Total pages in book: 91
Estimated words: 87608 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 438(@200wpm)___ 350(@250wpm)___ 292(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 87608 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 438(@200wpm)___ 350(@250wpm)___ 292(@300wpm)
“Why are we out here?” I asked her.
“I don’t know.” She spun in the wind with her arms out. “I just love it here so much. Don’t you?”
I did. In the spring I sat in the meadow close by and watched the does bring their fawns, the mother quails walking with their chicks, and all the rabbits. It was like a scene out of Bambi, and it never ceased to make me smile. Where we were, though, was toward the deeper forest, nearly where the preserve began, but you could still smell the salty ocean air on the breeze because that too was close.
“Why are we here?” I asked her again, staring at her, marveling at how beautiful she was, her long lashes brushing the tops of her cheeks when she closed her eyes.
I was missing something; that had to be it. We were riding along, she was as distracted by me as I was by her, and everything else had been moving in a blur. Something occurred to me.
“Why are you so happy?”
She smiled and bit her bottom lip. “I met someone. He’s in the Peace Corps, and he loves my village, but he’s worried, I think, that I would never leave it. But I would, you know. For him I would, and his home sounds lovely.”
My grandparents, Enedina Bautista and Arthur Corey, had met when my grandfather was sent to El Salvador. She was a nurse at a local hospital but also a healer, taught by her grandmother. He was there to build homes, wells, all the things needed. They were smitten with each other from the moment they met, and then came love. But what did any of that have to do with me? With now?
“You’re distracted, you said?” I asked her as she spun some more, faster, until she lost her footing and fell down into the grass.
I moved—floated, really; it was a dream, after all—over to her and stood still, staring down at her, seeing she was older now, the woman I’d known.
“Sometimes when we’re not looking, we find our future.”
Oh, dear Lord. I groaned loudly, stepping back.
She sat up and grinned at me.
“You’re pushing,” I told her. “Lorne might not want to be tied to the land, or to me.”
She made that humming sound that meant she was considering something, and I noticed she wasn’t looking at me anymore but over near the oak. When I turned, I saw blood there, and then more, rising through the rift.
But that wasn’t possible. No matter what they did on the other side, the number of souls murdered, it would never be enough blood to wash into our dimension and create a path. That simply couldn’t happen.
And I’d cleansed the body that had once been Rulaine before the land consumed her. So there was no tainted blood on my side of the rift to call on.
“You’re saying I’m missing something,” I said to my grandmother, who was now my grandfather, getting up and dusting himself off.
“Like logs on the fire,” he told me, which didn’t help at all.
“Is there any way you could be more clear?”
He shrugged and turned away but then looked over his shoulder at me. “He seems like mortar to me.”
“Listen,” I began, ready to give him a piece of my mind because he was slipping around from subject to subject without any context. He’d gone from giving me a warning to talking about Lorne. I knew that because he’d always said I was foundational, like the bricks of the hearth the house was built around, and suddenly Lorne was the mortar?
He was gone, though, on the breeze, and I was left in the dream alone. It was dark suddenly, the blood was rising, and I was starting to get scared.
Being a dream, I was swimming in blood in seconds, and I saw a doe standing on a small hill, screaming, which I’d never heard a deer do in my life, and I just knew her fawn was lost. I had to find her baby, so I dived under the blood now moving river-fast, but there was nothing underneath except bodies, so many, moving with me in the current.
Coming up for air, flailing, my hand was grabbed, and it was Lorne. He was on a paddleboard, and once I was on, I realized there was a fawn with him and knew where he belonged and to whom. When I lifted my head to tell him, he tipped his chin at me.
“Like logs on a fire,” he said, and sighed.
“What?” I asked sharply.
“They stack up.”
My eyes snapped open, and I was in my bed. When I turned to my right, Rulaine was there in my grandmother’s rocking chair, reading Candide, of all things.
“You’re ridiculous,” she said, and went back to her book.
Jolting, I woke up, and the room that had been dark was lighter, letting me know it was early, before dawn. Checking the room, I saw no ghosts, noted that Argos was curled up on the rocking chair and that everything else appeared normal. The best part, without question, was Lorne, beside me, passed out, tucked under the covers like someone had made sure he would be warm. I was guessing my grandmother.