“So what do we do now?” Toby asks.
“Jilly has to go back,” Joe says.
I shake my head. “Not until Raylene wakes up.”
“Every moment your dreaming self and the real you are both here in the dreamlands, the tie that binds you to life grows thinner.”
“I know,” I tell Joe. “That’s what the spirit told me, too. But I have to talk to my sister before I go back. If she stays in the dreamlands, I might never get the chance to talk to her again.”
“We’ll get you back over here,” Joe says. “Once you’re healed. It’ll just take some time.”
But I’m not so sure. Once I’m healed … I don’t know if that’s ever going to happen. And as for ever getting back here, when I was with the spirit, confirming my choice to help Raylene instead of myself, she made it sound like coming back was a possibility, but I still got the distinct impression I wouldn’t necessarily ever be able to return. Or if I did, it wasn’t going to be anytime soon.
I know it’s dangerous to stay on right now. I can feel the Broken Girl. There’s a constant pressure, an ache to get back into her, to be complete again. But I have to do this. Then a thought comes to me.
“Couldn’t you just take the Broken Girl back?” I ask Joe.
I see him think about that. Finally he nods.
“It would help,” he says. “But you can’t stay out of her for too much longer. You’ve both been here too long.”
I nod. “I won’t. Thanks for coming after me, Joe. And for standing up for my sister.”
“I hope I did the right thing.”
“Me, too.”
Because I don’t know. I’m not so sure as I let on that Raylene’s going to come out of this changed. All I know is that just before Pinky shot her, Raylene was actually listening to me. We were connecting. And then she tried to save me, stepped in front of the shot that was meant for me.
“Let’s hope for her sake she has changed,” Joe says. “Because if she hasn’t, Jack’s going to come down hard on her.” He pauses, reluctant, then adds, “And I’d have to be with him on that.”
“I understand,” I tell him.
He steps up to me and lays his forehead against mine, hands on my shoulders. I remember he told me once, that’s the kiss of life.
“Please,” he says, “Don’t stay here too long.”
Then he turns and walks farther down the gulch to where the Broken Girl lies. The pit bull waits a moment, its attention on me now instead of Pinky’s body. When I reach down to pat the dog, it avoids my hand, then steps in, bumps its head against my leg.
“Where’d you get the dog?” I call after Joe as the pit bull trots after him.
He stops to look back. “I didn’t get her anywhere,” he says. “She’s a friend who stepped in to help.”
“What’s her name?”
“She hasn’t told me.”
“Well, thank her for me,” I say.
Joe smiles. “She’s got ears,” he says. “Thank her yourself.”
I do and the dog barks once at me.
I watch as Joe goes down on one knee beside the Broken Girl, face turned to the dog. He says something I can’t hear and she does what she did to me, bumps her head against his knee. Then she steps away like the canids did, one moment there, the next gone. I’m getting so used to this, I don’t even blink.
Joe lifts the Broken Girl in his arms.
“Remember,” he calls to me.
“I know. Get back as quick as I can.”
And then he’s gone, too, carrying his burden back into the World As It Is. The pull I felt toward the Broken Girl changes when she’s gone. It turns into a hollow feeling, deep inside my chest.
I look at Raylene for a long moment, but she hasn’t changed. Sleeping, I guess. I hope. Her color’s still good and her breathing is normal.
I turn to Toby.
“Want to help me bury my sister’s friend?” I ask him.
“No,” he says. “But I will.”
The ground’s too hard, and we don’t have tools anyway, so we start to pile stones on her, raising a cairn like Toby says they did in the old days. It’s hot, sweaty work, but it helps to keep me from thinking what’s going to happen when Raylene, wakes up. What will I say to her? How will she feel toward me?
I don’t know what to expect. But I don’t know what exactly it is that I want either.
5
NEWFORD
“Thank god,” Sophie said when Joe came walking out of the wall, carrying Jilly in his arms.
She scrambled to her feet. The odd manner of their appearance, the impossibility of their walking through solid matter as they had, barely registered. All she could focus on was Jilly.
Behind her, Wendy started to cry and Sophie understood. She had tears of relief in her own eyes. Turning, she helped Wendy to her feet and the two of them stood with their arms around each other.
“You’re okay?” Cassie asked Joe. “Both of you?”
He nodded. “For now.”
Angel and Lou hurried up from where they’d been standing down the hall. Lou helped Joe take Jilly’s weight and carry her back to her bed. The rest of them crowded into the room after them.
“Can one of you get a nurse in here?” Joe asked.
Cassie nodded. “I’ll go.”
Wendy touched Joe’s arm, looking as grateful as Sophie felt.
“Oh, god, we were so worried,” Wendy said. “It’s been hours. We thought you’d never find her and bring her back.”
“It’s not over yet,” Joe said. “Her dreaming self is still on the other side.”
Sophie understood the ramifications of that immediately, but a confused stillness fell across the room, sending ripples of uncertainty through the rest of them.
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” Lou asked.
Sophie could see the relief he’d been feeling drain out of him.
“He means her spirit is still in the dreamlands,” she told Lou.
“Why … why didn’t she come back with you?” Wendy asked.
“Unfinished business,” Joe told them. “But this time it’s Jilly’s choice—something she says she needs to do. Nobody forced her.”
“So it’s not over?” Angel asked.
Joe shook his head. “Not yet.”
He sat on the edge of the bed, stroking Jilly’s brow with his fingers. Angel went to where Lou was standing at the foot of the bed and wrapped her arms around him, burrowing her face against his shoulder. He held her, patting her shoulder, but his gaze remained on Jilly. Wendy took Sophie’s hand. Glancing at her, Sophie gave Wendy’s fingers a squeeze, then they put their arms around each other’s waists, standing close for the comfort. They, too, studied Jilly where she lay so broken and still, searching for, praying for some sign of resuscitation.
Joe looked past them to the door. “Where’s that nurse?”
Raylene
MANIDÒ-AKÌ
It’s funny. Here I am dying, but for the first time in my life I feel like I’m really at peace. I never felt like this before, not even when I was a little kid, back afore my sister went and took off, or when Hector and me was together. Don’t matter where I went, if’n I was alone or in a crowd, I always knew I was carrying around some kinda black mark on my soul. I done so many shitty things in my life it couldn’t be no other way.
I was never no sociopath freak, don’t know better, thinks the whole damn world’s just a-circling ’round her. I only acted like I didn’t know. Like I didn’t care. But I knew I was doing wrong. And maybe I never let on or nothing, but that knowing left a shadow on me—Catholic guilt, I’m guessing. You can’t never get away from what the damn priests and nuns try to drill into your head.
Only I guess I found me a way now: die, and it’s all gone.
I don’t feel forgiven—that’d be asking too much of anybody. But I do feel forgotten. Like the world’s going on and nobody’s thinking ’bout me, for good or bad. I’m just off of thei
r radar and I like it.
Or maybe it’s just the world spitting me out like a melon seed it don’t want to swallow. I don’t care. All I know is I’m falling up through this smear of black nothing, heading straight for this one pinprick of light that never seems to get no closer, but I’m coming up on it all the same. For once in my life, I feel completely at peace.
Until something starts to pull me back down again.
I fight it, but it ain’t no use. Whatever’s got ahold of me is just a-pulling me back. It’s got itself dug in like some old mule that won’t be budged, not no how. And I know what it is. It’s my own damn dying self, got itself resuscitated. All of a sudden, I can feel my body again. All the holes are closing up like I never had no load a buckshot tore through me. The blood’s starting to move in my veins, my lungs are drawing in air. I can feel the black mark of guilt set up shop inside me and just like that, my moment of peace is gone.
I was dying, and now I’m not, simple as that.
There’s a flicker flash in front of my eyes—strobing lights like at them clubs Pinky likes to take us to, and then I’m back inside my body. The ground’s hard under me, the tatters of my T-shirt are wet and sticking to my skin. I sit up and stare down at all the blood I got on me. Then I lift my head and have me a look around.
I’m in a forest, but the big woman sitting on the ground nearby grabs my attention right off and I don’t look no further.
She’s like one of them New Age earth mamas, you know, a big—I mean, big—woman, wearing the sack dress, got her a face as round as the full moon with a mess of curly dark hair just clouding up around it. I know her type. She’s got that air ’bout her of somebody who’s been meditating too long, or just smoked her a nice fat spliff—way mellow. The eyes are kinda spooky, though. Deep and dark and they have them a glow back in behind of them that almost seems familiar, though I know I never seen her before.
“You got anything to do with bringing me back?” I ask her.
The woman shakes her head. “Your sister did. She gave up her own chance at good health so that you might live.”
I have to think on that a minute, work it through.
“You mean she could’ve helped herself,” I finally say, “but she’s gone and left herself stuck as a cripple just to help me?”
The woman nods.
I shake my head. “What a chump.”
I look around some more. We’re not in that holler in the dreamlands where Pinky and me took my sister. The trees here are godawful big and the air feels kinda thick and heady. We run through places like this with the pack, but none of ’em felt this old or … I don’t know. Just away from everything. And I mean away. I don’t hear nothing—not a rustle, not a bug, not a bird—coming outta the woods around us. It’s just me and this creepy New Age woman with the moon face.
“Where is everybody?” I ask. “Come to think of it, where the hell are we anyway?”
She doesn’t answer me. Instead she says, “I would have thought you’d be grateful for her sacrifice.”
I’d laugh, only it ain’t close to funny.
“What for?” I tell her. “I was happy being dead. I was at peace, for Christ’s sake.”
“One doesn’t need to die to find peace.”
“Yeah, well ‘one’ don’t need to talk like no swami guru neither, but it happens, you being a case in point.”
She gives me this calm, sorrowful look. I guess it’s supposed to make me feel like we’re friends, like she cares about me, but it don’t do nothing for me. I can count my friends on one finger and she ain’t it.
“Why are you so angry?” she asks.
“I got lots to be pissed about, starting with finding myself back in my skin instead of finally being free of the mess of my life.”
“Yes, of course,” she says. “What your brother did to you was—”
“Fuck you, lady. You don’t know jack about me or anything I could be feeling, ’cept for being pissed at being alive and having to listen to you and that’s only ’cause I’m spelling it out for you.”
She’s like one of them social workers used to come see me when I was doing my six months in the L.A. county jail. They were all these soft-spoken little bitches wouldn’t know a trauma if it come up and bit ’em in the arse. Course moon mama here’s got enough bulk to make up two or three of them, but otherwise she’s cut from the same bolt of cloth. But then she goes and surprises me.
“You’re right,” she says. “Never having been human, never having experienced what you did, I can only imagine how it might have felt for you, what it would drive you to.”
Wait a minute, I’m thinking. Let’s back up here.
“What do you mean ’bout ‘never having been human’?” I say.
She gives me this look. “What did you think I was, child?”
I don’t like the child business, but I answer her anyway.
“Some do-gooder trying to fix what’s too broke to be fixed,” I tell her.
“Are you so sure of that?” she asks. “That you can’t be fixed?”
I shrug. “I’m confused ’bout a whole lotta shit, lady, but that part ain’t too hard to work out. I’m the one’s been living this life you only get to see from the outside.”
She gives me a slow nod and rises to her feet. The movement takes me by surprise. ’Stead of lumbering up from where she’s been sitting, grunting and groaning with the effort like some old hog got its legs knocked from under it, she just kinda floats up into a standing position.
“Well,” she says, “There’s nothing to stop you from finishing the job your sister’s sacrifice interrupted.”
“Guilt don’t work on me,” I tell her.
Those dark eyes fix their gaze on me, cold and hard like a thundercloud.
“What makes you think I’d be interested in making you feel guilty?” she asks.
She’s looming over me, so I get to my feet, but it don’t make me feel any bigger. She got a way of making me feel small that’s got nothing to do with her size. I ain’t playing to it, but I got to admit I’m curious.
“Then what do you want from me?” I ask.
“Nothing,” she says. “I was only interested in speaking with you before you woke up.”
“Wait a minute—you mean I’m dreaming right now? This ain’t a done deal?”
She gives me a weary look.
“You did die,” she says. “Your sister did sacrifice a normal life to bring you back. You are alive once more. None of that has or can be changed now. This is only a way station between when you lost consciousness and are returning to it. Never fear. As soon as you wake up, you’ll be free to seek oblivion once more.”
I just shake my head. “See, you really don’t get it, do you? I ain’t no suicide bomb. I figure everybody’s got a time they’re going to die and it’s nothing I’d go looking for. I just ain’t made that way. But this was my time. I was gone and I never felt so light and free, letting go all the garbage of my life and floating free. That’s what got took from me.”
“Then by such consideration,” the woman says, “obviously, it wasn’t your time.”
There’s still dark thunder in her eyes, but her voice is calm. Damned if I can find a hole in her argument either. Finally I give her a slow nod.
“Well, I guess it’ll make Pinky happy,” I say. “She’s never been all that big on making decisions by herself.”
Though she was good enough at pulling that trigger, I find myself thinking. But that weren’t the natural order of things. Independent thinking never stood Pinky to no good. All it ever did was get her in more trouble.
Then I realize the woman’s just looking at me. Her eyes have finally softened, but there’s a whole world a something going on between us that I can’t begin to get me a handle on.
“What?” I ask.
“Your friend Pinky is dead,” she says.
It takes a couple of moments for that to register.
I can’t look at her. It was bad e
nough all them years I did without her when she was doing her time—but at least we had us our visiting days and we could run with the pack. I can’t imagine a world without her in it at all. She’s been with me from the beginning. Hell, wasn’t for Pinky, I could still be my sick freak brother’s girlfriend, trapped back there in Hillbilly Holler. Without her … well, I guess now I know how come I was dragged back into life. The world had it one more joke to play on me.
Goddamn. I can’t believe she’s gone.
I feel the pressure building in behind my eyes. My chest’s so tight I got trouble breathing.
Goddamn.
I swallow hard. No way I’m breaking down in front of nobody, ’specially not this moon-faced woman with her eyes gone too kind now.
“How … how long I been gone anyways?” I manage to ask.
“Not long,” the woman says softly. “An hour or two.”
I nod. Like it means anything. No matter what we got to say here, Pinky’s still going to be dead. But I need to keep this conversation going. It’s all that’s keeping me from falling to pieces. I’m like a china mug, tottering on the edge of the table. A touch of wind, somebody makes the wrong move, and down I’ll go a-tumbling to shatter on the floor.
“Did she die hard?” I ask.
“She went quickly,” the woman said. “After you were shot, she made a second attempt to kill your sister, but this time a dog knocked her down. She fell badly, struck her head on a rock, and died instantly.” She hesitates a moment, then adds, “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, right. You don’t know me and you never knew her. What do you got to be sorry about?”
“Any death diminishes all of us. You can’t pluck a blade of grass without changing the landscape. It might not be immediately noticeable, but the change is there, nevertheless.”
“You’re not just talking ’bout Pinky, are you?”
I’m thinking ’bout all them proud horned horses we took down, me and Pinky and the rest of the pack. The unicorns with their blood like a drug. They were a hell of a lot more’n any blades of grass.
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