“She’s been waiting for you, actually,” Molly answers for me.
“Yeah,” I mutter, before turning my head to face Max. “My tires are going to need to be replaced before I can finish getting everything taken care of,” I start. “I was wondering if you might know anyone who could help me with something like that.”
“Sure I do,” he says. “Why just pop on down to the store and let Ol’ Marty know what’s going on and I’m sure he’ll have you fixed up in no time.”
That’s not such a great option for me at the moment.
The obvious thing for me to do would be to ask Max if he knows anyone else, but I’m frozen in place, unable to coax the words from my mind to my tongue. “Max,” I start, “you don’t know about…” I trail off as Molly turns around quickly, shaking her head.
Max is just looking at me, waiting for me to finish the thought. Apparently he doesn’t know.
“…I don’t what?” Max asks.
Molly’s already turned her attention back to the lemons she’s squeezing, and I’m rising to my feet.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I have to go. Thanks for the advice about the tires, Max. Molly, it’s been great seeing you. We’ll have to find some time before I leave to talk some more.”
“If you’d like, I can come by and give you a hand at your grandma’s cabin,” she says. “Just let me get this all cleaned up and I can come now if you’d like.”
Max says, “Molly, I’m sure Kate’s got a lot going—”
“That would be great, actually,” I tell her. “Would you mind if I steal your wife for an hour or so?” I ask Max.
He looks at Molly. “Is that something you’re ready for?” he asks. “You’ve been doing so well. I’d hate to see you be overwhelmed.”
“Oh, Max,” Molly says. “It’s just a walk around the lake.”
While Molly cleans up the squeezed lemons, Max takes me by the arm and leads me into the front room.
“You’re aware of Molly’s condition, right?” he asks in a whisper.
“Of course,” I respond.
He scratches the back of his neck. “She’s been doing well these last few months,” he says. “She’s even started getting out there to take care of the garden from time to time, but she hasn’t left the property since we moved,” he tells me.
“Do you think it would be too much for her?” I ask.
“That’s not my call,” he says, “Molly’s been clear enough about that in the past. Just give me a call if you see her start to pull back into herself, will you? I’ll come and get her if she has any trouble.”
I manage to get the word, “Okay,” out before Molly comes around the corner and into the living room.
“Are you ready?” she asks, clapping her hands together once in front of her and taking a deep breath. She’s trying to psyche herself up for what’s to come.
“Yeah, let’s hit the road,” I tell her.
She gulps, but walks past me to open the door. “After you,” she says.
“Talk to you later, Max,” I tell the sheriff.
He tips his hat. Molly and I walk out of the house.
The door is hardly closed behind us before Molly is clutching my arm, saying, “I can’t go into your grandmother’s house. Let’s just walk around to the other side of the lake awhile where we can speak privately.”
“Are you all right?” I ask. “We can always talk the next time Max is out of the house.”
“It needs to be now,” Molly says.
She’s doing fine until we get near the edge of their grass. I can only speculate about what she must be feeling right now, but it can’t be very pleasant. Her grip is a bony vice around my upper arm. She’s shaking.
“Come on, Molly,” I tell her. “I don’t want to set you back when you’ve been doing so well. Not that I’d want to set you back any—”
Molly releases my arm and closes her eyes as she crosses the threshold from grass to pavement. She takes a deep breath in and then out before turning and motioning for me to follow her.
I step onto the road, and Molly takes me by the hand. We start walking.
“How much do you know?” I ask.
“Not here,” she whispers. “Max doesn’t know, and I don’t want him to overhear.”
Now that she’s crossed from the grass to the road, Molly’s walking so fast I’m almost jogging to keep up with her. We take the less populated of the two possible routes to the far side of the lake, but Molly holds her silence.
Once there are a few trees between us and her home, Molly pulls me off the road in the direction of the lake. There are about twenty feet of overgrown shoreline before the edge of the water, and Molly stops somewhere in the middle. She sits on the ground in the space between three large trees.
“Sit,” she whispers. “With all the plant life around here, nobody can see this spot from the road, but we have to be quiet.”
“Max said you hadn’t left the—” I start, but Molly puts a finger to my lips.
“Softly,” she whispers.
“You wanted to tell me something,” I whisper back. “What was it?”
“I know,” she says, “but I imagine you’ve figured that much out by now.”
“Okay, but how did you know that I was—well, you know,” I say. As much as I’ve wanted someone to talk to about all this, I hadn’t realized just how difficult it would be saying the words.
“Like I told you,” she says, “I saw you walking toward him.”
“I don’t remember most of that day,” I tell her. “He was there right out in the open?”
“It’s something they do,” she says enigmatically. “They needed to know that you’re in good health.”
“I don’t understand,” I tell her.
“Don’t worry about that now,” she says. “What has Mrs. Blaylock been saying to you?”
It’s the people you never see who know the most about you.
“She hasn’t said much,” I answer. “In fact, the only thing she told me was to stay away from the lake.”
“That old bat,” Molly says. “Ever since she was taken down there with them all those years ago, she’s had it in her head she was all they’d ever want or need.”
“I’m done with it, though,” I tell Molly. “They weren’t willing to meet my requirements, so I had to stop.”
“What were your requirements?” she asks, but before I can answer, she puts her still-quivering hand over my mouth, saying, “Shh.”
A few seconds later, I hear the car going by on the road so close to where we’re sitting. She waits a few seconds before removing her hand. She nods and motions for me to continue.
“You know why they took me on board, right?” I ask.
She nods, saying “I haven’t shall we say, participated myself, but I have a general idea.”
Before I can go on, though, I hear someone calling for Molly.
“He’s looking for us,” Molly says. “Knowing Max, he probably got worried and came to make sure I’m all right.”
“What do you want to do?” I ask.
“We have to go,” she says. “We can talk later, but there’s one more thing: Ambra has a diary. Have you found it yet?”
“A diary?” I ask. Not knowing what’s in it or where she’s going with this, playing dumb seems like the best option.
“She used to read it to me when she’d come by when Max was out,” Molly says. “It doesn’t matter. What you need to know is in there.”
“What do you mean ‘what I need to know’?” I ask. “I’m finished. I’m out of it.”
“Shh!” she warns. Max’s voice is close. He must have parked the car.
Without another word, Molly gets up, grabs my hands and helps me to my feet. Her hands still haven’t stopped shaking.
“I don’t think there’s anything left that I need to know,” I tell her.
“Molly?” Max’s voice comes, not far from where we’re now standing.
“Just read the d
iary,” she says. A moment later, she’s calling, “Max! We’re over here!”
We start walking toward the road, almost running into Max as we come around a tree.
“I’m sorry, Max,” Molly says, suddenly hyperventilating. “I thought I could do it. When the panic started to set in, I pulled poor Kate off the road.”
She throws her arms around Max’s shoulders. I’m about to come up with an excuse and get out of there before Max asks any questions when I see Molly’s hands stretched out behind Max’s head, miming turning the pages of a book. She stops turning the imaginary pages. Holding up four fingers, she points to where the book would be if it were real.
Whatever she wants me to find, it’s on page four.
“Do you need a hand getting her home?” I ask Max.
“If you’d do me a great favor,” he says, reaching into his pocket while Molly clings to him now, her arms tight around him. He pulls out his keys and tosses them to me. “The car’s parked in front of your place. If you could just bring it around, I’d appreciate it.”
So I walk the short distance to the cabin and get behind the wheel of the sheriff’s car. As I’m pulling up, Max and Molly gingerly make their way toward the road.
I leave the keys in the car and the door open, saying, “Let me know if you need anything else. I should get home and see if I can finish getting everything packed. Are you all right, Molly?” I ask.
“I will be,” she says, though she’s a lot paler than she was even a few minutes ago.
It would have been nice if we’d had a little more time to talk, but it’s enough for now just knowing there’s someone I can talk to about what’s been happening. I’ll read the page when I get back, but I don’t think it’s going to change anything. I’ve made up my mind.
When I get to the cabin, though, I go straight to Gramma’s bedroom. I turn to the fourth page and start reading. As my eyes move over the page, my heart begins to beat faster and harder in my chest to the point it feels like I’m going to choke on my pulse.
Seeing the word “Arcturian” when I opened the cover of the diary earlier today told me Gramma was aware of their presence and had come into some contact with them. What I didn’t expect, though, is that about fifty years ago, Ambra gave birth to her first child. It wasn’t human.
Chapter 13
I spend the whole day reading and rereading those first few pages of Gramma’s diary. At first, I thought the revelation that my grandmother had had the same kind of relationship to the Arcturians that I so recently gave up, but then I kept reading.
After she had given birth to her first child, she told the Arcturians she couldn’t do it anymore. Almost immediately, though, she started having doubts about her decision. Though she doesn’t go into specifics regarding what those doubts were, exactly, she does write how she returned to them:
“I waited until after dark when he used to come to me, and I went out to the lake. The journey was cold, nearly blind. They told me where I needed to go, but until now, I had no idea I had become so desperate for his touch,” she wrote. “I felt so near death before I found myself with him again.”
It’s dark now, but nothing has changed. Whatever I may feel right now, I can’t imagine being with anyone other than Ryker. Maybe it’s the inferior wiring of my human brain, but I can’t just go along with something like that.
I’m trying to think of what it was that convinced me to agree to be with Ryker in the first place. I felt sympathy for the Arcturians in a visceral way, but that wasn’t what convinced me. It was Ryker.
The more I think his name, the more I crave being in those arms again. What am I supposed to do about it, though? The fantasy is over. Even with knowing Gramma bore more than one Arcturian child, the idea of that is still a lot to get my head around.
In spite of all that, though, I find myself rising to my feet. I won’t go back unless I know I can be with Ryker again, but there’s got to be a way of convincing them. I can’t explain what compels me so strongly to try, but whatever it is, it’s stronger than reason.
What I have to do seems clear, but I want to be sure. To that end, I find one of Gramma’s formerly-hidden wine bottles with a cork sticking about halfway out of its mouth. After that, I grab a pen and my pocket notebook from my purse, and I’m out the door.
The world outside the cabin is thick even though the sky is overflowing with stars. I close the front door to the cabin and start walking toward the lake.
What drives me now isn’t the longing for pleasure or the chance to be of some great universal importance, though the first is somewhere in the background. No, what drives me now is the unanswered question.
Everything happened so fast. From beginning to end, it’s only been a couple of weeks, and I’ve barely had time to process everything, much less come to any wisdom about it. I need to know if that spark Olive mentioned is real, and if it is, I'm not sure if I can trust myself to let it go.
The shore is thick with plant life and me very nearly run into a tree on my way, but I eventually manage a path to the edge of the water. I should have brought a flashlight. I figured the stars and the moon would give enough light, but it’s a new moon tonight, and I can hardly see my pen as it moves over the paper.
What I write, or at least what I’m trying to write is a simple plea: “I wish to return. You know my terms. Contact me.”
I tilt my head back and look toward what I can see of the sky beyond the branches of the tree above. Here I am trying to communicate with an alien race and all I can think to write boils down to, “Hey, I’m all right doing the thing you wanted me to do as long as I can do it in the way you told me not to do it. Call me!” It’s hardly the kind of inter-species communiqué I’d hoped for, but I can’t think of anything more that needs to be said. I’d settle for a better way to say it, but that’s not coming to me either.
I’m shaking my head, muttering, “This is stupid,” over and over again as I collect a handful of pebbles from the ground and dump them into the empty wine bottle. Just to be on the safe side, I grab another handful and drop that into the bottle as well before rolling up the piece of paper and poking it through the mouth of the bottle.
Even if the message reaches them, there’s no reason to think they’re going to change their minds about anything. If there’s any chance of answering the unanswered question, though, I’m going to have to try.
It takes a minute, but I manage to stuff the cork back into place, and I look out into the blackness of the lake. Maybe I misunderstood what Gramma wrote in the journal and what Olive said before the Elders left that room, but this is the best I’ve got so I cock my arm back and lob the bottle toward the center of the lake.
The bottle hits the water with a loud splash, and my immediate instinct is to turn and run back to the cabin. I don’t. I’m no safer there than I am here. There’s nothing left for me to look forward to except for what might be. Maybe I’ll find what I’m looking for here. Could be I’ll find it in my world. Perhaps I won’t find it at all.
The truth is I’m tired of waiting for something to happen. My life so far has just been one long preparation for something I know never going to come. So, ironically enough, I sit down on the shore, and I wait for something to happen.
In the next moment, a dim beam of light illuminates the water in front of me, and I stand back up again, brushing myself off, though that’s about to render itself a pointless exercise.
As I step into the water, I feel a kind of painless electricity, and I keep going. The shore tapers off for about ten feet before dropping off entirely, and I make sure I’m as close to the center of the lake as possible before I dare to look down again.
I take a short series of slow deep breaths and before I can convince myself otherwise, I dive beneath the surface of the lake.
The journey is freezing, and I’m nearly blind as I swim downward, but I keep going, trying to follow the brightest part of the light on my way. I’m already running out of breath and I’
m not anywhere near the source of the beam, so I exhale about half the air in my lungs to hasten my descent.
More quickly than I would have thought possible, trepidation turns to fear turns to panic and every part of my body is telling me to turn around and go back to the surface, but I just swim that much harder.
It’s hard to say how far away the light is now. It’s becoming so bright in my field of vision that I’m not exactly sure I’m swimming straight down anymore, but I keep my burning eyes open. They told me where I needed to go, but until now, I had no idea I had become so desperate for his touch
The water around me is starting to warm, and I know I must be getting close, but I’m nearly out of air while my arms and legs tighten from the strain. As I let the last bit of air out of my lungs, I know I’m going to die. That’s no reason to stop now, though, it’s only inevitable.
Alien Romance Box Set: Alien Heart Complete Series (Books 1-4): A SciFi (Science Fiction) Alien Warrior Abduction Invasion Romance Box Set Page 38
