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Gutsy shrugged. “Pretty much.”
“You’re weird,” said Alethea, “but I love you.” She kissed Gutsy on the right cheek; Spider kissed the other side.
Gutsy went outside to watch them walk away. They seemed to take all the light and warmth of the day with them. That was okay, Gutsy told herself. Everything would be okay.
It was a moonless night and there were ten billion stars up there, so she dragged one of the plastic chairs around to the side of the house where there was no light. Sombra followed, silent as a ghost, and lay down beside her chair.
Gutsy leaned back, propping her bare feet against the wall, and looked upward at infinity. Her heart hurt but her eyes were dry. She’d cried enough tears and now she wanted to let all that go, at least for a while.
Gutsy liked the silence. And the dark. She understood it. It appeared to be simple, but never was; it appeared to be empty, but wasn’t.
Without knowing she was going to do it, her left hand drifted down and began scratching the back of Sombra’s neck. The coydog allowed it. When Gutsy became conscious that she was doing it, she almost stopped. Almost.
She almost said, It’s all right, too.
Almost.
But she didn’t want to lie to the dog, or to herself.
Above them the wheel of night turned.
18
GUTSY DREAMED OF BURYING HER mother. Not once, not twice, but every single day of her life. That was what her life had become. Finding her mother, withered and dead, wandering in the rooms of their little house; restraining her; re-shrouding her; wrestling her improbably heavy body onto the cart; driving back to the cemetery; burying her; coming home; finding her mother there again. Over and over in an endless dance of heartbreak and horror.
When she heard her bedroom door creak open, the sound folded itself into her dream. It was Sombra, come to watch as Gutsy did up the knots again around Mama’s ankles and knees, elbows and wrists. The coydog watched with eyes that burned with real fire; eyes that gave off the only heat in the whole world. Sombra was bigger in the dream, more wolflike.
The dog’s presence bothered Gutsy as she slept. It was wrong. When she’d come in from stargazing, hadn’t she left the dog in the kitchen, with the door closed? How could he be in her room?
The dreaming Gutsy paused in her work, the ends of rope in her hands, and turned to the dog.
Except it wasn’t a dog.
Somehow her mother wasn’t in the shroud Gutsy was tying.
Instead Mama stood there in the open bedroom doorway. Her clothes were torn and streaked with mud, her eyes empty of everything except a bottomless hunger, her gray hands reaching and her dry teeth snapping at the air.
“Mama . . . ?” said Gutsy in a voice that sounded like a little child’s.
She wanted to wake up out of the dream, but she could not.
Because she wasn’t dreaming.
And her mother was there, in her room, reaching for her.
19
SOMBRA HOWLED IN THE KITCHEN.
Gutsy screamed in her bedroom.
Mama moaned as she grabbed Gutsy.
The dream held Gutsy with cold, strong fingers, trapping her for a moment at the edge of waking. For a terrible fragment of a second she wasn’t sure whether this was a nightmare or if the world had cracked open and nightmares spilled out into her real life.
Then the smell of rot and grave dirt and sickness dragged her all the way into wakefulness.
Though it was still a nightmare. Of a kind.
