The Onion Girl by Charles De Lint Page B

said. Then she looked more closely at Wendy. “What’s the matter?”
    â€œNothing.”
    â€œNo, there is. You’re keeping something from me.”
    â€œIt’s not for me to tell,” Wendy began.
    But if not her, then who? No one wanted to tell Jilly—why would they? It was such a horrible thing to have to relate on top of everything that Jilly was already going through here in the hospital. But sooner or later someone was going to have to.
    Wendy got up from her chair and came to sit on the edge of the bed. She took Jilly’s left hand and stroked the fingers where they came out from under the cast.
    â€œI’m going to hate this, aren’t I?” Jilly said.
    Wendy nodded. “But you’ve got to be strong.”
    â€œOh, god. It’s about the paralysis. It’s permanent.”
    â€œNo, it’s not about any of this,” Wendy said. “It’s about your paintings. Someone broke into your studio after the accident.”
    6
    I don’t know why I don’t take it worse than I do. I guess it’s because I already feel so divorced from my life here in the World As It Is, that when more horrible things happen, they don’t feel like they’re happening to me. They’re happening to the Broken Girl.
    â€œYou’re sure you’re okay?”

    Wendy repeats the question for about the hundredth time while she puts on her coat and stows her journal away in her backpack.
    â€œI’m not even close to okay,” I tell her and offer up a weak smile. “I mean, look at me, lying here like a lump.”
    â€œI meant about the paintings.”
    â€œI know you did,” I say.
    Somehow, losing the faerie paintings doesn’t feel like much of a surprise when I’ve already lost my painting arm. The truth is, I can even detect an element of relief welling up from underneath the initial shock that hit me when Wendy first gave me the awful news. Because that’s one more tie connecting me to the World As It Is that’s gone. But I can’t tell her that. It’ll just make her worry even more.
    â€œThings’ll work out the way they’re supposed to in the long run,” I tell her. “We might not like all the details, and the trip’s not always fun, but we’ll make do. That’s part of the blessing and curse of being alive.”
    Wendy looks so small and sorrowful, standing there by the door, her backpack trailing on the floor as it hangs forgotten by one strap from her hand.
    â€œGod, you sound so fatalistic,” she says.
    â€œI know. And it’s not me,” I add before she can say it.
    â€œWell, it isn’t.”
    I give her a sympathetic look. “I’ve been through worse,” I tell her.
    â€œI can’t imagine worse,” she says.
    Then she’s gone, swallowed by the hallway.
    â€œI’m glad you can’t imagine worse,” I say softly to the empty room. “No one should have to. But that doesn’t stop it from happening to us all the same.”
    I stare up at the ceiling. Sometimes when I lie here I try to count the dots in the ceiling tiles. If I can ever count them all in one tile without losing track, then I can multiply the dots by the number of tiles in my room and I’ll know just how many dots there are up there. Maybe I can even figure out how many there are on this floor. Or in the whole hospital.
    It’s something to do when I’m lying here in the bed. It’s either that, or remembering, and remembering always seems to take me too far back in my life, back to the dark ages, before my life began again.
    This evening the dots don’t hold my attention. Instead I start thinking about how I first started drawing. Not the pathetic little sketches I tried
to sell for spare change when I was living on the street, but further back, when I was just a child.
    Sometimes I think children want to paint and draw more than they want