The Complete Where Dreams

by M. L. Buchman

  The waiter showed up and slid a petite filet mignon in front of Melanie and a platter with a matching filet and a large Australian lobster tail before him. He put his nose down to the plate and inhaled the heady mix of beef and seafood. The almond-flecked butter tickled his nose and the dollop of horseradish nearly made him sneeze it was so fresh.

  “And I certainly don’t miss the food.” He cut into the steak. “You’ll see, Melanie. I’ve got Dave and Betsy all lined up to take us out on a daysail tomorrow afternoon. Their boat is in a lot better shape than mine. You’ll like it. Tomorrow night we’ll dine at the top of the Space Needle and have a nightcap at the Alexis, very old world, very traditional. Sunday I’ve got a pilot to fly us around Rainier and St. Helens. They’re amazing from the air. I’m thinking of taking lessons.”

  He’d intended to let the itinerary be a surprise as they went, but she looked so down that he’d spilled the beans. She seemed to perk up a bit and take a bite of her steak.

  Wait until she saw the city from the rooftop, outdoor hot tub perched outside the penthouse at the Sorrento with its awesome night view of the city.

  By the time they’d finished dissecting Jo’s promotion, the lawsuit that had done it for her, and who she was going to tackle next, they’d worked their way through most of the bottle of champagne, the clams, a Dungeness Crab Seafood Cocktail, some Coconut Tiger Prawns, and a mountainous pile of onion rings that none of their waistlines would appreciate in the morning.

  Cassidy decided to just splurge and took a big piece of the focaccia bread and dipped it in the olive oil and garlic.

  “What ‘bout you, Cassidy? Tell us the wonders of your week.” Jo’s voice had slipped out of power lawyer, back into Vassar casual. It took a lot of wine to do that.

  “Yeah, what ‘bout you? Something more exciting than the man with two first names, puh-lease. He is just such a total drip.” Perrin mocked Jo’s slip but everyone was too tipsy to care.

  Jack James, the man with two first names. He was handsome, polite, sometimes lover, and a useless jerk.

  “Seconds.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Sick of ‘em.”

  “She’s shhick of ‘em.” Perrin was now mocking her.

  Her mind wasn’t connecting the bits and pieces together. But somewhere or other the thought did have sense of purpose even if she was too drunk to see it.

  “No more sad second-raters for this girl.”

  Jo grew quiet. One very drunken night in their dorm room, Cassidy had confessed to how much she hated being second to both of them. Perrin with all her flash and confidence, Jo with her perfect grades and steady boyfriend.

  “No more thankless thirds either, huh?” Perrin purred pleasantly.

  Cassidy started to giggle at the alliteration in her head. Perrin purring pleasantly through a pursed pucker.

  “Thankfully through with the, uh, thoughtless thirds,” Cassidy acknowledged.

  Jo cracked a smile but suppressed it quickly, but not before Cassidy caught her.

  “And those sad, sad sloppy seconds.” Perrin started nodding, then kept doing so as if she’d forgotten she’d started. Her hair swooshed back and forth in a mesmerizing pattern of diagonal stripes.

  It sounded even worse put that way. Cassidy glanced at Jo, but she shook her head ever so slightly. She’d never told her about Cassidy’s complaints, Perrin was just on a roll.

  “And those flatulent fourths. Even I don’t want those,” Perrin continued.

  “I’m done with them all,” Cassidy declared. “I’m better than that.”

  Perrin jutted out her chin, “Straight up, girlfriend. So what now? Fancy frolicsome firsts?”

  “Straight up!” she shot back. “Nothing but the best for Cassidy Knowles from now on.”

  Jo raised her flute, and Perrin her third Cosmo.

  “To Cassidy’s fun firsts.”

  “To Cassidy.” Jo nodded to her so she’d know that Jo had meant to end it there.

  Perrin slowly scanned about the room, then abruptly turned and leaned in so close that Cassidy could smell the Triple Sec, lime, and cranberry on her breath.

  “So, what’s the news? What are we drinking to again?” Her eyes were squinted as she tried to remember.

  “No sad seconds,” Jo reminded her quietly.

  “That’s not news. That’s just about time. I want the news.”

  Cassidy considered as well as the champagne would allow her. News. News. News. There must be something. She still hadn’t told them about the lighthouses. But she didn’t want to, not yet anyway. It was still too close to losing her father.

  What was the topic?

  No settling any more—that was it.

  “I broke it off with Mr. Jack James.”

  “Thank God above and Satan below,” Perrin clapped her hands together and looked to the ceiling. “He was such a waste of your time.”

  Jo was waiting. Waiting and watching.

  “When?” Jo’s soft question barely penetrated Cassidy’s whirling thoughts.

  It took her three tries to finally slip her flute back into the vase. It kept moving around the table.

  “Um,” she laughed and it partly came out as a sob. She covered her face with her hands for a moment feeling the burning flush on her cheeks. A quick wipe at her eyes and she sat up straight, slapped her hands down on her thighs.

  “About a dozen seconds ago.” That laughing sob came out again. She tried to refill the flute and her hands were so unsteady she ended up pouring the champagne into the vase instead. She set the bottle down hard enough that for a moment she was afraid she’d broken the glass table.

  Jo handed her own flute over and Cassidy knocked it back. The bubbles burning the back of her throat.

  “Why now?”

  “What’s today?” She waved her hand at them, at the restaurant.

  “The fourteenth,” Jo blinked hard to focus on her watch. “Still.”

  “Valentine’s Day,” Perrin offered.

  “Right. And where is the man with two first names? Where is Jack James?”

  “Where?” Perrin asked caught up in the question.

  “I don’t know. But he certainly isn’t here. Probably doesn’t know what day it is. Handsome, pleasant, and totally lost in his own world.”

  “Bor-ring!” Perrin declared around a hiccup. She tucked the long side of her hair behind one ear. She took one of Cassidy’s hands and held it tightly. In that instant, the flashy designer was gone and one of her best friends sat beside her.

  “Cass. He was never even a flatu-, ‘scuse me, flatulent fifth. You are so much better than hi-im.” That hiccup launched her hair from behind her ear and over half her face again.

  Cassidy nodded. She knew she was better. She just didn’t feel that way whenever she was with him. She always felt…grateful. Whether it was his doing or hers, it didn’t matter; it was too sad for words.

  Tears started to flow and she couldn’t stop them. It wasn’t sadness, not for casting off the man with two first names. A bit of it was for thinking so little of herself in the first place. A big chunk of it was plain and simple relief.

  “I am so done with sec-onds.” Now she had the hiccups.

  Perrin answered with a another hic-nod-hair swirl.

  Jo burst out laughing. A rare event in itself.

  And totally infectious.

  They leaned together as the tears, laughter, and hiccups flowed between them.

  “See.” Melanie waved a negligent flick of her fingers toward the lounge as they left the restaurant.

  Russell glanced over the heads of the dozens of little groups in the lounge. One of the top “meat markets” in town. The best place to meet the other fast-rising singles of Seattle’s finest, Cutters’ bar, if he’d cared for such things. Once he had, which was weird.

  Then he spotted them and his mind froze the scenario. The perfect image. The image that passed by when the camera had missed the moment. The image that could neve
r be recreated no matter what was done in the studio.

  Angelo’s wine reviewer, still perfectly put together, not a hair astray, dressed all in black as before, laughing or maybe crying on her friend’s bare shoulder. Blue and black, matching and contrasting. The third, serious, reserved, her clothes as light as her hair dark. A single arm extended forward and hand resting palm-down between the shoulder blades of her grieving friend.

  Three women. They were so close. Clearly they knew each other the way new friends couldn’t and the way lovers rarely did.

  “Traveled Road…partway.” That’s what he’d call the shot if he had it. Or perhaps that carefully reserved and rarely bequeathed “Untitled” for when no mere title could possibly add more.

  It was easy to picture them together in a couple of decades: hair gray, surface beauty faded, and all three still close. Still radiant.

  Lime Kiln Lighthouse

  San Juan Island

  First lit: 1914

  Automated: 1962

  48.5159 -123.1524

  The last major lighthouse established in Washington State, it faces Canada and still watches over the entrance to Haro Strait. It was also the last to receive electricity, not until after WWII.

  It is one of the best known lighthouses in the state, known far and wide as a whale observatory. Pods of orcas and gray whales frequently pass close in front of the lighthouse’s craggy doorstep.

  MARCH 1

  “It sounds like someone is screaming and laughing at the same time.”

  The technician, who wore his own set of headphones, nodded. “J-pod. That’s their dialect, Ms. Knowles.”

  “Cassidy. What’s J-pod and they have dialects?” The two of them sat shoulder-to-shoulder in the first floor of the Lime Kiln lighthouse. Through the narrow window she could see the Georgia Straits. No whales anywhere in sight.

  “The J-pod is one of our local groups of orcas. They wander up and down Puget Sound nattering away like a bunch of old-timers. And then,” he paused as a particularly quick set of chirps rattled through her headphones.

  “There, hear that? That’s a group of youngsters. Sound like they’re maybe a mile offshore. The main pod is two or three miles out.”

  “This is incredible.” She was listening to passing whales swimming somewhere out of sight below the surface.

  Jeff was typing madly on his laptop.

  “What are you doing there?”

  “Just recording the time of passage and how many voices I hear, fourteen so far.”

  She inspected him more carefully. Mid-twenties, nice face, at least what she could see above the heavy beard, with his brown hair back in a ponytail. He sat in front of a console with switches and plug-ins, though clearly most of it occurred in the laptop where wiggling lines mimicked the sound in a series of waves too fast to follow.

  “We can only hear about a third of what they say. Most of the rest is ultrasonic to our hearing.”

  “Ultrasonic, like the planes?” Whale-sized sonic booms?

  “That’s supersonic. ‘Ultra’ means too high for us to hear. We had to develop special microphones to hear their full vocal range. See, our hearing stops here,” he pointed at a line near the lower part of the wiggles on the screen. Even as he did so, one of the lines shot well above his finger and she didn’t hear a thing on the headphones except a creepy sensation of fingernails running up her spine.

  “What are they saying?”

  He turned to face her, his neutral brown eyes wrinkled with a bit of a smile.

  “Not a clue, yet. We think a lot of the high stuff is echo-location so they can find food and one another. Same things bats do. But what they chat about all day is a complete mystery. Their vocabulary is huge whatever it is. Not just squeaks and squawks. There are patterns, thousands of them as far as we can tell. Perhaps a fully evolved and complex language.”

  Jeff’s specialty was as narrow as hers, and as highly trained: nuance, common themes, major notes, and minor notes. Hers were color and smell and taste, and his was sound, but they had far more in common that she’d have guessed.

  They sat in companionable silence as the whales sang to each other. She tried to pick them apart. Did one always have a deep, dropping pattern? Heee-whaaa. What would it be like to learn more about another species? To study something with such passion?

  Well, she had actually; since birth she’d been exposed to the details of wine and food.

  Of course her passion didn’t require sitting in a concrete lighthouse with peeling white paint.

  Maybe Jeff’s passion wasn’t so charming once she thought about it. The concrete room certainly wasn’t very warm despite the heater under the desk. She couldn’t smell the ocean just a dozen feet away. Instead it smelled of mold and decaying paint. It smelled of heated metal and sounded of the squeaky fan that was barely keeping her legs above freezing.

  Out the slender window, an impossible vision appeared; not a whale breeching nor a row of tall fins skimming the water.

  It was a blue sailboat with maroon sails. The same number of sails as the two pictures on her wall. One big one in front of the mast and reaching all the way to the deck. The other one, from the mast back until it reached past where the captain stood in the back. It hung so low that it looked as if it might hit him when it swung.

  “Thanks, Jeff.” She dropped the headphones and rushed out as he stammered a call after her. She ran over the rocks, digging for her camera in her leather backpack. She managed the picture barely in time before he sailed out of the frame with the lighthouse.

  She took another photo just of the boat in case the first one didn’t come out.

  He must have the same calendar, because this was past coincidence. They’d met three months in a row. Too bad there was no way to signal him. It would be a good laugh to meet in a bar somewhere, maybe see if he had a set of letters too.

  No, that would be too weird. Two lost people having their lives shaped by a calendar. She raised a hand in salute, but he was facing away, looking forward. He’d have no possible way of knowing why she was waving. It wasn’t as if she wore a huge red sail.

  This is what her father had told her. In his letter he’d confirmed that she wasn’t unique. She tucked a hand into the pocket of her Kors coat and held the letter as she moved back to the cliff edge beside the lighthouse and looked out at the shining water. In the distance, Vancouver Island lay across the horizon, where she could see some tiny shapes at the limit of visibility, the buildings of the city of Victoria.

  Farther south, the Olympic Mountains were still white. She could smell the snow and the sea salt. She could imagine the light, cold breeze starting as a whisper on the distant polar seas, a wave splash pushing the air ahead. The small swirl building along the Aleutians and sweeping down the coast. Threading among the Canadian Gulf Islands on its way to here, the wind’s first contact with the continental U.S. And she was the first to breathe it, to take in the salt spray thrown into the air three thousand miles away.

  I had no direction. I was out of the Vietnam War, out of the army, and unexpectedly still alive.

  Cassidy could hear her dad’s voice from the letter, soft and warm on the cold breeze. Not rough with throat cancer. She heard his voice from when she was a teenager, a sound she could wrap safely around herself when she grew scared. She didn’t turn to him, didn’t want to break the illusion.

  Your mama never made it to grad school, I always felt bad about that. After a month we were living together. After six months she’d turned our vineyard into a business, not a big one, but a business. It was the real birth of the Napa Valley and there we were on the ground floor.

  “Napa Valley? I certainly didn’t grow up in the Napa Valley.”

  The big surprise came along, you. So we had a wedding in the fields right before the harvest.

  September wedding in the vineyards, it must have been beautiful. He’d never told her they’d gotten married because Mama was pregnant. She’d always assumed it was the othe
r way round. Not that it bothered her much.

  Not much of a reception. I spent our wedding night out in the fields watching for an early frost. A real freak cold snap slid down from Canada and we weren’t big enough to survive the loss of even a single crop. We dodged that one, but then we were into the harvest. Never did have a honeymoon. Too much work to do.

  But it didn’t matter. Your mama and I were just plain right for each other. From that very first moment when she’d tumbled out of that VW van. Her hair the same dark red as grape leaves in autumn.

  You’ll find the right man, Ice Sweet.

  That was a laugh. She was thirty now and the “right man” was a myth. She did require at least “compatible” though, and Jack James hadn’t even been that.

  I know you don’t believe me, but you will. Until then, don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense. My life never did.

  Love you, Ice Sweet.

  “Love you, Daddy.”

  “Bite me, Angelo.”

  His friend didn’t answer. Probably because he wasn’t there, but that was a lousy excuse.

  “Too busy redesigning your stupid restaurant to take four days off to go sailing.” Russell grabbed for the jib sheet as he came about, but missed it. And he hadn’t tied a knot in the bitter end. The line shot out of the cockpit, nearly snagged Nutcase as it whipped past the cat, making her jump straight up like a furry fireworks, ran out the pulley block, and was over the side trailing in the water.

  He brought the boat up into the wind, forcing the sail back over the boat. Then he sprinted forward, snagged the line dripping with freezing water, and ran back for the cockpit letting the rope slip through his fingers. He added a cold rope burn to his list of complaints against Angelo.

  The boat fell off the wind again before he could run the line through the block. He whipped a couple turns around the winch and let it draw all wrong while he got control of the tiller again.