us. It’s like he just doesn’t quite scan.”If we look at the path, we do not see the sky.
—Native American saying
Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
—Emily Dickinson
“Spare change?”
The crowd eddies by on either side of me as I pause. It seems pointless, doling out a quarter here, a quarter there, as if twenty-five cents can make that much of a difference in anyone’s life, but I can’t stop myself from doing it, because it does make a difference. It means we’re at least paying attention to each other, acknowledging each other’s presence.
Come lunch time, some people buy lottery tickets, others waste their money on junk food. Me, I usually brown-bag it. Then after I’ve eaten, I go out for a walk, making sure I have a handful of change in the pocket of my jacket.
So I turn to the girl, my hand already in my pocket, fingers sorting through the coins by feel. She has a raggedy Gothic look about her, from her pale skin and the unruly tangle of her short dark hair to the way her clothes hang from her skinny frame. I find myself wondering, is this all she has to wear or a fashion statement? These days it’s hard to tell. Scuffed workboots, torn jeans, black T-shirt, black cotton jacket. She has so many earrings in one ear that I’m surprised her head doesn’t tilt in that direction. Her other lobe has only one small silver stud of an owl’s head. Except for her blood-red lipstick, she’s entirely monochrome.
She smiles as I drop a pair of quarters in her palm. “If this were a fairy tale,” she says, “you’d have just guaranteed yourself some unexpected help later on in the story.”
It’s such a charming and unexpected line, I have to return her smile. “But first I suppose I’d have to stand on one foot and call your name three times while hopping in a circle.”
“Something like that.”
“Except I don’t know your name.”
She grins. “It’s not supposed to be easy, is it? But maybe a random act of kindness is magic enough, in its own small way. Maybe I owe you now and I’ll have to come to you if ever you need my help.”
“That’s not why I gave you the money.”
“I know.” She touches my arm, her fingers weightless on my skin and soft as a feather. “Thanks.”
She pockets her fifty cents and turns away. “Spare change?” I hear as I start walking again.
Just before I fall asleep that night, I find myself thinking about fairy tales. I try to imagine myself in stories of old women and spoons that go adventuring and talking cats that repay a small kindness with a great kindness until I remember that I’m not a thirdborn child the way the central characters usually are in a fairy tale. That brings me wide awake again. Once upon a time I was the middle child; now I’m an orphan, without siblings. Thinking about family takes me to a place I try to never go, but it’s too late now.
I lie awake for hours, watching the slow shadow of the streetlight outside my window as it crawls across my ceiling. Finally I get up and go to the window. I mean to pull the shade, but then I see someone standing out there on the street, under the streetlight, looking up at me.
He’s dark-eyed, dark-haired, that ravened thatch an unruly nest of untamed locks standing up at attention around his head; alabaster skin—brow, cheeks, throat, hands, even his lips. He has a face like a knife, all sharp angles, and there’s a Gothic look about him that reminds me of the girl panhandling earlier today. With him it’s reinforced by the old-fashioned cut of his clothes—Heathcliff come off the moor, not exactly the way Brontë described him, but the way I imagined him, a figure of shadow and pale skin that haunted my sleep for weeks. I used to live in delicious dread of his appearing at the foot of my bed and sweeping me up into his arms and away. Where, I was never exactly sure. Before I got the chance to figure out where I might like a man like that to take me, my life was irrevocably changed and I didn’t think about that kind of thing again for a very long time.
But that was over twenty years ago, when I was barely into my teens, and still had dreams. Right now I’m thirty-six, suffering from a familiar insomnia, and not at all happy to have acquired my very own stalker, no matter how handsome he might be. Bunching the open V of my nightgown closer to my throat with one hand, I step back, out of his line of sight, and sit down on the bed again. Safe, I think, only something makes me turn my head and that’s when I see the spare-change girl from earlier today, sitting on the other side of my bed like an invited guest.
“Don’t worry about him,” she says. “He won’t hurt you.”
My heartbeat goes into overdrive. I start to ask how she got in here, but the words stick in my throat and a half second later I realize that I have to be dreaming. My pulse is still drumming way too fast, but I don’t feel quite so nervous now. It’s funny. Maybe I don’t dream—or at least I don’t remember my dreams—and I certainly can’t remember ever knowing that I was dreaming while I was dreaming, but here I am, doing both. I wonder if I’ll retain any of this tomorrow morning.
“Do you know him?” I find myself asking.
“He’s my sister.”
“He?”
She laughs. “Oh, I guess that sounds pretty confusing, doesn’t it?”
Even for a dream, I think.
“We’re . . . wyrds,” she says. “Or at least that’s what they used to call us.”
“Weirds?”
I don’t realize until later that we’re using two entirely different words.
She nods. “Exactly. As in the fates. Sometimes we were called muses, too, though I doubt anyone would do that today. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of interest in muses anymore.”
I give her a blank look. My hand goes to the night table and finds cigarettes, matches and ashtray. I have the usual twinge of regret as I light up, that familiar I-really-should-quit-one-of-these-days nag, but I ignore it. Dropping the cigarette package and matches on the bed between us, I take a long drag, then tip the grey end of my cigarette into the middle of the ashtray.
“These days,” she explains, “people don’t really care about using the muscles of their own imaginations. I mean, why bother when the media can provide every thought or idea you’ll ever need?”
“That’s a bit cynical.”
“But no less true.”
I shrug. “And it doesn’t explain what he’s doing down there—or why you’re in my bedroom, for that matter.”
Or, come to think of it, what she was doing out on the street at noon, cadging spare change.
“My sister being down there is my fault,” she says. “He saw me talking to you earlier today and when he realized that you don’t dream at all, he had to have a closer look.”
“I’m dreaming now.”
“Are you?”
I better be, I think, but decide to change the subject.
“So you’re fates,” I say.
She nods again. “There are three of us—like in the stories. They got that much right.”
I finally start to twig. “You mean like in the Greek myths?”
“Something like that.”
I’m thinking, there are three of them in the stories, one to spin the threads of our lives, one to weave them, and one to cut them when you’ve reached the end of your thread. Spin, weave, cut. Birth, life, death. I steal a glance out the window and Heathcliff’s still standing out there, looking up. He hasn’t got a hooded cloak or a scythe, but I’m pretty sure I know which one of the three he is now. Snip, snip.
My cigarette’s already at the filter. I stub it out and light another one. Even sucking smoke into my lungs the way I am, I can’t believe my time has come. I’m not ready, but then who is? I’ve always subscribed to Woody Allen’s philosophy: “I’m not afraid of dying,” he’s supposed to have said. “I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Or I guess I just pretended I did. I feel guilty about being alive, but fear’s a bigger emotion. I’m afraid of dying. Not because it means my life’s over—what I’ve got is no big deal—but because of who I might meet when I do die and what they’ll say to me.
“And . . . your other sister?” I ask.
“She’s spinning.”
I nod because it makes sense. The spare-change girl sitting on the edge of my bed is too much a part of the here and now, too full of vitality not to be the weaver. Life. I take a drag from my cigarette and sneak another look at her older sister, waiting for me down there on the street.
“Why does she look like a man?” I ask, thinking maybe I can postpone the inevitable if I can just keep her talking.
The girl shrugs. “He got disbelieved into looking the way he does. That sort of thing happens to us when people stop dreaming their own dreams. And no dreams at all makes it even worse.”
I’m finding this way too confusing, even for a dream.
“Okay,” I tell her. “So your sister’s down there because I don’t dream.” I find that I don’t want to let on that I know why she’s really here—maybe because if I ignore it, it won’t be real. “Why are you here?”
“Because it’s my fault that he’s here right now and I didn’t want you to be upset. A lot of people find him unsettling.”
Maybe the strangest thing about all of this is the way she keeps referring to her sister as “he.”
“But sooner or later . . .” I begin.
“He would have come around to see you,” she says, finishing when I let my voice trail off. “It just takes time, getting to everyone. You probably wouldn’t have even known he was nearby, if you hadn’t seen me earlier today.”
One of the curses of fairyland, I think. Once you’ve had a glimpse of it, you can always see it, just there on the periphery of your vision. Or at least that’s the way it goes in some of the old stories. I played Good Samaritan with fifty cents, and the next thing I know I’ve got two of the Greek fates hanging around.
I’ve finished my second cigarette even quicker than the first. I stub it out and light yet another one. I don’t want to hold on to what she’s telling me, but I can’t let it go. Death’s down there on the street, his gaze meeting mine every time I look out the window. Eternity seems to linger in his eyes and I can’t read him at all. Is he bored, sad, amused?
“If he’s busy,” I say, turning back to the girl. “I can wait. Really. I’m in no hurry.”
“That’s not the way it works,” she tells me. “Everybody has to dream, just as one day, everybody has to die.”
Jenny Wray woke in a cold sweat. She sat up and stared frantically at the side of her bed, but of course there was no one there. She leaned forward so that she could see out the window and there was no one standing under the streetlight either. She started to reach for the cigarettes on her night table, then remembered that she’d given them up over ten years ago.
God, it had seemed so real. Death below, his younger sister in the room with her. The taste of the cigarette.
She sat up against the headboard, arms wrapped around her knees, reliving memories that had no business hanging on for so long, no business still being so clear. It was a long time before she could even think of trying to get back to sleep. Her visitors had been wrong about one thing, she thought as she stretched out once more.
“See,” she murmured into her pillow. “I do dream.”
Because what else could it have been?
“When we visit, we come like a dream,” she heard someone reply. “But it’s not the same. It’s not the same thing at all.”
She recognized the voice. It was the spare-change girl. She could picture her face without having to open her eyes, could imagine Death having joined her, standing at the foot of the bed now in all his Gothic trappings.
The idea of dreaming about them still being in the room with her gave her the creeps. Maybe if she pretended they weren’t there, they’d simply go away. The skin prickled up and down her spine at the thought of their presence until she stole a glance through her eyelashes and saw she really was alone. When she finally drifted off, she wasn’t sure if she was falling asleep, or dreaming she was falling asleep. The difference seemed important, but she was too tired to try to make sense of it now.
The dream wouldn’t go away.
It followed Jenny through the day, clinging to the wool of her thoughts like a persistent burr until she knew she had to talk to someone about it. The trouble was, who? She was temping these days, only her second day at this particular office, so she couldn’t approach one of her coworkers, and it wasn’t the sort of topic that normally came up in conversations among her own small circle of acquaintances; she didn’t have any real friends. It wasn’t until she was leaving the office that she thought of someone who wouldn’t think she was weird or laugh her off. So instead of taking the bus home, she caught a subway downtown.
It took her a little while to find the shop she was looking for. When she finally did and went inside, she stood in the doorway, momentarily distracted. The air in the shop was several shades darker than outside and redolent with the scent of incense. There were packets of herbs for sale and bins of candles; crystals displayed on swatches of dark velvet along with ornately-designed daggers and goblets; ceremonial hooded cloaks hanging along one wall and books crammed on shelves, many with the word magic or magick in the title, as well as any number of items that Jenny couldn’t identify, or if she recognized the item, didn’t know the use to which it would be put, presented as it was in this context.
Ash Enys, the young woman behind the counter, was the niece of a woman Jenny had met while sitting a booth at a craft show a few years before. She reminded Jenny of last night’s dream, of the middle fate with her pale skin and punky hair. They shared the same monochrome wardrobe: black jeans, jacket and combat boots, white T-shirt, smudges of dark kohl around the eyes. Ash’s lips even had the slash of blood-red lipstick, except the shade of hers ran more toward the purple spectrum. The only real difference was that the spare-change girl hadn’t had a nose ring.
“Never thought I’d see you in here,” Ash said with a smile when she recognized Jenny.
Jenny returned her smile. “Why not?”
“I don’t know. Doesn’t seem to be your style.”
“So what is my style?”
“Uptown,” Ash said. “No offense.”
Jenny liked to dress well, not voguing, but definitely stylish. Today she was wearing patterned stockings, heels, a form-hugging short skirt, silk blouse. She didn’t use much makeup, but the little she did was artfully applied. Her dark hair was a short pageboy with long bangs. Minimal jewelry—a stud and a dangling earring in one ear, the latter’s match in the other, a plain silver band on the ring finger of her right hand.
“No offense taken,” she said. “But everybody’s got secrets.”
They were alone in the store. Feeling bold, she tugged her blouse free from her skirt and lifted it so that Ash could see the small silver ring that pierced her navel. She got it one day when she wanted to prove to herself that she was brave. That hadn’t happened. Bravery, she realized, had nothing to do with what one chose to do to one’s self. But she did like the secret of it, the knowledge of its existence, hidden there under her clothes where no one else could see it.
“Cool,” Ash said.
Jenny tucked the tails of her blouse back into her skirt.
“So what are you looking for here?” Ash asked.
“You.” As Ash’s eyebrows rose questioningly, Jenny went on to explain. “I remember Gwen telling me you’d gotten a job here and I had a question about, you know—” She waved her hand vaguely in the direction of a shelf full of books on dreaming. “Stuff like this. Dreams.”
“I’m not exactly an expert,” Ash said.
“Well, you’re the closest to an expert that I know.”
Ash smiled. “Uptown girl.”
“That’s me.”
“So what do you want to know?”
“What does it mean when you dream about Death?”
“Yours or somebody else’s?”
“I mean the personification of Death,” Jenny said. “You know, a pale-faced guy, all in black.”
“Did he ask you to play chess?”
Jenny smiled at the film reference, but shook her head. “He just stood in the street outside my apartment last night, watching me.”
“Well, some people think dreams can be like premonitions—”
Jenny shivered.
“—while other people think that’s bullshit.”
“What do you think?”
Ash shrugged. “If I had a dream like yours, I’d definitely lean toward it being bullshit.”
“No, seriously.”
Ash leaned on the counter to look more closely at her. “This has really got you spooked, hasn’t it?”
“No. Of course not. It’s just . . .” Jenny sighed. There was no point in lying. “Yeah. I found it really creepy. Especially because, normally, I don’t dream—or at least I never remember my dreams. But this one won’t go away. It keeps popping back into my mind when I’m least expecting it.”
“Well,” Ash said, “symbolically, meeting Death isn’t necessarily such a bad thing. I mean, Shiva is the god of both Dance and Death, and in the Tarot, the Death card is more often considered to be a symbol of transformation and spiritual rebirth. Even in Western culture we didn’t always depict Death as the hooded skeleton with a scythe. The Greeks envisaged Death as the daughter of night and the sister of sleep.” She cocked an eye at Jenny. “Maybe that’s why Keats described himself as ‘half in love with easeful Death.’ They used to call sleep the little death, you know, so maybe when we die we step into a dream that never ends because we never wake up again.”
Jenny stared at Ash, not really seeing her. She was remembering what the middle fate had told her about dreams and dreaming. When she finally focused her gaze she saw Ash wearing an apologetic look.
“I guess I’m not being much help, am I?” she said.
“She said the reason he’d come to see me is because I don’t dream,” Jenny told her.
“She?”
“The middle fate. That’s what she said they were—wyrds. The fates—or at least two of them. She was the one who was actually in my room—Death was sort of hanging around on the street outside.”
“This sounds like it was quite the dream.”
“It was,” Jenny said. “She looked a little bit like you.”
Ash laughed. “Generic Goth, right? I guess I deserve that for my uptown-girl comments.”
Jenny shrugged that off.
“So where does the girl come in?” Ash wanted to know.
“I don’t know exactly,” Jenny said. “The first time I saw her I was awake—she was panhandling near my office and I gave her some money. But then later I dreamed about her and that feels more true now than what I know for sure happened. She kept going on about muses and dreams and . . .” She let her voice trail off. “God, would you listen to me? I’m talking about it as though it actually happened, as though she really was in my bedroom.”
“I’ve had dreams like that,” Ash said. “Everybody does. It’s like you wake up and you can’t believe it didn’t really happen. I know this guy who had a dream about cats Morris dancing. He really, really believed it had happened. He was so excited when he woke up, he wanted to tell everybody. I just happened to be the first person he saw that morning, so I saved him the embarrassment of trying to convince anybody else that it had been real.”
Jenny was only half listening. “She said it wasn’t a dream,” she told Ash. “She said that they came like a dream, but it wasn’t the same thing as a real dream. She was pretty emphatic about it.”
“So what did they want?”
“That’s what I was hoping you could tell me.”
Ash lifted her hands, palms up. “The Goth strikes out,” she said, “because I don’t have a clue. I guess you’ll have to ask them yourself if you dream about them again.”
“I hope the opportunity never comes up,” Jenny said.
But of course it does. Not that night, nor the next, but Friday, I no sooner put my head on the pillow, than I find myself in this club I’ve never been in before—at least I don’t recognize the place. Dark, smoky, loud. The DJ’s spinning “Le Bien, Le Mal” by Guru and MC Solaar. I remember the first time I heard the piece, I thought it was so weird hearing somebody rapping in French, but it’s got a definite groove and the dance floor is happening, so I don’t think I’m the only person who likes it.
There’s a guy standing close beside me and I don’t know if I’m with him, or if the crowd’s just pushed together, but he lights my cigarette for me. The music’s turned up past conversation volume which makes it hard to talk. He’s nice-looking and I think maybe I’d like to dance, but then I see a familiar figure going up the stairs on the far side of the club and out the door. I think: It’s Ash, but I know it’s not. It’s not any other generic Goth either. I tell the guy I’ve got to go, using sign language because the music’s still seriously loud, and he just gives me a shrug. I guess I wasn’t with him after all.
It takes me a while to make it across the club and up the stairs myself. By the time the cool air outside hits my face, there’s no sign of the girl. I have that hum in my head—you know, the one that follows you home after a concert or a night of clubbing—and I figure I must have had enough loud music for one night, even though all I can remember is the last few minutes or so. I hail a cab and settle down in the back seat. We go about a half-dozen blocks before I turn to look out the window on my left and realize the girl’s sitting beside me. Was she there all along, or did she simply materialize on the seat beside me? It doesn’t really matter because that’s when I figure out that I’m dreaming again.
“See,” I say to her, “I told you I dream,” but she shakes her head.
“And I told you,” she says, “that we only seem like a dream. It’s easier for you to deal with us that way.”
“Who do you mean by ‘us’?”
She shrugs. “People like me. Or my sisters.”
One of whom’s been disbelieved into looking like a guy and just happens to be Death. It’s so strange, when you think about it. Death’s got sisters. They never told us that, but then nobody has the real scoop on death, do they? There are all the light at the end of the tunnel stories, but those people come back, so who knows if their near-death experience really connected them into the secret, or if they simply imagined the light and the tunnel?
“So . . .” I clear my throat. “Where is your sister? Out taking a few lives?”
I don’t feel nearly as cocky as I’m trying to sound.
She gives me a strange look. “More like living them,” she says.
I’ve no idea what she’s talking about, but I figure as long as I’ve got the ear of one of the fates, I might as well ask her a few questions, find out for sure what everybody else has to guess at.
“Why do we have to die?” I ask.
She shrugs. “What you really want to know is, ‘Why do I have to die?’ ”
“I guess.”
She doesn’t answer me right away. Instead she says, “It’s such a beautiful night, why don’t we walk?”
When I agree, she taps the cabbie on the shoulder and tells him we’ll get out here. He pulls over to the curb. She doesn’t offer to pay, so I dig out my wallet, but he just shakes his head. Says we didn’t go far enough to make it worthwhile. I don’t argue. I just thank him the way my companion does and join her on the pavement, but it’s the first time I ever saw a Newford cabbie turn down money.
The spare-change girl slips her arm in mine and we head off down the street. For some reason I don’t feel weird, walking arm in arm with another woman like this. Maybe it’s because it’s such a beautiful night, one of those rare times when the lights of the city just can’t drown out the starlight that’s pouring down from the sky above. Maybe it’s because I know I’m only dreaming.
“Why do you have to die?” she says, returning to our earlier conversation. “You might as well ask, why were you born? It’s all part of the same mystery.”
“But it’s not a mystery to you, is it? Or at least it’s not to your sister.”
“Which one?”
“You know. The one who was standing outside my apartment the other night. He’d know, wouldn’t he?”
“Perhaps,” she says. “He’s always had access to a lot of very potent imaginations. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if he’s run across the answer in one lifetime or another.”
I know she doesn’t mean he’s immortal—though of course he is. She means all the lives he’s taken.
“But you don’t know,” I say.
She shakes her head. “I think it’s all part of a journey and what you’re thinking of as the start and the end are just convenient markers along the way. You don’t get the whole picture right away. Maybe you never do. Maybe it’s like tao and it’s only the journey itself that’s important, what you do on it, how you grow, not where you come from or where you finally end up.”
“I can’t buy that,” I tell her. I have an old pain aching in my chest, but I don’t speak about it. It’s not something I can speak about—that I even know how to speak about. But while I can’t deal in specifics, the general injustice that crowds my head whenever I think about death and how people die is easy to verbalize.
“What about little kids?” I ask. “What about infants who die at birth? What do they get a chance to learn? Or what about all the terrible suffering that some people have to undergo while others just drift peacefully away in their sleep? If this isn’t random, then, I’m sorry, but Death’s one spiteful bastard.”
She gets this sad look. “Death can’t pick when you die, or how you die, just as no one can decide what you dream.”
“You make it sound like the people who suffer choose to suffer. That a baby chooses to die when it does.”
“You have so much anger in you.”
“Well, excuse me,” I tell her, “but I’m not like you and your sisters. I have to die.”
And probably sooner than I want to, considering how my companion’s older sister has taken this sudden interest in me. But that’s not why I’m really angry. I think maybe she knows, only she doesn’t call me on it.
“But is dying so bad?” she asks. “How else can you move on to what comes next, if you don’t leave the baggage of this life behind? What comes next might well be more wonderful than anything you can even begin to imagine in this world.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No,” she admits. “I don’t. Just as I don’t know why some die in pain and others in their sleep. Why some die young and others in their old age. Why good people can suffer and evil ones prosper.”
“Well, what about your sister?”
“What about him?”
“Doesn’t he know? I mean, if anyone should know, it’d be him.”
“My sister has many good qualities,” she says, “but omniscience isn’t among them.”
“I just think if he’s going to show up standing outside my apartment that he should at least have the decency to tell me where I’m headed next.”
She shakes her head. “All he’s concerned with is why you don’t dream.”
“Why should that bother him?”
“I told you. People not dreaming changes us. Every one who doesn’t dream is like a little black hole. If it isn’t tended to, it’ll draw other dreamers into its net and soon there’ll be vast numbers of you, abed and dreamless.”
“Well, what does that matter? I mean, who really cares if we dream or not?”
“We do. He does.”
I try to digest this. “So dreaming is important to him.”
“Very much so.”
“I was talking to someone recently,” I tell her, “and they mentioned something about how people once called sleep the little death.”
She nods her head. “I remember.”
Like she was there, but I let it pass because she probably was.
“So maybe,” I say, “dying is like going into a dream that never ends because you never wake up again.”
This seems to interest her. “I like the idea of that,” she says.
I feel like I’m on a roll now. “And maybe that’s another reason why it’s so important that I dream. Because if I don’t dream, then I won’t die.”
She doesn’t reply. Instead she says, more to herself than to me, “I wonder if that’s the real reason John’s been around for all these years.”
“Excuse me?”
“John Buttadus. It’s like he just doesn’t quite scan.”
“What are you talking about?” I ask.
She blinks out of her reverie and gives me this irresistible smile that I can’t help but return.
“What were you saying?” she asks.
I start to repeat what I’ve just said, until I realize she’s gone back to what we were talking about before she spaced out on me.
“Does this mean that so long as I don’t dream, I don’t die?” I ask.
“I don’t think there’s been an appointment made for you yet,” she tells me. “At least, not that anyone’s told me.”
“And we’re not dreaming right now?”
She shakes her head.
“Well, I can sure live with that,” I say and then I have to laugh at the double meaning of what I’ve just said.
I pause to light a cigarette. Our reflection in a store window catches my eye. She looks Gothic, I’m uptown, but the poor light and dark glass blend the differences. We could almost be sisters.
“Those are going to kill you,” she says as I put away my lighter.
I blow a wreath of blue-grey smoke into the air between us.
“Is that inside information?” I ask.
She shakes her head.
“Because I quit years ago,” I tell her. “And besides, I don’t dream, remember? I’m going to live forever. I could probably take them up again if I wanted to.”
I have this giddy feeling that I can’t shake. I feel immortal, the way I did when I was a kid, when my life was still normal. That makes me almost fall into the trap of reliving the past, but I manage to sidestep the memories. I’ve had to live with them for almost as long as I can remember. Right now, I just want to hold onto this good feeling and never let it go.
I’m still smiling when I wake up the next morning, never mind that what I experienced last night had to be a dream. Except it wasn’t—at least not according to Death’s sister, the middle fate, and if anybody should know, it’d be her, right? So I’m safe from him—safe from what I know will be waiting for me when I die. Until I have a real dream. So I guess the big question is, how do I stop myself from inadvertently doing just that?
Saturday found Jenny back at The Occult Shop, but Ash didn’t appear to be working this morning. In her place behind the counter was a tall, green-eyed woman who presented a look that was the direct opposite of Ash’s Goth image. She wore a high-necked black dress over tights the same color and a pair of combat boots. The dress was unadorned except for a bone ankh broach pinned above her right breast. Her long blonde hair was gathered into a loose ponytail that hung down to the small of her back in a golden waterfall. She looked like she should be in a fashion magazine instead of working the counter here.
“Ash doesn’t work Saturdays,” the woman told Jenny when she asked. “Maybe I can help you. My name’s Miranda.”
The store was much busier than it had been the last time Jenny was here—too busy, she thought, for the kind of conversation that would ensue when she explained why she was here. And where would she even begin? Ash at least had the background.
“It’s sort of personal,” she explained, trying not very successfully to hide her disappointment.
“Well, you can usually find her over in the park on weekends,” Miranda said.
“The park?”
“Fitzhenry Park. She’s generally hanging somewhere around the War Memorial with Cassie or Bones.”
Jenny had no idea who Cassie or Bones might be, or what they would look like, but she fastened onto Ash’s possible whereabouts with a single-mindedness that surprised her and was almost out of the store before she remembered to thank Miranda for her help.
“No problem,” Miranda replied, but she was speaking to a closed door.
Jenny found Ash sitting on the steps of the War Memorial with a man she decided had to be Bones. He was a Native American—probably from the Kickaha reservation north of the city. His skin had a dark coppery cast and his features were broad—the chin square, eyes widely set, nose flat. His hair was as long as Miranda’s back in The Occult Shop, except he wore his in a single tight braid, with feathers and beads interlaced in the braiding. He looked to be in his early thirties and so far as Jenny was concerned he could have stepped into modern Newford right out of some forgotten moment in history, if it hadn’t been for his clothing: faded jeans, torn at the knees, scuffed leather work boots, a white T-shirt with DON’T! BUY! THAI! written across the front.
“Hey, pretty lady,” he called to her as she came near. “Medicine’s right here—plenty powerful—if you got the wampum.”
Before Jenny could answer, Ash elbowed him in the side.
“Enough with the talking Tonto already,” Ash said. “She’s a friend. Jenny, this is Bones; Bones, Jenny.”
Bones gave Jenny a grin that made him look a little demented and she took an involuntary step back.
“He likes to act the fool,” Ash explained, “but don’t mind him. He’s okay.”
“I’m okay, you’re okay,” Bones said. “Pull up some stone, Jenny, and have yourself a seat.”
Jenny gave him an uncertain smile. There was something about the way he looked at her—some dark light in his eyes—that reminded her of the eldest fate, standing outside her apartment the other night, except it didn’t wake awe in her so much as nervousness. An uncomfortable feeling washed over her, a sense that in this man’s presence, anything could happen. And probably would. She wasn’t sure she was ready for another strange encounter—not when she still hadn’t gotten over the one that had brought her here in the first place, looking for advice.
“What are those for?” she asked, pointing at a pile of tiny animal bones that lay on a square of beaded deerskin by Bones’ feet. “Besides giving you your name, I mean.”
She asked as much out of curiosity as to get him to stop regarding her so intently.
“It’s the eyes, isn’t it?” Ash said. “That and the grin.”
Jenny looked up at her. “What?”
“She thinks you don’t know what to make of me,” Bones said.
“Well, I . . .”
“Bones always makes people feel a little strange when they first meet him,” Ash said. “He says his real name translates into something like Crazy Dog. I say, whoever named him knew what they were doing.”
Bones nodded, still grinning. “And these,” he said, indicating the bones, “are my medicine wheel.”
“Oh.”
Ash laughed. “But you didn’t come here to get your fortune read—did you?”
“No. I . . .” Jenny hesitated, feeling as intimidated with Bones’s presence as she’d felt in The Occult Shop with all the people standing around. But she took a breath and plunged on. “Do you know a way to make sure that you don’t dream?” she asked.
Ash shook her head. “No, that’s a new one on me.”
“It’s just that I know you sell herbs and stuff to help people dream. . . .”
“Like a dream-catcher?”
“I guess. What’s that?”
Ash described the spider-web like weaving of threads that went back and forth around a twig that had been bent into the rough shape of a circle, how the pattern, and the feathers, beads, shells, and the like woven into it, were supposed to draw good dreams to a sleeper.
Jenny nodded. “Yes, like that. Only something that’ll do the opposite.”
“You’ve got me.”
“You don’t like your dreams?” Bones asked.
“No, it’s not that. I don’t dream.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“I want to make sure it stays that way.”
“Maybe you should go back to the beginning,” Ash suggested, “so Bones knows what we’re talking about.”
“I . . .”
“Don’t feel shy. He’s a good listener and maybe he can help. He’s gotten me out of a jam or two.”
Jenny felt a flush coming on. “I don’t know. I feel weird. . . .”
“Weird is good,” Bones said. “Means you’re not locked into what’s here and now, but you’re seeing a little further than most people do.”
That was an understatement if Jenny had ever heard one. “Okay,” she said with a sigh. “It started with a dream that wasn’t a dream. . . .”
“So one of the fates is a guy,” Bones said when Jenny finished relating her recent experiences.
“I think he’s like Coyote,” Ash said. “A shapeshifter—only the face he wears is the one you least expect.”
Jenny looked from one to the other. “What are you talking about?”
“The guy in your dream,” Ash said. “The eldest fate.”
Bones shook his head. “No, what we’re really talking about is you, Jenny. The visions you’re experiencing and the people you’re meeting in them are just something the spirits are doing to try to get your attention.”
“I’m not sure I follow you,” Jenny said.
“I don’t know you,” Bones said, “and you don’t know me, so I don’t know how much I should tell you. I don’t know what you want to hear.” He sounded regretful, but the crazy look in his eyes seemed to make a lie of that.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.
“I don’t want to piss you off. I mean, what’s the percentage in it? What do either of us get out of me telling you something you don’t want to hear?”
“I’m listening.”
“But are you hearing? The spirits spoke to you and what did you do? You took their gift and instead of learning from it, you’re trying to turn it to your own advantage.” He shook his head. “Never works, you know.”
Jenny could feel her face go stiff. “What the hell’s that supposed to—”
“Anger’s good,” Bones told her, breaking in. “It’s one of the ways the spirits tell you that you’re alive.”
“I’m not—” Jenny began, but she broke off.
Angry? No, she was furious at his cocky, know-it-all manner, but she heard an echo of what he’d said a few moments earlier—I don’t want to piss you off—and that was enough to make her wonder just why she was so angry. She looked at Ash, but Ash didn’t want to meet her gaze. She turned back to Bones. His face gave away nothing. Crazy eyes watched her back, solemn and laughing at the same time. She took a couple of steadying breaths and forced herself to calm down, to let the hostility go. It wasn’t that she was suddenly into making nice. It was more that she realized that Bones seemed to understand the experiences she’d had—certainly better than she did—and he was right: he had nothing to gain in making her angry, or hurting her feelings. So maybe it was worth her while to hear him out.
“Okay,” she said finally. “I am feeling angry. But I want to hear what you have to say.”
“You sure?”
Ash elbowed him again before Jenny could reply.
“Okay,” he said. “Let me put it this way. Does the sun rise and set just for you?”
Jenny shook her head.
“But it passes over you and makes you a part of its wheel, doesn’t it?”
“I guess.”
“Then perhaps you should learn to accept that you are a part of the world’s wheel and not struggle so hard against what must be.”
“So what are you telling me?” Jenny asked. “That I should just lie down and die?”
Bones grinned that crazy grin of his. “No, I’m saying you should get back on the wheel. Dream. Live. Don’t look at the ground when you want to see the sky. What’s the point of living forever if you don’t experience life now?”
“Who says I’m not experiencing life?”
“You do. Your dreams-that-aren’t dreams do. The spirits that have come across from the medicine lands to talk to you do.”
The anger rose up in Jenny again, but this time she was quicker to deal with it. She looked away from them, bit at her lip. The dark place inside started to draw her down into its grasp and she couldn’t seem to fight it.
“I’m sorry,” Bones said, and she sensed that he meant it.
“You don’t understand,” she said finally. “That’s the problem with living, nobody really understands. But we’ve got to carry on all the same. The trick isn’t to save up our points for when we die so that maybe we can buy ourselves into a better life. The trick is to have that better life now. To make it for ourselves. To take it, if people are trying to keep it away from us.”
Jenny still couldn’t look at them. She picked at a loose thread on the seam near the knee of her jeans. The past was swallowing her again and this time she couldn’t trick it into going away. It lay too thick inside her, that miasma of old hurts and griefs.
“Sometimes . . .” she began.
She had to stop and gather up her courage before could go on. This wasn’t something she talked about. It was too hard to talk about. She took a steadying breath and tried again.
“Sometimes,” she said in a small voice, “I don’t feel I have anything to live for. Sometimes I feel like I don’t deserve to live, but I’m more scared of dying.” Finally she looked up. “I’m scared of dying and seeing them and of what they’ll say to me, because I know it wasn’t fair, that they had to die while I went on.”
“Who died?” Ash asked softly.
“Everybody. My parents. My little sister. My older brother. My cousin did it. I was only . . . I was only twelve when it happened. He killed everybody except for me. I hid under my bed and waited for him to come . . . to come get me too, but he never did.”
“Your own cousin?” Ash said. “Jesus. That’s horrible.”
“What happened to him?” Bones asked.
“He killed himself. That’s why he never came after me. He . . . he killed everybody else and then he shot himself. I was under my bed for the rest of the night and most of the next day, just . . . just waiting for him.”
Ash shook her head. “You poor thing. You were just a little kid.”
“And then . . . then I went to live with my grandparents, but they died too.”
“But your cousin . . . ?” Ash began.
“He . . . he didn’t kill them. They just . . . died. . . .” It was getting harder and harder for Jenny to get it out. Starting had seemed tough, but going on was worse. Her chest was so tight she could barely breathe. She couldn’t see because she was blinded with tears. Her throat felt thick, making her choke on the words before she could get the words out.
“None . . . none of them died easy. Not my own family. Not my grandfather from cancer, a few . . . a few years after I came to live with them. Not my grandmother . . . she had Alzheimer’s. By the time she finally died she didn’t even know who I was anymore . . . .”
She finally turned her face toward them. “Why did they all have to go like that? Why not me? I should have died with them. Instead, I’ve just got this emptiness inside where family’s supposed to be. I feel so . . . so lonely . . . so guilty . . . .”
Ash came and sat beside her and put an arm around her, drawing Jenny’s head down to her shoulder. Bones took her hand. She looked at him. Even through her tears she could see that crazy light in his eyes, but it didn’t seem so strange anymore. It felt almost comforting.
“You’ve got to talk to those spirits one more time,” he said. “This time you’ve got to tell them what you’re feeling. That you don’t want to die—not till it’s your time—but you do want to live until it’s your time. You want to be alive. You want to dream. You’ve got to ask them to help you let it all go.”
“But she said the reason they came to me was because I don’t dream. What’s the point of me telling them what you’re saying I should? Wouldn’t they already know it?”
“The thing with spirits,” Bones told her, “is they want you to work it out on your own. Then, when you ask them for the right gift, they might help you out.”
“And . . . and if they won’t?”
“Girl,” Bones told her, “you’ve got a lot of strong medicine tucked away inside you. Everybody does. Those spirits don’t want to help you, you come back and talk to me again and I’ll see what I can do about waking it up for you.”
“Why can’t you just help her now?” Ash asked.
“Because these are spirits we’re talking about,” Bones said. “You don’t mess with spirits unless you’ve got no choice, Ash—especially not spirits that are working their medicine mojo on someone else. There’s no way I’m getting in between them until they get off this wheel and I can climb on it. That’s the way it is.”
So here I am, waiting for Death to show.
I’m trying to feel brave—or at least project a little courage even though I have none—but I don’t think it’s working. I don’t know which I’m more afraid of: that I won’t dream, that I know I’ll never die and have to go on like this forever, or that maybe he’ll take me away with him right now. Except in the end, it’s not Death that joins me in my bedroom, but the middle fate, the spare-change girl.
“Where is he?” I ask her.
“You’ve decided to dream once more,” she says, “so he’s gone on to deal with other matters.”
Harvesting other lives you mean—but I don’t say that aloud. I don’t know whether to feel relieved that it’s not me this time, or angry that he even exists in the first place.
“Why can’t he just leave us alone?”
She shakes her head. “Without his gift, what would you have?”
I’m sick of this idea that without death, that without knowing we’re all going to die one day, rich and poor, whatever our creed or color, we can’t appreciate life. Even if it is true.
“I wanted to talk to him,” I say.
She gives me a long considering look. “Did you want to talk to him, or to the eldest of us?”
And then I understand. It hits me like a thunderclap booming under my skin. It’s been her all along. He’s the middle fate, Life; she’s the one that cuts the thread and ferries us on. My heartbeat gets too fast, drumming in my chest. All my resolutions about facing the past and my fears drain away and I want to tell her that I’ve changed my mind again. I don’t want to dream. I don’t want to be more alive if it means I have to die.
“Is this it?” I ask her. “Have you come for me?”
“Would that be so bad?” she says.
She projects such a strange aura of comfort and happiness that I want to shake my head and agree with her.
“I’m scared,” I tell her.
“Fear lets you know you’re alive,” she says, “but that doesn’t mean you should embrace it.”
“You’re starting to sound like Bones.”
“Ah, Bones.”
“Do you know him?”
She smiles. “I know everybody.”
I want to keep her talking. I want to put off the moment for as long as I can, so every time she finishes speaking, I try to fill the silence with another question.
“How do you decide when it’s someone’s time?” I ask.
“I told you,” she says. “I don’t choose when or how you die. I’m only there to meet you when you do.”
“Do people get mad at you, or are they mostly just scared like me?”
The eldest fate shook her head. “Neither. Mostly they’re too concerned with those they left behind to be angry or frightened. That old homily is true, you know: it’s always harder for those left behind.”
“So . . . so my family wasn’t mad at me because I didn’t die with them? And my grandparents . . .”
“How could they be? They loved you as much as you loved them.”
“So I don’t have to be scared of meeting them in . . . wherever it is I’ll be going?”
“I don’t know where you’ll go or who you’ll meet when you’re there,” the eldest fate says. “And I don’t know what they’ll say to you. But I don’t think you have to be scared.”
I take a deep breath. “Okay,” I tell her, wondering as I’m saying it where I’ve found the courage. “I’m guess I’m ready.”
I wonder how it’ll happen. Maybe I’ll be lucky. Maybe I’ll be one of the ones who just drifts away in her sleep.
“I’m not here to take you,” the eldest fate tells me.
I don’t even have time to feel relief, I’m so confused. “But . . . then why are you here?”
“I came as a friend—to finish our earlier conversation.”
“As a friend?”
“You know, returning a kindness,” she says.
“But . . .”
“I’m everybody’s friend,” the eldest fate explains. “Most people just don’t know it.”
I think of what Bones told me. I think about what I can’t let go of, how I’m always so afraid, how I’m too scared to get close to someone because I know they’re just going to die on me, how most of the time I feel so lost and alone. I think about how sick I am of the way I’ve lived my life, how I want to change it, but I can’t seem to do it. Not on my own. I think about all of this. I look in the eldest fate’s eyes and I see she understands.
I’m not going to live forever. I know that. I don’t expect that. I don’t even really want it. All I’ve ever wanted is the chance to be normal, to have a piece of what everybody else seems to have: a respite from the hurt and pain. I don’t have to die to find that.
“I could use a friend,” I tell her.