Newford Stories by Charles De Lint Page A

took after her side of the family.”
    “Humans are so complicated,” I said.
    “Which you’re not.”
    “Oh, I’m very complicated.”
    “I meant human.”
    “What makes you say that?” I asked.
    He kept count on his fingers. “One, you can
see me, which most people can’t. Two, you can talk to me, which
most people really can’t. Three, you’re sitting there all calm and
composed, when most people—most human people—would be
flipping out.”
    I shrugged. “Does it matter what I am?”
    “Not really.”
    He looked down the hall as though he could
see through the walls to where his mother lay sleeping. The mother
who’d ignored him when he was alive and, now that he was dead,
still ignored him. Her mind might be filled with old memories, but
none were of him.
    “Can you help me?” he asked.
    “Help you with what?”
    “With…you know. Getting her to remember
me.”
    “Why is it so important?”
    “How can I die and go on if no one remembers
that I was ever alive?”
    “Lots of people don’t remember me,” I said,
“and it doesn’t bother me.”
    He chuckled, but without any humour. “Yeah,
like that’s possible.”
    “No, it really doesn’t.”
    “I meant that anybody would forget meeting
you.”
    “You’d be surprised.”
    He held my gaze for a long moment, then
shrugged.
    “So will you help me?”
    I nodded. “I can try. Maybe it’s not so much
that your mother should remember you more, but that she should
remember your sister less. The way it seems, there’s no room inside
her for anything else.”
    “But you’ll try?”
    Against my better judgment, I found myself
nodding.
    He did a slow fade and I was left alone in
the living room. I sat for a while longer, looking at the place
where he’d been sitting, then slid off the coffee table and walked
back into the hall. There were two closed doors and two open ones.
I knew that one led into the old lady’s bedroom, the other into a
bathroom. I went to the first closed door. It opened into a room
that was like stepping inside a cake, all frosty pinks and whites,
full of dolls and pennants and trophies. Madeline’s room. Closing
its door, I continued down the hall and opened the other one.
    Both rooms had the feel of empty places
where no one lived. But while Madeline’s room was bright and
clean—the bed neatly made, shelves dusted, trophies shined—the
boy’s room looked as though the door had been shut on the day he
died and no one had opened it until I had just this moment.
    The bedding lay half-on, half-off the box
spring, pooling on the floor. There were posters of baseball
players and World War II planes on the wall. Decades of dust
covered every surface, clustering around the model cars and plastic
statues of movie monsters on the bookshelves and windowsill. More
planes hung from the ceiling, held in flight by fishing lines
strung with cobwebs.
    Unlike the daughter, he truly was
forgotten.
    I walked to the desk where a half-finished
model lay covered in dust. Books were stacked on the far corner
with a school notebook on top. I cleared the dust with a finger and
read the handwritten name on the “Property of” line:
    Donald Quinn.
    I thought of bees and drunk drivers, of
being remembered and forgotten. I knew enough about humans to know
that you couldn’t change their minds. You couldn’t make them
remember if they didn’t want to.
    Why had I said I’d help him?
    Among the cousins, a promise was sacred. Now
I was committed to an impossible task.
    I closed the door to the boy’s room and left
the apartment.
    The night air felt cool and fresh on my
skin, and the sporadic sound of traffic was welcome after the
unhappy stillness of the apartment. I looked up at its dark
windows, then changed my shape. Crow wings took me back to the
Rookery on Stanton Street.
     
    * * *
     
    I think Raven likes us better when we visit
him on our own. The way we explode with foolishness whenever Zia
and I are together wears him down—you