by Toby Neal
Jolene laughs in embarrassment, but I can easily see my handsome brother and sister-in-law hurtling to the highest office in the land as they spearhead a new government.
And as I put the rack of syringes filled with precious fluid away in a cooler, I’m proud of the part I’ve played, too. We are better together.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Roan
Phil and I ride all day, headed toward distant mountains until darkness engulfs the plain. We sleep under the stars with our horses hobbled nearby. Waking at dawn we continue, entering the mountains as the sun reaches its apex. Our pace slows as we navigate the virgin wilderness.
Phil is leading me right back toward the Haven. Does he know that?
I don’t ask where we are going, or when we will get there, or how he will resolve my dilemma. Faith in Phil is the only thing I have left to hold onto.
Because I’m dangerous. Deadly. And quite possibly, the darkness has already won.
As the sun sets, casting a soft orange glow over the thick forest, we reach a cliff and Phil dismounts. “We’re staying here tonight?” I ask.
Phil grins and shakes his head. “Now we climb.” He reaches into his saddlebag and pulls out ropes and harnesses.
“What?”
“I got into climbing after you went away.” He begins to unspool the nylon rope. “Helps me think.”
I can understand that.
We leave the horses and Shadow at the bottom of the cliff. Shadow’s anxious whining reaches me for the first hour, but it fades away, as does everything but the rock face.
Darkness falls. Phil climbs before me, wearing a backpack heavy with supplies, placing the holds and looping the rope through to make sure we don’t fall.
We reach a ledge about ten feet wide. The cliff continues above us, and in the side of the mountain is a dark cleft entrance. The moon is high and my fingers, back and calves ache, but my head is clear of all doubts. The valley spreads below me, forest giving way to desert. Light and dark, summer and winter, man and woman, water and sand.
Phil silently helps me out of my harness and coils the ropes, leaving them at the edge of the cliff. Slipping off his backpack, Phil heads toward the cave entrance.
He lights a lantern already hanging on the wall. The interior blooms into light.
Paintings emblazon the walls and ceiling, making me gasp. Bison roam, rendered in ochre, black, and red. Hunters on horseback chase them off cliffs. Village life is captured: men and women working side by side. A world passed into darkness surrounds me, seeming to move with life in the flickering light.
Phil begins to chant—a rhythmic and hypnotic sound without words, but infused with deep meaning. He builds a small fire, throwing aromatic herbs onto it. The smoke rises straight to the ceiling, escaping through some unseen vent, filling the cave with the rich scents of sage, tobacco, and something dark and wild I can’t place.
Phil gestures for me to sit down on the stone floor. He packs a pipe and passes it to me with a lighter. I light it and breathe in pure tobacco smoke. My whole body tingles from the rush of nicotine, making my head spin.
He passes me a flask. “Drink,” he says. “Drink it all.”
I place the metal container to my lips. The liquid inside is harshly bitter and grainy. I almost gag, the nasty taste mixed with the heavy tobacco threatening my stomach. Phil touches my forehead gently, and I lie back onto the stone floor. Above me the bison run, the hunters chase, the women dance…and then it all slowly fades to black.
Darkness encircles me, wraps me in a void filled with presences: some loving and welcoming, some malignant. What is my essence? What am I to those who touch me?
I am floating through a black sea of invisible jostling bodies, and as I bump them, I can feel their essential being. I am walking in the land of shadows.
Fear roars through me, and it draws the malignant spirits like blood in the water attracting sharks. Am I one of them?
They are smothering me, burying me, grinding me down as they crush in around me.
I fight, but I have no arms. I kick, but I have no legs. I scream, but I have no voice.
Phil’s voice reaches me through the terror. “Roan. Winterboy. I have claimed you and you belong to the light. The darkness has no hold on you.”
The fear rolls away like fog moving over water, taking the evil presences with it.
I came to this shadow land to find a new purpose beyond being the Gray Man, to answer the burning questions: who am I? What am I here for? Have I become evil?
The first days after I left the Haven were like this: moving, but with no destination. Running, but with no goal. Living, but with no purpose.
A glint in the darkness, the far-off glimmer of a tiny candle that grows brighter and brighter. Something is attracting me like a magnet, and I trust that force. I trust what Phil said: that I belong to the light. I can’t yet believe it myself, but Phil’s word is enough right now.
The glow increases until walls rise around me. Slowly, like watching a photo develop in fluid, I realize that I’m in my cabin outside the Haven.
The back bedroom space is filled by the wooden bed frame Grandfather built. The mattress I stuffed with corn husks and topped with a denim pad filled with down from birds I hunted is covered with the rabbit skin mantle I worked all winter to make.
The little potbellied stove is going, melding with the candlelight and casting a golden light so beautiful it tightens my chest.
I am naked, but perfectly warm. My body is solid and whole, emitting a radiance. The many tiny wounds and scars that are such a familiar part of me are healed.
My body is as it is meant to be, and never can be on the physical plane. I feel so good.
The candle that drew me here rests on the wooden table, and as I look at it, the light intensifies, suffusing the room in splendor. Everything turns to gold and melts into pure light as a powerful presence fills the space.
Awe rises up in me, and I drop to my knees. There is no other response possible before such grandeur, such pure power.
The presence I feel is love.
Love. Just love. Overwhelming, pure, universe-creating love.
From the beginning of time I was loved. Created in love, born in love, I am love.
The atoms that make up my cells change to a new frequency. I express nothing but this insane, overwhelming love that binds the universe together.
Bathed in rapture, I recognize who I am and what I will always be: loved, lover, loving.
I relax into trust and peace.
The cabin slowly coalesces again, forming back into shapes, objects appearing, gelling into familiarity. I am a body again, on my knees, in an old cabin where I spent many years living under an abusive hand.
But when I lift my head and open my eyes, I see it anew.
I remember the anger and the hurt behind it, experience the hardness, and know it as scabs formed over wounds not allowed to heal. I am profoundly changed, and I am healed, now.
The door of the cabin opens and Lucy stands there. She too is naked.
She is perfection, her shape molded out of light, her eyes beaming with the joy and love mirrored in my heart at the sight of her.
All of the falsehoods are stripped away, and we recognize each other as we always have. But now I am healed and whole, capable of receiving Lucy’s love. I can give her all the love that is in me, too, an untapped well that has existed forever.
Regret for all of the lost time, for all of the needless suffering I inflicted on us both, wells up and is extinguished.
When I take her in my arms she is solid. Real. But when I bend my head to whisper her name, there is no sound…though my breath stirs the glossy black curls beside the shell of her ear.
I don’t need words to express my love for her.
I fall to my knees, and slide my hands up the radiant skin of her legs. I long to taste strawberries again.
She fists her hands in my hair, and opens her legs for me, and I drink
at her sacred spring.
Her rapture suffuses the space with silent music.
She draws me up and wraps herself around me, sweet as a honeysuckle vine climbing a stone wall. Her touch leaves a glowing, golden trail on my skin. She is mine, and I am hers.
I have Lucy in my arms like I’ve always wanted. I lift and she wraps her legs around my hips. I walk us forward to lie on the soft furs that I prepared with her in mind, and this very fantasy in my dreams: Lucy on her back before me, that lush body mine to enjoy, her ebony hair spread on the pillows.
I kiss her mouth, moving down her body, and each spot where my lips touch, her skin gleams with a fire from within. She is so sensitive, so responsive, so completely attuned to me, and I to her. We are meant to be together.
I trail my lips and fingers down to her navel, and I kiss her there…and then raise my head to look at the spot. The glow does not fade, like it did elsewhere.
There’s a light deep in her belly, and it pulses—a tiny beacon. When I touch my lips to her flesh, it brightens at my nearness, flickering hot and leaping with its own light that recognizes me.
Lucy is pregnant.
A wave of joy crashes over me and I throw my head back to shout my happiness, my love for her, for this new life. But in this universe there is no sound, only vision and sensation, and the universe reverberates my feelings back to me…to us.
And to the tiny life we created.
Lucy’s eyes glimmer with tears, her mouth forming silent words: “I love you.”
“And I love you!”
She laughs, understanding what I’m yelling, even in the silence. I’m not holding anything back anymore.
When I surge into her, it’s a claiming, it’s the oneness I’m destined to share with this woman. Before the foundation of the world we were one.
Our child is sheltered between us, love binds us together, and not even death could tear us apart.
I embrace the truth of this vision and know that real life will be exactly this.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Lucy
This is so different than the dreams I’ve had for the past two months. Instead of that steel door slamming, I am surrounded by love, enthralled by desire, filled by Roan, and infused with joy.
His fingers have a bruising grip on my hips as we rock together in an eternal rhythm.
What started out as a slow seduction has become a wild taking, and Roan is giving himself to me and finally claiming what I’ve offered, holding nothing back.
The cabin glows gold, and the fire in the stove is a warm caress. The rabbit fur blanket sliding up and down my back is softer than the finest silk. Even though this is just a dream, it is so glorious, so good, so nourishing.
My heart—my Roan—is back in my arms.
I grip his waist and bite down on his shoulder so that he growls as pleasure spirals through me, not a lightning strike but a thickening mist. Slowly, the fog coalesces, forming into a cyclone, wind whipping through me, taking me higher and higher.
“Lucy, I love you.” The dream is silent, but Roan’s voice echoes in my mind. Love radiates off his body lending power to the storm inside me. Love, unity, and gratitude surround us.
The cloud twists tightly into a tornado, the source of my pleasure unstoppable, capable of great destruction but also life-giving: rain to a parched landscape, lightning to an overgrown forest, Roan and me.
I scream his name, not with my voice but with my very soul, and Roan vibrates through the room, out into the forest, spreading across this Scorched earth.
He holds my cheeks, our gazes meeting as he continues to move inside of me. Our eyes connect us, and that blue-black glint is gone, replaced with the openness of space.
The cloak of despair, the weight of history has lifted.
Roan is free because of love.
His gaze holds mine, and I see pleasure overtake him; his eyes flutter closed, his mouth covers mine as he fuses with me…and I wake.
I wake in the basement of the Haven, in my empty room. The gray walls are stark, the bedding twisted, and a pulse of nausea moves through me.
I roll out of bed, caught up in the sheets, but make it to the toilet.
Every morning I throw up.
I don’t mind. The love I have for the life growing inside of me is so intense—like the love I have for Roan, but more elemental.
I love Roan for the man he is, for his past and his future. I love the baby because it’s a part of me, a part of Roan, and all possibility. I’ll do whatever it takes to shepherd my child safely into this world.
I sit back, resting against the wall for a moment just breathing, remembering Roan’s voice in my head, and immersing myself in that pure love we shared.
My knowing whispers to me that it is real…but my sore heart is afraid to believe.
Mama is in the kitchen, scrubbing a pan. The scent of bacon still lingering in the air brings on another wave of illness, but I push through it.
She looks over her shoulder as I cross to the cabinet and doesn’t smile. “You slept in.” It’s like an accusation. What she’s trying to say is you’re an unwed single mother and a sinner. But she can’t, because I’d freak out on her, as would any one of my brothers…even Luca, the biggest Catholic of us all, knows I don’t need judgment.
It’s the apocalypse, and the fact that I’m not married is the least of my problems.
“Good morning to you, too.” I get out a box of saltines and nibble on the edge of one.
“You’ll need to eat more than that if you want your baby to come out strong.”
Anger rocks through me. “You know what Ma? I don’t need to hear that from you. I’m sick, and doing the best I can. What are you trying to do, make me feel crappier?”
Mama drops the pan and turns around wiping her hands on her apron, and then placing them sternly on her hips glaring over at me. “I guess you should have thought of that before you…” She nods up and down gesturing to my body. “Did whatever you did.”
I put down the saltine. “You need to change your attitude about this. I know you think I’m some kind of slut.” She doesn’t answer but her eyebrows raise, her mouth tightening. “This baby was created in love. I love Roan and he loves me. And I love my child.” I place my hand protectively over my stomach.
“Where is Roan then? If he loves you so much, where is he?” Her voice is bitter acid.
“I don’t know, Ma. Thanks for pointing it out though.” My throat tightens. I’m on the verge of tears, again. I’m always on the verge of crying these days. But I’m also just done with the guilt that she’s been throwing my way. “I’m going out today.”
My mom cocks her head at the change in subject. “What do you mean?”
“I’m going outside the boundary walls. I’m going for a walk.”
“That’s not safe,” she sputters. This will be the first time I’ve left since being taken by Kane and his men.
But I need to get out of this place.
My dream left me nourished, but my mom is dragging me down. Guilt. Sin. Mistakes.
There is none of that between Roan and I—there’s just pure love. And if I go to his cabin, I can pretend we’re together, just like the dream. “All the skinheads around here are dead, you heard the Sheriff tell us that yourself last night.”
Mama’s cheeks pinken at the mere mention of the man. She turns back to the sink, picking up the pan again. “Talk to your brothers. I don’t think it’s safe.”
“They said they got them all, the mine area is emptied out, and we are perfectly safe. For now.”
She keeps her back turned to me and just shakes her head. Deep sadness brews inside her, heavy despair an almost crushing weight. My heart pumps harder as the knowing tells me she’s afraid for me to have to face all the burdens and challenges she did, raising a child alone.
I cross the room and put a hand on her shoulder. She bursts into tears. My strong, capable mother is crying because of me.
“Mam
a, you really should be proud.” She puts the pan down and wipes her hands on her apron, bringing it up to her face and swiping at the tears. “You raised seven kids, and they all turned out great. We’re all independent and functional.”
Mama laughs on a sob. I open my arms and she turns, leaning into me. I rub circles on her back as she trembles. “You did an amazing job, but we’re all grown up now. I’m an adult woman, a mother. I know what’s best for me. What’s best for my baby. You can trust me.” She nods against my shoulder still crying even as the weight on her eases. “Your job is done.”
She steps back enough that she can look me in the eye and gives me a teary smile. “One thing you’ll learn, Lucille, is that a mother’s job is never done.”
I pack a small bag and leave through the back hatch. My feet carry me through the woods, onto the path that leads to Roan’s cabin.
That’s where we were in the dream; I know it even though I’ve never seen the interior.
Will our child have this strange knowing?
The cabin’s grass is long, the water pump at the center almost hidden by it. I wade through the weeds up onto the porch. There’s a padlock on the front door. I close my eyes and think of Roan, what he would do. The knowing pulls me over to an empty clay pot beside the porch. I lift it to discover a rusted key. The padlock opens for me and the door creaks on its hinges as it swings wide.
The interior is dim and dusty, but cozy.
I put down my bag and open the shutters, then pull up the front windows. It’s warm enough that I don’t need a fire, but I take some of the wood off the porch, placed there by my love’s hands, and get a blaze going in the potbellied stove because I want it to be as close to the dream as possible.
The fire crackling, I finally look over at the bed in the back corner, shrouded in shadows. I take a deep breath and walk over to it.
Relief surges when I see the almost complete rabbit fur blanket. Now that I see it I know that dream was real.
Roan came to me in my dream. And he will come back to me here, in this place, I just know it.
