“Please, Mark, please come back to me. You have to live!” Lucy could feel a greater flow of energy as she begged him to live, and she was beginning to feel the strain on her body and soul.
“Please, Mark, please. I can’t do this. I can’t. Please wake up.” Doubt in herself began to turn to despair as she screamed and cried for Mark.
“Take me, instead!” she yelled to the heavens, then redirected her plea to the forest. “Help me! Benjamin, I need you to help me!”
Darkness began to creep in around her. She held fast to Mark’s lifeless body and fell backwards with him as her whole existence and life was sucked into a black hole. She fought it with every ounce of her strength, but at last she gave in to the despair and everything went black.
“Lucy, Lucy!” The words seemed to echo as though down a long empty tunnel. Someone was calling out to her.
“Help me, where are you?” she called back.
“Lucy!” Again she heard the voice calling her name, but it was closer.
“Help me, please!” she called again. Her eyes popped open. She felt cool air on her face and the smell of the ocean in her nostrils. Staring down at her with eyes stricken in panic was Mark.
“Oh, thank God, you’re alive! Are you okay, can you move?”
Lucy’s mind raced. Where am I? she thought. Am I alive? She tried to recall the last few moments. She had been in the forest with Benjamin. He told her she had a gift. She had to save Mark. She looked up at him and examined his face. There wasn’t a scratch on him. She recalled his blood pouring down her arm. Her arm was clean.
“What happened?” she said; her voice cracked.
“You totally saved us. You pulled me down out of the way. I don’t know what happened exactly, but look at the car.”
Mark helped her to a sitting position. In front of her, the airbag hung from the dashboard, having been deployed when the car collided with the corner of a bicycle shop storefront. Looking behind them, she saw the semi-truck stopped in the middle of the road while the driver surveyed the damage. A trail of glass and debris led to the roof of the car which rested in a twisted, mangled heap beneath the trailer. From across the street, Lucy saw two figures running toward them. Kat and Dave were yelling to ask if everyone was alright. She saw the headlights of all the cars in the caravan gleaming through the opening between the truck and its trailer. Mark tried his door, but it was jammed, so he jumped over the top of it and rushed around the front of the car to Lucy’s side. He tried that handle, but it was jammed as well.
“Here, let me help you out.”
Lucy looked at him, but then slumped back into the seat. “No, I think I just need to sit here for a minute.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, no problem.” He reached into the car and softly cupped her cheek. “I’ll stay close, if you need me.”
Smiling weakly, she tilted the weight of her head into his hand, closing her eyes as she tried to figure out what was real and what wasn’t. She was sure he was bleeding before she lost consciousness, yet there he was, jumping out of cars and running around in perfect health. He even seemed energized, like an excited kid. Lucy knew that surviving a near-death experience sometimes energized people, but she had been through the same thing and she felt totally drained.
She took a deep breath and opened her eyes. Glancing down at the gear shifter she noticed something glistening from the center console. She looked curiously at it as it seemed somewhat out of place.
Mark’s grip released. “I’m going to go tell them we’re okay.”
Lucy acknowledged with a nod. As soon as he was gone, she reached down to touch the shiny corner of the console. It was wet and sticky. Bringing the tip of her finger into the glare of the headlights behind her, she knew what she was looking at. Rubbing her two fingers together, the substance smeared into a thin, almost
orange-red color. It was blood.
Chapter 8
The drive home from the hospital hadn’t been pleasant. James Higgins didn’t say a word. Lucy sat next to him in the cab of his truck and wanted nothing more than to fall asleep. But, all she could think about was the accident and what she was sure she had seen. She remembered examining the twisted metal. Bare steel and dark gray primer were visible from bends and breaks all over it. She closely examined every inch of the contorted steel looking for blood or any sign that anyone had been hurt in the accident. She was so sure of what she had seen, that Mark was bleeding as the car ran off the roadside, but there was nothing. She found no evidence to support what she thought to be true other than the small drips of blood on the console inside the vehicle. He was fine and she was fine. They hadn’t been so much as scratched in the accident.
As Lucy walked into the house, she headed for the stairs, but she heard her father calling her back.
“Lucy, sit down, please.” He seemed calm, but he was nowhere near being at ease.
Lucy sat down in a dining room chair and looked at her hands.
“What were you thinking, Lucy? We trust you to go to a dance, to be around good kids, and the first chance you get, you head out of town to dark coves at night—and on the way, these friends decide to drag race!” His voice was getting louder. “Do you realize that statistically you should be dead right now? I don’t even want to know if there was alcohol involved.”
Lucy looked up as she fought tears. “There wasn’t any alcohol, I promise. They’re not like that.”
“Well, I certainly hope you’re right. We’ll know in the morning.” He turned around and paced to the sink. Laura was leaning against the counter with her arms folded.
“Lucy …” James faltered for words. “I don’t even know how to respond to this,” he said as he walked back over to the table. “I want your keys.” His words hung in the air as he held out his hand.
Lucy looked up in shock. She wanted to say something, plead her case, but the evidence was set firmly against her. She got up and walked over to where she had dropped her purse by the front door. She handed her father her keys. No more words were exchanged, and James put the keys in his pocket.
Sensing the conversation was over, Lucy turned around and marched herself up to her room and calmly closed her door. She then threw herself on her bed and screamed into her pillow, tears flowing.
***
Staring at the ceiling of her room the next morning, Lucy felt bitter. She was angry, but she didn’t know with whom. The truth was that she had only herself to blame for any of what had happened to her. But more than bitterness, Lucy had been haunted all night by the events that took place during the crash.
The dream. Having been knocked unconscious in the most severe incident in her life, she didn’t understand why she would dream, especially of a place she hadn’t been in days. Then, she had an improbable thought: What if the dream wasn’t a dream? As odd as it seemed, she was beginning to doubt that the rainforest was a dream at all. It was so unlike a dream, not by the sounds and smells, but that she remembered everything in it with great detail.
What if it was the reason we survived? she thought. What if I do have some sort of gift?
The immortal words of Arthur Conan Doyle sprang to her mind. “That when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” But Lucy was no Holmes.
You’re being ridiculous, Lucy, she thought. You don’t have supernatural powers, you’re not a super hero, and you certainly can’t heal things. It was a dream. No one has special powers; that’s what movies are for. We all want to be so special that we make up stories about how some of us are. Get a grip, she chastised herself, as she lay in bed fighting the sunlight of the new day.
What was real was that since she was “just fine” in the words of the doctors, she would be going to work. As she got out of bed, her mental wrestling match was abruptly ended by the sound of a knock at her door.
“I’m up,” she said, her voice sounding as hoarse as it had while she spoke to officer Gerhardt earli
er that morning.
Laura Higgins entered the room and closed the door behind her.
“Mom, I’m really not in the mood. I need to shower and get to the library in less than an hour.” Her words were full of self-pity as she sat down in her desk chair facing away from her mother.
Laura walked up to and stood right next to her daughter. “Lucy, I need to talk to you, so I would appreciate it if you would face me.” She suddenly became stern, the kind of tone in her voice that begged to use the first and middle names. “And you will look me in the eye when I talk to you. Do you understand me, young lady?”
Lucy wasn’t used to her mother speaking that way, so she turned around and obeyed the command.
“I’m so disappointed in you, Lucy. You took advantage of your father’s leniency, and that makes me angry. And you took advantage of me as well.”
Lucy looked confused.
“The two days you skipped classes this week. Did you think we wouldn’t know?”
Lucy closed her eyes for a moment as her mother threw another log on the fire of guilt that was consuming her.
“I didn’t tell your father because I knew how he would react, but I guess that doesn’t matter anymore. How could you be so irresponsible?”
Lucy didn’t have anything to say on the subject, as she was fully aware of her transgressions. She just sat and silently stared up at her mother.
“Do you have anything you’d like to share about the horrible decisions you’ve made this week?”
Lucy shook her head.
Laura uncrossed her arms and turned for the door. “Get dressed. I’m taking you to work today and I’ll pick you up at five. You have twenty minutes to be in the car.”
Lucy looked up to catch her mother before she left the room. “Mom.”
Laura stopped in the doorway and looked over her shoulder. There was so much Lucy wanted to say to her in that moment, but only one thing felt right, the one phrase that could start the healing process.
“I’m sorry.”
Laura slowly turned in the doorway to face her daughter. Her eyes were so soft and gentle that it hurt Lucy to know just how disappointed she was over the whole situation. Laura took a deep breath as if to say something that would make everything alright. Her eyes were a dead giveaway that she had forgiven her daughter, and Lucy could tell that everything was just fine.
But then Laura looked at Lucy with those disappointed eyes again and said, “You’re telling that to the wrong person.”
***
Lucy walked into the library. Kenny was the only one there, and he was on the phone, haggling for more books or ironing out the details of that afternoon’s Children’s Read Aloud. Lucy was actually quite content that no one else was there. She wasn’t really in the mood to talk.
She set her purse at her station and checked the drop box. There weren’t a lot of books to sort through and that was another relief. As she sat in her chair and pulled up to the desk, her last dream in the grove flashed momentarily in her head. When she thought about Mark lying there, seemingly dying in her arms, she felt a tug in her stomach, a sick feeling that brought back the pain and despair she felt as she remembered calling for Benjamin, asking for his help.
“Well, hey, you!” came the always loud, but somehow soothing voice of Mrs. Breen.
Lucy looked up at her favorite person in the library. “Hi, Mrs. Breen.” She could feel her voice choke just a little.
Mrs. Breen heard it, too, as she walked over to Lucy and sat down in the chair next to her. Lucy just looked at her. Mrs. Breen was just another person to whom she wanted to tell everything, but couldn’t even begin to tell anything.
Sandi leaned toward Lucy and whispered, “I saw your name in the morning edition. Why are you here, darlin’?”
It was all Lucy could do not to let out a cascade of emotion, so she didn’t even try. She reached her arms around Sandi’s shoulders and let go of everything in convulsive gasps.
“I … I don’t know. My parents are … are …” She sobbed uncontrollably and Sandi just held her tightly.
“You don’t need to talk, sweetie. Just let it out.”
The two held each other for a minute while Lucy exorcised her demons. She didn’t talk, she just cried.
As she was winding down, Kenny leaned his head out of his office with the phone characteristically attached to it. “Why are we still locked?” His voice was high and irritated. “It’s after ten.”
Sandi turned to him as she handed Lucy a tissue. “You just get that greasy, hippy head of yours back inside your little box. I just came in and there ain’t no one out there waiting. So, if you don’t mind, we’re busy over here.”
Kenny shot her a menacing scowl and then noticed Lucy’s red, crying eyes. His expression changed to the closest thing to compassion that Kenny was capable of, then he turned back to his conversation and ducked back into his office.
“I better go get the doors before he blows a gasket,” she said, winking.
Lucy just laughed into her hands, feeling so grateful for Mrs. Breen and her ability to lighten any mood.
***
Lucy took her usual lunch at two o’clock. She walked outside into the air of the fading summer. She could tell that fall was on its way because the air was getting cooler. It was still early September, but on the Oregon coast the summer died with August.
She walked over and sat on the library bench. With her hand on the cold metal seat, she thought about Mark, how helpless he had looked in the grove and just how much she had wanted him to live. She closed her eyes and meditated. She thought of the grove. She thought of Benjamin standing with his sword hanging at his side. She thought about the ridiculous notion that she had some kind of gift, a way of healing or regenerating life. It wasn’t real, it was a dream, she thought.
In the seclusion of her eyelids, with the fatigue of so little sleep, she thought that maybe a little bit of a test would be possible.
Okay, when you open your eyes, you need to find something and find it fast, a flower or plant or something.
In her mind it was easy to see herself doing it. But, as soon as she opened her eyes, seeing reality in front of her, the thought of doing what she wanted to do became absurd and she could hear her logic try to talk her out of it.
She stood up and held onto her task no matter how stupid it felt. There was no one to watch, and even if there was, they wouldn’t see anything unusual. So she walked over to the flower beds and started looking. It didn’t take long to find a daisy lying dead, having somehow been broken off of its stem.
“That’ll do,” she said as she bent down and picked it up.
Many of the petals fell off as she lifted it. It had been dead for some time, probably cut and tossed by a lawnmower.
Holding it in her hands she tried to recall what it was she did in her dream that brought Mark back. She couldn’t recall anything specific, just that she felt scared and incapable of the task. She remembered crying, and then there were the ferns. They grew to life right before her eyes, but all she could remember was how pathetic they looked, crumpled in her hands. They evoked sadness and sympathy, but she didn’t know what that had to do with healing anything.
Looking down at the flower in her hand, she tried to feel sorry for it, that its small life was cut short, but all she could feel was how ridiculous it felt. She took a deep breath and shook her head. C’mon, you have to at least try. She convinced herself that one attempt wasn’t going to hurt anything except maybe her pride.
The little flower lay dead in her hand and she closed her eyes one last time and started to think about the flower planted in the soft fertile ground, waving in the breeze, its white petals swaying back and forth. As the image started to become more real, she felt, in the tiniest degree, the same electric flow she was becoming used to. It startled her that she could feel it with something that wasn’t human, and she opened her eyes. Looking at the flower, it was still brown and deteriorating; there was no life or
color in the petals, and Lucy’s heart sank.
“You’re so stupid,” she said to herself as she gently dropped the flower back in the flowerbed.
***
After work, Lucy was picked up by her mother and the two of them rode home without a word. They ate dinner as a family without a word, and Lucy went to bed without so much as a goodnight from either of her parents. Staring up at the ceiling in the darkness she thought about her ridiculous trial with the daisy and how like the daisy, she, too, was dead inside. She lay motionless, forgotten and alone as sleep enveloped her.
He stood in the golden grove of the rainforest as if waiting for her. Leaning against a tree, he wore a black jacket, jeans that were faded with use, and a white shirt. From across the clearing, he looked at Lucy.
She had so many questions and the least of them wasn’t whether or not the place she was in was real or a figment of her imagination, but she didn’t know exactly how to broach the subject with a person that could just as easily be a fixture in her fantasy.
“You probably want to know what this place is.”
Lucy bobbed her head. “Among other things,” she said, trying not to show her bewilderment and frustration.
“Okay, I’ll start there. But, I need to tell you that everything that has happened here recently is only slightly less confusing to me than it is to you.”
She gave him a perplexed look. “Is this real, then? Am I making this up, or have I somehow teleported to another universe?”
Benjamin couldn’t help but laugh. “No, you’re not in another universe, but you aren’t really in your own reality.”
“What does that mean?”
“When you come here, what do you think it is?”
“A dream,” she replied without hesitation.
“So you believe this is all in your head?”
Immortal Light: Wide Awake Page 11