—Joanna gasped and dropped two plastic bottles of skin-care products that she had been about to put into the makeup case. As they clattered onto the floor and rolled away from her, she realized she was standing in the bathroom, in her sleepwear. In the mirror she saw the open door behind her. She half expected her mother to follow her out of the dream, but no one appeared in the doorway.
Bewildered, gazing at the contents of the open makeup case—mascara, brushes, Q-tips, and more—she slowly realized that at some point she had gotten out of bed and, still dreaming on her feet, had begun to pack. Suitcases. In the dream, two suitcases had stood alongside the deer path as she had run after the buck and doe.
Vertigo afflicted her, and she leaned against the vanity until the brief spell of disorientation passed.
In the bedroom, the wheeled luggage stood by the armchair. The telescoping handles were at full length and locked in position. She tipped one bag onto its wheels and pulled it just far enough to be sure that it was heavy, fully loaded.
Joanna had no memory of preparing for travel. Never before had she walked in her sleep or experienced a fugue state of any kind. She couldn’t comprehend how she could have packed while lost in a dream. However, now she began to recall selecting items of clothing and precisely folding them to fit in the suitcases.
As she had dreamed, her heart had beat double time. It didn’t slow now that she walked the world awake. Her horror at not having been fully in control of herself frightened her no less than had the specter of her drowned mother.
The bedside clock read 12:32 a.m. She’d slept only a few hours.
Approaching the TV, she was aware of her pulse pounding in her throat and in her temples. Soft ashen light filled the screen, much like what she thought she’d seen on nights when she’d half awakened from a dream only to be drawn quickly back into it. Previously, the pale glow seemed to be the light of a dead channel, but it was not that, after all. No slightest fleck of static marred the smooth gray light, and no number glowed in the channel indicator.
She felt . . . observed.
The conviction grew that she’d been manipulated in her sleep by some technology—or entity—beyond her comprehension. If the dreams of the past few weeks had welled up from the unfathomed depths of her subconscious, they had also at least in part been shaped and shaded by some strange power separate from herself. The dreams were as much a summons to Rustling Willows Ranch as were the phone calls from the unknown woman and the self-starting vehicles.
In her youth, the path of her life had been changed by tragedy, by the loss of love. Perhaps because of those losses, as an adult Joanna had often chosen solitude, loneliness, over the satisfactions of companionship, which had the benefit of forcing her to be self-sufficient. She addressed problems without equivocation. Loneliness had other advantages; it provided time for self-reflection and for the exercise of the imagination, always of value to a novelist. Long lonely nights also facilitated the development of the recognition that the world was riddled with mysteries and floating in a sea of hidden meaning as surely as it revolved around the sun. She believed in pursuing the truth of things rather than living in the pleasure of ignorance, and never before had a mystery as abstruse as this challenged her.
If anything about her life to date had been markedly different from what in fact it had been, she might have pulled the plug on the TV and lied to herself about what had happened, might have mummified her memory in wrappings of denial. Or she might have called for an appointment with a physician to be tested for a brain tumor, might even have sought the services of a psychiatrist.
However, being who she was, she did not—could not—pull the plug, but moved closer to the television to touch that rectangular electronic eye. Although her heart still labored and tremors shook her, she demanded, “Who are you? What are you?”
The quality of the light failed to change, and the perfect silence of the set endured.
She waited, but not for long.
In the bathroom once more, Joanna picked up the two dropped bottles of skin-care products and tucked them into the makeup case. She closed the lid and snapped the latches shut.
After putting the case beside the wheeled bags that stood next to the armchair, she took a quick shower and dressed. She booked an early flight to Denver and a connecting flight to Billings, Montana.
Waiting for dawn, which was still hours away, eating breakfast at the kitchen table, she thought about Jimmy Alvarez, Jimmy Two Eyes. Katherine’s description of the boy hadn’t pierced Joanna’s armored memory; but when he appeared in the dream, in the orchard, she remembered him at once. When he’d spoken, she recognized his rough voice and knew he had talked to her often during their years together on the ranch, only to her when they were alone, so that no one but she knew he was capable of speech. Her recollections didn’t return in a flood; she remembered nothing more than Jimmy’s face, his voice—and that he was in some strange way her secret friend.