“I thought boys didn’t like to see their girls dancing with other men,” I said when I came back to him after one dance, and he let go a belly laugh that all but knocked me off my feet.
“Darlin’, if they’ve got that much to worry about, I guess I wouldn’t like it, either, in their shoes.” He winked, then cast an exaggerated look toward the dance hall clock and lowered his head to say, “Your mama staying up waitin’ for you to come home at the stroke of midnight?”
I lifted my chin in a mixture of pride and offense. “I’m nineteen years old, Gary Muldoon, and in college. I can go home when I want.”
He gave me a grin that melted all the offense out of my expression, then caught my hand. A moment later we were in sweet-scented woods, Gary offering me his coat as I shivered. I slipped into it, feeling silly for leaving my own coat behind, though a tiny part of me knew I’d done it on purpose so I could huddle in the warmth left from his body. “I’m lost in here,” I protested in amusement, which was more true than I expected. Gary had height and breadth on me even as an septuagenarian. His younger self was wonderfully broad-shouldered.
“That’s whatcha get for leavin’ your coat inside,” Gary teased. “C’mon, this way.” He nodded ahead of us, taking my hand to lead me over a root-ridden forest pathway, an incline leading us to a bluff that looked over a night-black ocean. “They’re sendin’ me to Korea,” he said abruptly.
My heart caught, little white pulse of pain. “When?” Gary watched me out of the corner of his eye, as if afraid of my reaction. I’d let go of his hand, and mine were knotted together in the sleeves of his army jacket, worry tasting like copper at the back of my throat.
“I leave Saturday. You gonna wait for me, sweetheart?”
“Wait for you,” I said quietly. “What do you think I’ve been doing the past four months, Gary?”
Relief swept the big man’s expression and he turned all the way to me, hope bright in his eyes. “It ain’t much, but I wanted to…” He slid a hand into his front pocket and came out with a small black box. My heart caught again, a lurch so profound I wasn’t sure it would start again, and Gary gave me a funny crooked grin as I lifted my gaze to his. “It ain’t much,” he repeated, “but maybe it’s enough. I’ll getcha somethin’ better before we—well, will you? Will you marry me, Annie?” He opened the box and a soft golden glow sprang up from the ring within. I laughed, and touched the stone with a fingertip—
—and flinched awake in a surge of alarm that pushed sleep away. I could feel it consciously now, a pressing blackness trying to enter me more forcefully than it had Billy or Melinda. There, it had the sense of having all the time it needed. With me, it felt disturbed, as if my power drew it out of its usual languor and encouraged it to action. I jerked back from the river, shaking darkness from my skin, and put my hands against my mouth. I didn’t want to look at Gary. I was afraid I’d start crying, which would be impossible to explain.
“Jo?” Concern colored Gary’s voice and I bit my knuckles, eyes wide as I stared into the unblended water. “It’s what you think it is,” I whispered. “It wants to put you to sleep. Or me. I don’t know. It followed me in here. I’m sorry, Gary. I didn’t mean to do this. I just wanted to put a tingle on your heart to help it heal some more.”
“Jo,” he said again, the word more solid. “Darlin’, something’s stoppin’ it. What?”
“The…” I closed my eyes, the yellow chip of stone set into silver metal against a black box playing behind my eyelids. “The topaz,” I whispered. “I think it’s the topaz. It woke me up.”
“Woke you up?”
“I think it’s trying to give me things I want. Dreams. Dreams I want. Like they’re real.” My voice was tight, and I wasn’t sure I was really talking to Gary. The last dream swam around in my mind, its focus on Mark and the mechanic’s job I’d been so happy with. I wondered, sharply, if the only reason it’d lost its hold on me was Morrison’s intrusion into the scene. I wondered, too, if Gary had been able to afford a diamond fifty years ago when he proposed to his wife, if I’d be content to stay in that dream of happiness they’d shared for five decades.
I shook my head, trying to push the questions away, and climbed down the tree so I could crouch at the river’s edge without touching the water. “Come here.” My voice kept playing in that same scratchy whisper, too tight and small to really be heard. “Take the topaz out and take my hand.” I reached for his without looking, waiting until he’d dropped from the tree and done as I asked.
His raw strength rumbled through me, the big V8 engine I always thought of around him. I didn’t so much gather it up as focus it through the topaz, like I was letting the darkness know that this man, at least, wasn’t an easy target. The stone held in our hands thrummed with its own kind of defiance, like it knew what I was doing. I couldn’t sense any natural antipathy for the gem on the part of the darkness, but the rest it offered was far from peaceful, and the topaz seemed to have an opinion about that. I added my own whisper to the barrier against sleep the gem presented, a shoring up of its will, then said to Gary, “Push it out. It’s your mind. Your garden. You’re the one with the power to reject it. I’ll be right behind you.”
War fell down on us, clods of earth spraying from the sky as we crawled forward, doing more than just holding the line against the enemy. We were encroaching on Korean territory, the black scent of powder in the air and screams of anger and fear tearing through smoke and gunshots. I dragged in a breath that somehow sounded too loud in the noise and Gary reached back to silence me, a warning hand lifted. I bit the heel of my hand, tasting mud, and waited.
The surge forward came before I knew it, a final call across the lines that was a promise of victory or death. Enemy fire lashed out in rays of colored heat, more seen in my mind’s eye than in reality. Only the aftermath, puffs of dirt rising where bullets hit, men falling in their path, were truly visible. But for every encroachment I saw another of my brothers in arms stand fast, stagger forward and reclaim a span of land. My vision blurred, confusing me: those warriors had faces of their own, but when I looked too closely they became my face, contorted with determination that bordered on rage. Even my face was a confusing concept; I saw myself, Gary, reflected all around, doing battle against an unseen adversary.
Once routed by even a single step, our attackers fell back, slowly at first and then faster, slipping through cracks and hollows as if they’d never been there at all. As quickly as a syringe might draw blood. And then we met a wall, as if the forty-ninth parallel had been given physical, real presence, and then the enemy lay beyond that wall and I stood at the edge of Gary’s garden, fingers against it, panting from an effort I could hardly conceive of. I thought I saw feathery eyes glowing, dark in the shape of the wall.
Then sparks of gold and blue darted through it, the colors of topaz half daring anyone to test them. I dropped my hand with a wheezed laugh and turned to Gary.
He was battle-torn and bleeding, gray eyes gone darker than I’d ever seen them. Youth had fled him, for all that he was no older than he’d been at the USO dance. That boy was gone, though, leaving behind a man who’d learned mortality belonged to everyone. All my laughter fell away and I stepped forward, reaching up to take his face in both hands. “Come on back to me now, Gary. It’s gone. Whatever it is, it’s gone.”
He flinched when I touched him, staring down at me as if I were a stranger to him. Then a shudder ran over him and he folded one of his hands around one of mine, taking it from his face. “Jo.” The name seemed to bring him back to himself a little, and he drew a sharp breath, eyes clearing. “Jesus, I ain’t had dreams like that in forty years.”