Sea of Dreams

by C.L. Bevill

  * * *

  A day later I was moving from the bed to the bathroom by myself. Slowly but surely. I had lost the I.V., and I was keeping all the food and water down. I had a pile of library books, at my request, and my notebook. I had kept busy upgrading my entries. To be certain, I wasn’t exactly sure what to say about the fireflies. Kara called them pixies and said they looked like teeny-weeny human beings with wings if you looked closely. Their bodies radiated a bioluminescence that made me think of the little bugs. They had warned me as best they could that danger was about. Furthermore, they had located Kara and Zach and managed to get them to come help me. Kara said they had buzzed around them and then opened a path in the direction they wanted them to go. Only a mile or two away, they had heard the screams as they had got closer, and could see the bonfire, as well.

  The fact that fireflies/pixies/new creatures had gone out of their way to save me made me wonder endlessly. Why me? Why not the other one the man had gotten hold of? How had they known to find Kara and Zach? And the questions kept leading to other questions. How had Kara and Zach found each other? What was Zach’s story?

  “How do you feel?” Zach asked from the doorway. Dark and forbidding, the clouds outside had chased the pair inside. He lingered near the door and kept glancing at me while I pretended not to notice. Kara was reading in the chair by the window while I was propped in the bed.

  “I’m okay,” I said. I was okay. The antibiotics were working well on me. I was taking some painkillers for the aches, but it wasn’t as bad as I would have thought. The bruises on my flesh were already turning yellow. The wound on my shoulder was a healthy, healing pink. Kara told me my back looked the same. She was happy with my progress.

  “You don’t talk much,” Zach commented. I lifted my eyes to his and caught that extraordinary expression again. He looked at me as though, as though…what?

  “It doesn’t seem…real,” I said, aware that it sounded lame. Kara put her book down and gave me her undivided attention. “All this. You. Kara. I feel like I’m going to wake up, and I’ll be alone again.” Aware that my tone sounded pregnant with despair, I glanced at my notebook and the little drawing of the firefly pixies that Kara had done.

  “If it’s too good to be true,” Kara ventured delicately, “then it must not be true?”

  “It wasn’t good to lose my father,” I said. “I woke up in a sleeping bag, and he was gone. I don’t know how long it was before I realized his clothing was still inside his sleeping bag, and his boots were still sitting beside the bag. I searched the mountainside for hours before I gave up to go find help. I kept thinking that I would run into someone who would help me.” I kept looking at the notebook. My knuckles were turning white from clasping the paper pages together. “I never did find anyone. But I walked off the mountain and down the mountain and I kept looking. I looked until the moment I walked into my house and found my mother’s wedding rings on the kitchen floor next to her nightgown and a broken glass of milk. That wasn’t good either.”

  Kara and Zach didn’t say anything.

  “No, it doesn’t seem real,” I mumbled. “I’m sorry. I guess I want to know what’s going to happen next.”

  Zach was suddenly standing next to the bed. He hunkered down and took my hand in his. His flesh felt warm, and I wanted to cling to it eagerly like a lifeline. “We won’t leave you, will we, Kara?”

  “No, hon,” Kara answered, and her tone was open honesty. “I always wanted to have children, you know. Now I’ve got two to mother. I hope you don’t mind. I’m an awful pain to live with, too. Maggie always did say so.”

  “Maggie was your partner?” I asked. That was sad, infinitely sad to lose the person you loved most in the world, the one you had committed yourself to being with. Pain was pain no matter who had been lost.

  “Oh yes. An artist. She did the most wonderful landscapes. She did pretty well in the galleries,” Kara’s voice dangled reflectively. I glanced up to see her wipe an errant tear away from her eye, and I wished I hadn’t said anything.

  Zach was still looking at me, holding my hand. I wanted to pull away, but I didn’t know how to do it without making it seem as though I thought it was distasteful. (It wasn’t, but boy, was I confused about my feelings.) “How did you find each other?” I asked, meaning Zach and Kara, but Kara seemed to understand.

  “Once I couldn’t find anyone else, I left Klamath Falls,” Kara said, and her tone was mild again. “I thought I’d head to I-5 and go south. I walked across the mountains toward the interstate, and found that my knees weren’t doing so great. I tried a bicycle, which is better for me, but I decided I was going to have to find a hospital with a physical therapy section for my knees. Well, that, and I had the strangest inkling to go north. Kind of weird that. I kept smelling the strongest scent of cinnamon. Instead of going south, I followed the smell up to Medford and stopped at the library to read up on physical therapy options for knees.” She waved her hand placidly at Zach. “And I found him instead of Cinnabon. What were you reading?”

  “A thesis on apocalyptical theology,” Zach muttered. He rubbed my fingers once more and let go. He stood up and retreated to the door. My fingers tingled oddly.

  “Theories on how the world is going to end?” I asked. Well, it wasn’t so far off from what I thought for a few minutes, about being in hell. The devil would know, too. My idea of hell had changed. Hell would be being alone again, without any hope of seeing anyone else.

  Zach nodded. “I was trying some different trains of thought in order to get my head around what happened.”

  “He had a pile this big,” Kara laughed, indicating about three feet in the air with her hand. “Books that I couldn’t pronounce the names of. ‘Psychosocial Anthologies of the Archetypal Indicators of the Apocalypse.’”

  “You made that up,” Zach accused genially.

  “Well,” Kara said. “Maybe a little. I was so shocked to see him sitting there, I forgot to say anything. For a minute I didn’t know what to do. I think he was so engrossed in his reading that he didn’t hear me come up. He looked up after that and dropped the book on the floor, and then knocked the rest on the floor in his surprise.” She smiled a little. “Would you believe I just ran over to him and hugged him?”

  I believed it. I think I would have done the same if I had seen either of them in a normal fashion. What was normal, by the way? I might have done the same to the other man, too, if he hadn’t been acting like a psychopath. I would have walked right up to him and let him do his worst in my excitement over seeing another living, breathing, walking human being.

  “Embarrassed the heck out of him,” Kara went on, oblivious to my wool gathering. “I think I held onto him for five full minutes. He had to pry me off.”

  I looked at Zach and saw that he was staring at me again. I wanted to say “What?” but I couldn’t bring myself to say the word. I just let my gaze drop to the notepad again.

  “That was the first night either one of us got a full night’s sleep,” Kara said. “I was so relieved that I wasn’t the only one.” She paused and then said, “I bet you felt the same way, huh, Sophie?”

  “Yes,” I said simply.