The Big Dark Sky (56)

Joanna stopped a few steps inside the room, reluctant to approach Jimmy, but her hesitation shamed her, especially because Hector might sense her disquiet. The passage of so much time had been as unkind to Jimmy as had been Nature; but he was surely still the harmless soul that he’d always been. He had no capacity to commit evil, no reason to harm her.

In front of the armchair stood a padded footstool. Joanna sat on it and said, “Jimmy? It’s me. Joanna. Jojo. Do you remember?”

As if unaware of her, chin on his chest, he continued muttering to himself, like a troll reminiscing about deeds done in dark and dripping caverns.

She leaned forward and reached out hesitantly at first, but then boldly took one of his hands, which was warm and dry and limp.

“I had a dream about you, Jimmy. First a bear then two deer led me through fields and forest, straight to you in the apple orchard. In the dream, you asked me to come, to help you, and here I am.”

He stopped muttering, but he did not raise his head.

Pressing his hand between both of hers, she said, “All the animals . . . When I was a girl, it was so magical. You seemed magical.”

At last he lifted his chin off his chest. From deep under a brow of malformed bone, his eyes came into view, the left one blue and clear, the right one dark and bloodshot and set higher than the other. Although his stare had evidently never troubled her when they were children, she almost flinched from it now. Her heart beat harder, faster. If she allowed this unexpected fear to be apparent, she would offend Hector, if not Jimmy as well, so she repressed it and gave his hand a gentle squeeze to reassure her secret friend of her continued affection.

Without turning his head, he glanced surreptitiously at his father, at Wyatt Rider, and then fixed Joanna with his stare once more. His limp hand stiffened and squeezed one of hers.

She interpreted Jimmy’s actions to mean that he desired to visit without observers, just her and him.

“I’m all right here,” she told Wyatt. “Jimmy and I have a lot of catching up to do.” To Hector, she said, “When we arrived, Wyatt was raving about your Studebaker pickup. I know he’d love to have a look at it.”

“She’s a beauty,” Wyatt said.

Hector smiled broadly. “I saw her sitting in a driveway at a yard sale forty years ago. She needed help. Did all the mechanical work myself, then dismantled her and sent the pieces off to be painted, to get all the corners and cracks and the backs of things.”

As the men left the room and moved away through the house, Joanna returned her attention to Jimmy. The uneven set of his eyes made it difficult to match both barrels of his stare. For that and other reasons, she focused on the one that was as clear and blue and eerie as the glass eye of a doll.

The men’s voices grew more distant. The front door closed with a thud.

In the ensuing quiet, here at the back of the house, the click-click-click of the windmill rotor reminded Joanna of the pegs on a casino wheel of fortune ticking past the pointer that would decide the value of the gambler’s bet.

She waited for Jimmy to speak first. When he remained silent, she said, “In my dream, you said you were in a dark place, lost.”

He didn’t reply. The pupil of his blue eye was open wide to bring in what meager lamplight the shadowed room provided. It seemed as though it was not merely a pupil but also a black hole with the intense gravitational field of a collapsed star, into which she might be drawn helplessly, until she found herself having traveled out of this universe into one far stranger.

She didn’t like the tremor in her voice when she said, “In the dream, you said, ‘Please come and help me.’ And now I’m here.”

Within her enveloping two hands, his hand curled into a fist, but still he failed to speak.

“The phone call that I received . . . the voice was that of a woman. She called me Jojo and said she was spiraling into Bedlam. She said, ‘Please come and help me.’ Is she someone you know, Jimmy?”

He had ceased to blink, his eyes steady and standing open like those of a dead man, though still he breathed.

“In the dream, when we were in the apple orchard, you also said, ‘The terrible big dark sky.’ The woman on the phone used those same words, and that was not a dream.”

The breeze swelled against the walls of the house. From the becoming wind, the wooden vanes of the mill strained a thin lonesome sound, and the rotor clicked more rapidly than before.

Joanna changed tack. “All those years ago, Jimmy, to delight me, you somehow controlled all the creatures of nature, the birds and squirrels and rabbits, the deer and coyotes, the wolves and bears. You’re some kind of—I don’t know—some kind of savant, psychic, something. For a few special years, my childhood was a fantasy. I was a ruling princess of everything that lived in the forest and the fields—but it was real.”

His pale tongue licked the thin lips of his freakishly wide mouth, though it brought forth no words.

“It was real,” she repeated. “But I was made to repress all memories of it. Did you take those memories from me?”

Outside, an engine turned over. The Studebaker pickup.

“Did you restore my memories so that I’d come back here?”

He said nothing.

“The elk were you. You sent the elk to welcome me. It’s crazy, but it must have been you.”

The sound of the engine receded. They seemed to be taking the pickup for a spin. Maybe Hector was letting Wyatt drive.