Declan’s phone buzzed.
He sighed.
Jordan stepped back, bowing a little, giving him permission, the moment instantly deflated by how little work the phone had had to do to capture his attention. He took his phone from his pocket and looked at it.
Matthew had sent a text: please come home
It was the plaintive text of a child to a parent, sent to Declan because Matthew had no parent, and because it was the middle of the night, and he’d woken, if he had slept at all, and remembered that he was a dream.
“I …” he began.
Jordan smoothly anticipated the cue. She retreated another step back to her canvas, and there, with the side of one of her brushes, she scraped all of her work away.
“Why—?”
Jordan’s slow smile spread once more. “You’ll have to come back for another sitting.”
He had told himself it would only be for that night, and he had meant it, he had, but he was a liar, even to himself, and so he said, “Yes.”
Dabney Pitts had never done anything heroic in his life until that day. No one had really asked him to. No one had ever really asked him to do anything. He was twenty-eight years old and neither very clever nor very stupid. He was neither very handsome nor very ugly, tall nor short. He was just a guy, and before that, he’d been just a kid, and before that, he’d been just a baby. No one really asked him to do anything. They mostly didn’t remember him. He didn’t make waves.
But now he’d made waves.
He’d barricaded that strange woman in the freezer.
The old ladies looked pretty bad. When he’d come home from getting high with Welt, he’d found them careened across the stairs in an unnatural way. Mags’s mouth was open, and there was a little bit of blood in it. On her tongue. Slicked, sort of. She didn’t have as many teeth as he did. He wasn’t sure if that was a new situation. Olly looked a little better, but one of her eyes looked wrong. Collapsed wasn’t the word for it, but it was better than crumpled, because it was hard to crumple something as wet as an eyeball.
He’d found a woman who looked a lot like a more mature version of the old ladies’ new tenant hiding in the bedroom with blood spattered on her. He’d forced her into the freezer with a kitchen knife. He had an idea that otherwise she might crawl out a window. The broom closet might have worked, but he didn’t have a way to lock it, and in any case it was too much work to get all the stuff out of there she might use as a weapon. She was obviously dangerous.
Easier to put her in the empty chest freezer in the crawl space and set some shit on top of it.
She’d said, “Please don’t do this.”
“It’s unplugged,” he’d told her.
“Just let me go.”
“Shut up,” he’d replied, and the rush of bravery to his head had been nearly too much for Dabney Pitts. He wasn’t entirely sure he was built for it. He’d been doing all right, he thought, until this recent downward turn had brought him to a spare room at Rider House after he used the last of his rent money for pot and a Redbox rental of that new comedy that involved a beach house and that one actress he thought was cute as a rabbit.
“Help’s coming,” he told Olly now. This probably wasn’t true. This wasn’t the kind of neighborhood and house that cops hurried to, not like nice white suburban neighborhoods where they didn’t expect bad things to happen. People, cops included, expected bad things to happen at Rider House. It didn’t make them less bad; it just seemed to make them less of an emergency.
He wasn’t sure if Olly was even awake to hear him. He noticed Mags had a little bit of blood coming from her ears. That didn’t seem good.
He guessed he could have marched the new woman at knifepoint to the cops. Maybe. Just the idea made him feel ill. Even if he hadn’t had open warrants, his courage had already been overextended; he was starting to feel distinctly uneasy in this dark house with these two women who looked less alive than he would’ve liked, with a woman who had visited some kind of violence barricaded in a warm freezer downstairs.
He was going to be a braver person from now on, he thought. He was going to call his sister and tell her he was sorry about taking her cash out of the coffee can while she was out. He was going to swim upstream a little. Maybe he wasn’t built for it, but he wasn’t built for this, either. He could get muscles.
He sat down next to Olly and took her hand. It was very cold. He said, “Just hold on.”
Ronan was a cloud, and he was raining.
“Everyone thinks their world is the only one. A flea believes a dog is the world. A dog believes the kennel is the world. The huntsman thinks his country is the world. The king believes the globe is the world. The farther out you get, the wider you get, the higher you get, the more you see you have misunderstood the bounds of what is possible. Of what is right and wrong. Of what you can truly do. Perspective, Ronan Lynch,” Bryde said. “That is what we must teach you.”
It was a confused dream, lacking all the clarity of his dream at the mansion. Within the dream, he couldn’t remember what he’d successfully dreamt about, only that it had been sharper than this one. Mostly he remembered being a cloud. It was very peaceful. No one expected much from a cloud but for it to do what it was made to do. He could hear the little pattering of the precipitation down below.
“Are you going to do that all night?” Bryde asked.
Ronan didn’t reply, because he was a cloud. He was glad to be spared the conversation, really. Words felt exhausting and he was relieved to find he didn’t have the necessary parts to form them. He spread through the colorless sky and rained some more. He thundered a little.
Bryde’s voice sounded a little annoyed. “You’re not going anywhere, so I might as well tell you a story. Are you going to be quiet?”
Ronan did not entirely cease thundering, but he changed it to a low roar.
“Probably you’ve heard it before, your father from Belfast, your mother from a Belfast man’s dreaming: the hawk of Achill,” Bryde said. “The hawk of Achill was the oldest man in Ireland, so goes the story. He was born Fintan mac Bóchra in a place far away from Ireland, and when Noah’s flood threatened, he fled to Ireland with two other men and fifty women. Noah’s flood washed away his companions and the foolish world of men, but Fintan transformed himself into a salmon and lived.”
Ronan saw vaguely, from above, his rain making interesting divots on a vast ocean’s surface, and deeper, he glimpsed a salmon digging through the water. In the way of a dream, he could be above the water and below it at once, and he watched the salmon navigate through strange kelp forests and past frightening creatures of the open sea.
“Fintan coursed through the ocean and learned everything about that strange world that he couldn’t have known as a man. After the flood receded, he could’ve become a man again, but he’d acquired a taste for worlds beside the one he’d been born into. Having learned the world of men and the world of fish, he transformed himself into a hawk, and he pitched through the skies for the next five thousand years, becoming the wisest man in Ireland.”
Now Ronan saw this, too, the hawk with its crisp feathers wheeling through him, so deft and nimble with its flight the rain never touched it.
“You can learn a lot when you see something through someone else’s eyes,” Bryde said, and he sounded a little sad. “You can learn a lot when you see it from below, or from far above. You can learn a lot when you see generations live and die while you soar in slow, high circles in a changing sky.”
The cloud that was Ronan had begun to rain on a pale beach beside turquoise water. He was starting to feel a little shitty again. He rumbled; words were coming back to him and he didn’t want them.
Bryde said, “Some of the stories said Fintan finally turned back into a man, and finally died. But some of them say he’s still up there, soaring far above the rest of the world, holding all the world’s wisdom and secrets in that ancient mind. Five thousand years of knowledge, five thousand years of below and abo
ve. Imagine what you could learn if you put out that arm and the hawk of Achill landed on it.”
The dream abruptly changed.
Ronan stood on a familiar cold shore. The cloud was gone; he had his human body back. The wind snagged his clothing and threw sand up against his skin as he faced a turquoise ocean before him. He knew without looking there would be black rocks tumbled up behind him.
The Dark Lady’s ocean.
Ronan felt intensely present, there on The Dark Lady’s shore. The painting, he thought. The painting must be back under Declan’s roof.
“There you are again,” Bryde said wryly.
He was here, yes, and now that he wasn’t Ronan-the-cloud, he had room in his mind for all the concerns of Ronan-the-boy. “Matthew hates me.”
“Did you want him to be stupid forever?” Bryde asked. “Wisdom is hard. Do you think the hawk was always happy with what he learned?”
“He thinks I’m a liar.”
“Then perhaps,” Bryde said, “you shouldn’t have lied.”
Ronan put his hands behind his neck, just as Matthew had in the church. He closed his eyes.
“Perhaps the next creature you should turn yourself into in your dreams should be a dream,” Bryde said. “What do you think a dream wants?”
“Fuck everything.”
“What does a dream want?”
“I don’t want to play right now.”
“What does a dream want?”
Ronan opened his eyes. “To live without their dreamer.”
“Look at me,” Bryde said.
Ronan turned, shielding his eyes. High up on the black rocks, he saw a silhouette against the gray.
“You’re ready for the next part of the game,” Bryde called down. “I am, too. But I’ve been burned before. Wait, I tell myself, wait, slow, high circles, watching.”
“Don’t tell me I didn’t save Hennessy,” Ronan said. “I was there. I kept up my end.”
Bryde said, “She is just afraid. She knows what dreams want, and she wants that for her dreams. Do you want that for Matthew?”
He already knew that Ronan wanted it for Matthew. It didn’t even have to be said. Ronan had wanted that for as long as he knew Matthew was one of his.
Bryde said, “I want it, too.”
“Do you know how to do it?”
The silhouette on the rocks scanned the sky as if looking for the hawk from the story. Then Ronan saw the silhouette visibly square its shoulders. Bracing. Preparing.
“Next box,” Bryde said, “rabbits are coming to you. Next box. Are you ready?”
Ronan held out his arms on either side. I’m here, aren’t I?
Bryde said, “You have been waiting for me; she has been waiting for you. When she stretches out her arm, answer the call. Remember that hawks have talons.”
Ronan woke up.
It was early, early morning. The light through the blinds was still the ugly orange of the streetlights outside, fencing his vision in narrow slats. His phone was ringing on Declan’s guest room nightstand.
He picked it up.
Ten years before, J. H. Hennessy had shot herself.
One shot, .45 caliber. The gun belonged to a friend of the family, reports said. It was registered, everything north of proper except for the part where it killed someone, and maybe even that, because isn’t that every guy’s fitful dream? There was music playing when it happened. An old jazz recording, some woman’s voice pitching and lilting along as the sound fuzzed and popped. Jay was in a large closet. The lights were out. The only illumination came from a small, high window, and everything it touched was gray. She was dressed in a bra and underwear and a robe. Mascara was drawn down her face. She was holding a gun to her own head, and she was listening for the door to open.
This was not in the reports, but Hennessy knew it because she was the one who opened the door.
“Mum?” Hennessy said.
“You won’t miss me,” Hennessy’s mother said.
“Wait,” Hennessy said.
The gun barrel flashed.
It was also not in the reports that Jay had died disappointed. It was not supposed to be Jordan Hennessy, her daughter, who opened the closet door. It was supposed to be Bill Dower. All week long she had been courting his attention through a series of checks and balances, emotional outbursts and reticent withdrawals, and she had concluded the week’s emotional roller coaster by putting herself in that closet with the gun. Hennessy understood now that Bill Dower was meant to feel sorry for her and find her; Bill Dower was meant to take the gun out of her hand. Hennessy understood now that she had not been important in the equation, which had always only ever had two variables: Jay, and Bill Dower. Hennessy was one of those inert bits in between, only important when she had to interact with a variable.
She was not supposed to open the closet door.
It was supposed to be Bill Dower.
It was supposed to be Bill Dower.
It was supposed to be Bill Dower.
But Hennessy ruined the setup, both by spoiling the surprise of her mother with the gun and also by proving that Bill Dower wasn’t coming, the games were over.
And all she could say was—
Wait.
Later, therapists said she was taking it better than they had hoped.
Of course she was, Hennessy thought. She’d been expecting her mother to kill either herself or Hennessy for years.
She was a mess, Bill Dower said. What a beautiful mess.
Like mother, like daughter.
But Jordan wasn’t a mess, Hennessy thought. Any mess in Jordan was from living with Hennessy. Hennessy, who’d said the worst possible thing to her in Senko’s parking lot the night before. Where had that foulness even come from? Who was this person who would sneer that she was the dreamer, and Jordan only the dream, as if Jordan were not more competent at living in every single way?
A Hennessy, that was who.
She knew all the girls were disappointed with her. She saw it in their faces when she returned that night. Jordan was right. Something about Ronan Lynch, about another dreamer, had hopped them up on hope more than anything else she’d ever seen. They’d seen what he could do and they thought Hennessy, with a little help, could do the same. They didn’t understand.
“Where’s Jordan?” June asked.
“We had a row,” Hennessy said. “She’ll get over it.”
And she could see in their faces that they were proud of Jordan.
She slunk off to the studio to chain-smoke. She hated that they were hopeful, but more than that, she hated that they were hopeful about her. She was going to let them down again. She always let them down. Her poor girls. What a mess.
Early that morning, her timer went off, and instead of resetting it, she called Ronan Lynch.
He met her at a place called the Shenandoah Café, near Gainesville, west of DC, a restaurant located the opposite direction of rush hour traffic and open at the absurdly early hour that she’d called him. It was not as empty as one would expect given the hour; the clientele had a vaguely truck-stop vibe although the café itself was far quainter than the typical interstate stop. Buckled wood floors, primitive shop shelves from floor to ceiling, booths huddled around glass-topped casement display tables, every cranny filled with hundreds—maybe thousands—of knickknacks. According to a sign by the register, these knickknacks had been donated by customers from all over the world. Some appeared valuable, like parchment-thin china cups, and others appeared worthless, like Dracula rubber ducks. It was an installation where noise, rather than worth, was the relevant measure of success.
The hostess had left them at a table that contained metal roses, golden bells, and etched ocarinas. The shelf beside it held hollow books and ships in bottles and Excalibur letter openers.
Ronan said, “My family used to come here.”
“You and the big D. Declan.” She tried out the word again as she picked up the laminated menu card. Everything you could want as long
as what you wanted was breakfast food. “I don’t know how you don’t just say his name all the time. It’s like chocolate in your mouth, isn’t it?”
He regarded her with unimpressed silence. He had a judgmental silence that said far more than words. This particular silence conveyed that he thought it was stupid that she was blustering when he was being earnest, don’t fucking waste his time.
Hennessy raised an eyebrow and shot back her own silence, which was less nuanced. It said something along the lines of Sorry, man, bluster’s all I got because I’m scared shitless and dying.
Sad violins, said Ronan’s silence.
I don’t need your pity, said Hennessy’s.
“Good morning, kids.” The server had appeared and, without prompting, began disseminating coffee from an old metal carafe into the mugs already assembled on napkins before them. She was an older woman, plump and bright-eyed. Her name tag read “Wendy,” as if it might be an alias, her true identity hidden from the regular clientele of the Shenandoah Café. She leaned close to get their orders, confidentially, as if they were secret debriefings, then tapped her pencil against her pad and left.
Ronan waited.
Hennessy sighed and slid down into her side of the booth with her mug of coffee. She wished she could have a cigarette. She wanted something more to do with her hands. “Okay then, what do you want to know? I’ve had the same dream since my mum died. Every time I close my eyes long enough to dream, it begins, always the same. Always the shit, always awful.”
“What’s the dream?”
“I read,” Hennessy said, “that the most common recurring dream in America is falling. I would’ve guessed test-taking. I hear that one’s common for perfectionists.”
“What’s the dream?”
“Supposedly, lovers can share the same dream if their heads are in close proximity,” Hennessy added, a little desperately, holding her fingers up to demonstrate. “Not very peer-reviewed, though. At least the blog post I read said it wasn’t.”
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