The men’s voices grew more distant. The front door closed with a thud.
In the ensuing quiet, here at the back of the house, the click-click-click of the windmill rotor reminded Joanna of the pegs on a casino wheel of fortune ticking past the pointer that would decide the value of the gambler’s bet.
She waited for Jimmy to speak first. When he remained silent, she said, “In my dream, you said you were in a dark place, lost.”
He didn’t reply. The pupil of his blue eye was open wide to bring in what meager lamplight the shadowed room provided. It seemed as though it was not merely a pupil but also a black hole with the intense gravitational field of a collapsed star, into which she might be drawn helplessly, until she found herself having traveled out of this universe into one far stranger.
She didn’t like the tremor in her voice when she said, “In the dream, you said, ‘Please come and help me.’ And now I’m here.”
Within her enveloping two hands, his hand curled into a fist, but still he failed to speak.
“The phone call that I received . . . the voice was that of a woman. She called me Jojo and said she was spiraling into Bedlam. She said, ‘Please come and help me.’ Is she someone you know, Jimmy?”
He had ceased to blink, his eyes steady and standing open like those of a dead man, though still he breathed.
“In the dream, when we were in the apple orchard, you also said, ‘The terrible big dark sky.’ The woman on the phone used those same words, and that was not a dream.”
The breeze swelled against the walls of the house. From the becoming wind, the wooden vanes of the mill strained a thin lonesome sound, and the rotor clicked more rapidly than before.
Joanna changed tack. “All those years ago, Jimmy, to delight me, you somehow controlled all the creatures of nature, the birds and squirrels and rabbits, the deer and coyotes, the wolves and bears. You’re some kind of—I don’t know—some kind of savant, psychic, something. For a few special years, my childhood was a fantasy. I was a ruling princess of everything that lived in the forest and the fields—but it was real.”
His pale tongue licked the thin lips of his freakishly wide mouth, though it brought forth no words.
“It was real,” she repeated. “But I was made to repress all memories of it. Did you take those memories from me?”
Outside, an engine turned over. The Studebaker pickup.
“Did you restore my memories so that I’d come back here?”
He said nothing.
“The elk were you. You sent the elk to welcome me. It’s crazy, but it must have been you.”
The sound of the engine receded. They seemed to be taking the pickup for a spin. Maybe Hector was letting Wyatt drive.
Joanna leaned closer to Jimmy. “Mi hermano. Querido hermano. Please talk to me now as you did when we were so young.”
He wrenched his fist from between her clasping hands, and at last he spoke in the guttural voice—almost a bestial growl—that she had heard in the dream. “You’ve changed, Jojo. You’re not the same.”
A chill—part exhilaration and part disquiet, wonder married to fear, occasioned by hearing him other than in a dream—shot up her spine and stippled the nape of her neck with gooseflesh. She understood his words to be a gentle complaint that she had for so long abandoned him.
“I would have come to see you if I’d known you were here, but until the dream last night, I had no memory of us. You must know I had no memory.”
Sudden tears welled in his eyes and spilled down his cheeks. “You’re not the same,” he repeated.
“I’m older, as are you, dear one.”
He shook his head, and fierce emotion twisted his misassembled face into a greater strangeness. “You’re not the same, just not the same.” His wide mouth cracked open, a crescent of crooked teeth, and he hissed an accusation: “Innocence, innocence, you’ve lost your innocence!”
Taken aback by his passion, she rose from the footstool. “I’ve grown up, Jimmy. That’s all. I’m still me, still Jojo.”
In her purse, her cell phone rang.
Leaning forward in his armchair, Jimmy cried with anguish more than anger, but not without a trace of the latter, “Answer it!”
Hands trembling, she fished the phone from her purse. No caller ID. She took the call and recognized the voice of the woman who had phoned her more than once in Santa Fe.
“You’ve lost your innocence,” the caller said. “You’re filled with moral confusion, strange convictions, fears, and calculation. How can you save me if you can’t save yourself?”