Overheard in a Dream
Page 39
The viewpoint and its adjacent car park were alive with activity when James alighted from the helicopter. Conor and Laura had been whisked away to the hospital in Rapid City, but he hadn’t been injured in the incident. He brushed off the attentions of the paramedics to reach the three children.
“It was me and Morgana who called them!” Becky said excitedly. “Morgana’s folks got a radio thing in their truck and, guess what? I turned the truck on all by myself so we could use it!”
“When we get home, I want to phone Mum,” Mikey said, “and I’m going to tell her we had an adventure and you rode in a helicopter! And you’re a hero, aren’t you, Daddy? ’Cause you saved that little boy and his mum. Just like Spiderman! I can tell everyone you’re a hero!”
“I don’t feel like much of a hero, buddy.”
“We did have an adventure,” Becky said. “And we can tell Mum that me and Morgana called the helicopter guys all by ourselves.”
“Yes, and I’m very, very proud of you. All three of you were very responsible.”
“Well, not Mikey,” Becky said. “Know what he did? He peed over the side of the rail. I told him not to. I told him to go into the bathroom like he was supposed to, but he did it anyway.”
“Guess how far this boy in my class can pee, Dad,” Mikey said.
“Come on, you two.” Reaching Lars’s Jeep, James opened the door. “In you go. Let’s get back to town. You too, Morgana. You come with us. Your dad’s going to meet us at the hospital.”
Turning the Jeep out of the car park, James stepped on the accelerator. The car park – brightly lit with emergency lighting – faded in the rearview mirror. They plunged into the brittle moonlit March darkness.
Mikey fell asleep even before James had passed the park entrance. Becky was soon flopped over the top of him asleep by the time they reached the interstate. Only Morgana, sitting in the front passenger seat beside James, remained awake.
She had her elbow braced on the door armrest, her cheek in her hand, and she stared out into the darkness. James glanced furtively at her, trying to reconstruct from her dark features what Fergus must have looked like.
“That was a lot of excitement,” he said at last. “I’ll bet you’re tired.”
She nodded.
“It’s all right to go to sleep, if you want. It’ll take us a while to get back to town.”
“I’m not sleepy.”
The darkness sped past.
James looked over again. She seemed so tiny strapped into the seat.
“What happened tonight was very scary, wasn’t it?” he said. “Is it still on your mind?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“I thought my mum was going to die.”
“Yes, it was awful, wasn’t it? Luckily, though, everything’s turned out all right. Conor’s going to need to stay in the hospital overnight, I think, because he’s had a bump to his head, but he’ll be okay. And your mum isn’t really very badly hurt at all. She’ll probably be able to go home when we get to the hospital.”
A soft silence followed, plumped up with the sound of deep, peaceful breathing from the back seat.
Morgana turned her head away from James to look out of the window again. “What scared me most was thinking about the Lion King,” she said. “His mother died. He was just a baby when it happened, so he doesn’t even remember what she looks like. I always feel so frightened when he talks about that, because I wouldn’t want it ever to happen to me. But tonight I thought it was going to.”
“So, you’re still playing with the Lion King?”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
Silence.
“Listen, Morgana, I’m very, very sorry I told your parents about him. I broke your trust and that was wrong of me.” James said. “And I’ve felt bad that you thought you couldn’t talk to me about him anymore.”
“That’s okay,” she replied softly.
“No, it isn’t okay. It was something that should have stayed between us because you made it really clear that you were telling me in confidence. I was wrong to tell without your permission.”
She shrugged. “No, it’s okay. When I told the Lion King about what you’d done, he said it didn’t matter. The same thing’s happened to him. His auntie doesn’t want him to play with me either. She told him she would give him a spanking, if she found out he was still seeing me.”
“Why does his aunt not want him to play with you?” James asked.
“She doesn’t believe him. She doesn’t think I’m real.”
James looked over questioningly.
Morgana turned and smiled. “Isn’t that silly? The Lion King said to me that when he told his auntie that he had seen me down by the creek, she said, ‘Don’t you dare ever speak to me of visions, Luhr! You sound just like your mother.’”
Other Works
Also by Torey Hayden
One Child
The Tiger’s Child
Twilight Children
Ghost Girl
Just Another Kid
Beautiful Child
Somebody Else’s Kids
Silent Boy
Copyright
HARPER
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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Previously published in other
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First published in English as Overheard in a Dream
by HarperCollins 2008
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© Torey Hayden 2008
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