Newford Stories Read Free

going.
    But there were no thin, dark-haired girls
out on the snowy street, and why should there be? It was too cold.
Snow was falling thick with another severe winter storm warning in
effect tonight. Those girls were safe at home. She knew that. But
she kept looking for them all the same because in her chest she
could feel the beat of dark wings—not the sudden panic that came
out of nowhere when once again the truth of her situation reared
without warning in her mind, but a strange, alien feeling. A sense
that some otherness was calling to her.
    The voice of that otherness scared her
almost more than the grey landscape lodged in her chest.
    She felt she needed a safety net to be able
to let herself go and not have to worry about where she fell.
Someplace where she didn’t have to think, be responsible, to do
anything. Not forever. Just for a time.
    She knew Jilly was right about nostalgia.
The memories she carried forward weren’t necessarily the way things
had really happened. But she yearned, if only for a moment, to be
able to relive some of those simpler times, those years in high
school before she’d met Peter, before they were married, before her
emotions got so complicated.
    And then what?
    You couldn’t live in the past. At some point
you had to come up for air and then the present would be waiting
for you, unchanged. The wasteland in her chest would still stretch
on forever. She’d still be trying to understand what had happened.
Had Peter changed? Had she changed? Had they both changed? And when
did it happen? How much of their life together had been a lie?
    It was enough to drive her mad.
    It was enough to make her want to step into
the otherness calling to her from out there in the storm and snow,
step out and simply let it swallow her whole.
     
    * * *
     
    Jilly couldn’t put the girls from the café
out of her mind either, but for a different reason. As soon as
she’d gotten back to the studio, she’d taken her current
work-in-progress down from the easel and replaced it with a fresh
canvas. For a long moment she stared at the texture of the pale
ground, a mix of gesso and a light burnt ochre acrylic wash, then
she took up a stick of charcoal and began to sketch the faces of
the two dark-haired girls before the memory of them left her
mind.
    She was working on their bodies, trying to
capture the loose splay of their limbs and the curve of their backs
as they’d slouched in toward each other over the café table, when
there came a knock at her door.
    “It’s open,” she called over her shoulder,
too intent on what she was doing to look away.
    “I could’ve been some mad, psychotic
killer,” Geordie said as he came in.
    He stamped his feet on the mat, brushed the
snow from his shoulders and hat. Setting his fiddle case down by
the door, he went over to the kitchen counter to see if Jilly had
any coffee on.
    “But instead,” Jilly said, “it’s only a mad,
psychotic fiddler, so I’m entirely safe.”
    “There’s no coffee.”
    “Sure there is. It’s just waiting for you to
make it.”
    Geordie put on the kettle, then rummaged
around in the fridge, trying to find which tin Jilly was keeping
her coffee beans in this week. He found them in one that claimed to
hold Scottish shortbreads.
    “You want some?” he asked.
    Jilly shook her head. “How’s Tanya?”
    “Heading back to L.A. I just saw her off at
the airport. The driving’s horrendous. There were cars in the ditch
every couple hundred feet and I thought the bus would never make it
back.”
    “And yet, it did,” Jilly said.
    Geordie smiled.
    “And then,” she went on, “because you were
feeling bored and lonely, you decided to come visit me at two
o’clock in the morning.”
    “Actually, I was out of coffee and I saw
your light was on.” He crossed the loft and came around behind the
easel so that he could see what she was working on. “Hey, you’re
doing the crow girls.”
    “You know them?”
    Geordie nodded. “Maida