For the first time in what seemed like forever, she felt at peace.
58
Steve
One moment, they’re in the air—Si’tala with her angel raven wings carrying the woman that I now recognize from back when Sadie was putting the hate on me. Lana or Leila or something. The next, Si’tala vanishes and the woman’s dropping toward the ground. Luckily, it’s only a dozen feet or so before she hits. I brace myself to catch her, but who am I kidding? Gravity’s not on my side and I’m not as strong as one of the ma’inawo.
She hits me hard and all I manage to do is break her fall and get the wind knocked out of me. I lie there trying to catch my breath for a long moment, the woman sprawled across me. I’d move her off, but I can’t muster the energy. She’s the first to stir. She slowly pushes herself away, then sits beside me, a stunned look in her eyes. I still don’t feel like I can do much more than lie here on the ground. Finally I manage to suck in a tortured breath. And another.
The sound draws her glazed eyes.
“You…okay?” I manage.
I watch her eyes clear until her gaze focuses on me. “I just had the weirdest dream…” she starts. Her voice trails off as she takes in where she is. The mountaintop, the endless sky. Me, sprawled on the ground by her knees.
“I’m not dreaming, am I?” she says.
I move my head back and forth.
She gets a puzzled look. “But I’m not freaking out. So I must be dreaming. Especially with you in it.”
I get my hands under me and work myself into a sitting position. The world does a slow whirl before it settles again.
“You’re not dreaming,” I tell her.
“I have to be.”
I don’t bothering repeating myself. Instead, I wait for her to accept what she already knows.
“God, this is so weird,” she says finally.
“No argument there.”
She gives another look around us. “Where are we?”
“Inside my head—at least that’s what Si’tala told me. Or we’re in some part of the otherworld that I access through being inside my head. It’s kind of confusing.”
“And Si’tala is?”
“The winged woman who just saved your ass.”
She gives a slow nod. “Right. Winged woman. We’re inside your head. Nothing weird about any of this.”
“How’d you end up falling from the sky?” I ask.
“Oh, the usual way,” she says. “There was a woman floating above her hospital bed. When she started turning, I tried to stop her from pulling out her breathing tubes and IV, but as soon as I touched her, I showed up here.” She pauses to look upward. “Or rather there.”
Her gaze comes back to mine. “None of this freaks you out? I feel like I should be a total wreck, but I’m stupid calm.”
“I fell down the rabbit hole a couple of days ago,” I tell her. “After a while you get to the point where nothing really surprises you anymore.”
She lifts a quizzical eyebrow.
“Well, before I found myself here,” I say, “I met a dog that can turn itself into a full-sized helicopter.”
“That’s imposs—” She cuts herself off. I can completely sympathize.
“The woman in the hospital bed,” I say. “Was that your friend? The blonde you were with when I met you earlier?”
“You mean Marisa? No. It was your friend. Aggie.”
I nod. Of course it was. I point toward where Aggie’s floating just out of sight below the lip of the plateau. “Go have a look,” I tell her.
She stands up, then goes pale and sits right back down. “I don’t understand,” she says, hands on her temples.
“Welcome to the club.”
We fall silent then. I have this urge to lie back down on the ground and close my eyes. Maybe I’ll fall asleep and when I wake up I’ll be back in my trailer.
“I owe you an apology,” the woman says.
“For what? Falling on me?”
She smiles. “No, for giving you such a hard time back when we first met. I know you’re not Jackson Cole.”
“What changed your mind?”
“Marisa and I met another friend of yours—Ramon Morago. He told us all about you and your cousin Jackson. I don’t know why I never twigged to it before, but God, the two of you could have been identical twins.”
I nod. “People always took us for brothers.”
“But you didn’t really care for the limelight, did you?”
That’s not really true. I loved it at first. But after a while, the public perception of Jackson Cole just swallowed me to the point where I no longer knew who I was anymore. The substances didn’t help either. But that’s not something I can tell her.
I settle for, “Once you see what crazy fame does, you just want to get as far away from it as possible. It’s way easier being the guy on the crew with the baseball cap pulled down to hide any resemblance.”
“I get it.” She laughs. “You know, two days ago I’d have had a million questions for you about those days.”
“But now?”
She gets a faraway look in her eyes. I wait until she comes back to me.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” she says. “I guess I finally realized that there are a lot more important things to write about than the little pieces of some rock star’s life, especially one who’s been dead for so long.”
She suddenly looks horrified and covers her mouth. “No offense,” she says. “I’m sure you must miss him—”
I raise my hand. “It’s okay,” I say, interrupting her. “I came to terms with it a long time ago,” I say. “Maybe it’s good that you’re going to put your energy into writing about more important things.”
She smiles. “For years I would have argued that, but I had a bit of an epiphany the morning I arrived. It was just a conversation with this old desert rat at the motel where we’re staying, and I bet he has no idea how much the things he was saying made an impact on me.”
“What made you such a Diesel Rats fan?” I can’t help but ask.
“That’s the funny thing. For the longest time I wasn’t, but my best friend Aimee lived and breathed their music. It wasn’t until she died that I really started listening to it myself.”
“To keep close to her.”
She shakes her head. “No. Aimee killed herself. I started to listen to the music to try and figure out why it couldn’t save her. Then I just kind of fell in love with it myself.”
She’s looking off into the skyscape as she speaks.
I don’t know what to say. Back in the Diesel Rats’ heyday, I had a lot of fans tell me that. Hell, playing the music that saved them was what saved me back then. Until it couldn’t anymore. Until all the crap in my life got to be so heavy that a simple song just couldn’t keep that weight off of me.
I never thought of killing myself. But I did need to escape so badly that I traded places with my cousin. He was going to be the rock star and I was going to quietly vanish into the woodwork.
It would have turned out okay. Steve had stood on the outside while all the crap went on in my life. He’d watched it all play out, the good and the bad. I don’t have a doubt in my mind that he would’ve made a better Jackson Cole than me.
But then that damn plane had to go down.
“People talk about art saving them,” I finally say.
She looks at me.
I go on. “You know, reading this book, hearing that song, at just the moment when you need it most. And sometimes it’s not just taking it in. Sometimes it’s making art that saves a person. But it’s not always enough. Sometimes nothing can save them, not even the loving support of family, or friends, or complete strangers who reach out to help. Maybe the hardest thing is discovering too late how good some people are at hiding how bad they feel.”
“That was Aimee,” she says. “I had no clue—nobody did. Not until we read her journals after…after she...” Her voice trails off and she sighs. “There are a lot of nights I’v
e lain awake wishing I’d never read that damn journal.”
“It’s got to suck,” I tell her. “I guess all we can hope is that the folks who didn’t make it finally found the peace they were looking for.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Honestly, I have no clue. What I do know is, we can’t beat ourselves up for things that happened that we couldn’t control.”
The words coming out of my mouth are ones I’ve heard before. From friends, when everything about the band was imploding. Later, from Possum and Morago. But as I say them now, it’s like I’m hearing them for the first time.
I didn’t make Steve take that flight. I didn’t even ask him to change places with me. We just got talking one night, me bitching about how everything had turned to shit, Steve being sympathetic, then finally joking, “Hey, we should just change places for a while. I’ll be the rock star, you’ll be the roadie, and let’s see how we like it. Bet you my Les Paul that you’ll get over it pretty fast.”
I don’t remember exactly when it stopped being a joke. But there was no pressure on either side, once we’d decided. We both thought it’d be a laugh, and I really needed the break from the whole lifestyle.
He even called me just before his flight. “Hey, loser,” he said, and I could hear the grin in his voice. “I’ve a girl and a bottle of sipping whiskey waiting for me on my plane. How’s your evening shaping up?”
It was the last conversation we ever had.
But what happened to the plane wasn’t my fault. Just like I didn’t turn Sully into a hopeless junkie, or push Toni to start fucking Ben, or cause the accident that took Martin. And I sure didn’t have any control over what Grandma did, killing her husband that way.
It was all just one thing on top of another, lying heavy on the endless expectations everybody had for me. The fans. The records execs.
Write another hit.
Play a killer show.
Channel all the shit in your life into something that makes money for everybody.
You’re an artist—you’re supposed to be tortured.
I’m not to blame.
How come I’m finally coming to terms with it now? Sitting here, in this impossible place, talking to some woman I barely know.
“You just went somewhere,” the woman says.
I pull myself out of my thoughts to focus on her face. “Yeah, I guess I did. I was just listening to what I was saying to you and it’s like someone hit a switch in my brain where it all actually made sense. I mean, saying you can’t dwell on regrets always makes sense, intellectually. It’s the believing in it that’s so hard.”
She smiles knowingly. “Can you teach me that trick?” she asks.
“’Fraid not.”
She gives a slow nod. “I didn’t think so.”
“All I know is, it’s taken forty years for it to sink in for me, so maybe patience is part of the process.”
“I don’t know that I want to live with it for forty years,” she says.
“I hear you. Say, I don’t know that I ever caught your name.”
“It’s Leah—Eleanor Leah Hardin, actually, but I never felt like an Eleanor.”
“Leah suits you. You don’t look like an Eleanor.”
“What does an Eleanor look like?”
“Not like you? Morago’s the man for names. He could tell you.”
“Morago,” she repeats. Then she stands up and walks back to the edge, where Aggie’s still doing her slow spin, floating out there—hell, it could be miles above the ground. Who knows, in this place.
“There’s got to be something we can do for her,” she says when I join her. “You don’t have a rope or something, do you?”
I shake my head. “When Si’tala grew those big raven wings I planned to ask her to get Aggie after she’d rescued you.”
“That all feels like a dream now, there and then gone. What happened to her anyway?”
“No idea. I just hope we’re not stuck here, because I don’t know a way back.”
“Out of your own head,” she says.
I give a slow nod. “I’m still not really up on how that works.”
“Maybe you just have to wake up.”
“Except I wasn’t sleeping,” I tell her.
Leah looks at Aggie again. “Back when we first met, it seemed like you two were pretty good friends.”
“You know the person in high school that everybody wanted to be friends with?”
She nods. “Though that wasn’t me.”
“Wasn’t me either,” I say. “But Aggie’s like that. She’s got time for everybody, and when you’re with her, you’ve got her complete attention. I’d be hard put to find a better person.”
“I got that. The moment Marisa and I showed up at her place, she welcomed us. We both felt an immediate connection to her.”
Her voice trails off and I don’t have anything to add. We sit down again, but this time near the edge of the plateau where we can keep an eye on Aggie.
“You know,” Leah says after a while, “I didn’t get here by dreaming or having some raven spirit bring me. All I did was grab Aggie’s arm while she was floating above her hospital bed.”
I get a feeling of dread as I realize where she’s going with this. “Don’t even think about it,” I tell her.
“She’s not that far out,” Leah goes on as if I never spoke. “I bet if I took a running jump, I could reach her.”
“Best case scenario, you reach her and manage to hang on. But then what? You can’t bring her back and you’ll both be stuck out there. Worst case scenario, you fall, and to tell you the truth, I don’t know that there’s a bottom.”
“No, best case scenario is I reach her and she transports me back to the hospital.”
I shake my head.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “I’ll tell them where you are. Morago will know how to get you back, won’t he?”
“It’s not that,” I say. “If you jump, all you’re going to do is kill yourself or fall forever, which amounts to the same thing. Imagine falling for so long that you die of hunger and thirst.”
“Come on. It makes sense for me to try this, or at least as much sense as anything else does. Ever since I got to the rez it’s been one impossible thing after another. Why should this be any different?”
“Because if you’re wrong, you die.”
“And if I’m not wrong?”
I’ll give Leah this: she’s stubborn. But that doesn’t always equate with wise.
“Are you ready to bet your life on that?” I ask her.
She’s quiet for a moment, then finally sighs. “No, I guess not.”
She turns away from where Aggie’s floating to look across the mesa. “What’s on the other side?” she asks.
She stands up before I can answer and walks to the opposite side. I give Aggie a last look, then follow after her.
“It’s the same,” she says when I reach where she’s standing near the edge. “Minus Aggie,” she adds. “I thought maybe there’d be a path down or something.” Her shoulders slump in disappointment.
She’s right. There’s just another expanse of endless sky as far as the eye can see. It’s obvious that there’s nothing.
She turns to me. “So what is this place?” she asks. Holding up a hand before I can speak, she adds, “I know, it’s in your head. But why this place? What’s so special about it?”
“I guess everybody’s got demons,” I say. “This is where I come to beat mine. It’s what I imagine when I’m meditating—that I’m on this huge mountaintop floating in the sky where nothing can touch me and I can’t hurt anybody.”
“You feel you’ve hurt people?”
I remember she thinks I’m my cousin, so I say, “I’ve certainly let them down.”
Hurt swells in her eyes and she looks away. “Yeah,” she says after a moment. “I know all about letting people down.”
Neither of us talk for a while then. I lower myself to the ground, feelin
g stiff and sore from the impact of trying to catch her earlier. It’s funny. If I’m just in my head, why are physical ailments bothering me?
Leah sits nearby, too close to the edge of the rock for my liking, and dangles her legs. “So why’s Aggie here?” she asks. “If this is some private meditation place that only exists in your head, how would she get here? How would she even know about it?”
“She described it to me.”
Leah lifts an eyebrow.
“It was a long time ago,” I tell her. “Not long after I first moved to the area. She’s the one who suggested I visualize a safe place where I could get away from my endless circular thoughts—just enough to get a breathing space. When I couldn’t think of one, she described this mountaintop to me. She said it was the spot she always came to when she needed to feel grounded. Hers was in some actual mountains, but I didn’t need a whole mountain range. I just needed the space you see here, away from everything, with only the sky around me.”
“Bet you wish you’d used your own backyard now.”
I think of the little canyon that runs off the tunnel behind my trailer.
“That would have been a good idea.” I say.
“So how did she get to this place of hers?”
“She took some trail that switchbacked up to the top.”
Leah leans over and looks between her knees.
“You mean like that one?” she asks.
When I get up to join her, she stands as well.
“I don’t see anything,” I tell her.
“Look harder,” she says.
But when I do she takes off, racing for the other side. She’s younger than me, wearing running shoes. By the time I realize what she’s doing, she’s already gone half the distance.
“Leah, don’t!” I call out.
I start to run after her but there’s no way I can catch up. She gets to the far edge and launches herself off, arms reaching out.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I yell.
I know I’m too late. She’s long gone. But I push myself harder, shoes slapping against the stone, and then—
59
Thomas
The Wind in His Heart Page 34
