He came in and quietly closed the door, as if he thought the sound of the latch might set her off. Adrian wasn’t a big person, not much bigger than Cleo herself, but when he walked into that room there was something huge about him, something almost bigger than life.
She was so proud of him.
So glad he was her brother.
They had been through a war together, the battle of growing up, of finding themselves, of making sense of the senseless. They’d been through a massacre and survived.
Adrian grasped her gently by both arms. “I came to get you.” He spoke slowly.
She nodded, wondering what the hell he was talking about and where he was taking her.
“You’re going to come back to Seattle with me.”
“ Seattle?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t.” She couldn’t leave this room. It was the place where she’d made contact. It was part of the equation.
He looked around at the mess, the candle wax on the floor, at Cleo. “What have you been doing?’
She smiled a little, remembering. “Transcending time and space.” Adrian would understand. Adrian would be proud of her.
She didn’t know how it happened, but suddenly she was sitting at the kitchen counter with a bowl of soup in front of her. It was cream-colored, with flecks of something.
“Eat,” Adrian commanded.
She stared at it. And stared some more. What were those things?
While she stared into the bowl, she felt him lift her hand, felt him wrap her fingers around the cold metal of a spoon.
“Eat,” he repeated. “Or I’ll force-feed you.”
And he would.
She ate, trying to avoid the dark things. She did pretty well until she got about halfway done and the concentration of dark things began to overpower the liquid. She accidentally got a dark thing.
It had a strong taste.
A mushy texture.
Mushy…mushroom. She was eating mushroom soup.
The spoon clattered to the floor as she ran for the bathroom to throw up.
That was the beginning of Cleo’s eating problems.
Adrian helped her pack her stuff. Actually, Adrian did most of it. Cleo sat, staring at nothing.
She didn’t know why he was going to all this trouble. “I can’t leave,” Cleo told him.
“You can’t stay.”
He was her older brother. He knew about such things. She nodded, realizing he was right. At least for the moment.
While they packed, he discovered that she would drink milkshakes if they didn’t have any pieces of anything in them. So he plied her with shakes until she got diarrhea and had to stay in the bathroom for hours. Two days after his arrival, all of her belongings were packed and put in storage and they were on a flight to Seattle.
She woke the next morning to find herself face-to-face with a small child who stood staring at her, a wet finger dangling from her pouty mouth.
“Are you Macy?” Cleo asked haltingly, her voice broken from sleep and the weakness that was so much a part of her now.
“That’s my bed.” Macy dragged the wet finger from her mouth and poked at the mattress with its Winnie-the-Pooh sheets. “My bed.” She patted the woven pink blanket flung carelessly over her pajama-clad shoulder. “My bankie.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t take your bankie.”
With the sober seriousness of the Pope, Macy dragged the blanket from her shoulder and tucked the bulk of its pink softness under Cleo’s cheek.
Cleo could only blink back tears and try to smile.
Adrian didn’t believe in waiting. That morning he got Cleo in to see his shrink.
“She’s good,” he told Cleo as he drove her to the office. “I no longer feel guilty about things I have no control over.”
“You mean you’re now able to forgive yourself for not living up to Mother’s agenda?”
“Nothing to forgive.”
“But are you able to forgive her for having that agenda?”
“I said my shrink was good. I didn’t say she worked miracles.”
Cleo told the shrink about how she could transport herself through time and space.
“Grief,” said Dr. Mary Porter, “can do strange things to a person’s head. Remember that, at the time, you were on painkillers, you were sleep-deprived, and you were most likely suffering from post-traumatic stress.”
They discussed many things, but often the conversation would swing back to dreams Cleo had had as a child. There was one dream in particular that, no matter how many years passed, remained solidly ingrained in her memory.
“I’m little, and I’m alone in the woods,” she told Dr. Porter. “But I’m not scared. I’m skipping and chanting jump-rope rhymes. Old lady, old lady, turn around. I’m wearing a red velvet dress with black patent-leather shoes. I can feel the breeze on my skin, I can smell the heavy vegetation. And suddenly I come upon three people, two men and a woman. They’re standing there in the middle of the woods. An intrusion on an otherwise happy moment. One of the men turns around and yells at me, and his face is pretty and ugly at the same time. And then I see he has a gun in his hand.”
As a child, Cleo would come out of the daydream with her body covered in sweat. It always seemed so real. So vivid.
“What do you think that was about?” Cleo asked Dr. Porter. Even though she hadn’t had the dream in years, she could still remember it the way someone else might remember a wedding or a graduation.
“No one really understands the intricacies of the human mind,” Dr. Porter told her. “Personally, I think dreams, daydreams included, are a way for us to subconsciously heal ourselves. A way for us to make things right. There may have been something going on in your childhood, something you may not even remember now, but whatever it was, your subconscious wanted to fix it, make it better. And since you quit having the dream, whatever it was that was bothering you must have gone away.”
It seemed like a good enough answer to Cleo.
With continued counseling, Dr. Porter helped Cleo get past her eating disorder and her grief, but Cleo could never convince Dr. Porter that one January she’d transported herself back in time. And Dr. Porter could never fully convince Cleo that she hadn’t.
Chapter Fourteen
It was officially his day off, so after dropping Cleo at the motel, Daniel swung by the gas station to pick up a six-pack of beer and cigarettes. He’d quit smoking three years ago, but his nerves were frazzled. He ordered the cigarettes from the clerk, then, at the last minute, took a detour down a nearby aisle, picked up a package of condoms, and tossed them on the counter along with the beer and cigarettes. He stared at the clerk, daring him to say something about his purchases.
Admirably poker-faced, the clerk rang up the items, bagged everything, and gave Daniel his change.
Daniel grabbed the stiff paper bag and left, figuring everybody in town would know that the town cop was not only drinking on duty, he was getting laid and enjoying a good smoke afterward as well.
Outside, he almost mowed down a woman with two little kids. He sidestepped, mumbled an apology, then looked directly at the woman.
Julia Bell.
That was the bad thing about a small town. Your past was always jumping up, smacking you in the face. “Julia?” he asked, even though he knew it was his old girlfriend. He’d kept reluctant tabs on her. Years ago, his mother had written to let him know Julia had gotten married. And written again when she was pregnant with her first child. After his mother’s funeral, he’d spotted Julia’s name in the guestbook and knew she’d been there, even though he hadn’t seen her.
She was heavier now, but not overweight. And she’d lost the sparkle, but she had something else, something that was maybe better-contentment. Daniel knew contentment was what Julia had wanted out of life.