“Would you want a child of a Wilcox?” she asked frankly, blue eyes wide with guileless curiosity.
“I’m having the child of a Wilcox,” I pointed out. As I replied, I suddenly felt heavy, oddly off-balance, and I looked down to see that my belly was nearly as rounded as my mother’s.
“Unfortunately,” she said, laying a hand on my swollen midsection. Then, almost off-handedly, she added, “You might want to get that looked at.”
Then she was gone, disappearing as neatly as the ghostly Maisie or Mary Mullen ever had. I stood there on the beach, feeling the unaccustomed heaviness of late pregnancy. Something about that odd west-rising sun compelled me, and I began to walk into the water, hardly seeming to notice as it came up to my knees, then my waist, then my chest, and finally my mouth. Cool black surrounded me, and suffocated me, and I drifted away with the tide, letting it take me.
* * *
An urgent hand on my arm. “Angela. Angela!” Connor’s voice.
I blinked, taking in the blackness of the space around me, my eyes gradually adjusting to see the faint glow of moonlight coming in from the window across the room. “Wha?” I said groggily.
“You were breathing really hard, gasping, almost like something was choking you.” He was turned toward me, leaning on one elbow as he watched me with worried eyes. “Bad dream?”
“Sort of,” I replied. My face felt oddly chilled, so I reached up to touch my cheek, only to find both it and my mouth wet, as if someone had splashed water on me. What the…? I wiped the moisture away, telling myself it could’ve been saliva. But I’d never been much of a drooler, and my skin was wet enough that it would’ve required a Great Dane to create that much slobber.
Walking into the black water, letting it rise up and over my head….
I shivered, and at once Connor was reaching out to me, taking me in his arms and holding me close. “Jesus, you’re freezing,” he said. “It’s not even cold.”
And it wasn’t. Late May and June were some of the warmest months in these parts, until the monsoon rains came with their blessed moisture and much-welcomed cloud cover. We almost always got a cool breeze at night in Jerome, but even so, the temperature in the room was probably in the low 70s.
“I dreamed,” I began, then shook my head. “It’s silly.”
“What?” When I didn’t answer, he brushed his lips against my hair and said quietly, “Angela, you’re the prima here. Even if you’re not a seer, even if you don’t necessarily have visions, your dreams still can be important.”
What he said was true, but I wasn’t sure I really wanted to acknowledge that fact. It would mean that in my dream I’d slipped into the astral plane, had left my body to walk in that otherworld. Events that happened there could affect one’s corporeal body, or so I’d been told. Until now, though, I’d never experienced that kind of psychic travel. What did it mean?
“And your hair is damp,” he added, sounding quite matter-of-fact, as if these sorts of things happened every day. Maybe they did in the Wilcox family. He’d never given me a great deal of detail on how Marie’s second sight really worked.
“I dreamed that I was talking to my mother, and she was pregnant with me. Then she left, and I walked into the ocean. Just walked straight into it, like I wanted to drown.”
For a few seconds he was silent, apparently processing this latest revelation. “And you woke up all damp, as if you really had gotten wet.”
“Yes.” Despite the warmth of his embrace, my teeth began to chatter, and I realized the tank top I wore was sticking wetly to my body. True, that could’ve been sweat, but it wasn’t quite warm enough in there for me to have been perspiring that much. “I need to get out of this top,” I told him.
He let go at once. I pushed off the covers and slid out of bed, then went to the dresser and got a clean top. As I pulled it on and tugged it down to mostly cover my underwear, my hand slid against my belly. Maybe the slightest roundness there, which could have had just as much to do with the enormous burger I’d eaten too soon before going to bed than the baby, which still couldn’t be much bigger than a fingernail at this point.
My mother’s words came back to me. You might want to get that looked at.
After locating a hair elastic on the dresser’s top and tugging my damp hair back into it, I turned to Connor. “I think we need to get that doctor’s appointment lined up as soon as possible.”
* * *
Whether any magical strings were pulled, I didn’t know for sure, but that Friday I was in Flagstaff at the office of Dr. Ruiz, the ob-gyn several of Connor’s cousins had recommended. I decided to leave aside the improbability of getting an appointment at all on the Friday before a long weekend, let alone with a highly in-demand doctor, and just be glad that I wouldn’t be left to stew over the holiday as to whether my baby was okay or not.