The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (13 page)

Jack placed his fingers against the glass, watching the
silent image of her as she rode the bus, rain soaking her hair and dress, her
face.
Or was she crying?
The notion hardened like glass slivers in his
chest. Did she know how much he loved her? Did she know how much he needed her?
They were a desperate, codependent couple caught in the grips of their own
insanity, each trying to elicit the other’s help in fending off the strangling
hold of their own private madness.

But did she know how much
he needed her? More perhaps than she needed him? Did she know how sorry he was
for everything that had happened, and would happen still? She couldn’t. There
was no way.

Would she forgive him?

He hoped so. He needed her so much. Loved her so much.

You are going completely insane.

He sat in front of the
screens, a cold cup of coffee in his hand, the sun falling away, the sky
turning to black. Day became night and still he watched, hoping against reason
that Ellen would find it in her heart to forgive his inadequacies.

Ellen remembered riding a
bus long ago. A different bus. A different town. A different Ellen Monroe
leading a very different life. She was riding the Dreamline, tripping on
something; what, she could not remember. But what she experienced she
remembered with crystal clarity, a kind of recall had only by psychedelic drugs
and near-death experiences. And what she saw on that long-ago afternoon spent
in motion—no destination, no direction, no motive for going anywhere or doing
anything—was a young woman crying alone. And she wondered in that
once-upon-a-time life in her once-upon-a-time drugged haze—
how existential
the Dreamline could make you
—who actually cried on a
cross-town bus?

Irony has a funny way of
making you hate your own memories.

She pushed the same piece
of wet hair back from her face over and over, the movement disguising her
efforts to wipe at her eyes. She didn’t want to be crying on a cross-town bus.
She wanted to be strong. She
had
to be strong.

But everything was going
wrong, and no one understood. Even she didn’t understand anymore. She had to
rescue Jack, free him from the Wasteland. But Jack wasn’t real, just a character
in a book, a face out of a dream. He didn’t exist.

No wonder they thought she was insane.

Her fist ached from the effort of crushing
the wadded prescription, trying to make it disappear. Useless. Easy enough to
flatten and fill at any drugstore. Kohler would know if she didn’t. He would
punish her; send her back to the sanitarium.

And there, Jack would be destroyed forever.

Right back where she started, head under water and still sinking, her
progress, her belief in her own normalcy, the greatest example of her delusion.
All this time, sliding backwards, back to the reality from before. Before her
spartan third-floor apartment, before the old woman across the landing and her
grandson—
not too bright, but clever with his hands
—before Mr. Dabble and
her job at the bookstore, before Dr. Kohler and his sugared lies, eyes licking
her skin. Like Alice down the rabbit hole, she was falling past the Sanity’s
Edge Saloon, past Nail and Gusman Kreiger and Jack (
especially Jack
).
She was dropping all the way down into the straitjacket and the padded walls of
the hospital—
not sanitarium or asylum; negative words that made people
uncomfortable
—where they kept you if your father was rich enough and
influential enough to buy you out of a manslaughter charge. Not because he
cared, but because having a criminal for a daughter was a political liability,
messy if indelicately handled. So you wear pajamas all day and a straitjacket if
you misbehave, sit in a room with soft walls and listen to the muffled screams
and howls and random gibbering of the institutionalized beneath the delicate overtones
of music meant to soothe. The daily indignities of group therapy confessions,
one-on-one discussions about her rejection of authority being misplaced
self-loathing, a regimen of pretty colored pills.
Say, do you remember the
color of Lithium, anyway?
Or maybe, just maybe, a shot of muscle relaxant
and a rubber mouth-guard while a kindly nurse monitors the voltage on a pair of
electrodes pasted to your temples with conductive gel.

The image brushed her spine like icy fingers, and made her shiver.

This was the part of the
dream where you knew you were screaming only you couldn’t make a sound, where
you were falling forever, the world tipping up on its edge, emptying you off
like the remains of a meal scraped from a dinner plate and poured down the drain.
And there was nothing you could do to stop it. She was going all the way back,
back to being lost, trapped in the vast limitless world inside of her dreams
while the wasteland that was reality eroded around her, collapsing away into
nothingness. Just like before, it was happening all over again. Everything was
changing, but nothing had changed. Jack made it different, but he couldn’t make
it last, and now it was all going back to the way it was.

So maybe Kohler was right.
Maybe there was no Jack Lantirn. Maybe he didn’t exist. Maybe Jack was nothing
more than a byproduct of her fantasies, a delusion, a fabrication based on the
character of a book.

Maybe the true reality
was her insanity.

Well, good-morning to
you, sunshine.

It would begin simply, like all things: a prescription, some mood-leveling
medication. And with that first step, she would slowly and inexorably
reconstruct the reality she had fled all that time ago when she found herself whisked
away to the Sanity’s Edge Saloon. Only this time, the Saloon wouldn’t save her.
Jack wouldn’t save her.
How could he if he didn’t exist?
This time, she
would
try to kill herself. Not like before; she had not tried to kill herself before,
of that she was certain …
reasonably
certain …
pretty
certain …
probably
certain, anyway.

But this time she
would
try. And this time, she might
just succeed.

Through angry tears, she
saw the tight fist, fingers aching and exhausted, knuckles white as she worked
to contain the awful truth of Kohler’s prescription and everything that went
along with it. Here it would end. And here it would start.

And she had no idea how
to stop it.

Or if she should even
try.

I’m so sorry, Jack,
but I can’t go back again. Not to the hospitals and the treatments and the dark
rooms with the soft walls, strapped down to a bed while the drugs they pump
into me take me down again and again and again. I won’t be able to survive it a
second time. It’s your fault. You showed me something different, and now I
can’t accept this world for what it is. But it was only dreams. I know that
should be enough, but it’s not. I can’t deal with the hospital. Not again. I’ll
die. Or I’ll get sane. Either way I’ll lose you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

She rang the bell as the
bus came to her stop, and stepped into the rain. And there she stood, the air
cool and pleasant after the cloying humidity of the bus, the heavy smell of
strangers, of damp hair and wet clothes and body odor and sticky vinyl seats.
She breathed deep, looking around like someone looking for a way out of a
crowded room.

Half a block away,
Dabble’s Books
. Across the street,
Serena’s
Coffee Shoppe
. On the one side, her nice normal job with her nice normal
boss and her nice normal life.

On the other side of the street, coffee.

That was how it began
with Jack. He found her in the waiting room, shaking through a violent drug
come-down that first morning at the Sanity’s Edge Saloon, and he brought her
coffee. So long ago, it seemed; days or weeks or maybe lifetimes.

Or maybe it never
really happened at all.

But what if it did? What
if all that mattered was that she remembered that it happened, and that it all
began with a cup of coffee?

*     *     *

Serena looked up as Ellen came in out of the rain. “You’re
drenched.”

With the workday ended,
the coffee shop stood deserted, much to Ellen’s relief. She didn’t care to be
seen this way, enduring the consternation and pity of strangers, her hair
plastered and dripping, dress clinging and wrinkled, a bag over one shoulder
and a prescription sheet squeezed into one hand like a street person wandering
in from the elements, looking for food and spare change.

Her open hand was shaking.

“Well don’t just stand there, come over and sit down.” Serena
was coming out from behind the counter, a towel and a shawl in hand, her
movements so fluid and smooth that Ellen would have sworn Serena had been
holding them all along, waiting for her to arrive. She led Ellen away to a
small table in the back, out of view of the street and
Dabble’s Books
,
placing the woven shawl over her shoulders and drying some of the rain from her
hair. “What happened to you?”

“I got caught in the rain,” Ellen answered.

“I should say you did.
Sit down and I’ll bring us some tea.”

She didn’t want to sound
ungrateful, so she silently pressed at her hair with the towel until it stopped
dripping down her neck, and waited for Serena to return with two teacups
balanced easily in their saucers. She placed one before Ellen, the aroma an
inviting mix of green tea, mint and something sweet.

“Would you like sugar or
cream?” Serena asked. Ellen was shaking her head, but Serena’s business-side
had emerged. “I also have honey, lemon, and skim milk if you’d like that? Sorry,
no half-n-half.”

Not caring either way,
Ellen asked more from curiosity than need. “Did you run out?”

“No,” Serena answered,
sitting down across from her. “I don’t believe in it. It’s indecisive. You
either want cream, or you want skim. Half-and-half is middle ground, timid and
contradictory, so I don’t offer it; you have to commit to a course of action.
It’s the only way.”

Then Serena dismissed the
subject with an offhand wave, a gesture both dignified and final. “So what
happened? Did you get caught without your umbrella?”

Ellen
nodded; the truth—she didn’t own an umbrella, and would rather stand in the
rain than inside her shrink’s office—sounded too neurotic.

“Well next time you
should really try to get under cover,” Serena scolded mildly. “Summer or not,
you could catch a cold. You’re shaking.”

Again Ellen nodded,
placing a hand around the delicate teacup, drinking the warmth through her
fingers. Almost instinctively, she released the wadded prescription slip and
left it forgotten on the table as she placed her other hand to the cup’s side. “I
thought colds were caused by a virus, and not weather?” she said
conversationally.

Serena offered a smile
both knowledgeable and slightly condescending. “Tell that to Daisy Miller. The
tea should help warm you up. Do you have far to go to get yourself home? I have
a spare umbrella if you need one.”

“Actually, I should get back to work,” Ellen said. “I need
Tuesday and Friday afternoons off, so I come in afterwards to help Mr. Dabble
with his inventory.”

“His inventory,” Serena
said, the idea somehow amusing her. She leaned her chin upon her fist, eyes
sparkling majestically. “So how is Nicky?”

Serena’s familiarity with
her boss still surprised her. “Okay, I guess. Do you know him well?”

“Nicky and I go way
back,” Serena replied.

“Oh. He never speaks of
you.”

“No,” Serena said with
that same superior half-smile. “He wouldn’t.”

Ellen raised the tea to
her lips, the aroma strong with peppermint, and took a sip. “This is
delicious.”

“Thank you,” Serena said.
“It’s a special blend of my own. The rose hips give it a tart sweetness.” Then
the coffee shop owner leaned across the table and whispered conspiratorially, “and
a dribble of Irish whiskey helps ward off the chill.”

Ellen stifled a laugh,
looking away so that she could swallow and hide her smile. That quick, Serena
picked up the crumpled prescription slip from the tabletop.

“Well, that’s one way to
keep something safe from the rain, but I’m afraid it looks a little worse for
wear.” The auburn-haired woman deftly unraveled the paper, her clever fingers
sorting the slip apart, uncreasing and unfolding until it lay exposed in the
middle of the small table.

“It looks like a
prescription,” Serena observed.

Ellen stared at the piece
of paper between them, a scrawl of blue, fountain-tip lines telling some kind
of illegible story, a secret language known only to doctors and pharmacists.
“Everyone thinks I’m crazy.”

“Are you?” Serena asked
gently.

“I didn’t used to think
so,” Ellen answered.

“And now?”

“Now I’m not so sure.”

“Well, I
have just the thing,” Serena said, up again and heading back behind the counter.
Ellen looked ruefully at the prescription, and considered simply pocketing the
slip before Serena returned. But Serena was back in an instant with a
decorative teapot and a flat circle of polished marble. She neatly placed the
marble coaster over the prescription slip then set the teapot down on top of
it. “There, that should flatten it nicely. If you offered it to a druggist in
that condition, he might think it was meant to be discarded, or that you came
by it inappropriately.”

Ellen nodded politely,
but thought the effort unnecessary.

“Is he good?”

“Who?” Ellen asked.

“Your doctor. The one you
just came from.”

Ellen took a sip of tea,
the question playing in her mind as she carefully chose each word of her
answer. But when she opened her mouth to speak, what came out—for the second
time that day—was not what she intended, something practiced and contrived, but
the unvarnished truth. “No, but he thinks he is.”

Serena’s eyebrows tilted
with polite interest. She would not press for details—etiquette forbade it—instead
lifting her cup to drink some of the tea.