No Dominion (The Walker Papers: A Garrison Report) (22 page)

Hot an’ cold rushed my face, part relief an’ part terror. My heart was hammering loud enough I thought the world could hear it. “Guess I hadn’t thought about it, doll. Guess I figured we had lotsa time.”

“No.” Just one hard word, like she couldn’t make herself say anything more.

Another tremor went through me, shaking down dreams I didn’t hardly know I had. Lil’ boy-shaped dreams, an’ lil’ girl-shaped ones too. Dreams with little faces like Annie’s an’ big broad shoulders like mine, an’ dreams with high laughing voices and stomping hurrying feet. They hardly had shapes to ‘em, those dreams, until they started to fall. Then I could see ‘em all clear as day, toothless grins and white wedding dresses, falling down like rain. And like rain, they hit the earth an’ disappeared into sparkling splashes of nothin’.

There wasn’t anything I could say, sitting there in that ruin. I got on to the couch and pulled Annie into my arms. She didn’t wanna let me, staying stiff and upright, but I held on until inch by awful inch she leaned into me. Not relaxing, and feeling like she might never relax again, but at least I was holding her.

It came out in bits an’ pieces over days, how the doctor said she seemed all right but that it couldn’t be any surprise to a nurse that sometimes a real bad sickness, like a fever, could leave someone unable to have kids. She couldn’t talk about it for more’n a minute without getting stiff and hurting again, an’ all I could do was keep saying I loved her, right up until she threw a mug across the room an’ screamed, “I know you love me! Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I’m afraid it’s not enough?” an’ collapsed into tears.

I couldn’t catch her in time, she fell so fast, but I dropped down beside her an’ held her again. She fought like a wildcat, hitting and screaming with a kinda horrible incoherence that made all the sense in the world. She was a nurse, she understood how it could happen to somebody else, but when it was her, when it was her own body betraying her, an’ she wouldn’t let me say it wasn’t, ‘cause to her way of thinking, it was, no matter what all her studies might say, when it was her it was unbearable. An’ what if me loving her wasn’t enough, if she couldn’t give me babies, an’ I kept sayin’ it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter, darlin’, I had her, I wasn’t gonna want somebody else, but not even the tears rollin’ down my own face convinced her, not for days an’ weeks, until the worst of the pain had passed. I still caught it on her face some days, though, as the years went on. I’d see it when she was looking at other people’s kids, an’ all I could ever do was hold on an’ never let go.

We had our ups an’ downs over the years, an’ we had our moments of the world turnin’ upside-down, when some kinda magic reared its head again, but the truth was, we never had a worse time than that, not ‘til the doctor told us Annie was dying of emphysema.

I had a headache start up about then, pounding at the back of my skull like a devil tryin’ ta get out. I was the smoker, not Annie. Didn’t seem fair she’d get the disease instead of me. Her breathing had been bad for a while and I’d cut down, started smoking outside the house insteada in it, but I threw my last pack of cigarettes away that day and wasn’t ever tempted by ‘em again. We sat there in silence, holding hands and listening to the doc tell us about the advancement of the disease an’ treatments, but he had a look that a nurse and her husband knew plenty well. After a few minutes Annie cut him off, saying, “How long, Doctor?” with the same grace as she faced most things.

The fella sighed and looked away, then back again, preparing to give it to her straight. “The truth is, Mrs. Muldoon, I don’t understand how your health has been as good as you claim for the past several years. The advanced stage of the disease suggests you should have been suffering, even bed-ridden, for an extended period of time already. If it was a cancer, perhaps, but—”

“Doctor.”

“What I’m trying to say is that it’s unusually aggressive, Mrs. Muldoon. If our treatments can’t slow the progression, I’m afraid you may have as little as a matter of weeks.”

My headache spiked, making the world go white for a minute. I couldn’t have heard that right, but Annie was talking, her hands real still in her lap and her voice the kinda steady it got when she had to deliver bad news to somebody. “I’ve only been ill a few months. That’s…difficult to accept.”

“I know.” The fella looked as helpless as I’d ever seen anybody, but it had nothing on the panic rising in me. A lifetime of crazy moments came back, from Annie’s Pop to the fever-comas at the hospital all those years ago, from near misses in Tampa and Pamplona to the wonderful, strange months in New Orleans, and one thought came clear in my head: Annie wasn’t sick.

Not a natural sickness, anyway. Not somethin’ that came on the way emphysema was s’posed to. This was something more like the sick fever, something that didn’t belong, that shouldna been happening to her. I was just about hearing that voice in my head again, though it’d been quiet for so long I’d damned near forgot about it. It was the one that had said
this ain’t right
about a few things a long time ago, and for the first time in fifty years I was thinking the same thing:
this ain’t right.

An’ the voice that’d been mostly quiet at the back of my head woke up with a roar. A whole lifetime almost like the one I’d led, only just a little different, crashed through my memories and I had just enough time to realize that voice had always been me, just me from way down the road, when it took over me and
then
became
now
—

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

My vision went double before it settled out, two of me looking through my eyes for a couple seconds. I’d been a passenger to my own life for the past fifty years, quiet and enjoying most of it, and trying ta keep my mouth shut and not make anything worse or better when I didn’t, even when things I didn’t remember kept cropping up. Now it was my turn, an’ the fella I almost was could take his shot at sittin’ in the background for a couple weeks. ‘cause that was all we had, and I knew it. We hadn’t had a lot of time, once the doc had diagnosed her.

And it killed me knowing Joanne Walker was only a couple miles away and three years too early to save my wife. There was nothing I could say to Jo that would change that. She was a twenty-four year old kid right now, angry at the world and a long damned way away from the girl I was gonna meet a few years down the road. I could turn up on her doorstep like some crazy old man pleading for a miracle, and it wouldn’t get me one. It had to be me and Annie alone through this, and she wasn’t gonna come out of it alive.

“Gary?” She and the doc had asked me somethin’, and I hadn’t been listening. “Gary, are you all right?”

I closed my eyes a minute, afraid to even look at her. The lady had just been told she was dying, and she was worried ‘bout whether I was all right. The selfish part of me wanted to say no, but I took her hand an’ bowed my head over it, still not ready to meet her eyes. “I’m okay, doll. We’re gonna get through this.”

She said, “Gary,” again, this time with an old fondness that I missed so bad it made my hands hurt, holding hers. I dared look up, to look into blue eyes that time hadn’t faded one bit, even if there were wrinkles around ‘em now and her blond hair had turned  snow white. I’d been looking out through my other self’s eyes all this time, watching us growing old together again, but it wasn’t the same as looking at her myself. I wished I knew how Cernunnos had settled me into my own self’s head, and wondered what the devil had happened to my own old bones that had been riding with him for so long.

Wondering gave me a flash of mist an’ greenery, a cool breath of air like comin’ home, an’ then I knew and understood. I was resting somewhere else, safe in the land he called home, while my consciousness took the long way ‘round. More than that, I could feel my memories of riding with the Hunt settling into Tir na nOg’s earth, so that the weight of what I’d seen and how it might have changed me wouldn’t crush me. I’d been mostly immortal all that time, and now I was slipping back into mortal bones that weren’t ready to carry so much time or so many memories. I hadn’t known Horns could do that. ‘course, I didn’t know much about what gods could do, and didn’t figure on arguing with ‘em when they did it.

Annie said, “Gary,” again in that same voice, and I knew she was gonna tell me what she’d said to me the first time I’d gone through this, that there wasn’t any way through this one.

Only this time I said, “No.” Before she said anything else, I said, “No. We gotta talk, doll. We gotta think about what’s going on here, all right?”

She hesitated, then nodded. The doctor looked strained, but he got up when we did, offering support and sympathy, and encouraged Annie to start a drug regime right away. The prescriptions were waiting at the front desk. We picked ‘em up on the way out, and made it to a bench on the street before Annie had to sit down and say, “Gary,” again.

“Listen to me, doll.” I took her hands and kissed ‘em, trying not to tremble. It’d been  four and a half years since I’d gotten to do that, by my count. “My girl.” I’d been using those words a lot lately, meaning Joanne, but they were Annie’s first. “I love you, darlin’. Don’t know that I’ve said that enough.”

Meeting her eyes, was hard. She was smiling, kinda sad and wry all at once. “You say it every day, Gary. How often do you think it needs to be said?”

“More.”

“Sweetheart.” She untangled her hands and put one against my cheek. “Saying it more often isn’t going to make this go away. But I love you too. You know that.”

“Yeah.” I’d gotten sloppy sentimental the first time we’d done this, too, but not the same way. I’d been reeling from the fear of losing her, then. Now I had her back, maybe not for long, but I had her and this time I knew what we were up against. “Annie, I’m gonna start talking and you’re gonna think I’m crazy, but you gotta hear me out, all right? I know you’re holding yourself together and looking calm so I’ll be all right, but don’t worry about me. I know you’re shaking and scared inside, but you gotta listen, just for a couple minutes. Can you do that for me?”

My girl took as deep a breath as she could without coughing, and nodded. “I was there when a lot of people got this same kind of bad news, Gary. I’m all right. Go ahead and say what you need to say.”

“Your Pop wasn’t crazy.”

That came from so far outta nowhere that for a split second she looked like
I
was crazy. Then she laughed, soft an’ breathless. “Thank goodness for a definite diagnosis, then. He’s been dead nearly thirty years, Gary. Why does it matter now?”

“We been through some strange stuff, haven’t we, sweetheart? We don’t talk about it much when it ain’t happening, and I guess it’s died down the older we got, but…we’ve seen things most folks wouldn’t reckon on being real, ain’t that right?”

Annie smiled like I was bringing up the good times. “I suppose we have, at that. I hadn’t thought about most of it in a long time. It seems like another life.” Her eyes got dark, like she was rememberin’ that pretty soon it would be another life.

I held her hands again, trying not to crush ‘em. “Your Pop wasn’t crazy, Annie. I was there the day that car almost hit you. Somebody did knock you outta the way. His name’s…well, I call him Horns, ‘cause his name’s a mouthful, but the way I see it, sweetheart, that’s where it all started.”

“You were there—” Annie wet her lips, then closed her eyes a minute. I could see her trying not to dismiss what I was saying outta hand, trying not to think I
was
crazy. After a bit, she said, “Let’s get my prescriptions and go home. We can discuss it there.”

She was quiet in the car, an’ I did my best to keep my mouth shut. Once we got home she had a look around like she’d never seen the place before. Committing it to memory, even if she was the one gonna leave. Then finally she came to sit, an’ said, real mild-like, “You were there. And you never thought to mentioned that before now?”

“Darlin, I didn’t…remember.” I sighed and sat too, rubbing my hands over my face. “You know how you an’ me, we remember different things happening at the same events? It’s like that’s happening inside my own head. There’re things it’s like I’m remembering twice, and one of those memories is seeing you by the roadside, an’ Horns comin’ down to tackle you outta the way.”

“Who is Horns?”

I recognized the voice she was using, and looked up with a little grin. “No going all Nurse Annie on me now, sweetheart. Will you trust me if I say it don’t matter who he is? That what matters is me knowing that day wasn’t an accident, an’ that your Pop wasn’t going crazy? He did see a guy on a silver horse come outta nowhere and knock you aside, an’ I can tell you that the reason it happened, the reason any of this is happening, is because of the girl in that painting he did there at the end. Joanne. Joanne Walker. She’s a friend of mine, darling, or she will be, and she’s got magic like you wouldn’t believe.”

“She
will
be?”

There wasn’t no Nurse Annie in her voice anymore. It was just my girl sounding strained and about to break. I shut myself up and hugged her against me, wishing I’d known to shut up earlier. “Some of the things your pop saw were flashes of the future, huh? I got something like that going on right now too.”

Her silence said more than words, but after a minute she filled it with the words, too, soft an’ scared: “Do you know what’s going to happen to me?”