The Big Dark Sky (78)

They had spent hours together, for she’d known to bring a small picnic basket containing cupcakes and cookies and cans of Coca-Cola wrapped in cold packs. They talked and talked that day. Of all that had been said, only one line had teased her memory as she’d stood on the dock with Wyatt minutes ago: If I had found someone like you sooner, Jojo, I might have begun the awakening. Now she tried to dredge from her drowned memory the conversation that would put those words in a meaningful context.

More cloistered lightning throbbed repeatedly deep within the pending storm, pale flares fluttering through the orchard as if they were reflections from the wings of passing angels. The trees shook. As leaves were stripped from their limbs and shivered across the grass, Wyatt encouraged her to give this up and return to the house.

Then, in her mind’s eye, she saw the orchard as it had been on that windless day: sunshine streaming through an architecture of apple trees, the ground a webwork of golden light and purple shadow, the empty picnic basket on the bench between her and Jimmy. He had cupcake frosting on his chin, and she intended to wipe it off, but at the moment she was intrigued by what he was saying. Perhaps this wasn’t precisely what had been said back in the day, but instead the essence of it translated through fallible memory.



The rough voice that so entertained her through four years of her youth: “If I had found someone like you sooner, Jojo, I might have begun the awakening.”

“Waking who?”

“You might call him a prince.”

“A real prince?”

“Yes. He’s been sleeping a long time.”

“I like this story. This is a good story. You mean sleeping like under a spell?”

“Yes.”

“Like Sleeping Beauty, except he’s a boy?”

“He and his retinue.”

“His what?”

“His retainers, the closest servants of his court.”

“They’re all sleeping?”

“Yes. They’re all bespelled.”

“Why don’t you wake them?”

“If there had been more people like you, maybe I would have.”

“You want me to kiss them awake?”

“A kiss isn’t required. Only I have the power to wake them.”

“When will you?”

“Maybe never.”

“That doesn’t seem right. What kind of story is that?”

Jimmy was silent.

She said, “Are there dragons in this prince’s kingdom?”

“I don’t want to play this anymore,” he said.

“So are you a king?”

“Why would you think I am?”

“Because you have power over a prince.”

“I’m not a king. You wouldn’t understand what I am.”

“I’m not dumb, you know. Don’t say I’m dumb. I’d understand.”

“I told you I don’t want to play this anymore.”

“You started the story. Once you start a story, you have to make an end for it. That’s the rule.”



Memory was foiled when lightning cracked the sky, for the first time breaking from the conventical clouds, blazing down the night in jagged blades. Shadows leaped, and it seemed the apple trees jumped wildly to tear free of their roots. A crash of thunder came close behind the lightning, so powerful that the earth shook underfoot.

As Joanna had been lost in a long-ago summer day, listening to a conversation once forgotten, Wyatt had come around the bench. He grabbed her hand and shouted as though some threat other than the storm loomed—“Come on, hurry, don’t look back!”—and drew her from the orchard, onto the broad lawn, toward the house, at a run.

In spite of the detective’s admonition, Joanna did glance back when the darkness again relented to the pyrotechnics of the storm. If Wyatt had seen something, it was not there now. Nothing moved behind them except what the wind harried, and curtains of rain that were briefly turned to silver sleet in the flash of lightning.





67


Jimmy saw the sky on fire before and heard explosions in the clouds before, and nothing happened to him then, so he wasn’t scared of the weather now. He was wet before, and nothing happened except time passed and he was dry again. He was wet now, but he was sure to get dry again.

He knew the way. All his life he went with his father on this road, went from the ranch to town, from town to the ranch, and then past the ranch when they stopped living there. He knew the way to where the girl was, knew it as good as he knew all the rooms of the little house where he lived with his hurt father.

She wasn’t angry with him. She was angry with the Thing that moved inside him and did what it wanted with him. She would help him. He was no good alone, his father gone to God. She was the only one who could make things right.

The water came down hard like it did sometimes, and the wind threw the water at him. He kept moving. He knew the way, staying with the white lines down the middle of the black, lines sometimes broken, sometimes not, the lines to the house where the girl lived.

If lights came, he’d get off the road. No way to know who the lights were. Might be mean people, and he was alone now. Father knew what to do with mean people. Jimmy didn’t know.

The water came down hard, and the light from the sky came down bright and loud.