Now, standing behind the bench, her hands on the back rail, she raised her voice to compete with the wind. “The thing that used Jimmy—it played along with my fantasies, in fact encouraged them. What did it get from that? What was its purpose? If we understood its purpose, we might figure out exactly what it is.”
Wyatt stood on the other side of the bench, worriedly surveying the turbulent darkness for something more threatening than elk.
Joanna expected no answer from him. She was speaking aloud to herself, trying to reach into the past to pry out the details of a half-recollected moment with Jimmy.
A summer day when she was eight years old. Deer led her into the forest, and a grizzly escorted her on an adventure through it, and the deer reappeared when the trees ended, leading her across a meadow to the orchard, where Jimmy waited.
They had spent hours together, for she’d known to bring a small picnic basket containing cupcakes and cookies and cans of Coca-Cola wrapped in cold packs. They talked and talked that day. Of all that had been said, only one line had teased her memory as she’d stood on the dock with Wyatt minutes ago: If I had found someone like you sooner, Jojo, I might have begun the awakening. Now she tried to dredge from her drowned memory the conversation that would put those words in a meaningful context.
More cloistered lightning throbbed repeatedly deep within the pending storm, pale flares fluttering through the orchard as if they were reflections from the wings of passing angels. The trees shook. As leaves were stripped from their limbs and shivered across the grass, Wyatt encouraged her to give this up and return to the house.
Then, in her mind’s eye, she saw the orchard as it had been on that windless day: sunshine streaming through an architecture of apple trees, the ground a webwork of golden light and purple shadow, the empty picnic basket on the bench between her and Jimmy. He had cupcake frosting on his chin, and she intended to wipe it off, but at the moment she was intrigued by what he was saying. Perhaps this wasn’t precisely what had been said back in the day, but instead the essence of it translated through fallible memory.
The rough voice that so entertained her through four years of her youth: “If I had found someone like you sooner, Jojo, I might have begun the awakening.”
“Waking who?”
“You might call him a prince.”
“A real prince?”
“Yes. He’s been sleeping a long time.”
“I like this story. This is a good story. You mean sleeping like under a spell?”
“Yes.”
“Like Sleeping Beauty, except he’s a boy?”
“He and his retinue.”
“His what?”
“His retainers, the closest servants of his court.”
“They’re all sleeping?”
“Yes. They’re all bespelled.”
“Why don’t you wake them?”
“If there had been more people like you, maybe I would have.”
“You want me to kiss them awake?”
“A kiss isn’t required. Only I have the power to wake them.”
“When will you?”
“Maybe never.”
“That doesn’t seem right. What kind of story is that?”
Jimmy was silent.
She said, “Are there dragons in this prince’s kingdom?”
“I don’t want to play this anymore,” he said.
“So are you a king?”
“Why would you think I am?”
“Because you have power over a prince.”
“I’m not a king. You wouldn’t understand what I am.”
“I’m not dumb, you know. Don’t say I’m dumb. I’d understand.”
“I told you I don’t want to play this anymore.”
“You started the story. Once you start a story, you have to make an end for it. That’s the rule.”
Memory was foiled when lightning cracked the sky, for the first time breaking from the conventical clouds, blazing down the night in jagged blades. Shadows leaped, and it seemed the apple trees jumped wildly to tear free of their roots. A crash of thunder came close behind the lightning, so powerful that the earth shook underfoot.
As Joanna had been lost in a long-ago summer day, listening to a conversation once forgotten, Wyatt had come around the bench. He grabbed her hand and shouted as though some threat other than the storm loomed—“Come on, hurry, don’t look back!”—and drew her from the orchard, onto the broad lawn, toward the house, at a run.
In spite of the detective’s admonition, Joanna did glance back when the darkness again relented to the pyrotechnics of the storm. If Wyatt had seen something, it was not there now. Nothing moved behind them except what the wind harried, and curtains of rain that were briefly turned to silver sleet in the flash of lightning.