent over her sketchbook, for life drawing classes and Albert Choira, one of her arts instructor at Butler U., who had instilled in her and every one of his students the ability to capture shape and form in just a few quick strokes of charcoal.

Her depression and the sick feeling in her stomach had gone away, and her heart didn’t feel nearly so fragile anymore, but all too soon it was noon and time for her to go. She had Christmas presents to deliver at St. Vincent’s Home for the Aged, where she did volunteer work twice a week. Some of her favorites were going to stay with family during the holidays and today would be her last chance to see them.

“We’ll be going soon, too,” Babe told her when Jilly explained she had to leave.

“Going?” Jilly repeated, feeling an odd tightness in her chest. It wasn’t the same kind of a feeling that Jeff had left in her, but it was discomforting all the same.

Babe nodded. “When the moon’s full, we’ll sail away.”

“Away, away, away,” the others chorused.

There was something both sweet and sad in the way they half spoke, half chanted the words. The tightness in Jilly’s chest grew more pronounced. She wanted to ask, Away to where?, but found herself only saying, “But you’ll be here tomorrow?”

Babe lifted a delicate hand to push back the unruly curls that were forever falling in Dilly’s eyes.

There was something so maternal in the motion that it made Jilly wish she could just rest her head on Babe’s breast, to be protected from all that was fierce and mean and dangerous in the world beyond the enfolding comfort that that motherly embrace would offer.

“We’ll be here,” Babe said.

Then, giggling like schoolgirls, the little band ran off through the ruins, leaving Jilly to stand alone on the deserted street. She felt giddy and lost, all at once. She wanted to run with them, imagining Babe as a kind of archetypal Peter Pan who could take her away to a place where she could be forever young.

Then she shook her head, and headed back downtown to St. Vincent’s.

She saved her visit with Frank for last, as she always did. He was sitting in a wheelchair by the small window in his room that overlooked the alley between St. Vincent’s and the office building next door. It wasn’t much of a view, but Frank never seemed to mind.

“I’d rather stare at a brick wall, anytime, than watch that damn TV in the lounge,” he’d told Jilly more than once. “That’s when things started to go wrong—with the invention of television. Wasn’t till then that we found out there was so much wrong in the world.”

Jilly was one of those who preferred to know what was going on and try to do something about it, rather than pretend it wasn’t happening and hoping that, by ignoring what was wrong, it would just go away. Truth was, Jilly had long ago learned, trouble never went away. It just got worse—unless you fixed it. But at eightyseven, she felt that Frank was entitled to his opinions.

His face lit up when she came in the door. He was all lines and bones, as he liked to say; a skinny man, made almost cadaverous by age. His cheeks were hollowed, eyes sunken, torso collapsed in on itself. His skin was wrinkled and dry, his hair just a few white tufts around his ears. But whatever ruin the years had brought to his body, they hadn’t managed to get even a fingerhold on his spirit. He could be cantankerous, but he was never bitter.

She’d first met him last spring. His son had died, and with nowhere else to go, he’d come to live at St. Vincent’s. From the first afternoon that she met him in his room, he’d become one of her favorite people.

“You’ve got that look,” he said after she’d kissed his cheek and sat down on the edge of his bed.

“What look?” Jilly asked, pretending ignorance.

She often gave the impression of being in a constant state of confusion—which was what gave her her charm, Sue had told her more than once—but she knew that Frank wasn’t referring to that. It was that strange occurrences tended to gather around her; mystery clung to her like burrs on an old sweater.

At one time when she was younger, she just collected folktales and odd stories, magical rumors and mythologies—much like Geordie’s brother Christy did, although she never published them. She couldn’t have explained why she was drawn to that kind of story; she just liked the idea of what they had to say.

But then one day she discovered that there was an alternate reality, and her view of the world was forever changed.

It had felt like a curse at first, knowing that magic was real, but that if she spoke of it, people would think her mad. But the wonder it woke in her could never be considered a curse and she merely learned to be careful with whom she spoke. It was in her art that she allowed herself total freedom to express what she saw from the corner of her eye. An endless stream of faerie folk paraded from her easel and sketchbook, making new homes for themselves in back alleys and city parks, on the wharves down by the waterfront or in the twisty lanes of Lower Crowsea.

In that way, she and Frank were much alike. He’d been a writer once, but, “I’ve told all the tales I have to tell by now,” he explained to July when she asked him why he’d stopped. She disagreed, but knew that his arthritis was so bad that he could neither hold a pencil nor work a keyboard for any length of time.

“You’ve seen something magic,” he said to her now.

“I have,” she replied with a grin and told him of her morning.

“Show me your sketches,” Frank said when she was done.

Jilly dutifully handed them over, apologizing for the rough state they were in until Frank told her to shush. He turned the pages of the sketchbook, studying each quick drawing carefully before going on to the next one.

“They’re gemmin,” he pronounced finally.

“I’ve never heard of them.”

“Most people haven’t. It was my grandmother who told me about them—she saw them one night, dancing in Fitzhenry Park—but I never did.”

The wistfulness in his voice made Jilly want to stage a breakout from the old folk’s home and carry him off to the Tombs to meet Babe, but she knew she couldn’t. She couldn’t even bring him home to her own loft for the holidays because he was too dependent on the care that he could only get here. She’d never even be able to carry him up the steep stairs to her loft.

“How do you know that they’re gemmin and whatever are gemmin?” she asked.

Frank tapped the sketchbook. “I know they’re gemmin because they look just like the way my gran described them to me. And didn’t you say they had violet eyes?”

“But only Babe’s got them.”

Frank smiled, enjoying himself. “Do you know what violet’s made up of?”

“Sure. Blue and red.”

“Which, symbolically, stand for devotion and passion; blended into violet, they’re a symbol of memory.”

“That still doesn’t explain anything.”

“Gemmin are the spirits of place, just like hobs are spirits of a house. They’re what make a place feel good and safeguard its positive memories. When they leave, that’s when a place gets a haunted feeling.

And then only the bad feelings are left—or no feelings, which is just about the same difference.”

“So what makes them go?” Jilly asked, remembering what Babe had said earlier.

“Nasty things happening. In the old days, it might be a murder or a battle. Nowadays we can add pollution and the like to that list.”

“But—”

“They store memories you see,” Frank went on. “The one you call Babe is the oldest, so her eyes have turned violet.”

“So,” Jilly asked with a grin. “Does it make their hair go mauve, too?”

“Don’t be impudent.”

They talked some more about the gemmin, going back and forth between, “Were they really?” and

“What else could they be?” until it was time for Frank’s supper and Jilly had to go. But first she made him open his Christmas present. His eyes filmed when he saw the tiny painting of his old house that Jilly had done for him. Sitting on the stoop was a younger version of himself with a small faun standing jauntily behind him, elbow resting on his shoulder.

“Got something in my eye,” he muttered as he brought his sleeve up to his eyes.

“I just wanted you to have this today, because I brought everybody else their presents,” filly said,

“but I’m coming back on Christmas—we’ll do something fun. I’d come Christmas eve, but I’ve got to work at the restaurant that night.”

Frank nodded. His tears were gone, but his eyes were still shiny. “The solstice is coming,” he said.

“In two days.”

Jilly nodded, but didn’t say anything.

“That’s when they’ll be going,” Frank explained. “The gemmin. The moon’ll be full, just like Babe said. Solstices are like May Eve and Halloween—the borders between this world and others are thinnest then.” He gave Jilly a sad smile. “Wouldn’t I love to see them before they go.”

Jilly thought quickly, but she still couldn’t think of any way she could maneuver him into the Tombs in his chair. She couldn’t even borrow Sue’s car, because the streets there were too choked with rubble and refuse. So she picked up her sketchbook and put it on his lap.

“Keep this,” she said.

Then she wheeled him off to the dining room, refusing to listen to his protests that he couldn’t.

* * *

A sad smile touched Jilly’s lips as she stood in the storm, remembering. She walked down the alleyway and ran her mittened hand along the windshield of the Buick, dislodging the snow that had gathered there. She tried the door, but it was rusted shut. A back window was open, so she crawled in through it, then clambered into the front seat, which was relatively free of snow.

It was warmer inside—probably because she was out of the wind. She sat looking out the windshield until the snow covered it again. It was like being in a cocoon, she thought. Protected. A person could almost imagine that the gemmin were still around, not yet ready to leave. And when they did, maybe they’d take her with them ....

A dreamy feeling stole over her and her eyes fluttered, grew heavy, then closed. Outside the wind continued to howl, driving the snow against the car; inside, Jilly slept, dreaming of the past.

The gemmin were waiting for her the day after she saw Frank, lounging around the abandoned Buick beside the old Clark Building. She wanted to talk to them about what they were and why they were going away and a hundred other things, but somehow she just never got around to any of it. She was too busy laughing at their antics and trying to capture their portraits with the pastels she’d brought that day.

Once they all sang a long song that sounded like a cross between a traditional ballad and rap, but was in some foreign language that was both flutelike and gritty. Babe later explained that it was one of their traditional song cycles, a part of their oral tradition that kept alive the histories and genealogies of their people and the places where they lived.

Gemmin, Jilly thought. Storing memories. And then she was clearheaded long enough to ask if they would come with her to visit Frank.

Babe shook her head, honest regret in her luminous eyes. “It’s too far,” she said.

“Too far, too far,” the other gemmin chorused.

“From home,” Babe explained.

“But,” Ply began, except she couldn’t find the words for what she wanted to say.

There were people who just made other people feel good. Just being around them, made you feel better, creative, uplifted, happy. Geordie said that she was like that herself, though Jilly wasn’t so sure of that. She tried to be, but she was subject to the same bad moods as anybody else, the same impatience with stupidity and ignorance which, parenthetically speaking, were to her mind the prime causes of all the world’s ills.

The gemmin didn’t seem to have those flaws. Even better, beyond that, there was magic about them.

It lay thick in the air, filling your eyes and ears and nose and heart with its wild tang. Jilly desperately wanted Frank to share this with her, but when she tried to explain it to Babe, she just couldn’t seem to make herself understood.

And then she realized the time and knew she had to go to work. Art was well and fine to feed the heart and mind, and so was magic, but if she wanted to pay the rent on the loft and have anything to eat next month—never mind the endless drain that art supplies made on her meager budget—she had to go.

As though sensing her imminent departure, the gemmin bounded around her in an abandoned display of wild monkeyshines, and then vanished like so many willo’-thewisps in among the snowy rubble of the Tombs, leaving her alone once again.

The next day was much the same, except that tonight was the night they were leaving. Babe never made mention of it, but the knowledge hung ever heavier on Jilly as the hours progressed, coloring her enjoyment of their company.

The gemmin had washed away most of the residue of her bad breakup with Jeff, and for that Jilly was grateful. She could look on it now with that kind of wistful remembering one held for high school romances, long past and distanced. But in its place they had left a sense of abandonment. They were going, would soon be gone, and the world would be that much the emptier for their departure.

Jilly tried to find words to express what she was feeling, but as had happened yesterday when she’d tried to explain Frank’s need, she couldn’t get the first one past her tongue.

And then again, it was time to go. The gemmin started acting wilder again, dancing and singing around her like a pack of mad imps, but before they could all vanish once more, Jilly caught Babe’s arm.

Don’t go, don’t go, she wanted to say, but all that came out was, “I ... I don’t ... I want ...”

Jilly, normally never at a loss for something to say, sighed with frustration.

“We won’t be gone forever,” Babe said, understanding Jilly’s unspoken need. She touched a long delicate finger to her temple. “We’ll always be with you in here, in your memories of us, and in here—”

she tapped the pocket in Jilly’s coat that held her sketchbook “—in your pictures. If you don’t forget us, we’ll never be gone.”

“It ... it won’t be the same,” Jilly said.

Babe smiled sadly. “Nothing is ever the same. That’s why we must go now.”

She ruffled Jilly’s hair—again the motion was like one made by a mother, rather than someone who appeared to be a girl only half Jilly’s age—then stepped back. The other gemmin approached, and touched her as well—featherlight fingers brushing against her arms, tousling her hair like a breeze—and then they all began their mad dancing and pirouetting like so many scruffy ballerinas.

Until they were gone.

Jilly thought she would just stay here, never mind going in to work, but somehow she couldn’t face a second parting. Slowly, she headed south, towards Gracie Street and the subway that would take her to work. And oddly enough, though she was sad at their leaving, it wasn’t the kind of sadness that hurt. It was the kind that was like a singing in the soul.

Frank died that night, on the winter solstice, but Jilly didn’t find out until the next day. He died in his sleep, July’s painting propped up on the night table beside him, her sketchbook with her initial rough drawings of the gemmin in it held against his thin chest. On the first blank page after her sketches of the gemmin, in an awkward script that must have taken him hours to write, he’d left her a short note:

“I have to tell you this, Jilly. I never saw any real magic—I just pretended that I did. I only knew it through the stories I got from my gran and from you. But I always believed. That’s why I wrote all those stories when I was younger, because I wanted others to believe. I thought if enough of us did, if we learned to care again about the wild places from which we’d driven the magic away, then maybe it would return.

“I didn’t think it ever would, but I’m going to open my window tonight and call to them. I’m going to ask them to take me with them when they go. I’m all used up—at least the man I am in this world is—but maybe in another world I’ll have something to give. I hope they’ll give me the chance.

“The faerie folk used to do that in the old days, you know. That was what a lot of the stories were about—people like us, going away, beyond the fields we know.

“If they take me, don’t be sad, Jilly. I’ll be waiting for you there.”

The script was almost illegible by the time it got near the end, but Jilly managed to decipher it all. At the very end, he’d just signed the note with an “F” with a small flower drawn beside it. It looked an awful lot like a tiny violet, though maybe that was only because that was what Jilly wanted to see.

You saw real magic, she thought when she looked up from the sketchbook. You were real magic.

She gazed out the window of his room to where a soft snow was falling in the alley between St.

Vincent’s and the building next door. She hoped that on their way to wherever they’d gone, the gemmin had been able to include the tired and lonely spirit of one old man in their company.

Take care of him, Babe, she thought.

That Christmas was a quiet period in Jilly’s life. She had gone to a church service for the first time since she was a child to attend the memorial service that St. Vincent’s held for Frank. She and Geordie and a few of the staff of the home were the only ones in attendance. She missed Frank and found herself putting him in crowd scenes in the paintings she did over the holidays—Frank in the crowds, and the thin ghostly shapes of gemmin peering out from behind cornices and rooflines and the corners of alleyways.

Often when she went out on her night walks—after the restaurant was closed, when the city was halfasleep—she’d hear a singing in the quiet snowmuffled streets; not an audible singing, something she could hear with her ears, but one that only her heart and spirit could feel. Then she’d wonder if it was the voices of Frank and Babe and the others she heard, singing to her from the faraway, or that of other gemmin, not yet gone.

She never thought of Jeff, except with distance.

Life was subdued. A hiatus between storms. Just thinking of that time, usually brought her a sense of peace, if not completion. So why ... remembering now ... this time ... ?

There was a ringing in her ears—sharp and loud, like thunderclaps erupting directly above her. She felt as though she was in an earthquake, her body being violently shaken. Everything felt topsyturvy.

There was no up and no down, just a sense of vertigo and endless spinning, a roar and whorl of shouting and shaking until

She snapped her eyes open to find Geordie’s worried features peering out at her from the circle that the fur of his parka hood made around his face. He was in the Buick with her, on the front seat beside her. It was his hands on her shoulders, shaking her; his voice that sounded like thunder in the confines of the Buick.

The Buick.

And then she remembered: walking in the Tombs, the storm, climbing into the car, falling asleep ...

“Jesus, Jilly,” Geordie was saying. He sat back from her, giving her a bit of space, but the worry hadn’t left his features yet. “You really are nuts, aren’t you? I mean, falling asleep out here. Didn’t you ever hear of hypothermia?”

She could have died, Jilly realized. She could have just slept on here until she froze to death and nobody’d know until the spring thaw, or until some poor homeless bugger crawled in to get out of the wind and found himself sharing space with Jilly, the Amazing Dead Woman.

She shivered, as much from dread as the storm’s chill. “How ... how did you find me?” she asked.

Geordie shrugged. “God only knows. I got worried, the longer you were gone, until finally I couldn’t stand it and had to come looking for you. It was like there was a nagging in the back of my head—sort of a Lassie kind of a thought, you know?”

Jilly had to smile at the analogy.

“Maybe I’m getting psychic—what do you think?” he asked. “Finding me the way you did, maybe you are,” Jilly said.

She sat up a little straighter, then realized that sometime during her sleep, she had unbuttoned her parka enough to stick a hand in under the coat. She pulled it out and both she and Geordie stared at what she held in her mittened hand.

It was a small violet flower, complete with roots.

“Dilly, where did you ... ?” Geordie began, but then he shook his head. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”

But Jilly knew. Tonight was the anniversary, after all. Babe or Frank, or maybe both of them, had come by as well.

If you don’t forget us, we’ll never be gone.

She hadn’t.

And it looked like they hadn’t either, because who else had left her this flower, and maybe sent Geordie out into the storm to find her? How else could he have lucked upon her the way he had with all those blocks upon blocks of the Tombs that he would have to search?

“Are you going to be okay?” Geordie asked.

Jilly stuck the plant back under her parka and nodded. “Help me home, would you? I feel a little wobbly.”

“You’ve got it.”

“And Geordie?”

He looked at her, eyebrows raised.

“Thanks for coming out to look for me.”

It was a long trek back to Jilly’s loft, but this time the wind was helpful, rather than hindering. It rose up at their backs and hurried them along so that it seemed to only take them half the time it should have to return. While Jilly changed, Geordie made great steaming mugs of hot chocolate for both of them.

They sat together on the old sofa by the window, Geordie in his usual rumpled sweater and old jeans, Jilly bundled up in two pairs of sweatpants, fingerless gloves and what seemed like a halfdozen shirts and socks.

Jilly told him her story of finding about the gemmin, and how they went away. When she was done, Geordie just said, “Wow. We should tell Christy about them—he’d put them in one of his books.”

“Yes, we should,” Jilly said. “Maybe if more people knew about them, they wouldn’t be so ready to go away.”

“What about Mr. Hodgers?” Geordie asked. “Do you really think they took him away with them?”

Jilly looked at the newly potted flower on her windowsill. It stood jauntily in the dirt and looked an awful lot like a drawing in one of her sketchbooks that she hadn’t drawn herself

“I like to think so,” she said. “I like to think that St. Vincent’s was on the way to wherever they were going.” She gave Geordie a smile, more sweet than bitter. “You couldn’t see it to look at him,” she added, “but Frank had violet eyes, too; he had all kinds of memories stored away in that old head of his—just like Babe did.”

Her own eyes took on a distant look, as though she was looking into the faraway herself, through the gates of dream and beyond the fields we know.

“I like to think they’re getting along just fine,” she said.