Her eyes widened, and it seemed as if she was struggling within herself, struggling to believe what I had just told her. Then she stood up a little taller, her shoulders straightening, and she said simply, “Then I think it’s time for both of us to go home.”
18
Promised Land
Marie took my hand firmly in hers, and we walked along the creek bed, heading south and east. This time, though, the empty fields and thickly growing pines began to fade away, replaced with the familiar sprawl of suburbia. And as the real world fell in around us, we began to move faster and faster, not flying as I had in some of my meditations, but still doing a credible imitation of The Flash as we covered the miles to downtown in only a few seconds.
At the last minute she let go of my hand, and I felt my consciousness fall into my body with an almost physical thud. My eyes shot open, and I saw Lawrence and my father watching me in concern, even as Connor’s fingers clasped mine and he said,
“Angela? What happened?”
It all seemed to hit me at once — Nizhoni, and Jeremiah, and how they had walked away from me up that shining creek, going into the light. “It’s over,” I whispered. For some reason, my throat felt as dry as if I’d walked a hundred miles of desert road.
“What do you mean, ‘it’s over’?” Connor asked.
“The curse. It’s broken. They made up, and he kissed her, and they went into the light together.”
None of that was probably very coherent, but he seemed to get the gist of it, because his eyes lit up and he pulled me against him, kissing my mouth and my cheeks and my forehead while somehow laughing at the same time. I didn’t mind, even when he missed and kissed my eyelid. After all, it was Connor, and just to feel him and hear him was enough for me.
When he pulled away, though, he frowned, reaching out to touch my cheek. “You’re hurt.”
“Just a scrape,” I said, so giddy with everything that had happened that I’d honestly forgotten about the cut on my face. “I’ll clean it up later.”
He didn’t protest, although he did reach over and pick up a napkin from the coffee table and hand it to me. I pressed it against my skin, finally feeling the sting of the wound, although it didn’t hurt nearly as much as it had when I first got it.
“You have done very well,” Lawrence said, and my father nodded.
“We’ll want to hear the whole story soon, but for now, let me get you a glass of water.”
That sounded like a great idea. I watched him rise from his chair and head to the kitchen, and my gaze strayed to the clock on the wall in the dining room. Ten past ten. So I’d been gone for only a few minutes.
Or an eternity, depending on how you looked at it.
I heard the clink of ice in the glass, and then the soft gush of water from the dispenser in the refrigerator door. As my father was leaving the kitchen, there came a soft knock at the front door. He stopped in the hallway, looking back toward us where we sat in the living room. “Should I get that?”
“I don’t know who it could be, but yeah, might as well,” Connor said. “I doubt they’d be dropping by at this hour if it wasn’t important.”
My father nodded and went over to the door, opening it with his free hand. Since he was blocking the doorway, I couldn’t see who was there — but when the glass of ice water fell from his hand and shattered on the wooden floor, scattering ice cubes everywhere, I thought I had a pretty good idea.
“Hello, Andre,” Marie said.
* * *
It was, as they say, an evening of surprises. Once my father got over his shock, he brought Marie into the living room, then apologized about the mess and fetched me another glass of water. Then it was time to tell the story as they all listened intently, exclaiming at certain points — how Jeremiah had never kidnapped his bride, how he and Nizhoni had reconciled at the end — until at last we all sat there quietly, exhausted and overwhelmed. So much had changed, and yet —
Connor was sitting close enough that we were thigh to thigh, his warmth as always reassuring, solid, real. And so some things, the important things, were still the same. We had each other.
And now…now we had a future.
He did try teasing Marie about her disappearing act, but she’d only said, “There are some times when a person needs to be alone. This was one of those times.” Her expression had been calm enough, but there was a certain sharpness to her dark eyes that told me she wasn’t going to tolerate any more questions on the subject.
Luckily, he backed off. I got the feeling that he didn’t want to push her, not when my father was sitting there and watching her with an expression of pure wonder on his face. It was clear that he didn’t care that she wasn’t the laughing, pretty young woman she’d once been. She was his Marie, and that was all that mattered.