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But I didn’t know. I didn’t know at all.
People loved him, though. If h
e left the store without me, he’d be mobbed almost instantly by people who just happened to be walking by the station. Cal! they’d exclaim. What a surprise to see you! What are you up to? Oh, well I don’t mind walking with you since I was heading that direction anyway! Then they’d wave at me through the glass almost as an afterthought, and I’d roll my eyes as Cal turned back to me with a grin, the worry not quite leaving his eyes. If he did leave my side, it was only for a few moments, and only because I practically shoved him out the door. He’d take off on whatever errand I’d sent him on, almost at a jog, his companions struggling to keep up with his long strides.
“I wish you wouldn’t make me leave you,” he said with a scowl one night, very late. “I don’t like to take my eyes off you. Not when we don’t know what’s out there.”
I snorted as I rolled off him and onto my back. “That’s life,” I told him quietly. “You never know what is out there. You just have to hope and trust that you’ll see the other person again.”
He must have heard something in my voice betray me. A slight tremor, a rhythm to my words that belied the teasing lilt I tried to make him hear. Before I knew what was happening, he was atop me, crushing me into the mattress, teasing his tongue over my skin. There was always need with him, but this was somehow more. He held me as if I was something precious, something extraordinary, as if I was his guardian angel instead of him being mine. He spread my legs with his knee, and I saw blue, everything I saw was blue. He took me that night with such abandon that I cried out incoherently as he rammed into me, unable to form words, much less thought. Blue lights shot across my vision, though whether from him or in my head I didn’t know.
I awake early the morning after, shortly before he rises to wake me for the
sunrise, heat radiating from him as he presses against my back, draping his arm over my waist. I turn over, my face against his. He chuffs quietly in his sleep, gives a light snore, then falls silent. First, I wonder if he dreams as I reach up to smooth the lines from his brow. And, second, I try to remember what it’s like to sleep alone. I can’t. These are the only thoughts I have until he opens his eyes right before dawn and smiles a sleepy grin at me. There is something there, in his eyes, a deep warmth far beyond anything I’ve seen in him before. I think I know its name, though I can’t bring myself to say the words. It’s as if in me he’d seen the greatest thing in his long life.
A life he is ending by being here with me, I thought as he pulled me to him. Not everyone was kind, though. I didn’t miss the scowls of Griggs as he drove by us on the street. Walken would nod coolly as he entered his office on the other side of Poplar. They knew, somehow, that I knew. What I was supposed to know didn’t matter, just that I knew. I knew about Arthur Davis. I knew about Joshua Corwin. I knew about my father. These were men who killed to maintain their secrets. I didn’t know which one of them pulled the trigger at Corwin’s head, or hung Arthur by his neck, or ran my father off the road. I didn’t know if the specific person mattered. Not even if it was Traynor, who’d disappeared. They were all complicit, and I would bury them alive if I got the chance.
Cal knows of my anger, though he says little of it. Sometimes I think he has plans all his own, though I don’t know what they could be. I suppose I should be worried about what he will do. Or about my soul. But I don’t think I am.
No FBI agents have knocked on my door asking after Corwin.
No Strange Men have wandered into town.
It makes me nervous.
It doesn’t help that the dreams are getting louder and louder. Standing by the roaring river, the rain pounding down from the sky. The metallic shriek of Big Eddie’s truck crashing down the embankment. Crosses. Feathers, both on the surface of the river and in my father’s dead hand. A darkened figure up on the road. My name called, my body submerged. I’ve never really thought about sounds in a dream before, but as the dream progresses, each time an inch or two closer to the window, the world around me is shrieking, enough so that it feels like my head will split and save me the trouble of drowning. I don’t know if the further I am getting in my dream has to do with Cal becoming more human. All I know is I have to get into the truck.
It also doesn’t help that I’ve started having the dreams while I am awake. Conversations get interrupted because the river has rushed in and engulfed me. I swim as fast as I can (thinking inhale, try, breathe, drown), but the truck’s only an inch closer each time. I’ll snap from the waking dream, laughing it off if I’m talking to a customer or my family. If it’s Cal, it doesn’t matter because he already knows. He’s the one who pulls me away.
But I’m getting closer each time. I have to see my father’s face.
“I don’t know if this is such a good idea,” I mutter, sitting on the edge of the
bed. “As a matter of fact, this sounds like an awful idea.” Cal is standing in front of the mirror, his face scrunched up as he stares at his reflection, trying like hell to tie his tie. For all that he can do, for all that he is, it’s the tiniest of things that trip him up the most. The most human of things. Like tying a tie that I’m still unclear about why he decided to wear. (Where it has come from inspires a whole other set of questions I don’t want to bother with; the slacks and dress shirt he wears are tailored perfectly, as if they’ve been made for him. Someone has obviously been sneaking around.)
I sigh and walk over to him, knock his hands away and untangle the knot he’s somehow gotten his finger stuck in. “We can just stay in,” I mutter.
“Your mother invited us,” he says, checking himself out in the mirror again.
“Vanity,” I scold him.
“It would be rude not to go. Do you like this tie?”
“It’s okay, I guess. I don’t know why you want to wear a tie.”
“Oh.”
“She also invited Abe.”
“Yes. Good. I like Abe.”
“And the Trio.”
“Nina. Ah, little one. She is so special.”
“And Mary and Christie,” I remind him. “Who don’t know you sprout wings like a butterfly.”
He stops looking at his reflection to scowl at me. “I’m not a butterfly. I am big. Impressive, even. Suzie Goodman told me I was the most impressive specimen of man she’d ever had the pleasure of seeing.”
