Michelle West - Under The Skin.pdf

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Under the Skin
By Michelle West
The rain that fell in the city was the color of her eyes, clear and gray where it
blanketed the traffic-strewn streets with the persistence of its fall.
The river that ran between roads, set into a valley that nestled between forked
branches of highway, was swollen with April movement. She came out of that river,
like the first shoots of spring, into air redolent with the speech of cars, strange and
terrible and now, to her alone, ordinary-as ordinary as rain, as snow, as the
movement of leaves in their season.
She had chosen her form, had slept in it, and now, awakened, she tested the air.
And then, at last, she called forth a glimmer of power-power older than even the
valley in which she stood-and fashioned for herself a seeming, a glamour, beneath
which she might do her work.
For in this diminished time, work was all that was left her; she had no court, no
politics, nothing but magic stripped of place, of any context which was not hers.
Hard, to learn the ways of trees. She remembered her youth, and their voices which
were now so very muted. Harder, to learn the ways of squirrels, bears, foxes, of
stags, for their speech traveled with them, died and was born again, was perturbed in
all things by the short bursts of their life.
It was easy-she remembered it clearly-to learn the speech of man. Easy to think that
she understood it, that creatures that barely lived longer than animals could be
understood.
Had she but known.
"Janie, come downstairs now and take the garbage out! How many times do I have
to tell you?"
About as many times, Jane thought, as she shut her book and rolled off he bed, as
you say everything else. "I'm coming!"
"That's what you said fifteen minutes ago, young lady!"
Jane Thornton was not a stupid girl, so she didn't correct her mother. Instead, she
swung the thin door wide, ran out into the hall, pivoted on the banister and
practically sailed down the stairs, all in one continuous motion that ended with the
wall in the vestibule. Her fingers left smudge marks.
Jane's mother was standing, arms folded, beside the microwave in the kitchen. "I
don't know what's gotten into you lately," she said, as Jane lifted the two twist-tied
garbage bags. "All you do anymore is sit up in your room doing God knows what."
She mumbled a "Yes, mother" under her breath and refused to meet her mother's
eyes. They were dark, those eyes, where they'd once been bright. Jane couldn't
remember the last time her mother had smiled, although a cynical grimace was pretty
commonplace these days. Not much to be happy about, really.
It was probably her father's fault, and her father was, damn him anyway, quite
happy in his new life with his lovely new wife and his bright new home. No room
there for either Jane or her mother, although he called Jane regularly and had even
sent an idiotic pink sweater for her last birthday.
On the other hand, it was hard not to understand his choice when her mother was
 
like this. She dragged the garbage to the can at the side of the house, and then, after
stuffing the two bags into the can, headed down to the curb with it. As she trudged
back up the walk to the house, it began to rain. Warm drops hit her upturned face as
she studied the roiling clouds above without the slightest interest in shelter.
Rain.
Beneath it, a stirring. She finished her work and waited, thinking it odd to have
traveled this far. She had no kin. And perhaps it was time, after all.
It wasn't that Jane didn't have friends; she had them. It was just the only two that
she'd ever really given a damn about were now living in Arizona and Quebec. They
wrote, and she wrote; after her father left, she wasn't allowed to make long distance
calls anymore because it was too expensive. But it didn't matter. The letters had
become few and far between, and she knew that Tracy and Corinne had gone on
with their lives, meeting new people and learning to fit into the new places that had
called them away.
Rain fell, unbroken; the air rumbled as if the skyscape of cloud were the victim of a
quake; white light illuminated the sky above, and she tried to catch sight of the
heavens in the fading afterimage.
It was hard to believe that at some time in the early 1900s Arundel Avenue and the
streets that surrounded it were considered the very outskirts of the city. Now, buried
beneath the network of parkettes and parking lots that paralleled the Danforth, the
subway trains rumbled like living metal worms, and a mere fifteen minutes took you
right to the heart of the city.
The trees that lined the streets here towered over the rooftops; they were huge old
maples for the most part, and they had always been huge and old. Their roots were
sunk well past people's basements, just as the leaves were well above their
bedrooms; they twisted and broke old pipes as they grew, and every so often-in a
storm like this-they dropped the heavy burden of their branches on the power lines.
Still, the city hadn't seen fit to cut them down or rid the neighborhood of them, and
Jane walked beneath leaves which were lit on the underside by street lamps, and
above by lightning's occasional flashes.
Where do you go when you have nowhere to go?
Some people went to cafes, and some to dance clubs; some to bars and some to
parks, some to the islands in the harbor and some to bookstores along the
Danforthothers with cars went to stretches of empty wilderness where one could be
alone by one's own choice and not the choice of everyone else around you. Alone,
rather than lonely.
Jane Thornton had no car. She had a license, it was fairly recent, but her dad had
taken the car because her mother lived close to a subway. And besides, really, her
mother didn't have money for anything that was comfort: alcohol, food.
The city had wild patches, but no wilderness, no wildness.
Except in storms like this. Jane looked down and realized that the streets were
empty; even the headlights of cars were gone. She closed her eyes and the rain hit
her face. Thunder roared, and she roared back; the roar held no words, but then,
words were not needed.
"Where were you?" Her mother's voice, slurred only a little. Later in the evening, it
would probably be slurred a whole lot more, Jane gave it fifty-fifty. Her friends
 
wondered why she didn't drink. Well, they had; she didn't see much of them now.
She didn't bother to answer the question, but her mother didn't expect an answer
by now; it wasn't so late that she'd been worried. "Your father called."
"So?"
"So call him back or he'll blame me for not delivering his message."
She mounted the stairs two at a time as the rain's momentary clarity was destroyed
by her life.
"...anyway, Pat and I were wondering if you'd like to come over for Sunday dinner
this week."
"No."
"Janie, I haven't seen you in almost six months."
"School's been keeping me busy."
"Which is why you're failing."
Mom told you that?
"My grades are none of your business," she said, biting back words, holding them
in.
"You're still my daughter, Janie. Your grades are very much my business.
Especially if you aren't listening to your mother." He fought the words back too, his
temper and hers were not so different when they were angry. But he was older, better
at it. "Janie, we'd really like to see you. I'd really like to see you."
She was angry at them both, and her anger was sudden, like the storm had been;
the words in her throat were a rumble, and then a roar. "Dad, you just don't get it do
you?" He didn't have the chance to reply. "I don't come to dinner because I can't
stand the sight of Pat, or you for that matter."
"Janie, don't you-"
"Don't you tell me what to do! You lost that right when you lied to us, cheated on
us, and took off on us!"
"If your mother-"
"My mother doesn't have anything to do with this! Do you think I'm too stupid to
figure it out on my own? Where do you get off telling me I'm selfish or I'm spoiled?
I didn't promise to love and honor Mom until death do us part, you did!"
Silence, then. Her hands were shaking as she pressed the receiver to her ear, to her
lips. She was waiting for his anger to flood back along the wires that bound them
together in this conversation.
But that wasn't what he offered her, smug bastard. He never gave her what she
needed. "Janie, try to understand. Life with your mother wasn't ever very easy."
"And living with you was better?"
"No, probably not for her." His words were so calm and so measured; she hated
them.
"Is that you speaking, Dad, or is that the fancy therapist you're seeing?"
Silence was better than patience, and he was silent for another thirty seconds. She
counted them. Then, "When you fall in love for the first time, you'll understand it
better. You've never been in love, Janie."
"You mean I've never been in lust," she snapped back. "And you're wrong. But at
least I knew it for what it was."
"That's enough, Janie. You've never been with anyone that's as good for you, as
 
good to you, as Pat is to me."
"Is she? Is she really that good?"
She heard an intake of breath so sharp it made her smile. But then he said, "I'm
sorry that we can't talk right now. I never meant to hurt either of you. I didn't do this
to hurt you, and I hope one day you'll understand that. But I deserved that chance to
be happy, and I won't listen to you cut down my wife."
He hung up before she could.
What about us, you bastard? What about our happiness?
She was strong, was Jane Thornton; she didn't even start to cry.
There was a resonance about anger and grief that had its own feel, stripped of
words and expression and humanity. In the valley she had chosen for her awakening,
she stirred, stood, lifted her chin. Testing something that was not just air, but the
scent of approach. Her own.
The sky's burden was shed by rain's work; sun cast a shadow, long and thin into
the straggly grasses. That shadow was unmoving in a way that nothing but the great
metal bridge above her was. She waited, as if she were not part of life, of the living.
The next morning, Jane cut school. School was a waste of time, anyway. A bunch
of teachers tried to "help" you in your "difficult" situation. Jane wanted nothing from
them but to be left alone.
The only way to be left alone was not to be there. So she walked the quiet streets,
beneath the towering trees. Followed them, stepping over the cracks in the sidewalk
because of the old childhood rhymes. She made a point of hitting all the lines,
though.
She even paused in front of her house, thought about going in; her mother was at
work at the office. No one would be there. She made it as far as the front door.
Turned the knob. Walked away.
Home was the last place she wanted to be.
I'd be Happy, she thought, if I never had to see this place again.
Done, someone said, and she turned at once. A small child, trying to escape the
grip of his mother's hand for an excursion into the sparse traffic, was the only thing
in sight that was talking.
Never mind. She shoved her hands into her pockets and began to walk.
She made her way from Arundel to the Danforth, and from the Danforth down
Broadview and into the Don Valley, following the bike paths beside the river that
nestled between the two sides of the highway. The trees here were green, when they
were alive, and the weeds were colorful enough, but the river was a dead one, and if
there was animal life other than the dogs that people walked, it hid very well.
As Jane maneuvered her way beneath the day branch of a stunted tree, light caught
her eye, flashing like reflected sun over rippling water. It came again as she lifted her
head, and she began to slowly wend her way toward it, leaving behind the smooth
asphalt of the newly paved bike path. Only when she was halfway there did Jane
wonder what she was doing, but by then she had no intention of going back until she
found the source of the light itself. She bet that it was probably the window of some
abandoned old wreck.
Good damned thing she didn't have two cents to rub together. She lost.
The trees seemed to grow darker and rougher as she approached the light; they
 
were tightly packed and harder to move around. There were thorny plants that
caught the hem of her pants-tearing it twice; there were burrs that caught her hair,
pulling at it rather than joining it.
I get it, I'm Prince Charming, and this is the forest of thorns. She had no intention
of kissing any sleeping woman, wasn't as if she didn't get abused enough by
moronic idiots passing themselves off as human beings, but she was damned if she
was going to give up before she managed to clear the trees.
And she forgot it all as she managed to peer between the forked trunk of a gnarled
old tree whose leaves she wouldn't have recognized had she carried an encyclopedia
with her. Because framed by the vee of that split trunk was a woman who was
shining with a hazy luminescence.
Her hair was a spill of silver that seemed to catch particles of the sun and reflect
them, wayward, back; her eyes were wide and dark and perfect, and her lashes, like
her hair, were silver. She wore a sleeveless summer dress that caught the breeze and
defined its passage. Her skin was white as ivory, and her arms were long and
slender; her fingers were smooth and perfect as she lifted her hands in greeting.
"Welcome," she said. If lightning had a voice, this was it; a flash of brilliance that
lingered in the air long after the actual light had passed.
Jane opened her mouth to speak, and nothing came out, although if a toad or a frog
had climbed out of her lips, it wouldn't have surprised her much. Compared to the
silver-haired woman, Jane was everything ugly and awkward.
"Come, Jane Thornton. You found me for a reason. I am not a danger to you, nor
you to me. Come."
Jane scraped her way through the fork of the tree and landed with a clumsy thump
on her knees. The woman offered her a hand, and after a moment, Jane took it; she
looked down and saw her bleeding and scraped skin against the perfect whiteness of
light.
"W-who are you?"
"I am a companion, of sorts. Come, walk a while with me in my forest."
Jane looked over her shoulder, seeing the highway and the bridge that towered
overhead.
The woman laughed, and her voice was the brook that trickled in silence. "It has
taken me many years to understand it, Jane, it is more difficult than I or my distant
kin realized it could be. But wilderness is more than isolated forest, and a forest is
more than trees." She turned and started to walk and Jane began to amble awkwardly
behind her, stubbing her toes and hurting her knees when she fell. Finally, the woman
stopped.
"You are Jane Thornton. I have been waiting, I think, for you. It is our, my, way, to
wait; to be sought rather than to seek. I am hidden, always, to those who will not
look, who don't know how to look. They are many." Her smile was distant for a
moment, cool as the winter white of her hair. Sun caught both.
"You are the first to find me in many years, and it means what it means, Jane
Thornton. You could not see me if you did not seek a new life, a new beginning."
She held out a hand and pulled Jane up from the ground; her hand was cool and
strong. "You do not walk well here, but this is only the first time that you've come. It
will get easier, I promise you that. Until then, let me aid you." She reached into the
 

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