by Jen Minkman
She shrugged, staring at the palms of her hands as if the answer was written there. “I’m just so tired. Weird stuff has been going on. Yesterday, when we were visiting Rainbow Bridge, I heard a coyote howl in the distance. Josh heard it too, and he looked at me in this ... this anxious way, as if he was in a panic and wanted to protect me. But he didn’t. He stayed away from me. Yazzie thought he was acting weird, too. After that incident, Josh kept his distance all afternoon.”
“Coyotes?” Nick’s eyebrows furrowed. “Didn’t we see coyotes at your house too, before we went to the rodeo? Or were they just dogs?”
Hannah breathed in and out, trying to suppress her feelings of terror. In her mind, she relived the moment the shadow from her vision turned into a coyote. “I don’t know,” she blew out defeatedly. “I just don’t know. Do you guys think I’m getting some kind of supernatural warning?”
Emily arched an eyebrow. “Why supernatural?”
“Well, I sort of zoned out at Rainbow Bridge. There’s no other way to describe it. One moment I was relaxing in the sun, and the next I had a vision of a wintry landscape and three creepy, shadowy figures watching me. One of them shapeshifted. He morphed into a coyote.”
“You were in a trance?” Nick asked in surprise.
“Something like that, yeah.”
“It happens during vision quests as well,” he said, leafing through his notebook. “Images of the past are experienced as if they’re happening in the present,” he read out loud from his notes.
Hannah swallowed. Slowly, it began to dawn on her. The dreams and the terrible vision seemed to come from the same time period – from the past. Josh had looked the same, as if he was about thirty years old. Could she actually be seeing things that had happened in the past?
“But ... what have I ever done to see those images? I keep dreaming about things I’ve never seen before, but they seem so real, so I don’t think my mind is fabricating them. What should I...”
Her words locked in her throat when the waitress put the quiche they’d ordered on the table. Great. She sounded like the village idiot, babbling about supernatural warnings and apparitions in the middle of a café.
Emily put a reassuring hand on Hannah’s arm. “You know what? I need to be in Naabi’aani today and tomorrow, but I can come straight to your place Wednesday afternoon. I’ll stay with you for a few nights. And we’ll figure this out. We can make a list of everything you’ve seen and experienced and try to make sense of it. Don’t think you’re losing it – spirituality is a constant in our culture, so at least you blend right in with us Native Americans.”
Nick put his arm around her shoulders. “And I’ll try to sound Josh out about what happened at Rainbow Bridge during our hiking trip. Maybe he’s overly sensitive to spiritual things, being a medicine man and all. I can tell you one thing, though – he likes you. I don’t need crystal ball-gazing or Tarot to tell you that.”
Hannah blushed. So Nick saw it, too. Was she the only one walking around with blinkers on? “Thanks, guys. You’re the best friends ever.”
In the meantime, a thunderstorm was raging outside. After lunch, Hannah walked back in the summer rain, glad it was freshening up her foggy head. Her heart sped up as she neared the log cabin. Maybe Ben was back, together with Josh.
Her face fell when she saw the empty driveway, but she forced herself not to feel disappointed. Whistling a tune, she made a shopping list and got into her Datsun to drive to the big supermarket in Page city center. Luckily, she found a parking spot close to the entrance.
Still whistling – she was stuck with the melody to her own song, so apparently it was catchy – Hannah pushed her cart through the aisles and decided to stock up on burgers from the frozen food section. Maybe Ben would want to organize a barbecue again after they were back from the reservation on Friday.
When she emerged again with two bulging bags in her shopping cart, the sky had cleared and it was bright and sunny. Next to her stall, another car was waiting, with the top down, its indicator lights blinking.
“You leaving?” the young guy behind the wheel asked. Next to him was another guy who looked exactly like him, and an older man who was clearly their dad was in the back seat. For some reason, they were all giving her the once-over.
Hannah nodded. “Yes, I am. I just need to load my groceries into the trunk.”
The guy smiled. His eyes bored into hers, and Hannah blinked uncomfortably. Why was he staring at her like that? In fact, why were they all staring at her?
She whipped around and opened the trunk to put away her stuff. She could feel the guy in the driver’s seat watching her. A tingling feeling between her shoulder blades told her that she was being observed. When Hannah furtively looked over her shoulder, she saw the guy’s twin brother and dad were also still staring at her with the same piercing look. Six cold eyes were trained on her.
Her heart was tapping against her ribs. She quickly stuffed the last pack of frozen burgers into one of the boxes in the trunk. “I’ll be right back,” she mumbled in the direction of the waiting car, pushing the cart back to the store entrance with her best attempt at a stony face.
This was nuts. Why was she being so paranoid? Those people had scared her. But why? There was nothing wrong. That family was just waiting for her to leave. They just wanted her to hurry up. Hannah wiped off her sweaty palms on her pants and cursed inwardly.
After putting the cart away, she deliberately strolled back at a leisurely pace to catch her breath. When she got back to the Datsun, the twins and their dad had disappeared. Probably moved on to greener pastures. She hadn’t been quick enough for them. Well, so much the better. She was glad to be rid of the trio with their creepy, staring eyes. There’d been something deeply unsettling about them.
During the drive back, it started to lightly rain again. Halfway through, she had to put the roof back up. When Hannah parked the car on the driveway, Ben still wasn’t back.
“I’ll be home after dinner,” the text message on her phone said. She’d left the thing on the kitchen table.
Determined not to feel empty and neglected, Hannah went out to get the groceries from the car and then sat down to a nice cup of tea, cupcakes and a documentary on National Geographic. It was the first time this vacation she’d turned on the TV – it was time for some mindless distraction.
Over the course of the evening, the sky cleared again. By the time it turned dark and Hannah went out to sit on the front porch with a pizza and a can of beer, some stars were already visible. In the west, she saw the planet Venus twinkle on the horizon. It brought back memories of stargazing with Josh. He’d told her about the constellations in the sky. He’d whispered to her that he had closed off from deep communication with his family. Funny how that story about the distance between him and his parents had brought her and Josh closer together in that moment.
Just after nine o’clock, Ben’s Chevy finally appeared around the corner. He honked at Hannah sitting outside, waving cheerfully.
“I see you had dinner by yourself?” he asked with a tilt of his head toward the pizza leftovers on her plate.
“You didn’t eat yet?” Hannah said in surprise. “I thought you were still in Naabi’aani, having dinner with Josh.”
Ben shook his head. “No, Josh had to leave for Tuba City in the afternoon to get some registration forms for college, and I’d promised him to drop by Yazzie’s in Wahweap to arrange for a permit. You know, to hike on the rez. He can get us a discount. Josh wanted to have some sort of official consent from the tourist board, because he’s taking both me and Nick for three days. We don’t want to steal jobs from the official guides and not pay anyone anything.”
“Are you guys going to hang out tomorrow as well?”
“No, I have to study all day long. I won’t have any opportunity for that from Wednesday till Friday. Now that I have a plan, I want to stick to it for once.”
Shoot. So Josh wouldn’t be here tomorrow either. Chances were he
wouldn’t come here on Wednesday, because Nick and Ben would meet up with him on the reservation. Which meant she would have to wait till Friday. That is, if he stayed around after the hiking trip. Maybe he wouldn’t even show his face at all.
“You look disgruntled,” Ben said with a sidelong glance. “Aren’t you happy I’ve declared studying my newest hobby?”
Hannah looked back at Ben and gave him a kind smile. “Of course I am. Sorry I’m so prickly. It’s good to see you taking your studies so seriously.”
Ben nodded. “Yeah, Josh kind of inspired me. He is so dead serious about the studies he chose. We talked a lot about the education system in Navajo Nation. Josh wants to set up some sort of program to stimulate young people to get a proper education and be more prepared for the world out there. So they won’t touch drugs, join a gang, or be hit by continuous unemployment. He says the country needs more schools. His latest idea is to found a college in Kayenta with some other people.”
“Wow.” Hannah was fascinated. “He sure is passionate about this whole thing.”
“Yeah, that seems like the right word for it.”
Hannah bit her lip. “So, how was he?” she asked softly.
Her brother sighed. “Well, weird. He was absent-minded, I could tell. It’s happening more and more, lately. Today, he didn’t ask about you, on purpose. You know what I mean? Normally-speaking, he asks me stuff when I tell him about you and your plans for the day, but now he was trying to hold himself aloof. It was painfully obvious. He wants to keep a distance, but he can’t.”
“Why do you think that is?” Ben’s analysis didn’t sound exactly promising.
“No idea, but I’ll grill him about it this week. Well ... I’m going to try, at least.”
The rest of the evening, Hannah was restless. The next morning, when she woke up with a pounding sleeping-pill headache again, her restlessness had only gotten worse. Ben would be buried in textbooks all day, so she decided to flee to the beach and join Amber and Ivy for a day of sunbathing. Even ordering grilled gambas at The Winking Shrimp in the evening didn’t cheer her up. Hannah stared out across the water, listening to her neighbors chatting about everything and nothing. The Josh-less days stretching out ahead of her felt like a high hurdle she couldn’t jump. Which was ludicrous. She’d had Josh-less days for years, and she’d been fine. If only she wouldn’t feel so fidgety and impatient. She should stop thinking about him. Apparently, he wasn’t thinking about her either, because she hadn’t heard from him at all anymore after he’d said ‘see you soon’ on Sunday. She didn’t dare drop by on the rez. Suppose he didn’t actually want to see her? She would look totally stupid. In fact, she was stupid. No single person had ever made her feel this much off-kilter before. She had to stop doing this to herself!
When she walked back with Ivy and Amber that evening, Hannah had decided to go to bed as soon as possible and not so much as mention Josh’s name to Ben. But her plan went up in smoke when she stepped in and saw a brown paper bag on the kitchen table, next to Ben’s books.
“What’s that?” she asked curiously.
“Oh, Josh brought it. He dropped by on his motorcycle this afternoon.”
Hannah gave Ben a look of annoyance. “Oh,” she said crisply. Couldn’t he have given her a call on the beach?
“Listen, he was only here for, like, five minutes,” Ben replied defensively, raising his hands. “Don’t give me the stink eye.”
“Sorry,” Hannah mumbled. Of course, Ben was right. She wasn’t making any sense.
“Besides, he dropped by to bring that stuff especially for you. He said there’s things in it to make a dreamcatcher. He’s going to help you make one on Friday, after we come back from the rez. I told you he was going to come over for dinner, right?”
Hannah blushed. So Josh had been thinking about her. “Cool. Thank him on my behalf when you see him tomorrow, okay?”
She sat down at the table and curiously opened the bag. Inside, she found a ring of intertwined twigs, a brown leather cord, a reel of strong, thin yarn, feathers, silver wire and red beads. It already looked pretty now. She hoped Josh would help her to turn it into an awesome dreamcatcher.
After changing into her pajamas and crawling into bed, Hannah indecisively eyed the strip of sleeping pills. That road would lead to another throbbing headache tomorrow morning, for sure. Maybe she should give this night a try without medication. How bad could it possibly be?
She woke up screaming, sitting bolt upright in bed.
“Han!” Ben’s panicky voice was close to her ear. “What’s wrong?
Bewildered, she stared up at Ben’s anxious face. Her brother was sitting next to her on the bed, his hands comfortingly on her shoulders. She felt like she’d only just fallen asleep, but that was impossible. Judging by the light streaming in through a crack in the curtains, it was already morning.
“What’s the matter?” Her voice cracked in her throat. Her mouth was dry, and she started to cough. Ben handed her the glass of water on her bedside table – the water she hadn’t used last night to take her pill. She gulped it down eagerly.
“You were dreaming,” he replied. He wiped the sweat off her brow with one hand. Only now, Hannah felt how clammy her pajamas were. She pulled the fabric off the sweaty skin of her back.
“Why did you come to me?” she asked, confused.
“You were screaming like crazy.” Ben shook his head in disbelief. “I swear, it sounded like someone was murdering you. I half expected to find someone in the room with you, attacking you with a knife.”
“Was I screaming for help?” Hannah whispered, throwing the blankets off. She was still feeling way too hot.
“No, you kept yelling ‘Go away!’ and you were crying.” He rubbed his face and sighed, his gaze drifting to the pills on her bedside table. “Did you use those?”
“Not last evening. I did the days before.”
Ben fell silent. “I am really worried about you,” he finally said, pulling Hannah into an embrace. “I heard you screaming a few nights ago, too, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it was now. It started after we picked you up when you were stranded at the lakeside.”
“I’m worried too,” she said timidly. “I feel like I’m losing my mind, slowly but surely. I mean, really, what is the big deal? Some drunk retards threaten me, and I chase them away with a gun that’s not even loaded. Why should I still freak out about that?”
“Maybe you’ve been working too hard? Stressed out about your teaching job?”
“No, not really. I felt just fine when I got here. Tired, but happy.”
Ben sighed. “I wish you could just wake yourself up from a nightmare. I usually do that when I have a really nasty dream.”
“Wake yourself up? How?”
He laughed. “Well, you can do it on one condition – you have to be aware you might be dreaming. If you want to check if that’s the case, you just watch your own hands in the dream.”
Hannah frowned. “Why?”
“Because you can never count the fingers of your own hand in a dream. The minute you try and you fail, you wake up.”
“Wow.” She shook her head. “I never knew. Interesting, but unfortunately, I am never aware I might be dreaming. I always think it’s real.”
He stroked her head. “Poor you. And you don’t remember now what you dreamed about?”
“Nope. Not a clue,” she blew out.
Ben got up. “I’m sorry, but I have to leave now. Nick’s waiting for me.” He pressed a kiss to her forehead. “I’ll talk to you later. We’ll be back here before driving to the rez to meet up with Josh.”
“Thanks, Ben,” Hannah said quietly. “For everything.”
“Emily is going to stay over tonight and tomorrow, right? Please talk to her about what’s bothering you. Take those stupid sleeping pills for now, even if you don’t like them. Drop by Officer Curry whenever you have the time. And once Josh has made you a dreamcatcher, you can hang that next to your bed, okay?”<
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Hannah nodded and waved feebly at Ben as he walked out the door. She slumped back and stared at the ceiling. God, her entire body was covered in sweat. She had to get out of bed and take a shower. That would make her feel better.
When the hot jet of water hit her sticky back and she closed her eyes, Hannah suddenly remembered her nightmare.
She’d been standing on a hilltop with a strong wind blowing. It had been near that familiar precipice, looking out over a canyon that looked a lot like Canyon de Chelly on the reservation. A long time ago, she’d visited the place with Ben and her mother, but she still knew what it looked like. Dark clouds had drifted across the sky, and the three sinister shadows had been right in front of her. They’d looked so terrifying that just the memory of seeing them made her gasp for breath again.
Hannah opened her eyes, tightly gripping the shower rail to keep herself from falling. She could still sense the horrifying presence of the shadows, even in broad daylight, being wide awake. Pure evil radiated from their faces.
Gingerly, she closed her eyes again. In her nightmare, the three creatures had driven her back toward the edge of the precipice, red eyes aglow and toothy snarls on their faces. Her arms had crawled with insects all of a sudden. She could feel them walk on her skin, under her hair, her feet. The feeling still gave her goosebumps.
That’s where the dream had ended, because that’s when Ben had woken her up. Hannah sucked in a breath and opened her eyes again. She sagged down to the floor of the shower cabin and put her arms around her knees. The hot water was beating down on her, but despite the heat, she was shivering.
She couldn’t wait to talk to Emily. This time, she wouldn’t hold back. She’d describe every minute detail of her dreams and visions, and tell Em what fears were plaguing her during the day, constantly lingering at the edges of her mind. She would also tell her friend about the strange things that had been happening ever since the nightmares started. Someone had really stolen her necklace and put it outside on the lawn. She’d bumped into three creepy lumberjacks without life-force in the supermarket. Three coyotes had shown up at the cabin and had ominously stared at her. And so help her, something had surely been off about the three people waiting for her in the parking lot as well. She just knew. Keeping it all to herself wasn’t doing her any good – it was time to come clean.