My voice
My breath
My blood singing in my veins for you
To give them power
They are lost
I love you
It’s too late but I love you
And I’m sorry
I never told you.
All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams. ~Elias Canetti
I dream of a river and I am carried along its currents. No boat or raft. I’m submerged to my chest in cold, dark water as the river cuts through a deep valley or canyon. I see huge, looming walls of rock. In my peripheral are people, places and moments in time. They skim across the rock and vanish when I look at them directly. I can only catch a glimpse. A few scraps.
The blue whale.
The rusted clown.
The melting spire.
Memories.
Hers, not mine. She’s carried along with me and she’s been cleaved in two, one half of her bright and vibrant, the other half gray and dying. I carry her with me in a current of her memories. We journey together. We run. Men from her broken and violent life chase her and I have to protect her. To pull her out of this deep ravine and carry her somewhere safe.
As the light of dawn begins to spill into the canyon, I’m sucked under by a riptide. It’s a cold, bony hand dragging me under. I kick for the surface, but the pull is too strong.
I hover somewhere between the shallows and the deep, my lungs stretched to bursting…
I wake up gasping for breath in deep, greedy gulps. Shivering so badly my cot creaks. My skin is pale as bone, broken out in gooseflesh, as if I had been swimming in freezing cold water. The dream skims just beyond my consciousness and I can only grab onto a few shreds. I remember almost nothing but the words that fall out of my mouth.
“North,” I say aloud, still trying to catch my breath, my teeth chattering. “The center.”
I don’t know what that means except that Jo needs me. She‘s in danger. Or in pain.
She’s slipping away, fading to gray, and I have to find her before it’s too late.
Dolores, Louisiana
Four years later
It was a slow day. By two p.m.. Lee’s Place was all but empty. Only a few stragglers at the counter hunched over their coffee and greasy hash browns. I finished up my side work and went to the back room to take off my apron and count up the day’s tips.
Twenty-seven dollars.
I sighed. “Shit.”
Patty appeared at the door to the back room, staring me down with stony gray eyes, as if my shift weren’t over and I was cutting out early. I always likened Patty Stevenson to Medusa, with a head full of suspicious snakes watching everything and everyone around her.
“Where you going?” she said.
None of your goddamn business, that’s where.
I forced a smile as I looked up at my boyfriend’s mother, not quite meeting her eye for fear of being turned to stone. “I’ve got errands. Some grocery shopping for dinner tonight. Nothing exciting. You’re still coming over, right?”
She made a scratchy noise in the back of her throat and patted the coiled platinum curls of her hair. My overactive imagination heard snakes hissing. She glanced at my loose ponytail with the strands I pulled free to help conceal my scar. Her eyes narrowed at the cut that split my lower lip, still dark with congealing blood.
“You take better care of Lee, you hear?” she said, jutting her chin. “If you didn’t rile him up like you do, he wouldn’t take a hand to you, and you wouldn’t have to show up to work looking like this. I can’t have my employees looking like trash.”
“I know, Patty.”
She sniffed again. “I’ll see you at your place for dinner. Don’t forget Lee likes his fried chicken nice n’ crisp.”
As if I’d forget. The last time I made Lee fried chicken, he raged it was ‘undercooked mush.’ I barely managed to dodge the skillet of scalding oil he threw at me, then spent the better part of the night scrubbing it off the kitchen wall.
Patty left me alone and I recounted my tips. I did a few mental calculations and stuffed twenty bucks into my wallet and put the remaining seven in the pocket of my jeans. Seven dollars, plus another fifteen I’d stashed earlier wasn’t worth a drive out to Del’s. But if Patty—along with a bunch of Lee’s asshole friends—was coming over for dinner tonight, I’d need the mental reinforcements of Del’s friendship to get me through it.
I headed out through the kitchen, offering a goodbye to the guys.
“Goodnight, boys.”
“Night, beautiful,” called Hector at the grill.
“Take care, JoJo,” said Jeremiah from the dishwasher.
I took their cheerful smiles and tucked them in my pocket next to the seven dollars.