Sleep Stalker (Ghosts Beyond the Grove Book 1) (8 page)

     Addie smiled and nodded her head.  “That’s exactly what I see, too.  What’s weird about it is that I’ve never seen symbols that bold before.  Usually, I have to stare at it for a while before I see anythin’.  Were you thinkin’ about multiple issues while swirlin’?”

     “Guilty as charged,” I confessed.  “Two very separate things actually.”

     “Which explains the two very clear patterns.  You have strong psychic energy, has anyone ever told you that before?”

     “Not exactly but I’m not surprised.  What do they mean?”

     “The foot suggests a journey—either literally or figuratively.  It suggests big changes in your life.  The feather shows that someone very close to you is havin’ a tough time right now.  Ya need to pay close attention to them and help them stay grounded through the upheaval.”  Addie placed the cup back down on the table. 

     I nodded my head slowly.  “I think you’re a damn good teomancer.”

     “Go forth, my ladies.  Your destiny doth wait for you outside the halls of Poe’s Corner,” a male voice boomed from behind me causing me to nearly jump out of my skin.  I was so engrossed by my reading and what it could possibly mean that I didn’t notice anyone else enter the shop.

     Addie laughed and echoed my sentiments perfectly.  “I was so involved in that readin’ that I didn’t even see you come in!  Ruby, this is Derek Hexum—he’s one of the second shift baristas here but he thinks he’s Shakespeare.”

     Derek was tall and thin with gold-rimmed glasses and a mop of sandy brown curls on top of his head.  He was already wearing his Poe’s Corner apron which meant that he must have snuck in at least several minutes earlier.  He shook my hand warmly then gestured dramatically toward the door.

     “Nice to meet you, Ruby.  Now go forth until the ‘morrow.”

     “You don’t have to tell me a third time,” I said as I untied my apron and tossed it behind the counter.  “Nice to meet you Derek and great job with the teomancy, Addie.  See you guys later.”

     While on the short bus ride back to our apartment, I thought about the tea leaf reading and how it might apply to my life.  I hadn’t heard back from Zach about his offer to take me to dinner.  Maybe my one word reply spoke volumes about how I felt about the whole idea.  He should be home from class by the time I got back to the apartment.  I would make my decision regarding dinner based on his mood.  There was no way I was going anywhere with a grumpy jackass—not tonight. 

     I unlocked the door hoping that I would find him either in a good mood or fast asleep.  The apartment was quiet so I expected to find him curled up in our bed, enveloped by a deep sleep.  Well, what was
supposed
to be
our
bed.  So far, we’d fought every night and taken turns sleeping on the futon.  But that was a whole other issue at this point.  In the silence, I found relief.  A sleeping Zach meant no dinner out but also no arguing for us tonight.  I’d just begun to relax when I heard him screaming at the top of his lungs. 

     “DAMMIT!”

     I pushed open the bedroom door and gasped when I saw what was going on inside. 

     “Oh my God!  Zach!  What are you doing?!”

     The bedroom was trashed.  The mattress was flipped up sideways against the wall.  Every drawer was pulled out and lying upside down on the floor.  The bar in the closet was full of empty hangers while every article of clothing I owned sat in a heap in the middle of the floor. 

     Zach fell to his knees, looking around like he had no idea what caused the destruction.  As I stood there fearing for his sanity, a single white feather fell from the light fixture and floated slowly down onto the carpet between us.

11.  Fight or Flight

     “Ruby, I….”  But I stopped there.  How exactly was I supposed to finish that sentence?  All I wanted to do was find that dress and perfume.  I never meant to trash the apartment in the process.  It was the bookstore incident all over again.  But if she hadn’t insisted on playing games with me, this never would have happened in the first place.  How do you apologize for something you really aren’t sorry for?  You don’t.  She was just as much to blame for this as I was.  More so.  So instead of saying I was sorry, I said the first thing that came to mind.

     “I need some fresh air.  Let’s go to dinner now.”

     She stared at me like I was insane, nodded her head, but said nothing.  On the way out the door, she asked me for the car keys.  That bitch didn’t even trust my driving now.  She was trying to control me.  Didn’t she understand that she already controlled every thought in my head?  Every emotion in my heart?  But I was too tired to argue so I gave her the keys anyway.  A few miles down the road, she finally spoke. 

     “Does Cozumel sound okay?  We haven’t had Mexican in a while,” she said timidly as though she were afraid of me. 

     That pissed me off.  She had no reason to fear me.  I’d
never
hurt her—not intentionally anyway.  Was that this was all about?  Was she still festering over the time I accidentally smashed my elbow into her nose?  She
knew
it wasn’t on purpose.  I was in the middle of a fistfight with Ryan Fetterhoff at the time.  I apologized for that incident a thousand and one times and rescued her ass almost as many times since.  She needed to grow up and stop holding stupid grudges.  She needed to stop being a baby.  Now.

     “No,” I said with an authoritative tone, “I ate authentic Mexican almost every night while I was in Santa Ana.  We’re going for Chinese tonight.”

     “Okay,” she replied meekly.

     And that pissed me off, too.  How could she be so controlling one minute then so submissive the next?  What kind of satisfaction did she get out of teasing me only to give in to my every whim shortly thereafter?  I hated her.  I loved her.  I hated the fact that I loved her.  I loved the fact that I hated her.  I wanted to go to sleep.  My dreams were much less complicated than real life.  Sometimes my dreams were more real than reality itself was.

     As she pulled into the lot of the shopping complex, I noticed something that interested me more than any buffet ever could.  Food would have to wait a few more minutes.

     “Stop!” I shouted and she hit the brakes hard.  The car behind us honked its horn then swerved around us angrily.  I gave the driver a smug look as I flipped her off.  Ruby shot me a dirty look but didn’t comment on my obscene hand gesture.  Good.  Because she wasn’t my mother and she had no right to lecture me about, well, about
anything
.

     “What!?  Liberty Buffet is way down there!  Why did you tell me to stop here?  You’re lucky that car didn’t rear end us.”

     “No,
you
are lucky that you didn’t cause an accident.  You insisted on driving so you need to take responsibility for your performance behind the wheel.”

     She inhaled slowly through her nose—something she only seemed to do when she was angry.  Not just mad but flaming furious.  Incredible Hulk kind of furious.  But she swallowed it.

     “Just answer my question.  Why did you tell me to stop here?”

     “Right there,” I said, pointing to the store off to our right.  “I want to make good on my promise to take you shopping.”

     She opened her mouth like she was going to argue then closed it.  “Okay.”  She parked the car and we walked silently into the clothing store together.  I was starting to get really sick of that word “okay”.

     Ruby loved to shop.  She loved to try on clothes and shoes, loved to search around the racks for something she couldn’t live without.  But this time, I was the one circling the store for the perfect item.  I was going to find that dress and buy it for her.  She was going to put it on and dance for me.  She was going to be the girl in my dreams not the nag she’d recently become. 

     I made a beeline for the rack of dresses and began searching for something even remotely close to the one she pretended not to own.  While I browsed through the floor length dresses, she perused a different rack packed with shorter ones. 

     “This is kind of cute,” she said, now more cheerful than she had been in the car.

     I looked up hoping to see that tribal print dress in her hands but met with disappointment.  The one she thought was “cute” was nothing like what I was looking for. 

     “No.  It isn’t.  It’s too short and too red and too plain.  You need something long, something with a crazy pattern.  Something orange and brown with braiding at the neckline.”

     Slowly, she hung the red dress back where she’d found it.  “I don’t really like orange and I’m kind of too short for long dresses.  I only wear them on special occasions because I tend to get my heels caught in them when I walk.”

     “Oh, so dressing up for me isn’t a special occasion anymore?  What, now that you have me right where you want me, you don’t want to please me anymore?  You’re such a selfish bitch sometimes.”

     And there it was—that first stupid tear dangling precariously from the corner of her eye.  I wasn’t going to put up with her making me feel bad right now.  “I don’t see anything that would look good on you.  Let’s go eat now.”

     The thirty second drive down to Liberty Buffet felt more like a ten mile funeral procession.  Why did she have to be so difficult?  So emotional?  So damned frustrating? 

     I stuffed my face at that buffet so I didn’t have to talk to her.  She barely ate anything.  She was festering and brooding and probably contemplating revenge of some sort.  She was going to play more games with me to get even.  I had no clue what her problem was and I was dangerously close to not caring anyway.  Why was she doing this to me?

     At the end of the meal, she opened up her fortune cookie and pulled out the slip of paper inside.  She paused for a moment before speaking the only words she’d uttered since leaving the clothing store.

     “Do not question destiny.  Go forth and follow its lead.”

     Destiny.  I was so sick of hearing her thoughts on fate and how things always happened for a reason.  There’s no pattern to life.  None at all.  Life is chaos.  I knew she would glean cosmic importance from that stupid piece of paper.  I believed in raw, more tangible things.  Things like instincts—things like fight or flight.  When confronted by the enemy, you always have two choices.  Mine were to either spend the rest of the night listening to her entertain stupid notions that fate brought us together or the option I chose—to merely walk away from the table and pretend I didn’t hear a word that she said. 

     Exhausted or not, the door definitely didn’t hit me on the way out.

12.  Caught in a Landslide

     I sat through the entire meal obsessively trying to act normal.  But how could I when I could barely remember what normal felt like?  In a matter of a few short days, Zach had managed to uproot our entire relationship.  If three evil ghosts, one sweet ghost with a terrible crush on me, a jealous ex-semi-girlfriend, misguided fatherly anger, and the conniving twin brother of my dead boyfriend couldn’t tear us apart, I thought
nothing
ever would.  What was wrong with him?  He was fine before his trip but now I barely recognized him.  He was mean and spiteful, hurtful and demanding.  It was like someone flipped the switch in his brain from “sane” to “certifiably nuts”.  I was already concerned before seeing the kind of damage he did to the apartment today.  Now, I was scared for him.  And honestly, for myself as well. 

     I decided not to rock the boat, so to speak, until I could figure out what to do with him.  Getting him to consent to a medical evaluation to see what was causing his fatigue would probably be easy to achieve.  But I was afraid that he needed way more than a simple blood test or two.  What he needed was a psychiatrist.  Something inside him snapped—I was sure of it.  And I was going to have to explain that fact to my dad whether I wanted to or not.  But not right now.  Now, I needed to get through this week with the least amount of drama possible.

     My usual appetite was missing when we sat down at that table.  I ate slowly and watched as Zach turned his fork into a shovel.  I had begun to look at Zach and me as inseparable.  Two people who would always be bound by an invisible force holding them together.  We were able to go our own ways always knowing that that force would bring us back to the other in the end.  Today was the first time I ever considered that perhaps that tie could—possibly even
should
—be irreparably broken.  Today was the first time that I truly contemplated walking away from him and never looking back.  Maybe Fate didn’t always get things right.  Maybe our time together was meant to come to an end eventually.  Maybe that time was now.

     As I pondered how different my life would be if I walked away from that table right now, packed my things, and left for good; the waitress brought our check and two fortune cookies.  I opened the one closest to me and read it in disbelief.

     “Do not question destiny.  Go forth and follow its lead.”

     When Zach got up from the table abruptly and left his fortune cookie behind, I snatched it and threw it into my purse.  I would open it later in another moment of crisis for anonymous advice.  Not that I believed that a cookie could or should determine my future.  But sometimes it was comforting to receive random bits of wisdom when you needed them the most.

     I returned to the apartment to find that the bathroom was also in a shambles.  Every toiletry bottle I owned was open and leaking onto the floor.  The bottle of Midnight Kiss I purchased online for
double
what I used to pay for it in the store lay in broken shards in the sink.  The new can of hairspray I just bought was in the shower, its nozzle snapped off and utterly useless to me.  My favorite conditioner was leaking down the side of the new clothes hamper I’d recently bought.  The “His” and “Hers” towels I was so excited to buy were covered in various shades from my eye shadow palette which was crushed into powder on the lid of the toilet.  Things were far worse than I originally imagined.

     It wasn’t long before Zach casually tossed the mattress back onto the bed frame and fell asleep.  Once I knew that he was out for the night, I grabbed the car keys and walked out the front door.  What I needed was to get away—at least for the time being.  If he was sleeping, he wouldn’t know that I wasn’t home.  I needed to break down somewhere far away from him. 

     Not knowing the town well enough yet, I drove aimlessly looking for a place to go where I could collect my thoughts.  I settled for an obscure corner of the mall parking lot.  There I sat—for an entire hour—crying because I didn’t know what else to do.  Once I was finished, my eyes were like sandpaper—so dry that even blinking was painful.  But now that that was out of the way, I was ready to think about things rationally and logically.  I was ready to come up with a plan of some sort.  I was ready to find a solution not just for me, but for Zach as well.  And to do that, I needed someone else’s opinion.

     “Clay!” I called out.  For some reason, I would look up when I summoned him.  I knew he wasn’t “up” in any sense of the word but it felt like he was.  He was no angel but he always came to my rescue when I needed him.  And now was no exception.

     As soon as he appeared, I began babbling incoherently to him about everything that happened today.  Confused, he would randomly repeat a word I’d said out loud like he was trying to make sense of what I was saying.  Finally, he’d had enough.

     “Look, Ruby, I will help you anyway that I can but you have to slow down so that I can understand what you’re saying.  Right now, all I’m getting is that Big Foot pulled all of his feathers out, trashed your apartment, and then stole Zach’s fortune cookie.  I really hope I’m missing something here.” 

       Instead of scolding him for being a typical man and not listening to every word I’d said, I laughed.  I laughed in spite of how desperately hollow I felt inside.  “Thanks for making me smile, Clay.  Maybe I need another minute or two to calm down before I start explaining it to you again.  Let’s go for a drive.”

     I turned the radio up full blast and pulled out into traffic.  By the time we got to the first stop light, Bohemian Rhapsody was playing.  We both looked at each other and giggled.  The last time we listened to this song, Zach was with us.  We were on the interstate on our way to check out Pendleton University for the first time.  Back then, Zach was “normal”—I was the only one who could see ghosts.  He may have assumed that Clay made that trip with us but he never asked me outright and I never brought up the subject.  That afternoon, the three of us sang and it was such a fun, carefree moment.  Things were far from perfect back then but at least Zach and I weren’t fighting constantly.  At that point, he seemed like the sanest person I knew.