Exit Light

by Megan Hart

  She didn’t begin to know where to search for Ben. She knew his face, the smell of him, the weight of his mouth. She knew his first name, but not his last.

  He’d said he was what he’d always been, but what was that? A guide, an Eagle Scout? Even with the vastness of the Internet at her fingertips, she had no way of knowing where to begin, and though she forced herself to sleep every night and looked for him, the Ephemeros had gone dark and silent in the aftermath of what had been done to it. She was afraid to shake it more, afraid it would break for good.

  She didn’t see Martin again until the funeral. Henry Tuckens had no family who seemed willing to come forward to plan the simple service Tovah knew he’d have wanted. There hadn’t been much money to put toward a fancy casket or pay for a lunch after, but then again there hadn’t been many people to feed.

  A hard recent frost and the layer of snow meant Henry would be interred in the cemetery’s mausoleum until warmer weather allowed a grave to be dug, and the brief ceremony took place there rather than at the as-yet nonexistent grave site. Tovah had met Father Halloran a few times at the Sisters of Mercy. Henry had liked him.

  The crowd was small. Ava had made it, and Marco. A frail woman in an oversized coat hung toward the back of the group, chain-smoking. Tovah’s throat closed at the smell of the cigarettes. The woman, who wore Henry’s features with less grace than he had, didn’t linger. Tovah didn’t get to ask who she was.

  Now, the service finished and Henry’s body tucked away inside the vault, the crowd dispersed. Tovah thanked Father Halloran and slipped him an envelope that he took without comment. She turned to make her final goodbyes to her friend, grateful for the privacy she now had in which to weep.

  “Hello, Tovah.”

  At the sound of Martin’s voice, she turned. Martin, shoulders hunched inside a long black wool coat, had his hands shoved into his pockets. The chill wind had blushed his cheeks, and his eyes watered from the sting of it. He blinked at her.

  “Martin.” She didn’t know what else to say. She hadn’t seen him since the night Henry died. She’d seen lights on in his house and heard the putter of his car as he drove away in the mornings, but that was all.

  It felt wrong to cry against him, so she didn’t. Tovah forced her tears back and scrubbed her face with the handful of tissues she was never without these days. Her upper lip had rubbed almost raw. She looked a mess…and didn’t care, which said a lot about how she felt about Martin, if not exactly what.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d be here,” she said.

  Martin’s eyes remained shuttered, his face neutral. She didn’t blame him. She’d really taken him for a ride.

  “I had to come,” he said without further explanation.

  She didn’t deserve one, and the way he said it made her feel stupid for doubting him. “Of course. I’m sorry.”

  She was sorry for many things, the dissolution of their friendship not the least. He’d kissed her, and she’d let him. Had even encouraged him, then pushed him away without explanation, and what good reason could she really give him? “There’s someone else” didn’t really fit, did it, when she’d only ever met the other person in a world to which she couldn’t bring herself to return?

  “The service was very nice.” Martin looked around briefly. “I didn’t know Henry was a veteran.”

  “I don’t think he told many people.” Tovah had known only because of Spider. Henry had never mentioned it in the waking world.

  “He could have gone to a veteran’s hospital. Had benefits.” Martin looked around again at the cemetery’s rolling hills, the grass tipped with white. “He could have had better treatment than just a nice plot in a government cemetery.”

  “He had good treatment at the Sisters of Mercy.” Tovah’s quiet vehemence turned Martin’s head. “From you.”

  It was too cold for silence to hang between them, too frigid to stand and share a poignant moment. Neither of them moved. Tovah’s fingertips were getting numb.

  “Thank you,” Martin said at last. “That means a lot.”

  Why couldn’t it be Martin, she thought suddenly, fiercely. Why couldn’t she fall in love with this decent man who took such care of everyone around him and asked for none, himself?

  Why not me? Edward had asked, and she shuddered at the memory.

  “You’re cold. You should get inside.” Martin looked up the slight hill to the parking lot where her car and his sat side by side.

  “Yes. You too.”

  Together they walked up the sidewalk. The slope was just enough that she had to concentrate extra hard on every step. There was no ice, but she could still slip. Martin didn’t offer his arm, and Tovah didn’t ask for it.

  They had spent many moments without speaking and more than a few enmeshed in awkwardness, but it poked her more keenly today. This was her fault, and she didn’t know how to fix it. She didn’t know if she ought to try.

  Deep breath.

  “Would you…like to get some coffee with me?” The question wasn’t a new one, the act of asking it not real bravery.

  Martin looked at her without expression. “No.”

  Tovah flinched.

  Martin had pulled his car into the spot next to hers but in the opposite direction, so opening their drivers’ side doors put them within inches of one another. Martin slid into his seat without effort, while Tovah prepared to do the balancing act required for her to get behind the wheel without falling into her seat. She was glad for the focus, today. It kept her from looking at him.

  Martin’s hand stopped her door before she could close it, and she looked up at him, surprised. She hadn’t noticed him get out of the car. “Martin?”

  “What were you really trying to do?” he asked seriously. Intent. His gaze probed hers. “With Henry,” he added, saving her from guessing if he’d meant with him.

  “It’s complicated, Martin.” Complicated and pointless to try and explain, since Tovah wasn’t certain she’d ever do anything like it again.

  He nodded like her answer hadn’t surprised him. “Tell me, anyway.”

  A burst of wind pushed against him. The frigid sting slapped Tovah even within the shelter of her car. She could imagine how it felt to Martin, but he didn’t flinch. His bare hand gripped the cold metal of her car door. His fingers had turned red.

  “It has to do with…dreams.”

  He lost the neutrality he must have been forcing and pushed away from her car with a grimace she thought was disgust. A low noise burst from his throat. Not quite a laugh.

  “Jesus, Tovah! Do you think I’m an idiot? Is that what you think?” He turned, the blue of his eyes only a rim of color around the vast dark circles of his pupils. “Dreams?”

  She couldn’t get out of the car gracefully, but she struggled to do it anyway. Now it was her turn to grip the car door for support. Martin had turned, his hands linking behind his head like a man trying not to hit something.

  “No, I don’t think that! I never did. I told you it was complicated.”

  “And crazy!” Martin turned.

  Tovah caught a glimpse of blue shirt beneath the black wool coat and swallowed hard against the memory of seeing him for the first time. She didn’t refute his accusation of insanity.

  “You think I don’t know crazy?” Martin continued. “I’m a fucking psychiatrist, for fuck’s sake!”

  She’d never heard him swear, had never imagined such vulgarity from him. “I know that.”

  He whirled to look at her. He raked both hands through his hair, pushing the waves into spikes the wind further mussed. For a moment he pressed both palms to his temples, his teeth gritted, the perfect portrait of a man in pain. Then he took them away and shook himself, cracking his neck and rolling his shoulders.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  She couldn’t tell him the truth. Not the exact truth. “Henry was teaching me about lucid dreaming and…and astral projection. Out-of-body experiences.”

  It wasn’t quite a lie
.

  Martin stared. A fierce grin slashed his face and he turned from her again. “Astral projection. Very New Age.”

  “That’s a funny sort of attitude from you,” she snapped. “What makes that different from Healing Touch or whatever the hell you were trying with him?”

  “The results of Healing Touch and guided imagery can be medically and statistically proven.” Martin’s scowl was pure heat but did nothing to warm her.

  Anger prompted her to tell him everything, all about the Ephemeros, but common sense held her back. Her stomach clutched, and she had to swallow hard against her retort. She wasn’t really angry with Martin.

  “So you convinced me to give you drugs—you convinced me to give you a controlled substance, an action that could have cost me my job, not to mention my license! And for what?” Martin sneered. “Some half-assed foray into a bunch of metaphysical bullshit that did nothing? Nothing!”

  “What did you really think I was doing?” she shouted, wanting to advance on him but hanging on to the car door, instead. Keeping it between them. “Why’d you give me the drugs, then, Martin? What the hell did you think I was going to do?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Then why are you so angry with me?” she cried around the tears forcing their way up her throat like bile.

  “Because you told me to trust you, and I did,” Martin said. “And Henry still died, dammit. And you won’t tell me the truth.”

  “Martin—”

  He tossed up his hands, pushing her away without touching her. He went back to his car and got behind the wheel.

  “Martin!”

  He turned, saying nothing.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, not sure he could even hear her over the winter breeze.

  “Go back to sleep,” Martin said, and slammed his car door and drove away.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Tovah took the long way home. Backcountry roads fell quickly to darkness and she took them without the anxiety that would have plagued her in past months. Husked cornfields and empty cow pastures followed her on every side, but though she tried to get lost, eventually she found herself on a state road she recognized.

  Pulling into her driveway, fingers numb from gripping the wheel, she looked at her house. A single light burned in the kitchen, lit for Max’s benefit. He would need to go out. Be fed. She couldn’t forget about her faithful friend, no matter how much she wanted to forget about everything else.

  Once fed and returned from the yard, though, Max ignored her and went to sleep. The night wore on and Tovah found no solace in it. Nothing held her attention. She got up to get herself a drink of water she didn’t want and looked across the yard she shared with Martin.

  His light was on, as it usually was. She could see his outline as he stood at his sink, too. The shadow blurred as he moved away.

  It was late, but she could not sleep. She didn’t want to. Tovah dumped the water into the sink and watched it swirl down the drain. She set the glass on the drainer.

  Martin’s light was still on.

  Martin was a good man. It wasn’t fair, the way things had worked out between them. How having a choice had led her to put aside something that could be good, something right in front of her, to once again choose the slippery and ephemeral substance of dreams. She had learned a lesson, probably too late, but that didn’t stop her from shrugging into her coat again.

  Martin had been there for her in a way she’d never allowed anyone else to be. He’d seen everything about her, the real her, not some representation. Martin had laughed with her, shared himself, opened up. Martin was a good man, and if nothing else she owed him an apology.

  She did not allow herself to hesitate when rapping at the french door leading to his kitchen. From inside she heard the scrape of chair legs on the floor. The curtain didn’t even twitch before the lock snicked and the door edged open.

  “Hi,” she said. “Can I come in?”

  Silently, Martin nodded and held open the door for her. Also silently, he kicked aside a rag-tied throw rug that was in her path. His kitchen was warm, the cold air from outside still swirling around her, and he shut the door quickly behind her.

  Tovah hadn’t been in this house since Martin moved in. The previous owners had decorated it with country blue walls and red apple accessories, but he’d painted the walls stark white. A series of black-framed black-and-white photos adorned the wall and matched the black appliances.

  She wasn’t here to admire his interior decorating.

  “I have something to tell you,” she said.

  Martin nodded and gestured for her to sit. And there, at his bare white kitchen table, Tovah told him all of it. About her accident, the depression, how she met Henry and what he had told her. About the Ephemeros, and what she could do there. She told him about the past few months and the destruction that had threatened that world, and her part in it. Of her dream lover and all his pieces, and why she’d needed so desperately to get to sleep the night Henry’d died. She talked for a long time without a break or a word from him.

  “I know it’s a crazy story,” she said at last, her throat dry from talking. “You must think I’m insane.”

  Martin gave his head the barest shake. “I told you, Tovah. I know crazy.”

  His slow, easy smile made everything seem a whole lot better.

  “I’m sorry, Martin. For everything. I really like you.”

  “I really like you, too.”

  They stared across the table.

  “Do you think you’ll ever be able to get back there?” Martin asked her seriously. “To the Ephemeros?”

  “Everyone gets there,” she said.

  He nodded. “But do you think you’ll be able to…what did you call it? Shape? Do you think you’ll ever be a shaper again?”

  That question needed more thought before answering, but Tovah was weary of thinking on it. “I don’t know.”

  Martin nodded again, his face solemn. He reached for her hand and took it, cradling it palm up in his own. His fingers traced the lines there. His touch tickled, but she didn’t pull away.

  He didn’t look at her at first, but when he did, his gaze was intent. “Do you want to?”

  Tovah closed her fingers around his. “Dreams aren’t real.”

  He lifted her fingertips to his mouth. “No, sweetheart. That’s where you’re wrong.”

  They stared at each other. It was not the first time she’d catalogued Martin’s features or noted the blue of his eyes. Tovah remembered his kiss, and the times he’d seemed so uncomfortable in his skin, only to turn up with confidence a short time later. She remembered the way the grandfather clock had marked the time as Martin’s mouth had pressed hers.

  How the patients calmed around him.

  How the road had stretched out while she dreamed.

  How his mouth and hands had felt on her, how tenderly he’d cared for her wound, how he’d been there when she woke, screaming.

  And how the patients calmed around him.

  “Martin,” she said. “When’s the last time you dreamed?”

  His fingers tightened on hers, not quite painfully but promising it. “I told you, didn’t I? I don’t dream.”

  Tovah closed her eyes. “Oh, Martin.”

  “You can call me Edward, if you like that better. Martin’s my middle name. I was named for my grandfather. I use it now because I don’t like people to know I’m Eddie Goodfellow. The story was in a lot of papers. On the news. Once they know that, they think they know me.”

  She opened her eyes.

  Beneath her feet, the meadow. The stream that was always Ben’s and never hers. Spider’s flowers. All of it, there in Martin’s kitchen. She hadn’t shaped this because they weren’t in the Ephemeros. They weren’t asleep.

  “How?” she asked simply.

  Martin shrugged and looked at their linked fingers. “I was eight when they took me. Angie and Stan. They stopped me when I left the playground
. Told me my parents had sent them to pick me up from school. That my grandpa had to go to the hospital, and they were going to take me there. To meet my mom and dad.”

  He looked at her, then, blue eyes glittering with tears that didn’t slip down his cheeks. “I knew I wasn’t supposed to go. But…Angie knew the safe word. The one my mom had told me she’d give anyone who came for me, so I’d know it was okay.”

  Slowly, slowly, Martin’s kitchen disappeared and became the swirling gray of the Ephemeros. “How are you doing this?”

  He let go of her hand and got up. The table disappeared, though she still sat in the hard-backed chair. Martin paced. He scraped a hand over his hair, rumpling it. He stopped and shot her a look.

  “Sleep’s a funny thing, you know? An average person can survive up to six weeks without food. Maybe a week without water. But you know how many days you can go without sleep before it starts to kill you? Four days. That’s when the hallucinations start. In studies, sleep-deprived rats have died after a month. Humans take less than half that time to lose their fucking minds.”

  “How long has it been since you slept?”

  “They did things to me when I slept,” Martin said in a voice so broken it broke her, too.

  “How long, Martin?”

  “Long enough.” His shoulders slumped, then straightened.

  Mountains grew and lightning flashed. Thunder boomed, rolling across the meadow. Martin tipped his face to the sky, eyes closed and mouth open, arms outstretched, as the rain began to fall.

  It didn’t touch her. Tovah, on her chair, stayed dry. Her heart didn’t need to beat, her breath come short in fear—did it? Were they here, or were they there?

  “It’s how you helped them all, isn’t it? Your patients? You shaped them into calm.”

  He looked at her and swallowed a mouthful of rain. “I helped them!”

  “But what about all the people you hurt, too?” She didn’t raise her voice, didn’t accuse.