I shake my head and turn my wrist to check an imaginary watch. I have time.
Jesse inclines his head toward the woods that lead to his farm. We can leave and go hiking across the fields whenever you’re ready.
A slight nod from me. Okay, but in a few. I move the plate, which has a small puddle of melted chocolate ice cream, a fraction to let him know that I have no idea what to do with it. He nods like he understands, then takes my plate from me as he stands.
His jeans don’t reach his ankles. Instead, they stop about an inch short. Jesse has been doing nothing but growing over the last month. For a while, I think he was concerned he wouldn’t hit a hundred and ten pounds before high school. Now, at his current rate of growth, I’m concerned he’s going to run out of skin and his bones are going to pop out of his body. He wears his favorite T-shirt, the one that has a T-Rex trying to clap his hands, and there is a silent countdown to how many more times he’ll be able to stretch that material over his head and squeeze it over his shoulders. The blue University of Kentucky baseball cap his gran bought him in fifth grade, the one that was too big, is starting to settle nicely upon his red hair, and his voice, within the past month, has dramatically deepened.
Jesse’s changing, and it’s awkward, because I’m not. I’m still the shortest of our graduating eighth-grade class, and my body is still like it was in fifth grade. Mom’s threatening to take me to the dermatologist for acne medication, and I swear there is enough steel in my mouth from braces to stock a small manufacturing company.
Glory offers her plate to Jesse, and as he takes Suzanne’s, she grips the arms of the chair and edges forward as if she’s going to stand. Jesse shifts all the plates to his left hand and offers his gran his right. She accepts it and slowly rises to her feet. “I need to use the little girl’s room.”
Suzanne releases Jesse once she’s steady on her feet. Jesse moves ahead of her, opens the screen door, then follows Suzanne into the house, leaving Glory and me alone.
I link my fingers together and rest them on my knees. I glance at Glory out of the corner of my eye, feeling like it’s proper to start some sort of conversation with my hostess, but I don’t know what to say other than the obvious. “Thank you for having me this evening. The cake was delicious.”
“What did you dream about last night?” Glory asks.
“Um…” What type of question is that? “Nothing.”
“You did.” Glory tilts her head in this very airy way. Somehow, she appears cool in the humid night. “Did you know dreams are messages from the universe?”
I look over my shoulder toward the inside of Glory’s house, and I’m disappointed when Jesse doesn’t walk back out to save me from this strange conversation.
“My angels told me you dreamed of the moment that will set a series of life-altering events into motion.”
I dreamed of a cat. There is nothing life-altering about a lost cat in a field. I think her “angels” are wrong, but I don’t want to be rude. I just want the conversation over, so I lie, “I don’t dream. Or at least I don’t remember them.”
It’s not a lie, so much as a stretch of the truth. I typically don’t recall my dreams, but I do remember the cat—how haunting it looked and how its cries were lonely and sad.
“You dreamed, but it’s okay if you don’t want to share. And just so you know, down the road, even when you think I’ve forgotten you, I haven’t. You have always been and always will be at the forefront of my mind.”
My brows slowly rise. I have a hard time believing she even knows my last name. Glory stares straight into my eyes, unwavering, and my brain works overtime to find something coherent to say in return. The screen door squeaks open, and I exhale with relief when Jesse and Suzanne walk back out.
“You two run along,” Suzanne says with a wave of her hand as she sits in the rocking chair. “Have your fun. Glory will take me home after a bit.”
Jesse grins at me, and I don’t need another incentive to leave Glory’s cottage for the safety of Jesse’s land.
Chapter 45
Jesse
Scarlett’s laughter echoes in the open field, and the sound is one of my favorites in the world. Right up there with the sound of the leaves rustling with a light breeze, creek water lapping over rocks, and my gran telling me she made oatmeal cookies.
It’s three in the morning, late May, and thanks to the full moon, there’s a dull light guiding our way. We’re racing and she’s in the lead. Not by much. A foot or two. My heart is pumping as fast as my arms as I try to catch up with her. She’s fast, faster than me, and I can tell by the glint in her eye as she glances back at me that she will win.
I’d like to win. It’s a great feeling to come in first, especially since she’s won the last few times, but we’re coming up to Gran’s trailer—close to the end of a great night with the best person in the world. A night I don’t want to end.
With a chuckle, I slow up. “You win, Tink! I give up!”
She eases to a walk, and when she turns to face me, she wears a brilliant smile. “You’re slow, Lachlin.”
No, she’s just that fast.
We graduated from the eighth grade together today. She wore a blue dress she and her mother had bought in Louisville last month. Scarlett had whispered to me before the ceremony that she hated how tight the dress was, making her feel like she couldn’t breathe, and that the material against her skin made her itch and fidget. She despised the dress so much that I kept it to myself how beautiful she looked—with the way the deep blue of the dress matched her eyes.
But how she looked then was nothing compared to how she looks now—pieces of her black hair falling from a sloppy ponytail, freckles showing on her shoulders from a tank top, and mud on her favorite pair of ripped jeans.
“What time do you want to head home?” I ask.
“Soon.” There’s sorrow in her tone, as if she’s also sad this night has to end. “Dad’s been waking up around five the past couple of weeks. Sometimes he cracks open my door to check on me before going downstairs.”
Scarlett’s dad hates me. Always has. It’s because I’m a Lachlin and everyone in our town believes that means I’m trash and trouble. Also, the whole town thinks I’m cursed. Her dad doesn’t want her anywhere around me. Has even said so to my face. He can’t keep us away from each other at school, but he’s told Scarlett, any other time, I’m off limits.
But Scarlett and I are friends, best friends, so she sneaks out her window and climbs down to hang out with me. Most nights, I toss rocks at her window to let her know I’m ready, but tonight she was out her window and dangling from a tree branch as I crossed the street from my trailer to her house.
“I think Glory and I talked once about caterpillars when I was younger,” Scarlett says out of nowhere. “At least I think we did. Maybe we didn’t. Maybe it was a dream.”
Glory is my older cousin. She lives on the other side of my family’s farm and makes money working as a “psychic.” “You’re saying you had caterpillar and Glory dreams when you were younger?”
“You make it sound strange.” Scarlett rolls her eyes.
“Anything with Glory is strange,” I say. “You want to climb a tree before you go home? The one in the east field is calling our name.”
Her gaze goes straight to the deep cut on my chin that I got when we fell during a recent climb gone bad. Concern flickers through her eyes, and before I can tell her I’m okay, she steps forward and traces my wound. Scarlett’s touch causes my heart to stop and then start at a rate that makes it almost hard to breathe—reactions I don’t understand.
Stop it. She’s my best friend. I’m her best friend. Friends. That’s what we are. That’s what she needs us to be, but…there’s something in her touch….something inside me that feels…different.
Different from when we were six.
Different from when we were ten.
Different from even yesterday.
“Does it hurt?” she whispers.
Yes. “No.”
I see her replaying the accident in her head and she shivers. I know because the same cold chill runs through me as I think of her falling.
“I’m okay,” I say softly.
I wait for her to draw her hand back, but instead she touches me one more time, and my skin burns with her caress. She meets my eyes and it’s all there—the snap of the branch, her scream, the fall…and then there was me jumping from the safety of the tree to catch her.
She steps back and clears her throat. “I should go home.”
“Yeah.” She should. There will be other nights to climb trees.
Scarlett starts for her house, and I join her, right by her side. Around us, the crickets chirp and frogs croak. I shove my hands in the pockets of my jeans as I consider telling Scarlett that my mom’s back in town. She’s been staying with some guy for the past few months. Mom’s been quiet about this one—who he is, what, if anything, he does for a living. But she did tell me that she wants me to meet him next weekend.
I don’t want to go. Meeting Mom’s boyfriends never ends well, but I can’t say no to Mom when she looks at me all hopeful—that maybe this is the one that will work out.
“Do you think high school will be different?” Scarlett breaks the silence and drags me out of my head.
“Different how?”
“I don’t know.” She pulls at the low branch of the tree in front of Gran’s trailer and peels off a large green leaf. “Do you think people will be…friendlier?”
Probably not. The group of kids we’ve gone to kindergarten with will be in our first period class of high school. Can’t imagine being handed an eighth-grade graduation diploma is going to help with their small-minded attitudes. “Maybe.”
“It’s okay if they aren’t,” she says, like she’s honestly fine that people will continue to talk crap about her because she hangs with me. “We have each other. I only hope that we’ll have lunch together. I heard they have two-to-three different lunches and that they divide it up based on where you are in the building around lunch time. It’ll suck if we don’t have lunch together.”
“We’ll have lunch together,” I say as we cross the street. Scarlett and I live in the only two houses at the end of a long gravel road in the middle of nowhere.
“You don’t know that,” she says.
“Yeah, I do.”
“How can you possibly know that? Are you psychic like Glory now?”
I wink at her and grin. “I’ll skip class to have lunch with you.”
She purses her lips. “You can’t do that.”
“I will.”
“You can’t. Skipping will get you into trouble, and even if you could skip one day, you couldn’t skip all year.”
That’s what she doesn’t understand, I would—for her. “You’re my best friend.”
“So?”
“We’ll have lunch together.”
We stop under the tree next to her house, the one that leads to her second-floor room. She looks at me, that incredulous expression she has when she’s aware I’m up to no good—which is often. I hitch my thumbs in the pockets of my jeans and good-naturedly wait for Scarlett’s stern reprimand, but as she goes to open her mouth her head darts to the right, toward her house.
Adrenaline hits my bloodstream—is it her parents? Is she busted?
“Do you hear that?” Scarlett asks.
We go silent, and I strain to hear what she’s hearing.
She steps forward. “There it was again.”
Once again, I got nothing.
She takes off to the land beside her house, and I’m quick to follow. Scarlett pauses by the trees and places her hands out in a signal for me to stop and stay silent. I do, and then I finally hear it. A soft meow.
My head snaps toward the sound. “This way.”
We’re methodical in our movements—slow and apprehensive. Most stray cats don’t want to be found, and house cats that have lost their way can be skittish. Any wrong move will send the cat running, but Scarlett has a soft spot for all things with fur. Knowing her, the two of us will be tracking the cat past her three-in-the-morning self-imposed curfew so she can confirm that it’s well-fed and safe.
I pause, my instincts telling me that we’re close, and as if Scarlett senses it as well, she puts her hand out again. My gaze roams, searching.
“There,” Scarlett barely whispers, and I follow her line of sight to the spot next to a bush. There, lying on its side in the undergrowth is a cat, white with black spots. In the moonlight, it watches us, its ears pulled back, its fur puffed out, and its body close to the ground—signs that it’s scared. In the same position, I would be, too.
“Lower yourself,” I breathe out, a reminder of how to handle frightened animals.
Towering over the animal only makes you intimidating. I crouch, so does Scarlett, and the cat thankfully stays in place. I glance over at Scarlett, and she’s doing all that I’ve taught her through the years: don’t make direct eye contact—just fleeting glimpses to assess the situation. Don’t give the animal a reason to bolt.
The cat watches Scarlett more than me, which allows me to slip in for a closer look.
There’re no wounds I can see, no blood gushing from anywhere, but there is a rip in its ear—a sign of at least one past fight. I pay extra attention to the rib cage to see if the cat is skin and bones, or if it has had the ability to do well on its own. My forehead furrows as parts of the cat show signs of malnourishment—it’s thin and its rib cage sticks out. Then my stomach sinks as I notice its protruded belly, with several enlarged pink spots on the abdomen.
I watch the abdomen. The cat’s stomach moves up and then down. I keep staring, intently, so much that my eyes start to burn as I fight the urge to blink. Then there it is—the rolling in the stomach.
“The cat’s pregnant, Tink,” I say softly.
Her head snaps in my direction, making the cat sit up. “Are you sure?”
“It’s either that or she has one hell of a tape worm, but I’m betting pregnant.”
“Can we catch her?” Scarlett asks. “Put her in one of the barns to keep her, and eventually her kittens, safe?”
I slowly extend my arm and the cat scrambles away with its back arched. I withdraw my arm to make myself smaller. It’s a bonus that the cat doesn’t dart. “If we go for her now, she’ll probably run off. Why don’t you go on home, and I’ll get some food from Gran’s.”
“Are you going to trap her with food?”
I shake my head. “I don’t want her to get hurt. I’m going to get her to trust me with food. Hopefully she’ll like me and let me pick her up. If not, I’ll consider using a raccoon trap. But something tells me once we start feeding her, she’ll warm up.”
“What if she’s not here when you get back?”
“She will be.”
“How do you know?”
I meet Scarlett’s eyes. “I don’t, but I think she will be. Plus, it’s the best option we have at the moment.”
She nods. We slowly ease back and are silent as we walk back toward her house. Once again, at the bottom of the tree, we look at each other.
“You promise we’ll help her?” Scarlett asks, and the ache of leaving the cat behind is noticeable in her voice.
“I promise.” I don’t break those. She knows that. I especially would never break a promise to her.
Scarlett gives me a soft smile. Then without another word, she jumps up to the lowest branch and starts scaling for her bedroom window.
There’s a lot of things screwed up in my life, but I have Scarlett and somehow, that makes everything else okay. Once safely inside, Scarlett waves down to me. I lift a hand in goodbye and then head back to my land, to Gran’s trailer, so I can find some food for our new cat.
Only a Breath Apart Original Opening
Chapter 46
Jesse
Wind whips through the tree outside the window. The thrashing limbs give the shadows on the wall th
e appearance they’re alive—poltergeists, ghosts. I’m a realist, so I don’t believe in spirits beyond the grave, but I do believe in memories. Some memories are so real they’re overpowering. That’s the black hole I’m sinking into tonight, memories come back to life.
Except for the soft light from the lamp next to my grandmother’s bed, the trailer is dark. Rain taps against the tin roof, and the last song on the vinyl record that’s been playing for the past twenty minutes ends. The room fills with the sound of dead air and the needle scratching on the paper label.
Gran loves listening to records, and that record player has been in her room for as long as I can remember. No matter how many times I’ve tried to bring her musical tastes into this century, she refuses. “Nothing sounds as good as it does playing from vinyl. Stop trying to change me, Jesse. I like who I am fine.”
It’s three in the morning. I rolled in at midnight, and something in the way she was dreaming kept me from going into my room across the hall. Gran had been in a wrestling match with an unseen force, and she appeared to be on the losing end. But I started playing her favorite albums on low, and she’s eased into a better sense of peace.
Everything seems normal again, except for her breathing. It’s shallow, labored, a wheeze. Her chest moves up and down, but I don’t like the sound of it. The doctor told her in April that her heart wouldn’t make it past July. It’s August. I reach over, place the needle back into the groove, and Johnny Cash sings once again. His voice is deep, the lyrics heavy, and the crazy growling in my brain becomes harder to ignore. I’m slowly losing my mind.
“You can feel it, can’t you, Jesse?” Like she’s a damn ghost herself, Glory’s pale face is the first part of her I see before she enters the light of Gran’s room. Her wild, wet blond hair sticks to her face, and water drips onto the worn carpet from the hem of her long dress. “The air is different, weighted. The doors between this world and the next are converging here—ready to take another soul.”
The Novella Collection: A series of short stories for the Pushing the Limits series, Thunder Road series, and Only a Breath Apart Page 21
