Jennifer Crusie - Maybe This Time

What does he look like? He’s the blond guy in the dream?

“Yes. Almost white hair, cropped short. Tall. Great shoulders.” She yawned again. “Wire-rimmed glasses.”

This guy gave you the head-banging sex you’ve been dreaming about? The shadow sounded doubtful.

“Bluest eyes you’ve ever seen. Classic nose. Beautiful mouth. Women stop to stare at him and he doesn’t notice because he’s looking at me. Us. Are you sure you’re me?”

Yes, the girl said. Although I like guys who are built.

“No you don’t,” Andie said, confused. “You go for musicians and art majors. And your mother tells you to stop chasing water signs and find an earth.”

What?

“Flo. Our mother. You’re not me.” She struggled to sit up again, and the girl moved, and the vertigo sent Andie back to her pillows. She squinted at the shifting shape. “I think my hair was bigger then. Who are you?”

I’m you. You saw him. Then what happened? Did you smile at him?

“I was already smiling,” Andie said, sinking deeper into the bed, trying to get from dream to sleep. “I stopped smiling when he walked toward me.”

And you waited until he came to you. You made him come to you.

“No, I met him halfway. The band was playing ‘Somebody’s Baby.’ It’s hard to stand still when you hear ‘Somebody’s Baby.’ ”

The girl swished her skirt again. It would have been better to wait.

“I don’t wait for anybody.” Andie pulled the covers up over her head, feeling like Alice.

The girl was quiet for so long that Andie was almost asleep when she said, That’s better.

Andie pulled the covers off her face. “What?”

Not waiting for anybody. That’s better. Then what happens?

Andie shifted against the pillows. “We dance, and I’m so turned on I can’t talk.”

Dancing is good.

“And he says, ‘Come with me,’ and I do, and he kisses me in the street and it’s the best kiss of my entire life. I want to go to sleep now.”

Then what happens?

“We go to his apartment and have head-banging sex, and twelve hours later, he proposes, and I think he’s crazy, but we go to Kentucky.” Talking about it brought it all back, how crazy happy she’d been, how crazy happy he’d been. Not like himself at all. “He remembered to put Jackson Browne in the tape player, but he forgot a ring and we stopped in an antiques store and got this old gold band that I loved.” Andie pulled her hand out of the covers and looked at it. “A week later, it turned my finger green, and he went crazy because he wanted to get a real one, but I said no.”

You’re wearing a green ring? the girl said, disapproval strong in her voice.

“I cleaned it up and painted and varnished it so the green didn’t happen again. I should get rid of it.” Andie closed her hand so the ring wouldn’t slip off and put her hand under the covers again.

Then what?

“Then we got married. Because I can’t say no to him. Couldn’t say no to him for a whole year. From the minute he said, ‘I’m North Archer and I think we should leave,’ I was done.”

The shadow shifted quickly, moving closer. You were married to North Archer?

Andie woke up at that.

The girl was much more solid now, still translucent but clearer, stronger, beautiful, big dark eyes and mad curling hair, and when she moved, all the parts of her moved together so the vertigo was almost gone. You were married to North Archer and you divorced him? WHY?

“Because the guy I married disappeared into his law office and came out a walking suit.” Andie sat up. “What kind of dream is this? You’re not me. I was never beautiful.”

The room was very clear now, the moonlight almost like sunlight, edges sharp and entirely non-dreamlike, and the place was freezing.

“This isn’t a dream,” Andie said. “You’re a ghost.”

Don’t be silly, the girl said. There’s no such things as ghosts.

She moved toward Andie again, but this time Andie stayed sitting up, staring into the eye sockets of a dead woman.

“No,” she said, and the girl flowed over her, freezing her to the bone, saying, You should get him here. You should bring him here. He should be here to kiss you goodnight, and the nausea swept over her again, a disorientation so fierce that she fell back onto the bed, spiraling down into the dark again.

When she woke up, her windows were full of sun and the room was perfectly normal.

The girl had been so real. I don’t believe in ghosts, Andie thought, especially ghosts in dreams. She shook her head and went to get dressed and deal with Alice and Carter, reminding herself that it was just a dream.

Andie was distracted during breakfast, and Alice took full advantage, scoring cookies with her cereal as she listed all the things she was not going to do that morning. Andie answered her automatically, thinking about the dream, until Alice said, “I should have four cookies,” and she said, “No, you should not,” and took the cookie plate away from her.

There were dreams and there was reality, and reality was stopping Alice before she made herself sick.

“You are mean,” Alice said, scowling at her.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Alice, do you know a woman who has lots of curly dark hair?”

“You,” Alice said, and drank the last of her milk.

“Not me. Really pretty. Wearing a party dress. A blue party dress.”

“No,” Alice said, her nose in her glass.

“Huh.”

“I need another cookie.”

“No. You have to do your reading now. You can have a snack later. And then we’ll mulch your butterfly garden.” She wiped the chocolate from the cookies off Alice’s face, still thinking about the blue girl in the moonlight.

Blue girl. Blue dancing princess.

“Alice, who’s the blue dancing princess?”

“I want to read outside.” Alice got up and left the room, and Andie thought, This is not good.

Alice must be dreaming about the same girl. That brought up all kinds of things that Andie didn’t want to think about and Alice obviously didn’t want to talk about. And when Alice didn’t want to talk…

“Come on,” Alice said from the doorway into the dining room. “I’ve got my book.”

“Get your hoodie,” Andie told her. “It’s chilly out.” When Alice came back with her black hoodie zipped up, they headed out toward the pond, a large, green, stagnant surface that looked more like a massive leak in the moat than a planned water feature, which made sense since the moat was equally green and disgusting. Alice walked in front, her black-and-white-striped legs kicking through the fallen leaves and making her black flounced jersey skirt bounce. Cute, Andie thought, and considered telling Alice how good she looked. The last time she’d tried it, Alice had made gagging sounds, but she’d worn the skirt and leggings every day since then.

“Looking good, Alice,” Andie called.

Alice made gagging sounds.

When they got to the pond, Andie shook out the old quilt they used to picnic, and Alice threw her book down and announced, “This is the Sea of Azof. It is the world’s shallowest sea.”

Andie looked at the turgid, green pond. “Okay.”

Alice nodded. “We should go look at the butterfly garden.”

“Now?” Andie said, but Alice was already marching around to the far side of the house, so she dropped her things on the blanket and followed her around.

The garden was pretty bleak in October, most of it dead or dying with only the spiky purple asters still giving it their all.

Alice looked sad. “It’s dead.”

“We’ll put the mulch down after lunch, and that will keep it warm, and then it’ll all come back again in the spring.”

“I know. But that means the butterflies are gone.”

“They’ll be back in the spring, too.” Andie watched her, trying to see what she saw. “Did you plant this garden?”

“Aunt May did,” Alice said, sadly. “But I helped. A lot. She said it was my garden, too.”

Andie almost said, “In the spring, we’ll clean it all up,” and then she remembered that in the spring, God willing, they’d be in Columbus. “We can plant a garden like this in Columbus.” She tried to remember how much sun the backyard of North’s Victorian got.

“Last year, Aunt May collected seed. From the black-eyed Susans and the coneflowers and I forget what else.” Alice kicked at a bushy serrated-edged plant. “And this stuff takes over everywhere so we have to get rid of some of it.” She sounded like an exasperated adult, and Andie thought, Aunt May said that.

She kicked it again, and a lemony smell floated up to Andie. “What is it?”

“Lemon balm,” Alice pronounced, and Andie pictured a kindly, older woman bending down and saying, “Lemon balm,” to Alice in that same tsking voice, Alice nodding wisely beside her.

“Aunt May really knew her plants,” Andie said.

“These are what butterflies like.” Alice pointed to a stalky-looking plant that looked like giant dead daisies. “Coneflower.” She pointed to another. “Black-eyed Susan. Parsley. Columbine. Joe Pye. Zinnia. Salvia. Milkweed. Bergamot. Aster. Butterfly bush.”

She pointed to each of them, naming them lovingly, with a softness Andie hadn’t seen in her before, and then she stooped and plucked a big, ugly withered plant with a fuzzy stem. “Weed,” she said, disgusted, and threw it away.

“They must be very beautiful in the summer,” Andie said. Now, it looked like a garden of death except for the plucky asters.

“The butterflies are bee-you-tee-ful,” Alice said. “Swallowtails and monarchs and skippers. I’m going to be a lepidopterist when I grow up.”

“That’s very cool,” Andie said, meaning it.

Alice nodded, accepting the approval as her right. “And sometimes we get hummingbirds, which are also very cool. Aunt May said we could plant hummingbird plants next summer…”

Her voice trailed off, and Andie thought, Ouch, and then Alice turned her back on the garden, her face blank, and marched back to the blanket, where she plunked herself down, put her Walkman headphones on, and picked up her book.

Andie sat down beside her. “We’ll make a hummingbird garden, Alice. Either here or in Columbus, wherever we are, we’ll have a butterfly and hummingbird garden. And we’ll put the mulch down to keep these plants warm all winter.”

Alice shrugged and opened her book.

Andie thought, Tell North we need a hummingbird garden, too, and then went back to considering the thing that had been haunting her since the night before: the blue girl. Maybe Alice had inspired the dream. They were telling the Princess Alice story every night now, Alice correcting her and shaping it as they went, but the blue dancing princess was always in there. Maybe she was just dreaming Alice’s story…

She smelled something horrible and looked over to see Alice poking at something with a stick. When she looked closer, it was a dead frog, bloated in extinction.

“Alice, don’t do that, it’s dead.”

Alice pulled her headphones off, and Andie repeated herself.

“It only looks dead,” Alice said. “It’ll be okay.”

She poked it again, and Andie took the stick away before she broke it open and released God knew what. “It’s dead,” Andie told her firmly. “Leave it alone.”

Alice looked up at her, her eyes flat. “You don’t know so much.”

“Probably not. But that frog is dead.”

“No, it isn’t,” Alice said, her face screwed up to yell. “No, no, no, no-”

She turned away as her voice rose, and then she stopped, staring across the pond.

“What?” Andie said, and looked, too.

There was a woman there, dressed in old-fashioned black, her flounced skirt motionless in the October wind, her body half-bowed.

“Who is that?” Andie said.

Alice jerked around and stared at Andie for a moment, her eyes wide with surprise.

“Alice, who is that woman over there?”

“There’s nobody,” Alice said, and sat down with her book.

Andie looked back at the woman, thick-waisted and clumsy as she moved closer to the edge of the trees. “Alice?”

“I don’t see anybody.” Alice stared at her book, and for the next minute the pages didn’t turn while she stared down. Then she stole another look across the pond and closed her book. “Tell me the Princess Alice story again.”

Andie looked back at the woman. Maybe just a neighbor. Alice wasn’t the neighborly sort, maybe she didn’t like people watching her. Andie didn’t like people watching her, either.

“Princess Alice,” Alice said. “Tell me.”