"Where did you go?” she asked, unaware for a moment that she was speaking aloud.
The sound of her own voice startled her.
If I’m going to start talking to myself in public, she thought, I should at least carry around a cellular phone so that people will think I’m talking to someone.
But she had been talking to someone. She’d been talking to her daughter and the red-haired woman and the Indian with the too-deep eyes who she was sure, just before he’d vanished, had been looking right at her as though...
For an instant she thought she’d closed her eyes and called up a memory of the Indian when he suddenly appeared almost at her feet. Then she realized he was really there. She jumped back, heartbeat drumming in her chest.
“You—” she began. “Where did...?”
The man regarded her with a clownish gaze, but there was something dark behind the mocking humor, a sense that he could see into whole worlds that she couldn’t, places hidden and strange.
“I guess this is just one of those days,” he said. “Did Jilly send you, too?”
What he was saying made no sense, so Lisa ignored it, concentrating instead on what was foremost in her mind.
“My daughter,” she said. “Where did my daughter go?”
The Indian regarded her steadily for a long moment.
“Am I supposed to know what you’re talking about?” he asked finally.
Lisa didn’t know what to think. Had she seen Nia sitting with this man and another woman, a dog lying by her daughter’s knee? Had they all disappeared? Or had she imagined it? Had the Indian been sitting here all along and she simply hadn’t seen him? But he was still holding the smudge-stick in his hand. While it was no longer burning, the scent of the smoke still hung in the air, faint, but unmistakable.
She sank slowly to the ground and sat facing him, legs tucked under her.
“No,” she said. “Of course not.”
“So are you here to have your fortune told?”
Lisa glanced at where the other fortune-tellers were set up near the War Memorial.
“Is that what you do?” she asked.
“It’s one of the things I do.”
And was one of the others making people vanish? she wondered. Did it also include appearing and disappearing out of nowhere like a Cheshire cat, with those spooky clownish eyes in place of the cat’s long-lasting grin?
“I’m looking for my daughter,” she said. “She’s run away from home.” She hesitated, then added, “I thought I saw her here, sitting with you and a red-haired woman. There was a dog, too. And smoke.” She pointed at his smudge-stick. “The smoke was coming from that—lots of it. More than should be possible, really.”
“You saw all that?”
Lisa sighed and nodded. “You all vanished and I was sure I’d imagined everything. But then you came back, except you must’ve been sitting there all the time and I just didn’t see you for some reason.”
“I must’ve been,” he agreed.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be telling you all of this. It’s just that I haven’t had much sleep in the last few days and it seems like one bad thing after another has been happening and I guess I can’t seem to shut up.”
She started to rise, but he put out a hand to stop her.
“You don’t know Jilly.” It was more a statement than a question.
“No. I’m sorry.”
Why was she apologizing? she wondered.
She started to get up again, and again he put out his hand. He didn’t touch her. Instead he seemed to simply press the air above her knee in such a way that it was too much of an effort to rise.
“Look, I really shouldn’t be taking up your time, Mr., uh...?”
“People call me Bones.”
She blinked for a moment at the odd name, but then thought for a moment about what he’d said. Not his name was Bones—people just called him that.
“I’m Lisa,” she said and automatically put out her hand.
He smiled, mostly with his eyes, then gravely reached over and shook.
God, Lisa thought. What am I doing? She had to be really screwed up if she was now going around introducing herself to street people.
“So why’d your daughter run away?” he asked.
“You don’t really want to hear my problems...”
“Normally I’d agree,” he said. “But this seems to be turning into a helping people kind of a day and if that’s the way the wheel’s turning, who am I to try to stop it or get off?”
The more he said, the less Lisa understood. It was as though they were having two separate conversations.
“So she ran away,” Bones prompted her.
“And I’ve no idea why. No, that’s not entirely true. Just before I came to the park today, a man I’d never seen before met me in the hallway of my building with a message from her. He said Nia was upset because I’m...um, dating a woman.”
“I see.”
Lisa was glad that someone did. She felt more as if she’d stumbled back into that fairy tale, because here she was telling a complete stranger things that she’d never spoken of to anyone before.
“I should’ve talked to her about it first, I guess,” she found herself saying.
“Or,” Bones said, “if it was troubling her that much, she could have brought it up.”
“This guy also said she thinks that I’m not me anymore—that there’s someone else living in my head.”
She gave him an apologetic look, knowing how ridiculous that sounded. But he merely regarded her seriously.
“Because of your dating women?” he asked.
“Just one woman,” Lisa replied. “And it was only our first date. And now she’s in the hospital and she might even die.” She rubbed her face with her hands. “Oh god, how can everything be so messed up?”
“Why don’t you start at the beginning of your story,” Bones said.
It made no sense—unless she really had been enchanted—but she found herself telling him about Julie and Nia, her ex’s phone call and the stabbing last night, the whole sorry mess of her life. Bones never interrupted her. He smoked hand-rolled cigarettes while she spoke, nodding encouragingly whenever she seemed to hesitate, but let her dictate how much she told him and in what order.
“This is so weird,” Lisa said when she’d finally run out of words.
Bones lifted his eyebrows questioningly.
“Talking to you like this. I mean, no offense, but I don’t usually run on at the mouth with strangers.”
“How does it make you feel?”
“Confused.”
Bones smiled. “Good answer.”
He paused to grind out a cigarette in the dirt, carefully stowing the butt away with the others he’d smoked while she was talking. Lisa waited, wondering, what came next? She should be going through the park, looking for Nia. Or she should return to the hospital. Sitting here was doing nothing to solve her problems.
Bones fixed her with that dark, troubling gaze of his. “You did see Nia here,” he said.
Whatever she’d been expecting him to say, this hadn’t been it.
“But that...that’s impossible...”
“That she was here,” he asked, “or that she appeared to vanish?”
Lisa clung to one word. Appeared. Her own gaze seemed to get swallowed by those dark eyes of his.
“She only appeared to vanish?” she asked.
She looked around, hoping to discover that Nia had been sitting with them all along—the same way Bones had, remaining unnoticed by her for some reason until she suddenly realized he was there. But except for a black squirrel, busily digging up something a few yards away, the two of them were alone under the oak’s spreading canopy.
“So to speak,” Bones said. “She’s stepped away into another place.”
“Stepped away...”
“But she’ll be back soon. You can wait with me if you like.”
“What do you mean by stepped away?”
Lisa asked.
“She’s in the spiritworld,” Bones explained. “Chasing after a friend of hers who got himself lost.”
Lisa was sure he was making fun of her, but while the mocking humor was still there in his eyes, he seemed completely serious about this.
“Maybe I’m just stupid,” she said, “or perhaps I didn’t hear you right, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Actually, when you came right down to it, she realized that had been the story of this whole conversation so far.
“Do you believe in heaven?” Bones asked. “You know, with all the angels and seraphim?”
“I guess.”
“Well, the spiritworld’s like that, but a bit more personal. You can’t see it from here, but unlike heaven, you can visit it some times. When you’re dreaming, say, or on a vision quest. It’s harder to get there from here in your physical body, but that’s not to say it can’t be done.” He smiled, but Lisa didn’t find it particularly comforting. “Case in point: your daughter and her friend.” He was trying to tell her that she was in a fairy tale, Lisa realized. So who did that make him? The kind stranger, offering help, or the big bad wolf? “You’re saying Nia’s in another world.”
Bones nodded.
“That’s right beside this one, only we can’t see it.”
He nodded again.
“And she was...following someone there.”
“That pretty well sums it up,” Bones told her.
Lisa had to struggle with this. It made more sense that she’d only imagined Nia and the red-haired woman disappearing. But then she thought she’d imagined Bones disappearing, too, and he’d come back. And if it was true...“Can you send me, too?” she asked. “To go find Nia?”
“I don’t think so.”
Not, he couldn’t, Lisa noted.
“Why not?” she asked.
He hesitated. “The spiritworld’s a big place—not an easy place to find somebody.”
“But that’s what you’re saying Nia’s done.”
The worry burrs were clinging all over her thoughts again. Without even thinking about it, she’d gone from disbelief to acceptance—with all the uncomfortable anxieties that called into play.
“Is she in some sort of danger?” she asked.
Bones hesitated again. “Not if you don’t follow her,” he said finally, seeming to choose his words with care. “Wait with me. It shouldn’t be long. Time doesn’t move the same there as it does here. She could be there a month and be back here only a few minutes after she left.”
Just like in the fairy tales.
“And she won’t be hurt?” Lisa asked. “She’ll come back okay?”
For a third time Bones was slow to respond.
“So long as she doesn’t do something stupid,” he said.
“Stupid? Like what?”
Bones sighed. “Like listen to her head instead of her heart. The spiritworld’s more of an intuitive place. Things happen because you expect them to happen. You meet who you expect to meet. But if you think about it too much, it throws the equation off.” He tapped the ground beside his knee. “This is the logical world, for all that it doesn’t seem to make sense half the time. You can’t bring the perceptions you use here and expect them to work there.”
“But she...she knows all that, right?”
“Oh, sure. Got herself a guide and everything.”
“You mean the red-haired woman,” Lisa said.
“Her name’s Zeffy.”
“And she’s the guide.”
Bones shook his head. “No. I was talking about Buddy—the dog.”
Lisa put her face in her hands. She felt like Alice, falling down the rabbit hole. Why was she even listening to this nonsense? She lifted her head to look at Bones. He smiled at her, then licked the gum on the paper of the cigarette he was rolling. Twisting off the ends, he dropped the excess tobacco into his pouch and stowed it away. Lit a match with a thumbnail and got the cigarette going, blue-grey smoke wreathing his head for a moment until a breeze took it away.
“You want one?” he asked.
Lisa shook her head. His cigarette didn’t smell like plain tobacco. There was a hint of something else in the smoke.
“Is that just tobacco?” she asked.
God, had he been sitting here smoking joints and spinning this bizarre story all along? But then she recognized the smell at the same time as he replied.
“Mostly tobacco,” he said, “with just a pinch of sweetgrass to keep the manitou smiling.”
“The manitou.”
“The little mysteries,” he explained. “Spirits.”
“And they’re, what? Watching us now?”
“They’re always watching,” he said. “And full of mischief. That’s why I offer them the sweetgrass and tobacco—to keep them from pulling tricks on me.”
Lisa swallowed. Either she was more tired and out of it than she thought, or everything was actually beginning to make some sense. The problem was, when you started to accept any of it, it all began to clamor for belief.
“Maybe I will have one of those cigarettes,” she said. “Just while we’re waiting.”
Bones pulled out his tobacco pouch and began to roll her a cigarette. He gave her another one of those smiles of his that almost seemed to be mocking, but not quite. The worry burrs clung thick to Lisa’s mind, clumps of them, brambled and prickly.
I hope I’m not going to regret this, she thought.
4 ZEFFY
This is a joke, right?” Zeffy said as they took in their surroundings. "I mean what kind of a spiritworld is this?”
Beside her Nia shook her head, obviously as confused as Zeffy was feeling herself.
They were sitting on a sandy public beach—Pacific Ocean, Zeffy decided, because the sun was making its way down toward the distant horizon. So they were somewhere in California. Unless the sun was just rising, but that didn’t feel right at all. She’d always been good with directions and the horizon, where the ocean and sky blended together into a hazy line, definitely felt westish.
All around them, tanned people were lying on towels or in beach chairs, sunbathing, reading, dozing, listening to portable radios and Walkmans. A volleyball game was under way over to their right, close to where a long concrete and wood pier thrust out into the ocean. There appeared to be a restaurant at the end of it, a one-story structure with a flat roof and mostly windows for its walls. Skateboarders and in-line skaters were practicing their moves where the pier descended at a mild incline into a parking lot filled with cars, the westering sun dazzling on their windshields and chrome. Beyond the lot were a small town’s worth of buildings stretching as far as she could see down either end of the beach. Mostly adobe or wood-frame, some brick, none taller than three stories. Some were obviously storefronts, others private homes.
So they were in some Southern Californian beach town. Only which one? And why? How had they ended up here instead of this spiritworld that Bones was supposedly sending them to?
“It’s still pretty amazing,” Nia said.
Zeffy turned back to her. Nia was stroking a nervous Buddy and obviously trying to project a nonchalance she couldn’t be feeling. Zeffy knew the feeling. You wanted to pretend everything was normal, even when you knew the world had gone completely off-kilter.
“What is?” she asked.
“Well, that he could send us all the way here, just like that.” Nia snapped her fingers. “This is like one of those places where the old Beats used to hang out, back in the fifties—don’t you think?”
Being reminded of how they’d gotten to this place didn’t make Zeffy feel any better. It just confirmed the sense that nothing was as it seemed any more and brought the queasiness in her stomach to the forefront.
Don’t think about it, she told herself. Soldier on.
“Yeah,” she said. “I suppose it does. But we were supposed to be going after Johnny and Max.”
“Maybe this is where they went?”
Zeffy sighed. “I don’t know.” She scanned the beach again before returning her attention to her companion. “We were supposed to keep them in mind when he sent us,” she said, “but I didn’t do a very good job of it. I started to, but then I got to thinking about Max’s guitars, more than Max himself. And I didn’t think of Johnny at all.”
“Me either,” Nia admitted. “I tried to, but then I got worried about how we were going to get back.”
“What do you mean?”
Nia put her arm around Buddy’s neck and stared out at the ocean. “We never asked Bones how we’re going to get back.”
Zeffy’s heart sank. How could they have been so dumb?
“No,” she said slowly. “We never did.”
“So what do we do now?” Nia asked.
“I guess finding out where we are would be a good start.”
Sitting close to them on an incredibly garish towel—all Kelly greens and yellows—was the proverbial Californian from a hundred beach movies: a young man with long blond hair and a deep tan wearing shades and a pair of brightly patterned cotton shorts. He was reading a paperback, his thumb across the title, but if the cover art that Zeffy could see was anything to go by, it had something to do with dwarves and large-breasted women in metal bikinis. “Excuse me,” she said.
He looked over to them, finger holding his place in the book.
“Could you tell me where we are?” Zeffy asked.
He shook his head. “The beach, man—where’d you think?”
“No, I meant what town?”
“Santa Feliz.” Smiling, he added, “You got any more of whatever it is you’re on?”
“We’re not on anything.”
“Whatever you say.”
Zeffy sighed. Of course it did sound ridiculous, asking where they were like this. But what else could they do?
“In California?” she asked, bracing herself for yet one more incredulous look.
“You got it. South of L.A. You need some help?”
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