Erik woke in a meadow, a high mountain meadow, and found he’d been napping on a bed of bright wildflowers. All around, majestic and grand, rocky peaks reached toward the sky, still capped with the last of winter’s white. The sky itself was the pure, sweet blue of Becca’s eyes.
It took him an extra moment to realize that the meadow was one he’d created in his own mind, the meadow in the painting he hadn’t quite finished yet.
So strange, that he should fall asleep and wake here, in this beautiful place he’d made up himself.
A little too strange, really.
Erik shrugged and got to his feet. Best not to examine any of this too closely, he decided.
So he breathed deeply of the fresh, clear air and basked in the feel of the sun shining down, warm and good, on his upturned face.
“Erik?”
Erik’s heart bounced into his throat when he heard her voice. He spun around.
She was there, poised on the edge of the meadow, silhouetted against the rugged peaks and the blue, blue sky.
“Erik?” This time the word had a plaintive sound.
Still, he didn’t answer her. He stared at her, feeling hurt and angry. Deserted. Betrayed. She’d sworn never to leave him. And yet, where was she now?
She seemed to know his thoughts. At least, she answered them. “Please. Try to understand. I didn’t want to leave you. I swear to you. I had no choice.” Hesitantly she approached, her hands outstretched. “Erik, please…”
He looked her up and down. He knew what he wanted. He made his demand. “I’ll have those secrets now. All of them.”
She dropped her hands. “You sound…so strange.”
“I’m angry. And afraid. I don’t know where you are. And besides…”
“What?”
“This is only a dream.”
He felt cruel somehow, saying the truth right out loud like that. And more so, when she backed up a step.
“Don’t say that. Let’s pretend, please? Let’s pretend that it’s real.”
He shook his head, not feeling he could allow that lie. “But it isn’t real, Evangeline.”
She fell back a second step. “How did you know that name?”
Then he felt more sad than angry. “I always knew. Since that day in your shop, when I touched you. And everything changed. You remember that day.”
“Oh, yes. I do. I’ll never forget it.”
“Good.” Impatience rose in him. “The secrets, then.”
Even here, in this dream place, she hesitated to tell him. “What good will it do, to tell you now?”
He shook his head, aware by some means he couldn’t explain that somewhere, in a windowless locked room, a fevered woman slept fitfully, racked by chills. “This might be the only chance you’ll get to tell me the truth.”
She knew what he meant. “Yes,” she said, then added, “but will it do any good? Will you remember? Will it be real to you?”
“Probably not. But do it anyway.”
“It does feel as if it will matter. And there’s that old cliché, isn’t there? About confession being good for the soul. Do you think it counts, even in dreams?”
He asked, “Are you stalling?”
She looked down at the wild grasses that grew at their feet. “Yes. I guess I am.”
“Stop it, then. Tell me.”
“What?”
“Everything.”
She looked up and smiled, a beautiful, shy smile. Then she asked, with great formality, “Won’t you sit in the flowers with me?”
He thought about that. There seemed no harm in it. “Yes. All right.”
She reached out her hand.
His remained at his side. He looked down at it, wondering why he couldn’t extend it to her. Then it came to him. Dreams were so tricky. They had their own rules.
He told her, “Here, we can’t touch.”
The longing in her eyes cut him like the sharpest of knives. “I see.” She dropped her arm. “This way, then.”
She led him to where the flowers grew thickest, then she sat. He followed suit. They looked at each other.
The silence grew painful. At last, she confessed, “I don’t know…how to begin.”
He considered for a moment. “Start when you were little, after your mother died.”
“All right. If that’s what you want.”
He leaned back, half reclining on an elbow among the fragile flowers, and stretched his legs in their worn jeans out toward her.
She sighed as she watched him. “Oh, Erik. It’s so hard to believe this is only a dream. You seem so big and solid and real.” In her eyes, desire moved.
He responded to it, as he always had. He wanted nothing so much as to grab her and hold her, to cover her sweet mouth with his own. He tried to keep to the point. “You’re stalling again.”
“No. Listen. I want you to know.”
“What?”
“Whatever happens, to have known your love has made all the difference to me. To have met you at last. It’s made every lonely year worth living through…”
“Talk,” he said, more gruffly than he should have.
“Yes. Of course. I will.”
Yet still, she didn’t speak for a moment. He sensed he shouldn’t push her again right then, so he made himself wait until she could bring herself to begin the old story. As the seconds spun out, he found it unbearably painful, that he couldn’t reach out and touch her. He had to do something. So he picked a yellow buttercup and rolled the stem between his thumb and forefinger.
At last, she spoke. “After our mother died, we—Nevada and Faith and I—lived with our father, Gideon. It was a rough life.”
He chose a purple lupin. “You told me that.” He felt her watching him as he picked more flowers, bleeding hearts and columbines and Queen Anne’s lace, adding each one to the wild bouquet in his hand.
It came to him that she’d fallen silent again. He glanced up from the flowers. “Keep going.”
“Yes. All right.” She took in a breath and went on. “Gideon never seemed to make a go of anything. He worked odd jobs, when he could get them. And he gambled away most of his paychecks at cards. Sometimes he’d come up with wild money-making schemes. But none of them ever amounted to anything. We slept in his car a lot of the time, and we’d clean up at public rest rooms, and eat whatever he could scrape together for us. It seemed we were always hungry. And always moving west.”
“From where you’d lived with your mother?”
“Yes. We started out in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where my mother’s house was. And by the time I was ten, we were in Los Angeles.”
“Five years of wandering.”
“Yes.”
“And then?”
“Then…things changed.”
“Why?”
“Because of me.”
“Explain.”
“Because I…had an accident. In a public pool.”
“What kind of accident?”
“A fatal one.”
He looked up from the flowers then and right into her huge, soft eyes. He couldn’t quite take in what she’d said. It had made no sense, even in this strange dream world. “Fatal means you died.”
She closed her eyes then, and breathed deeply.
He saw again a cold, dank room. And he saw Evie, a prisoner there, shivering on a narrow bed.
She seemed to see what he saw. She whispered, her eyes still shut, “Tell me that this is real. You and me. Here in this meadow I’ve never seen in my life except in that picture of yours.”
But he couldn’t tell her that. That would have been a lie. He remembered the swimming pool. He wanted to get to the truth about that. “Evie. Go back. What did you say? You said afatal accident.”
With some effort, she opened her eyes and looked at him. “I’m saying I died. And came back to life. And when I came back, I was…different than before.”