The Newford Stories Page 8

  “Can you imagine?” Maida asked.

  Zia shook her head. “Barely. And I was there.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” Jilly said.

  “Yes, it’s a veryvery sorrysome state of affairs,” Maida said.

  “And we’re unemployed, too!”

  “Lucius says we’re unemployable.”

  “Because now we have a record.”

  “A permanent record.”

  “Of being bad bad candy cane-eating girls.”

  They both looked so serious and sad that Jilly became worried. But then Zia laughed. And Maida laughed, too.

  “What’s so funny?” Jilly asked.

  Zia started to answer, but she collapsed in giggles and couldn’t speak.

  Maida giggled, too, but she managed to say, “We sort of like being bad bad candy cane-eating girls.”

  Zia got her fit of giggles under control. “Because it’s like being outlaws.”

  “Fierce candy cane-eating outlaw girls.”

  “And that’s a good thing?” Jilly asked.

  “What do you think?” Maida asked.

  “I think it is. Merry Christmas, Maida. Merry Christmas, Zia.”

  “Merry Christmas to you!” they both cried.

  Zia looked at Maida. “Why did you say, ‘Merry Christmas toot toot’?”

  “I didn’t say ‘toot toot’.”

  “I think maybe you did.”

  “Didn’t.”

  Zia grinned. “Toot toot!”

  “Toot toot!”

  They pulled their jingling bell brooches out of their pockets, which they’d forgotten to return to the store where they’d “found” them, and marched around the kitchen singing “Jingle Bells” at the top of their lungs until Goon, the professor’s housekeeper, came in and made them stop.

  Then they sat at the table with their cups of sugar, on their best behaviour, which meant they only took their brooches out every few moments, jingled them, and said “toot toot” very quietly. Then giggling, they’d put the brooches away again.

  Make a Joyful Noise

  Everyone thinks we’re sisters, but it’s not as simple as that. If I let my thoughts drift far enough back into the long ago—the long long ago, before Raven stirred that old pot of his and poured out the stew of the world—we were there. The two of us. Separate, but so much the same that I suppose we could have been sisters. But neither of us remembers parents, and don’t you need them to be siblings? So what exactly our relationship is, I don’t know. We’ve never known. We just are. Two little mysteries that remain unchanged while the world changes all around us.

  But that doesn’t stop everyone from thinking they know us. In the Kickaha tradition, we’re the tricksters of their crow story cycles, but we’re not really tricksters. We don’t play tricks. Unless our trick is to look like we’d play tricks, and then we don’t.

  Before the Kickaha, the cousins had stories about us, too, though they were only gossip. Cousins don’t buy into mythic archetypes because we all know how easy it is to have one attached to your name. Just ask Raven. Or Cody.

  But gossip, stories, anecdotes…everybody seems to have something to pass along when it comes to us.

  These days it’s people like Christy Riddell who tell the stories. He puts us in his books, the way his mentor Professor Dapple used to do, except Christy’s books are actually popular. I suppose we don’t mind so much. It’s kind of fun to be in a story that anyone can read. But if we have to have a Riddell brother in our lives, we’d much prefer it to be Geordie. There’s nothing wrong with Christy. It’s just that he’s always been a bit stiff. Geordie’s the one who knows how to have fun and that’s why we get along with him so well, because we certainly like to have fun.

  But we’re not only about mad gallivanting and cartwheels and sugar.

  And we’re not some single entity, either.

  That’s another thing that people get wrong. They see the two of us as halves of one thing. Most of the time they don’t even recognize us when they meet us on our own. Apart, we’re just like anybody else, except we live in trees and can change into birds. But when you put the two of us together, everything changes. We get all giddy and incoherence rules. It’s like our being near each other causes a sudden chemical imbalance in our systems and it’s almost impossible to be anything but silly.

  We don’t particularly mind being that way, but it does make people think they know just who and what and why we are, and they’re wrong. Well, they’re not wrong when the two of us are together. They’re just wrong for who we are when we’re on our own.

  And then there are the people who only see us as who they want us to be, rather than who we really are—though that happens to everybody, I suppose. We all carry around other people’s expectations of who we are, and sometimes we end up growing into those expectations.

  * * *

  It was a spring day, late in the season, so the oaks were filled with fresh green foliage, the gardens blooming with colour and scent, and most days the weather was balmy. Today was no exception. The sun shone in a gloriously blue sky and we were all out taking in the weather. Zia and I lounged on the roof of the coach house behind the Rookery, black-winged cousins perched in the trees all around us, and up on the roof of the Rookery we could see Lucius’s girlfriend Chlöe standing on the peak, staring off into the distance. That meant that Lucius was deep in his books again. Whenever he got lost in their pages, Chlöe came up on the roof and did her wind-vane impression. She was very good at it.

  “What are you looking at?” we asked her one day.

  It took her a moment to focus on us and our question.

  “I’m watching a wren build a nest,” she finally said.

  “Where?” Zia asked, standing on her tiptoes and trying to see.

  “There,” Chlöe said and pointed, “in that hedge on the edge of Dartmoor.”

  Neither of us was ever particularly good with geography, but even we knew that at least half a continent and an ocean lay between us and Dartmoor.

  “Um, right,” I said.

  Other times she said she was watching ice melt in Greenland. Or bees swarming a new queen above a clover field somewhere in Florida. Or a tawny frogmouth sleeping in an Australian rainforest.

  After a while we stopped asking. And we certainly didn’t fly over and ask her what she was looking at today. We were too busy lounging—which is harder to do on a sloped roof than you might think—until Zia suddenly sat up.

  “I,” she announced, “have an astonishingly good idea.”

  I’d just gotten my lounging position down to an absolute perfection of casualness, so I only lifted a questioning eyebrow.

  “We should open a store,” she said.

  “Selling what?”

  “That’s just it. It will be a store where people bring us things and we put them in the store.”

  “And when it gets all filled up?”

  She grinned. “Then we open another. We just keeping doing it until we have an empire of stores, all across the country.”

  “We don’t have the money to buy anything,” I said.

  She nodded. “That’s why they’d have to just give us the stuff. We’ll be like a thrift shop, except we wouldn’t sell anything we got.”

  “That seems greedy. What do we need with things?”

  “We can give everything away once we’ve established our empire. It’s just for fun.”

  “It seems more like a lot of work.”

  She sighed and shook her head. “You are so veryvery lazy.”

  “That’s because today is a day especially made for being lazy.”

  “No, today’s a day for building an empire of stores and if you won’t help, I’ll do it myself.”

  “I’ll help later.”

  She nodded. “When all the hard work will probably be done.”

  “That’s the risk I’ll have to take.”

  She stuck her tongue out at me, then shifted to bird shape and a bl
ack crow went winging off above the oaks that line Stanton Street. I laid my head on the shingles again and went back to my very successful lounging.

  I was so good at it that, eventually, I fell asleep.

  * * *

  When I woke, it was dark. Chlöe was still standing on the peak of the Rookery, and the trees around me were now filled with sleeping black birds. Above, the sky held a wealth of stars only slightly dimmed by the city’s pollution. I looked for Zia. She wasn’t back yet, so I slid down to the edge of the roof and dropped the remaining distance onto the dew-damp lawn. Cousins stirred in the trees at the soft thump of my landing on the grass, but went back to sleep when they saw it was only me.

  I left the grounds of the Rookery and walked along Stanton Street heading for downtown, where I supposed I’d find Zia. I wondered if she’d actually had any success getting her silly plan off the ground, or if she’d gotten distracted after leaving me and was now up to who knew what sort of mischief.

  I could understand her getting distracted—it’s such an easy thing to have happen. For instance, there were so many interesting houses and apartments on either side of the street as I continued to walk through Lower Crowsea. It was late enough that most of them were dark, but here and there I found lit windows. They were like paintings in an enormous art gallery, each offering small and incomplete views into their owners’ lives.

  Zia and I like to visit in people’s houses when they’re sleeping. We slip in and walk through the empty rooms, helping ourselves to sweets or fruit, if they’re the sort of people to leave them out in small welcoming bowls or baskets. There might as well be a sign that says, “Help yourself.”

  But we really don’t take much else when we go inside. A bauble here, some unwanted trinket there. Mostly we just wander from room to room, looking, looking, looking. There are whole stories in the placement of vases and knickknacks, in what pictures and paintings have been hung, where, and in what order. So we admire the stories on the walls and windowsills, the shelves and mantles. Or we sit at a desk, a dining room table, or on the sofa, leafing through a scrapbook, a school yearbook, a magazine that’s important to whosever home this is.

  We’re curious, yes, but not really all that snoopy, for all that it might seem the exact opposite. We’re only chasing the ghosts and echoes of lives that we could never have.

  So, as I continued past Stanton Street, I forgot that I was looking for Zia. My gaze went up the side of an apartment building that rose tall above me and I chose a unit at random. Moments later I was inside, taking in the old lady smells: potpourri, dust and medicine. I stood quietly for a moment, then began to explore.

  * * *

  “Maddy?” an old woman’s voice called from a room down the hall.

  It was close enough to my name to make me sit up in surprise. I put down the scrapbook I’d been looking at and walked down the short hall, past the bathroom, until I was standing in the doorway of a bedroom.

  “Is that you, Maddy?” the old woman in the bed asked.

  She was sitting up, peering at me with eyes that obviously couldn’t see much, if anything.

  I didn’t have to ask her who Maddy was. I’d seen the clippings from the newspaper pasted into the scrapbook. She’d been the athletic daughter, winning prize after prize for swimming and gymnastics and music. The scrapbook was about half full. The early pages held articles clipped from community and city newspapers, illustrated with pictures of a happy child growing into a happy young woman over the years, always holding trophies, smiling at the camera.

  She wasn’t in the last picture. That photo was of a car crumpled up against the side of an apartment building, under a headline that read, “Drunk Driver Kills Redding High Student.” The date on the clipping was over thirty years old.

  “Come sit with Mama,” the old lady said.

  I crossed the room and sat cross-legged on the bed. When she reached out her hand, I let her take mine. I closed my fingers around hers, careful not to squeeze too hard.

  “I’ve missed you so much,” she said.

  She went on, but I soon stopped listening. It was much more interesting to look at her because, even though she was sitting up and talking, her eyes open as though she were awake, I realized that she was actually still asleep.

  Humans can do this.

  They can talk in their sleep. They can go walking right out of their houses, sometimes. They can do all sorts of things and never remember it in the morning.

  Zia and I once spent days watching a woman who was convinced she had fairies in her house cleaning everything up after she’d gone to bed. Except she was the one who got up in her sleep and tidied and cleaned before slipping back under the covers. To show her appreciation to the fairies, she left a saucer of cream on the back steps—which the local cats certainly appreciated—along with biscuits or cookies or pieces of cake. We ate those on the nights we came by, but we didn’t help her with her cleaning. That would make us bad fairies, I suppose, except for the fact that we weren’t fairies at all.

  After a while the old woman holding my hand stopped talking and lay back down again. I let go of her hand and tucked it under the covers.

  It was a funny room that she slept in. It was full of memories, but none of them were new or very happy. They made the room feel musty and empty even though she used it every day. It made me wonder why people hung on to memories if they just made them sad.

  I leaned over and kissed her brow, then got off the bed.

  When I came back to the living room, there was the ghost of a boy around fifteen or sixteen sitting on the sofa where I’d been looking through the old lady’s scrapbook earlier. He was still gawky, all arms and legs, with features that seemed too large at the moment, but would become handsome when he grew into them. Except, being a ghost, he never would.

  Under his watchful gaze, I stepped up onto the coffee table and sat cross-legged in front of him.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  He seemed surprised that I could see him, but made a quick recovery.

  “Nobody important,” he said. “I’m just the other child.”

  “The other…”

  “Oh, don’t worry. You didn’t miss anything. I’m the one that’s not in the scrapbooks.”

  There didn’t seem much I could add to that, so I simply said, “I don’t usually talk to ghosts.”

  “Why not?”

  I shrugged. “You’re not usually substantial enough, for one thing.”

  “That’s true. Normally, people can’t even see me, never mind talk to me.”

  “And for another,” I went on, “you’re usually way too focused on past wrongs and the like to be any fun.”

  He didn’t argue the point.

  “Well, I know why I’m here,” he said, “haunting the place I died and all that. But what are you doing here?”

  “I like visiting in other people’s houses. I like looking at their lives and seeing how they might fit if they were mine.”

  I looked down at the scrapbook on the coffee table.

  “So you were brother and sister?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Does she ever come back here?”

  He laughed, but without any mirth. “Are you kidding? She hated this place. Why do you think she joined any school club and sports team that would have her? She’d do anything to get out of the house. Mother kept her on such a tight leash that she couldn’t fart without first asking for permission.”

  “But you’re here.”

  “Like I said, I died here. In my own room. I got stung by a bee that came in through the window. No one knew I was allergic. My throat swelled up and I asphyxiated before I could try to get any help.”

  “It sounds horrible.”

  “It was. They came back from one of Madeline’s games and found me sprawled dead on the floor in my bedroom. It did warrant a small notice in the paper—I guess it was a slow news day—but that clipping never made it into a scrapbook.”

 
; “And now you’re here…”

  “Until she finally notices me,” he finished for me.

  “Why did she ignore you?” I asked. “When you were alive, I mean.”

  “I don’t know. Madeline said it’s because I looked too much like our dad. We were in grade school when he walked out on her, leaving her with a mess of debts and the two of us. I guess her way of getting over it was to ignore me and focus on Madeline, who took after her side of the family.”

  “Humans are so complicated,” I said.

  “Which you’re not.”

  “Oh, I’m very complicated.”

  “I meant human.”

  “What makes you say that?” I asked.

  He kept count on his fingers. “One, you can see me, which most people can’t. Two, you can talk to me, which most people really can’t. Three, you’re sitting there all calm and composed, when most people—most human people—would be flipping out.”

  I shrugged. “Does it matter what I am?”

  “Not really.”

  He looked down the hall as though he could see through the walls to where his mother lay sleeping. The mother who’d ignored him when he was alive and, now that he was dead, still ignored him. Her mind might be filled with old memories, but none were of him.

  “Can you help me?” he asked.

  “Help you with what?”

  “With…you know. Getting her to remember me.”

  “Why is it so important?”

  “How can I die and go on if no one remembers that I was ever alive?”

  “Lots of people don’t remember me,” I said, “and it doesn’t bother me.”

  He chuckled, but without any humour. “Yeah, like that’s possible.”

  “No, it really doesn’t.”

  “I meant that anybody would forget meeting you.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  He held my gaze for a long moment, then shrugged.

  “So will you help me?”

  I nodded. “I can try. Maybe it’s not so much that your mother should remember you more, but that she should remember your sister less. The way it seems, there’s no room inside her for anything else.”