“They don’t need to. I’m feelin’ like the old gray ghost.”
“Yeah, well.” I tightened my fingers around his. “No giving up that ghost, okay? Not for a while yet.”
Gary snorted. “You kidding? You’ve only just gotten started. I’m not plannin’ on checking out for a while yet. I want grandkids,” he said with a wink and a sudden grin. My heart lurched.
“That’s why you’re hanging around, huh? Nice to finally find out there’s a reason.” My attempt at levity fell flat, but Gary smiled anyway, then let his eyes close, which told me as much as anything how tired he was. I’d never met a more open-eyed kind of guy than Gary. We stayed like that for a few minutes, me trying to memorize him while he breathed, then I closed my own eyes, hoping I wouldn’t cry.
“Lissen, Jo.”
My eyes popped open again. Gary was wearing his serious face. His really serious face, so serious I’d never seen it before. Nerves twisted in my stomach. “Yeah?”
“The grandkids, y’know I’m joking. But—”
“God, Gary, don’t. Okay? Don’t get all maudlin on me.” I managed a feeble smile. “At least wait until you’re sitting up again, okay?” I made the smile brighter, even though tears stung my eyes, and I bent over his hand. “Anyway, I know, okay?” My voice squeaked. “I know. Me, too, huh? Okay? Me, too.” I blinked back tears, keeping my head lowered over his hand. Gary reached over himself with his left hand, clonking my head with the oxygen sensor on his middle finger as he ruffled my hair. “Ow.”
He chuckled. “Sorry. Okay. Arright, Jo. Now you gotta keep me up to date on what’s goin’ on out there, all right? I hate missin’ things.”
I sat up laughing and brushed my hand over my eyes. “I know. I will, I promise. Like, here, you’ll like this. I was talking to Virissong, the spirit guy the coven wants to bring across, when the hospital called.”
Gary’s eyebrows retained their bushiness even when the rest of him looked smaller. “What’s he like?”
“He seems okay. I guess I’m going to do this.”
“Man,” Gary said, “I gotta get out of here. I’m gonna miss all the good stuff.”
“Only you think it’s the good stuff.” I gave him a watery smile. “When’re they letting you out?”
“I donno. A cute blond nurse says I gotta go to physical therapy. Me, physical therapy. I’m seventy-three years old. What kinda crap is that?”
“The kind that’s going to make sure you live to see seventy-four,” I said sternly. Gary’s eyes brightened, as if chastisement was better for him than sympathy. It probably was.
“You’re gonna keep me in line, aren’t you,” he grumbled, without disguising the note of pleasure in his voice.
“Damn straight.” I took a deep breath. “And I’m going to do a little laying on of hands, and then I’m going to ask a power animal to keep an eye on you.”
If somebody’d said that to me, it would’ve made me even crabbier. Gary lit up again. “Yeah? What animal?”
“I’ll know when it comes. Tomorrow morning.” The part of me that knew I wouldn’t really turn my back on shamanism stung me with cold guilt. If I’d studied maybe I could’ve seen this coming and done something to prevent it. Preemptive healing.
“Stop it,” Gary said. I twitched and blinked at him. “You’re lookin’ all guilty,” he said. “Knock it off. I’m an old man, Jo. I ain’t gonna last forever, and there’s nothing you or anybody else can do about that. But I’m not checkin’ out just yet, so just stop it, you hear? You want to find this old dog a little spiritual support to shore him up, I’ll appreciate it, but don’t go thinkin’ you can stop nature in its tracks. You hear me?”
“I hear you.” I smiled a little. “I’m just not sure I’m ready to listen.”
He squeezed my hand. “Fair ‘nuff. Women always take their own sweet time makin’ up their minds to see sense.”
I nodded, then straightened my spine. “Hey!”
Gary cackled, breathier than usual, but still his own laugh. “There’s my girl,” he said again, and let himself slip back into resting. I waited until he slept, then dug down inside me for the power that lay behind my breastbone.
It flickered and murmured, responding sluggishly. I wasn’t too sure how to go about repairing a broken heart. Cosmetic changes, like visualizing a new paint job, seemed inadequate, and the patch replacement that I’d used to fix the hole in my own lung struck me as somehow dangerous. I’d been dying at the time. Screwing up would have only finished the job. If I messed up now, Gary, who wasn’t dying, might. My car analogy was turning out to have limitations I didn’t like.
In the end the best I could do was to share my own essence, the way Billy had done with me back in March. I thought it would help, just by giving him more than his own depleted energy to draw from as he healed. It took a while to formulate, but I slipped a small, delicate ball of silver rainbows inside Gary’s chest, and wished it Godspeed and good luck.
Then I stayed until a nurse came to usher me out, and went back to my apartment to sob in the shower.
Routine brought gratifying numbness. I wrote tickets and walked my beat, nodding at locals and stopping to give directions to tourists. I didn’t have to think, which was a godsend. Thinking put me back into that place where it was too hard to breathe. Gary might’ve believed there wasn’t anything I could’ve done, but I wasn’t so sure.
At lunch I went back to the station instead of stopping on my beat to get a bite to eat. I wasn’t hungry, and I needed comfort smells, grease and oil and gasoline. I went down to the garage, even though I didn’t think I was up to watching Nick carefully not look at me.
It was almost a relief that Thor was the only one around, lying on his back beneath a vehicle. I stood there by his feet until he slid out to get a wrench from the toolbox by the car. His eyebrows, grease-smeared, rose a little as he saw me. I looked around, unable to meet his eyes as I mumbled, “Wondered if there was anything I could help out with for a while.”
He frowned at me. I looked somewhere else again. “Please.”
“Yeah.” His answer was so gruff and so long in coming that I flinched, startled out of trying to think of where I was going to go when he said no. “Rodriguez got his wheels out of whack again. Get some coveralls and take a look.” He gave me the faintest smile possible and slid under his work-in-progress again. I was left staring at his legs, stunned.
I’d warned him about Rodriguez’s axle alignment problems six months earlier. Maybe good of Thor wasn’t so bad after all.
Rodriguez didn’t really spend hours beating his vehicle’s axle out of alignment, even if I’d accused him of doing so in the past. I’d never yet checked his vehicle and found the alignment outside of factory tolerances, which didn’t mean he was wrong. Some drivers are more sensitive to the variations in alignment, and Rodriguez was like the princess with the pea. The camber and casting readings on his vehicle were a full degree side to side off, enough to cause a pull.
And that was something I could deal with. Methodical, straight-forward work could fix an alignment problem. It took my mind off everything, and I finished the job with reluctance, not wanting to leave the garage and face the world again.
Thor, still on his back, rolled out from under the car he was working on and pushed up on an elbow, watching me. I wiped my hands down on the cleanest towel I could find and stripped the coveralls off. I’d done it a thousand times—just about literally—with the guys in the shop there. I’d never felt self-conscious before, too aware of Thor watching me. Big and thick and clumsy: that was the Joanne from high school, too tall and too poorly socialized. I fumbled the coveralls as I tried to put them back on their hook and caught a new handful of grease. I closed my eyes, sighed, and shoved my hand back through my hair before my brain caught up with my actions.
Thor’s laughter, deep and out loud, made hairs stand up on the back of my neck. I looked over my shoulder, mouth twisted. Propped up on an elbow, still on the creeper, he looked like a beefcake calendar picture, except in a pinup he’d be in jeans, stripped to the waist, and glistening with baby oil instead of wearing tar-smeared coveralls. “You know where the shampoo is.”
My mouth betrayed me and the corners turned up in a tiny smile. “That bad?” I headed for the washroom, not expecting an answer. Thor’s voice followed me anyway.
“Well, they said you’re Native American, but I think war paint’s supposed to be different colors.”
