Marion E Currier

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Frontmatter Copyright

  Dedication

  Book Chapters Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Appendix Epigraph

  Taíno Dictionary

  Lineage of Rafael Jagua Baluarte

  About the Author

  LINKED

  Marion E. Currier

  Other books by Marion E. Currier

  A Night Way Out

  Copyright © 2016 by Marion E. Currier

  First printing: 2011

  ISBN 978-1-365-53869-8

  Lulu.com

  www.marionecurrier.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  This is a work of fiction. The persons and events are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  For Glee and Ray – because true love really is eternal

  Para Puerto Rico – el hogar de mi alma

  Chapter 1

  The only sound was that of labored breathing and dull footsteps on the spongy forest floor. His shirt no longer moved in the breeze, but was soaked with sweat, sticking to him as if it were his very skin. We were right behind her, keeping our eyes on the soft brown curls cascading half way down her back, amazed at her sense of direction in this almost impenetrable thicket.

  "Wait," he finally huffed, pressing his hand gently against her shoulder. I didn't like it. But of course he didn't know that. Nor did he know of the pain that wrapped itself around my heart as he smiled warmly at her, searching the features of her delicate face, while I lost myself in the dark night of his eyes.

  When he leaned in to kiss her, a disappointed groan tore itself lose from my chest. My hand flew to my mouth, but it was too late. I didn't manage to stifle the sound, my eyes fluttering at the noise, opening to the view of my bedroom walls.

  Chapter 2

  A helicopter landed on the high rise across from my office window. As with any movement I watched on Brickell Avenue, it was just another scene in the endless silent movie that played day in, day out. Without any sound coming through the giant windows, I felt like a deaf person. Or someone who was only half alive. To a gardener, a farmer or a tribe of Natives it must seem like an odd way to live, freezing under air conditioning every day, when in reality it's hot, humid, windy or rainy.

  Things were so different when I was with Rafael. With him, anything was possible; everything was larger than life. But now…now I was back in the big-windowed office that teased me with visual snippets of everything that appeared more appealing and worth my time than sitting here. I slumped into my seat, my eyes still on the soundless blades of the helicopter as they picked up speed again for lift-off. It was all so terribly wrong and backwards.

  "If that crease gets any deeper, you can probably put a dime in its fold." Elena smiled as she sat down across from me. "Morning, Mel."

  "Good Morning, Elena." I ironed my forehead with a fingertip.

  "So what were you pondering with that serious stare?"

  Gnawing on my lip, I studied my friend and co-worker. Her elegant frame molded itself comfortably to the seat, the hem of her skirt just above the knee, and her slender fingers wrapped around what would only be the first of several Cokes for the day.

  "Just how healthy it really is – or isn't – to be living the majority of our waking hours in air conditioned bliss," I said.

  The corner of Elena's mouth came up. "Bliss is a good thing, air conditioned or not. And I don't recall anyone ever referring to being in humidity as a blissful experience."

  "It can be," I muttered, thinking of last night's run through the forest.

  "Ah." Elena nodded. "Sounds like you slept then."

  "You say that like it's a bad thing. Given that the alternative is insomnia, it's not such a bad deal."

  "Except for your head. Where did it take you this time?"

  I sighed. Elena had been part of my life almost as long as the dreams that took up most of my nights, but it wasn't the same as when I was 12 or 14. Back then it seemed…maybe not normal, but certainly not as weird and plain nuts as it did in my mid-40s. Yet rather than fading, the dreams were getting stronger, more frequent and so vivid that they coated my lungs with moisture and left my hair tangled from the wind. Waking up was at once relief and agony at leaving behind what seemed so real while I was in it.

  "Into the forest," I said slowly. "A lot of running."

  Elena nodded. "I'm assuming you weren't alone."

  A smile crept across my face. Bless her for treating my nighttime forays like a perfectly healthy topic of conversation. "Of course not," I replied. "I never am. You know that."

  She stared off into the corner of the room for a moment. "It's been 33 years," she finally said. "That's a long time."

  "It's not like I asked for this," I replied, well aware that my tone was defensive and at the same time protective. But protective of what? The figments of my apparently rather vivid imagination? "He was just there one day." Or I was. Quite frankly, after all of these years I wasn't sure if he was invading my nights or I was spying on his days. They'd been intertwined for so long that I couldn't tell anymore.

  I massaged my temples, a flash of us…him and me…running through the forest. And her. I shook my head, the image annoyingly persistent now that I didn't really want to see it. I sighed again, deeply. "Do you think I'm going insane? Maybe I'm schizophrenic."

  Elena shrugged. "If you're going nuts, then it's the slowest, most long-winded process I've ever heard of," she said. "Schizophrenic? I don't know, is anyone talking to you right now?"

  I shook my head.

  "No little voices chatting with you, telling you about government conspiracies?"

  I shook my head again. "Maybe it's a lesser known side effect of menopause."

  She grinned. "Whatever it is, judging by the ever increasing circles under your eyes, you do seem to be spending a lot more time lately being….active in your sleep."

  "Maybe I should get some drugs. Or Estrogen. But what if…"

  "What if what?" Elena looked at me, curious.

  I'd never mentioned the dreams to anyone else. Not my parents when I was young. Not my ex-husband, when they almost disappeared during my eight years of semi-happy marriage. Elena was the only one. And yet I felt foolish, wishing I hadn't started the sentence.

  "What if…taking medication makes them go away," I said quietly.

  Elena ran her tongue along the edge of her teeth, with that soft hissing sound that always signaled an epiphany. "You would miss him," she said, sounding absolutely certain in her statement and yet surprised when my cheeks turned crimson in confirmation. "Thirty-plus years of following this Rafael character around and you would actually miss it if he didn't traipse through your head every few
nights?"

  I said nothing. What could I say? My reaction already convicted me and I couldn't think of a lie good enough to fool Elena.

  "That's what I thought." She pulled her chair close to my desk and fixed her icy blues on me. "I probably should have asked you this years ago, but is he really just someone your subconscious invented or is he some guy you've secretly been stalking without telling me?"

  I wasn't sure what was worse, Elena questioning everything I'd confided in her over the years or her thinking I would stalk someone, and for three decades no less.

  "When my grandfather didn't return after World War II," I started, "my grandmother told me she dreamed so many times that he'd called her to say he'd met another woman and wasn't coming back, that she could no longer swear he really died. She even had me convinced and when I was little I wanted to go track him down and bring him back to her." I wiped at my eyes. "I'm pretty sure I never stalked Rafael, but…I can't swear to you that he's not real. My goodness, that does make me sound crazy."

  "Possibly so," Elena admitted, "but shy of going to a doctor for this, which you've successfully resisted doing so far, ever thought of turning the tables – of not waiting until Rafael wanders through your head, but going after him?"

  I blinked, convinced that I was hearing wrong.

  "Think about it," Elena continued, "through all of these years, you've seen bits and pieces of places. Don't you think you can figure out where he is, play private detective in your head so to speak?"

  I reached for Elena's Coke, grimacing as the sweet liquid gooed over my taste buds. Her favorite beverage was so not my thing, but I needed something for my throat, which was going dry as I sat there gape-mouthed, listening. She couldn't be serious. Or could she? What if I did figure out where he was. Then what would I do?

  Like so many times before, Elena knew my thoughts while they were still spiraling through my head. "When you do, then you should go there," she said.

  I slowly sat down the soda can. "And do what?"

  She shrugged. "You'll figure it out."

  "Thank you," I said, meaning this truly, deeply, sincerely. "It's the first time you sound more nuts than me. Maybe that's what I needed." I collected the documents for our morning meeting. "I don't think I will be going on any journey into the deep crevices of my brain and then jet off to whatever place I find in there."

  Elena rose, motioning me to share the load of papers I kept accumulating. "Why not? You said yourself the dreams are getting more intense, more frequent. Maybe you need to face something that's been locked up in your noggin for 30+ years and you're not getting it, so it keeps getting stronger, trying to tell you something."

  The dime-deep frown returned between my brows. "You make my head sound like the place of an alien invasion," I grunted. "I appreciate your trying to help, but I don't think diving any deeper into this is the answer."

  Elena opened the door for me. "I'm just saying that if you get more proactive about the whole thing, maybe inspiration will hit you and you can figure out how you can still have 30 or 40 years of good, deep sleep-filled nights."

  We headed down the hallway to the conference room, and though I should have been mulling over the details of the marketing presentation we were about to give to a new client, I found myself concentrating on the echo of Elena's last words. Maybe it was precisely the lack of those good sleep-filled nights that made her suggestion sound more logical than it really was. I took a deep breath, allowing a welcoming smile to brighten my face as we entered the room, and willing my brain cells to focus on the unique qualities of a newly designed running shoe we were about to promote.

  Chapter 3

  The 1 a.m. rerun of yet another 90's sitcom was playing its closing theme song when I finally found myself yawning heartily. I'd pushed off going to bed as long as I could, hoping it would send my body straight into dreamless La-La-Land. Grabbing my pillow and a flannel quilt, I stretched out on the sofa and turned off the TV. Sometimes changing locations helped.

  Tonight, it didn't.

  We were back in the city, such as it was, and Rafael was small. Perhaps three, I mused in my invisible, yet ever present self. Because his mother was still alive. Guey was her name. She adored him and he loved her to pieces. I knew because I had seen him cry and felt the void her untimely death left in him. When he ached, so did I.

  Guey fixed him lunch, some kind of corn meal cereal. He watched her intently with his big dark eyes. They were the first thing I had noticed about him, even when he was still very young. They were unusual, a solid pool of black ink hugged by a white that always had the softest blue glow to it, as though the underlying color of the ink were reflected in it.

  His not perfectly even smile, the nose with the down-turned tip…they were unmistakably his father's. But the eyes were Guey, as was the center of his soul that shone through them. There was a tenderness in Guey and Rafael and between them that was utterly oblivious to all surroundings, be they inanimate object or another being. This tenderness seemed at times to even be unaware of earth's natural gravitational pull, as though gravity didn't apply because nobody had made neither Guey nor Rafael aware that technically they were bound by nature's rules. I perceived it like an electrical current that could be felt, but not seen. A current that carried only warmth and goodness.

  I loved watching them together. Even though I often found it confusing that the dreams did not happen in chronological sequence, I didn't mind when they took me back to those seven young years of Rafael's life when Guey was still part of it.

  "Jagua, you must eat," she said softly, calling Rafael by his middle name as she often did when Manuel, his father, was not around. It was a word in her native tongue, she had explained to her husband, a word that meant black ink, clearly inspired by his eyes. Manuel had smiled, consenting as he always did, adding the name to the official birth record.

  I sat unnoticed, watching her as she fed her small boy, singing songs in a language I did not understand, but whose soothing melody made me smile and feel good.

  Rafael dipped his fingers into the mush, watching contentedly as it dribbled off the tips back into the little wooden bowl. A wisp of straight hair fell into his forehead as he leaned down, trying to reach the bowl's contents directly with his mouth. I laughed, as did Guey. Both of our arms reached for the little boy, but I pulled back as she cradled him against her cheek. A twinge of envy surged through me that she got to hold him and I didn't, and I looked away, embarrassed for feeling that way.

  When the beep on my mobile phone insisted it was time to get up, I was surprisingly refreshed, more so than during previous nights. Maybe my stubborn head knew when I reached my breaking point, allowing me to just quietly witness a gentle moment in Rafael Jagua's life, without any drama to leave me feeling drained by morning. I knelt by the side of the sofa and gave thanks, resisting the question of how come I never had been given a child. I'd asked it before without ever sensing a reply. And maybe one wasn't needed because what difference would it make; why let me have a big explanation when that still wouldn't change the facts.

  I turned on the Channel 7 news and let the perky voices of the early morning newscasters bounce me through my morning routine.

  As Murphy's Law has it, not one station on my car radio played music when I searched for a song, spitting forth only multi-voiced conversational salads. I flicked off the radio, finding myself revisiting yesterday's conversation with Elena. Her suggestion still amazed me. In the light of day and after a good night's sleep, it seemed as strange as the dreams themselves. Yet I couldn't deny that a tiny voice within me tried to petition for her plan. I had never thought, never even considered that there could be room for action on my part in all of this. And maybe instead of considering it, both Elena and I should really be making an appointment with a shrink – which was pretty much what I told her as we walked into the office together. Only with a small caveat.

  "I'll do it. I'll dig around in my head and see if I can make all of thes
e pieces fit into something. If I figure out the place, I'll go there," I said, underlining my words with a very deep and slow breath. "And if nothing comes of it, promise me we'll both make appointments with a psychiatrist."

  Elena raised her brows. "Why me? I'm not the one with the dreams."

  A smirk encircled my mouth. "But you are the one who seems to think they are the most normal thing in the world for me to be living with all of these years. And you are the one who told me just yesterday I should go play private detective in my head and then buy a ticket and go visit whatever I find in there. I would say that qualifies us both for the two-for-one special on any psych's couch."

  My friend contemplated me for a moment before nodding. "Alright, you've got a deal." She stretched out her hand. "But no cheating. And no giving up just because it might get difficult. You've got to give it a fair try."

  "Deal." I shook her hand, feeling my heart pound with an electrifying mix of excited anticipation and absolute panic. If I hadn't known Elena for so long, I'd honestly be worried I'd just made a deal with the devil. How two grown women could in all seriousness be contemplating a voyage – into my head essentially – I could neither answer nor fully justify. All I knew is that once we shook hands, I could not turn back. Nor did I want to.

  Elena checked her watch. "I've got a meeting in five minutes. Why don't we talk about this over lunch and you can tell me what clues you've scraped up from the bottom of your brain."

  "Sure." The word bent from statement into question as I found myself left standing alone. I searched for my assistant behind the counter top that encircled her desk. "Reva, do me a favor and hold my calls for about three hours. I have an important project to work on." Only a half lie from my non-employer point of view. I shut the glass door to the office behind me, realizing just how overwhelming the silence behind the shut door was. The sun played benignly on the windows of Miami's generous crop of office buildings, and to keep my eyes from wandering guilt-ridden to the quarterly report I really should be working on, I dropped it into a drawer. That left only me and the expectantly blinking cursor on my laptop's screen.