Sleep Stalker (Ghosts Beyond the Grove Book 1) (21 page)

     Everything I owned, I willed to Zach—including my still hefty bank account.  When I received that check from Giuseppe, I added Zach’s name to the account without telling him because I knew that he would argue about it.  Not that money was of any use to him in the state he was in, but it would help his parents with his medical bills at least.  I also asked her to tell everyone that I loved them and was sorry that I went and got myself blown up somewhere over the Midwest.  Unlikely scenario?  Yes.  But I was and always would be my own doomsday prophet.

     Pessimist or not, the moment the landing gear pulled up and away from the runway; I felt nothing but exhilaration.  Filled with awe, I watched everything on the ground grow smaller and smaller until even the tallest buildings were pixelated specks on the landscape.  I understood now what Zach enjoyed about flying.  What I had yet to figure out was what form of darkness followed him home from his trip.

     The flight itself was uneventful.  Even the small bit of turbulence we hit halfway through didn’t faze me.  Granted, it was probably minor but it felt no different than hitting a string of potholes on the interstate.  The only discomfort I felt occurred thirty minutes out from Denver as we began to make our descent. 

     My left ear didn’t handle the change in pressure well and a splitting pain seared through it until it finally popped as we touched down on the runway.  Miraculously, I felt like a seasoned traveler once inside Denver International Airport.  I waited for my next flight anxiously but not out of fear.  Instead, I wanted to feel the same rush I felt leaving Pittsburgh.  I wanted to set foot on warmer ground, ground my mother once traveled.  I knew why I was eager to visit Sedona.  But I was curious to find out why
she
was and how this was going to help Zach.

     The last leg of my journey was as smooth as the first.  After collecting my bags, I wandered around the claim check for a while working up the courage to go outside and hail a taxi to my hotel.  The area was filled with people waiting to pick up friends and family from their various flights.  That’s when I started to feel painfully alone.  I stood there gazing out of the large panes of glass watching taxi after taxi drive by while trying to build up enough courage to go after one.  I needed a proverbial kick in the hindquarters to get me moving again.  Thankfully, Fate and my mother provided it.

     Lost in my own thoughts, I was startled to feel a sharp tug on the back of my shirt.  Assuming the worst, I whirled around prepared to fight off a thief trying to steal my bag.  What I found was a tiny toddler wearing the cutest outfit you could imagine.  She couldn’t have been more than four years old, her dark hair a mop of ringlets draped over her shoulders. 

     “This is for you ‘cause you look scared,” she said, plucking a feather from the red tutu around her waist and handing it to me.

     Her panicked mother rushed toward us as I smiled and thanked the girl for the gift.  I was already astounded by this sign from above when I heard the woman shout out the little girl’s name.

     “Miranda!  Why did you run off?”

     Miranda.  That was my sister’s name.  It couldn’t be coincidence.  I was on the right track but I needed this to boost my confidence in myself and the path I was on.

     The lady approached ready with an apology for her daughter’s behavior—something definitely unnecessary yet I was glad she did because it yielded even more encouragement for me.

     “I’m sorry Miranda bothered you.  She usually doesn’t do these kinds of things.  In fact, she’s incredibly shy and afraid of everything and everyone.  She was so scared to fly today that I had to tell her that her tutu had special powers that would protect her.  I’m starting to think that was a bad idea.”

     I stared down into the now frightful green eyes of that little girl and saw not a trace of the bravery I’d seen only moments earlier.  It was almost like she’d been guided by unseen forces to approach me. 

     If I could have looked into a mirror just then, I would have seen that her bravery had in fact been passed onto me instead.  I dropped down to Miranda’s level and thanked her for the two gifts she’d given me.

     “Thank you so much for the feather.  It took away all of my fear.  Your mother was right—that pretty little tutu of yours
is
magical!  Just don’t run away from your mom again, okay?”

     Lowering her eyes, Miranda gave a shy nod of her head in agreement.  I stood back up and gave her mother a cryptic thank you as well.

     “Thanks for letting me talk to her.  She would make a great therapist someday.”

     Confidently, I marched outside and scored myself the first taxi I spotted.  With that feather safely tucked inside the front pocket of my carry-on, I crawled into the backseat of that cab feeling like everything was going to be okay.

     If I had known what was transpiring at that very same moment back home in Charlotte’s Grove, I would have flown back instantly.  But instead, I sauntered blissfully into my adventure thoroughly unaware of the danger Zach was in.   

35.  As Above…

          Even after taking two sleeping pills, I woke up only two hours later feeling like I hadn’t slept a wink.  All I wanted was for her to meet me in my dreams like she promised me she would.  But in order to dream, I had to at least stay asleep for a full night.  I tossed and turned restlessly before I finally gave up and got out of bed.  Immediately, I wished I hadn’t done that.  I felt like death.  I only made it as far as the living room couch before collapsing down in defeat. 

     “Zach!  It’s about time you wake up!  You slept fourteen hours straight!  I called Jason to come over and check on you—I was afraid you might be dead!”

     The sound of my mother’s voice annoyed me far worse than I could ever convey.  She was overdramatizing things the same way Ruby did.  I wasn’t stupid; I was tired.  I knew how to tell time and she was wrong about how long I’d been asleep.  Why was everyone trying to keep me awake?  Didn’t they know how much happier I was when I was dreaming?  Or didn’t anyone care?

     “What’s your problem?” I snapped back at her.  “Are you trying to kill me or what?  Why is she the only one who understands how tired I am?”

     By the furrowing of my mother’s brow, I knew I’d said too much.  Now she was going to insist on knowing who “she” was and I didn’t have the answer to that.  It was Ruby but it wasn’t.  Yet it was.  Somehow.  Part of her was inside of me now, leading me to where I would be the happiest.  But the external part of her was an evil serpent trying to control me just like everyone else was.  It was confusing but
I
understood it perfectly.

     “Zach, who are you talking about?  You act you’re still asleep even when you’re awake.  Are you sleepwalking again?”

     Questions, questions, questions.  Why did every conversation feel like the Spanish inquisition lately?  Why couldn’t they leave me alone—let me find peace?  The more I talked the less they seemed to listen.  If I told her what she wanted to hear, maybe then I could get what I needed.  Sleep.  I needed sleep.

     “Yes, I’m sleepwalking,” I stated in a monotone voice.  “I need to use the restroom.”

     With obvious difficulty, I hauled myself up off of the couch and lumbered down the hallway like a zombie.  Part of it was an act to convince Mom that I was indeed still asleep.  Most of it, though, was because I was so sleep deprived that I couldn’t coax more than a slow shuffle out of my leg muscles. 

     Once safely out of sight behind the bathroom door, I inspected myself in the mirror hoping to catch a glimpse of her like before.  Through half closed eyes, I squinted and concentrated on my image but found only my tired visage staring back at me.  As my eyelids began to shutter themselves unwillingly, I heard a whisper in my ear.

     “We’re above all of this.  Our love has transcended the earthly plane.  You can only find me in your dreams now.  You need to fall asleep so that we can be together.  You’re ready—meet me on the other side of the bridge.”

     That was all I needed to hear.  I snatched the bottle of sleeping pills and yanked the cap off.  One by one, I popped the capsules into my mouth and swallowed until the bottle was empty. 

     Sleep.

36.  …So Below

     It was early evening by the time I checked into my room at the Marsden Suites Hotel.  It was basically the same caliber as the hotel in Pittsburgh but it felt like Buckingham Palace to me.  After a long day of excitement and cramped seating, that hard mattress was nothing short of luxurious.  I’d arranged to meet with Roxanne at her dance studio at eight o’clock after their recital.  I had plenty of time for a nap given the change in time zones.  Once I fell asleep, though, I wished that I hadn’t.

     It was that enigmatic dream about Tucson again.  I passed the same buildings, the same scenery as before.  I even made it back to Fourth Street like I had the last time.  Rosewood stood majestically at the end, gleaming like the Taj Mahal.  That was where I needed to be, right?  It was the only thing that made sense.  Not that anything about my real life remotely resembled sense but still—in a dream, even the craziest of scenarios was supposed to make perfect sense.  So when I got stopped halfway there, I was confused.  

     On the sidewalk in front of the Bee Still Whiskey Refinery, I came across a blonde lady in a security uniform frantically waving a badge in the air.  Thinking that she couldn’t possibly be concerned with anything I’d done, I tried to navigate quietly past her. 

     “Hold yer horses!” she exclaimed in a southern accent, shoving her badge in my face.  “Y’all don’t look twenty-one.  I’ll need to see some ID.”

     “Oh,” I said, suddenly realizing that she thought I was trying to enter the distillery.  “No, I’m not trying to go in there,” I replied, gesturing to the Bee Still.  “I’m heading home—down there.”  I pointed to Rosewood then attempted to take another step closer to it.

     Like a redneck ninja, she swiftly blocked my path and repeated her need for identification.  What part of my answer did she not understand?  Since when did you need to be twenty-one to simply walk past an alcoholic establishment?  Pennsylvania had fairly strict liquor laws—I found it impossible for Arizona to be any more stringent in their underage enforcement.

     I tried everything imaginable to get past her.  Crossing the street didn’t help.  Begging did nothing.  Doubling back and attempting to slip by unnoticed failed too.  Needless to say, the dream ended in a haze of frustration and utter confusion.  And that’s exactly how I felt when I woke up.

     My nap was shorter than I originally intended it to be so I took a quick shower then pulled out my laptop.  The hotel was far from a five star establishment but when I made reservations, I made sure to find a place with Wi-Fi.  If there was one thing I couldn’t do without, it was internet access. 

     I had Googled Forth Street, Tucson once before but didn’t find any of the places in my dream to exist in real life but I thought it was worth another shot.  Not only did the Bee Still Whiskey Refinery not reside on that street, it didn’t exist period.  And with it being a purely business district and not residential, there was no evidence of anything resembling Rosewood within at least a thirty mile radius.  Now what?

     Nothing, that’s what.  I wasn’t going to let a dream sway me from my purpose.  I wasn’t in Arizona to find Rosewood and I certainly wasn’t searching for a phantom whiskey refinery either.  I was here to talk to Roxanne.  I was here to find out more about Mom and how the secrets of her past held the key to my future with Zach.  Instead of brooding over what I couldn’t figure out, I got dressed and left early for the dance studio.

     By the time I caught a cab and made it through heavy traffic, I was glad I did.  The recital had just ended as I stepped out onto the sidewalk in front of Studio Tutu.  Girls of every age in every manner of dance costume were still swarming the steps leading to the front door.  Only having the memory of one recent picture from the studio’s website to go on, I didn’t have much luck picking Roxanne out from the crowd.  There were too many dancers, too many parents and grandparents for me to visually pick through.  Finally, I decided to step back until the crowd subsided.  That’s when she found me.

     “Ruby?” she said in the form of a question though with the overtone of someone who was certain they already knew the answer.

     I looked to my left and spied a lady who was roughly the right age though in better shape than I was.  Tall and graceful just like I remembered my mom being the night I saw her fleeting form at the prom. 

     “Roxanne?” I replied with that same connotation in my voice.  It was her—it had to be.  Despite the sweltering desert sun, I got a sudden chill up my spine.  I was a thousand steps closer to the truth than I had been only seconds before.  To describe the feeling in the pit of my stomach as butterflies would have been a gross understatement.  It was more like a flock of giant condors furiously beating their wings down there.  I took a deep breath to calm my excitement then walked toward her.

     “Well of course that’s you, Ruby!  You look exactly like Camille did at your age—except for the hair.  Her hair was always stick straight even on the most humid days.  I always used to tease her that she must use glue instead of mousse.  She always looked so perfect.”

     It was a silly, unimportant thing to learn about someone but it made me smile.  Finally, I’d met someone who knew the little details about Mom from a time before she met my dad.  With any luck, she would also know the big things, too.  The things that would help me get my own life back in order.  But most importantly, Zach’s as well.

     She led me inside the studio and into a refreshing dose of air conditioning.  It felt so weird to me that only this morning, I was bundled up in a heavy jacket and now, even wearing jeans was making me sweat.  Going straight from a Pennsylvania pre-winter to the hot Arizona sun was quite a temperature shock.  But in the end, the difference in weather was the least shocking part of my trip.

     I wandered around the studio alone for a few minutes while Roxanne took care of a few post-recital details before locking up for the night.  Running my hand down the ballet bar as I walked, I looked into the mirrors and pictured myself as a dancer.  Then laughed hysterically out loud.  I wasn’t coordinated—at all.  It was so strange to think that while I looked a lot like her, my mother and I were such very different people. 

     Once the front doors were locked, Roxanne turned out the lights and we went upstairs to her apartment.  With each step, I became increasingly excited.  I could almost feel Mom waiting for me up there—waiting for her old friend to share her secrets with me.  I had no clue of how this trip was going to help me save Zach but I had faith that it would.

     Roxanne offered me a seat at her kitchen table then plopped a photo album down in front of me.  “These are the photos we took while on our cross country adventure.  I’ll let you look through them while I change out of this dress.  When I get back, I’ll make us some tea and we can talk.”

     “Okay,” I said, anxiously opening what felt like a time capsule to me.  Inside those pages, I was going to find Mom when she was only a few years older than me.  Suddenly, I thought about the terrible high school yearbook photo I’d seen of my dad.  Maybe Roxanne’s comment about me looking exactly like Mom wasn’t the compliment I thought it was.  Every swan had her ugly duckling phase, I suppose, but I liked to think that mine was far behind me.  Yes, eighth grade yearbook photo, I’m talking to you.  Yikes.

     From the very first photo, I knew that I was right.  She was beautiful.   Perfect, in fact.  I couldn’t spot a single flaw.  She looked so much like me yet better.  She didn’t have a single trace of my monthly bout with minor acne.  She didn’t have any frizziness to her hair.  But she did have a thigh gap decades before it was trendy.  How was someone so perfect so closely related to me?  I could see exactly why my dad fell in love with her and why he would be willing to let minor mysteries slide to be with her.  She was breathtaking.

     I was still flipping through the pages in awe when Roxanne returned and placed an old fashioned tea kettle on the stove.  I’d never actually seen one of them in use before—I thought they belonged in the Smithsonian not on the stovetop.  But there was something comforting about it.  Something that took me back to a time before microwaves and modern conveniences that I took for granted.  Back to the time when Mom was my age. 

     While the water heated, she sat down next to me and watched silently as I flipped through the photos until I came to the last page.  When I was done, she reached over and reopened the album to the first page.

     “That picture was taken in Philadelphia just before we left on our road trip.  I’m on the left with the terrible blonde dye job—complaining that they each packed more than we had agreed to.  There was only so much space in the trunk of your mom’s car.  But she did love her shoes and had to bring like fifty pairs along with us even though she probably wore less than half of them along the way.”

     Mom was a shoe lover, too!  Why did I never know this?  I could only imagine what a trip across country would have been like with her.  Photo after photo, I discovered that she and I were more alike than I ever would have guessed.  If only Fate had given me the opportunity to find this out firsthand.  Page after page, she became more real to me.  And then…we got to the photos taken just before they made it to Sedona.  That’s when she returned to being a mystery to both of us.

     “Something happened the last night we spent at the Grand Canyon—something that haunts me still.  You see, Josette and your mom grew up together, had known each other for years before I ever came into the picture.  Typically, they never made me feel left out.  But every once in a while, I was reminded that they shared an inner circle that I simply wasn’t a part of.  That night was one of those times.”

     No.  I didn’t have the time or patience for inner circles or unanswered questions.  I didn’t come here for more cloak and dagger activity—I came here for solutions.  Zach’s very life depended on it.  And so did my long term happiness.  If I couldn’t save him, was there any hope for saving me?

     I sat quietly and listened to Roxanne’s account of what happened that night, all the while questioning what it could all mean.  Was this the missing piece I was looking for?  And if so, how was I ever going to retrieve it now some thirty-odd years later?