That very morning she had stumbled out of her bunk bed bleary-eyed and confused. She sat at our rough-hewn table and ate her hot bowl of Wheatena in silence. Adelaide noticed the sleep in her eyes and bent down with a moist towel to rub the sand away. Wanita looked at the green-eyed redhead with bewilderment. She touched Addy’s hair, put her fingers to her own cheek. Then she began to speak as if she had already been in the middle of an explanation.
“... they started out really big, like that tower thing on top’s that hill—”
“Coit Tower,” Reggie said as he ate.
“— and they get smaller and smaller, but then they come awake and start to sing,” the dreamer said. “It’s like they was purple glass at first with hot stuff inside, but when they get real small, like a little Christmas tree, then they’s pink with little tears runnin’ down they sideses.”
“Who are they?” Adelaide breathed in the softest possible whisper.
“Like glass,” Wanita said again. “An’ they sing when they get little. Tinkle-like, humming-like, an’ nobody could hear it but them an’ me. All the animals and bugs that drink the little tears think that the glass sticks is just sticks, but they not. They be singin’ an’ laughin’. An’ you could hear ’em everywhere.”
“Where?” I asked gently, but I should have been gentler still.
By the way Wanita looked up, I could tell that she was coming out of the dream.
“Wanita!” I said sharply.
“Huh?”
“Where were the pink sticks made from glass?”
She shrugged and said nonchalantly, “In a place where the sun is blue and the sky is red. Not anywhere that we could go. Except if you dreamed it.”
“Can you go there in your dreams, Wanita?” Addy asked.
“I did last night. Can I have a apple?”
And so went the way of Wanita’s dreams. She traveled the universe at night while we slept. Her mind was gone for what must have felt like weeks or more overnight. Sometimes we worried that she’d be gone so long that she’d forget who she was completely, or even what she was. But that was the way of godhood, I supposed. All Addy and I could do was feed them and listen to them, groom them with our love and respect. And keep them safe from Death.
“There’s something out there, almost like it was music,” Reggie said. “But... but it’s something... it’s something else. Like safe. Safe.”
As soon as Reggie said it, I could hear it. Like a whole orchestra of brass and silver horns so far away that I couldn’t even tell what direction they were in. But when Reggie pointed I believed that sound might be coming from that way.
The extra senses I’d gained from Ordé had quieted over time. The stars still sang to me, the bands between the rainbow still revealed new colors, but it had become so normal that I hardly remembered what it had been like to have common senses. And my time around the children had disoriented those perceptions because I could always feel the Blues when they were near. It wasn’t a hard sensation, more like the feeling of a cloud partly blocking the sun.
Their light had hidden the music from me.
“Uh-huh.” Adelaide nodded while closing her eyes, holding her face up as if to feel the wind. “Yeah, I do feel something. It’s like sunlight through water.”
The children and I had gone back to the cabin. I was excited to tell Addy about what I felt. Addy’s senses had been altered by carrying Ordé’s child. She and I had somewhat similar powers, only she couldn’t hear and see things as much. Addy’s ability was more in intuiting what the children were feeling and thinking. They could come to her for advice and she’d interpret what they felt even though the needs of those small blue gods were often things that she had never known.
“Mr. Needham didn’t feel it,” I said.
Needham was the camp handyman. He was an older white gentleman who didn’t mind having an interracial family on the grounds. It was late in the fall and we were the only paying customers. Maybe he would have felt differently if it were the height of summer.
“We can’t hear it either,” Alacrity added. “We just said we could ’cause we were so happy.”
“Uh-huh,” Reggie said. “It’s like I know it’s there, but I can’t really hear it.”
“Probably because it wasn’t meant for normal people or the Blues,” Addy responded, opening her eyes. “This is probably meant for people like Chance and me. It’s like a beacon for the half blind. Reggie probably figured it out because he was looking for someplace safe but it just happens to be where that call comes from.”
“How far away do you think it’s coming from?” I asked.
Addy closed her eyes and held up her face again. After a few moments she shook her head and frowned.
“We gotta go there,” Reggie said.
“Uh-huh,” Alacrity agreed.
“What do you think, Wanita?” I asked our round-faced dreamer.
“ ’Kay,” she answered, as if I had been trying to force her to go.
“I don’t mean you have to go, honey,” I said.
“But we do,” she said softly while fingering her pink sweater. “Like them fishes.”
“What fish?” asked Alacrity.
“The blue ones,” Wanita replied.
Alacrity nodded, making a rare serious frown.
“Then we better get some more campin’ stuff,” Reggie said. “ ’Cause we gotta go way up in the woods an’ I don’t think the road will go all that far.”
We spent the week buying nylon tents and rugged shoes, powdered packets of food and sleeping bags. We had gloves and bug repellent, a shortwave radio, hard candy and chocolate bars to energize little girls. Ordé’s account felt the drain.
We were all happy at the prospect of refuge. But the morning we were to leave, the signal — brass horns, the liquid air, whatever it was — was gone. Reggie was disoriented and uncertain; Addy and I couldn’t hear a thing. We waited for another week for the sensation to return. It came while we were sleeping on a Tuesday night, late. I got everybody up and hustled them into the van, and we drove without stopping except for gas stations and food stores. Addy and I alternated driving and sleeping. We traveled for eighteen hours on highways and secondary roads going south. Two hundred miles or so past San Francisco we hit dirt roads. For another two days we bumped along back roads.
The last drivable road finally came to an end on Friday afternoon. It didn’t end exactly; there was still a clearing there, but it had fallen into disrepair — recently, as far as I could tell. There were trees fallen across it and great upheavals in the ground. We decided to camouflage our VW van and explore. The feeling that came from that way was neither stronger nor weaker. None of us knew how long the trek would be.
Reggie had almost half our gear on his broad shoulders. The pack he carried was impossibly large. He was straining under the weight, but there was something about him when he got on the trail of an idea or imagined destination — he kept on going no matter what.
He mouthed soft drumlike sounds, pom pom pompom pom, as he went. Now and then he’d make verbal notes about our passage. “Heavy foot on the light turn. Slashing lines on the left.” Sometimes he’d stop and look around like a small child who has temporarily lost sight of his mother in a crowded supermarket.
“You okay, Reggie?” I asked once when he seemed a bit lost.
“Yeah, man,” he replied. “You know what, Chance?”
“What?”
“My sister’s been here?”
“Wanita?”
“No, uh-uh. Luwanda’s been here,” he said.