Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day(18)

They aren’t fighting. They aren’t attacking each other. A mother suckles her young in the shadow cast by Sophie’s knee; two large males groom each other on Sophie’s shoulder. It is a rodent Eden, and I don’t understand it in the least.

Sophie’s gaze sharpens, fixing on my face. “Jenna,” she says. It’s like hearing the town drunk sober for the first time. She smiles at my surprise. “I didn’t expect to see you here. I’m sorry about the other night. I really don’t like the shelters, but I appreciated the change.”

“Hi, Sophie,” I say. I’m confused. I glance to Brenda, who nods, encouraging me to keep talking. There’s a secret here, something I’m supposed to puzzle out on my own. Turning my attention back to Sophie, I look at her again. Her eyes are bright, like the eyes of the rats around her.

Oh.

“I didn’t know you were a witch until Brenda told me, and I guess that means I wasn’t looking close enough; I’m sorry,” I say. “I guess I didn’t want to know. I don’t get on so well with witches.”

“Ghosts rarely do,” says Sophie, her voice filled with forgiveness. “It’s all right. You were always kind to me, even if you didn’t know why I get confused sometimes.”

The rats are watching me, eyes tracking in tandem with hers. I hold myself still, not moving away from them, and ask the next logical question: “You’re not a street witch, are you?”

Sophie shakes her head. A small rat—whatever the rodent equivalent of a child is—peeks out of her hair and snuffles its nose at me. “No. I’m not.”

There are all kinds of witch. People can pull power from just about anything, if they love it hard enough, if it speaks to them with enough clarity. “You’re a rat witch.”

“I am.”

That explains why the street witches, the city witches, the urban witches, haven’t been taking care of her. No one loves the rats. They’re vermin, prey for cats and dogs and city-sponsored exterminators, skittering shadows in the gutters with nowhere to belong. But they do have somewhere. They have wherever Sophie is, the slope of her shoulder, the shelter of her upraised knee. She is their home, and they are her eyes and ears among the city.

It makes perfect sense. It makes no sense at all.

“I can talk to pigeons too, but they don’t like to come around when I’m with the nest,” says Sophie. “I don’t . . . do so well away from my rats. I’ve externalized myself for too long, and I don’t reinternalize fast enough to make sense.”

I glance to Brenda, who reads my confusion in my eyes, and says, “Some witches—not all, but some—can push themselves outward, into whatever their powers affect. I can go out of my body into a cornfield, if I want to. If I have reason to. Haven’t done it since Bill died. There’s always a risk you’ll decide you like being something other than a human being, and decide to stay. The temptation was something I always felt strongly. Going out without having something to call me back seemed . . . unwise.”

“I go into my rats,” says Sophie. She smiles, the rats moving around her like a brown and endless tide. “They show me things I’d never see if I was all inside myself. But sometimes parts of me decide they’d rather be rats forever, and then I only get those parts back when I’m here, down in the dark, with them. Don’t be sorry for me. I like this life better than the one I had before they came for me.”

She doesn’t give details. I don’t ask for them. I spend my nights taking phone calls from the lost and the lonely, and I know all about lives that can look like purgatory, or even hell, compared to the simplicity of being down in the dark, feeling like you belong. At least Sophie found her freedom in something other than a razor’s edge.

“How did you find out about the ghosts, Sophie?” asks Brenda, pulling us back on task. There’s a serenity in her voice that I remember from my mother’s. I glance at her, asking myself questions I never asked before. I know she was married, out in Indiana, out in the corn. Did she leave children behind when she came here to rediscover herself? She’s old enough that they would have been grown, moving on to lives of their own, ready to let their mother go.

The world is full of stories, and no matter how much time we spend in it—alive or dead—there’s never time to learn them all. They just go by so quickly.

“Jenna gave me her pie money,” says Sophie. She casts a shy smile in my direction. “I knew what it was, and it made me want to do something nice for her, because nobody gives me their pie money. So I thought maybe one of the other ghosts would know something nice I could do. Or maybe I thought they’d give me more pie money. I didn’t have my rats with me; I wasn’t thinking too clearly. I just went looking. And they weren’t there. They weren’t anywhere. So I came here, and I asked the rats if their ghosts were missing. They said yes.”

“Wait,” I say. “Rats have ghosts?”

This time, the look Sophie gives me is pitying and indulgent, the look of a teacher dealing with a recalcitrant child. “Of course,” she says. “Anything can leave a ghost, if it has something worth waiting for. They don’t need much time to move on, though. Rats only live four years, if they’re lucky. So I give them what they need, and they go where they go, and I miss them.”