4
Perchance to Dream
Clouds tumbled in from the west to the east, turning and shape shifting, growing dark and gray.
“I think it’s going to rain,” Tracy said. “That should put an end to this heat wave.”
Mack grinned. “Perfect funeral weather.”
Tracy grimaced, and Mack’s grin widened. She shook her head.
A light drizzle fell as they left Fairy-Tale Fun Land. Ashley faced the sky with her mouth open, letting the drops tickle her tongue as they passed through her. Tracy watched her and half-smiled. Then Tracy noticed Josh looking at her, and Tracy quickly frowned. She was still angry at him. Thunder rumbled in the distance. The rain would turn heavy soon.
“We should find a dry place to sleep,” she said.
“Bumper cars,” Mack said.
“Steamboat.”
“The bumper cars are the best. They’re like big cushy recliners, and you can see and hear the rain.”
“The stupid blinking lights near the bumper cars don’t turn off until a couple hours after midnight,” Tracy said. “They make it hard enough to sleep. Thunder and lightning would only make it worse.” She turned to Josh. Like it or not, he was here with her. At least he might be able to help her win an argument with Mack. “The steamboat has a long leather couch thingy in the middle and leather benches along its sides. It’s the closest you can get to a nice comfortable bed in this place, unless you count the nurse’s station. But the nurse’s station is dark, and the steamboat has windows all the way around. The view is gorgeous. It’s not too dark, and it’s not too bright. It’s the perfect place to sleep on a rainy night.”
Mack rolled his eyes.
“It’s BOR-ring,” he sang. “Why don’t we let the guests decide? What would you like better: the dumb, old, boring steamboat or the super-cool bumper cars that are like sleeping in great big, soft, easy chairs?”
“What do you say, Ashley?” Tracy asked. “Want to have fun sleeping in a steamboat?”
“Nuh, uh,” Ashley said. “I want to sleep in a bed with my Bunby.”
“Your Bunby?” Josh asked. “What’s a Bunby?”
“My blue Bunby.”
“Is that like a bunny?”
Ashley giggled. “It is a Bunby!”
“Well, I don’t think we’ll find your Bunby here.” Tracy crouched beside Ashley and rubbed her own chin in a thoughtful manner before acting excitedly surprised. “But I know something else you might like. How would you like to sleep with a hundred stuffed animals?”
Ashley bounced on her heels and clapped. “A hundred? Really?”
“Really.”
“Aw, come on, Tracy.” Mack groaned. “You don’t want to sleep there. What about you, Josh? Wouldn’t you rather sleep in the bumper cars?”
“Anywhere Ashley wants to sleep is fine,” Josh replied.
“But...”
Tracy took Ashley’s hand and dashed in the rain to the Wild West Fairgrounds. Josh followed, trying to shield himself with his arms from the rain. Mack rolled his eyes, but he followed anyway, keeping himself dry by ignoring the raindrops. Tracy stopped in front of one of the old-fashioned fair stalls. Its painted shutters were padlocked.
“This is it,” she said.
Ashley pulled herself up on the counter and put her eye up to the wide gap between the shutters.
“Wow,” Ashley said. “I can see lots and lots and lots of stuffed animals in there.”
“Told you,” Tracy said. “Now, can you guess how we’re going to get in?”
Ashley shook her head. Tracy stood beside her and took her hand.
“We are going to walk through this.” Tracy pointed at the counter and the shutters above it. “Just close your eyes.”
Ashley obeyed. Tracy looked back to make sure Josh was also paying attention before she closed her eyes too.
“Imagine you are standing in the middle of a wide open space,” she said, “like a big mall. Can you picture the mall?” She opened one eye and saw Ashley nod. She closed both eyes again. “Now take two steps forward into the mall.”
They took two steps forward.
Tracy looked around first to make sure Ashley wouldn’t be startled by anything when she opened her eyes. Ashley was standing on the wooden floor and not in middle of a chair or something, and the light coming through the cracks in and between the shutters and around the door opposite them kept the stall dimly lit.
“Okay, Ashley,” she said. “Open your eyes.”
Ashley obeyed. She gasped. “Wow, it’s like magic.”
“Yup.” Tracy brought her mouth to the gap between the shutters and spoke to the boys outside. “You guys coming?”
She took a few steps back to give Josh room. He was inside the stall with his first step and was almost touching one of the basketball hoops on the back wall with his second.
“You’re even longer than you look,” Tracy said.
He opened his eyes. “This stall isn’t.”
“Mmm.” Tracy shook a bit of the rain from her hair. “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea. You and Mack can sleep in one of the other fair stalls. Or the bumper cars. He’d like that.”
Mack walked in, eyes opened. He slumped on the wooden chair in the corner, his faced turned away from Tracy.
“I’ll stay,” Josh said.
“You’ve already made that clear,” Tracy mumbled.
She took off her white, gauzy costume and left the white t-shirt and jeans on. Her t-shirt wasn’t all that wet, and the light in the stall wasn’t too bright. Still, she folded her arms over her chest, just in case Josh could see something. She sat on the floorboards against the right wall with a bunch of stuffed animals—silly snakes, fish, lions, zebras, hippopotami, and giraffes—behind her. Ashley cuddled up beside her and placed her head on Tracy’s shoulder. There was a stuffed, bright yellow hound dog between them. Ashley petted it, but she frowned.
“It’s not my Bunby,” she said. “I want my Bunby.”
“This nice doggie misses someone, too,” Tracy said, giving the stuffed hound a pat. “Maybe you can help him feel less lonely.”
Ashley nodded and yawned. “I’m hungry.”
“Me, too,” Josh said, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor. “Why is that?”
“Ever hear of a ghost limb?” Tracy asked.
“When someone loses a leg or an arm, but they still feel it?”
“Well, you’ve got a ghost stomach,” Tracy explained. “Ghost hands, nose, mouth: you’ve got a ghost everything. You can still feel your body, even though you don’t have one. That’s why you feel hungry and tired.”
“But there’s a difference,” Mack said. “You don’t have to feel hungry and tired. You can choose what you want and don’t want your ghost body to feel.”
“Like when you chose to not let me hold your hand?” Josh asked.
Mack wrinkled his nose. “You tried to hold Tracy’s hand?”
“After I pinched him,” Tracy said.
“Oh,” Mack replied. “Okay, that makes sense.”
“It does?” Josh asked.
“It does if you know Tracy.”
“I’m hungry,” Ashley said again.
“There’ll be plenty to eat in the morning.” Mack spoke in a too sweet voice, like the condescending host of an educational television show for preschoolers. “In the meanwhile, you can eat in your dreams. What’s your favorite food?”
Ashley put her index finger to her lips and thought a while. “Spaghetti and meatballs.”
“The sooner you go to sleep, the sooner you are going to get the best spaghetti and meatballs you ever had.”
Ashley smiled and closed her eyes. She rested her hand on the toy hound. “Good night, Old Yellow. If you see my Bunby, please tell him I miss him.”
Soon she was fast asleep.
Mack laughed. “Little kids are fun to fool with. This is going to be great. Still wish we could have slept in t
he bumper cars, though. This stall stinks.”
He leaned back. The wooden chair he sat in remained upright and its backrest poked through his shoulders. His legs rose—as did the rest of him—until his body was almost flat. He turned to face the left wall and curled his body ever so slightly in. A ghostly, overstuffed, white recliner faded in beneath him. He sighed. Soon the rise and fall of his chest made it clear that he too was asleep.
“Can we do that?” Josh whispered, pointing at Mack.
“I don’t know,” Tracy whispered back. “I suppose we can, but Mack is very good at it. It’s as if he was born to be a ghost.” She paused and then quickly added, “Which is exactly why Ashley shouldn’t stay here. We don’t want her to get used to this.”
Josh continued to watch Mack sleep. “I guess it was his fate.”
“His fate?”
Josh nodded.
Tracy huffed. “There’s no such thing as fate.”
Josh turned to face her, his eyebrows raised. He was clearly surprised, but there was something else. What was it? Sadness, perhaps, or pity. Perhaps a bit of both. Tracy’s stomach started to flip flop again, and she looked away.
“You don’t believe in fate?” It was a question, not a statement.
She shrugged. “’Course not.”
“Why not?”
“Because...” She thought awhile. “Fate means you have no control over your life. No matter what you do, it’ll determine what happens to you. Your choices don’t matter, and that means you aren’t responsible for anything. How can you be, when it’s all fate?”
“Well, I don’t think it’s all fate.” He ran his fingers through his hair again. “You do have control over most of your life. But I think sometimes something happens that you do have no control over, something that was just meant to be. And that’s what fate is.”
“Something like a sweet, little girl dying on a theme-park kiddy ride?” She paused. “You think that was fate?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. But I think it’s more comforting to think it’s a part of some grand plan than a random accident.”
“No, it’s not.” Tracy’s cheeks grew hot, and she clenched her teeth. “You saw the look on her mother’s face. What kind of grand plan lets such horrible things happen? And how can you believe in a plan like that?”
Josh slumped over and sighed. “All I know is that sometimes things happen in life that can’t be explained logically, and fate is really the only explanation.”
“Like what?”
“Like dreaming something before it happens even though there’s no way you could know it was going to happen.”
Tracy snorted. “No one has dreams like that. And if you believe anyone who says they do, I have a nice bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.”
“What if I told you I dreamed that I died trying to save Ashley before it happened?”
Tracy blinked. Was he serious? “If you knew you were going to be killed, why did you get on that ride?”
“I didn’t remember my dream until it was already too late, but I knew everything that would happen before it happened.”
She didn’t know what to say to that. She turned to look at the ribbon of light coming through the gap between the shutters.
Josh paused. “I also had a dream about a girl, the kind of dream you never forget, the kind that feels like it’s trying to tell you something important even though you don’t know what that thing is. At least until it happens, and then you know...”
“What?”
He looked deep into her eyes. The weak light in the stall shined brightly in his. “You know you were meant to be together. You know it was fate.”
She stared back at him. Tracy usually had a quick answer for everything, but what could she say to that? The silence between then stretched awkwardly on.
A flash of lightning momentarily brightened the stall, and thunder boomed two seconds later. The rain pounded on the stall’s tin roof, beating out a loud, quick rhythm. Tracy slowly returned to her place beside Ashley and rested her own head on a fat teddy bear. She faced the back wall, away from Josh. In the darkness, she heard him sigh. The sky outside rumbled.
“Hey,” he said. “Look at that.”
Tracy turned around. Josh was pointing at Ashley. A pink, floral quilt covered the little girl, and her head rested on a soft, pink pillow with a matching pillowcase. Under her arm beside the toy hound, she embraced a ghostly, ratty, blue toy bunny.
“Huh,” Tracy whispered. “What do you know? She found her Bunby.”
Josh smiled, but Tracy worried. Ashley was quickly picking up skills. How long would it take before she got used to being a ghost? And once she did, would they ever be able to convince Ashley that she belonged in the Light?
End of this sample
If you enjoyed this small sampling of Ride of Your Life you can pick up a copy in the Kindle Store.