The Night Mark(67)

“That purr could wake the dead,” Carrick said. “I don’t know if he eats the rats or just scares them away by purring at them, but I haven’t seen hide nor hair of a rat or a mouse since the day Oz moved in.”

“Did you name him after The Wizard of Oz?”

“Dolly did. She’s a Dorothy, you know. Been Dolly all her life, though, her father says. One of the few words she says.”

“I didn’t know she could say anything. This is her cat?”

“She brought him here a few weeks before you came. They had one too many cats and kittens at their place, and her mother was threatening to throw them in a sack and toss that sack in the ocean. Dolly wouldn’t stand for that, so she brought the three toms out here. Two ran off to God knows where, but Ozzie stuck around.”

Ozzie kneaded her thigh through her skirt, and she tried to enjoy the affection and ignore the pinprick of his sharp little claws. Then he rolled up into a tight furry doughnut on her lap, purring so loudly she could feel the vibration down to her feet.

“Ozzie of Oz,” she said, stroking the silver V between Ozzie’s ears. The Wizard of Oz. That was exactly what this was, wasn’t it?

“What are you smiling at?” Carrick asked.

“I feel like Dorothy in Oz. You know, since I came here,” she said. “This place is so different from what I’m used to, like another world.”

“Like Oz?”

Faye nodded.

Oz. Of course. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? In The Wizard of Oz, the lady who played the mean teacher looked exactly like the Wicked Witch. The Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow all looked like men who worked on Uncle Henry and Auntie Em’s farm. And here Carrick looked just like Will. And Dolly reminded her of someone, but she couldn’t quite remember who. Like Dorothy, Faye had been swept away and carried off to another world. They’d both woken up in another land where everything was different and yet oddly the same. And Faye, like Dorothy, just wanted to go home.

Or did she?

“I keep thinking I’m going to wake up and it’ll all be dream. Just like Dorothy did.” Faye looked at Carrick and smiled. “And all this will be gone, and I’ll be back where I came from.”

Carrick narrowed his eyes at her.

“A dream?” he asked.

“You know,” she said. “At the end of the—” She almost said “the movie,” then remembered The Wizard of Oz wouldn’t come out for years. “At the end of the book, when Dorothy wakes up from her dream about Oz.”

“You must not have read the same book I did.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Land of Oz isn’t a dream,” Carrick said. “Oz is real, and Dorothy goes back to it again and again in the other books.”

“Oh, yes,” Faye said, swallowing hard. She’d never read the book, although she’d seen the movie so many times she’d lost count. “That’s right. Been years since I read it.”

“If you ask me, I don’t know why Dorothy ever wanted to go back to Kansas. I’ve been to Kansas,” Carrick said. “Would you pick Kansas if you could have Oz?”

“Oz had wicked witches, you know. Kansas doesn’t.”

Carrick touched the bruise on her face, a touch as soft as a kiss.

“Everywhere’s got wicked witches.”

Faye wanted to press her face into Carrick’s hand the way Ozzie had butted his head against hers.

“Tell me something,” Faye said.

“Anything.”

“What would you do right now if I wasn’t married?”

“You are married.”

“Pretend I’m not.”

“I can’t pretend. I don’t have that good of an imagination.”

“Can you imagine this, then? Imagine I didn’t survive when I fell into the water. What would happen to you if I’d drowned that night?”

Carrick mulled that question over for a good long while. Faye held her breath and waited for the answer. She didn’t know why she’d asked him, except something told her she needed to know.

“Have you ever seen an abandoned lighthouse?” Carrick asked. “Windows broken, paint faded and peeling and no light shining out from it?”

“Yes,” Faye said.

“Aye, then, there’s your answer.”





16


On the third morning Faye woke up in 1921, she realized something.

She wanted to stay.

She wanted to stay so much that if a man in black showed up on Carrick’s porch and offered her a key to a door to take her to 2015, she would politely decline, wish the man well, close the door and get back to work. The body she’d woken up in was her body. The face she saw in the mirror was her face. The life she inhabited was her life. Whether she had become Faith or Faith had become her, Faye didn’t know and didn’t care anymore. She fit this life like a hand in glove.

While Dolly cooked breakfast downstairs, Faye dressed, pinned up her hair and went to work in the garden. The garden that was her garden now. According to the almanac, which Dolly consulted on a daily basis, it was time to plant beets and carrots for an autumn harvest. Faye found the seed packets and went to work weeding and sowing. Faye had never been one to cook elaborate meals that required hours of preparation. And yet here she was, planting food in June she wouldn’t eat until September. She caught herself smiling while she pushed seeds into the soil, even though the sun was hot and kneeling on the ground was uncomfortable. How long had it been since the salt in her eyes had come from sweat and not tears?