When I was in middle school, I had a run of pretty spectacular nightmares. In the summer after my one and only year of college, while my love life and circle of friends dissolved around me, my brain had tried insomnia for a while. They were about the worst sleep disturbances I’d had until now.
I lay in the bedroom, wrapped in the dusty sheets. As soon as my head hit the pillow, all signs of fatigue vanished. My mind was more than awake; it was bouncing off the inside of my skull like a rhesus monkey in a caffeine overdose study. My thoughts flickered from the insurance we’d gotten on the new rental car, to whether I needed to fill out any tax paperwork, to my older brother’s impending marriage, to the way the lantern had hissed while I’d buried an innocent man alive, to the sound of Aubrey laughing when he’d just realized something. No thought connected to the one before it. There was no predicting where my mind would leap next. It was like someone had gotten my remote control and was channel surfing my head.
I tried the meditation and breathing exercises that Chogyi Jake had taught me to help focus my qi, the vital energy of life and magic. I couldn’t do it. Every time I started to focus on my breath, I got distracted with how my toe felt or whether my hand had moved on its own or what was going to happen next in Jennifer Aniston’s love life. An animal howled out beyond my window. If might have been a coyote, or it could have been a stray dog. From where I was, I couldn’t tell the difference.
I didn’t know I was falling asleep at all until I felt the shovel in my hand. The lantern hissed like a snake beside me, and something just under my skin shifted like a wave on the surface of a lake. A black coffin was in a hole in front of me. In a grave.
I woke up screaming. My heart was racing, and I fumbled for the lights. The bedroom flooded white as daylight and the door burst open. Ex in a pair of dark green sweatpants and black T-shirt, and with a panicked expression. The light turned the windows into mirrors, and I caught a glimpse of myself huddled against the headboard. I was shaking, and I hated that I was shaking. Ex looked around the room, searching for danger.
There wasn’t any. There was nothing there but me. My phone showed 4:30 a.m. I said something obscene, and then, liking the way the words felt, I let loose a slow, steady stream of profanity, like air slowly leaking out of a balloon. The tension left Ex’s shoulders.
RAnother nightmare?” Ex asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine. Go back to bed.”
“Are you going to be able to sleep?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
He lifted an eyebrow and walked out of the room. I went to the bathroom, and I was still standing over the sink, washing my face and waiting for my hands to get steady again, when I heard him come back in. The squeak of the bed as his weight pressed it down. The soft, unmistakable zip of playing cards being shuffled. He was sitting cross-legged at the foot of the bed, a legal pad and ballpoint pen beside him. The cards were a standard red-backed poker deck.
“Gin rummy?” he asked.
I pushed the hair back from my eyes. The prospect of trying to force myself back to sleep or else make it through the long hours until dawn with no company apart from my thoughts had been charmless anyway. The sense of relief left me smiling.
“Sure,” I said. “You deal first.”
We didn’t talk about it. Not about the secret thing living in my skin, not about the bad night in Chicago. Not about Eric or the nightmares or the shame that kept me from wanting anyone to know that I was struggling to make it through the day. Everything we said was about the cards or movies we’d seen when we were kids or the relative strengths of Wonder Woman and Superman. We were innocuous together. The anxiety faded slowly over the span of hours, but it faded.
It only occurred to me when the sky outside the window started shifting from black to charcoal and the distant mountains started to be a visible horizon that, with my dark hair and white T-shirt, I looked like I was trying to be a photo negative of Ex. I was up 620 points to 570 when Ex put down his cards, stretched, and yawned wide enough that I could see his back teeth.
“Coffee?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said.
He touched my shoulder before he went out. Nothing more. Just a little contact, and then gone. While he banged around in the kitchen, I laid my head down on the pillow. I closed my eyes just for a minute to rest them. When I opened them again, it was almost noon. I heard the front door of the ranch house close, but then nothing, so I figured Ex had been heading outside. I got up, switched out my pajama bottoms for some blue jeans, pulled a thick gray wool sweater over my T-shirt, tugged on my boots, and headed out.
The kitchen and living room were shut down. Cleaned and everything put away the way it’d been when we’d arrived. The ashes were all gone from the fireplace. Ex’s suitcase and laptop carrier were by the door, ready to be packed out. I snagged a rubber band out of my pocket, pulled back my hair, and tied it into a rough ponytail before I walked outside.
The cold felt like being slapped. Sunlight that intense and total didn’t have a right to go with air that frigid. And it was dry enough I could feel my eyes getting gritty just walking across the wide gravel driveway.
Most of the places we’d gone, we’d rented minivans. But most of the places we’d been, there had been four of us and Aubrey had been driving. When I’d place. E met Ex, he’d had a little black sports car, a very pretty motorcycle, and a cot in a barely converted garage. Now he was leaning into a black and silver Mercedes two- seater with a roof that hardly seemed higher than my hips. Some tastes don’t change.
“Hey,” I said.
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” Ex said. “I’m just trying to figure out how we fit all the luggage in here last time.”
“With difficulty.”
“Yeah, that sounds right. Well, there’s still some coffee in the thermos there. I cleaned out the fridge, but we can stop in Española for some lunch if you’re hungry.”
“I take it we’re going somewhere?”
“We are,” he said. “Taos.”
I crossed my arms. “Taos?”
“Well, not in the city proper,” he said. “We’ll be going through it, though. There’s a little town about twenty minutes northwest of there called San Esteban.”
“I’m not going to see Chapin’s pet shrink,” I said.
“No. You’re not. The Catholic sanctuary in San Esteban is where Father Chapin and the others are. Their base of operations. We’re going to see them.”
“I don’t mean to be dim,” I said. “But why are we doing that?”
“While you were asleep, I figured out my Plan B. Father Chapin is … He’s the best at what he does. Better than I am. Better than those idiots in Hamburg. He and I have a history, but I thought that if I told him everything about your situation, we could ask him for help. That was Plan A, right? Ask for help.”
“That’s what I thought. So Plan B is … what? Ask again?”
Ex closed the car door. I expected it to have a deep, satisfying clump, but some hidden hydraulics kicked in at the last second, slowing the door down and settling it into place with a barely audible click.
“Plan B is insist.”
Chapter Three
Since Uncle Eric died, it felt like I’d spent more time traveling than being anywhere. I tried to count up the hours I’d spent in airplanes and airports, and came to the rough conclusion that I could have gone around the world five times. Marco Polo and Magellan were homebodies compared to me. I expected the drive north to Taos to be just another trip: a couple of hours in a vibrating metal box, ending someplace I didn’t know. Instead, going down the two-lane highway pointed out something I hadn’t realized. Pretty nearly all the places I’d been to in my long, slow survey of my domain had been cities with airports. With big hotels filled with smartly dressed people lining up
