Dreams Underfoot

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.