by Roger Bruner
Jo, have you always been this stubborn and persistent? I yawned in her face with middle-of-the-night breath. “Trying to … wake up.”
I don’t know if she understood my mumbling or not, but I desperately needed to finish waking up. This nightmare had been the worst one yet, and it still had me trembling. Along with Jo’s efforts to wake me.
“Kim, speak to me. What’s wrong?” Jo wasn’t giving up. “Were you having a bad dream or what?”
Aleesha looked at me, but the shadows hid her expression. I had no doubt it was a mixture of concern over my nightmare and sympathy for my having to endure Jo’s inquisitiveness.
“Maybe she doesn’t feel like talking about it, Betsy Jo.” She drew Betsy Jo out in a convincing Southern drawl. As if addressing Jo by her full name hadn’t been an adequate warning to hush.
Her teeth shone extra white in the dim light, making her resemble an angry wolf baring her fangs to protect her young. Maybe she didn’t mean to come across that heavy-handed, but—if Jo’s defensive scowl was any indication—that
was how she took it.
“She’s my friend.” Jo’s tone of voice reminded me of Anjelita’s reaction to the other children in Santa María when they got too close to me without going through her. “My best friend.”
She looked at me for confirmation, but this latest nightmare had drained me too much to worry about who was whose best friend, much less to respond.
She looked at Aleesha and pointed her thumb at me. “She wouldn’t keep anything from me.” Then she shifted her eyes back to me. “Would you? Go ahead. Tell her, Kim.”
I blinked. I couldn’t take Jo’s babbling until I finished waking up, and I was still trying to fight my way out of the creepy never-never land that held me as completely captive as if a fifty-foot, woman-eating plant were sitting on my stomach.
“Jo,” Aleesha said and then stopped. From her tone, she might have been a mother about to address a selfish, petulant child. “What kind of person is more concerned about secrets than about a good—a best—friend having another horrible nightmare?”
Aleesha, I hope you didn’t say what I think you said. Expect problems if you did.
Jo couldn’t have looked more shocked if somebody had slapped her in the face with a live flounder.
“You’re just jealous because Kim and I are better friends than the two of you.”
I might have been struggling to gain control of my consciousness, but I was alert enough to recognize that Jo’s comeback was totally-off-the-wall inappropriate. I was shocked; I’d never heard her express such jealousy and possessiveness.
Did she think her lifelong role as my guardian angel gave her the right to take control of my life? Perhaps even to try living her life through mine?
Aleesha was undoubtedly rolling her eyes. Since I couldn’t see her face clearly, I assumed Jo couldn’t, either. That was a good thing.
Not that I gave two cents about Jo’s feelings right now. Her attitude had angered and hurt me—just as it had when she failed to come over right after Mom’s death. Forgiveness was the last thing on my mind.
So help me if she didn’t do a double take before Aleesha or I could respond.
“Another horrible nightmare?”
No! Why did you pick now to pay attention to Aleesha?
“What’s she talking about, Kim?”
“She … Aleesha knows that I’ve had a couple of nightmares recently.” I didn’t want to discuss it; but the can of worms was open, and I couldn’t wiggle the lid back onto Pandora’s box to save my life, to mix clichéd metaphors rather pathetically.
“But you didn’t tell me about them.” Jo sounded like she was going to start crying.
No, I didn’t, and I’m not going to now.
She didn’t wait for an answer. “Has this been happening just since Terri’s death?”
Why can’t you say “Miss Terri” like Aleesha? I hate it when you refer to my parents by their first names, especially since Mom’s death. But that’s not relevant.
Not as relevant as her being so on-target that I couldn’t hide a guilty expression.
“So you knew …?” Jo said to Aleesha. I hoped I didn’t detect a catfight brewing.
I puffed a little sigh of relief when—instead of saying anything else to Aleesha—Jo looked out the window and started talking in a low voice. To herself? Maybe. To God? Uh …
“She told her dream to …” She mumbled the last couple
of words, but I doubted that it was a compliment. Nope. Definitely not talking to God.
She seemed to have forgotten for the moment that Aleesha and I were still there. “Kim told Aleesha about her nightmares, but she didn’t tell her best friend.”
Then she came back from wherever she’d been lost in space and looked at me again. “So, what was your nightmare about?”
What? I guess you weren’t paying attention when Aleesha said, “Maybe she doesn’t feel like talking about it. “
“Which one?” I pictured Jo as the Phantom of the Opera and me as Raúl. We were dueling over Christine’s fate—the continued privacy of my dreams—in a fight to the death. Although I feinted unpredictably to fend off her jabs, I was wearing down fast.
My question appeared to catch her off guard. “The first, uh, no, this one … uh, how many have there been?”
I gave up. I couldn’t hold her off any longer. I just hoped she wouldn’t say anything to Dad.
“Three.” Maybe if I left out the pertinent details. “In tonight’s, I dreamed it was Good Friday. The crucifixion was going on. I had a better view than the people with front-row seats, although—”
“Huh?”
“You might say I was on stage. I was one of the thieves being crucified with Jesus.”
“Oh.”
Aleesha didn’t usually remain quiet very long, but I sensed her stillness. She was like that when listening intently, and that habit was comforting. I was counting on her ability to read between the lines. And on her prayers while I continued.
“Anyhow, the other thief had been talking to Jesus. He’d asked for salvation, and Jesus told him he’d have a place in God’s kingdom that day.”
I sighed. Do I really have to tell you the rest? Too late to back out now.
“Instead of cursing Jesus like the other thief at Jesus’ actual crucifixion, I asked for redemption, too.
“But instead of giving me the assurance He’d given the other thief, Jesus looked at me and laughed. Oh, how He laughed. He never would have laughed at any repentant sinner that way in real life, but that doesn’t matter in a dream. Then He said, ‘Don’t you see that sign above your head?’ I couldn’t angle my head well enough to read it. ‘It details your crime,’ Jesus said. ‘Your unforgivable sin.’
“I kept pleading with Him. I repented of every sin I could think of, and that took hours, but at the end I was no better off than at the beginning. Jesus had already forgiven me for all of those piddly sins, but my own personal unforgivable sin hung over my head like a guillotine, and I knew there was no hope.
“Even though I was high in the air with breezes blowing all around, I could feel the fires of hell burning closer and closer. The smell was so rancid I started coughing. I couldn’t stop. The devil was trying to grab me. He couldn’t quite reach me, but he was getting closer each time he swung his arms toward me. In another few seconds, he would have been close enough. That’s what you helped wake me up from.”
Aleesha dropped down beside me, and I put my head on her lap. She understood what I’d meant and how real it had seemed. She stroked my hair while I sobbed endlessly.
Jo’s face was one gigantic question mark. She must not have known what to do. It was too late for her to try to hold and comfort me the way Aleesha had done. The chances of her understanding how terribly that dream tormented me were slim, and she didn’t stand the slightest chance of comprehending its significance.
“I need a breath of fresh air,” I said before grabbing my coat
and pulling it on over my nightclothes. I slipped into my furry kitty-cat slippers and opened the door.
Since Jo had never tolerated cold weather well, I didn’t think she’d follow me. That was my plan, anyhow.
Sure enough. “Take care you don’t freeze out there,” she said before lying down again as if nothing had happened.
I caught a motion from Aleesha—four wiggly fingers flashing in my direction. She’d join me as soon as Jo went back to sleep.
I couldn’t see my watch, but I doubted that three minutes passed before the door opened and Aleesha came outside. We went inside one of the units we’d already cleaned and painted. The inside temperature must have been thirty degrees warmer than outside, even without heat. We sat down on the floor and turned off our flashlights.
“Kim,” Aleesha said, “that friend of yours is one sick puppy.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with her. She’s never acted this way before.”
“Has she ever had emotional problems?”
“She’s a teenage girl,” I said. “She has hormones. Why?”
“Something’s bugging the daylights out of her.”
“You, maybe?” I wasn’t trying to be funny. “Our friendship? The way she was talking—”
“Those things are too obvious, Kim. They’ve been that way for months now. But this is new. I wonder if something’s happened to her since we’ve been here?”
I shrugged. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. Bad news, maybe? But she sounded so happy in the van. So enthusiastic. She’d done a one-eighty from the way she acted at supper, and now she’s done another one.”
“What should we—?”
“I’m going to talk to Mr. Rob.” Aleesha turned and headed for the door.
“He gets up early.” She stopped and faced me again. “You can catch him then.”
“I’m going to talk to him now. I’m not sure this can wait.”
chapter thirty-three
Graham O’Reilly stood in the doorway of his apartment, gazing in the direction of a sunrise that had yet to appear. His arms and legs were lost in a pair of red flannel pajamas that billowed like sails in the early morning breeze, making them look big enough to fit a man three times his size and propel the heaviest of the old-time clipper ships.
Perhaps they’d been a gift. From someone who didn’t know how small Graham was. He surely hadn’t purchased something so ill fitting for himself. That sleepwear made him look thinner than me, if that was possible. But at least I didn’t look gaunt.
I wondered if he’d lived a particularly hard life. I couldn’t imagine ever getting to know him well enough to find out.
Graham wore no robe, and I tried to keep from wondering how he kept his pajama bottoms up. Gross! I didn’t want to imagine a strong gust of wind suddenly whipping them to his knees.
“Morning, Graham,” I said as I pulled my coat together in the front and started fiddling with the zipper. “Aren’t you freezing?” I almost felt guilty for wearing such a warm coat when the chill had turned him such an icy blue.
My hands felt so numb I couldn’t fit the ends of the zipper together. I put my mittens on, but then I couldn’t feel what I was doing. I took them off again. Even those few seconds of warmth had helped, though. I zipped my jacket all the way to my mouth without any further problem and pulled the hood over my head. I didn’t care much whether it messed up my hair or not.
I didn’t pull the drawstring, though. A too-tight hood might keep me from hearing this too-soft-spoken man. If he ever returned my greeting, that was.
He took his time, and when he finally spoke, he barely moved his lips. “Like Paul. Content whatever.”
I had to think for a few seconds before remembering what I’d said, and I interpreted his answer to mean he was comfortable in the cold. Or accepting of it. Or maybe just unwilling to complain about it.
“Thank you again for walking me down Red Cedar Lane last night.” I hesitated and then added, “Even if I didn’t know you were there.” I chuckled gently to let him know that hadn’t bothered me.
“Young ladies. Not out alone. Not after dark.”
I started to say, “You shouldn’t have worried. I would have been fine by myself. I know some major self-defense moves. Besides, nobody else was out there.” But something told me he would have disagreed strongly in his nearly wordless way, and I didn’t want to start even the smallest of disagreements with a man I was determined to get to know better.
Maybe even to like, to enjoy, and to appreciate. And for more than just his exceptional cooking skills.
“I suppose not,” I said with what I hoped was enough conviction to avoid provoking a reprisal. “I needed to pray, though, and that was the best place to do it.”
“I know.”
Something about his tone sounded … strange. Mysterious. Unsettling.
And what did he know? That I’d needed some private time with God? He must have overheard me tell Dad that. Or had he learned from his own experiences that Red Cedar Lane was a good place to pray?
“I like to be by myself when I pray,” I said.
“In closet.” Okay. So maybe he disagreed about Red Cedar Lane.
I stood there watching my breath and pondering the applicability of his statement to someone like me who was spending two weeks in a place that didn’t have closets. I suppose I could have prayed in one of the units we’d already cleaned out, but why fret about Graham’s admonition, anyhow? The man was obviously a bit too conservative for my taste.
“You. Pray aloud.” Huh? How did he …?
But, of course. He’d walked beside me almost the whole way from the two-lane road to the first building on the prison grounds. He’d heard me praying. He knew everything I’d prayed about. Including …
“I pray out loud whenever I’m by myself.”
“Never alone.”
“I meant whenever I’m alone with God.”
He didn’t respond. His eyes were on the sunrise, which was just starting to paint the skies above the mountains to the east. As far as I could tell, he hadn’t taken his eyes off the horizon since I came outside.
“Gorgeous sunrise,” I said. Although the brilliant colors erased the stark darkness of the mountains and made me feel like falling to my knees in worship, I needed to entice Graham to talk. “I guess you’ve seen a lot of sunrises in your lifetime. You’re what—sixty, sixty-five, seventy?”
Now that I saw him this close in daylight, he looked more like seventy-five or eighty.
“Seventy. I think.”
“I think” should have raised a flag, but I was too busy making a rough estimate of the number of sunrises in seventy years of life to dwell on it. He’d lived through maybe 25,000 sunrises—if I could still do some basic math without a calculator.
But before I could try to impress him with that figure, he
spoke again. “Long time, no sunrises.”
“What? You mean the sun hasn’t risen on a regular basis for a long time?” Nobody would be strange enough to say something like that. Not even Graham.
“Haven’t seen.”
“Why not?”
He didn’t say anything at first. “Now see. Six months. Seven.”
Huh? He hadn’t answered my question, but apparently he hadn’t seen any sunrises until a few months ago. At the rate this conversation was going, I hesitated to question him further for fear it might slip from first gear back into neutral. And ultimately into reverse.
I decided to take one more chance. “Is there a reason for that?”
He seemed to hesitate. Actually, he looked like he wanted me to shut up, leave him alone, and let him enjoy the sunrise in solitude.
“Yes.” He didn’t offer to explain, and I’d already used up all the chances I dared to take. I wished Aleesha had been outside with me. She was better at probing than I was. Not that I thought she would have learned any more from Graham than
I had.
“Jo troubled,”
he said.
Oh, were you hanging around outside our unit last night eavesdropping?
“You troubled,” he added.
Continuing to focus on the sunrise, he missed seeing the flush that flooded my face. How did he know that? And how much did he know?
“I troubled. Same you.”
I nodded, but he didn’t see me.
“Guilt. No escape.”
I wanted to run away. I didn’t need some pathetic old man to confront me about my guilt. I already understood it far better than I wanted to, thank you very much.
But I forced myself to say, “Uh-huh.”
What was he trying to say about my guilt? And how did he know about it?
You dummy. He overheard your prayer. You prayed aloud, and you covered every concern under the sun. You prayed about the prison ministry. You prayed about Jo. You prayed about your own guilt. He must have even heard you praying about—
“Guilt. Stays forever.” A tear trickled down his cheek, and I wondered how he would react to a hug.
There’s bad timing, and there’s worse timing, but Aleesha’s arrival outside before I could respond to Graham or hug him was the worst timing of all. I felt like I’d just started making a connection with him, even though I’d never spoken with anyone who was so difficult to talk with or who raised more questions than he answered.
“Having fun, you two?” Aleesha said. “Where’s your robe, Graham? Aren’t you afraid of being arrested for indecent exposure?”
Although he appeared to ignore her at first, his head jerked—possibly involuntarily—somewhere in the middle of Aleesha’s greeting. I wondered which word had been the trigger.
I thought about motioning for her to leave Graham and me alone, but I changed my mind. The spell—such as it was—had been broken.
“So how does Rob look in the middle of the night when he hasn’t had a chance to put on his makeup yet?”
Although Aleesha giggled at my question, Graham’s expression remained unchanged. Passive. Unemotional. I no longer had his attention—or his interest.
