“You knew before I did. Just like you knew—” he stopped and closed his eyes. The handle creaked, but he didn’t open the door.
Just like I knew what? Did he somehow sense the things I was keeping from everyone? Could he sense them, too? Is that why he’d pushed me down? I touched his arm again—intending to ask—but now his skin was scalding hot.
“You’re always hot! Are you sick . . . ?” Instinctively, I reached for his forehead, but he slid my hand down his cheek and placed it back in my lap.
“Neither one of us shares easily.” His thumb stroked the inside of my wrist once, a swath of fire that made me shiver. “Be careful. I want you to be safe.”
And then he was outside; and I was driving away. When I slowed to turn at the cross street, I looked in the rearview mirror and he was still standing there, watching me as the cat twined around his ankles.
Not-so-small Decisions
I woke up sobbing and alone. Desperate to stay awake. Desperate to go back to sleep. Desperate to find them. Desperate to forget.
Just a dream. Just another goddamn dream. I didn’t even know who they were. I cried in the predawn blackness until hot tears soaked my hairline and stickiness clogged my throat. When my whimpers turned into choking gasps, I rolled over and coughed myself into snuffling stillness. I’d lost them. Over and over again.
Feverish and trapped by sweaty bedding and months of nightmares, my body yearned for the cool air teasing my exposed cheek, but I couldn’t move. One at a time, over and over, one or the other, I always lost them. Or could never find them. Lifetimes of searching in an endless loop that made no sense, but woke me in a terror that left me depleted. A hollow pang of failure filling my gut every morning. Breakfast of goddamn champions.
I’d been lucky the past few nights, but the stress of the party, or that glass of wine—or maybe the robbery—if only I could remember exactly what I dreamed, then I could work my way through it. Analyze the psychology of it. Then next time I could be aware—on some level at least—that it was just a dream. I tried to pick my way through the vaporous threads of images and feelings, but no matter how I tried, they wafted just out of my mind’s reach. Drifting away until the next time they captured me in their weave.
Some time passed—minutes? hours?—when Nina Simone reminded me it was a new day. I’d dozed off again, and was beyond disoriented, fumbling for my phone and knocking it off the nightstand. Flopping over the side of the bed, I groped until my fingers found the smooth rectangle, but she was belting out the last verse by the time I summoned enough will to open my eyes and swipe the alarm’s shut-the-hell-up option. With effort, I heaved my upper body back up onto the bed and lay there, exhausted.
My head hurt. Wasn’t it Saturday? Why had I set my alarm? It was still black in my bedroom, making it that much harder to keep my eyes open. God, I hated daylight saving time in the spring. Waking up in the dark sucked. I spotted a few angels perkily zooming around near the ceiling and made myself focus on them, fighting the urge to go back to sleep. Why had I set my alarm so early?
Eileen. Eight o’clock pickup. Get up.
My subconscious was a better mother than me. I groaned and stretched, arching sideways across the bed and rolling onto my stomach. My head and feet dangled off opposite sides of the mattress as I tried to remember why I was so tired.And why did I hurt? My muscles felt as if I’d worked out, and I could sense bruises along my spine. Had I fallen?
Oh. Right. Stiffly, I rolled again to stare up at the ceiling. Nothing like kinetic memory to bring it all back. The white sparks swooped closer as if in agreement.
“Hi, guys. What are we going to do about Cara?” I watched them zip among themselves and then tighten into a somewhat more unified cluster. “Marshalling the forces? Be strong and do what we can? Is that it?” Some broke away, some disappeared, and others reappeared; and as I spent the next several minutes watching their haphazard display, my mind wandered.
It was the image of Cara, crying in her underwear, that sharpened my thoughts. When she’d told me of her impossible situation—when I’d seen how genuine her tears were—my maternal instincts had kicked in. It had never occurred to me to doubt her. I’d just wanted to help her. But should I doubt her? I pondered that as the angels careened around my room.
I didn’t think she’d lied to me, but maybe she was lying to herself. Maybe she’d had a one-night stand, and her brain was clinging to the fantasy that her baby had no father out of guilt that Adam wasn’t the biological father. That sounded crazy enough to be true. Seriously twisted and in need of a psychotherapy session or two—make that two hundred—but possibly true. Even if she was mentally off-balanced, she was still a terrified young woman who needed help. But maybe I shouldn’t have been so quick to assume her story was true just because she believed it. Adam’s concern could be because the woman he loved was nuts, not because she was in physical danger from the unknown.
“What do you think guys?” A vivid, lightning-blue spark appeared
