“Sure. Blue and red.”
“Which, symbolically, stand for devotion and passion; blended into violet, they’re a symbol of memory.”
“That still doesn’t explain anything.”
“Gemmin are the spirits of place, just like hobs are spirits of a house. They’re what make a place feel good and safeguard its positive memories. When they leave, that’s when a place gets a haunted feeling.
And then only the bad feelings are left—or no feelings, which is just about the same difference.”
“So what makes them go?” Jilly asked, remembering what Babe had said earlier.
“Nasty things happening. In the old days, it might be a murder or a battle. Nowadays we can add pollution and the like to that list.”
“But—”
“They store memories you see,” Frank went on. “The one you call Babe is the oldest, so her eyes have turned violet.”
“So,” Jilly asked with a grin. “Does it make their hair go mauve, too?”
“Don’t be impudent.”
They talked some more about the gemmin, going back and forth between, “Were they really?” and
“What else could they be?” until it was time for Frank’s supper and Jilly had to go. But first she made him open his Christmas present. His eyes filmed when he saw the tiny painting of his old house that Jilly had done for him. Sitting on the stoop was a younger version of himself with a small faun standing jauntily behind him, elbow resting on his shoulder.
“Got something in my eye,” he muttered as he brought his sleeve up to his eyes.
“I just wanted you to have this today, because I brought everybody else their presents,” filly said,
“but I’m coming back on Christmas—we’ll do something fun. I’d come Christmas eve, but I’ve got to work at the restaurant that night.”
Frank nodded. His tears were gone, but his eyes were still shiny. “The solstice is coming,” he said.
“In two days.”
Jilly nodded, but didn’t say anything.
“That’s when they’ll be going,” Frank explained. “The gemmin. The moon’ll be full, just like Babe said. Solstices are like May Eve and Halloween—the borders between this world and others are thinnest then.” He gave Jilly a sad smile. “Wouldn’t I love to see them before they go.”
Jilly thought quickly, but she still couldn’t think of any way she could maneuver him into the Tombs in his chair. She couldn’t even borrow Sue’s car, because the streets there were too choked with rubble and refuse. So she picked up her sketchbook and put it on his lap.
“Keep this,” she said.
Then she wheeled him off to the dining room, refusing to listen to his protests that he couldn’t.
* * *
A sad smile touched Jilly’s lips as she stood in the storm, remembering. She walked down the alleyway and ran her mittened hand along the windshield of the Buick, dislodging the snow that had gathered there. She tried the door, but it was rusted shut. A back window was open, so she crawled in through it, then clambered into the front seat, which was relatively free of snow.
It was warmer inside—probably because she was out of the wind. She sat looking out the windshield until the snow covered it again. It was like being in a cocoon, she thought. Protected. A person could almost imagine that the gemmin were still around, not yet ready to leave. And when they did, maybe they’d take her with them ....
A dreamy feeling stole over her and her eyes fluttered, grew heavy, then closed. Outside the wind continued to howl, driving the snow against the car; inside, Jilly slept, dreaming of the past.
The gemmin were waiting for her the day after she saw Frank, lounging around the abandoned Buick beside the old Clark Building. She wanted to talk to them about what they were and why they were going away and a hundred other things, but somehow she just never got around to any of it. She was too busy laughing at their antics and trying to capture their portraits with the pastels she’d brought that day.
Once they all sang a long song that sounded like a cross between a traditional ballad and rap, but was in some foreign language that was both flutelike and gritty. Babe later explained that it was one of their traditional song cycles, a part of their oral tradition that kept alive the histories and genealogies of their people and the places where they lived.
Gemmin, Jilly thought. Storing memories. And then she was clearheaded long enough to ask if they would come with her to visit Frank.
Babe shook her head, honest regret in her luminous eyes. “It’s too far,” she said.
“Too far, too far,” the other gemmin chorused.
“From home,” Babe explained.
“But,” Ply began, except she couldn’t find the words for what she wanted to say.
There were people who just made other people feel good. Just being around them, made you feel better, creative, uplifted, happy. Geordie said that she was like that herself, though Jilly wasn’t so sure of that. She tried to be, but she was subject to the same bad moods as anybody else, the same impatience with stupidity and ignorance which, parenthetically speaking, were to her mind the prime causes of all the world’s ills.
The gemmin didn’t seem to have those flaws. Even better, beyond that, there was magic about them.
It lay thick in the air, filling your eyes and ears and nose and heart with its wild tang. Jilly desperately wanted Frank to share this with her, but when she tried to explain it to Babe, she just couldn’t seem to make herself understood.
And then she realized the time and knew she had to go to work. Art was well and fine to feed the heart and mind, and so was magic, but if she wanted to pay the rent on the loft and have anything to eat next month—never mind the endless drain that art supplies made on her meager budget—she had to go.
As though sensing her imminent departure, the gemmin bounded around her in an abandoned display of wild monkeyshines, and then vanished like so many willo’-thewisps in among the snowy rubble of the Tombs, leaving her alone once again.
The next day was much the same, except that tonight was the night they were leaving. Babe never made mention of it, but the knowledge hung ever heavier on Jilly as the hours progressed, coloring her enjoyment of their company.
The gemmin had washed away most of the residue of her bad breakup with Jeff, and for that Jilly was grateful. She could look on it now with that kind of wistful remembering one held for high school romances, long past and distanced. But in its place they had left a sense of abandonment. They were going, would soon be gone, and the world would be that much the emptier for their departure.
Jilly tried to find words to express what she was feeling, but as had happened yesterday when she’d tried to explain Frank’s need, she couldn’t get the first one past her tongue.
And then again, it was time to go. The gemmin started acting wilder again, dancing and singing around her like a pack of mad imps, but before they could all vanish once more, Jilly caught Babe’s arm.
Don’t go, don’t go, she wanted to say, but all that came out was, “I ... I don’t ... I want ...”
Jilly, normally never at a loss for something to say, sighed with frustration.
“We won’t be gone forever,” Babe said, understanding Jilly’s unspoken need. She touched a long delicate finger to her temple. “We’ll always be with you in here, in your memories of us, and in here—”
she tapped the pocket in Jilly’s coat that held her sketchbook “—in your pictures. If you don’t forget us, we’ll never be gone.”
“It ... it won’t be the same,” Jilly said.
Babe smiled sadly. “Nothing is ever the same. That’s why we must go now.”
She ruffled Jilly’s hair—again the motion was like one made by a mother, rather than someone who appeared to be a girl only half Jilly’s age—then stepped back. The other gemmin approached, and touched her as well— featherlight fingers brushing against her arms, tousling her hair like a breeze—and then they all began their mad dancing and pirouetting like so many scruffy ballerinas.
Until they were gone.
Jilly thought she would just stay here, never mind going in to work, but somehow she couldn’t face a second parting. Slowly, she headed south, towards Gracie Street and the subway that would take her to work. And oddly enough, though she was sad at their leaving, it wasn’t the kind of sadness that hurt. It was the kind that was like a
