Fantasy Life

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Lyssa sighed. She had shipped all of their books, their summer clothing, and their linens the day before she’d left. UPS would deliver them after she arrived.

  She hadn’t called ahead to let her mother and grandmother know that she and Emily were coming, but if Cassie’s talents were running true to form, Cassie and Athena already knew. If they didn’t want Lyssa and Emily to show up, they would have called by now.

  Athena had called the day after Reginald died, claiming she’d seen the story on CNN. She might have, but Lyssa knew that Cassie had put Athena up to it. Cassie had promised she wouldn’t use her telepathic powers to spy on her daughter any longer, but Lyssa hadn’t believed the promise.

  And why should she, with all the times that Cassie had broken that very promise? Her mother was probably spying, even now.

  Ahead, Lyssa saw lights from two cars parked across the highway. Other lights—the big lights used at construction sites—blared on either side of the road, revealing foundations and half-built walls of houses.

  Lyssa slowed to a near crawl. She wondered how she was going to get across the highway, with an accident in front of her. Maybe there were side roads now, near all the construction. She was surprised to see it. When she had moved away, the population of Anchor Bay was stable, and there was no point in building beach cottages this far away from the beach.

  Her headlights caught two more yellow rainslickers, one near a car, and the other near the side of the road. The one near the side of the road seemed to be moving, and it took her a moment to see through the darkness that still shadowed everything.

  The rainslicker beside the road was holding a construction worker’s stop sign.

  No one would be working in this weather. There had to be some kind of problem on the road ahead.

  She slowed the Bug to a near stop, then checked over her shoulder. Emily lay across the backseat, a book under her right arm, and her stuffed dog Yeller under her left.

  Yeller had become her constant companion since her father’s death. He had given her the dog—an overstuffed cocker spaniel—the last summer he had been well. Emily hadn’t treated it differently from any of her other stuffed animals then; the dog hadn’t even had a name until August.

  She had started carting it around the night of her dad’s death and named it when she’d finished the weepy Old Yeller, which Lyssa hadn’t wanted her to read. But Emily had read it, then reread it, and reread it again. Obviously the book spoke to her, and whenever Lyssa asked what Emily liked about it, Emily couldn’t—or wouldn’t—answer.

  Lyssa finally eased to a complete stop. She could hear water slurping beneath her tires. Her headlight beams revealed water pouring over the road, the rain dotting it as if landing on a lake.

  The man sloshed his way toward the driver’s side of the car and, with a swirl of his hand, indicated that she should roll down her window.

  She did, letting in cold air and drops of rain.

  He bent over. Beneath his slicker, he wore a baseball cap. She could see the Detroit Tigers logo just above the brim. His face was ruddy with the cold and dotted with moisture.

  “How was the road through the corridor, ma’am?” he asked without so much as a hello. His voice was deep and official.

  “Tricky.” She didn’t want to add that she hadn’t driven mountain roads in weather conditions like that in nearly fifteen years.

  “But clear?”

  “No branches on the highway, if that’s what you mean.”

  “And the road’s still secure?”

  Mountain roads fell away, something Midwesterners never believed. Once, when she was sixteen and crazy, she had driven through the corridor with a boyfriend. Fortunately, she had been at the wheel and something—maybe even a sending from her mother—had warned her that danger was ahead.

  She had stopped just in time to avoid a massive landslide that took the road with it.

  “It was secure when I went over it,” she said. She didn’t like how this conversation was heading. It was nearly ten o’clock at night. She was exhausted, and she wasn’t sure she could drive back to Portland.

  He nodded and turned his head in profile, looking at the squad cars parked across the road. The wind blew hard, shaking the Bug, but the man in the slicker looked like the gust hadn’t even bothered him.

  He turned back to her, his face in shadow. She couldn’t see his expression at all.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to turn around, then, ma’am,” he said.

  Lyssa knew he would ask that. Rain blew in the window, spattering the side of her face. So close. She was so close, and like everything else, she couldn’t seem to cross that final distance.

  Emily moaned in the back and then stirred. “Mommy?”

  Lyssa glanced over her shoulder. Emily’s eyes were barely open. “Go back to sleep, hon. We’re almost there.”

  Emily’s eyes closed.

  The man waited until Lyssa looked at him. Her left arm was getting wet from the rain blowing in the window.

  “What’s the problem?” she asked.

  “All this rain we’ve had this fall,” he said. “It’s flooding everything. The ditches are overflowing, and the ground is saturated. We’ve had more than two inches today alone, and it’s created a puddle on the other side of this barricade that’s deep enough to drown in.”

  His words made her shudder. She didn’t want to think about drowning. She hoped Emily hadn’t heard him.

  Lyssa looked through the windshield. The wipers were beating a pattern against the rain, but not holding it off. The water in front of her looked even deeper than it had a moment ago.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. I’m not an expert in this stuff. I’m just the lucky guy who happened to be on this side of the flood when they decided to close the road.” His eyes were blue and filled with compassion.

  “Is Anchor Bay flooded?” she asked. That had happened once before—at least according to her grandmother. It had been right around the time Lyssa had been born.

  “No, ma’am. Just this part of the highway, at least so far as I know.”

  She made herself take a deep breath, to hold back the panic growing inside her. Sleeping roadside wasn’t an option, no matter how tired she was. Trees could fall in winds like this, and staying on this open space wasn’t wise either.

  She might only have a short window to get back through the corridor, and even doing that was taking her life—and Emily’s—into her hands. As dark as that road was, she might not be able to see if the road had fallen away while she had been down here.

  Even if she did make it through the corridor, she’d still face a drive of more than an hour just to get to Portland’s outskirts. And then there would be the problem of getting a hotel on a night like this. Most travelers had booked in by now, and with most of them heading toward the coast, they would have the west side of Portland full.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am.” The bill of the man’s baseball cap dripped onto the side of the car.

  He had no idea what he was asking her to do. Even if she did manage to drive back to Portland, there was no guarantee that the storm would let up before she ran out of cash.

  Oregon Coast storms could end in an hour or last for days, with squall after squall coming through. There was no guarantee that she’d be stranded for only one night. She might be stuck for a week or more.

  If she ran through the cash, she had her cashier’s check, but that was in case her mother and grandmother wouldn’t let Lyssa and Emily stay at Cliffside House. Lyssa needed a first and last month’s rent, along with a security deposit. She hadn’t even thought about the kind of work she would find in a village of six hundred people. Obviously, it wouldn’t be anything like what she was used to.

  “How deep is the water?” she asked. “Maybe I can try to go through really slowly.”

  “I can’t let you do that, ma’am.” He leaned closer. She could see his face now. Something about the set of his mouth seemed familiar. “If
the water hasn’t washed away that part of the road yet, it will by morning.”

  Lyssa bit her lower lip, thinking. Maybe she could call her mother and ask her to wire some money to Salem or Portland. That might work. Cassie, one of the purest hippies who ever lived, did not believe in credit cards. She didn’t believe in money either, but saw it as a necessary evil.

  Cassie probably wouldn’t even know how to wire money. And Lyssa’s grandmother Athena tried to make it a policy to avoid getting between Cassie and Lyssa. Or at least, she used to.

  Lyssa glanced around her, trying to remember landmarks.

  “Ma’am, I’m sorry—”

  “Does the Old Mountain Road still run along the ridge-line?” Lyssa asked.

  The man looked startled. “How do you know about that?”

  “I grew up here,” she said, looking in her rearview mirror. She thought she had seen lights, but it must have been a reflection of the lights in front of her.

  “I thought I knew everyone who grew up in Anchor Bay,” the man said.

  Lyssa felt her cheeks warm. The old embarrassment had come back and she hadn’t even entered the village yet.

  “I grew up in Cliffside House,” she said in the same flat tone she had used as a teenager, daring people to make fun of her.

  The man shoved his cap back, exposing his face to the rain. His jaw was square, his cheekbones high. His nose had been broken at least once, and he had very blue eyes.

  “You’re Lyssa Buckingham?”

  She felt her flush grow deeper despite the growing chill in the car. Of course she was Lyssa Buckingham. No one else had ever left Cliffside House.

  He didn’t wait for her response. “I’m Gabriel Schelling. We went to school together.”

  It was her turn to be surprised. Gabriel Schelling had been the best-named person she had ever met. He had been thin, pale, and blond, his hair a mass of curls that made him seem almost ethereal. His eyes had been the color of the sky on a clear summer day, and his mouth—she had studied those lips, thin and mocking, wishing that she could convince them to kiss hers.

  He’d looked nothing like this solid, broad-shouldered creature beside her car, a man who looked more at home in the dark and wet than he would with wings and a harp.

  Except for that mouth. It still had that thin, almost feminine line. No wonder she had recognized it. She had thought of it enough as a teenager.

  “Gabriel,” she said, trying to smile and only partially succeeding. “Chemistry with Mr. Robertson, just before lunch.”

  Gabriel laughed. “The day he mixed the wrong ingredients—”

  “—clearing the entire school.” She laughed too. She hadn’t thought of that in years.

  His eyes lit up, making his entire face seem brighter, then he ran a hand over it, as if he were trying to get the water off. He pulled the cap and slicker back down, nodded once as if he were regaining his adult demeanor, and said, “Athena never said anything about you coming through tonight. I just spoke to her on the radio.”

  Athena was still working dispatch then, and Gabriel had to be working for the sheriff’s office. Funny, Lyssa wouldn’t have pegged him for that. He had seemed like a dreamer in school, someone who would live a literary lifestyle, who would spend his days around books and students, discussing Joyce and Wordsworth and the meaning of life.

  “I always got the impression,” he was saying, “that you weren’t going to come back.”

  “Did my grandmother tell you that too?”

  He shrugged. “Years ago now.”

  “You know that Grandmother can’t see the future.”

  His smile faded completely. “She can be pretty accurate.”

  The but remained unspoken. Lyssa heard it anyway. She had heard it until she was eighteen years old.

  But, people said, if you really wanted accuracy, you should talk to Cassandra Buckingham.

  Lyssa shuddered.

  “Sorry,” Gabriel said. “You must be getting cold.”

  “I don’t want Emily to get too wet.” The door was already soaked. Lyssa put a finger on the armrest, wondering what she would do about the damp.

  “Your daughter?”

  Lyssa nodded, not willing to go into any more detail.

  “I’m sure Athena and Cassie won’t mind waiting a day or two to see her. There’s a new hotel about twenty miles south of Joe’s Tavern. You gotta turn at the intersection. They built the place a few years ago, when it became clear that folks got stranded on the way to Spirit Mountain.”

  Apparently people still didn’t understand that Western back roads were nothing like side roads in the East. Halfway to Spirit Mountain Casino would be right about the point where Intersection Road got nasty.

  Amazing that hotels could thrive out here in the middle of nowhere.

  “It shouldn’t be full,” he said, “not at this time of year, no matter what the weather.”

  So maybe her assumption was wrong. Maybe the hotel wasn’t thriving.

  Lyssa bit her lower lip again and stopped when she felt her teeth pull off a patch of skin. Going back to that hotel still meant a repeat of the nasty drive through the corridor, and then an equally nasty twenty miles of winding mountain road.

  She moved her shoulders, hearing them crack. If she went back, she might as well drive to Portland. The extra hour would be worth the hassle. She wasn’t used to this kind of driving anymore either.

  Gabriel leaned closer, using his body to block the rain. “Don’t try the Old Mountain Road, Lyssa. It’s been in bad shape for years. You could get stuck up there and no one would find either of you for a long time.”

  She nodded. Bile rose in her throat—the taste of desperation. She was learning to recognize it after the summer.

  But, she told herself, nothing could be as bad as that dismally hot afternoon by the lake, tramping through those reeds, and seeing Reginald.

  She still saw him, every time she closed her eyes.

  “All these new houses,” she said, glancing at the construction, the dirt turning into a river of its own. “You’d think someone would have built another road in by now.”

  Gabriel studied her for a moment, then looked in the backseat, not so much at Emily as at all her toys. Lyssa didn’t have to look to know what he saw: a box labeled Emily’s Things, a pile of books behind the passenger seat, and every stuffed animal Emily owned lined up in the rear window.

  The suitcases were in the trunk, along with boxes too precious to trust to the UPS system. She didn’t want to think about everything she owned, everything she valued, traveling across the country in a succession of matching brown trucks.

  Gabriel’s expression became grave. Lyssa had a feeling he could tell, just from the evidence in her backseat, that Lyssa was moving back to Anchor Bay.

  “Hang on,” he said.

  He stepped away from the car and pulled out a portable radio. Lyssa watched him, surprised that he wasn’t using a cell phone. Apparently old habits died hard here.

  The radio squawked as he brought it up to his mouth. He turned his back to her, and she debated whether to roll up the window.

  In the end, she decided to. She didn’t want to hear him talking to her grandmother, seeing what Athena’s reaction to Lyssa’s arrival would be.

  Lyssa had a hunch that if her grandmother disapproved, Lyssa and Emily would have no choice. They would never be allowed in Anchor Bay.

  But why wouldn’t Athena approve?

  Then Lyssa glanced in the backseat. Emily was huddled into even more of a ball, probably cold from the air that had blown in from the window.

  If Cassie had had a vision, then Athena might not want them back. The predictions of Emily’s power had been dire when she was a baby, so dire that even Cassie, who seemed to love the darker visions, wouldn’t tell Lyssa everything.

  Of course, Lyssa hadn’t asked either.

  Gabriel sloshed back over, still clutching the radio in his left hand. Lyssa felt her heart pound. She didn’t
want to talk to her grandmother, not like this, not with witnesses.

  “We’re not hearing good things about the corridor,” he said, as if he’d spoken to someone other than Athena. Maybe he had. Maybe Athena had stopped working late. She was in her seventies now, after all.

  “So I can’t go back through?” Lyssa asked.

  “I didn’t say that.” He stuck the radio into a pocket. “You still might have to risk it.”

  She closed her eyes. They ached with exhaustion.

  “However, there is another route.”

  She opened her eyes. He was watching her closely.

  “I’d have to take you on it, and we have to turn around if there’s trouble.”

  Her heart twisted at the word trouble. But she was willing to face a short difficult trip if it prevented the longer.

  “Let’s try it,” she said, and hoped she was making the right choice.

  Ten

  Highway 19. Mile Marker 3

  Seavy County. Oregon

  Lyssa Buckingham. Gabriel tried not to look at her Volkswagen Beetle as he opened the back door of his squad car. He pulled the rainslicker over his head, bundled the plastic up, and tossed it in the backseat. The baseball cap went in after the slicker.

  Then he hurriedly pulled open the driver’s door, sliding behind the wheel before his uniform had a chance to get wet. He was acting like a high school kid. His hands were shaking as if he were eighteen again, and the graduation ceremony was just ending.

  He stuck his keys in the ignition and turned the car on, setting the heat on tropical. He gave Lyssa a quick wave, then ran his hands through his mess of curls. He should have gotten his hair cut the day before, like he had planned to. At least then his hair would have been tame. Now he looked like an overage Jesus freak who was trying out for the main role in Godspell.

  Not that it mattered. Lyssa Buckingham had left Anchor Bay decades ago, married, and had a little girl—a child big enough to fill the entire backseat of a car. She had looked fragile, that child, as if she was ill or under a great deal of stress.

  Gabriel had made it a point not to follow Lyssa’s life, especially after she’d married into the Walters family. He had no idea why she was returning to Anchor Bay now, on this night, when the weather was the worst he had seen in years.