“Now, now, old girl. Don’t you know brave Artemis doesn’t cry? Here.” He plucked a black-eyed Susan and handed it to her. “Hold on.” From the bench, he retrieved a book of poetry—Wordsworth, his favorite. He nodded to the open page. “Here. Put it here.”
Evie laid the flower in the book’s crease, and James read the poem beneath it: “Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find / Strength in what remains behind.” Smiling, he slammed the book shut. “There. Preserved for all time.”
Mama’s voice drifted to them from the back porch. “James! Evangeline! Your breakfast will get cold!”
“Yon Hera beckons us to Olympus.”
Evie wanted to grab the edges of the dream like a blanket and wrap it around her, safe and happy. The sun warmed her face. The cicadas grew louder. Across the lawn, her mother and father waved from the back porch, happy and bright. But something wasn’t quite right. The house flickered just slightly. For a brief few seconds, it seemed almost like the entrance to a tunnel rather than a house, and something about the dark inside made Evie very afraid.
“James?” she said, panicked. “James!”
She saw him at the gate, dressed in his army khakis, a rifle slung across his back. The dream was turning. Evie was desperate to grab it back before it was too late.
“James, don’t go,” Evie warned as fog rolled in, rendering her brother a ghost. “You won’t come back. And we’ll be lost without you. We’ll be broken forever. James! Come back!” She was crying now, calling his name over and over, a lament. Her parents and the house were gone. In their place were the tunnel and a woman in a veil. “You can have him back. Dream with me.…”
“I can…” Evie murmured. All she had to do was say yes. And then James would stay with them forever. The dream made her believe it. Why, it couldn’t be simpler!
“I—”
“Brave Artemis!” James said. He stood at the top of the hill in the misty forest of that other dream she hated. “Time to wake up now.”
“No!” Evie screamed as the explosions started.
She woke in her bed, her stomach roiling. She barely made it to the toilet before she vomited up the night’s booze. And then she lay on the cold tile floor, crying.
Across town, Nathan Rosborough stumbled from an all-night poker game quite a bit poorer than when the evening had started. Drunk on Scotch and desperate to be accepted by the other, more important, stockbrokers, he’d played down to the skin of his wallet. He hadn’t wanted them to think he was some kind of quitter. But now, as he sobered a bit, he was worried. He’d be lucky to scrape together enough to eat in the coming week. This thought weighed heavily on Nathan as he stared out at the skyline, the colossus unfurled, and felt a longing so powerful it bordered on obscenity. Then he fished his last nickel from his pocket and stumbled down the steps of the Fulton Street subway station to wait for the train.
The platform was deserted at this hour. A newspaper story about a missing heiress had been taped to the wall beside an advertisement for a dandruff cure: Nora Hodkin, age eighteen. She had been seen four days ago heading to the downtown IRT wearing a blue dress and a brown hat. The grainy newspaper photograph of Nora Hodkin showed a pretty, wide-eyed girl astride a horse. Her distraught parents offered a five-hundred-dollar reward to anyone who found her.