The Multitude

by J M Fraser

  Her mother didn’t show the slightest amusement at the clever play on words. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

  Carla escaped out the window to watch the chill winds of autumn swirl dead leaves across the sidewalk, but the waiter soon pulled her back to the restaurant by setting an iced tea in front of her. She met her mother’s eyes again. The woman pursed her lips around a straw and sipped her drink, beating her down with an overly concerned stare.

  “I’ve been seeing a counselor, Mother.”

  “A shrink?”

  “Not so loud.” She would have loved to flee out the window again, but a lifetime of mother-daughter exchanges foretold that an explanation would be extracted sooner or later. The longer she held out, the noisier the conversation might get. “I’ve been having nightmares about asking a man to kill me.”

  She cringed, expecting an outburst, yet her confession was met by silence. Working up the courage to meet her mother’s eyes took awhile.

  But her mother displayed neither shock nor scorn, only her trademark, head-tilted, half-smile expression of curiosity. “How are your waking thoughts?”

  “I’m not suicidal.” As if a simple denial could prove such a thing, even to herself.

  Her words hung in the air like the bloodied blade of a guillotine, until her mother leaned forward with the sharp stare of a coconspirator. “You’re merely having dark sexual fantasies!”

  With impeccable timing, the comment filled a brief void in the restaurant’s general clatter. Heads turned in their direction.

  “Mother, do you not have an inside voice?”

  The waiter returned. He set their lunches down and caught Carla’s eye. She had to admit her mother had targeted a suitable subject for leering. Either this dark-haired Adonis inherited his muscular frame from the gods or he was bent on setting the record for frequent visitor points at the gym. Under different circumstances he might have stirred her, too, but only one man could accomplish such a thing at the moment. She averted her gaze until the waiter left, fighting the urge to reach into her purse and fondle Brewster’s card.

  Once they were alone again, her mother shot a glance around the restaurant and then leaned forward, like some character in a spy novel. “All right, Carla, here’s my inside voice. The women in our line have been blessed with amazing dreams.”

  Carla caught her breath. “And you waited until now to tell me?”

  “You’ve never said anything one way or the other about yours, so I assumed the trait stopped with me.”

  “So what do you mean by amazing?”

  “They seem every bit as real as this lunch we’re having. Conversations with actual people, journeys to other worlds—”

  “You’ve visited other worlds?” Carla accidentally brushed her sleeve into her salad, but who cared about French-dressing stains at a time like this?

  Her mother slumped away. “Not lately. Somehow, I’ve outgrown the ability to do that.”

  “But you remember it happening?”

  “I remember having two lives, one here and one somewhere else.”

  “In the forest?” Carla barely heard her own whispered words over her pounding heart.

  “I’m not sure. The point is, I’m not crazy and neither are you.” Her mother turned her attention to a bowl of chicken noodle soup.

  Carla didn’t know whether to press the matter further or wait until a time when they might have more privacy. Her mother was perfectly capable of bouncing an exclamation of surprise off all four walls of the crowded restaurant if their notes about dreams matched. She decided to come at the topic from a different angle, a dream her mother would know nothing about. “I’ve started seeing someone.”

  “Good. You’re more stable when dating.”

  “I’m quite the handful otherwise, huh?” Although she’d been dwelling on her mental health for months, the comment still stung.

  Her mother set her spoon down. “I was teasing.”

  “Do you like being teased?”

  Her mother reached across the table, patted Carla’s hand, smiled. Her eyes gleamed with genuine interest, perhaps even pleasure.

  Carla forgave her.

  “Tell me about this new man.”

  “His name is Brewster DeLay.”

  “That’s no ordinary name!”

  “He’s no ordinary man. He writes novels that don’t sell, and he’s failing at his day job, but you’d think he was on the top of the world. I love his attitude. He’s always positive, funny, caring.”

  “Handsome?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Her mother broke eye contact and looked down at her hands. “You think I’m shallow for asking.”

  “No, Mother, I think it’s time to get real. I’ve given my talisman to a man I only meet in my dreams.”

  “The coin?” Her mother’s hushed question was spoken so sharply it managed to turn a few heads.

  “Shh. Didn’t you hear the weird part? I’ve given an heirloom away to a shadow.”

  Her mother turned to the window and stared with thousand-mile eyes. “You’ve given the talisman to someone special. I suppose that’s how it was meant to be used.”

  English didn’t seem to be working. “He and I haven’t actually met in the traditional sense of the word.”

  Her mother took her by the hands. “What are you talking about? I see true love in your eyes.”

  And Carla had true love in her heart, but she was setting herself up to be crushed when the wormholes or whatever snatched Brewster away. “He might not be real!” She pulled her hands away. “We’ve only met in my dreams and not very often.”

  “There’s something so sweet about love at first sight.”

  “Mother, have you been listening to me?”

  “Have you been listening to me? I’m sure the place I visited in my dreams was real. Yours must be, too!”

  The notion was amazing, dizzying, validating. Terrifying. A chill ran down her spine. “What if the train is real?”

  A shadow crossed her mother’s face.

  “You think it might be?” Carla asked.

  “No. I just… Did you ever get a sudden fright for no reason? I thought I remembered something, but I didn’t.”

  “Well, here’s a reason for me to be scared, mother. I’m in a lot of trouble in another world. Two men are chasing me and—”

  “But you found your hero!”

  “He can’t help. He’s in a different place entirely.”

  “Is he?”

  “Are you suggesting he isn’t?”

  Her mother went at her salad, took her time chewing a forkful, thinking the question over, perhaps. “Everything ties together somehow.”

  Carla tended to tune her mother out when she got going down this path. With any encouragement, her mother would start talking about crystals or pyramids, witchcraft…as opposed to the likely conclusion they both suffered from some form of genetic instability.

  The waiter returned to freshen their drinks. “Hey, are you sisters?”

  “Don’t even go there.” She shot a look at her mother, fully ready to put her fork to good use if any more flirting went on.

  The waiter wandered off, leaving them to brood in silence.

  Eventually, her glass-half-full mother brightened. She motioned out the window. “Look at that! I can’t remember ever seeing lake snow this early.”

  Carla turned to the window and lost herself in a swirl of white. The squall dissipated as quickly as it came, leaving a dusting of powder in its wake, then a burst of windswept leaves, then no sign she’d seen any snow at all. She wouldn’t let herself dwell on the possibility she’d imagined it. “I’ve been thinking about getting away for a few days to sort things out. Can you watch the store for me?”

  “Now you’re thinking straight! The cabin would be the perfect escape for you. Remember how your father used to take us there to celebrate the first blizzard?”

  “I was just a little girl.”

  “Don’t ever let go
of that.” Her mother’s smile didn’t quite hide the tinge of sadness in her eyes.

  Carla had been planning a trip to Manhattan, but the thought of a brief detour to the Tug Hill Plateau carried plenty of appeal. She loved the nature walks and antique picking the area afforded. Not to mention a quiet evening or two in the cabin, where she could sew new dolls for her shop. She’d been neglecting her craft.

  Her mother fished in her purse, came out with a key, handed it over. “Stay as long as you like.”

  Carla closed her hand around it. “Just for a couple nights, but I’m driving to Manhattan after that.”

  A shadow crossed her mother’s face again. “Why so far?”

  “A subway keeps calling my name. Elaine is big on facing down fears.”

  “Elaine?”

  “She’s my thera— She’s a friend of mine.”

  “Manhattan isn’t safe. I’ve told you this before.”

  “Yeah. Way too often.”

  Her mother crossed her arms.

  Time for a white lie. “Okay, I’ll just go to the cabin.”

  “Promise?”

  “Mother.”

  “What?”

  “When you visited, you know, other places, in your dreams, did you ever come back with anything?” The very act of asking such an incongruous question in a commonplace setting disoriented her. The couple across the aisle might have been deciding which movie to see, and the businessmen behind them could have been closing a deal. A baby’s fuss could be heard from the other side of the restaurant. She closed her eyes against the sensation of being out of body, as if looking down at the booth from the ceiling.

  When she reopened them, her mother’s probing gaze stole into her soul again. She found refuge in her purse, pulled Brewster’s card out, and slid it across the table. “This makes him real, doesn’t it?” Her voice cracked.

  Her mother handled the card as gently as a Communion host before handing it back. “You and I have a gift, Carla.”

  “You need to tell me more about it.”

  “The talisman you passed on? I woke up to find it in my hand one day.”

  “What?”

  “A girl gave it to me in a dream.”

  Carla replayed the words in her head twice before she could trust she’d heard them. Her stomach tingled. If a coin could emerge from a dream, kick around in the waking world, and then disappear into an entirely different dream years later, her ideas about wormholes, time travel, and alternate realities had now become far more likely than any self-diagnosis of dementia. Yet, if she were sane, the whole universe must have gone crazy. “What’s happening to us?”

  With a slow shake of the head, Carla’s mother said it all. Neither of them had any idea. “What’s wrong with having a little extra God in our lives?” she said.

  Carla grimaced. Not everyone could share so cavalier an attitude. Barbarians were closing in with a net. A subway train was barreling too fast into a station. “Who was the girl?”

  “We ran into her in a park when you were three. She was the typical blonde-haired, ponytailed girl you’d find on a thousand middle-school playgrounds. First she visited our waking lives and then she popped into my dream. Abbie or Addie…no… Gabby. Gabriella, I think. I never saw her again after that.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Nine hundred miles west in his Chicago office

  Brewster frittered his time staring out the window, gazing at the paintings on his office wall, and halfheartedly flicking spider mites off his desk. He’d been in a fog since staggering into the building earlier that morning.

  Somehow, the Virtus dream had settled into the area of memory reserved for actual events. Although only seven hours had passed from when he and Carla drifted off together to the point he awakened alone with her coin in his hand, the disorienting recollection of a two-day trek through scrubby desert had gotten lodged between those bookends.

  This thing scared the hell out of him.

  He reached into his wallet and examined the coin. Why not leave a damn note instead? Dear Brewster, catching a wormhole back to Syracuse. See you soon. Would he see her soon? The possibility he wouldn’t plunged through his stomach like a bad taco.

  A ringing phone pulled him back to a world where people were expected to get some work done. He slipped the coin back into his billfold and tried answering with something resembling enthusiasm. “Brewster DeLay.”

  “We’ve got problems.” Charlie Hanson’s whine grated through the receiver.

  Brewster suppressed a groan. “What’s up?” He made a mental note to check caller ID next time he got the crazy impulse to answer his phone.

  “Are you managing that place or what, Brewster? You people burned through one hundred thousand dollars cash last month. We’re almost out of dough up here.”

  As the chief financial officer of Parker Investments—a sorry mess of a holding company that owned not only Crestview Finance but several other stumbling businesses—Charlie certainly had the authority to lodge a complaint. But the man had forfeited all right to straight answers by failing to attend a single strategy session. Ever since the recession began sucking the life out of Crestview, Charlie had avoided brainstorming meetings like the plague. He kept his hands clean by steering clear while Brewster struggled alone against an avalanche of loan defaults.

  “Are you there, Brewster?”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “You couldn’t have sounded more positive when we met with the bankers a week ago.”

  “How did you want me come across? They’re scared enough.”

  “Not only them.”

  No kidding. Brewster took a deep breath. “It’s no big deal, Charlie. Most of our customers wait until month-end to make their payments, and the last two days of September happened to fall on a weekend. You’ll see a huge Monday deposit in our October numbers.”

  “Can I count on a better month?”

  “Uh-huh.” If he tried taking another deep breath, he might have choked on the lingering cloud of false optimism he’d just exhaled into the phone. Who knew what could be relied upon anymore? Try as he might, Brewster couldn’t account for, let alone predict, the company’s monthly cash flow with any degree of precision. Money came in from fees on new deals and from customer payments on old ones. It went out to cover payables, expenses, payroll, and amortization of Crestview’s whopping bank loan.

  Amortization. Therein lay the problem. The bank pulled loan repayments out of the company’s accounts at the end of each month. The complex formula determining amounts due was supposed to be driven by the number of days since last payment, but it seemed inconsistent. He’d grown suspicious nervous bankers had started cheating to get their money back quicker. Whenever he thought Crestview had finished a halfway decent month, the unsolvable amortization formula bit him in the ass.

  None of this ever mattered in the good old days. The company’s cash hadn’t been any easier to predict, but it tended to grow from one month to the next. Nobody worried over unexplained fluctuations.

  “Just break even for a change,” Charlie whined. “That’s all I’m asking.”

  “You can take it to the bank.” The false assurance rolled off Brewster’s tongue nice and smooth. Poor Charlie needed a dose of comfort wherever he could find it. In addition to Crestview, the man had the failing performances of several other recession-ravaged companies to worry about. Parker Investments had demonstrated an uncanny knack for buying the wrong businesses.

  Brewster ended the call, shifted his gaze to a print on the wall, and pictured himself sitting beneath the willow tree depicted, a thousand miles away—ideally with Carla snuggling beside him. That thought brought the dream back, the water turning to wine, and the sketch of a dead ringer for Carla, named Maynya. Frontier-rugged or not, the world he’d been dreaming about offered plenty more potential than this one. He could imagine himself a hero there.

  Why had breathing become so difficult all of a sudden? He headed out of his office in pu
rsuit of open spaces, but he had to scurry through the even more claustrophobic bullpen area first. Everyone’s quiet stares said it all. Heather and her staff didn’t need to pore over the numbers the way Charlie had. Having lived and breathed loan defaults every day, they could smell pending disaster.

  At least when he escaped to the lobby, Ronda managed to lift his mood. The eternally optimistic redhead always cast gloom to the wind. This time, she’d arrived in the office wearing a frilly pink-and-white skirt-and-blouse combo—a nice contrast to the others who tended to dress darker as times got harder. She glanced up from the reception desk with a friendly grin before returning to the task of polishing her nails.

  “You look like a slice of strawberry shortcake,” he said.

  Ronda reshaped her smile into a comic pout. “Are you harassing me?”

  “Kinda.”

  “We could call the police again. If I’m lucky, they’ll arrest you this time.”

  “That’s why I’m lamming it.”

  “Good. Send us a postcard from wherever.”

  Outside, nature grabbed Ronda’s relay of cheerfulness and ran with it. The intoxicating, early-autumn scent of burning leaves served as an antidote to his malaise. He lifted his gaze heavenward, where a phalanx of geese pointed an arrow to the south, honking across the sky. He almost forgot his problems.

  “Excuse me.”

  The unexpected voice shot directly into his nervous system. He jumped and spun in tandem, almost giving himself whiplash in the process.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.” The woman smiling at him must have come out of that Honda in the visitor space. But she might as well have stepped out of a gothic novel, given the world’s craziness lately and the nature of her costume. A lacy black dress spread an aura of midnight all the way to her ankles, and the red silk scarf looping around her neck hinted at vampires. The woman’s thick mass of raven hair billowed in the breeze and brushed against a rose-and-thorn tattoo high up one arm.

  In the past, such haunting beauty might have melted him into the pavement. The old Brewster might have rallied and risen back up, responding with a good line. But he’d lost his moxie.