A Thing As Good As Sunshine (7 page)

"That
is if you still want my help," she said.

"Yes!
Yes, please!" I put my hands to my face, surprised to feel cool tears on
my cheeks; tears of hope. "I didn't know how we were going to survive this
mess."

Laume
relaxed, lowering her body back down until her arms rested easily on the edge
of the boat and then she elegantly rested her chin on her arms. "I like
your enthusiasm, little darlin', but perhaps it would be better if we discussed
my price before you agreed?"

"Price?"
I asked. Higher Powers put a price on rescue? I never heard of God charging to
perform a miracle. Not that I wouldn't have given anything to get us all back to
dry land, but I thought that was the kind of thing they did out of the goodness
of their hearts, or to improve their reputations. How inhuman that felt, how
not-divine.

"Yes,
a price," Laume said, her smile becoming predatory. "A bargain, if
you will. I have a task that your unique talents are perfectly suited for. In
exchange, I will transport your friends to safety."

CHAPTER TWO

My unique
talents?

A
bargain?

A
price and a task?

"What
do you mean?" I asked, feeling like I'd fallen down some desperate,
aquatic version of Alice's rabbit hole.

"First,
we must agree to the bargain. You agree to help me and I will grant your wish."

"If
I say yes, I won't have to kill anyone? Will I?" I asked.

Laume
smiled in a wholesome way again. "Probably not."

I bit
my lower lip. "I really don't have a choice."

"Of
course you have a choice, silly girl," Laume said. "There's always a
choice. It's only been three days, yes? You could wait another three or four
sunsets for a boat to happen by before anyone dried up and died. Except for maybe
this one," Laume nodded to Paulo lying beneath her.

Then a
very odd sensation crept over my eyes, as if someone had blindfolded me with
the softest, lightest silk in the world. I have no issue with kink, not among
consenting adults, but what happened next was not something I would have agreed
to experience had I known it was coming, and it scared me like nothing I'd ever
faced. Instead of going dark, my vision began to lighten, fading up into what
looked like a helicopter's view, time-lapse image of us in the lifeboat and the
waters around it. The images flew so quickly that it took me a minute to
understand that I wasn't seeing a replay of the last few days, but a preview of
what we were in for.

Laume's
version of
the Ghost of Christmas Future
was ugly. As she hinted, Paulo
didn't make it to see another sunset. The worst part was watching the four of
us argue — silently, of course, as this particular freak show had no audio or
soundtrack — about whether to leave him lying in the back of the boat or lay
him in the water and tie him to the boat. My stomach cramped watching Maria and
Cooper get so pissed-off that they came to blows. Maria lost.

I
wanted to vomit watching Cooper carefully pick Paulo up and lay him in the
water where he bobbed, half surfaced-half submerged, with the setting sun
finally giving his pale skin some color.

It was
horrible.

We,
the grown-up versions of the misfits from the juvenile ward at Texas State
Hospital, were not prepared to deal with losing Paulo.

I
bowed my head and brushed my hands at the mythical blindfold over my eyes, not
that it helped. "Okay, okay. Just make it stop."

Laume purred
her satisfaction. The vision stopped and I saw the darkness and the boat and
Laume again.

"You
must say
I agree
."

"I
don't know," I said. She had me at such a disadvantage. I did not want
what I just saw to ever happen for real. If Paulo died, if any of us died in
this godforsaken dingy, Billy's Asylum Rats would be quitso for sure and I'm
not sure any of the rest of us would really
make it
, even if we survived
and got back to dry land.

The
decision was too much for me to handle on my own. "I need to wake my
friends and ask them for their help."

"It's
not a difficult decision. Either you will help me so that I can help you and
your friends. Or I'll just go and find someone else who can help."

"But..."

With
that, Laume let go of the boat and dropped quickly out of my sight — bubbles
gurgling to mark her submersion beneath the dark water.

The
cynical side of me knew she was bluffing; Higher Power or not she answered my
plea because she needed my help at least a fraction as much as we needed hers.
I held tight to that cynicism as I waited to hear Laume surface again. And I
waited. And waited. And the waves around the lifeboat stirred up a notch, like
a song swinging into its bridge. And Paulo started to moan in his sleep — low,
sad, distressed — his face so pale that it nearly glowed in the low ambient
light of the stars. In my memory I saw his lifeless body floating, tied to the
boat, and it was no easier to take as a memory than when Laume had given me the
vision.

"Laume?"
I asked the air. I stood up to see if she might be hovering just below the dark
surface of the water at the back of the boat. There wasn't enough light to see
clearly, but the shapes of the waves gave nothing away. "Come back."

Nothing.

My
inner cynic started to panic.

"Laume!"

My
shout caused Paulo's whimpers to grow louder, but none of the rest of them
appeared to be disturbed by the desperation in my voice. They should have woken
up but were as still as death. Death which might decide to come for Paulo
first, but would get all of us sooner rather than later if we didn't get back
to dry land, food and drinkable water.

Death
that would surely come if Laume didn't come back to help us.

"Laume,
please come back." I looked back up at the sky, tears clouding my eyes so
that the stars streaked together. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Please. I need
your help."

Without
a splash or a sound, the lifeboat tilted a bit toward the stern and there was
Laume, perfectly dry and perfectly pretty. "You must say I agree."

My
tongue stuck to the top of my dried-out mouth, trying to prevent me from making
a huge mistake by agreeing to such a blind bargain, but I managed to peel it loose
and say, "I agree."

She
nodded to show that she'd heard me and lifeboat tipped toward its stern, plowing
quickly through the water in the opposite direction of the skittering clouds.

Somehow,
soundlessly and effortlessly, Laume pushed the little boat as smoothly as if it
were being towed off the tail of a gigantic cruise ship. Compared to three days
of hand-paddling and drifting with the wind and tide, it felt like the boat had
suddenly grown jet packs. Miles zoomed by. I reached my hand over the side and
felt the rush of warm water flow over it and knew that despite the unknowns, I'd
made the right choice. The only possible choice.

Now I
just needed to understand what I'd stupidly and blindly agreed to do. Just as I
opened my mouth to ask, Laume said, "You do like children, I expect."

Children?
What about me did she see as maternal? I doubt it was my carefully sculpted
eyebrow arches or my waist-length platinum blonde hair. I'm sure it wasn't my
skin-tight, red polka-dot swing dress that showed off my twenty-seven inch
waist. And I'm convinced that it wasn't my tattoos — the leopard print full-arm
sleeves, the blood-red heart over my breastbone, or the trail of stars running
up the back of each leg — that made her think I had a soft-spot for ankle
biters.

I'm the
drummer of a 'billy band at night and a pastry chef before the sun comes up. My
car, a chopped-and-channeled fifty-six Buick, doesn't have seat belts much less
tethers for a damn baby seat. In fact, on the streets of Austin, most parents herded
their children away from me when I walked down the sidewalks. And I'm talking
about downtown Austin, home of everything weird.

I
think there was enough moonlight that Laume could read the concern on my face.

"Oh
dear. Not very fond of children," Laume said. "That might make this
task a tad tricky for you, I'm afraid."

She was
afraid? I hyperventilated as I envisioned her sending me on a trip to an African
refugee camp to save hundreds of starving children or laying in for a stint as
a kindergarten teacher with thirty munchkins underfoot. Or worse, I paled at
the thought of magically becoming someone's evil step-mother.

"I
really don't know anything about kids," I said.

"But
you were one," Laume said. "Once upon a time."

A
sarcastic laugh escaped me before I could stop it. Sure I had once been a small
human, under the age of majority, too young to smoke or drink, legally. Not
that any of that had ever made me a child. No, my father, who loved reminding
me that he
raised me all by himself
, insisted that my behavior must, at
all times, rise to his expectations of a young adult. And he enforced that
mandate as soon as I was old enough to understand that my mother was years-gone
and never coming back. I think I was three, maybe four. Took a lot of
deprogramming at the Texas State Hospital during my teen years to get over
that.

Thinking
about my father and the couple of days at the hospital before I met Maria and
JoJo made my scalp crawl in anger. "Could you fucking be less cryptic and
just tell me what you want me to do?" I yelled.

Our
speed dropped until the little boat flattened out and coasted to a stop in the
dark water. Laume's eyes narrowed and I knew that had been exactly the wrong
thing to say. She pursed her perfectly stained lips and considered me for a few
moments over my sleeping friends before her face relaxed. "You are under a
great deal of strain," she said. "I will forgive your slip in
manners, this once."

I
fought the urge to thank her as a subject thanks a queen's mercy, or to
apologize like an employee caught with her hand in the register, but couldn't
stop the urge to bow my head and Laume took that to mean whatever she needed
from me and got the boat underway again.

"There
is a girl, Hannah Faye Williams, she's in trouble and she needs your help. She
also has daddy issues," Laume said, implying that she knew something — maybe
everything — about my relationship with my father. "You will go to the
northwest of your country, the city of Portland, and help her."

"Help
her how?"

Laume
raised her face to the sky as if to ask her fellow gods and goddesses why she'd
been burdened with the stupidest human on the planet. When she met my eyes
again she said, "I'm sure I have no clue what a child needs to grow up and
become what you might call well-adjusted. I'm relying on you to figure that
out."

"I'm
not what most folks would consider well-adjusted." I was only good at
three things in life; drums, pastry and sex. Well-adjusted people my age finished
college, had babies and shopped for mortgages.

"Even
so, you were a child whose mother was unavailable and whose father failed to
live up to the role he took on for himself by engaging in coitus without the
proper protection. I am confident you will know how to help. I would not have proposed
our bargain otherwise."

"What
kind of trouble is she in?" I asked.

"Dear
Hannah Faye is in the worst kind of danger; she risks losing her soul. The
government has taken her from her home and placed her in a vile place that
threatens to quash the very essence of her being — as if she were some unwashed
plebeian."

My
imagination ran away with that thought. Not that I was a churchgoing,
bible-thumper type myself, but suddenly my mind's eye spun images of ritual
circles around raging bonfires and I feared that somewhere in the woods of
Oregon a little girl was being forced into an arranged marriage with a man
three times her age. It made perfect sense to me that a Higher Power might want
to get involved with a situation like that. Hell, it might be worth a carefully
aimed bullet or two if the circumstances went badly enough.

"Why
this girl? Who is she?" I asked.

Laume
smiled at me and gestured beyond the front of the lifeboat. "Look."

I spun
my head around and saw something I'd been hungering after for three days: the
lights of a fishing boat in the near distance. I'd been so caught up in Laume's
description of my task that we'd gotten to within a couple hundred yards of it
and I hadn't even heard the thrum of its engines. It looked like a shrimp boat;
tall and wide with nets draping from large booms on both sides of the boat.

A cry
escaped me and I turned to thank Laume with tears in my eyes. Satanists and
creepy daddy-types be damned, I'd made the right choice and we were going to be
safe. JoJo and Paulo and Maria and Cooper and me, we were going to survive.
Billy's Asylum Rats would record and release music all over the internetz, we
would play live again, and we would be whole.

"Thank
you," I said.

Laume
bowed her head to me. "Of course. We have a bargain."

"We
do," I agreed.

I
turned forward to watch the fishing boat grow from the size of a bathtub toy to
its full hulking size, until I could smell the stench of its holds full of dead
and dying sea critters. Gradually Laume's push on the back of the lifeboat fell
off until we stopped within shouting distance of the shrimper.

"How
do I explain..." I started to ask as I turned around to ask Laume what I
could or should say to my phamily about how we'd been rescued. Only Laume no
longer hung from the back of the lifeboat.

She was gone,
just vanished, and so was my phamily. I was all alone.

CHAPTER THREE

In a night full of the Impossible, this bigger and greater Impossible
smacked me across the face. Our little lifeboat, the one Cooper had nearly died
retrieving from the sinking yacht, was empty but for me and a half-inch of
dirty rainwater. Scared that somehow my phamily had fallen overboard, I
scrambled from side to side along the length of the boat to search for them in
the black water, stretching my arm down, again and again. I got all the way to
the stern and found nothing but bathwater-warm, salt water. I took a second to
look around and thought about it. I’d heard no splashes, seen no ripples, found
no sign that anyone had been anywhere near the little lifeboat, except me. I
was alone.