by Megan Hart
Ava tossed up her hands. “Suit yourself. You used to love bingo, as I recall.”
“Yeah, well, that was then.” Tovah focused on Henry’s wan face. There was no point in pretending she didn’t remember those days, when bingo was the highlight of the week and she had to be forced to wash her hair and brush her teeth.
“You know something, Connelly? You’re the only patient I ever had who came back. Lots of ’em say they will, but you’re the only one who ever did.”
Tovah looked at the nurse who at one time had known her more intimately than any lover. “He doesn’t have anyone else.”
“Lots of them don’t,” said Ava as she left the room.
“That doesn’t make it right,” Tovah whispered to Henry, so Ava couldn’t hear.
She wasn’t, in fact, certain Henry could hear her. Sometimes he could. Sometimes he didn’t, it just depended on how far he was from his waking self. Tovah watched him sleep for a moment or two, then busied herself with making sure his room was clean and nothing was missing. The pajamas she’d bought for him were folded neatly in his drawer, which was good. Someone had nicked the last pair. The stack of books on the nightstand didn’t look as though they’d been touched. The bottles of shampoo and bars of soap lined up on his dresser were barely used.
“Spider,” she said. “You’ve got to get up. C’mon.”
His only response was the snort-whistle of his breath. This wasn’t surprising, but it was frustrating. Henry had been a patient in this hospital, on and off, for more than ten years.
Tovah settled into the chair next to his bed, picked up the copy of The Pickwick Papers and began to read. Doctors had told her it didn’t matter so much what was read to him, just that somehow, someway, some stimulus reached Henry’s mind while he shut himself away from the world. The doctors—most of them overworked and frazzled, this floor one last stop before they moved on to something bigger and brighter—didn’t know that Henry wasn’t lacking in stimulation. Yet Tovah was sure the reading didn’t hurt. He never admitted to listening to her, but she was convinced the time she spent reading aloud to him somehow anchored him to the waking world in a way none of their drugs or psychotherapies could.
The book served another purpose. It was so boring it usually put her to sleep within twenty minutes. It worked this time, too, her eyes drooping, and she slid a finger between the pages to mark her place. It helped, too, that last night she’d dreamed hard and strangely, that it had been almost too difficult to shape the club and the music. Last night’s dreams had worn her out.
Tovah wasn’t quite asleep yet. She was aware of the chair beneath her, the hiss of the hot air pouring out of the vents, and the muffled sound of shouting coming from the hall. Aware, too, of the way her hair feathered over her face as it tipped forward and the feeling of dry paper on her fingers. A gray mist swirled around her, softening the edges of these sensations. Colors muted.
And then, with a subtle shift, she lost sight of the hospital room and stepped forward, moving as though through water. She was there. The Ephemeros, land of dreams. Everything was bright and clear and fresh, and she tipped her face to a yellow sky with dancing pink clouds.
“I wondered when you were finally going to show up.” Spider crouched on a large boulder.
Today he represented in shades of gold and red, a spider in formal dress. His legs were longer today, his body less the squat, rounded shape of a tarantula and more like a garden spider. He held a small silk-wrapped package between his two front legs.
“You’re not going to eat that now, are you?” Tovah grimaced, stretching, feeling her limbs work the way they were all meant to. She loved this part, the first few moments when she arrived. It was like magic, the small changes her body went through as she shaped herself. She controlled how she represented, but in those first few moments after she crossed over, sometimes she surprised herself.
“It’s pastrami on rye!” Spider sounded offended. “What, you think I eat flies?”
“You are a spider,” she pointed out.
“And you’re a brunette,” Spider shot back. “Usually.”
This was true. Tovah ran fingers through her hair, longer here where it didn’t matter if it got tangled. “Huh. Look at that.”
She’d arrived with a definite auburn tinge to her tresses. She liked it. Where it had come from, she wasn’t sure, but she didn’t bother changing it. Everything else seemed the same. She did a few deep knee-bends, enjoying the way her muscles worked.
“You’re with me, ain’t ya? Over there?”
Despite his claim he wasn’t consuming insects, Tovah turned her attention away when Spider brought the package to his mouth and began to eat. “Yes. Ava sends her regards.”
Spider snorted. “She forgive me for the television yet?”
“No.”
Soft grass, each individual blade a different shade of green, brushed Tovah’s fingertips as she did a slow, even cartwheel. Then a split, something she couldn’t do in the waking world, no matter how hard she tried. She laughed, feeling lighter.
It was good to have people who loved her, even if they were a St. Bernard and a man who represented as an arachnid. Spider scuttled forward, the earth shaping with his every step to leave a trail of flowers behind him. It was a nice effect, though what purpose he meant for it to serve she had no idea.
“Just to be pretty.” He couldn’t read her mind, but he had no problem reading her face. “Flowers are pretty. You should try it.”
“Leaving a trail of flowers behind me? What’s next, jewels falling from my lips with every word?”
“You could do that, too, but flowers smell good.”
As he said it, the scent of roses and lavender filled the air. Tovah took a deep, hungry sniff. “They do. Thanks, Spider.”
“Anything for my girl. You know that.”
“Anything?” Tovah bent to scoop up a handful of flowers. The details were amazing, if not entirely correct. Spider was skilled, but even he needed to know what something really looked like in order to shape it accurately. He’d taken liberties with the petals, shaping them like hearts. Or maybe he’d done that on purpose. “Will you wake up for a while?”
His only answer was the turning of his back.
“Spider…”
No answer. Tovah looked around the meadow. To please him, she shaped a bird or two. Some butterflies. When she looked back at him, he’d shrunk from the size of a midsized dog to a large rat. The vibrant reds and golds had gone to muted browns and greens.
“So you’re going to abandon me? Is that it? Just walk away because you don’t like something I had to say? I don’t like a lot of the stuff you say to me, but I don’t ever run away.” She took a few running steps toward him, but he’d shaped the air to a thickness that made moving difficult. She concentrated and managed to thin it, but the birds and the butterflies disappeared, winking out in her field of vision like candles being snuffed. “Spider, dammit! You can’t sleep all the damn time! If you don’t wake up you’re going to—”
All at once he was huge, the size of a compact car, then bigger. He loomed over her. Fangs the size of her arm dripped venom that hissed and burned the ground where it struck.
“Don’t you say it!” The words shot from Spider’s mouth with the force of bullets.
Tovah flinched but stood her ground, even though her pulse thudded in her ears and wrists and her body tensed to flee. Spider wouldn’t hurt her.
“Don’t you say it,” he repeated.
Tovah held out her hands to him. “I don’t want to lose you, that’s all.”
His laughter echoed around them. The grass leaped up beneath her feet, thick and strong. The scent of flowers filled the air. Spider returned to his normal size.
“You won’t ever lose me, kiddo. I’ll be around for-fucking-ever.”
“Nobody can be around forever,” she told him. “Not even you.”
For one rare instant, the spider flickered and vanished, replaced by He
nry representing as the man he must have been before his stint in the hospital. Tall, strong, with powerful arms and legs. All his hair. A man who looked like he could rule the world.
The Ephemeros shuddered.
As though a door somewhere had slammed hard enough to shake the pictures on the walls, or something fragile had been dropped and shattered, the world rippled around them. Henry gasped, and Tovah went to one knee, on her good leg. The other had changed and she cried out, not only disturbed at how someone had shifted her representation, but with true grief at experiencing her loss all over again.
Henry helped her up and held her arm to give her balance. “Tovahleh, are you okay?”
She nodded and gripped Henry’s arm. “What the hell is that?”
The sky went dark. The ground turned to black sand. Cold. Lightning split the sky in flashes of blue and white and angry red. God’s fire, her grandfather had called it.
This had nothing to do with any god. Tovah slipped her hand into Henry’s. She’d encountered nightmares aplenty, but since meeting him and learning she could shape, she’d always been able to flee, escape, shift to something better. Or wake. But now they clung to each other as the earth rumbled beneath them and lightning made glass of the sand.
“What’s going on, Spider?”
It felt odd to call him that, when he was still Henry. He looked at her. He squeezed her hand.
“It will pass.”
“But what is it?” She’d experienced shifts in the Ephemeros before, when someone wanted something badly enough. But nothing ever like this.
“Shape it away, Tovah,” Henry said, looking into the distance. “Shape us a haven.”
“I don’t know how!”
“We’ll do it together. Shape with me.”
She concentrated. She’d felt Spider’s power many times before. The first time she’d woken in a dream and realized she was no longer powerless, he’d been there. The first time she understood she wasn’t merely imagining herself in a place, but was actually inside it, Spider had been holding her hand. He’d led her then. He would lead her now, too.
“Are we fighting something?” she whispered. “Something bad?”
“No. We’re trying not to be noticed, that’s all. Fighting’s not for us.”
“I didn’t know you were a pacifist,” she said.
“I’m not. I’m a coward.”
He grinned at her. He looked so much like the Henry she’d first met almost three years ago, the one who’d convinced her to play bingo and start eating again, that she wanted to cry. She leaned up quickly to kiss his cheek. Stubble scratched her lips.
Then he was gone and Spider was back, slightly less gaudily colored but still recognizable. She missed the touch of his hand. “Spider?”
“Time to go,” he told her.
“How do you always know—” she began, and then the Ephemeros faded as someone shook her awake.
“Miss?”
Tovah looked at Henry, so still beneath his shield of blankets. The hands of the clock told her she’d only been asleep for about half an hour. She hadn’t even dropped the book, though her finger had cramped from the pressure of holding it on her lap.
She’d have known the tall man standing over her was a doctor even without the white badge and clipboard. He had that disheveled, not-enough-sleep, too-much-coffee physique. In a pair of dark dress trousers and a deep blue button-down shirt, he was better dressed than a lot of the docs she’d seen. Better looking, too, despite the furrow in his brow as he stared at her. He had dark hair cropped short and eyes that matched his shirt.
“Sorry.” She sat up straight, immediately self-conscious. “Must’ve dozed off.”
“Careful. You don’t want to end up like him.” The doctor looked over at Henry, so silent. When he looked back at Tovah, the frown had disappeared. “Are you Henry’s case worker?”
It wasn’t a stupid assumption. Henry had no family to visit him. None that acknowledged him, at any rate. “I’m a friend, actually. Tovah Connelly.”
She carefully tested her sound foot to make sure it hadn’t fallen asleep while she was dreamwalking. It had only taken her one embarrassing incident in which she’d tried to stand on two numbed feet and fallen before she’d learned her lesson. She wiggled her toes, no problem, and got up. She offered her hand, which he took and dropped immediately after a bare hesitation she noticed but couldn’t figure out. Germ-a-phobe? Some doctors were.
“Martin Goodfellow,” he said. “I’ve been assigned to Henry.”
“You’re new?”
He nodded. “Started last week.”
“Well, he’s no different than he was last week,” Tovah said. “Vitals are steady, but no change, otherwise.”
He seemed taken aback at her knowledge, but rallied. “Are you a doctor?”
“No, but she’s played one on TV.” Ava pushed past them both and checked Henry’s chart. She gave Tovah a look. “Visiting hours are over. We’ll see you next week?”
“Next Sunday.” Tovah settled the book on Henry’s nightstand. “Tell him not to read ahead.”
“As if,” said Ava.
“It was nice to meet you, Dr. Goodfellow.” Tovah didn’t look at Henry. There was no point. He wasn’t really there.
Dr. Goodfellow stared at her but said nothing, and under the intense scrutiny Tovah had to fight not to look at her reflection in Henry’s mirror. Was he staring because of the way she’d lurched out of her chair like something from a horror movie? She’d tried to be more subtle than that. Or maybe she’d drooled while sleeping—
“Nice meeting you, too, Miss Connelly.” Dr. Goodfellow nodded sharply, leaving doubt about the veracity of his statement. “Take care.”
Tovah glanced at Ava, who was steadfastly ignoring the new doctor as she fussed with Henry. No help there, not even an eye roll. The nurse hadn’t yet formed an opinion about the new doc. Tovah smiled a little and let herself out of Henry’s room.
She shouldn’t take Dr. Goodfellow’s lack of enthusiasm personally. Some people just didn’t have the same set of social skills as others. Or maybe she’d caught him on a bad day.
Dr. Goodfellow caught her at the end of the hall. “Miss Connelly!”
She turned. He was smiling. He looked less tired than he had on first glance and a whole lot friendlier.
“Yes?”
“I was wondering if you’d be able to talk to me a little bit. About Henry,” he added hastily, as though she might assume he was asking her to chat about hemlines or the state of world affairs. “His file’s got a lot of notes but says very little, if you know what I mean.”
Tovah was a sucker for smiles, and Dr. Goodfellow had a great warm, buttery one, now that it had appeared. He slipped his pen into his breast pocket and put his hands on his hips.
“I’ve read it.”
“Have you?” He looked like she’d admitted to a felony, but only for a second. “Then you know what I mean.”
“I do.” Tovah studied him. She’d never passed more than a word or two with Henry’s previous docs, and then only because she’d forced them to talk to her about his treatment. Henry needed her to speak for him, since he refused to do it for himself. She couldn’t do much, but she tried. “I’ll be happy to talk to you about Henry.”
“Thanks, I appreciate it.” In sharp contrast to his original greeting, Dr. Goodfellow flashed her that warm smile again.
She liked the way it crinkled the corners of his eyes. “I can tell you’re new,” she said, gesturing at his clothes. “Nobody around here dresses like that.”
He looked down, then quickly up at her. For an instant, cerulean eyes flashed. His smile tipped on one side. “No?”
She was no way, no how, going to flirt with Henry’s new doctor. No matter how cute he was, or how nicely dressed, or…oh, hell, how good he smelled. Which was good, she discovered when he moved closer.
“Can I buy you a coffee? Or maybe you don’t have time now. You’re probably heading
out somewhere. Of course.” He shook his head before she even had time to answer. “I’m sure you’ve got something else to do. Another time?”
This swift exchange took her aback, just a little. “I come to see Henry every week, Dr. Goodfellow. If you really want to talk to me about him—”
“I do!”
She gave him a curious look.
“If I’m going to understand him, it will help to talk to someone who knows him.”
Tovah nodded slowly. His enthusiasm was obvious. Despite the crinkles, he still looked young. Maybe he hadn’t had time to become jaded about his work like most of the other docs she’d met here.
“Sure. I’ll be happy to help. And I don’t have anyplace I have to be just now, so…”
“Now? I’ve got time for a break.” He looked hopeful but a bit wary, as though he still didn’t expect her to say yes.
Tovah expected a man, a doctor, who looked like him to be more self-assured. Maybe even a little arrogant. His hesitance was utterly charming. She smiled. “Sure. Okay.”
“Great!”
She followed him to the cafeteria for a cup of very bad coffee and a piece of very good blueberry coffee cake. They sat at a table so small their knees touched with every shift, and she couldn’t bring herself to suggest they move to a bigger one. Nor did he seem bothered, though his legs were far longer and he must have wanted to stretch them.
“I’ve moved around a lot,” he told her. “Decided to see the world before I settled down. Worked in Alaska for a bit, then did a stint in Hawaii. I went from wearing a fur-lined parka to a bathing suit in less than twenty-four hours. If I ever find a house, I’ve got some great souvenirs.”
“You don’t have a house?” Tovah laughed, imagining him living in a tent or the back of his car.
“No. Just a really small, really lousy apartment that smells like cold pizza. I’ve never stayed in one place long enough to bother buying a house.”
Tovah lifted a crumb from her plate to her mouth. “Think you’ll stay around here long enough?”
It wasn’t until he looked up at her that Tovah realized how bold a question it sounded.