Like Moonlight on Water: Chapter 7
Skipping
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Skipping
“Sal, this is ridiculous. I can’t fall asleep with you staring at me.”
“I am observing, not staring.”
“Oh, that’s much better,” I muttered. Exhaustion had given me a pounding headache and a short temper.
He peeled himself off the wall. “If you will allow—”
“I will not. And stop lurking over there. It’s creepy.”
“Would you prefer…?” He eyed the bed.
“No!” I croaked, my body constricting in its cocoon of fleece and bedding.
His face reddened in the dim lamplight; and a sudden sweat flushed from every pore in my skin. I threw the covers off and left the room, bringing a chair back and planting it in the corner.
“Sit,” I pointed, before closing the bedroom door again. “And look away.”
He obeyed, while I stripped to my t-shirt and underwear and slid back under the covers.
“Your body reacts to stress in distinctive ways,” he said, his gaze politely angled toward a window.
“Pot, meet kettle.” Jerk.
His lips stretched. “I am, of course, referring to how chilled you were earlier.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I plumped my pillow and curled sideways so I could see his profile.
To his credit, he apparently wasn’t going to look my way again until I gave him permission. He dwarfed the wooden chair, his huge, muscled body balanced like an Apis bull on a miniature dais. The lamp’s glow brought out the golden sheen of his skin, and he sat so very still that only the irregular rise and fall of his great chest hinted that he knew I was watching him.
My eyelids drooped, and as if humming to himself, Sal began murmuring the words he’d been repeating for hours.
“We are each the boundless All. Our breath is the air for all worlds, and our dreams are the stars that light them. We are each the boundless All…”
According to Sal, the Picoji had been a deeply spiritual people. No one person wore the mantle of shaman. Rather, insights were shared like dishes at a communal feast, and even children contributed their dream stories.
“…our dreams are the stars that light them. We are each…”
Unfortunately, their beliefs were so simple that they’d had no need for rituals beyond this one rhythmic chant—and the fruit of a plant that Sal said no longer existed.
“Tell me again,” I mumbled.
His voice dropped into an even more soothing baritone, strong but hushed, like his throat was swaddled in a thick blanket. “They slept together under the open sky, head to feet, encircling their young in a gesture of loving inclusion, not protection.”
“You protected them,” I breathed, and through half-closed eyes, I saw his head lower.
“Of all peoples I had found, only their fractals were joyful, separating to dance under the moon or swim in the waves breaking on shore. And some would flicker like silver firelight, beckoning me to join them—though I could not follow where they went.”
“Traversing…” My eyes closed.
“Sometimes,” he whispered so low I held my breath to hear, “the children’s fractals liked to fly.”
My head was heavy on the pillow now; my eyes too tired to witness his pain. Instead, I drifted to sleep watching silvery children bob and soar over the ocean of my slow, rolling breaths.
But peaceful dreams gave way to night terrors. Grinning ghost children swooped from the night and carried me over dark seas, my legs trailing in burning hot water that boiled into a tsunami that sucked us all down…down…crashing me end-over-end onto cold, marble tile in the room where Adam had abandoned me. He’d told me I’d be safe, but my breath made icy puffs in the blue-gray light as I stumbled toward frosted glass doors that led to a balcony. Desperate to breathe fresh air, to escape, to fly, I rattled the doors but Pebbles leapt from a shadow and sliced my face with her claws. I screamed and blood ran down my legs and Adam pulled me to his warmth in our bed.
“Shh, it’s okay…just a nightmare,” he tried to tell me, but my body shook and he turned on the light. “See? Home. You and me.”
Home. You and me. Four words, and my life with him rushed through my mind, filling every thought with our school age crush and deepening love, decades of lockstep certainty and hopes—and sadness.
I couldn’t conceive. Something was wrong with me. We didn’t have a child. He’d wanted to name him…I’d wanted to name her…
“Eileen,” I whispered in his ear—and woke.
Silent tears streamed into my hair, and a lonely angel shimmered above me.
“I am here, Lila,” Sal’s voice was close in the darkness. “You are safe. Eileen is safe.”
I fumbled for the lamp, but his long fingers laced my wrist.
“No light…” He laid my arm by my side, leaving a web of warmth in the pattern of his touch. “Focus on what you have already seen. Where were you?”
“Nowhere. Dreaming.” I rolled away from him to curl around my barren womb. My daughter was in the next room. My body had never held a child.
“You were with Adam?”
A cry caught in my throat. Adam and I had never conceived. Our child was here. Sal was her guard. Her protector. She didn’t exist.
“Were you…thinking of him as you fell asleep?”
“No.” I wasn’t sure if I was answering or protesting. The solitary angel sputtered to my window like a tiny, blue firefly trying to escape.
“Concentrate, Lila,” Sal urged. “Which of your senses functioned? Could you hear? Touch?”
My fingers mapped the silky ridges across my stomach. Stretch marks. This body had swelled with child. This body was mine.
“Please, l-let me sleep…”
Sal’s sigh carried an ancient burden I was too hollow to bear.
“You must try again, Lila. This time, be observant of your surroundings. Notice what is different and what is the same.” He drew a long breath and began the chant again. “We are each the boundless All. Our breath is the air for all worlds, and our dreams are the stars…”
I tried to resist, but my quiet sobs relaxed into the rhythm of his voice and eventually stilled.
When I woke, I was cold, and my left hand was numb under my cheek. I was lying on my side with a rough sheet twisted around my bare legs and darkness scraping my eyes. I blinked, straining for light. Tried to inhale, to expand my lungs and gather strength to move. Shivered and gulped a breath of chilled night.
Night. Bedroom. My right arm was too heavy to lift, so my fingers crawled across the pitch blackness beside me. Empty space and cold sheets. Alone. Wrong. I shivered again and curled into myself. Not right. Wrong place. Dreaming.
A clatter and shattering glass pierced the room.
Not dreaming. Adam was still angry.
The room lightened to a smoky haze, but I couldn’t focus on the closed door. It slid through the gloom, moving just ahead of my gaze, looming close then lurching away. Adam was angry. So angry. Why had I left him alone? I had done something…said something…but I couldn’t remember what. He needed me.
I was at the door now, but couldn’t grasp the knob. My hand tingled as it flapped against the metal, and I heard Adam mutter my name. I’m here, I willed and found myself in a blurry, sepia-toned room. Our living room. Our sagging couch. My Adam, bare-chested and brooding, with a bloody shirt wrapped around one hand and a broken bottle in the other.
“Done hiding?” he growled.
Hiding? I reached for him, or thought I did, but my body felt leaden, disconnected.
“What’s wrong now? Another one of your dreams?” His sarcasm, thick and cloying, muddled my thoughts more.
Adam was always kind. Patient. In pain. Lost. Loss. Our loss.
My foot slid forward and I looked down. Saw painted red toenails and mottled tan tile, glints of light among lines of grout. Angels? On the floor? I dragged my other foot. So heavy—why was I so heavy?
“Stop!” Adam stood, gesturing with the bottle. “Glass.”
An electric buzz popped in my ears and I smelled blood and whiskey.
“You’re hurt…” My lips felt out of sync with my tongue.
He frowned, but let me pull him to my side. My fingers fumbled to unwind the soaked fabric. A gash had split his calloused palm from fingers to heel, blood still pooling between the wound’s ragged edges.
“What happened?” I cradled his hand, searching his glare for an explanation—and knew. This was my fault. The room sharpened around this new horror, but my head still felt thick. “Please, tell me wh—”
He jerked away. “There is no child, Lilith. There never was. I’m done.”
“No!” Panic surged as he turned his back to me. “No! I remember her!” I screeched, “I remember! She’s real!” Suddenly, it all came back. Years of this same old fight had shredded us into our worst selves, so-called doctors and cheap distilleries the only winners. “You can’t drink her away, Adam! She’s real!”
He threw the bottle to the floor, and shards of glass ricocheted, stinging my ankles like a swarm of midges.
“Please!” I begged. “She’s real! I’m not crazy! I’m not craz—!”
“Lila! Wake up!”
My eyes opened as my head snapped back.
“Wake up!” Sal shook me again. “Lila!”
“Ow!” I protested. “Lemme go!”
His fingers tightened. “Your heart stopped!” His eyes were wide, more white than gray.
“Clearly, I’m alive,” I shoved his chest, “so let me go!”
The bedroom door burst open and Eileen barreled in, fists swinging wildly at his back.
“Get off her!”
“Honey, stop!”
Sal spun away from the bed and out of Eileen’s reach. “I did no such thing!” he insisted—as if that made any sense.
Eileen raised her fists again and I swung my legs out of bed. “Stop it! Both of you.” Wincing at needle pricks in my feet, I stood and tugged at Eileen’s nightshirt. “I mean it! You too, alien.”
United by petulance, they both crossed their arms and glowered at me.
“I had a nightmare. For real.” I sat on the edge of the bed. Please, God, please let that have been a nightmare. “Sal was trying to wake me.” I counted my windows—one, two, three—out of habit. They were bright with morning light. Eileen was here. I looked down and dug my naked toes into the worn carpet. The prickles faded.
“You don’t even know when you’re lying anymore,” Eileen fumed.
“Why’d you let her hit you?” I asked Sal.
A swallow rolled down his throat. “Would you rather I had shocked her?”
“Maybe just a little zap.” My grin wobbled and Eileen stalked out.
He hadn’t let her. Not voluntarily. His modulators had incapacitated Adam once, triggered by some sort of primal protection protocol. But Eileen walloped him at least twice…
A subtle head movement told me not to ask. A secret from his team, then. A side effect, maybe, from her having his own modulators. I reached for my robe, stalling until I heard Eileen brushing her teeth.
“You really thought I was dead?” I asked him.
“Your heart stopped.”
“So you said.” I bundled up and covered my bare legs. “How long?”
“Forty-three seconds.”
Jesus. I kept my head down to tie the sash.
“Well…aren’t you like a human defibrillator?” I glanced up in time to cut off his correction. “Alien, I mean. Was giving me whiplash really necessary? You could’ve just given me a jumpstart.”
His teeth scraped his bottom lip.
“What?” I pressed. For him, that was a total loss of composure.
“Lila, where were you?”
“Nowhere! In a shitty nightmare.” I stood and tried to brush past him, but he caught me by the shoulders.
“You need to talk!” His hot hands slid to cup my face, and I recoiled. Instantly, he released me. “I will not force you.”
“I know.” I watched the pulse throbbing in his flushed neck. Impressions of Adam, hurt and loving and angry and grieving, flitted through my mind like startled birds. “It was a nightmare,” I repeated.
“Then you cannot discern the difference.”
Sal’s chest warmed my face like the sun, and I turned away. “Put that chair back, will you?”
A surge of heat hit my back and then several things happened. The pipes groaned as Eileen turned off the water. The chair creaked as Sal snatched it. A bloom of angels sparkled into being. A truck rumbled into the yard. And an electric guitar announced it was seven o’clock.
The alien shook his head and stomped out.
“My house, my music,” I muttered, but grabbed my phone and silenced it.
Adam’s here! Make it right, Lila, don’t—
Don’t start! I warned. Seeing him was going to be hard enough without an inner dialogue. Why was he here so early? The angels were excited, swirling around me like a cyclone of white starlight.
It was all a bit much before coffee.
I yanked on a pair of jeans and shed my robe before scooting Eileen out of the bathroom. Not for the first time, I wished I had the luxury of privacy, but in this small house—and with eavesdropping aliens—that just wasn’t an option.
I flushed the toilet and washed up as fast as I could. Not fast enough, though, because before I finished brushing my teeth, the tension in the next room became audible. Very audible.
“You expect me to believe a cat did this?”
Ah, shit. I’d forgotten about the screened door.
“Mom wouldn’t wake up!”
“What do you mean, she wouldn’t wake up?”
For God’s sake, Eileen. I rinsed, spat, and threw open the door.
“Good morning!” I swept across the room and into a kaleidescope of energies. “Oh, good! You brought the baby!”
Distracted, Adam’s scowl morphed into a confused frown, while little Traveler gurgled cheerily from his arms. My daughter, however, shot me a glare so hot the hairs on my neck stood up. And Sal? He was just staring at the ceiling. No doubt wishing Scotty would beam him up.
“Lila…” Adam’s tone carried a warning. “What happened?”
“Pebbles did it,” I told him. “How’s Cara? I’ve missed talk—”
“Damn it, Lila!” He smacked the door frame. “How about the truth for once?”
That set me aback, and even Eileen let out a low hiss. Adam’s hazel eyes were dark this morning, and unshaven scruff carpeted his neck and jaw. His son was Gerber-baby perfect in a blue onesie, but Adam’s shirt and jeans were wrinkled from at least a day’s wear.
Without thought, my arms reached out—and I forced them to the baby.
“He’s getting so big already!” I gushed. Traveler rewarded me with a coo. “C’mere, cutie pie.” I pulled him to me and hugged him close. “Are you letting your daddy get any sleep at all?”
Adam’s frown deepened. “This isn’t about me. What the hell has been going on here?”
Sal was studying his feet now. And Eileen had one hand on her hip and one eyebrow raised—daring me to answer so she could call me out on a lie. Traveler grabbed a fistful of my hair and started munching, his wide eyes fixed on my face.
“Lila! There’s a goddamn alien living in your house!” Adam threw a murderous look Sal’s way. “Dead bees? Psycho cat? Daughter’s a biker now? And you! You’re what, sipping tea on the porch?” He hooked a thumb toward last night’s forgotten mugs.
Drawn together like two magnets, Adam and I were separated only by the baby between us. His pain was my pain. His anger was my fault. Furious and confused, he demanded answers I couldn’t give, though every cell in my body wanted to give him anything—everything. My mouth opened, and I heard Eileen suck in a breath.
Then a flicker of movement caught my eye. The air around Adam was…seething. Startled, I stepped back and shifted my focus from his face to the emptiness around him. Thousands of black specks, terrifying voids of nothingness, roiled around him like minuscule black holes.
Instinctively, I twisted to shield the baby, and Sal moved closer.
“Tell us what you see!” His urgency told me not to hold back, no matter who was listening.
I swallowed and eyed the room before locking onto Adam again. A new expression marred the handsome face I knew so well, and a desolate sadness filled me.
“It’s the…the black things,” I confessed. “Only around…you.”
A great boom shook the house.
Instantly, Adam’s arms steadied me, and a whiff of rye and ozone burned my nose. We froze, our ears tuned for the same sound—but the sirens were silent.
“Not the nuclear plant,” I said.
Adam thundered outside, only to return a heartbeat later.
“Nothing in the sky,” he reported.
“So, not Sunny Point…”
He shook his head, and then the corner of his mouth lifted.
“Seneca Guns!” I bounced Traveler up onto my hip. “Wow, it’s been a while!” A shiver of relief rippled through me. “December, wasn’t it? Scared the bejeezus out of me.”
I realized that Eileen and Sal were staring.
“What? ‘Leenie, you were at school and the world had been nuts all year. Every day was another end-of-the-world news cycle and I didn’t have a handy-dandy, know-it-all alien to…tell…me…” I sputtered to silence.
“Neither of you felt that?” Adam’s disbelief matched mine—though he sounded annoyed.
“No,” grumped my daughter.
“Explain,” commanded Sal.
Adam swore under his breath and turned to inspect the much-abused screened door.
“Explain what, Sal?” I asked. “No one knows what the Seneca Guns are.” I glanced at Traveler, who grinned and passed a poof of gas. “Sonic boom, some shaking and rattling…you didn’t hear it?”
“I neither heard nor felt these…guns.”
“They’re not guns,” Eileen snapped. “It’s a sporadically recurring phenomenon that we call the Seneca Guns. It’s been happening all over the world for centuries.”
“Impossible. We would have noted such events.”
Her chin lifted, and I cut in.
“Sal, it’s just this weird thing. It’s not a big deal. Last I read, some scientists were trying to track mini-quakes and solar activity to see if there was a correlation.” I snorted, remembering my grandmother squealing and spilling coffee on herself one morning. “Mimi told me they were cannons fired by the ghosts of Civil War soldiers.”
Eileen rolled her eyes and Adam snarled something I couldn’t make out.
Sal frowned at his back. “We know nothing about this, Adam. I have previously explained that we record so much data that we can only parse it when need—or interest—arises.”
“Guess you need more slaves.” Adam yanked a section of ripped screen from the frame.
“Hey, now, leave that alone.” I told him. “No free handyman services.”
The rusted staples holding the old metal screening made me nervous. I shifted my focus, and the black voids swarmed over him like hateful sprites.
“Wait!” I thrust Traveler into Eileen’s arms. “Lemme find some pliers first.”
Lila! Stop him before th—
Adam cursed, and blood splattered to the floor.
