The Big Dark Sky (30)
Young Joanna hurried on alone, out of the tall grass, across recently mown lawn, to the bosk of apple trees, at the center of which a small, slump-shouldered figure sat on a bench. Although she had run and run, she was not breathing hard when she settled beside the boy. She was eight years old, and he was eleven. His head was turned away from her when she declared, You are amazing, Jimmy! You’re the best secret friend a girl could ever have. He faced her then, his mouth half again as wide as it should be, full of crooked teeth. One eye blue and clear, the other dark and bloodshot. Large head misshapen as hers might be if she were to look at herself in a fun-house mirror. This boy who was thought to be incapable of language, this boy who had never spoken a word in his life, who communicated to others his wants and needs in grunts and broken sounds, said in a rough and raspy voice, “I’m in a dark place. I’m lost. The terrible big dark sky. I’m a danger to myself and others. Only you can help me, Jojo. Please come and help me.” Before she could reply, he looked past her, toward the distant lake. If some people might find his face already fearsome, the dread that suddenly gripped him wrenched his pitiable countenance into a goblin mask. When she turned her attention toward the lake, she saw her mother coming toward them, hair hanging wet and straight, clothes sodden, as if she had risen out of the deep water. Mother’s face was gray and swollen, and her eyes were milky. Joanna was only eight, a year younger than she had been when her mother drowned. This made no sense. How had Mother drowned a year before her time? Yet here she came, almost to the apple orchard, reaching out with one hand for her daughter, among the trees now. Jimmy Two Eyes said, “Run, Jojo. Run!” Joanna sprang up from the bench but did not know to what haven she should flee or whether she should flee at all. Drowned or not, this woman was her mother who had always loved her. “RUN, RUN, RUN, JOJO!” Jimmy Two Eyes shouted, and the Aviator appeared beyond the orchard, and Jojo sprinted to the SUV. The back door flew open as she approached. She clambered inside. The door slammed shut. Her mother’s dead face loomed beyond the window, and the woman pounded on the glass with both fists. The unknown driver, whoever he might be, accelerated away from there, across the acres of lawn, past trembling willow trees, toward the house, which was when Joanna realized she wasn’t alone in the back seat of the vehicle. Somehow, the corpse from which she’d sped away now sat beside her. Eyes as white as hard-boiled eggs, gray face pocked and pale lips tattered by nibbling fish, teeth stained with whatever filth, Mother smiled—
—Joanna gasped and dropped two plastic bottles of skin-care products that she had been about to put into the makeup case. As they clattered onto the floor and rolled away from her, she realized she was standing in the bathroom, in her sleepwear. In the mirror she saw the open door behind her. She half expected her mother to follow her out of the dream, but no one appeared in the doorway.
Bewildered, gazing at the contents of the open makeup case—mascara, brushes, Q-tips, and more—she slowly realized that at some point she had gotten out of bed and, still dreaming on her feet, had begun to pack. Suitcases. In the dream, two suitcases had stood alongside the deer path as she had run after the buck and doe.
Vertigo afflicted her, and she leaned against the vanity until the brief spell of disorientation passed.
In the bedroom, the wheeled luggage stood by the armchair. The telescoping handles were at full length and locked in position. She tipped one bag onto its wheels and pulled it just far enough to be sure that it was heavy, fully loaded.
Joanna had no memory of preparing for travel. Never before had she walked in her sleep or experienced a fugue state of any kind. She couldn’t comprehend how she could have packed while lost in a dream. However, now she began to recall selecting items of clothing and precisely folding them to fit in the suitcases.
As she had dreamed, her heart had beat double time. It didn’t slow now that she walked the world awake. Her horror at not having been fully in control of herself frightened her no less than had the specter of her drowned mother.
The bedside clock read 12:32 a.m. She’d slept only a few hours.
Approaching the TV, she was aware of her pulse pounding in her throat and in her temples. Soft ashen light filled the screen, much like what she thought she’d seen on nights when she’d half awakened from a dream only to be drawn quickly back into it. Previously, the pale glow seemed to be the light of a dead channel, but it was not that, after all. No slightest fleck of static marred the smooth gray light, and no number glowed in the channel indicator.
She felt . . . observed.
The conviction grew that she’d been manipulated in her sleep by some technology—or entity—beyond her comprehension. If the dreams of the past few weeks had welled up from the unfathomed depths of her subconscious, they had also at least in part been shaped and shaded by some strange power separate from herself. The dreams were as much a summons to Rustling Willows Ranch as were the phone calls from the unknown woman and the self-starting vehicles.
In her youth, the path of her life had been changed by tragedy, by the loss of love. Perhaps because of those losses, as an adult Joanna had often chosen solitude, loneliness, over the satisfactions of companionship, which had the benefit of forcing her to be self-sufficient. She addressed problems without equivocation. Loneliness had other advantages; it provided time for self-reflection and for the exercise of the imagination, always of value to a novelist. Long lonely nights also facilitated the development of the recognition that the world was riddled with mysteries and floating in a sea of hidden meaning as surely as it revolved around the sun. She believed in pursuing the truth of things rather than living in the pleasure of ignorance, and never before had a mystery as abstruse as this challenged her.