“You can’t have me,” Jeremiah said aloud, sitting on that sofa the Worst family had left behind, that ray of waning sunlight shining through the window now down to a sliver. He recognized that darkness from his nightmare for what it was, evil, and he sensed the beginning of something spreading about town. From some of the exchanges of words between the town folk as they gathered earlier to search for the injured—meanness when there just wasn’t any reason for it—he’d recognized that something was amiss. Then he’d heard from Ellen what Dr. Craven said inside the Drapers’ house. Jeremiah knew now that something bad had come from that dust and that it had begun to change the town like his nightmare had begun to change him years ago.
He stood from the sofa and looked out the window, but suddenly the encroaching darkness out there made him antsy. He found a broom in the kitchen and busied himself sweeping in what little daylight remained. He started in the front room, working outward from the far corner next to the window, and found the whisking sound against the hardwood somewhat soothing. He glanced out one of the front windows, half expecting the town folk to be arriving soon with pitchforks and flaming torches. He was surprised Sheriff McKinney hadn’t tried to lock him up, especially after they found Boo in the dirt. They all knew he’d flipped that coin. They’d witnessed the fear in the man’s eyes the night before, sensing that kiss of death over his shoulder.
Jeremiah shook his head. That man’s luck had just finally run out. “Got what was coming to him,” he said to himself, using his finger to sweep a clump of dust from the windowsill. Before Old Sparky, when he’d brush up against a bad one, a vision would flash through his mind like a talkie film on speed loop. With Boo there had been no such vision. Just a feeling, a hunch, like a radio voice trying to break through bursts of static. Jeremiah had had to lean in close to catch a whiff of it, which was why he’d ultimately flipped that coin anyway. He’d flipped the coin on those other four men who ended up dead too. But with Boo, the why of it had been fuzzy.
Sheriff McKinney had looked too stunned to bring him in, like his mind couldn’t comprehend exactly what had just happened. So he’d turned from that quick burial, entered his house without a word, and closed the door behind him.
Jeremiah could tell even as he swept that this dirt was different—darker, thicker, grittier. The heaviness of it scratched the floorboards as he pushed it along. Before the light faded completely, he’d need to find some candles or kerosene lamps. He went back to the kitchen and looked through all the cabinets. In the first two he found nothing, but in the third he sensed movement. He hunkered down for a better look and found himself nose to nose with a family of tarantulas.
He fell back on his butt and crab-walked away, his fingers digging trenches in the dust covering the floor. And then something skittered over his hand. Another tarantula. He jumped to his feet, found a dented pot on the ancient stove, and brought it down three times until that spider didn’t move anymore. By that time the room had turned dark. It could have been his imagination, but it sounded like spiders crawled all over the walls, like the entire home was infested with tarantulas.
Had Josiah known it? Was that why he’d offered up the Worst house? Jeremiah hoped not. Ellen never would have agreed that he stay there if she had known. Luckily the moon was out and a faint glow permeated, enough that he didn’t have to feel his way through the house and risk accidently touching one of those tarantulas.
He shook his head. Part of him wished he was back inside the prison walls, where the world couldn’t get its claws into him. Wished that jolt in Old Sparky had taken him to his grave.
Someone knocked on the front door, and his heart lurched. Probably Sheriff McKinney coming with his wrist shackles. He still had the dented pot in his hand and couldn’t remember where he’d put his shotgun.
“Jeremiah?”
He sighed in relief, dropped the pot to the dusty floor, and hurried to the door. Ellen stood on the porch with a box in her hands. Peter held the typewriter.
“Can we come in?”
He backed away, and in they came—quickly, like they were trying not to be noticed. At least that’s how Ellen moved. The smiling boy didn’t seem to care.
Ellen put down the box and rooted inside of it. She lit two candles, placed them on the table, and the room hazed with dust motes.
“Josiah know where you are?”
“I can go wherever I please, Jeremiah.” He’d always loved her toughness. Nobody ever crossed Ellen Maverick more than the once without a lesson learned, and as Ellen Goodbye she was still no easy mark. No man could tell her what to do.
She said, “He was at the kitchen table when I left, but I don’t think he even noticed me. His eyes were open, but all I saw was sleep inside. Like that dust . . .” She paused, chewed on her lower lip like she was wrangling with herself about something. “There was something different about this duster, Jeremiah. And I’m not talking about how big and dark it was. It was something else.”
“I sensed the same, Ellen.” But he didn’t want to get into it either. Peter had just gone into the back bedroom with a lit candle, and he feared the boy might burn the house down. A minute later they heard a broom whisking across hardwood. Dust clouded into the hallway as the boy pushed it out. Dust motes took on another form altogether in that hazy nimbus of light shining from the bedroom. “What’s he doing here?”
Ellen folded her arms and scoffed. “Said he wants to stay with you.”
“He said that?”
“No, not with his own words. But after we all returned inside, it didn’t take but a minute and he was standing by the front door with that typewriter in his arms and that satchel over his shoulder, staring out the window at the Worst house. I said, ‘Are you wanting to stay with Jeremiah? In that old, nasty house?’”
“What’d he say?”
“What do you think he said? Said my exact words right back to me. So here we are.” She cleared dust from what was once the dining room table and pulled out two chairs. “Sit,” she said, like he was a dog and she the trainer. She pulled the nursery-rhyme book from the satchel and opened it to the inside front cover, where that date had been written. Tears pooled in her eyes. “Now, what’s this about?”
Jeremiah wiped his seat off and sat catty-corner from her at the table. “I found it in the dugout. The mother left it behind.”
“I know that. I mean, what’s it about, Jeremiah?” Her lip quivered, and her hands shook. Jeremiah moved as if to grab them, but she reeled them back. “The boy was born on the same day we lost ours in the miscarriage.” She sniffled, wiped her eyes. “The exact same day, Jeremiah. And don’t come back spouting ‘coincidence,’ because I won’t buy it.” She pointed down the hallway, where more dust filtered from the back bedroom. “He’s the same boy.”
“Can’t be the same boy, Ellen.”
She pounded the tabletop, and for a moment the broom stopped whisking across the floor back there. When it resumed, she said, “It’s the same face, Jeremiah. Same eyes and hair and dimples I’ve seen every night when I closed my eyes and got to imagining what he must have looked like. And when he does talk … the voice …”
He reached across the table to grab her hands, and this time she let him.
“I don’t know, Ellen, but it’s why I walked back through that duster when I did. To try to get some answers for you. For us.”
At the word us she slithered her hands from his and he felt part of his heart drop, but it was a feeling he’d needed to feel because things weren’t what they once were. She was married to Josiah now, and they had a kid of their own. As it should be. As it was meant to be all along. He put his elbows on the table and intertwined his fingers to keep them busy. “Maybe I was meant to stumble upon him, Ellen. Like a collision course neither one of us had the ability to stop. Two trains rumbling across that same track.”
“Like fate?”
“Something of the like.”
She fixed a strand of hair behind her ear, and his he
art lurched. “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “Ever since when I first saw him and passed out in the kitchen. What if … ?”
“Go on.”
“You’ll think I’m off the tracks.”
“Wouldn’t ever.”
She filled her lungs with a deep breath. “What if, when a couple loses a baby …” She shook her head.
He finished for her. “What if that baby is somehow born somewhere else?”
She suppressed a grin at the same time her jaw quivered. “Yes.” She gained courage, and her thoughts flowed. “Not the same baby, Jeremiah, but … but what if when one dies, something of his life goes into another. Like a part of him is still out there living. Even if it’s a small part.”
He nodded and wanted to agree with her to the core—Peter had to be explained in some way, didn’t he?—but deep down he didn’t know. It didn’t make much real-world sense, but neither did the life he’d been living since he was born. And truth be told, her theory had formed a ball in his gut that was growing bigger the more he thought on it.
When a baby dies, another is given life …
According to Wilmington, his birth had been an arduous one, one that had nearly killed his mother, but whenever he’d questioned him on it his daddy always waved it away, never getting into the details that Jeremiah knew were there. Something had happened that morning that Wilmington refused to tell—as well as Orion and Dr. Craven. And that something had everything to do with the nightmare that had plagued him his entire life, up until Old Sparky put a stop to it.
“What’s going through that mind of yours, Jeremiah?”
He looked up and locked eyes with her. “My nightmare was always the same. It never wavered.”
“As you’ve said.”
“One night I woke from it, sweating. Me and Josiah were ten, going on eleven.” He wiped his face and exhaled. “Josiah asked if I was okay. I told him I was. He said he could tell whenever I was having the nightmare and wished he could be there too. I told him never to wish such a thing and to go back to bed. And I thought he’d done just that. So I settled back into my pillow, craving sleep I knew would come, because I never had the nightmare twice in a night. But then he says, ‘Jeremiah, every one of them nightmares lasts the exact same amount of time.’ ‘How do you know?’ I asked him. And he points to the wall clock and says, ‘I count the seconds until they’re over. That’s how I get us both through.’”
“Both?”
“When I woke that night, he was kneeling beside my bed. That’s when I first realized what he’d been doing since we were little. When the nightmare would start, he’d come over and hold my hand for the duration.”
Ellen teared up again, then covered her mouth. Her hand trembled.
“One minute and fifty-one seconds,” said Jeremiah. “Josiah had timed it down to the second, and it was the exact same every night. Even in the heart of my nightmare, I could feel the pressure on my left hand, like something or someone was squeezing it. I learned that night what it was. Who it was.” Jeremiah leaned back in his chair, folded his arms. “Some things, Ellen, don’t need to be explained, or maybe they can’t be. Peter, my nightmare … that man Boo we just found buried in the dust. ’Cause sometimes the answers ain’t what we want to hear.”
They sat silent for a moment. A soft breeze sent dust tapping against the window and then settled. Ellen closed the book of nursery rhymes and the date along with it. She slid it across the table toward Jeremiah.
“You keep it,” he said.
She stood from the chair and didn’t argue, hugging that book close to her heart.
Peter had stopped sweeping in the back bedroom and begun tapping the keys on that typewriter again. They followed the sounds into the hallway, stepping over the dust he’d recently added to what had already accumulated there.
Jeremiah stopped in the doorway with Ellen by his side. She clutched his arm and rested her head against his shoulder. The floor was free of dust. In the middle of the bedroom Peter sat at a small wooden desk, smiling in the candle glow, and typing away like he was deep into some long overdue clerical work. Around him he’d carefully placed all those knickknacks Jeremiah had found inside the satchel with the book. The broken pocket watch rested to the side of the carved cowboy with the lasso, and every so often the boy would glance at the frozen time as he typed, never breaking stride. He never looked up to see them watching, although Jeremiah sensed that the boy knew exactly what they were doing and exactly what they were thinking.
Taking a moment to imagine what never was and never could be.
ELEVEN
Ellen woke the next morning and fixed a pot of black stovetop coffee.
The sun hung high in a clear blue sky, so reminiscent of yesterday that she dared not go outside yet. She peeked out the window. Nobody else was outside either. Nobody was digging out.
The kitchen was full of dust from yesterday’s storm, the duster of all dusters, and now that she got a good look at the particles in the daylight, that dust was most certainly different than the others. It was definitely a darker color, as if peeled from a deeper layer than what had previously been pulled from the earth. It looked thicker too. She rubbed a little between her fingers and remembered what she’d felt on her skin during the blow. It was coarser. Sharper.
She wiped dust from one of the kitchen chairs and sat down with her steaming coffee. What kind of life was this? But maybe yesterday was the worst of it. Maybe from here on out the storms wouldn’t be as bad.
She sipped coffee and burned the tip of her tongue but hardly felt the pain of it. Had she become that numb?
She had a notion to walk over to Dr. Craven’s house and pour the hot coffee over his old, liver-spotted head. He’d had no right to talk to Loreda Draper like he’d done. And then what he said to me about my own mother staying in town because she loved another man? What nonsense is that?
The coffee had already made her fidgety. She left the half-empty cup on the table and stood. A chuckle emerged like a burp. She’d never even thought half-empty before today. She’d always been a half-full kind of girl, striving for the sunny-side-up of things, not too unlike Orion across the street. But not now. Half-empty seemed appropriate.
Maybe it was the dust talking, like the doctor had said. She picked up a handful from the floor and let it filter through her fingers to the tabletop. Could it really be alive? Could it have gotten into the doctor’s brain and crossed some wires?
She walked down the hallway to their bedroom. James was still in his crib, and she assumed he was sleeping until she walked over and found his eyes wide open, staring up toward the ceiling. He was so still that at first she feared he wasn’t breathing, but then his chest rose and fell with a tiny breath. His head rolled toward her. He didn’t smile like most mornings when they first locked eyes.
“Morning glory,” she said. A blink was his only response. At least he wasn’t coughing. “You ready to get up?” He shook his head no and went back to staring at the ceiling. She leaned down and kissed his forehead and told him she’d give him another thirty minutes. “But then you best get up and get something in that belly.”
She turned away with reluctance, knowing something wasn’t right with her son. She hit the hallway, and finally James spoke.
“Dust to dust, Mommy.”
She froze, turned back toward the crib, and waited for more but none came. Just your imagination, Ellen. No way the boy just said that. She returned to the kitchen.
Josiah sat at the table holding the coffeepot by the handle, drinking straight from it.
“Josiah, my lands, what are you doing?”
“What’s it look like I’m doing, Ellen? Having my morning pot of joe.” He spilled some down his neck and flinched, but that didn’t stop him from taking another sip and then a gulp. He put the pot down on the table and wiped his mouth on a white, wrinkled shirtsleeve—same one he’d slept in. “You don’t look good, Ellen,” he said, deadpan. “The dust is wearing on you. And
not in a good way.”
It took a few seconds for what he’d said to register, because he’d never spoken to her that way. He’d said some unfavorable things inside the Bentley the other night, but that had been the Old Sam corn whiskey talking. This was flat-out mean and ugly, so much so that she didn’t have an immediate response.
Josiah finished off the pot of coffee. “You need some meat on those bones, Ellen. Maybe Jeremiah likes you that way, but not me.”
“Hush, Josiah.” She brushed the top of her fingers across her smooth cheek and stepped closer to her husband. “You need to shave, Josiah. And change your clothes, because you stink like a garbage can.”
She stopped cold and covered her mouth. What had she just said? Her thoughts had just slid out without her stopping them. With no filter. Like Dr. Craven yesterday.
“Josiah, I’m sorry.”
He waved it away. “It’s true, ain’t it?” He sniffed his shirt. “I do stink. Hard to come by extra water nowadays though, Ellen.”
“Just as it’s hard to come by food.” She looked at her arms, which were thinner than they used to be. She did need some meat on her bones.
“From dust to dust,” he said, staring out the window.
The words made her heart jump, remembering what James had said, or what she’d thought he said.
“You sure aren’t the same girl I married, Ellen.”
It was something that should have brought tears to her eyes, but she feared that all her tears had dried up. Instead of turning the other cheek she said, “And you’re not the man I married, Josiah. Not even close.”
He shrugged, patted his knees, and stood from the chair with a grunt. “Welp, I best get to doing nothing today.”
She was mentally trying to unsay the words that had just come from her mouth. Like Boo was trying to get that coin unflipped. She thought of Jeremiah and Peter across the way and the conversation she’d had last night about Jeremiah’s nightmare, hoping to at some point bring it up with her husband, figuring she’d have to find the right time to do so because he didn’t like to talk about things sentimental. But now the words just came right out. “I know you held your brother’s hand during his nightmares. You used to time them. Count down the seconds until they ended.”
What Blooms from Dust Page 11