“Oh. Yeah. I wanted to know if you could dog-sit Baxter again. I needed to know and you weren’t answering your phone.” He paused and she listened to nuances shift in the silence. “Tony and I got invited away for the weekend, but we don’t have to go.”
“I didn’t answer my phone because the battery is dead. It didn’t ring.” She repeated it with as much patience as she could muster.
She remembered what she was doing and poured herself a second cup of coffee. She held it to her nose, closed her eyes and let the steam warm her chilled skin. Somehow Justin, Tony and that dog had become her entire social circle.
She would have to add that to her to-do list. Fix toilet. Fix lamp. Fix self.
She said, “Of course I’ll watch Baxter for you. I love that dog.”
“Thanks, I appreciate it.” He glanced at his watch again. “I’ve got a deposition and I really have to run. But I’m coming back and we’re going to duke this out later. I’ll see you at two.”
She felt the bones in her body compress with the urge to smack him over the head. She gritted her teeth instead. The quicker she stopped arguing with him, the quicker he would be out the door. “Hurry or you’ll be late for work.”
“Oh hell.” He bent forward, kissed the air by her cheek and dashed out of the house.
Mary moved to the large living room window to watch with narrowed eyes as he drove away. She tapped a fingernail against the glass. “You can come,” she whispered to his retreating car. “But I’m not going to be here.”
? ? ?
She folded her laundry, put it away and straightened her bed. There was another load of colorful cloth scraps in the laundry room. She put the scraps in the washing machine and tidied the living room.
Since she lived alone and the two-bedroom house was more than big enough to suit her modest needs, she used the living room as one of her workrooms. She had four quilts in varying stages of completion. By far the most colorful was the patchwork crazy quilt. She fingered the cloth but the piece wasn’t speaking to her. It seemed a lifeless fact, separate from her existence as though some stranger had left it in her house.
She moved down the hall to the second bedroom, which she had turned into a studio. There she spent two hours trying to capture on canvas something of the imagery from her dream, but it was hopeless.
Those creatures had shone from within. The colors that had shifted within their bodies and flowed outward in whorls of light were too delicate and strange for her to capture on paper. The colors seemed indicative of emotion or personality, as if the creatures had senses so different from humans, they could actually see the pheromones their bodies released. No matter how she tried, she couldn’t convey the impression with paint or pencils, and she didn’t have the illustrative skill of a commercial artist.
She had been plagued with strange dreams for as long as she could remember. The one she had labeled “the sacred poison dream” was only one of the ones that recurred on a regular basis. Sometimes the details of the sacred poison dream were vague, or just different. Several details remained constant. There were the seven people, or creatures, three pairs of whom were mates; an escaped criminal; the poison that they drank; and the terror and sense of appalling loss when she awakened.
She shook her head. Some people believed each person had a soul mate, but she didn’t. The concept was too convenient, too romantic without real substance. People met other like-minded people because they shared things in common and engaged in similar activities. Birds of a feather really did flock together. Either that or they met by accident. She could never understand why that was a major recurring theme in her dreams.
At least she could be grateful that, no matter how violent or overwhelming the loss might feel in the dream’s aftermath, it held her in its grip for only a brief time before fading away. No one could endure that kind of raw anguish for long, at least not that Mary had witnessed. People seemed to suffer intense grief in waves.
The dreams had not been so intense or vivid when she had been a child but they had always been unsettling. They had gained in color, detail and emotion as she had grown older. As a med student at Notre Dame University, she’d taken advantage of the counseling offered through the university in an attempt to put whatever demons existed inside her mind to rest. For over a year she and her counselor had explored her childhood and the possible symbolism involved in the dream imagery.
Justin was right. She had lived an almost entirely normal childhood. She had fallen out of trees, tripped and misspoke in school plays, made cupcakes for bake sales and had sleepovers with friends. She remembered her childhood with detailed clarity. There was simply nothing for her to be haunted about, other than the death of her parents when she was fourteen. Even then she had gone to live with a loving aunt who had been attentive to the needs of a grief-stricken child.