Dream Dancer (Ghosts Beyond the Grove Book 2) (25 page)

41.  Letting it Soak In

     Call Queen Elva for some good old fashioned curse counseling, that’s what I was supposed to do.  While I waited for the call to connect, I kept my eyes trained on the small arrowhead at my feet.  I was waiting for it to start doing something evil—like emit an eerie glow or start spinning wildly out of control like a compass needle in a magnet factory.  But instead, it sat there in all of its ancient relic splendor doing absolutely nothing.  When the call finally connected, I began spewing out paranoia like it was a mouthful of scalloped potatoes.  I really hate scalloped potatoes.  Yuck.

     Queen Elva’s ears worked at the same pace as her southern drawl so I had to slow down and repeat myself a dozen times before she could understand what I was saying.  Both exhausted and exasperated, I sighed and forced myself to spit out the words I was so afraid to say.

     “Am I cursed now too?  Am I going to become the same half alive zombie that Zach is now?”

     This was where a simple yes or no answer would have been greatly appreciated.  But why should I expect anything in life to be that simple anymore?  Instead, I played a frustrating round of paranormal Jeopardy with her.  “I’ll take Curse Removal for $1000, Elva.”

     “Have you touched it with your bare hands?”

     “Yes,” I replied, instantly feeling stupid.  I was smart but sometimes when it came to things of this nature, I was riding the paranormal short bus.  Act first—counteract dumb moves the hard way later.  I began looking all around for signs of a woman in a tribal print dress. 

     The most suspicious thing I saw was Dr. Landon strolling out of the elevator, his face inflamed with obvious anger.  He ushered my father down the hall where they promptly disappeared inside one of the rooms.  I couldn’t detect any yelling but hushed conversations are often more dangerous.  For Dad’s sake, I hoped his valiant yet rebellious efforts to help me didn’t cost him his career.  It would probably really suck to lose your job
and
have your daughter become a walking zombie on the same day.

     “Do you feel different in any way?  Has your appearance changed at all?”

     The only thing I felt was fear and that was fairly commonplace for me.  I turned to Shelly and Rachel for help in answering Queen Elva’s second question.

     “Do I look cursed to you?”  That sounded silly even coming out of
my
mouth.  Shelly gave me a straightforward and emphatic no.  Rachel had to inject sharp wit into her reply. 

     “Well, based on that outfit you’re wearing, I’d say something evil took root in your brain.  But because I know you had that hideous get up on long before you touched that arrowhead, I’d have to say no.  You aren’t cursed just fashion challenged today.  Really, does everyone in Ohio dress like that?”

     There was nothing wrong with what I was wearing.  Okay, so maybe I didn’t pay as much attention as I should have when I was getting dressed this morning.  But I had more important things on my mind than whether my shirt slightly clashed with my leggings or not.  Or if I was wearing the absolute wrong pair of shoes to go with either of them.  Dammit.  She was right.  But it wasn’t Ohio that was making me ugly, it was love.  I was thinking more about Zach than I was myself these days. 

     Determined to end this curse before granny panties and bell bottoms crept their way into my dresser drawer, I let Rachel’s comment go without a snappy comeback—partially because she was right and I
had
no comeback.

     Confident that I wasn’t going to suffer the same fate as Zach simply because I touched that arrowhead, I begged Queen Elva for advice on what to do next.

     “Should I burn it?  Bury it?  Soak it in holy water during the full moon—what?  Just tell me how to destroy the hold this thing has over Zach.”

     “That all depends,” she drawled back so slowly that I almost lost it.

     I wanted to scream back at her.  Screw patience.  A sense of urgency was what I needed from her.  Why couldn’t she get that through her cotton candy covered skull?  Even my dad understood that time was of the essence otherwise he wouldn’t have broken hospital rules to retrieve the duffle bag for me.  But she was the only person I knew who had the slightest chance of helping me.  Removing as much of the frustration from my voice as I could, I asked the obvious question. 

     “Depends on
what
?”

     “It depends on what type of curse we’re dealing with here.  I’ll need some time to think about this over a nice, hot cup of tea.”

     Tea.  I was so sick and tired of tea by now that I threw up in my mouth a tiny bit at the mere mention of it.  I thanked her for the help that she hadn’t even given me and ended the call. 

     I passed along the bad news that there wasn’t any actual news to report and then left the hospital.  I needed to go for a drive while I thought things through.  And this time I wanted silence—which meant no blaring music and no Clay either.  Just me, my car, and the road before me.

     My mind flickered back and forth between the past, the present, and what a complete shambles the future looked like at this point.  My two year anniversary with Zach loomed in the near distance.  Nothing was at all the way it was the day we met nor on the day we celebrated so happily together last year.  Even if I could get in to visit him, it would be like spending time with a complete stranger.  Zach wasn’t Zach anymore.  The worst part was that our anniversary just so happened to be the same day as my birthday so even that would never be the same for me.  Little by little, Ruby as I knew her was slipping quietly away from me as well.

     After making several loops around Charlotte’s Grove, I finally felt ready to head back to Rosewood.  I wanted to re-read one more time the letter my mom left behind for me before she died.  She led me this far, this couldn’t be the end.  Maybe there was some sort of clue in that letter that I’d overlooked until now.  Or maybe I was grabbing at straws because I was desperate and at the end of my rope.  As I walked toward the front door of the mansion, I closed my eyes and asked her for more feathers to guide me.

     I stopped and looked around before letting myself in but found not a single feather—no firm raven quills, not even a hint of duck fluff anywhere in sight.  I sighed heavily before tugging on that massive oak door.  Maybe it was time for me to give up and accept defeat. 

     I trudged past Shelly and Dad with barely so much as a nod when they told me that Dr. Landon had decided not to report today’s incident to the hospital board.  Of course I was happy that he wasn’t going to face disciplinary action—but happy wasn’t an emotion that I was capable of showing at the moment.  Good news always led to more bad news and I wasn’t able to handle any more negativity tonight.

     Pulling out Mom’s letter, I read through it again and again.  She spoke not of her bad dreams or anything negative in any way.  She wrote of her dreams for me and my future.  She offered advice that only a mother could give.  I’d read the letter through so many times that I almost knew it by heart.  As I went to slip it back into the envelope it fluttered to the floor, and I noticed something that I had not seen before.

     The letter itself was hand printed on three separate sheets of crisp, white stationary using only the front sides.  They were then folded into thirds to fit the size of the envelope.  Once I realized that there wasn’t any writing on the backside of the first sheet, I never checked out the reverse side of the second page.  But as I was gathering the pages up off of the floor, I caught a few lines of writing there that had remained hidden throughout so many readings.

     Written there in an almost calligraphic script were two sentences.  “Life is a dance.  It’s all about knowing when to move forward and when to be still.”

     Cryptic at best, utterly useless to me at the moment.  Which was I supposed to be doing right now—moving forward or staying still?  Was this my sign to hang in there and wait?  Or was now the time to pick up the shattered remains of what used to be my heart and move on without Zach? 

     These words of supposed wisdom reminded me of an oft used quote that I’ve always found annoying.  “Life is like a box of chocolates—you never know what you’re going to get.”  I found that phrase to be grossly inaccurate.  A box of chocolates usually comes with a guide to steer you away from the yucky ones.  You know, like those terrible jelly filled ones that no one in their right mind would willingly eat.

     No, life was most definitely a field of landmines.  Bad things lurked beneath the surface where you had no chance of identifying them until your leg was half blown off.  My brain was kind of the same way lately.  No matter how hard I tried to stay positive, some days horrible things crept into my mind when I least expected them to.  I snickered to myself when I realized that my own thoughts were actually land
minds
.  At least I knew my wit was still as sharp as ever.

     But my body was tired.  So very tired.  And before I realized it, I was dead asleep.  My nap lasted less than an hour but I had the most vivid dream I’d ever experienced.

     I was in a room with stark, white walls—bare of anything except for a small wooden table and two matching chairs.  One of those chairs was reserved for me.  The other one was for my mother.  She’d never been in my dreams before so that in itself stuck out at me as an important fact.  But once she sat down, I realized something that took my dreams to a whole new level.

     This wasn’t actually a dream.  Yes, I was still asleep.  But no, it was entirely different from anything I’d experienced in the past.  I was in a place I’d never been before—and I didn’t mean the room itself.  I was in another realm.  I was in the small plane of existence where life and death were one and the same.  It wasn’t the same place I’d found myself during my near death experiences.  This was somewhere different.  And I realized that until now, I’d only scratched the surface of what lay beyond the world as we knew it.

     There at that table, I had the first real conversation I’d ever had with my mother.  Gone was my trademark impatience.  No trace of ego could be found in that room either. I was there to learn something important—whether to move forward or be still.  I was there to gain clarity and inner peace regardless of how things turned out. 

     “There comes a time in everyone’s life when they have to give up something they desperately want.  You could spend your entire life longing for something or
someone
only to find that it isn’t in your destiny.  How you deal with it is what defines your character, Ruby.”

     So if Zach wasn’t mine to keep in the end, why did destiny allow me to get so close to the prize?  No, I had to stop asking myself that question—it didn’t really matter why.  What mattered now was how I was going to move on after all I’d been through.  I needed to pick myself back up as gracefully as I could and leave the past in the past.

     “Were you ever in love before you met Dad?  Or did your dreams of him lead you past all of the others that could have come before him?”

     “You’re missing the point, Ruby.  You need to go back home now,” she said as she opened a door that was practically invisible until that moment.  “Oh, and read the other letter already, won’t you?”  And then she was gone.

     I thought it was a relevant question.  My dreams and even signs from Mom herself led me back to Zach every time.  Was this all just a long, heartbreaking lesson on where to draw the line between love and something that masqueraded around so convincingly that anyone would swear it was true love?  People often use the phrase “you’re too young to know what real love is”.  In my selfish little world I always looked at that as one more way that adults belittled people my age.  But maybe the wisdom card was a legitimate one to play here. 

     Maybe they were right.  Maybe one day Zach would be a distant and nearly forgotten about memory.  Maybe he was nothing more than a placeholder until the real man of my dreams was ready to find me.  Maybe thirty years from now, I would be grateful that I walked away when I did instead of staying stuck in a time loop of watching Zach lose more of his sanity every day until there was nothing left for him to lose.  But for now, it hurt like hell.  Zach was past the point of living a normal life but
I
wasn’t. 

     It was a terrible choice to have to make—one I’d agonized over for far too long.  But there in that room I felt stronger than I’d ever felt before.  The decision was made. 
My
decision was made.  But first, I had to read the letter she intended to be for my sister.  There had to be words of wisdom regarding letting go of someone you weren’t meant to have in the first place. I needed to wake up so I tried the advice from the old wives’ tale and pinched myself hard.

     I don’t know if it was that pinch or the ringing of my cell phone that actually woke me up.  I reached for my phone knowing instinctively that it was an important call.  When I saw that it was from Detective Bailey, every nerve in my body began to tingle with sparks of electricity.  This was the moment I’d been waiting for.

     “You solved the mystery didn’t you?” I shouted into the phone bypassing any sort of greeting altogether. 

     “Yeah, I think I did.  At least enough of it to help you save yer fella anyway.”