Yeah, she did. Except she’d thought she was getting better. Learning, finally.
The sky was pulsing, and with each dark pulse, the shadow of the Lace was printed across it. It was the Lace dream. It was always the Lace dream. It was always going to be the Lace dream.
Ronan pressed a hand to his temple. “I can’t—”
Ronan hadn’t thought much about the future.
This was a way he and Adam had always been opposites. Adam seemed to only think about the future. He thought about what he wanted to happen days or weeks or years down the road, and then he backfilled actions to make it happen. He was good at depriving himself in the now in order to have something better in the later.
Ronan, on the other hand, couldn’t seem to get out of the now. He always remembered consequences too late. After a bloody nose. A broken friendship. A huge tattoo. A cat with human hands. But his head didn’t seem built to hold the future. He could imagine it for just a few seconds until, like a weak muscle, his thoughts collapsed back into the present.
But there was one future he could imagine. It was a little bit of a cheat, because it was buried in a memory, and Ronan was better at thinking of the past than the future. It was an indulgent memory, too, one he’d never have copped to out loud. There wasn’t much to it. It was from the summer after Adam had graduated, the summer he’d spent with Ronan at the Barns. Ronan had come in from working on the fences outdoors and tossed his work gloves onto the grass-cluttered rug by the mudroom door. As he did, he’d seen that Adam’s mechanic gloves were lined up neatly on top of his shoes. Ronan had already known Adam was inside the house, but nonetheless, the image made him pause. They were just gloves, grease-stained and very old. Thrifty Adam always tried to get as much wear out of things as possible. They were long and narrow like Adam himself, and despite their age and stains, they were otherwise impeccably clean. Ronan’s work gloves, in comparison, were cruddy and creased and coarse-looking, tossed with carefree abandon, the fingers lassoed over Adam’s.
Seeing the two pairs tumbled together, a nameless feeling had suddenly overwhelmed Ronan. It was about Adam’s gloves here, but it was also Adam’s jacket tossed on a dining room chair, his soda can forgotten on the foyer table, him somewhere tossed with equal comfort in the Barns, his presence commonplace enough that he was not having to perform or engage with Ronan at all times. He was not dating Ronan; he was living in Ronan’s life with him.
Shoes kicked off by the door, gloves off.
A future. A good future. One Ronan had always liked thinking about. But the feeling of the Lace was still stuck to Ronan. It was hard to shake its insistent dread. It was getting all over the memory of Adam’s gloves. It was reminding him how even though it was a great memory, a great future, it hadn’t been enough for Ronan. If it had been enough, he’d still be waiting safely at the Barns until it came true. Instead, the Lace feeling murmured, he was here, jeopardizing that future more and more with every act.So how much did he really treasure that memory?
Not enough to keep it safe.
“I trust you enjoyed your dreaming,” Bryde said.
As Ronan’s dream paralysis came to an end, a light came on, revealing the small hunting cabin Bryde had brought them to a few hours after the episode at the fast-food restaurant. Two decayed deer heads on the wall stared at Ronan with strained expressions. A lamp made of antlers lit a plaid sofa. Ronan had been too stupid with nightwash to notice any of these details when they’d arrived. Now they seemed quaint, charming, relieving in their mundanity. The Lace was fading.
He didn’t know how Hennessy had lived with it for so long.
“What did you bring back?” Bryde asked. The way he asked the question somehow seemed to imply he knew the answer already but wanted to hear them explain themselves, a teacher asking a child to explain their stick drawing.
“A phone,” Ronan said.
“A phone,” echoed Bryde.
“An untraceable phone.”
“A phone,” said Bryde again.
“You sound like a parrot. Yes, a phone, I got a phone.”
“Why?”
Now Ronan was beginning to feel foolish, as if he’d missed a lesson. “To call my family?”
“Do you think it’s wise to be looking in the rearview mirror?” Bryde asked.
There was something both uncomfortable and fatherly about this. Bryde treating them like children; Bryde knowing this dimly lit path they were on.
“Okay, Satan,” said Ronan, and Hennessy laughed hollowly from the dismal plaid couch.
“Get up,” Bryde said. “Wash off your face. We’re going on a walk.”
“Idea! You two go on a walk. I stay here and hate myself,” Hennessy said.
“Put on a coat,” Bryde replied. “It’s snowing.”
His dreamers grumbled and did as he said.
The cabin they emerged from was notched into the side of a mountain and looked even more remote and murdery than it had from the inside. There was nothing around it but trees and more trees. The driveway through the woods was barely more civilized than the rest of the forest floor.
To Ronan’s amazement, it was snowing. Lightly, without urgency, but enough to lend the night a peculiar brightness. In front of the cabin, the car was dusted with snow, which made it no more visible than before. It was emotionally hard to see, not literally. Snow and grime didn’t matter.
Ronan pulled his skullcap down over his ears. “Where are we walking to?”
Bryde said, “Up.”
So up they went.
These were foreign trees. Unlike the huge oaks and twisted beeches of Lindenmere, Ronan’s half-remembered fairy-tale trees, these were evergreens. Fat spruces with chunky bark and branchless trunks stretching
