Burn (18 page)

The highway was nearly empty when she left the next morning. Too early for rush hour; the other cars on the road were long-haul trucks and city vehicles. It was damp out but not rainy, the kind of weather that makes the landscape look smudged, like a Monet painting. It made driving feel hypnotic, motoring through a dream. After thirty miles, she looked down and saw her phone was blinking. A text from Julian. “Leaving now. Need coffee.”

When she picked it up to attempt a one-handed reply, she saw there was also a voicemail, one that must have been left early this morning while she was in the shower.
Fenn?
She thought, but of course it wouldn't be. And she couldn't allow herself to want it to be – she had to let him move on. She could have made herself believe that, if her last act before walking out the door this morning hadn't been to go into Fenn's closet and take out the brown shirt, pulling the soft material over her own T-shirt. It still smelled like grass.

The voicemail wasn't from Fenn. “Hi. Lona? It's Maggie. Maggie Croft? You came to my house yesterday?” She said it like a question, like Lona wouldn't remember passing out in her guest bedroom twelve hours ago. Lona had almost forgotten that she'd left her number with Jeremy. “I'm calling because I think you left your hat here. At my house. It's black with blue stripes and a tassel? I thought it belonged to one of Jeremy's students, but he emailed the class and nobody claimed it. Anyway, if you give me your address, I can mail it to you. Unless you want to come and pick it up. It would be nice to see you again, dear. I have a doctor's appointment at two, but otherwise I'll be around all day. Come any time.”

Her stomach was rumbling. She was on track to beat Julian by at least a half an hour – there was plenty of time to stop somewhere for breakfast, but she hadn't passed a food sign for miles. The exits along this stretch of the highway were mostly industrial: tire stores and auto-repair.

After a couple of minutes, she pulled into an off-market gas station, refilling the tank and then ducking into the attached convenience store for a bag of chips or a candy bar. Inside was nicer than she thought it would be. Half of the store was occupied by a refrigerator with cold drinks and a few shelves of packaged foods, but the other half had a countertop with bar stools, and behind that, an oven that smelled like something warm and sweet.

“No fun to travel in that wet, huh?” The clerk was an older woman with bleached hair. She flicked her fingers disapprovingly toward the weather outside.

“It's not bad. It's not raining.”

“Huh. Wanna muffin? Blueberry or chocolate chip. In the oven, be done in ten.”

“Maybe.” She checked the time again. A muffin sounded better than the cheese curls she was holding in her hand.

“Or the scones are done now. Apricot pecan. Kinda dry. Which is all
your
fault.”

“I'm sorry?”

“Make me come out in the wet looking for you and forget about the timer.”

“I'm really sorry, but I don't know—”

From under the counter, Lona heard a whine. A small dog, fluffy and white. The clerk unwrapped the tray of scones, breaking off a piece to toss to the dog and putting another whole one on a plate for Lona. “Isn't that right?” the woman asked the dog. “Make momma come out in the cold and forget the scones?”

Lona slid onto the bar stool and accepted the plate. The woman was right. The scones were dry. She took a squeeze bottle of honey from the center of the counter and drenched the top.

“Daisy. Daisy, you already had your breakfast.” The dog was weaving between the rungs of Lona's stool, looking for scraps. “My fault,” the woman said. “The trainer always tells me feeding her table scraps makes her beg, but I do it anyway.”

“Should I just ignore her, or—” The dog was dancing on its hind legs, eyes glued to Lona's plate.

“Just ignore her. Dammit,
Daisy
. You bad dog. Unless you want to give her a treat, and then you'll have a friend for life.”

“Hi, Daisy,” Lona said to the dog. “Hi, Dais—”

“Keep your head up, Ned.”

The black and white ball in front of her was huge. It went almost up to her knees, covered in pentagons and hexagons. She stuck her tongue out in concentration, balanced on her right foot and drew her left one back. The ball disappeared from in front of her.

“Warned you to keep your head up, Ned.” Her dad was dribbling the ball away from her, down the length of the courtyard. “Ball won't go anywhere on its own. You don't have to worry about what the ball's doing. You have to worry about what your opponents are doing.” He weaved the ball between his feet; she could barely follow the blur. Then there was another blur – a black and tan and furry one.

“Daisy!” her father shouted. “Daisy, get out of the – dammit, Daisy.”

The sliding door behind him opened. Her mother, holding a book in her hand, her glasses propped on the top of her head.

“Jeremy, what are you doing?” she called. Daisy clamped the ball in her jaws and trotted it through the grass; Jeremy dived after her and missed. “Daisy, come here,” Maggie ordered. “Daisy – Jeremy, she's in the Pydnowskis' garden again. Get her over here and I'll put her—”

“Did you want some more coffee?” The clerk swished the coffeepot back and forth. “Woo-hoo. Hon? Coffee?”

“What happened?” Lona gasped. The counter was swaying in front of her; she slammed her palms down, trying to keep steady.

“Someone just walk over your grave?” the clerk asked knowingly, then swished the pot again. “Coffee?”

“No. No thanks. I need to – thanks anyway.” She pulled a ten-dollar bill out of her pocket and dropped it on the counter, lurching off the stool, groping blindly for the swinging door.

“Change, hon? Do you want your—”

A sheet of water hit her as she opened the door. The dampness had turned to pouring rain. She dived into the car, shaking in her wet clothes, out of anger and cold and fear.

“A gas station.” She said the words out loud so she could hear them and they would be real. “You are Lona Seventeen Always. You are not in a courtyard playing soccer. You are in the parking lot of a gas station.” Her teeth were chattering, and hearing the way her voice shook scared her even more.

She jumped at the sound of a knock on the car window. The woman from the counter was standing outside, wrapped in a plastic raincoat, waving a five-dollar bill. “Change?” she yelled. “Hon, are you okay?”

Lona shook her head, without rolling down the window. No, she wasn't okay. She pulled her seatbelt over her shoulder and skidded out of the parking lot, leaving the woman behind, her raincoat flapping around her knees.

This wasn't fair. This had changed the game. Lona had done everything. She had submitted completely to this Path. She had subjected herself to the same dream, over and over again – she could draw a scrupulously detailed map of that lab with her eyes closed. And now, after all of that – after all of that, why would she suddenly have a different vision? One from decades ago? One from when her mother was a child?
Why would she dream that
? Every time it seemed like she'd found solid ground, it was taken out from under her.

Her phone rang. Julian. It took her three tries to answer it, and when she finally did, she had to keep her elbow pressed against the window to steady herself enough to hold the phone.

“Where are you?” Julian asked. He sounded energized, full of coffee. “I just passed an exit for Fernwood Road, and I'm driving past this dump of a gas station with a big muffin in the window.”

“That's where I am,” she choked out. “I'm pulling out of that parking lot. I'll follow you.”

“Lona, are you okay?” It was raining hard. She had to fight to hear him over the noise of nails hammering against the roof of her car.

“I'm fine.” Her hands were shaking worse than Fenn's had been outside of the Josephine Kennedy center.

“You don't sound okay. The roads are really slippery out now – don't drive if you're—”

She thought she could already see his car, the familiar square tail lights of his rusty green van, several traffic stops ahead. The light in front of her was about to turn red, she pressed down the accelerator to make it through in time and felt the car skid to the right, hydroplaning across the blanket of water. The wheel spun in her hand and the car behind her honked; she saw the terrified faces of its passengers just inches away.

“I'm fine, Julian,” she said, when she managed to get control of the car. He must have seen her in his rearview mirror; he would be angry with her for driving recklessly. “Julian?” she said again. No answer. Bad weather must have wrecked the signal. The phone rang again a split second later.

“I drive better with two hands,” she testily answered the phone. “If you don't want me to get in an accident, don't call me.”

“Lona?”

It wasn't Julian. It was Maggie Croft again.
I just saw you,
she wanted to say.
I just saw you forty years younger and achingly pretty, chasing after an unruly dog
.

“Maggie.” She couldn't think of anything else to say.

“It sounds like you're driving, dear – I don't want to distract you. I just realized that when I called you earlier I forgot to give you our address. You know, in case you wanted to pick up the hat. I'll be around all day except for that doctor's appointment. We live at three-oh-one Dogwood Court, which is just off—”

“Maggie, I already have your address. Remember? I came to your house.”

“Of course you have. Where is my head? I do hope you'll come by.”

“Wait, though – Maggie, that's not your address.”

“What?”

“Whatever you just told me. Don't you live on a street called Sycamore?”

Maggie burst out laughing. “Ever since you visited, it's like my brain keeps getting stuck in forty years ago. I hadn't thought about the past in so long – you must have jostled something. Our real address, as you know, is eight-thirty-two Sycamore.”

“What was that other address?” she asked. The rain drummed on the roof of her car; she had to shout to hear herself. “Maggie? Maggie! What was that other address?”

“Oh, it's silly,” Maggie clucked. “When Zinedine was born, Jeremy was still getting his PhD. We lived in married student apartments until she was in kindergarten. Dogwood Court. It's funny. I hadn't thought of that place in years. It was horrible – linoleum floors, and the neighbors were these rude people who were completely maniacal about their garden.”

Lona had finally caught up to Julian at the next traffic light. He turned to his left and he saw her, shaking his head in frustration, pointing up toward the sky.
Don't drive crazy in the rain
. But then crossed his eyes and stuck his tongue out, trying to make her laugh. He must not be able to see she was on the phone.

“Lona? Are you still there?”

“I'm here.”

“Do you think you'll come over? You'd be welcome to stay for dinner.”

Julian jabbed his index finger toward the front of the car twice, then to the side
. Through two more traffic lights, then turn right.
He raised his eyebrows, making sure she'd understood.

“I can't come today, Maggie.” Her voice sounded hollow, like it was coming from someone else, somewhere far away. “I have somewhere important to be.”

She hung up the phone. The light changed. And then Julian went straight through the green light and she did a U-turn left, coming back in the direction she'd just come from, hearing the whir of her turning tires on the wet asphalt.

Calm. A calm had washed over her, had seeped from her toes to her scalp, like sliding into a warm pool.

She should have been scared. She had been scared almost every day since the first morning she woke up after having that dream. But she wasn't now. Every mile marker she passed, another coil of tension in her body seemed to unravel itself. Not because she was sure that what waited for her was a happy ending. But because she was sure it was an ending. Now it didn't feel peaceful so much as it felt inevitable. This was the final destination.

On the seat next to her, her phone rang. She didn't have to look to know that it would be Julian again, the seventh time he'd called. Maybe the eighth. She hadn't listened to any of the messages, which would be confused and then mad and then worried. He might offer to come and meet her. She didn't want him to, though – his company made sense when she was going to the lab. That was a place that belonged to both of them. This wasn't. This place was in her past alone.

The apartment complex was made of yellow brick. She had thought it would look abandoned, the way the old lab had in its pictures. It didn't. There were no flowers planted around the perimeter of the courtyard, the way there had been in the dream, but the grass was neatly mowed and none of the windows were broken. The building itself was shaped like a U, with three separate entrances, one on each side. In the middle, in the grassy area, there was a swingset and a cluster of picnic tables.

Zinedine had a birthday with a piñata by those picnic tables. Maggie made it out of pâpier mâché and hung it from a tree; the glue she used was too strong for the children's wiffle bat to break, and Jeremy eventually had to bust it open with a tire iron.

How did she know this? Memories that didn't belong to her, that had never appeared in one of her visions, were flooding her consciousness. As if they had always been there. As if they were just waiting for the right sensory memories to activate them again.

There were no signs – nothing identifying this as Dogwood Court
. That's because it's not anymore
, she realized. It couldn't be. The parking lot had spaces for at least fifty cars, but there were only a few others in the lot when she pulled in. And the apartments themselves – there were no bicycles on the balcony, or flower pots or hibachi grills.

For the first time in an hour, she hesitated. This still felt right, in her bones. But how was she supposed to get to the next step? Was she supposed to go in the main entrance, and walk down the hall, to the back, to Zinedine's old apartment? Was she supposed to stand in the courtyard and yell, “Mom?”

The rain had slowed to a drizzle. She parked the car in the spot closest to a bank of communal mailboxes and got out.
Where Jeremy used to park. Where he used to park and get the mail and complain when the Pydnowskis' catalogs were delivered to them instead.
The mailboxes were empty now. The door had fallen off one; some kind of bird had built its nest inside. Clever bird, where it was dry and warm. Her phone rang again. She pressed ignore, and tucked it in the zippered pocket of Fenn's shirt, where her fingers brushed against something cold and metallic.
What was that?
She pulled out the object – a silver cigarette lighter. But Fenn didn't smoke. She reached in the pocket again, and this time she felt something waxy and cylindrical. A small green candle, half-melted. The lighter he'd used for Lona's birthday cake, and he'd saved a candle.

Her heart pierced. How was it possible they'd celebrated her birthday less than a month ago? She tucked it and the lighter back in the pocket, zipping it shut for safekeeping. It hurt to know they were there, but it soothed at the same time, to have a piece of him along.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a flicker of motion. Someone was standing behind the main entrance door along the left side of the building. Too far away to tell anything about them, except that the person's build was slender. Zinedine? Would Zinedine be waiting for her? Did she know Lona was here? She had another thought:
Could Zinedine see what she saw
?

Is that why the Path had grown so much stronger since she met Maggie and Jeremy? Was it because the closer she got to Zinedine, the wider she opened the door for Zinedine to come in?

The figure in the doorway had seen her. It was waving. She squinted.

“Lona!”

The voice knew her name.

“Lona Seventeen Always!”

The voice knew her full name. And she knew the voice.

Her phone was ringing again. She turned it off.

“Harm,” she said. “It's been a long time.”