Dreams Underfoot

In The House Of My Enemy

1

The past scampers like an alleycat through the present, leaving the pawprints of memories scattered helterskelter—here ink is smeared on a page, there lies an old photograph with a chewed corner, elsewhere still, a nest has been made of old newspapers, the headlines running one into the other to make strange declarations. There is no order to what we recall, the wheel of time follows no straight line as it turns in our heads. In the dark attics of our minds, all times mingle, sometimes literally.

I get so confused. I’ve been so many people; some I didn’t like at all. I wonder that anyone could.

Victim, hooker, junkie, liar, thief But without them, I wouldn’t be who I am today. I’m no one special, but I like who I am, lost childhood and all.

Did I have to be all those people to become the person I am today? Are they still living inside me, hiding in some dark corner of my mind, waiting for me to slip and stumble and fall and give them life again?

I tell myself not to remember, but that’s wrong, too. Not remembering makes them stronger.

2

The morning sun came in through the window of Jilly Coppercorn’s loft, playing across the features of her guest. The girl was still asleep on the Murphy bed, sheets all tangled around her skinny limbs, pulled tight and smooth over the rounded swell of her abdomen. Sleep had gentled her features. Her hair clouded the pillow around her head. The soft morning sunlight gave her a Madonna quality, a nimbus ofBotticelli purity that the harsher light of the later day would steal away once she woke.

She was fifteen years old. And eight months pregnant.

Jilly sat in the windowseat, feet propped up on the sill, sketchpad on her lap. She caught the scene in charcoal, smudging the lines with the pad of her middle finger to soften them. On the fire escape outside, a stray cat climbed up the last few metal steps until it was level with where she was sitting and gave a plaintive meow.

Jilly had been expecting the black and white tabby. She reached under her knees and picked up a small plastic margarine container filled with dried kibbles, which she set down on the fire escape in front of the cat. As the tabby contentedly crunched its breakfast, Jilly returned to her portrait.

“My name’s Annie,” her guest had told her last night when she stopped Jilly on Yoors Street just a few blocks south of the loft. “Could you spare some change? I really need to get some decent food. It’s not so much for me ....”

She put her hand on the swell of her stomach as she spoke. Jilly had looked at her, taking in the stringy hair, the ragged clothes, the unhealthy color of her complexion, the toothin body that seemed barely capable of sustaining the girl herself, little say nourishing the child she carried.

“Are you all on your own?” Jilly asked.

The girl nodded.

Jilly put her arm around the girl’s shoulder and steered her back to the loft. She let her take a shower while she cooked a meal, gave her a clean smock to wear, and tried not to be patronizing while she did it all.

The girl had lost enough dignity as it was and Jilly knew that dignity was almost as hard to recover as innocence. She knew all too well.

3

Stolen Childhood, by Sophie Etoile. Copperplate engraving. Five Coyotes Singing Studio, Newford, 1988.

A child in a ragged dress stands in front of a ramshackle farmhouse. In one hand she holds a doll—a stick with a ball stuck in one end and a skirt on the other. She wears a lost expression, holding the doll as though she doesn’t quite know what to do with it.

A shadowed figure stands behind the screen door, watching her.

I guess I was around three years old when my oldest brother started molesting me. That’d make him eleven. He used to touch me down between my legs while my parents were out drinking or sobering up down in the kitchen. I tried to fight him off, but I didn’t really know that what he was doing was wrong—even when he started to put his cock inside me.

I was eight when my mother walked in on one of his rapes and you know what she did? She walked right out again until my brother was finished and we both had our clothes on again. She waited until he’d left the room, then she came back in and started screaming at me.

“You little slut! Why are you doing this to your own brother?”

Like it was my fault. Like I wanted him to rape me. Like the threeyear-old I was when he started molesting me had any idea about what he was doing.

I think my other brothers knew what was going on all along, but they never said anything about it—they didn’t want to break that macho codeof-honor bullshit. When my dad found out about, he beat the crap out of my brother, but in some ways it just got worse after that.

My brother didn’t molest me anymore, but he’d glare at me all the time, like he was going to pay me back for the beating he got soon as he got a chance. My mother and my other brothers, every time I’d come into a room, they’d all just stop talking and look at me like I was some kind of bug.

I think at first my dad wanted to do something to help me, but in the end he really wasn’t any better than my mother. I could see it in his eyes: he blamed me for it, too. He kept me at a distance, never came close to me anymore, never let me feel like I was normal.

He’s the one who had me see a psychiatrist. I’d have to go and sit in his office all alone, just a little kid in this big leather chair. The psychiatrist would lean across his desk, all smiles and smarmy understanding, and try to get me to talk, but I never told him a thing. I didn’t trust him. I’d already learned that I couldn’t trust men. Couldn’t trust women either, thanks to my mother. Her idea of working things out was to send me to confession, like the same God who let my brother rape me was now going to make everything okay so long as I owned up to seducing him in the first place.

What kind of a way is that for a kid to grow up?

4

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I let my brother ...”

5

Dilly laid her sketchpad aside when her guest began to stir. She swung her legs down so that they dangled from the windowsill, heels banging lightly against the wall, toes almost touching the ground. She pushed an unruly lock of hair from her brow, leaving behind a charcoal smudge on her temple.

Small and slender, with pixie features and a mass of curly dark hair, she looked almost as young as the girl on her bed. Jeans and sneakers, a dark Tshirt and an oversized peachcolored smock only added to her air of slightness and youth. But she was halfway through her thirties, her own teenage years long gone; she could have been Annie’s mother.

“What were you doing?” Annie asked as she sat up, tugging the sheets up around herself.

“Sketching you while you slept. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Can I see?”

Jilly passed the sketchpad over and watched Annie study it. On the fire escape behind her, two more cats had joined the black and white tabby at the margarine container. One was an old alleycat, its left ear ragged and torn, ribs showing like so many hills and valleys against the matted landscape of its fur. The other belonged to an upstairs neighbor; it was making its usual morning rounds.

“You made me look a lot better than I really am,” Annie said finally.

Jilly shook her head. “I only drew what was there.”

“Yeah, right.”

Jilly didn’t bother to contradict her. The selfworth speech would keep.

“So is this how you make your living?” Annie asked. “Pretty well. I do a little waitressing on the side.”

“Beats being a hooker, I guess.”

She gave Jilly a challenging look as she spoke, obviously anticipating a reaction.

Jilly only shrugged. “Tell me about it,” she said.

Annie didn’t say anything for a long moment. She looked down at the rough portrait with an unreadable expression, then finally met Jilly’s gaze again.

“I’ve heard about you,” she said. “On the street. Seems like everybody knows you. They say ...”

Her voice trailed off

Jilly smiled. “What do they say?”

“Oh, all kinds of stuff.” She shrugged. “You know. That you used to live on the street, that you’re kind of like , a onewoman social service, but you don’t lecture. And that you’re—” she hesitated, looked away for a moment “—you know, a witch.”

Jilly laughed. “A witch?”

That was a new one on her.

Annie waved a hand towards the wall across from the window where Jilly was sitting. Paintings leaned up against each other in untidy stacks. Above them, the wall held more, a careless gallery hung frame to frame to save space. They were part of Jilly’s ongoing “Urban Faerie” series, realistic city scenes and characters to which were added the curious little denizens of lands which never were. Hobs and fairies, little elf men and goblins.

“They say you think all that stuff’s real,” Annie said. “What do you think?”

When Annie gave her a “give me a break” look, Jilly just smiled again.

“How about some breakfast?” she asked to change the subject. “Look,” Annie said. “I really appreciate your taking me in and feeding me and everything last night, but I don’t want to be freeloader.”

“One more meal’s not freeloading.”

Jilly pretended to pay no attention as Annie’s pride fought with her baby’s need.

“Well, if you’re sure it’s okay,” Annie said hesitantly. “I wouldn’t have offered if it wasn’t,” Jilly said.

She dropped down from the windowsill and went across the loft to the kitchen corner. She normally didn’t eat a big breakfast, but twenty minutes later they were both sitting down to fried eggs and bacon, home fries and toast, coffee for Jilly and herb tea for Annie.

“Got any plans for today?” Jilly asked as they were finishing up.

“Why?” Annie replied, immediately suspicious.

“I thought you might want to come visit a friend of mine.”

“A social worker, right?”

The tone in her voice was the same as though she was talking about a cockroach or maggot.

Jilly shook her head. “More like a storefront counselor. Her name’s Angelina Marceau. She runs that dropin center on Grasso Street. It’s privately funded, no political connections.”

“I’ve heard of her. The Grasso Street Angel.”

“You don’t have to come,” Jilly said, “but I know she’d like to meet you.”

“I’m sure.”

Jilly shrugged. When she started to clean up, Annie stopped her. “Please,” she said. “Let me do it.”

Jilly retrieved her sketchpad from the bed and returned to the windowseat while Annie washed up.

She was just adding the finishing touches to the rough portrait she’d started earlier when Annie came to sit on the edge of the Murphy bed.

“That painting on the easel,” Annie said. “Is that something new you’re working on?”

Jilly nodded.

“It’s not like your other stuff at all.”

“I’m part of an artist’s group that calls itself the Five Coyotes Singing Studio,” Jilly explained. “The actual studio’s owned by a friend of mine named Sophie Etoile, but we all work in it from time to time.

There’s five of us, all women, and we’re doing a group show with a theme of child abuse at the Green Man Gallery next month.”

“And that painting’s going to be in it?” Annie asked. “It’s one of three I’m doing for the show.”

“What’s that one called?”

“‘I Don’t Know How To Laugh Anymore.’”

Annie put her hands on top of her swollen stomach. “Me, neither,” she said.

6

I Don’t Know How to Laugh Anymore, by Jilly Coppercorn. Oils and mixed media. Yoors Street Studio, Newford, 1991.

A lifesized female subject leans against an inner city wall in the classic pose of a prostitute waiting for a customer. She wears high heels, a microminiskirt, tubetop and short jacket, with a purse slung over one shoulder, hanging against her hip from a narrow strap. Her hands are thrust into the pockets of her jacket. Her features are tired, the lost look of a junkie in her eyes undermining her attempt to appear sultry.

Near her feet, a condom is attached to the painting, stiffened with gesso.

The subject is thirteen years old.

I started running away from home when I was ten. The summer I turned eleven I managed to make it to Newford and lived on its streets for six months. I ate what I could find in the dumpsters behind the McDonald’s and other fast food places on Williamson Street—there was nothing wrong with the food. It was just dried out from having been under the heating lamps for too long.

I spent those six months walking the streets all night. I was afraid to sleep when it was dark because I was just a kid and who knows what could’ve happened to me. At least being awake I could hide whenever I saw something that made me nervous. In the daytime I slept where I could—in parks, in the back seats of abandoned cars, wherever I didn’t think I’d get caught. I tried to keep myself clean, washed up in restaurant bathrooms and at this gas bar on Yoors Street where the guy running the pumps took a liking to me. Paydays he’d spot me for lunch at the grill down the street.

I started drawing back then and for awhile I tried to hawk my pictures to the tourists down by the Pier, but the stuff wasn’t all that good and I was drawing with pencils on foolscap or pages torn out of old school notebooks—not exactly the kind of art that looks good in a frame, if you know what I mean. I did a lot better panhandling and shoplifting.

I finally got busted trying to boost a tape deck from Kreiger’s Stereo—it used to be where Gypsy Records is. Now it’s out on the strip past the Tombs. I’ve always been small for my age, which didn’t help when I tried to to convince the cops that I was older than I really was. I figured juvie would be better than going back to my parents’ place, but it didn’t work. My parents had a missing persons out on me, God knows why. It’s not like they could’ve missed me.

But I didn’t go back home. My mother didn’t want me and my dad didn’t argue, so I guess he didn’t either. I figured that was great until I started making the rounds of foster homes, bouncing back and forth them and the Home for Wayward Girls. It’s just juvie with an oldfashioned name.

I guess there must be some good foster parents, but I never saw any. All mine ever wanted was to collect their check and treat me like I was a piece of shit unless my case worker was coming by for a visit. Then I got moved up from the mattress in the basement to one of their kids’ rooms. The first time I tried to tell the worker what was going down, she didn’t believe me and then my foster parents beat the crap out of me once she was gone. I didn’t make that mistake again.

I was thirteen and in my fourth or fifth foster home when I got molested again. This time I didn’t take any crap. I booted the old pervert in the balls and just took off out of there, back to Newford.

I was older and knew better now. Girls I talked to in juvie told me how to get around, who to trust and who was just out to peddle your ass.

See, I never planned on being a hooker. I don’t know what I thought I’d do when I got to the city—I wasn’t exactly thinking straight. Anyway, I ended up with this guy—Robert Carson. He was fifteen.

I met him in back of the Convention Center on the beach where all the kids used to all hang out in the summer and we ended up getting a room together on Grasso Street, near the high school. I was still pretty fucked up about getting physical with a guy but we ended up doing so many drugs—acid, MDA, coke, smack, you name it—that half the time I didn’t know when he was putting it to me.

We ran out of money one day, rent was due, no food in the place, no dope, both of us too fucked up to panhandle, when Rob gets the big idea of selling my ass to bring in a little money. Well, I was screwed up, but not that screwed up. But then he got some guy to front him some smack and next thing I know I’m in this car with some guy I never saw before and he’s expecting a blow job and I’m crying and all fucked up from the dope and then I’m doing it and standing out on the street corner where he’s dumped me some ten minutes later with forty bucks in my hand and Rob’s laughing, saying how we got it made, and all I can do is crouch on the sidewalk and puke, trying to get the taste of that guy’s come out of my mouth.

So Rob thinks I’m being, like, so fucking weird—I mean, it’s easy money, he tells me. Easy for him maybe. We have this big fight and then he hits me. Tells me if I don’t get my ass out on the street and make some more money, he’s going to do worse, like cut me.

My luck, I guess. Of all the guys to hang out with, I’ve got to pick one who suddenly realizes it’s his ambition in life to be a pimp. Three years later he’s running a string of five girls, but he lets me pay my respect—two grand which I got by skimming what I was paying him—and I’m out of the scene.

Except I’m not, because I’m still a junkie and I’m too fucked up to work, I’ve got no ID, I’ve got no skills except I can draw a little when I’m not fucked up on smack which is just about all the time. I start muling for a couple of dealers in Fitzhenry Park, just to get my fixes, and then one night I’m so out of it, I just collapse in a doorway of a pawn shop up on Perry Street.

I haven’t eaten in, like, three days. I’m shaking because I need a fix so bad I can’t see straight. I haven’t washed in Christ knows how long, so I smell and the clothes I’m wearing are worse. I’m at the end of the line and I know it, when I hear footsteps coming down the street and I know it’s the local cop on his beat, doing his rounds.

I try to crawl deeper into the shadows but the doorway’s only so deep and the cop’s coming closer and then he’s standing there, blocking what little light the streetlamps were throwing and I know I’m screwed. But there’s no way I’m going back into juvie or a foster home. I’m thinking of offering him a blow job to let me go—so far as the cops’re concerned, hookers’re just scum, but they’ll take a freebie all the same—but I see something in this guy’s face, when he turns his head and the streetlight touches it, that tells me he’s an honest joe. A rookie, true blue, probably his first week on the beat and full of wanting to help everybody and I know for sure I’m screwed. With my luck running true, he’s going to be the kind of guy who thinks social workers really want to help someone like me instead of playing bureaucratic mindfuck games with my head.

I don’t think I can take anymore.

I find myself wishing I had Rob’s switchblade—the one he liked to push up against my face when he didn’t think I was bringing in enough. I just want to cut something. The cop. Myself. I don’t really give a fuck. I just want out.

He crouches down so he’s kind of level with me, lying there scrunched up against the door, and says,

“How bad is it?”

I just look at him like he’s from another planet. How bad is it? Can it get any worse I wonder?

“I ... I’m doing fine,” I tell him.

He nods like we’re discussing the weather. “What’s your name?”

“Jilly,” I say.

“Jilly what?”

“Uh ....”

I think of my parents, who’ve turned their backs on me. I think ofjuvie and foster homes. I look over his shoulder and there’s a pair of billboards on the building behind me. One’s advertising a suntan lotion—you know the one with the dog pulling the kid’s pants down? I’ll bet some old pervert thought that one up. The other’s got the Jolly Green Giant himself selling vegetables. I pull a word from each ad and give it to the cop.

“Jilly Coppercorn.”

“Think you can stand, Jilly?”

I’m thinking, If I could stand, would I be lying here? But I give it a try. He helps me the rest of the way up, supports me when I start to sway.

“So ... so am I busted?” I ask him.

“Have you committed a crime?”

I don’t know where the laugh comes from, but it falls out of my mouth all the same. There’s no humor in it.

“Sure,” I tell him. “I was born.”

He sees my bag still lying on the ground. He picks it up while I lean against the wall and a bunch of my drawings fall out. He looks at them as he stuffs them back in the bag.

“Did you do those?”

I want to sneer at him, ask him why the fuck should he care, but I’ve got nothing left in me. It’s all I can do to stand. So I tell him, yeah, they’re mine.

“They’re very good.”

Right. I’m actually this fucking brilliant artist, slumming just to get material for my art.

“Do you have a place to stay?” he asks.

Whoops, did I read him wrong? Maybe he’s planning to get me home, clean me up, and then put it to me.

“Dilly?” he asks when I don’t answer.

Sure, I want to tell him. I’ve got my pick of the city’s alleyways and doorways. I’m welcome wherever I go. World treats me like a fucking princess. But all I do is shake my head.

“I want to take you to see a friend of mine,” he says.

I wonder how he can stand to touch me. I can’t stand myself. I’m like a walking sewer. And now he wants to bring me to meet a friend?

“Am I busted?” I ask him again.

He shakes his head. I think of where I am, what I got ahead of me, then I just shrug. If I’m not busted, then whatever’s he’s got planned for me’s got to be better. Who knows, maybe his friend’ll front me with a fix to get me through the night.

“Okay,” I tell him. “Whatever.”

“C’mon,” he says.

He puts an arm around my shoulder and steers me off down the street and that’s how I met Lou Fucceri and his girlfriend, the Grasso Street Angel.

7

Jilly sat on the stoop of Angel’s office on Grasso Street, watching the passersby. She had her sketchpad on her knee, but she hadn’t opened it yet. Instead, she was amusing herself with one of her favorite pastimes: making up stories about the people walking by. The young woman with the child in a stroller, she was a princess in exile, disguising herself as a nanny in a far distant land until she could regain her rightful station in some suitably romantic dukedom in Europe. The old black man with the cane was a physicist studying the effects of Chaos theory in the Grasso Street traffic. The Hispanic girl on her skateboard was actually a mermaid, having exchanged the waves of her ocean for concrete.

She didn’t turn around when she heard the door open behind her. There was a scuffle of sneakers on the stoop, then the sound of the door closing again. After a moment, Annie sat down beside her.

“How’re you doing?” Jilly asked.

“It was weird.”

“Good weird, or bad?” Jilly asked when Annie didn’t go on. “Or just uncomfortable?”

“Good weird, I guess. She played the tape you did for her book. She said you knew, that you’d said it was okay.”

Jilly nodded.

“I couldn’t believe it was you. I mean, I recognized your voice and everything, but you sounded so different.”

“I was just a kid,” Jilly said. “A punky street kid.”

“But look at you now.”

“I’m nothing special,” filly said, suddenly feeling selfconscious. She ran a hand through her hair. “Did Angel tell you about the sponsorship program?”

Annie nodded. “Sort of. She said you’d tell me more.”

“What Angel does is coordinate a relationship between kids that need help and people who want to help. It’s different every time, because everybody’s different. I didn’t meet my sponsor for the longest time; he just put up the money while Angel was my contact. My lifeline, if you want to know the truth. I can’t remember how many times I’d show up at her door and spend the night crying on her shoulder.”

“How did you get, you know, cleaned up?” Annie asked. Her voice was shy.

“The first thing is I went into detox. When I finally got out, my sponsor paid for my room and board at the Chelsea Arms while I went through an accelerated high school program. I told Angel I wanted to go on to college, so he cosigned my student loan and helped me out with my books and supplies and stuff. I was working by that point. I had parttime jobs at a couple of stores and with the Post Office, and then I started waitressing, but that kind of money doesn’t go far—not when you’re carrying a full course load.”

“When did you find out who your sponsor was?”

“When I graduated. He was at the ceremony.”

“Was it weird finally meeting him?”

Jilly laughed. “Yes and no. I’d already known him for years—he was my art history professor. We got along really well and he used to let me use the sunroom at the back of his house for a studio. Angel and Lou had shown him some of that bad art I’d been doing when I was still on the street and that’s why he sponsored me—because he thought I had a lot of talent, he told me later. But he didn’t want me to know it was him putting up the money because he thought it might affect our relationship at Butler U.”

She shook her head. “He said he knew I’d be going the first time Angel and Lou showed him the stuff I was doing.”

“It’s sort of like a fairy tale, isn’t it?” Annie said.

“I guess it is. I never thought of it that way.”

“And it really works, doesn’t it?”

“If you want it to,” Jilly said. “I’m not saying it’s easy. There’s ups and downs—lots more downs at the start.”

“How many kids make it?”

“This hasn’t got anything to do with statistics,” Jilly said. “You can only look at it on a person to person basis. But Angel’s been doing this for a long, long time. You can trust her to do her best for you.

She takes a lot of flak for what she does. Parents get mad at her because she won’t tell them where their kids are. Social services says she’s undermining their authority. She’s been to jail twice on contempt of court charges because she wouldn’t tell where some kid was.”

“Even with her boyfriend being a cop?”

“That was a long time ago,” Jilly said. “And it didn’t work out. They’re still friends but—Angel went through an awful bad time when she was a kid. That changes a person, no matter how much they learn to take control of their life. Angel’s great with people, especially kids, and she’s got a million friends, but she’s not good at maintaining a personal relationship with a guy. When it comes down to the crunch, she just can’t learn to trust them. As friends, sure, but not as lovers.”

“She said something along the same lines about you,” Annie said. “She said you were full of love, but it wasn’t sexual or romantic so much as a general kindness towards everything and everybody.”

“Yeah, well ... I guess both Angel and I talk too much.”

Annie hesitated for a few heartbeats, then said, “She also told me that you want to sponsor me.”

Jilly nodded. “I’d like to.”

“I don’t get it.”

“What’s to get?”

“Well, I’m not like you or your professor friend. I’m not, you know, all that creative. I couldn’t make something beautiful if my life depended on it. I’m not much good at anything.”

Jilly shook her head. “That’s not what it’s about. Beauty isn’t what you see on TV or in magazine ads or even necessarily in art galleries. It’s a lot deeper and a lot simpler than that. It’s realizing the goodness of things, it’s leaving the world a little better than it was before you got here. It’s appreciating the inspiration of the world around you and trying to inspire others.

“Sculptors, poets, painters, musicians—they’re the traditional purveyors of Beauty. But it can as easily be created by a gardener, a farmer, a plumber, a careworker. It’s the intent you put into your work, the pride you take in it—whatever it is.”

“But still .... I really don’t have anything to offer.”

Annie’s statement was all the more painful for Jilly because it held no selfpity, it was just a laying out of facts as Annie saw them. “Giving birth is an act of Beauty,” Jilly said.

“I don’t even know if I want a kid. I ... I don’t know what I want. I don’t know who I am.”

She turned to Jilly. There seemed to be years of pain and confu—

sion in her eyes, far more years than she had lived in the world. When had that pain begun? Jilly thought. Who could have done it to her, beautiful child that she must have been? Father, brother, uncle, family friend?

Jilly wanted to just reach out and hold her, but knew too well how the physical contact of comfort could too easily be misconstrued as an invasion of the private space an abused victim sometimes so desperately needed to maintain.

“I need help,” Annie said softly. “I know that. But I don’t want charity.”

“Don’t think of this sponsorship program as charity,” Jilly said. “What Angel does is simply what we all should be doing all of the time—taking care of each other.”

Annie sighed, but fell silent. Jilly didn’t push it any further. They sat for awhile longer on the stoop while the world bustled by on Grasso Street.

“What was the hardest part?” Annie asked. “You know, when you first came off the street.”

“Thinking of myself as normal.”

8

Daddy’s Home, by Isabelle Copley. Painted Wood. Adjani Farm, Wren Island, 1990.

The sculpture is three feet high, afiat rectangle of solid wood, standing on end with a child’s face, upper torso and hands protruding from one side, as though the wood is gauze against which the subject is pressing. The child wears a look of terror.

Annie’s sleeping again. She needs the rest as much as she needs regular meals and the knowledge that she’s got a safe place to stay. I took my Walkman out onto the fire escape and listened to a copy of the tape that Angel played for her today. I don’t much recognize that kid either, but I know it’s me.

It’s funny, me talking about Angel, Angel talking about me, both of us knowing what the other needs, but neither able to help herself. I like to see my friends as couples. I like to see them in love with each other. But it’s not the same for me.

Except who am I kidding? I want the same thing, but I just choke when a man gets too close to me. I can’t let down that final barrier, I can’t even tell them why.

Sophie says I expect them to just instinctively know. That I’m waiting for them to be understanding and caring without ever opening up to them. If I want them to follow the script I’ve got written out my head, she says I have to let them in on it.

I know she’s right, but I can’t do anything about it.

I see a dog slink into the alleyway beside the building. He’s skinny as a whippet, but he’s just a mongrel that no one’s taken care of for awhile. He’s got dried blood on his shoulders, so I guess someone’s been beating him.

I go down with some cat food in a bowl, but he won’t come near me, no matter how soothingly I call to him. I know he can smell the food, but he’s more scared of me than he’s hungry. Finally I just leave the bowl and go back up the fire escape. He waits until I’m sitting outside my window again before he goes up to the bowl. He wolfs the food down and then he takes off like he’s done something wrong.

I guess that’s the way I am when I meet a man I like. I’m really happy with him until he’s nice to me, until he wants to kiss me and hold me, and then I just run off like I’ve done something wrong.

9

Annie woke while Jilly was starting dinner. She helped chop up vegetables for the vegetarian stew Jilly was making, then drifted over to the long worktable that ran along the back wall near Jilly’s easel.

She found a brochure for the Five Coyotes Singing Studio show in amongst the litter of paper, magazines, sketches and old paint brushes and brought it over to the kitchen table where she leafed through it while Jilly finished up the dinner preparations.

“Do you really think something like this is going to make a difference?” Annie asked after she’d read through the brochure.

“Depends on how big a difference you’re talking about,” Jilly said. “Sophie’s arranged for a series of lectures to run in association with the show and she’s also organized a couple of discussion eve—

nings at the gallery where people who come to the show can talk to us—about their reactions to the show, about their feelings, maybe even share their own experiences if that’s something that feels right to them at the time.”

“Yeah, but what about the kids that this is all about?” Annie asked.

Jilly turned from the stove. Annie didn’t look at all like a young expectant mother, glowing with her pregnancy. She just looked like a hurt and confused kid with a distended stomach, a kind of Ralph Steadman aura of frantic anxiety splattered around her.

“The way we see it,” Jilly said, “is if only one kid gets spared the kind of hell we all went through, then the show’ll be worth it.”

“Yeah, but the only kind of people who are going to go to this kind of thing are those who already know about it. You’re preaching to the converted.”

“Maybe. But there’ll be media coverage—in the papers for sure, maybe a spot on the news. That’s where—if we’re going to reach out and wake someone up—that’s where it’s going to happen.”

“I suppose.”

Annie flipped over the brochure and looked at the four photographs on the back.

“How come there isn’t a picture of Sophie?” she asked. “Cameras don’t seem to work all that well around her,” Jilly said. “It’s like—” she smiled “—an enchantment.”

The corner of Annie’s mouth twitched in response.

“Tell me about, you know ...” She pointed to July’s Urban Faerie paintings. “Magic. Enchanted stuff.”

Jilly put the stew on low to simmer then fetched a sketchbook that held some of the preliminary pencil drawings for the finished paintings that were leaning up against the wall. The urban settings were barely realized—just rough outlines and shapes—but the faerie were painstakingly detailed.

As they flipped through the sketchbook, Jilly talked about where she’d done the sketches, what she’d seen, or more properly glimpsed, that led her to make the drawings she had.

“You’ve really seen all these ... little magic people?” Annie asked. Her tone of voice was incredulous, but Jilly could tell that she wanted to believe.

“Not all of them,” Jilly said. “Some I’ve only imagined, but others ... like this one.” She pointed to a sketch that had been done in the Tombs where a number of fey figures were hanging out around an abandoned car, preRaphaelite features at odds with their raggedy clothing and setting. “They’re real.”

“But they could just be people. It’s not like they’re tiny or have wings like some of the others.”

Jilly shrugged. “Maybe, but they weren’t just people.”

“Do you have to be magic yourself to see them?”

Jilly shook her head. “You just have to pay attention. If you don’t you’ll miss them, or see something else—something you expected to see rather than what was really there. Fairy voices become just the wind, a bodach, like this little man here—” she flipped to another page and pointed out a small gnomish figure the size of a cat, darting off a sidewalk “—scurrying across the street becomes just a piece of litter caught in the backwash of a bus.”

“Pay attention,” Annie repeated dubiously.

Jilly nodded. “Just like we have to pay attention to each other, or we miss the important things that are going on there as well.”

Annie turned another page, but she didn’t look at the drawing. Instead she studied Jilly’s pixie features.

“You really, really believe in magic, don’t you?” she said.

“I really, really do,” Jilly told her. “But it’s not something I just take on faith. For me, art is an act of magic. I pass on the spirits that I see—of people, of places, mysteries.”

“So what if you’re not an artist? Where’s the magic then?”

“Life’s an act of magic, too. Claire Hamill sings a line in one of her songs that really sums it up for me:

‘If there’s no magic, there’s no meaning.’ Without magic—or call it wonder, mystery, natural wisdom—nothing has any depth. It’s all just surface. You know: what you see is what you get. I honestly believe there’s more to everything than that, whether it’s a Monet hanging in a gallery or some old vagrant sleeping in an alley.”

“I don’t know,” Annie said. “I understand what you’re saying, about people and things, but this other stuff—it sounds more like the kinds of things you see when you’re tripping.”

Jilly shook her head. “I’ve done drugs and I’ve seen Faerie. They’re not the same.”

She got up to stir the stew. When she sat down again, Annie had closed the sketchbook and was sitting with her hands flat against her stomach.

“Can you feel the baby?” Ply asked.

Annie nodded.

“Have you thought about what you want to do?”

“I guess. I’m just not sure I even want to keep the baby.”

“That’s your decision,” Jilly said. “Whatever you want to do, we’ll stand by you. Either way we’ll get you a place to stay. If you keep the baby and want to work, we’ll see about arranging daycare. If you want to stay home with the baby, we’ll work something out for that as well. That’s what this sponsorship’s all about. It’s not us telling you what to do; we just want to help you be the person you were meant to be.”

“I don’t know if that’s such a good person,” Annie said. “Don’t think like that. It’s not true.”

Annie shrugged. “I guess I’m scared I’ll do the same thing to my baby that my mother did to me.

That’s how it happens, doesn’t it? My mom used to beat the crap out of me all the time, didn’t matter if I did something wrong or not, and I’m just going to end up doing the same thing to my kid.”

“You’re only hurting yourself with that kind of thinking,” Jilly said.

“But it can happen, can’t it? Jesus, I I ... You know I’ve been gone from her for two years now, but I still feel like she’s standing right next to me half the time, or waiting around the corner for me. It’s like I’ll never escape. When I lived at home, it was like I was living in the house of an enemy. But running away didn’t change that. I still feel like that, except now it’s like everybody’s my enemy.”

Jilly reached over and laid a hand on hers.

“Not everybody,” she said. “You’ve got to believe that.”

“It’s hard not to.”

“I know.”

10

This Is Where We Dump Them, by Meg Mullally. Tinted photograph. The Tombs, Newford, 1991.

Two children sit on the stoop of one of the abandoned buildings in the Tombs. Their hair is matted, faces smudged, clothing dirty and illfitting. They look like turnof-thecentury Irish tinkers. There’s litter all around them: torn garbage bags spewing their contents on the sidewalk, broken bottles, a rotting mattress on the street, halfcrushed pop cans, soggy newspapers, used condoms.

The children are seven and thirteen, a boy and a girl. They have no home, no family. They only have each other.

The next month went by awfully fast. Annie stayed with me—it was what she wanted. Angel and I did get her a place, a onebedroom on Landis that she’s going to move into after she’s had the baby. It’s right behind the loft—you can see her back window from mine. But for now she’s going to stay here with me.

She’s really a great kid. No artistic leanings, but really bright. She could be anything she wants to be if she can just learn to deal with all the baggage her parents dumped on her.

She’s kind of shy around Angel and some of my other friends—I guess they’re all too old for her or something—but she gets along really well with Sophie and me. Probably because, whenever you put Sophie and me together in the same room for more than two minutes, we just start giggling and acting about half our respective ages, which would make us, mentally at least, just a few years Annie’s senior.

“You two could be sisters,” Annie told me one day when we got back from Sophie’s studio. “Her hair’s lighter, and she’s a little chestier, and she’s definitely more organized than you are, but I get a real sense of family when I’m with the two of you. The way families are supposed to be.”

“Even though Sophie’s got faerie blood?” I asked her. She thought I was joking.

“If she’s got magic in her,” Annie said, “then so do you. Maybe that’s what makes you seem so much like sisters.”

“I just pay attention to things,” I told her. “That’s all.”

“Yeah, right.”

The baby came right on schedule—threethirty, Sunday morning. I probably would’ve panicked if Annie hadn’t been doing enough of that for both of us. Instead I got on the phone, called Angel, and then saw about helping Annie get dressed.

The contractions were really close by the time Angel arrived with the car. But everything worked out fine. Jillian Sophia Mackle was born two hours and fortyfive minutes later at the Newford General Hospital. Six pounds and five ounces of redfaced wonder. There were no complications.

Those came later.

11

The last week before the show was simple chaos. There seemed to be a hundred and one things that none of them had thought of, all of which had to be done at the last moment. And to make matters worse, Jilly still had one unfinished canvas haunting her by Friday night.

It stood on her easel, untitled, barelysketched in images, still in monochrome. The colors eluded her.

She knew what she wanted, but every time she stood before her easel, her mind went blank. She seemed to forget everything she’d ever known about art. The inner essence of the canvas rose up inside her like a ghost, so close she could almost touch it, but then fled daily, like a dream lost upon waking. The outside world intruded. A knock on the door. The ringing of the phone.

The show opened in exactly seven days.

Annie’s baby was almost two weeks old. She was a happy, satisfied infant, the kind of baby that was forever making contented little gurgling sounds, as though talking to herself; she never cried. Annie herself was a nervous wreck.

“I’m scared,” she told Jilly when she came over to the loft that afternoon. “Everything’s going too well. I don’t deserve it.” They were sitting at the kitchen table, the baby propped up on the Murphy bed between two pillows. Annie kept fidgeting. Finally she picked up a pencil and started drawing stick figures on pieces of paper.

“Don’t say that,” Jilly said. “Don’t even think it.”

“But it’s true. Look at me. I’m not like you or Sophie. I’m not like Angel. What have I got to offer my baby? What’s she going to have to look up to when she looks at me?”

“A kind, caring mother.”

Annie shook her head. “I don’t feel like that. I feel like everything’s sort of fuzzy and it’s like pushing through cobwebs to just to make it through the day.”

“We’d better make an appointment with you to see a doctor.”

“Make it a shrink,” Annie said. She continued to doodle, then looked down at what she was doing.

“Look at this. It’s just crap.”

Before Jilly could see, Annie swept the sheaf of papers to the floor.

“Oh, jeez,” she said as they went fluttering all over the place. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”

She got up before Jilly could and tossed the lot of them in the garbage container beside the stove.

She stood there for a long moment, taking deep breaths, holding them, slowly letting them out.

“Annie ... ?”

She turned as Jilly approached her. The glow of motherhood that had seemed to revitalize her in the month before the baby was born had slowly worn away. She was pale again. Wan. She looked so lost that all Jilly could do was put her arms around her and offer a wordless comfort.

“I’m sorry,” Annie said against Jilly’s hair. “I don’t know what’s going on. I just ... I know I should be really happy, but I just feel scared and confused.” She rubbed at her eyes with a knuckle. “God, listen to me. All it seems I can do is complain about my life.”

“It’s not like you’ve had a great one,” Jilly said.

“Yeah, but when I compare it to what it was like before I met you, it’s like I moved up into heaven.”

“Why don’t you stay here tonight?” Jilly said.

Annie stepped back out of her arms. “Maybe I will—if you really don’t mind ... ?”

“I really don’t mind.”

“Thanks.”

Annie glanced towards the bed, her gaze pausing on the clock on the wall above the stove.

“You’re going to be late for work,” she said.

“That’s all right. I don’t think I’ll go in tonight.”

Annie shook her head. “No, go on. You’ve told me how busy it gets on a Friday night.”

Jilly still worked parttime at Kathryn’s Cafe on Battersfield Road. She could just imagine what Wendy would say if she called in sick. There was no one else in town this weekend to take her shift, so that would leave Wendy working all the tables on her own.

“If you’re sure,” Jilly said.

“We’ll be okay,” Annie said. “Honestly.”

She went over to the bed and picked up the baby, cradling her gently in her arms.

“Look at her,” she said, almost to herself. “It’s hard to believe something so beautiful came out of me.” She turned to Jilly, adding before Jilly could speak, “That’s a kind of magic all by itself, isn’t it?”

“Maybe one of the best we can make,” Jilly said.

12

How Can You Call This Love? by Claudia Feder. Oils. Old Market Studio, Newford, 1990.

A fat man sits on a bed in a cheap hotel room. He’s removing his shirt. Through the ajar door of the bathroom behind him, a thin girl in bra and panties can be seen sitting on the toilet, shooting up.

She appears to be about fourteen.

I just pay attention to things, I told her. I guess that’s why, when I got off my shift and came back to the loft, Annie was gone. Because I pay such good attention. The baby was still on the bed, lying between the pillows, sleeping. There was a note on the kitchen table: I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I just keep wanting to hit something. I look at little Jilly and I think about my mother and I get so scared. Take care of her for me. Teach her magic.

Please don’t hate me.

I don’t know how long I sat and stared at those sad, piteous words, tears streaming from my eyes.

I should never have gone to work. I should never have left her alone. She really thought she was just going to replay her own childhood. She told me, I don’t know how many times she told me, but I just wasn’t paying attention, was I?

Finally I got on the phone. I called Angel. I called Sophie. I called Lou Fucceri. I called everybody I could think of to go out and look for Annie. Angel was at the loft with me when we finally heard. I was the one who picked up the phone.

I heard what Lou said: “A patrolman brought her into the General not fifteen minutes ago, ODing on Christ knows what. She was just trying to selfdestruct, is what he said. I’m sorry, Jilly. But she died before I got there.”

I didn’t say anything. I just passed the phone to Angel and went to sit on the bed. I held little Jilly in my arms and then I cried some more.

I was never joking about Sophie. She really does have faerie blood. It’s something I can’t explain, something we’ve never really talked about, something I just know and she’s never denied. But she did promise me that she’d bless Annie’s baby, just the way fairy godmothers would do it in all those old stories.

“I gave her the gift of a happy life,” she told me later. “I never dreamed it wouldn’t include Annie.”

But that’s the way it works in fairy tales, too, isn’t it? Something always goes wrong, or there wouldn’t be a story. You have to be strong, you have to earn your happily ever after.

Annie was strong enough to go away from her baby when she felt like all she could do was just lash out, but she wasn’t strong enough to help herself. That was the awful gift her parents gave her.

I never finished that last painting in time for the show, but I found something to take its place.

Something that said more to me in just a few rough lines than anything I’ve ever done.

I was about to throw out my garbage when I saw those crude little drawings that Annie had been doodling on my kitchen table the night she died. They were like the work of a child.

I framed one of them and hung it in the show.

“I guess we’re five coyotes and one coyote ghost now,” was all Sophie said when she saw what I had done.

13

In the House of My Enemy, by Annie Mackle. Pencils. Yoors Street Studio, Newford, 1991.

The images are crudely rendered. In a house that is merely a square with a triangle on top, are three stick figures, one plain, two with small “skirt” triangles to represent their gender. The two larger figures are beating the smaller one with what might be crooked sticks, or might be belts.

The small figure is cringing away.

14

In the visitor’s book set out at the show, someone wrote: “I can never forgive those responsible for what’s been done to us. I don’t even want to try.”

“Neither do I,” Jilly said when she read it. “God help me, but neither do I.”