by K.M. Weiland
Chapter Sixty
Chris dreamed one more dream.
From the mist and the rush of a waterfall, the Garowai spoke to him, disembodied, floating. He was perfect and whole, and yet he wasn’t. He was complete, but the glimpses Chris caught were only out of the corner of his eye. It was a dream like the dreams he remembered from before the crossing.
“It worked.” That seemed to be the most important thing to say.
“Aye, it worked.” The Garowai’s smile filled the dream. He seemed younger. The whorls on his muzzle were now a smooth steel blue, sleek and vibrant. His eyes shone, and his movements betrayed none of the flinches of arthritis. His voice was calm and clear. He didn’t sneeze.
“I can’t go back, can I?” Chris asked. If he could see the Garowai, even after dying in one world, perhaps he might somehow be able to return after all.
The Garowai shook his great head. His mane moved gently in the breeze. “No, my friend, that’s not the way of it. That I speak to you now is a gift, to both of us. I told you I would be following you in leaving Lael, and now I am.”
“You’re dying?”
“Not dying. Just moving on.”
“And what about Allara? She’s losing you too?”
“Allara will live. Allara will dream. And she will not be without a Garowai.” The black expanse of his wings spread. “You brought a new era to Lael. It is only right that the world have a new Garowai with which to enter it.”
“Is that what you came to tell me?”
“Partly. Partly also to tell you that what has happened to you may now feel like anything but a gift. Or worse: a gift that was snatched away after the giving. But that isn’t so, is it? Once given, a gift will always be. So take your gift, and live your life, Chris Redston.”
The mists rolled over him, the water rushed in his ears, and the Garowai gave one flap of his wings and swirled into the clouds. In his place sat a wet blue-black cub with nubbly wings behind his shoulder blades. The cub looked at him through green eyes, and when his mouth gapped, the smile was almost familiar.
That was the last dream.
__________
Two weeks after the storm, Chris left the office building of Mike’s publisher friend and entered the sunlight. Mike had written him a letter of recommendation, and, against even Chris’s own expectations, he had gotten the opportunity to pitch the idea of a book about the survivors of fatal car accidents.
His dad had agreed to check into a rehab center, and somebody had to make sure he stuck it out. Chris was that somebody, which meant he had to do something to keep the bills paid. It was time, after all. If he couldn’t live life in both worlds, he could live it here the way he should always have had the courage to live it.
He walked down the sidewalk, hands in his pockets. The world was finally beginning to put itself back together. The snow had melted. New grass glinted beneath the brown of the frozen blades. The streets had been cleared, the smashed windows boarded up, and the broken streetlights covered in duct tape. Traffic buzzed along, same as ever, horns blaring at the intersections. The power had finally come back on last week, and, one by one, businesses were reopening their doors.
He lifted his face to the sun. The temperatures hadn’t returned to the expected norms of early fall, but the cold had fled. It felt like spring, the warmth against his face fresh and tentative. Even this deep in the city, the air smelled clean.
After that last dream of the Garowai’s farewell, he went to bed every night and slept the sleep of the dead. He woke, rested and refreshed, his mind a blank. He still closed his eyes and dared to hope that somehow, impossibly, he would open them again to find himself back in Réon Couteau.
He wanted to see Lael repair itself. He wanted to see the beads of silver and green pearling the hills as the new grass responded to the warmth. He wanted to watch the people trickling back to their homes and to their lives, free from war and politics and tragedy. He wanted to see his mother and his sisters. And the Rievers—and Crea Quinnon—and Parry—and Eroll Leighton. And Allara.
At the intersection, the bumblebee yellow of a taxi swung around the corner, and he flagged it down. He gave the driver directions to Mercy General, where his dad was still recovering from his gunshot wound, then leaned back and watched the traffic blur.
Allara hadn’t called him. He had known giving her Mike’s number was an impossible gamble. Even if the dream had made any sense to her in this world, she would have to take a huge leap of faith to pick up the phone and call a man she had never even heard of.
He fingered what was left of the bruise Mike had inflicted behind his ear. Half of him had died in Lael, perhaps the better half. He felt continually at a loss, like a man who looked over his shoulder and couldn’t find his own shadow. And yet he would have traded the shadow all over again, would have sold himself twice over, for those months. He’d been given a chance to know the truth, a chance to see the glorious possibilities behind his dreams. Most people never saw beyond the veil of their own lives. He was one of the few. A Gifted.
Life was suddenly more than just what he could see stretched in front of him. There was a purpose, there was a plan. He no longer had to drift in the mire of apathy, absorbed in his own futility. He could open his eyes to the warmth of each new morning and embrace it as a gift of ineffable potential.
He had succeeded and he had failed. He had lost much, gained more, then somehow, impossibly, after all these years of clinging to his shriveled sense of the scope of life, he had learned to give it all away . . . because letting go was sometimes the only way of holding on.
What he had found in Lael had been worth the price. He would pay it again if he had no other choice. But acknowledging that didn’t kill the emptiness. For the rest of his life, he would be looking for his shadow, and he would never find it.
The cab stopped in front of the hospital’s main entry, and he paid the driver and climbed out.
His dad was sitting up in bed, his arm in a sling, reading the newspaper. His hands shook a little, but he smiled a welcome. “Mike’s looking for you. He went down the hall to get me some ice.”
Chris dropped his jacket on the foot of the bed. “You should get out of here. Enjoy the sun.”
“Sounds good to me.” His dad tossed the paper on top of Chris’s jacket and inched himself off the bed. “This room ain’t got much up on a jail cell.” His lower lip caught between his teeth, and he darted a glance at Chris, his cheeks hollowing a little bit more.
Chris ignored the comment and steadied his dad’s good elbow. He waited until Paul could stand without wobbling, then walked back across the room to hold the door open. “C’mon. Jail’s no place to spend a morning like this.”
The corner of Paul’s mouth pulled up, and he hobbled across the room.
In the hall, Chris flagged a nurse and told her to send Mike out to them. He and his dad wandered outside to where wooden tables had been interspersed along the sidewalk.
“So . . .” Paul eased himself onto a bench. “You’re going to write a book?”
“Yeah.” Chris sat next to him, his back to the table, and propped his elbows against the edge. “About Mom and Jenifer. And us—you and me and Lisa.”
Paul interlocked his fingers, pulled them apart, then locked them again. “That’s not something you’re going to regret, is it? I mean, that’s not going to hurt you all over again? Like . . . I’ve hurt you all these years.”
“We hurt each other.” He looked at his dad. “As soon as you’re settled at the center, I’m going to make a quick run out to Los Angeles to see Lisa and the girls. Then I’m coming back to be with you while you’re in rehab.”
The silence stretched. Paul cleared his throat and turned his head away. Without looking, his hand reached out to pat Chris’s. For just a second, Chris laid his hand on top of it. It was a touch of both repentance and forgiveness.
Through the sun glare on the exit’s glass doors, he could see Mike’s approach.
&nbs
p; “You know,” his dad finally said, “the nightmares . . . they did go away.”
“I know.”
“You do?” His dad looked back, surprised.
Chris shrugged. “You agreed to go to the center, didn’t you?”
A can of diet soda in one hand and a plastic cup of ice water in the other, Mike lumbered down the sidewalk. “Long time, no see. If I didn’t know better I’d think you were trying to avoid me.” He set the water on the table next to Paul and looked at Chris. “Some woman called my cell a little while ago, asking for you.”
The back of Chris’s neck went cold.
“Not that I mind being your personal answering service or anything, but don’t you think it’s time you got around to finding wherever it is you lost your phone?” Mike pushed his sunglasses up his nose.
“Did she leave a message?” He had to concentrate to hear himself speak over the sudden rush of blood in his ears.
“No, didn’t even give her name. Just wanted to know if you were there. I said no, but I’d pass the message along. She hemmed around a minute, then hung up.”
“Give me your phone.” He stood.
“Why?” Mike’s eyebrow appeared over the rim of his sunglasses. “She didn’t leave a message.” He dug the phone out of his shirt pocket anyway.
Chris took the phone. His hands shook as he thumbed back through the call log. “Who else called you this morning?”
“Nobody. Just her and the radio station. What’s going on?”
He found the first out-of-state call and hit send.
The phone rang once, then twice. He stood up from the bench and walked down the sidewalk, his hand pressed against his free ear to block out the rattle of traffic in the parking lot. The phone rang twice more, then picked up.
“Hello?”
His lungs stopped working, and he lurched to a stop.
“Hello?” From the other end of the line, Allara spoke to him. Allara Katadin, Searcher, princess of Lael, spoke to him, her voice bouncing off satellites and skipping through transmission towers to whisper in his ear.
He cleared his throat. “You called this number a minute ago. I wasn’t here. My friend picked it up.”
“Oh.” Her voice quieted, the way it did whenever she was keeping something back. “Yes, um, sorry, I didn’t mean for you to have to call me.”
“No, no, I don’t mind.” Everything was in her ball court right now. In this world, he didn’t know her name or where she lived. If she wasn’t willing to take a chance and admit she’d called this number on nothing more than a gut feeling, he’d lose her all over again. He pulled in a breath. “What did you need?”
“Um—” She laughed. “Look, this is going to sound really crazy, because I don’t know you, and you’ve never heard of me, but . . . I had this dream I was supposed to call you.” She laughed again. “Crazy, I know. I’m sorry,”
“Not so crazy.” His grip on the phone relaxed. He turned his back to the sun and looked at the shadow stretched in front of him. A smile warmed his face. “I’m a firm believer in dreams.”
Silence touched the phone, and when she spoke again, her voice was soft, and he could almost see the intensity of her blue eyes.
“So am I,” she said.
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Dedicated to my beloved Savior,
who has made us all with a plan in mind.
And to my brothers.
Derek—who came up with the idea in the first place.
And Jared—who helped make it into something worth reading.
K.M. Weiland lives in make-believe worlds, talks to imaginary friends, and survives primarily on chocolate truffles and espresso. She is the author of the historical western A Man Called Outlaw and the medieval epic Behold the Dawn, as well as the bestselling Outlining Your Novel: Map Your Way to Success. When she’s not making things up, she’s busy mentoring other authors through her blog Wordplay: Helping Writers Become Authors. She makes her home in western Nebraska. Visit her website: kmweiland.com.
Acknowledgments
I wake up every morning and realize how blessed I am, not just to be a writer, spinning worlds out of magic and air, but to be able to count on all the amazing people who have enriched both my writing and my life. Dreamlander has been a tremendous journey (or maybe a climb up a mountain climb, without any rope, would be the better analogy). I wouldn’t be standing here on top of the mountain without the support, suggestions, and occasional smacks on the back of the head offered by the following people:
My sister Amy: my #1 fan and favorite cookie maker.
My brothers: who are just responsible for this book reaching print as I am. Derek, who came up with the idea that maybe there’s more to our dreams than we think. And Jared, whose spot-on story sense and demands for excellence pushed and shoved, poked and prodded me every step of the way.
My editors: Adriela Ashford, Linda Yezak, and CathiLyn Dyck, who encouraged me and educated me.
My proofreader: Diana Cox, who caught all my crazy typos.
My beta readers: London Crockett, Lynnda Ell, Daniel Farnum, Holly Heisey, Steve Mathisen, Lorna G. Poston, Braden Russell, Liberty Speidel, April Upton, Laiel Upton, and Sterling Woomert. Thank you for shooting straight with me, catching my mistakes, and loving the story.
My parents: Ted and Linda, whose support is unfailing
Dominick Finelle: who created the beautiful cover art.
Paul Chernoch: who always does a fabulous job with the e-book conversion and design.
Robert Altbauer: whose cartography skills much surpass my doodles.
And Wordplayers everywhere: Your comments, questions, and constant encouragement on my blog make me smile and keep me going.