The tree limbs looked like the bony arms of witches. Jude shivered more as she stared up at them, and at their impossibly stretched heights. They'd never seemed sinister to her during the day, when she was out playing, but now they somehow seemed evil. The moon, too, seemed to want to find her out; a spotlight in the dark purple sky. She wasn't being careful enough, dried twigs snapped like gunshots as she rushed on. Time was running out. Jude could hear the creek murmuring to itself ahead, and she thought of Benny telling her that dogs couldn't catch your scent if you walked through water. (Benny was older, and knew these sort of things.) Was there a dog? She hesitated at the edge of the creek, listening hard. She heard a few crickets and a chorus of spring peepers, but no dog. She wavered a moment but decided that just because you couldn't hear something it didn't mean it wasn't there, and that went for dogs as well as monsters under the bed. Her feet were going to get wet, because she couldn't get her shoes on the right feet before she left the house(Benny promised to teach her to tie them.) The mud at the shore of the creek felt sticky between her toes, and the water felt so cold...Luckily the water only went up to her knees, so she was safe even if she had gotten the hem of her night gown wet. As she scrambled up the other shore a bramble caught her hand and left a bloody scratch. Jude felt like crying, but she had to find it. If she didn't find it there would be screaming, the kind that echoed and filled your whole head...It was here, it had to be, and she had to find it now, someone was coming...

Jude gasped and her eyes snapped open. She pulled her knees to her chest and waited for her heart beat to calm down. She knew it only take a couple of minutes, it always did. She'd been having the same nightmare for years: there was something missing and it was beyond her four year old self's power to find it. At first she'd thought that the dream was a faded memory, but neither Ben nor her parents could remember anything like that happening to her when she was four or any other age. Her therapist told her that there was probably a meaning to the dream buried in her subconscious, and she just had to find it. Jude had been struck by the irony of this, having to find the meaning in a dream about having to find something.

Jude stretched, luxuriating in the feel of her feet rubbing against her warm flannel sheets, and glanced at the clock. She sighed. As usual it was less than twenty minutes until her alarm was set to go off. For a moment she contemplated just lying in bed, in a dreamy stupor, until the alarm went off but she decided to get up and start getting ready for the day. She padded out to the kitchen to start some coffee, but got distracted by the fish before she went back to her room to get dressed. The two fish, black mollies named Oscar and Wilde, swam in their bowl, rather mindlessly. She poured a few flakes of food into their tank, thinking ruefully that they weren't the world's most interesting pets. She told herself that they had to do though, because her landlord wouldn't allow any others. Jude missed her cat Silver, a smoky-gray short hair with golden eyes, but her parents were taking good care of him. The fish seemed oblivious to her lack of interest in them, so she didn't waste her time feeling guilty about it.

She rummaged through her bureau and found the well worn jeans she wanted to wear for the day. She added a T-shirt to her usual sweat shirt because it was chilly out and some of the buildings weren't kept as warm as they could have been. She pulled back her long dark hair with a scrunchie so it'd be less of a mess at the end of the day.

Jude's parents were disappointed in her. They'd had expected her to move home and work on her masters after she graduated from college the Spring before. She had other plans. During the summer she found an apartment and a job doing something she liked- painting rooms in newly built office buildings. Her parents didn't understand her and kept saying "Jude, you're wasting your life." But she didn't see it that way. It seemed to her that the waste would have been her buckling to her parents wishes and putting up with their constrictive, over-protective version of life. (She was their only child) Maybe if they could understand how good using her hands at work made her feel, or how much she liked living on her own, things would be different; they might not be compelled to tell people "Our daughter paints office buildings," with such scorn and resentment in their voices. It doesn't really matter was all Jude told herself.

At least Ben was on her side, and didn't think she was a fool. His opinion mattered to her most of all, a lot of the time. If anyone had asked Jude point blank if she was involved with Ben, she would have answered no, thinking she was telling the truth. Their parents became friends long before Ben was born. The two of them were friends all Jude's life, back to the days when she tired out her legs trying to keep up with Ben, who was three years older than her. They were just very close friends, she assured people, and privately added that the fact that they'd been occasionally sleeping together since she was a sophomore in college did nothing to change that. She didn't accept her friends incredulity, and strongly suspected that some of them had facets in their own friendships that they weren't talking about.

She could of told them the truth, but it wasn't something that she wanted to share. They wouldn't get it, she was certain. Ben was comfortable. Familiar. He never tried to control her because he knew better. In short he was the perfect man; the one she could never fall in love with because it would have been too easy. The girl who didn't believe in fate never looked for the easiest means to the ends. Jude always wanted to the live the drama, and she told herself that the "boy next door" couldn't provide it . She was afraid of getting bored, and losing Ben wouldn't be worth that…

There was more ice on her car than she had expected, and she silently cursed herself for having taken so long getting ready to leave. It rained mistily even as she worked diligently with the ice scraper to unearth her car. After twenty minutes the rain had seeped into her jeans and supposedly rain-proof coat, and she slide behind the wheel of her car, sure she'd never be dry again. She resented the betrayal of the weather; there was supposed to be fluffy snow in January, not rain. Jude was thankful that the roads had been plowed and sanded during the wee hours of the morning, though she did not envy the people who had been out so early to fulfill the task.

The office building she was working on, an insurance agency, was a gleaming, institutional white. The fact that she'd been commissioned to paint each room of the interior an equally stark white did nothing to soften its clinical appearance. Jude thought that it could be salvageable if they used the right color accents for the drapes and furniture, but it wasn't her place to make those kinds of suggestions, and for all she knew they might be striving for stark. It didn't really matter to her all that much, white paint was easier to work with during the winter anyway- paint tends to sink into winter dried skin, and white was the least bizarre look she could hope for.

Jude let herself into the building with the key she'd been assigned by the building's owner. He was one of those anal types, and his attitude suggested that she'd better guard the key with her life and return it promptly when the job was finished. She hated that kind of mistrust, did the guy really think that'd she'd lend the key to friends or have a copy made so she could break in at some later date? She felt like offering the guy one of her kidneys as collateral, but thought better of it. She flicked on lights as she went, not minding the thought of running up the guy's electricity bill.

She stopped in the bathroom that she had set up as the paint station. She supposed that the paint station was a force of habit thing, it wasn't as necessary with just her painting as it was when she worked on jobs with other people, but even working by herself it made sense to keep the mess all in one central location. And, thanks to the magic of formula 409, no one would ever be able to tell she was ever there. Not that she ever made too much of a mess to begin with.

The day past quickly, and it was five o'clock almost before Jude realized it. She washed her roller and brush, wondering where the time had gone. There was something soothing about the repetitiveness of her job, and she was able to do it without thinking too much about it. Instead she daydreamed, painting on automatic pilot while background music sought to fill the void left by silence.

It was a soggy winter wonderland by the time she left the building. The rain had continued steadily throughout the day even as the wind picked up. Nothing Jude had ever learned in school could explain why it could rain when it was below freezing out. She skidded to an unsteady stop in front of her car, and wished fervently that the groundhog would bless them with a short winter when he woke up in a couple of weeks. The ice coated trees in the parking lot looked like they wouldn't mind an early spring either.

The roads were as slippery as the parking lot had been, so Jude promised herself that she'd drive slowly even though she wanted to get home as soon as possible. She was thinking of a movie to suggest to Ben when a flash of color appeared in the road a couple hundred yards ahead of her. She instinctively slammed on the brakes when she realized that it was a small boy on a sled. The car skidded on the icy road, and she twisted the wheel violently to the right, hoping not to hit the child. As the car swerved away from the boy it careened off the road, over the embankment and towards the woods. In the minute or so that followed Jude prayed over and over again that she wouldn't hit a tree. The car picked up speed as it raced down the equally icy embankment, and Jude realized that her prayers when unheard as a pine tree filled her view through the windshield.

Jude had difficulty processing what followed, and kept slipping back and forth from pain to an inviting darkness. She did catch fragments of speech, "…boy's mother called 911…car hit a tree…do you know where you are…ambulance… internal bleeding…" but she couldn't quite figure out if she was the one being spoken to, or where the people came from. After a while she ignored the voices completely and went to sleep.

When she woke up she was in her own bed, but there was something not right. She knew she wasn't supposed to be there for some reason, but she couldn't remember why. She got out of bed and went down to the kitchen, and was surprised to see how young her mother looked, and how big. She had this crazy sense of having shrunken during the night, and it was worsened by the way her mother talked to her, as if she was a little child or something. Her father came into the room and took her by the hand, leading her into the living room. He told her to sit down facing him, and she did, just to humor him. He held up a card with the letter A printed on it, and demanded that she tell him what it was. She worried for his sanity for a moment, but told him anyway. Things went along fine until they got to the letter G . She found suddenly that she couldn't tell him what it was. Her father looked sternly at her and said "Jude, what letter is this?"

She tried again to tell him, wondering frantically why she couldn't. "Tell me what letter this is Jude."

She was astonished to hear herself say " I don't know daddy." She pulled away her stinging hand. " This is the letter G, Jude. Say it."

" G!" She couldn't believe how frightened she was suddenly that her hand would be smacked again if she couldn't remember the letter.

" Alright, Jude." He held up another card. " What letter is this?"

She wanted to be sure that she could tell him what the next letter was, she knew the damn things, she just had to be very careful to say them right, or it was going to really hurt this time if she missed another letter. She was right, she couldn't say it and it hurt so much…

The white that filled her eyes when she reopened them made her wonder for a moment if she'd somehow gotten into the insurance building again. That led her to wonder if she'd in fact never left, and the events that followed her supposed leaving were all a bizarre daydream. However, before she could fully convince herself that this was the case, two things happened: a searing pain announced itself in her midsection, followed by its little brothers around the rest of her body, and her eyes focused enough for her to be able to determine that she was surrounded by white because she was in a hospital room. The unbiddened images of the accident flicked through her mind like slides in a projector, and she tried to ignore them in favor taking stock of what was damaged in her body. She noticed immediately that besides the pain in her middle that her head and one of her arms seemed enraged by something too. Before she could figure out just what her body was trying to tell her she became aware that she was not alone in the room.

She blinked, somewhat surprised that she'd missed the man's presence when she evaluated the room. For one thing, he was dressed all in black, which she felt should have made him obvious, given the lack of color in the rest of the room. He was so quiet though, that perhaps it was his very silence that allowed him to fade into the background for her. Jude was not sure what to make of his presence, she didn't think she knew him, and she doubted that he was an employee of the hospital. It occurred to her that he might have been elemental in her arrival at the hospital, perhaps a witness to the accident or even a rescuer. He looked somewhat familiar when she looked more closely, she thought maybe he was someone she'd gone to school with, someone a bit younger. But she never got the chance ask who he was. As she was about to open her mouth he stood, and she thought it better to see what he did before speaking. He merely stood at the foot of her bed for a time, long enough for her to come to the conclusion that his appearance was quite striking. Tall, thin, pale, dark-haired, dressed all in black, but saved from a mime-like countenance by deep blue eyes in a finely chiseled face. He didn't look like a mime to Jude, he was too watchful for that. She began to think that she would like it better if he didn't watch her so closely, because weren't mimes the one's who were on display? Not that he's a mime she chided herself. To cut herself off from that ridiculous line of thinking she finally spoke to him. " Um, do you have something to do with how I got here?" She found her voice far weaker than she'd anticipated.

" Everything, Jude. Everything." He said it with a hint of a smile, but Jude was not reassured.

" You know my name. Do I know you or something? My mind's not functioning right, and I can't seem to figure out how you know me."

He dragged a chair over to the side of her bed. " What makes you think that your mind's not working right?"

" Well, right before I woke up I had this weird dream that I was a little girl again, and -"

He interrupted her," It wasn't a dream."

She looked at him for a moment, wondering what the joke was. " It wasn't a dream? How would you know that?"

" Because, my dear Jude, I know more about this than you do. Allow me to introduce myself. I'm Ash." He completed his sentence with a slight bow towards her. Jude wondered if she was supposed to be impressed.

" Ah, nice to meet you Ash. Say, do you think you could find a nurse for me? I'd like for someone official to tell me what's going on here. No offense."

"There aren't any doctors or nurses here."

Jude looked at him confused. "Why not?"

"Because this is the place between. Observe well, Jude. You might learn something."

He got up slowly, walking to the window, and Jude found herself compelled to watch him. She wanted to protest, she knew that he'd let in the cold when he opened it. But the open window wasn't cold, it didn't seem to open to the winter air. It didn't seem to be opening to anything at all. Before Jude had a chance to speculate on that he was gone. Perhaps through the window, though there was so sound of falling. Jude thought that she was the one who fell, anyway.

The sun shined in through the window, making patterns on the carpet. Jude was distracted by them for a moment, because she thought they looked pretty, especially with the dust caught in the sun beams. A soft sound from the other side of the room reminded her what she was doing. She had to be careful, she wasn't supposed to be in her parents' room, she knew that, and if she got caught she'd be in trouble. But she really wanted to see. She didn't know why no one had let her see yet, and she was sick of waiting. As she crept past her parent's bed she noticed the bars were just like the ones that made up the back of her little rocking chair, the one that was just her size. They were the same brown, and looked like warm candy. She had to look through the bars, because she was too short to see over the top. It didn't bother her, she could see though them well enough. He was very little, probably smaller than some of her dolls. When he waved one of his arms around she could see his fingers curled up into a little fist, and she wondered what a little baby could be so angry about. Maybe, she thought, he was only upset that her parents weren't talking about him in a happy way. Jude wondered why, they had been happy before he came, but now they talked softly. Sad, like the way mommy talked about things that weren't anymore. She reached out to touch him, wanting to pick him up but not daring to. "Poor baby, you don't know anyone loves you. Jude loves you." He started to whimper, and Jude ran out of the room. If he cried mom or dad would come running, and she didn't want to be caught.

Jude opened her eyes with a start. It had seemed all so real. She knew it was a vivid dream, even though Ash would like her to believe otherwise. Ash. She wondered if might be that he too was only a dream. They gave you drugs in the hospital that did funny things to your mind. Jude thought it was a memory, but she couldn't remember there ever being a baby that stayed in their house. Perhaps her parents had taken care of a little cousin of hers once. If he was a handful that might explain why they were less than thrilled with him being there.

A nurse walked in, much to Jude's relief. The nurse gave her a startled smile. " I see that you're awake."

"Please, could you tell me what's wrong with me? I remember the accident…"

" Sure dear, just let me read your chart." As the nurse reached for the chart Jude wondered why she hadn't thought of reading it herself. " Says here that you have a concussion, a broken arm, and that they had to remove your appendix and spleen. Seems like you got shaken up real good."

" Do you know….do you know if the little boy is okay?"

" The little boy? Oh, you must mean the little fellow who came in with his mom this morning. His mom said it was a miracle you didn't get killed when you tried to stop for him. He's fine, though I dare say he'll be even better when he finds out you woke up."

" Why? I wasn't in a coma, was I?"

" Oh no, but you know how little children get these things into their heads, they think everything is their fault."

" Oh."

" I'll be back in a bit to check on you. Why don't you get some rest?"

" Yeah sure. Good idea."

She noticed for the first time that there were flowers in the room. The bunch nearest her was pink miniature roses, and when she craned her head she saw that the card said they were from Ben. She reached out carefully with her unbroken arm, and swatted at the card. Her muscles protested, but she got a hold of it on the third try. All the card said was " Get better soon, Baby. Love, Ben." She missed him suddenly, and wanted him there, the same way she craved her blankie when she was small. If only he were there nothing else would matter.

Ash walked back into the room, as if he belonged there. Jude gave him a resentful look. "Why Jude, if I didn't know better I'd say you weren't happy to see me. It's sort of like Rumpstiltskin between the two of us, wouldn't you say? Except you already know my name."

"Get out."

" That's not kind of you. Haven't you been taught to love fellow man? That we're all your brothers? Perhaps that bit of your education was left out, huh?"

" What do you want from me?"

" Oh, just an open mind. Open your windows of perception, and you shall be free."

"Free from you, I hope you mean."

" Maybe so, fair well, good journeyer."

She turned away from him, preferring to look at the wall. Maybe he'd leave her in peace.

The tree limbs looked like the bony arms of witches. Jude shivered more as she stared up at them, and at their impossibly stretched heights. They'd never seemed sinister to her during the day, when she was out playing, but now they somehow seemed evil. The moon, too, seemed to want to find her out; a spotlight in the dark purple sky. She wasn't being careful enough, dried twigs snapped like gunshots as she rushed on. Time was running out. Jude could hear the creek murmuring to itself ahead, and she thought of Benny telling her that dogs couldn't catch your scent if you walked through water. (Benny was older, and knew these sort of things. Besides his mommy read him Uncle Tom's Cabin and it said so. Books never lied.) Was there a dog? She hesitated at the edge of the creek, listening hard. She heard a few crickets and a chorus of spring peepers, but no dog. She wavered a moment but decided that just because you couldn't hear something it didn't mean it wasn't there, and that went for dogs as well as monsters under the bed. Her feet were going to get wet, because she couldn't get her shoes on the right feet before she left the house.(Benny promised to teach her to tie them) She thought that she could see better from the other side, so she waded in. The mud at the shore of the creek felt sticky between her toes, and the water felt so cold...Luckily the water only went up to her knees, so she was safe even if she had gotten the hem of her night gown wet. As she scrambled up the other shore a bramble caught her hand and left a bloody scratch. Jude felt like crying, but she had to find it. If she didn't find it there would be screaming, the kind that echoed and filled your whole head...It was here, it had to be, and she had to find it now, someone was coming...

She kept looking, but she couldn't see it. It had been here in the creek the last time she looked out the window, but now she couldn't find it. If she couldn't find it, then, then…tears blurred her eyes, and she wiped them away angrily. Her fists were still to her eyes when it grabbed her. She screamed and beat upon it with her fists until she realized that it was only her daddy.

He picked her up, and she put her head on his shoulder, sobbing. He rubbed her back as he carried her to the house, making shushing noises. When they were inside he held her on his lap and asked her why she'd gone outside so late at night.

" Daddy, Gramma said it was because the moon was missing. I saw the moon in the creek once, and I thought if I found the moon, then the baby could come back. I couldn't find it though. I tried and tried. Now the baby can't come back."

" Oh, Jude, that's not what Gramma meant. Gramma's old, and old people believe strange things. She said that it was bad luck to die during the new moon, but she didn't mean that the moon had anything to do with him dying. He just died, Jude, he was too weak to live. You have to go to bed, kiddo, tomorrow is going to be a long day."

Her mother held her on her hip the next morning, when it was drizzling and everyone wore black. They put the little box in the ground, and covered it up with dirt.

There was a stone, daddy said they had part of it cut early because they knew, and she knew from touch it that was so smooth on the front, just like the stones in the creek There were words on it, but Jude couldn't make them out. She only knew her letters, not the words they made.

Jude sat up with a short scream. Her four year old self might not have known what the letters had spelled out, but the present day Jude did. The stone had said "Gregory Ashford Page b. June 18^th 1980, d. August 23^rd 1980."

Jude sat in her bed, shaking. No one had ever told her. Her parents had always let her think that she their only child now and always. When she thought about it, the way they treated her made a kind of sense. They'd always been so protective, and over-acted when she got even the slightest injury. They were probably beside themselves now, and she wondered if the nurse had called her parents to tell them that she had been awake. She sort of hoped not, because she didn't want them to be reassured.

She was trying to figure out if Ash was a ghost or a hallucination, when Ben walked into her room. At first she was so glad to see him, and was about to tell him everything when something occurred to her: he knew. He'd been seven when her brother had died, so he must have remembered, even if she was too young to.

"You never told me," she said to him accusingly.

" Told you what?" he asked, sounding confused.

" You never told me that I had a brother."

He looked at her, pain in his eyes." They told me not to. I wanted a lot of times to tell you I felt bad about it, but my parents and yours said that it was best not to tell you since you were too little to remember yourself. They just thought it was better that way."

" So no one was ever going to tell me about it?!"

" They probably wouldn't have. How do you know, anyway?"

" Since the accident I've been dreaming about it, remembering everything that happened. There's just one thing I don't get. What did he die from?"

" His lungs weren't right. They couldn't do as much to save babies then as they can now, and my parents said that the kind of things they tried weren't very affective, and painful besides. Your parents decided to let him go peacefully, so they brought him home when they knew he was dying. They kept you and I away from him, I think they were hoping it'd be easier if we never saw him."

" I saw him once. That was one of the things I dreamed. Seeing him in his crib, wondering why my parents weren't happy to have him home."

" Jude, can you forgive me for not saying something? I wanted to tell you, but…"

" It's all right Ben. I'm not mad. I guess there are just some things you have to search out yourself."

Jude knew she was lying to him, it wasn't all right, but what else could she say? He was the one she depended on, so she couldn't stay angry at him forever. Her parents on the other hand…Ben looked at her when she sighed. Ash was right, being perceptive was freeing.

-srw(c)1999

This page hosted by Get your own Free Home Page