C.E. Murphy - Coyote Dreams

I felt a disbelieving smile pull at my mouth. “I’m sorry,” I said around it. “That sounds pretty great, actually. Maybe too good to be real.” I knew people whose too-good-to-be-real early relationships had turned into actually-just-good-enough-to-be-real ones. I knew ones that hadn’t turned out, too, of course, but all of a sudden I was feeling hopeful. So he was a kook who was willing to go with my whole magic-filled lifestyle. For somebody like me, that might not be a bad thing. And he knew when not to push it, which for somebody like me was perfect. “Where exactly did you come from?”

“Arizona.” He grinned, touched my cheek and ducked his head to steal a brief kiss, as threatened. Then he stepped back with another grin and a wink, and left me smiling idiotically after him as he sauntered off to find his car. Not until he left did I stagger upstairs to collapse in my bed, eyes wide despite a great weariness encroaching on me. I felt peculiarly normal , which struck me as all wrong, because nothing in the past twenty-four hours had been normal for me.

Which was a complex thought in and of itself. The last six or seven months, when I’d thought something along those lines, it’d meant old gods and spirit guides and magical things were going on. Right now it meant I’d almost accidentally slept with somebody and had gone out dancing and appeared to have something of a social life. That was all wildly abnormal. Billy’s illness might’ve been mystical in nature, but by God if my mind hadn’t assimilated that as an ordinary thing that happened in the course of Joanne’s life.

I honestly couldn’t decide if that was a good sign or not.

Somewhere right around the edge of sleep I could feel an idea of what I should be doing next starting to form. I was afraid to look too closely at it, for fear of sending it scurrying away. A few hours’ sleep before work might shake it loose, and in the morning I’d have to tell Phoebe I owed her one. Who could’ve known that a little R & R was good for the soul? I rolled over, chortling sleepily at myself, and dragged a pillow across the bed to moosh my face into it. It smelled faintly of Mark’s after-shave, which made my stomach tighten up, but the vast sleepies had a head start on berating myself with a what were you thinking lecture.

I was very nearly asleep when the phone rang.

Wednesday, July 6, 2:19 a.m .

Panic smashed through me, turning ice water to nausea in my belly. I fell out of bed and grabbed for the phone on the way to the floor, fumbling the receiver and putting it to my ear with shaking hands. “Hello? Jesus. What’s wrong? Hello?”

“Joanne?” It was a little boy’s voice, so out of place my foggy brain couldn’t comprehend it for a moment. “Joanne?” he asked again.

“Yeah, this is—yeah.” I rubbed my eyes frantically, trying to wake up. “Who is thi—is this Robert?”

“Yeah.” A gulp, precariously near a sob, sounded in the word. “Joanne, Mommy went to sleep like Daddy did. Erik is sick and tried to wake her up and we can’t get her to wake up. Can you help us? Please?” Robert was nearly twelve, the quaver in his voice swallowed down in an attempt at adult bravery, but Mommy and Daddy went a long way toward telling me just how scared he was.

“Everything’s going to be okay, Robert. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Are your sisters okay?”

“Clara’s still sleeping. Me and Jacquie are awake. And Erik keeps saying he’s gonna throw up.”

“Okay. You guys all get a blanket so you stay warm and keep Erik company in the bathroom so he can throw up in the toilet if he needs to, okay?” I pulled clothes on as I talked, exhaustion burning my eyes. “I’ll be there as fast as I can. Just hold tight, Robert. I’ll be right there.”

“Okay.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “What do I do if somebody else goes to sleep?”

Billy’s sleeping image flashed through my mind. And I’d gone out to have fun instead of trying to find answers. I was never going to forgive myself. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, Robert. It’ll be okay. I’ll be right there. You did good, calling me. I’ll be right there,” I promised again, and hit the door at a run.

The Hollidays’ home had a wonderful front yard that’d seen better days. Trees and bushes were mashed, and a section of the picket fence had been replaced but not yet repainted. The front porch, similarly, was of fresh raw wood, though a can of stain sat on the corner of the railing, making a dark cylindrical spot against the lightness of the wood. Billy’d repainted the new boards above the front door where the frame had been torn apart and fixed, since the last time I’d been over. Even in the middle of the night and half repaired, it looked like the sort of place where a person would want to raise a herd of children. Billy and Melinda were doing just that, with four already and a fifth on the way.

There was a white Mercedes SUV parked behind Billy’s car. I parked Petite behind Mel’s minivan and didn’t think anything of the SUV until I rang the doorbell, expecting Robert to answer. Instead, Brad Holliday, bearing the wild-eyed combination of alarm and anger people do when they’re woken up at two-thirty in the morning, flung the door open and stared at me. Even straight out of bed, he wore the heavy ring that had helped annoy me at the hospital. It was on his right hand, wrapped around the edge of the door above his head, and I wondered if he wore a wedding ring on his left hand. I hadn’t noticed earlier.

We stared at each other a few seconds, equally surprised, before I said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize there was another adult here,” and he started berating me for small-hours visits.

Robert appeared in the hall behind him and interrupted with “I called her, Uncle Brad,” before ducking under Dr. Bradley’s arm to take my hand and pull me into the house. Brad got out of the way, surprised into silence by his nephew’s arrival on the scene. I gave Brad a fleeting, semi-apologetic smile, and hugged Robert.

“Told you I’d be here as fast as I could. How come you didn’t get your uncle instead of me?”

Robert shrugged against my ribs. “You’re the one who got the Thing out of the kitchen.”

“Yeah.” I ducked my head over Robert’s, an arm around his shoulders as I pressed my mouth against his hair. I didn’t want to call it a kiss. Kissing sounded all girlie and uncomfortable, the wrong sort of thing to impose on an eleven-year-old boy. Comfort could be imparted by mouth presses, too. “Yeah, I guess I did.”

“The thing in the kitchen?” From the tone of his voice, I couldn’t tell which was worse for Brad: asking, or not knowing.

Robert shrugged under the weight of my arm, matter-offactly. “There was a Thing in the kitchen a couple weeks ago. A big snake thing. Joanne got rid of it. That’s what happened to the front of the house,” he added, as if it cleared everything up.

Brad’s mouth went thin and tight. “Robert, that was an effect of the earthquake. I’m sure your father explained that to you.”

Robert and I exchanged glances and the kid sighed. “Yeah, Uncle Brad. I know.” He didn’t actually say , “Whut-ev-aaar,” as people his age were prone to doing, but it sounded loud and clear in his voice. I swallowed hard to keep a smile from jumping into place.

“You think what put your Mom to sleep is the same kind of thing as the, uh, Thing?” I really needed to work on my Mystical Stuff vocabulary. I wondered if I could find a handbook. Robert shrugged against my ribs again and started leaning in a time-to-move way. I shuffled down the entry hall with him, hanging a right through the living room so we could go upstairs to the bedrooms.