“Arnie,” she said, “I’ve talked to Danielle”—Jill’s mom—“and she’s going to meet us at Haven. And the same construction boss sent his daughter and another driver down to Goat Creek to pick up the car Jill was driving last night. The army seemed to think it belonged to an escaped detainee and had impounded it, but the daughter convinced them that it was one of her dad’s fleet of vehicles and is bringing it back. She said to tell you it wasn’t a big deal, that the division at Goat Creek is still pretty confused.”
“There are so many of us,” said Arnie.
Casimir laughed.
There were quite a few of us to fit in even Mom’s Super-Mammoth . . . especially when it turned out, to Val’s horror, to include an ugly, raggedy sheep, which had somehow climbed through that hole in the Goat Creek fence and Mom’s safety net. Mom, who was maybe feeling a little light-headed, laughed and laughed. “I am sorry,” said Val about three dozen times. “I used a spell I only imperfectly remembered—”
“—and that worked,” Jill said, “under pretty ghastly circumstances. Shut up, Val—I mean, sorry, Mr. Crudon, but shut up. We’re all here, we’re all alive, we’re all great.”
So because Mom said and Val very reluctantly agreed that if the spell was that strong it might injure the sheep to break it by leaving it behind, Arnie and Casimir blocked off a little of Super-Mammoth’s gigantic rear so if any of the other animals noticed that one of their number was prey we’d have enough warning to stop and sort things out. The sheep, I guess demented with love, didn’t object to this at all. Casimir somehow found time to pull up some grass for it, and it lay down and munched its grass and then chewed its cud like hanging out with dogs (and a small swirly-striped tiger, who, to my enormous amazement and relief, jumped into the Super-Mammoth with the rest of the livestock) was something it always did. Maybe it thought other sheep were boring and that it had finally found its spiritual home.
We were on the road for hours—hours and hours—but I was still so tired I slept through most of it, tangled up with Takahiro (and quite a few gruuaa and my algebra book), while Jill and Caz curled up from the other end of the luxuriously long back seat of Super-Mammoth, and the three grown-ups sat in front. Since we left the window to the rear open, there were critter heads sticking through and looking for opportunities most of the time, but there wasn’t really space even for Majid at his most spaghetti-like between Casimir’s back and Taks’ long legs. So I’m not sure how I got squashed in with Mongo too, but I did. It’s very hard to do submission well when you’ve wedged yourself in like a doorstop under a door, but when I opened my eyes long enough to discover Mongo jammed up under my chin and against my chest, he tried. I couldn’t laugh either, my ribs didn’t have room, but Hix patted my face as if she got the joke.
But Taks and I were mostly out, like hibernating bears, and the critters must have behaved themselves because no one woke me up to be Critter Master. We stopped at a highway service area at least twice. I remember Mom trying to get me to eat something. But all I wanted was sleep—and to know that Takahiro was still there. I could hardly bear to be away from him long enough to go to the ladies’ to have a pee. Sure, I was a seventeen-year-old girl in love, but last night had been a little too epic.
It was dark again by the time we got to Haven. I recognized the smell of the pine trees in my sleep and for a moment I was four years old again and coming here for the first time, and frightened, and wishing I was at home in my own bed . . . the fear was too familiar, and for a moment, as I struggled back toward wakefulness, I remembered Dad intensely—remembered him more clearly than I had in years, his face, his laugh, his hazel eyes (that Mom said were my hazel eyes), his favorite tie, or the one he claimed was his favorite, because I’d given it to him, which had (surprise) dogs and cats all over it. He had been wearing it the night he died.
I was still tired, tired almost to death, and too much had happened in the last twenty-four hours, the last forty-eight hours. I was someone else than I had been two days ago—before the cobey in the park, before I tried to cradle a timber wolf in my lap, before my algebra book started following me around, before I knew what the sound of bullets fired at you sound like—before I’d kissed Takahiro. Before Mom took her magic back so she could protect us. Before . . .
For a moment I couldn’t bear it—couldn’t bear any of it. Couldn’t bear that Dad had died, couldn’t bear that he wasn’t seeing Ran and me grow up, couldn’t bear that he never met Takahiro—or Mongo . . .
But there was so much, recently, that was unbearable. Like that the world was nothing like I’d thought it was. That I wasn’t what I thought I was. And that what I was might matter in this suddenly strange world.
For a moment it hurt. It hurt a lot, like it had right after Dad had died, when the world that Mom and Ran and I lived in shattered into millions of sharp little pieces, and we were walking around on the slivers, so every step cut into us, and all we saw around us was empty and broken. When we found out that people die when they shouldn’t. That stuff happens, and sometimes it happens to you.
That the world was nothing like I’d thought it was.
It hurt like bullets ripping into my chest, or like being head-onned by some bugsucking assface at eighty miles an hour. For a moment it hurt so much I thought it would kill me. But—maybe because of the last two days, maybe because I was tired almost to death—I couldn’t refuse to let it in either, like I’d been refusing for almost eight years.
At first I held on, held on hard, like the hurt and the grief and the fear were a piece of paper I was trying to fold, like I had to fold them up to make the cobey that was trying to eat me go away. But I couldn’t fold them up, any more than I could fold gruuaa. I realized, hanging in my half-sleep and half-despair, that Hix was patting my face and humming again, and her sweet smell was stronger, like she was blowing it over me, like your mom tucks an extra blanket around you if it turns chilly. Mongo shifted fractionally (fractionally was all that was possible) and I had a familiar cold wet nose buried in the too-small gap between my neck and the curve of my collarbone. Taks, still asleep, let his arm slip down a little farther when Mongo moved, and tucked his hand between my belt and the waistband of my jeans, like making sure I couldn’t escape without his noticing.
Now. This was what now was.
Mongo was snoring.
Slowly, painfully, I let go. It was like prying my own fingers off the edge of the cliff. And that hurt too—particularly the falling part, and not being sure what was at the bottom.