"My brother," Alan said.
"Oh," she said. She went back around the bed and sat on the edge, facing
the wall. "Sorry." She crossed her leg and jiggled her foot, making the
springs squeak.
Alan wasn't listening. He knelt down and touched George's cheek. The
skin was soft and spongy, porous and saturated. Cold. His fingertips
came away with shed white flakes of translucent skin clinging to them.
"Davey?" Alan said. "Are you in here?"
Mimi's foot stilled. They both listened intently. There were night-time
sounds in the motel, distant muffled TVs and car engines and fucking,
but no sound of papery skin thudding on ground-down carpet.
"He must have come up through the drain," Alan said. "In the bathroom."
The broad pale moon of George's belly was abraded in long grey stripes.
He stood and, wiping his hand on his bare thigh, reached for the
bathroom doorknob. The door swung open, revealing the
sanitized-for-your-protection brightness of the bathroom, the water
sloshed on the floor by Mimi earlier, the heaps of damp towels.
"How'd he find us here?"
Mimi, in her outsized blazer and track pants, touched him on his bare
shoulder. He suddenly felt terribly naked. He backed out of the
bathroom, shoving Mimi aside, and numbly pulled on his jeans and a
shapeless sweatshirt that smelled of Mimi and had long curly hairs
lurking in the fabric that stuck to his face like cobwebs. He jammed his
feet into his sneakers.
He realized that he'd had to step over his brother's body six times to
do this.
He looked at his brother again. He couldn't make sense of what he was
seeing. The abraded belly. The rictus. His balls, shrunk to an albino
walnut, his cock shriveled up to unrecognizability. The hair, curly,
matted all over his body, patchily rubbed away.
He paced in the little run beside the bed, the only pacing room he had
that didn't require stepping over George's body, back and forth, two
paces, turn, two paces, turn.
"I'm going to cover him up," Mimi said.
"Good, fine," Alan said.
"Are you going to be okay?"
"Yes, fine," Alan said.
"Are you freaking out?"
Alan didn't say anything.
George looked an awful lot like Davey had, the day they killed him.
#
Mimi found a spare blanket in the closet, reeking of mothballs and
scarred with a few curdled cigarette burns, and she spread it out on the
floor and helped him lift Grant's body onto it and wind it tightly
around him.
"What now?" she said.
He looked down at the wound sheet, the lump within it. He sat down
heavily on the bed. His chest was tight, and his breath came in short
*hup*s.
She sat beside him and put an arm around his shoulder, tried to pull his
head down to her bosom, but he stiffened his neck.
"I knew this was coming," he said. "When we killed Darren, I knew."
She stood and lit a cigarette. "This is your family business," she said,
"why we're driving up north?"
He nodded, not trusting his voice, seeing the outlines of Grad's face,
outlined in moth-eaten blanket.
"So," she said. "Let's get up north, then. Take an end."
The night was cold, and they staggered under the weight of the body
wound in the blanket and laid him out in the trunk of the car, shifting
luggage and picnic supplies to the back seat. At two a.m., the motel
lights were out and the road was dark and silent but for the soughing of
wind and the distant sounds of night animals.
"Are you okay to drive?" she said, as she piled their clothes
indiscriminately into the suitcases.
"What?" he said. The cool air on his face was waking him up a little,
but he was still in a dream-universe. The air was spicy and outdoors and
it reminded him powerfully of home and simpler times.
He looked at Mimi without really seeing her.
"Are you okay to drive?"
The keys were in his hands, the car smelling of the detailing-in-a-can
mist that the rental agency sprayed on the upholstery to get rid of the
discount traveler farts between rentals.
"I can drive," he said. Home, and the mountain, and the washing machine,
and the nook where he'd slept for 18 years, and the golems, and the
cradle they'd hewn for him. Another ten or twelve hours' driving and
they'd be at the foot of the trail where the grass grew to waist-high.
"Well, then, *drive*." She got in the car and slammed her door.
He climbed in, started the engine, and put the hertzmobile into reverse.
#
Two hours later, he realized that he was going to nod off. The thumps of
the body sliding in the trunk and the suitcases rattling around in the
back seat had lost their power to keep him awake.
The body's thumping had hardly had the power to begin with. Once the
initial shock had passed, the body became an object only, a thing, a
payload he had to deliver. Alan wondered if he was capable of feeling
the loss.
"You were eleven then," he said. It was suddenly as though no time had
past since they'd sat on the bed and she'd told him about Auntie.
"Yes," she said. "It was as though no time had passed."
A shiver went up his back.
He was wide awake.
"No time had passed."
"Yes. I was living with a nice family in Oakville who were sending me to
a nice girls' school where we wore blazers over our tunics, and I had a
permanent note excusing me from gym classes. In a building full of four
hundred girls going through puberty, one more fat shy girl who wouldn't
take her top off was hardly noteworthy."
"The family, they were nice. WASPy. They called me Cheryl. With a
Why. When I asked them where I'd been before, about 'Auntie,' they
looked sad and hurt and worried for me, and I learned to stop. They
hugged me and touched my wings and never said anything -- and never
wiped their hands on their pants after touching them. They gave me a
room with a computer and a CD player and a little TV of my own, and
asked me to bring home my friends.
"I had none.
"But they found other girls who would come to my 'birthday' parties, on
May 1, which was exactly two months after their son's birthday and two
months before their daughter's birthday.
"I can't remember any of their names.
"But they made me birthday cards and they made me breakfast and dinner
and they made me welcome. I could watch them grilling burgers in the
back yard by the above ground pool in the summer from my bedroom
window. I could watch them building forts or freezing skating rinks in
the winter. I could listen to them eating dinner together while I did my
homework in my bedroom. There was a place for me at the dinner-table,
but I couldn't sit there, though I can't remember why."
"Wait a second," Alan said. "You don't remember?"
She made a sad noise in her throat. "I was told I was welcome, but I
knew I wasn't. I know that sounds paranoid -- crazy. Maybe I was just a
teenager. There was a reason, though, I just don't know what it was. I
knew then. They knew it, too -- no one blamed me. They loved me, I
guess."
"You stayed with them until you went to school?"
"Almost. Their daughter went to Waterloo, then the next year, their son
went to McGill in Montreal, and then it was just me and them. I had two
more years of high school, but it just got unbearable. With their
children gone, they tried to take an interest in me. Tried to make me
eat with them. Take me out to meet their friends. Every day felt worse,
more wrong. One night, I went to a late movie by myself downtown and
then got to walking around near the clubs and looking at the club kids
and feeling this terrible feeling of loneliness, and when I was finally
ready to go home, the last train had already gone. I just spent the
night out, wandering around, sitting in a back booth at Sneaky Dee's and
drinking Cokes, watching the sun come up from the top of Christie Pitts
overlooking the baseball diamond. I was a 17-year-old girl from the
suburbs wearing a big coat and staring at her shoelaces, but no one
bugged me.
"When I came home the next morning, no one seemed particularly bothered
that I'd been away all night. If anything, the parental people might
have been a little distraught that I came home. 'I think I'll get my own
place,' I said. They agreed, and agreed to put the lease in their name
to make things easier. I got a crummy little basement in what the
landlord called Cabbagetown but what was really Regent Park, and I
switched out to a huge, anonymous high school to finish school. Worked
in a restaurant at nights and on weekends to pay the bills."
The night highway rushed past them, quiet. She lit a cigarette and
rolled down her window, letting in the white-noise crash of the wind and
the smell of the smoke mixed with the pine-and-summer reek of the
roadside.
"Give me one of those," Alan said.
She lit another and put it between his lips, damp with her saliva. His
skin came up in goosepimples.
"Who knows about your wings?" he said.
"Krishna knows," she said. "And you." She looked out into the
night. "The family in Oakville. If I could remember where they lived,
I'd look them up and ask them about it. Can't. Can't remember their
names or their faces. I remember the pool, though, and the barbecue."
"No one else knows?"
"There was no one else before Krishna. No one that I remember, anyway."
"I have a brother," he said, then swallowed hard. "I have a brother
named Brad. He can see the future."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." He pawed around for an ashtray and discovered that it had been
removed, along with the lighter, from the rental car's
dashboard. Cursing, he pinched off the coal of the cigarette and flicked
it to the roadside, hoping that it would burn out quickly, then he
tossed the butt over his shoulder at the back seat. As he did, the body
in the trunk rolled while he navigated a curve in the road and he braked
hard, getting the car stopped in time for him to open the door and pitch
a rush of vomit onto the roadway.
"You okay to drive?"
"Yeah. I am." He sat up and put the car into gear and inched to the
shoulder, then put it in park and set his blinkers. The car smelled of
sour food and sharp cigarettes and God, it smelled of the body in the
trunk.
"It's not easy to be precognizant," Alan said, and pulled back onto the
road, signaling even though there were no taillights or headlights for
as far as the eye could see.
"I believe it," she said.
"He stopped telling us things after a while. It just got him into
trouble. I'd be studying for an exam and he'd look at me and shake his
head, slowly, sadly. Then I'd flunk out, and I'd be convinced that it
was him psyching me out. Or he'd get picked for kickball and he'd
say. 'What's the point, this team's gonna lose,' and wander off, and
they'd lose, and everyone would hate him. He couldn't tell the
difference between what he knew and what everyone else knew. Didn't know
the difference between the past and the future, sometimes. So he stopped
telling us, and when we figured out how to read it in his eyes, he
stopped looking at us.
"Then something really -- Something terrible... Someone I cared about
died. And he didn't say anything about it. I could have -- stopped --
it. Prevented it. I could have saved her life, but he wouldn't talk."
He drove.
"For real, he could see the future?" she said softly. Her voice had more
emotion than he'd ever heard in it and she rolled down the window and
lit another cigarette, pluming smoke into the roar of the wind.
"Yeah," Alan said. "*A* future or *the* future, I never figured it
out. A little of both, I suppose."
"He stopped talking, huh?"
"Yeah," Alan said.
"I know what that's like," Mimi said. "I hadn't spoken more than three
words in the six months before I met Krishna. I worked at a direct-mail
house, proofreading the mailing labels. No one wanted to say anything to
me, and I just wanted to disappear. It was soothing, in a way, reading
all those names. I'd dropped out of school after Christmas break, just
didn't bother going back again, never paid my tuition. I threw away my
houseplants and flushed my fish down the toilet so that there wouldn't
be any living thing that depended on me."
She worked her hand between his thigh and the seat.
"Krishna sat next to me on the subway. I was leaning forward because my
wings were long -- the longest they've ever been -- and wearing a big
parka over them. He leaned forward to match me and tapped me on the
shoulder.
"I turned to look at him and he said, 'I get off at the next stop. Will
you get off with me and have a cup of coffee? I've been riding next to
you on the subway for a month, and I want to find out what you're like.'
"I wouldn't have done it, except before I knew what I was doing, I'd
already said, 'I beg your pardon?' because I wasn't sure I'd heard him
right. And once I'd said that, once I'd spoken, I couldn't bear the
thought of not speaking again."
#
They blew through Kapuskasing at ten a.m., on a grey morning that dawned
with drizzle and bad-tempered clouds low overhead. The little main drag
-- which Alan remembered as a bustling center of commerce where he'd
waited out half a day to change buses -- was deserted, the only evidence
of habitation the occasional car pulling through a donut store
drive-through lane.
"Jesus, who divorced me this time?" Mimi said, ungumming her eyes and
stuffing a fresh cigarette into her mouth.
"*Fear and Loathing* again, right?"
"It's *the* road-trip novel," she said.
"What about *On the Road*?"
"Oh, *that*," she said. "Pfft. Kerouac was a Martian on crank. Dope
fiend prose isn't fit for human consumption."
"Thompson isn't a dope fiend?"
"No. That was just a put-on. He wrote *about* drugs, not *on* drugs."
"Have you *read* Kerouac?"
"I couldn't get into it," she said.
He pulled sharply off the road and into a parking lot.
"What's this?" she said.
"The library," he said. "Come on."
It smelled just as it had when he was 17, standing among the aisles of
the biggest collection of books he'd ever seen. Sweet, dusty.
"Here," he said, crossing to the fiction section. The fiction section at
the library in town had fit into three spinner racks. Here, it occupied
its own corner of overstuffed bookcases. "Here," he said, running his
finger down the plastic Brodart wraps on the spines of the books, the
faded Dewey labels.
H, I, J, K... There it was, the edition he'd remembered from all those
years ago. *On the Road.*
"Come on," he said. "We've got it."
"You can't check that out," she said.
He pulled out his wallet as they drew up closer to the checkout
counter. He slid out the plastic ID holder, flipping past the health
card and the driver's license -- not a very good likeness of his face or
his name on either, and then produced a library card so tattered that it
looked like a pirate's map on parchment. He slid it delicately out of
the plastic sleeve, unbending the frayed corner, smoothing the feltlike
surface of the card, the furry type.
He slid the card and the book across the counter. Mimi and the librarian
-- a boy of possibly Mimi's age, who wore a mesh-back cap just like his
patrons, but at a certain angle that suggested urbane irony -- goggled
at it, as though Alan had slapped down a museum piece.
The boy picked it up with such roughness that Alan flinched on behalf of
his card.
"This isn't --" the boy began.
"It's a library card," Alan said. "They used to let me use it here."
The boy set it down on the counter again.
Mimi peered at it. "There's no name on that card," she said.
"Never needed one," he said.
He'd gotten the card from the sour-faced librarian back home, tricked
her out of it by dragging along Bradley and encouraging him to waddle
off into the shelves and start pulling down books. She'd rolled it into
her typewriter and then they'd both gone chasing after Brad, then she'd
asked him again for his name and they'd gone chasing after Brad, then
for his address, and then Brad again. Eventually, he was able to simply
snitch it out of the platen of the humming Selectric and walk out. No
one ever looked closely at it again -- not even the thoroughly
professional staffers at the Kapuskasing branch who'd let him take out a
stack of books to read in the bus station overnight while he waited for
the morning bus to Toronto.
He picked up the card again then set it down. It was the first piece of
identification he ever owned, and in some ways, the most important.
"I have to give you a new card," the mesh-back kid said. "With a bar
code. We don't take that card anymore." He picked it up and made to tear
it in half.
"NO!" Alan roared, and lunged over the counter to seize the kid's
wrists.
The kid startled back and reflexively tore at the card, but Alan's iron
grip on his wrists kept him from completing the motion. The kid dropped
the card and it fluttered to the carpet behind the counter.
"Give it to me," Alan said. The boy's eyes, wide with shock, began to
screw shut with pain. Alan let go his wrists, and the kid chafed them,
backing away another step.
His shout had drawn older librarians from receiving areas and offices
behind the counter, women with the look of persons accustomed to
terminating children's mischief and ejecting rowdy drunks with equal
aplomb. One of them was talking into a phone, and two more were moving
cautiously toward them, sizing them up.
"We should go," Mimi said.
"I need my library card," he said, and was as surprised as anyone at the
pout in his voice, a sound that was about six years old, stubborn, and
wounded.
Mimi looked hard at him, then at the librarians converging on them, then
at the mesh back kid, who had backed all the way up to a work surface
several paces back of him. She planted her palms on the counter and
swung one foot up onto it, vaulting herself over. Alan saw the back of
her man's jacket bulge out behind her as her wings tried to spread when
she took to the air.
She snatched up the card, then planted her hands again and leapt into
the air. The toe of her trailing foot caught the edge of the counter and
she began to tumble, headed for a face-plant into the greyed-out
industrial carpet. Alan had the presence of mind to catch her, her tit
crashing into his head, and gentle her to the floor.
"We're going," Mimi said. "Now."
Alan hardly knew where he was anymore. The card was in Mimi's hand,
though, and he reached for it, making a keening noise deep in his
throat.
"Here," she said, handing it to him. When he touched the felted card
stock, he snapped back to himself. "Sorry," he said lamely to the
mesh-back kid.
Mimi yanked his arm and they jumped into the car and he fumbled the key
into the ignition, fumbled the car to life. His head felt like a balloon
on the end of a taut string, floating some yards above his body.
He gunned the engine and the body rolled in the trunk. He'd forgotten
about it for a while in the library and now he remembered it
again. Maybe he felt something then, a twitchy twinge of grief, but he
swallowed hard and it went away. The clunk-clunk of the wheels going
over the curb as he missed the curb-cut back out onto the road, Mimi
sucking breath in a hiss as he narrowly avoided getting T-boned by a
rusted-out pickup truck, and then the hum of the road under his wheels.
"Alan?" Mimi said.
"It was my first piece of identification," he said. "It made me a person
who could get a book out of the library."
They drove on, heading for the city limits at a few klicks over the
speed limit. Fast, lots of green lights.
"What did I just say?" Alan said.
"You said it was your first piece of ID," Mimi said. She was twitching
worriedly in the passenger seat. Alan realized that she was air-driving,
steering and braking an invisible set of controls as he veered around
the traffic. "You said it made you a person --"
"That's right," Alan said. "It did."
#
He never understood how he came to be enrolled in kindergarten. Even in
those late days, there were still any number of nearby farm folk whose
literacy was so fragile that they could be intimidated out of it by a
sheaf of school enrollment forms. Maybe that was it -- the five-year-old
Alan turning up at the school with his oddly accented English and his
Martian wardrobe of pieces rescued from roadside ditches and snitched
off of clotheslines, and who was going to send him home on the first day
of school? Surely the paperwork would get sorted out by the time the
first permission-slip field trip rolled around, or possibly by the time
vaccination forms were due. And then it just fell by the wayside.
Alan got the rest of his brothers enrolled, taking their forms home and
forging indecipherable scrawls that satisfied the office ladies. His own
enrollment never came up in any serious way. Permission slips were easy,
inoculations could be had at the walk-in clinic once a year at the fire
house.
Until he was eight, being undocumented was no big deal. None of his
classmates carried ID. But his classmates *did* have Big Wheels,
catcher's mitts, Batmobiles, action figures, Fonzie lunchboxes, and
Kodiak boots. They had parents who came to parents' night and sent trays
of cupcakes to class on birthdays -- Alan's birthday came during the
summer, by necessity, so that this wouldn't be an issue. So did his
brothers', when their time came to enroll.
At eight, he ducked show-and-tell religiously and skillfully, but one
day he got caught out, empty-handed and with all the eyes in the room
boring into him as he fumfuhed at the front of the classroom, and the
teacher thought he was being kind by pointing out that his hand-stitched
spring moccasins -- a tithe of the golems -- were fit subject for a
brief exposition.
"Did your mom buy you any real shoes?" It was asked without malice or
calculation, but Alan's flustered, red-faced, hot stammer chummed the
waters and the class sharks were on him fast and hard. Previously
invisible, he was now the subject of relentless scrutiny. Previously an
observer of the playground, he was now a nexus of it, a place where
attention focused, hunting out the out-of-place accent, the strange
lunch, the odd looks and gaps in knowledge of the world. He thought he'd
figured out how to fit in, that he'd observed people to the point that
he could be one, but he was so wrong.
They watched him until Easter break, when school let out and they
disappeared back into the unknowable depths of their neat houses, and
when they saw him on the street headed for a shop or moping on a bench,
they cocked their heads quizzically at him, as if to say, *Do I know you
from somewhere?* or, if he was feeling generous, *I wonder where you
live?* The latter was scarier than the former.
For his part, he was heartsick that he turned out not to be half so
clever as he'd fancied himself. There wasn't much money around the
mountain that season -- the flakes he'd brought down to the assayer had
been converted into cash for new shoes for the younger kids and
chocolate bars that he'd brought to fill Bradley's little round belly.
He missed the school library achingly during that week, and it was that
lack that drove him to the town library. He'd walked past the squat
brown brick building hundreds of times, but had never crossed its
threshold. He had a sense that he wasn't welcome there, that it was not
intended for his consumption. He slunk in like a stray dog, hid himself
in the back shelves, and read books at random while he observed the
other patrons coming and going.
It took three days of this for him to arrive at his strategy for getting
his own library card, and the plan worked flawlessly. Bradley pulled the
books off the back shelves for the final time, the librarian turned in
exasperation for the final time, and he was off and out with the card in
his hand before the librarian had turned back again.
Credentialed.
He'd read the word in a book of war stories.
He liked the sound of it.
#
"What did Krishna do?"
"What do you mean?" She was looking at him guardedly now, but his
madness seemed to have past.
"I mean," he said, reaching over and taking her hand, "what did Krishna
do when you went out for coffee with him?"
"Oh," she said. She was quiet while they drove a narrow road over a
steep hill. "He made me laugh."
"He doesn't seem that funny," Alan said.
"We went out to this coffee shop in Little Italy, and he sat me down at
a tiny green metal table, even though it was still cold as hell, and he
brought out tiny cups of espresso and a little wax-paper bag of
biscotti. Then he watched the people and made little remarks about
them. 'She's a little old to be breeding,' or 'Oh, is that how they're
wearing their eyebrow in the old country?' or 'Looks like he beats his
wife with his slipper for not fixing his Kraft Dinner right.' And when
he said it, I *knew* it wasn't just a mean little remark, I *knew* it
was true. Somehow, he could look at these people and know what they were
self-conscious about, what their fears were, what their little secrets
were. And he made me laugh, even though it didn't take long before I
guessed that that meant that he might know my secret."
"So we drank our coffee," she said, and then stopped when the body
thudded in the trunk again when they caught some air at the top of a
hill. "We drank it and he reached across the table and tickled my open
palm with his fingertips and he said, 'Why did you come out with me?'
"And I mumbled and blushed and said something like, 'You look like a
nice guy, it's just coffee, shit, don't make a big deal out of it,' and
he looked like I'd just canceled Christmas and said, 'Oh, well, too
bad. I was hoping it was a big deal, that it was because you thought I'd
be a good guy to really hang out with a *lot*, if you know what I mean.'
He tickled my palm again. I was a blushing virgin, literally though I'd
had a couple boys maybe possibly flirt with me in school, I'd never
returned the signals, never could.
"I told him I didn't think I could be romantically involved with him,
and he flattened out his palm so that my hand was pinned to the table
under it and he said, 'If it's your deformity, don't let that bother
you. I thought I could fix that for you.' I almost pretended I didn't
know what he meant, but I couldn't really, I knew he knew I knew. I
said, 'How?' as in, *How did you know* and *How can you fix it*? but it
just came out in a little squeak, and he grinned like Christmas was back
on and said, 'Does it really matter?'
"I told him it didn't, and then we went back to his place in Kensington
Market and he kissed me in the living room, then he took me upstairs to
the bathroom and took off my shirt and he --"
"He cut you," Alan said.
"He fixed me," she said.
Alan reached out and petted her wings through her jacket. "Were you
broken?"
"Of *course* I was," she snapped, pulling back. "I couldn't *talk* to
people. I couldn't *do* anything. I wasn't a person," she said.
"Right," Alan said. "I'm following you."
She looked glumly at the road unraveling before them, grey and hissing
with rain. "Is it much farther?" she said.
"An hour or so, if I remember right," he said.
"I know how stupid that sounds," she said. "I couldn't figure out if he
was some kind of pervert who liked to cut or if he was some kind of
pervert who liked girls like me or if I was lucky or in trouble. But he
cut them, and he gave me a towel to bite on the first time, but I never
needed it after that. He'd do it quick, and he kept the knife sharp, and
I was able to be a person again -- to wear cute clothes and go where I
wanted. It was like my life had started over again."
The hills loomed over the horizon now, low and rolling up toward the
mountains. One of them was his. He sucked in a breath and the car
wavered on the slick road. He pumped the brakes and coasted them to a
stop on the shoulder.
"Is that it?" she said.
"That's it," he said. He pointed. His father was green and craggy and
smaller than he remembered. The body rolled in the trunk. "I feel --" he
said. "We're taking him home, at least. And my father will know what to
do."
"No boy has ever taken me home to meet his folks," she said.
Alan remembered the little fist in the dirt. "You can wait in the car if
you want," he said.
#
Krishna came home,
(she said, as they sat in the parked car at a wide spot in the highway,
looking at the mountains on the horizon)
Krishna came home,
(she said, after he'd pulled off the road abruptly, put the car into
park, and stared emptily at the mountains ahead of them)
Krishna came home,
(she said, lighting a cigarette and rolling down the window and letting
the shush of the passing cars come fill the car, and she didn't look at
him, because the expression on his face was too terrible to behold)
and he came through the door with two bags of groceries and a bottle of
wine under one arm and two bags from a ravewear shop on Queen Street
that I'd walked past a hundred times but never gone into.
He'd left me in his apartment that morning, with his television and his
books and his guitar, told me to make myself at home, told me to call in
sick to work, told me to take a day for myself. I
felt...*glorious*. Gloried *in*. He'd been so attentive.
He'd touched me. No one had touched me in so long. No one had *ever*
touched me that way. He'd touched me with...*reverence*. He's gotten
this expression on his face like, like he was in *church* or
something. He'd kept breathing something too low for me to hear and when
he put his lips right to my ear, I heard what he'd been saying all
along, "Oh God, oh God, my God, oh God," and I'd felt a warmness like
slow honey start in my toes and rise through me like sap to the roots of
my hair, so that I felt like I was saturated with something hot and
sweet and delicious.
He came home that night with the makings of a huge dinner with boiled
soft-shell crabs, and a bottle of completely decent Chilean red, and
three dresses for me that I could never, ever wear. I tried to keep the
disappointment off my face as he pulled them out of the bag, because I
*knew* they'd never go on over my wings, and they were *so* beautiful.
"This one will look really good on you," he said, holding up a Heidi
dress with a scoop neck that was cut low across the back, and I felt a
hot tear in the corner of my eye. I'd never wear that dress in front of
anyone but him. I couldn't, my wings would stick out a mile.
I knew what it meant to be different: It meant living in the second
floor with the old Russian Auntie, away from the crowds and their
eyes. I knew then what I was getting in for -- the rest of my life spent
hidden away from the world, with only this man to see and speak to.
I'd been out in the world for only a few years, and I had barely touched
it, moving in silence and stealth, watching and not being seen, but oh,
I had *loved it*, I realized. I'd thought I'd hated it, but I'd loved
it. Loved the people and their dialogue and their clothes and their
mysterious errands and the shops full of goods and every shopper hunting
for something for someone, every one of them part of a story that I
would never be part of, but I could be *next to* the stories and that
was enough.