Exit Light (29 page)

“Jesus, Tovah! Do you think I’m an idiot? Is that what you think?” He turned, the blue of his eyes only a rim of color around the vast dark circles of his pupils. “Dreams?”

She couldn’t get out of the car gracefully, but she struggled to do it anyway. Now it was her turn to grip the car door for support. Martin had turned, his hands linking behind his head like a man trying not to hit something.

“No, I don’t think that! I never did. I told you it was complicated.”

“And crazy!” Martin turned.

Tovah caught a glimpse of blue shirt beneath the black wool coat and swallowed hard against the memory of seeing him for the first time. She didn’t refute his accusation of insanity.

“You think I don’t know crazy?” Martin continued. “I’m a fucking psychiatrist, for fuck’s sake!”

She’d never heard him swear, had never imagined such vulgarity from him. “I know that.”

He whirled to look at her. He raked both hands through his hair, pushing the waves into spikes the wind further mussed. For a moment he pressed both palms to his temples, his teeth gritted, the perfect portrait of a man in pain. Then he took them away and shook himself, cracking his neck and rolling his shoulders.

“Tell me,” he said.

She couldn’t tell him the truth. Not the exact truth. “Henry was teaching me about lucid dreaming and…and astral projection. Out-of-body experiences.”

It wasn’t quite a lie.

Martin stared. A fierce grin slashed his face and he turned from her again. “Astral projection. Very New Age.”

“That’s a funny sort of attitude from you,” she snapped. “What makes that different from Healing Touch or whatever the hell you were trying with him?”

“The results of Healing Touch and guided imagery can be medically and statistically proven.” Martin’s scowl was pure heat but did nothing to warm her.

Anger prompted her to tell him everything, all about the Ephemeros, but common sense held her back. Her stomach clutched, and she had to swallow hard against her retort. She wasn’t really angry with Martin.

“So you convinced me to give you drugs—you convinced me to give you a controlled substance, an action that could have cost me my job, not to mention my license! And for what?” Martin sneered. “Some half-assed foray into a bunch of metaphysical bullshit that did nothing? Nothing!”

“What did you really think I was doing?” she shouted, wanting to advance on him but hanging on to the car door, instead. Keeping it between them. “Why’d you give me the drugs, then, Martin? What the hell did you think I was going to do?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Then why are you so angry with me?” she cried around the tears forcing their way up her throat like bile.

“Because you told me to trust you, and I did,” Martin said. “And Henry still died, dammit. And you won’t tell me the truth.”

“Martin—”

He tossed up his hands, pushing her away without touching her. He went back to his car and got behind the wheel.

“Martin!”

He turned, saying nothing.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, not sure he could even hear her over the winter breeze.

“Go back to sleep,” Martin said, and slammed his car door and drove away.

Tovah took the long way home. Backcountry roads fell quickly to darkness and she took them without the anxiety that would have plagued her in past months. Husked cornfields and empty cow pastures followed her on every side, but though she tried to get lost, eventually she found herself on a state road she recognized.

Pulling into her driveway, fingers numb from gripping the wheel, she looked at her house. A single light burned in the kitchen, lit for Max’s benefit. He would need to go out. Be fed. She couldn’t forget about her faithful friend, no matter how much she wanted to forget about everything else.

Once fed and returned from the yard, though, Max ignored her and went to sleep. The night wore on and Tovah found no solace in it. Nothing held her attention. She got up to get herself a drink of water she didn’t want and looked across the yard she shared with Martin.

His light was on, as it usually was. She could see his outline as he stood at his sink, too. The shadow blurred as he moved away.

It was late, but she could not sleep. She didn’t want to. Tovah dumped the water into the sink and watched it swirl down the drain. She set the glass on the drainer.

Martin’s light was still on.

Martin was a good man. It wasn’t fair, the way things had worked out between them. How having a choice had led her to put aside something that could be good, something right in front of her, to once again choose the slippery and ephemeral substance of dreams. She had learned a lesson, probably too late, but that didn’t stop her from shrugging into her coat again.

Martin had been there for her in a way she’d never allowed anyone else to be. He’d seen everything about her, the real her, not some representation. Martin had laughed with her, shared himself, opened up. Martin was a good man, and if nothing else she owed him an apology.

She did not allow herself to hesitate when rapping at the french door leading to his kitchen. From inside she heard the scrape of chair legs on the floor. The curtain didn’t even twitch before the lock snicked and the door edged open.

“Hi,” she said. “Can I come in?”

Silently, Martin nodded and held open the door for her. Also silently, he kicked aside a rag-tied throw rug that was in her path. His kitchen was warm, the cold air from outside still swirling around her, and he shut the door quickly behind her.

Tovah hadn’t been in this house since Martin moved in. The previous owners had decorated it with country blue walls and red apple accessories, but he’d painted the walls stark white. A series of black-framed black-and-white photos adorned the wall and matched the black appliances.

She wasn’t here to admire his interior decorating.

“I have something to tell you,” she said.

Martin nodded and gestured for her to sit. And there, at his bare white kitchen table, Tovah told him all of it. About her accident, the depression, how she met Henry and what he had told her. About the Ephemeros, and what she could do there. She told him about the past few months and the destruction that had threatened that world, and her part in it. Of her dream lover and all his pieces, and why she’d needed so desperately to get to sleep the night Henry’d died. She talked for a long time without a break or a word from him.

“I know it’s a crazy story,” she said at last, her throat dry from talking. “You must think I’m insane.”

Martin gave his head the barest shake. “I told you, Tovah. I know crazy.”

His slow, easy smile made everything seem a whole lot better.

“I’m sorry, Martin. For everything. I really like you.”

“I really like you, too.”

They stared across the table.

“Do you think you’ll ever be able to get back there?” Martin asked her seriously. “To the Ephemeros?”

“Everyone gets there,” she said.

He nodded. “But do you think you’ll be able to…what did you call it? Shape? Do you think you’ll ever be a shaper again?”

That question needed more thought before answering, but Tovah was weary of thinking on it. “I don’t know.”

Martin nodded again, his face solemn. He reached for her hand and took it, cradling it palm up in his own. His fingers traced the lines there. His touch tickled, but she didn’t pull away.

He didn’t look at her at first, but when he did, his gaze was intent. “Do you want to?”

Tovah closed her fingers around his. “Dreams aren’t real.”

He lifted her fingertips to his mouth. “No, sweetheart. That’s where you’re wrong.”

They stared at each other. It was not the first time she’d catalogued Martin’s features or noted the blue of his eyes. Tovah remembered his kiss, and the times he’d seemed so uncomfortable in his skin, only to turn up with confidence a short time later. She remembered the way the grandfather clock had marked the time as Martin’s mouth had pressed hers.

How the patients calmed around him.

How the road had stretched out while she dreamed.

How his mouth and hands had felt on her, how tenderly he’d cared for her wound, how he’d been there when she woke, screaming.

And how the patients calmed around him.

“Martin,” she said. “When’s the last time you dreamed?”

His fingers tightened on hers, not quite painfully but promising it. “I told you, didn’t I? I don’t dream.”

Tovah closed her eyes. “Oh, Martin.”

“You can call me Edward, if you like that better. Martin’s my middle name. I was named for my grandfather. I use it now because I don’t like people to know I’m Eddie Goodfellow. The story was in a lot of papers. On the news. Once they know that, they think they know me.”

She opened her eyes.

Beneath her feet, the meadow. The stream that was always Ben’s and never hers. Spider’s flowers. All of it, there in Martin’s kitchen. She hadn’t shaped this because they weren’t in the Ephemeros. They weren’t asleep.

“How?” she asked simply.

Martin shrugged and looked at their linked fingers. “I was eight when they took me. Angie and Stan. They stopped me when I left the playground. Told me my parents had sent them to pick me up from school. That my grandpa had to go to the hospital, and they were going to take me there. To meet my mom and dad.”

He looked at her, then, blue eyes glittering with tears that didn’t slip down his cheeks. “I knew I wasn’t supposed to go. But…Angie knew the safe word. The one my mom had told me she’d give anyone who came for me, so I’d know it was okay.”

Slowly, slowly, Martin’s kitchen disappeared and became the swirling gray of the Ephemeros. “How are you doing this?”

He let go of her hand and got up. The table disappeared, though she still sat in the hard-backed chair. Martin paced. He scraped a hand over his hair, rumpling it. He stopped and shot her a look.

“Sleep’s a funny thing, you know? An average person can survive up to six weeks without food. Maybe a week without water. But you know how many days you can go without sleep before it starts to kill you? Four days. That’s when the hallucinations start. In studies, sleep-deprived rats have died after a month. Humans take less than half that time to lose their fucking minds.”

“How long has it been since you slept?”

“They did things to me when I slept,” Martin said in a voice so broken it broke her, too.

“How long, Martin?”

“Long enough.” His shoulders slumped, then straightened.

Mountains grew and lightning flashed. Thunder boomed, rolling across the meadow. Martin tipped his face to the sky, eyes closed and mouth open, arms outstretched, as the rain began to fall.

It didn’t touch her. Tovah, on her chair, stayed dry. Her heart didn’t need to beat, her breath come short in fear—did it? Were they here, or were they there?

“It’s how you helped them all, isn’t it? Your patients? You shaped them into calm.”

He looked at her and swallowed a mouthful of rain. “I helped them!”

“But what about all the people you hurt, too?” She didn’t raise her voice, didn’t accuse.

He shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Edward hadn’t known he was the boy, the dogman and the woman. Not for a long time. “You’re kidding me, right?”

He looked at her. “You’re the first person I’ve ever met who I thought would understand…me. Who might understand. I wouldn’t joke about that.”

Her stomach dropped. Tovah stood, still with only one sound leg. Martin had shaped a lot of things, but he hadn’t shaped her whole. Only she would think to do that.

So she did, sending out her will and making what she needed happen.

“Martin, look at me.”

He did.

Tovah stepped toward him. She took his hand in hers and held it tight. When she kissed him, it was not because of the man he’d been, but the one she’d wished he was.

“There is something you should know,” she told him gently.

She shaped the truth. It was hard, here, but she pushed until the world around them started to change. She shaped what she remembered of the haven she’d created for Eddie, and what she could remember of what she knew.

“What?” Martin looked down at her. His face didn’t change. “What is it?”

She touched his face and closed her eyes against tears she didn’t want to shape away. She looked at him, though, determined not to be a coward when it came to this. “That man I told you about. The one from my dreams?”

“The one who tried to break the…what did you call it?”

“The Ephemeros. The dream world. Yes, him.”

“What about him?”

Tovah took both Martin’s hands and held them tight. Tighter. “His name was Edward.”

“No.” Martin tried to jerk away but Tovah held him tight.

It was impossible; she couldn’t be strong enough for this. Not to keep him. Not to hold him. But the harder he pulled, the tighter her grip got.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “But you’re too dangerous, Martin. Do you know that?”

“No!” He yanked, and when that didn’t work, swept her legs from under her with his.

They fell to hard earth, jagged with stones. This was not soft grass, or even his kitchen floor. And he was not creating this.

At first, no matter how hard he’d tried, he couldn’t stay awake. He knew now they’d drugged him, but back then all he’d known was he was too hungry not to drink the milk they brought. But the longer they kept him, the harder he tried to keep his eyes from closing.

Until one day it had worked.

He didn’t sleep. He didn’t dream. And Martin—Eddie, then, not Edward unless he was in trouble—had discovered something else.

He could make things happen.

Good things. Bad things, too. Some very bad things had happened to Angie and Stan and he’d done them. He’d put the blood on his small hands. Blood that wouldn’t come off no matter how often he washed, or what soap he used. Or bleach.

“I’m sorry,” Tovah said again from underneath him this time, Martin covering her body like the lovers they’d never become. “But you can’t do this, any more.”

He looked up and cried out in terror and disgust. “Not the house!”

The white rancher, unmown grass. The basement. That was where they’d taken him. Kept him. Hurt him.

Somehow he and Tovah were on their feet again, and she was walking with him toward the front door. Martin held back, but she had an inexorable strength and though she was so much smaller, she was much, much stronger.

“Please,” he said as the basement formed around them. “Please, not this.”

She still held tight to his hands but her voice softened. A shadow peeled away from the walls. Small. The shape of a boy.

“Don’t you understand?” Tovah whispered. “I’m not the one doing this, Martin. It’s you.”

He wept, then, and fell to his knees and she let him go. Her hand stroked softly on his hair. She knelt beside him. She smelled of lavender and sunshine. Martin buried his face in his hands.

“And it doesn’t have to be this place,” she said. “Shape yourself a haven, Martin. And let yourself dream.”

He looked up at her then. “No.”

“You have to.”

“I said no.” She was stronger, but this was not her world.

It was his.

Martin got to his feet. “I thought I told you to go back to sleep.”

He didn’t need to use his hands to push her. Tovah stumbled back, her leg going out from under her. He didn’t like to hear her cry of pain but it was necessary.

“Don’t do this!” she cried.

“I have to,” he told her.

Tovah struggled to get up, a feat he knew would be nearly impossible given that her leg was now again missing from the knee down. He’d done that. Guilt pricked him, but when he looked past her shoulder and saw those stone walls, when he smelled the scent of burning, he knew he couldn’t do what she said.

“I killed them both,” he told her in a tight, hard voice that scraped his throat raw. “And then I burned the house down.”

Weeping, she cupped her leg and rocked against what must’ve been intense pain. “You were a boy, Martin.”

He looked down at her. “You might as well call me Edward. It’s what you want to call me, isn’t it? It’s who you want me to be.”

“No.” She shook her head. “I don’t.”

But he didn’t believe her. “Once anyone ever found out who I was, that’s all they cared about. All they thought they knew. I’ve spent my entire life trying not to be that boy, Tovah!”

She closed her eyes and incredibly, he felt the steady push of her will against his. He watched her body change, watched her get to her feet. Both feet. She stood steady and strong, tears streaking her cheeks but her fists clenched.

“Then stop being that boy! Stop doing these things.”

The truth ripped from him. “I don’t know if I can.”

“Then let me help you!”

He backed away from her touch, not trusting her. “No.”

“Martin.” Tovah said his name with such sweetness, such gentleness…such love…he knew her mouth had to be full of lies. “Then let me stop you.”

He didn’t need his hands to make things happen, but he put them up anyway. Mountains of glass and razors surged from the earth around them. The ground turned to black sand. A far-off wind howled like an angry, unfed dog. He had power. He could make things happen.

Bad things.

He dropped to his knees again, in front of her, and put his hands to the soft black sand. He put his forehead to it, too, and his mouth. It coated his lips, gritty and harsh. “I am so tired.”