The Onion Girl by Charles De Lint Read Free Book Online

side, blaming me when I first ran crying to her, a little scared girl, looking for comfort. Jimmy and Robbie, well, they was always no-account. I don’t know that I hated them. I don’t know that they even registered at all. I mean we was all victims, right? Just like our sister afore us.
    I think maybe I hate her the most of all, for running off the way she did. If she hadn’t lit out, Del would’ve stuck with her and never took up with me. I know that’s true. He told me often enough.

Jilly
    NEWFORD, APRIL 1999
    Sophie found Mona Morgan waiting for her by the mouth of the alley that ran along Jilly’s building on Yoors Street. The comic-book artist had her hands in the pockets of her green cargo pants, her head tilted back to study the second-floor window that Jilly used as a door to her fire escape “balcony.”
    â€œI would’ve given you the key last night,” Sophie said when she joined Mona, “if I’d known you’d be early.”
    â€œI just got here,” Mona told her. She ran a hand through her hair. The short blonde spikes were showing an inch of dark roots. “That’s where they went in, I guess,” she added, indicating the window.
    Sophie nodded. “Lou said he boarded it up before he left last night.”
    â€œThis is so awful,” Mona said. “I just dread going up there.”
    â€œMe, too.”
    Mona had offered to help clean Jilly’s studio loft when she’d heard Sophie and Wendy talking about it at the hospital last night. Wendy would have come as well, but she had a regular job writing copy and
doing proofreading at In the City now. The weekly arts and entertainment newspaper ran on a tight schedule that didn’t leave a whole lot of room for creative time management. It wasn’t like the old waitressing days when she could simply trade off a shift with someone and make it up later. These days, only Jilly still worked part-time at Kathryn’s Café.
    Sophie sighed. Or at least she had been up until four days ago.
    â€œDid you go by the hospital this morning?” Mona asked as the two of them returned to the front of the building.
    They walked past a few abandoned storefronts to the narrow entranceway that led to the second floor, pausing just inside the door so that Sophie could collect Jilly’s mail. It was mostly junk: flyers, a catalogue. There were also a couple of bills and a letter with an L.A. postmark. From Geordie, Sophie saw when she turned it over to look at the return address. That would have been mailed before the accident, she thought as they climbed the stairs to Jilly’s loft.
    â€œI went by first thing,” she said in response to Mona’s question. “I wanted to catch the doctor while he was making his rounds.”
    â€œWhat did he say about … you know …”
    â€œThe paralysis?”
    Mona nodded.
    â€œPretty much the same as last night,” Sophie said. “Every case is different. She could shake it off today, in a week, in a month …”
    â€œBut she’s going to be okay.”
    â€œOf course she is,” Sophie lied, as much to Mona as herself.
    The truth was she didn’t know if Jilly would ever be okay again. The results of the accident, especially the paralysis, seemed to have stomped Jilly’s normally irrepressible spirit right into the ground. Understandable, of course, considering what she’d been through, but it was so disconcerting to see Jilly like this, lying there, staring up at the ceiling, answering in monosyllables, her few words mumbled because the paralysis had also affected one side of her mouth.
    â€œIs she a fighter?” the doctor had asked Sophie before they parted this morning.
    Four days ago Sophie would have had no trouble answering yes.
    â€œBecause it’s the ones who are most determined,” the doctor went on, “who recover most quickly …” He gave a sad shake of his