Immortal Light: Wide Awake

by John D. Sperry

  The other side of the bay was at least a quarter mile away. The cry came again two or three times before its source could be seen some three hundred yards north. It was a person.

  Lucy ran toward the person, who slowly started to come into view, when she heard her own name on the wind. The person was calling her. Lucy ran faster and as she got closer, she was able to make out who it was. It was Kat. Somehow Kat had made it to the haven. All of Lucy’s thoughts had been concentrated on her friend, which she surmised was the reason for her appearance, but there was something different. Kat was distant; she wasn’t near Lucy like Benjamin had been. She had entered the haven far away.

  The two kept running toward each other, but at around one hundred yards apart, Lucy felt the oddest sensation that no matter how hard she ran, she could not get any closer to Kat. She could see clearly that Kat was running to her and calling to her. Looking down at the sand she ran faster and harder and even though the sand passed under her feet, when she looked up they were no closer. She was gaining ground, but there was nothing to show for it.

  Kat called desperately to her, but Lucy stopped and just stared, perplexed as to how or why Kat had even arrived there. As far as she knew, Kat was unresponsive to the light and anything to do with the other world. Lucy realized that Kat was only partially there. She seemed to be stuck in a place that was not as tangible as the haven. She couldn’t be sure that Kat even saw the haven, but she knew for a fact that Kat had seen her. As Lucy stared at her friend trying desperately to reach her, she saw Kat fade away, and she was once again alone on the beach.

  The robotic ring tone of her cell phone woke her out of sleep. The clock read 5:47 AM. In a delirious state, Lucy groped around her night table to silence the sound. Squinting at the bright blue screen she saw that it was Kat. Instantly awake, she sat up and flipped the phone open.

  “Hello?”

  “Lucy!” Kat’s voice was raspy and labored.

  “Kat, what’s the matter? You sound out of breath.”

  “Lucy, we need to talk. Can you come and get me and we’ll just go over to the school?”

  “Absolutely; I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  Slapping the phone shut, Lucy raced to her closet, grabbed a pair of jeans, a t-shirt, and hooded sweatshirt. With her backpack on, she pulled her hair into a ponytail as she descended the stairs.

  Kat was already waiting outside when Lucy arrived. In a matter of seconds she was in the car.

  “What’s the matter; is everything okay?” Lucy asked.

  Kat hesitated a moment. “I just had the weirdest dream.”

  Lucy’s heart started to race just a little bit. Was it possible that she had actually called Kat to her haven?

  “What do you mean ‘weird?’” was all Lucy could respond.

  “Well, I don’t know exactly. From the beginning, it felt like any other dream, just sort of weird and nothing making sense, but the longer it went on, the more I started feeling like …” Kat searched for an adequate explanation.

  Lucy looked at her as she drove. She knew the words Kat was looking for, but she was still wrestling with the likelihood that what Kat had experienced was what Lucy believed she had experienced.

  “It was too … too real.” She looked at Lucy for some sympathy.

  Lucy diverted her attention back to the road.

  Kat, not being one to just roll over on a conversation, decided she needed to clarify. “You know how dreams are sort of lacking in details, like color and sound?”

  “Yeah,” Lucy responded with a particularly flat affect.

  “Well, it wasn’t like that at all. I was on a beach and I could smell it and feel it and hear it—all of it.” She waited for a response.

  A million thoughts went through Lucy’s mind. Her friend had become a part of what she had been experiencing, and it wasn’t so much the fact that Kat had actually been there in the haven, it was that it was possibly the first solid evidence that any of it was actually real. Relief and sheer frustration took hold. She started to cry at the prospect of knowing that her best friend had been to her haven and she couldn’t say anything about it to her because if Kat knew how deep the rabbit hole went, there was no telling what she would say or do. But, regardless of the things she couldn’t talk about, she let the tears flow down her face. She wanted them to; she wanted Kat to know that something was wrong. She wanted Kat to ask her what was wrong, and she knew she would.

  “It wasn’t a dream, was it?”

  Lucy let go of all of her emotions and sobbed, shaking her head. Kat reached out and touched her arm. Lucy could feel the light energy flow between them, but Kat still didn’t seem to respond, like everyone else outside the haven.

  “I’m sorry,” Lucy choked out as she wiped her eyes. “I need to tell you some things about what you saw last night, and I can’t do it in just a few minutes.”

  Kat, suddenly in charge again, her ability to be sympathetic dominating her, let go of Lucy, grabbed her backpack and threw it in the back seat.

  “Then we’re skipping school today.” It wasn’t a question; it was an order.

  Wiping her eyes, Lucy mulled over in her mind the consequences if her parents were to find out that she skipped school again. The risk wasn’t really worth it, but a part of her needed to tell someone everything, and that someone was always going to be Kat.

  The girls left Lucy’s car in the school parking lot and walked to the city bus stop. They rode to North Bend and spent the day talking about everything. Lucy didn’t hold back about the haven and Benjamin. She expressed her feelings toward him, and despite the embarrassment caused by vocalizing those feeling out loud, she didn’t stop. Every word felt like a confession, and it was absolutely cleansing. Kat listened and asked appropriate questions. Every moment was one of pure relief.

  As they sat in the front window of a mini-mart eating donuts, Kat was silent. Lucy felt confident in her decision to tell her everything. She watched as Kat ate and thought. She was so grateful for her friend. There had never been anything the two of them hadn’t communicated and with the one secret she’d ever kept from Kat out of the way, she felt that their semi-estrangement had been resolved.

  “Lucy,” Kat said in a soft, subdued tone. “I just want you to know that I believe you. I don’t know why—and I’m being totally honest with you—but under normal circumstances, I would probably say you were crazy.”

  Lucy looked momentarily shocked.

  Kat held up her hands as if reading her mind. “Let me finish.” She sat up and placed her hands on the table. “What I saw last night, I could feel it, I mean physically touch it, and I know that what you saw was the same.”

  She looked down at her hands and Lucy could tell she wanted to say so much, but none of it was coming.

  “I don’t know what my part is in all of this, and maybe you’re right, maybe you just concentrated so hard on me that I was brought to you. But, I just want you to know …” Tears began to well up. Lucy couldn’t remember the last time she had seen Kat cry. “… that whatever you’re going through, no matter how weird or bad or whatever it is, you can always talk to me. Okay?” She reached across the table and grabbed Lucy’s hands.

  It wasn’t until that moment that Lucy realized that everything she had told her that day was secondary only to the abandonment Kat had felt over the last week. They were the best of friends and had been for years, but in a matter of days, Lucy had managed to shake their relationship at its core. The gravity of her actions and her selfishness finally hit her harder than it had in the haven and she, too, began to cry. The two girls held tight to each other’s hand.

  “Last night on that beach, Lucy, when I saw you running toward me, I was yelling your name because I wanted you to acknowledge me; I wanted you to remember me. But, no matter how hard I ran, I just couldn’t reach you.” Kat wiped tears and mascara from her face.

  Lucy squeezed Kat’s free hand, feeling every ounce of what she had done to her friend.

>   “I’m so sorry, Kat. I’m sorry that I did this to you. I was being so stupid and selfish.”

  “Lucy, I’m here for you. I would give up anything to be your friend. Please don’t forget about me, no matter what happens to you, okay?” She made sure to have Lucy’s attention.

  The two girls walked out of the store and hugged, both wiping the remaining tears from their eyes. It didn’t take long for Kat to return to her usual bouncy self as they walked back to the bus stop.

  “So, you think all of that stuff is real, the city and all that? I mean, how cool would that be if there really are other dimensions and universes? I’ve read about that stuff, you know.”

  A great sense of relief flooded Lucy because of Kat’s enthusiastic support. She was suddenly excited to talk about the prospects of everything she had seen in the last two weeks.

  “I think it would be really cool, but I don’t know if it’s real at all, I don’t really understand some of it. But what if it is just a bunch of crazy dreams?” Lucy asked, wanting a truly honest perspective.

  “If those are all dreams, then you have the most vivid imagination I’ve ever seen. Not to mention, we have some weird bond like twins or something.” Kat laughed about the prospect of them being sisters, but all Lucy could do was force a chuckle.

  Getting back to school before the end of the day didn’t prove to be any serious task. The two girls were actually on time to their last period classes and no one really seemed to notice that they were gone.

  Walking to the car at the back of the lot, Kat and Lucy laughed about how much fun it was to play hooky. The two girls felt their bond completely renewed and made plans to spend the rest of the day together.

  As they walked, Kat reached out and squeezed Lucy’s arm gesturing with a nod over her shoulder. Lucy looked and saw Benjamin standing near his motorcycle, Samantha draped on his arm. All of Samantha’s friends were standing around them talking and laughing. Lucy just looked down at the ground.

  “C’mon, let’s go,” she all but growled, walking with a more determined air toward her car.

  “Why don’t you tell him, Luce?”

  Lucy didn’t stop, she just kept walking. “Because I can’t,” she replied heatedly. “He’ll just deny it. He told me he would, remember?”

  “But you’re in love with him, and there’s obviously something special going on there.”

  “Well, when he’s ready to address that out here, then I’ll go with it.”

  Kat wasn’t satisfied, as she usually wasn’t. “You have to be proactive, Lucy. Remember what you did with Mark? I mean, that was the boldest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do. Why do you think I was so upset when I heard you broke up with him?”

  Lucy stopped at her driver’s side door. She looked back toward Benjamin, who was still enjoying his friends.

  “Well, this is different. He knows how I feel, so now it’s up to him.” Unlocking the doors, the two girls got in and Lucy pulled out of her space.

  As rubber burned onto Ingersoll Street, no one noticed that in the midst of the popular crowd, staring after the beige Cavalier was a pair of nearly luminous green eyes.

  ***

  Time slipped away from Lucy as life seemed to get back to normal. Her days were spent in school and working at the library, and at night she worked on getting her haven stable enough to use. Peter had been amazed at how little time it actually took. After just two nights of working on it, the haven was so stable that she could get there any time she wanted to. It was so stable, in fact, that almost a month had gone by since she last worked with Peter.

  Sometimes in class she would rest her eyes and jump to it for a few minutes. The first time she did that she discovered that time slowed down in the haven. It wasn’t much, but for every ten minutes she spent inside, she lost only about one minute in the real world. She had fun playing around with one minute naps, as they would have been perceived by the rest of the world, and being able to take a vacation to the beach in the middle of school.

  While she was simply having fun with it, it was made abundantly clear why Benjamin and Peter would ever choose to use them. It was more than a place of focus and concentration, it was truly a catharsis, as Kat had talked about. She often thought about how it was a shame she couldn’t bring her homework with her—she’d be valedictorian for sure.

  It was already cold in Coos Bay in mid-October. Walking across campus, Lucy thought about how strange it was that things began to feel normal with the passage of time, no matter how strange they may have seemed before. She was living her life on two different planes, and while there were only slivers of evidence that could confirm there was carryover between the haven state and reality, she would be content living in two different worlds simultaneously.

  Though Kat was more than understanding, they didn’t talk about it much. In the first few days after telling Kat everything, they even tried to get her back to the haven on the beach, but it had never worked. After, the subject rarely came up, and Kat’s biggest goal had become to break up Benjamin and Samantha and get him together with Lucy. It killed Kat that Lucy harbored such strong feelings for a guy that she had no intentions of going after.

  The wind was biting cold so Lucy wrapped herself in a pea coat and hid as much of her face as possible in the lapels as she climbed the stairs from the parking area. Looking down she watched each step pass beneath her feet until at the top she saw a familiar pair of brown leather shoes. Following them up to their owner’s face, she found Benjamin.

  It had been almost a month since she had talked to him last, mostly because she had gone out of her way to avoid him. It took all of her self-control to do so, but keeping her mind on her haven made it a simple task. The most difficult part was keeping him out of her thoughts while in the haven. If he had somehow shown up there, she feared she wouldn’t have been able to handle it and either lash out at him or latch onto him.

  Benjamin wore his usual black jacket with a button-down shirt tucked into jeans. He stood with his hands hanging onto his backpack straps and greeted her with a charming, “Hi.”

  Naturally and ridiculously, Lucy’s heart raced and the uncontrollable urge to be near him once again overcame her. It was the same emotion she fought every time she saw him.

  “Hi,” she managed to squeak out.

  While she was rarely face to face with him, the routine was getting a little absurd. How was it that no matter what had passed, she was still completely hypnotized by him and there was nothing she could ever do about it? But then there was the prospect that perhaps she was finally facing the moment she had hoped and prayed for: the moment when he would dissolve the barrier that stood between the haven and the rest of life. So, she decided to nudge the conversation along.

  “Waiting for Samantha?” Lucy’s question was only laced with disdain rather than soaked, but she had an ulterior motive; she would find out if there was a chance at all that he was who she hoped he was.

  Benjamin raised the corners of his mouth. “No, I’m just enjoying the cold. It never got this way where I came from.”

  “And where is that, where did you come from?” He provided a new opening, so Lucy exploited it.

  “I guess it is my turn, isn’t it?” he asked, and Lucy froze for a moment.

  She knew full well what he was referring to; she was just taken by surprise that he was playing so well into her plan.

  “Remember our deal? I would give you a bit of information about me?”

  Lucy laughed a breath of warm air as she feigned recognition of their agreement from weeks before. The fact that he remembered was actually very relieving to her.

  “Right, that. I sort of forgot about it for a minute,” she lied.

  The truth was that she pondered daily about every interaction she had ever had with Benjamin Raven, but she had to keep up a certain pretense.

  “I came from Southern California, but that’s not where I was born.” He grinned at her, knowing it would drive her crazy that he answer
ed her question, yet planted another.

  “Now that’s not fair,” Lucy pouted disappointedly.

  “I know. I just like to see you get irritated with me.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Lucy said indignantly.

  “Nothing, it’s just that I like your company, but you are a little boring so I have to make it interesting.”

  She knew he was teasing her so she didn’t get offended. Instead, she decided to play back.

  “Well, I guess compared to the company of the physical human embodiment of Tigger, I would be boring.”

  She didn’t laugh, though she prided herself on her quick-draw wit. After saying it, she felt that, as clever as it was, it might have been a little below the belt. You don’t just go after someone’s girlfriend to their face, but Benjamin’s response surprised her. He was actually suppressing a guffaw.

  “Touché, Lucy Higgins, touché.” He laughed, and Lucy started to laugh, too.

  “Shall we go to class?” Benjamin reached out his elbow and Lucy froze again. She couldn’t believe his invitation. She looked around, but she didn’t know what she was looking for, perhaps Samantha, but she thought, what the hell, and took his arm.

  Walking arm and arm with him she felt like she was both walking on a cloud and swimming in a fish bowl. She couldn’t fight the feeling that everyone was watching them. In a bold attempt to relax the moment, and figuring she really had nothing to lose, she brought up the subject of Samantha.

  “So, how is Samantha, anyway?”

  “She’s doing well, I suppose.”

  “Where is she?” Lucy hoped she wasn’t crossing any lines.

  “I don’t know. She usually shows up just before school starts.”

  She was getting nowhere with her line of questioning, so she ratcheted it up a notch.