Page 14

14

“I told you we have a problem. How many times are you going to make me do this?”

The dead woman stood over Lila’s bed, hands on her hips. Allison Casey did not look happy at all.

Lila tried to sit up but found she couldn’t. Her body felt drained of all capacity for movement. She could barely even move her lips to speak. But maybe she didn’t need to. This was a dream, after all. “What do you want me to do?”

“You have to pay attention. You gotta take care of this situation.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“How am I supposed to do that,” mocked the woman. “You sound like a coddled child. Do you always run from your problems? You tried to leave once already. I bet you’re gonna try it again. You gotta be tough to survive out here. Are you sure you have what it takes?”

Lila struggled to find her voice, which kept wanting to disappear into the back of her throat. “Did you? You didn’t survive.”

“Oh, so now you’re going to be rude to the murder victim?”

“I’m sorry. That was uncalled for. I’m really sorry about…well, the way you died.”

“You don’t know the half of it.” The dead woman shook out her hair, which danced in the quiet dream air. Gravity didn’t seem to operate the same way in this dream state. “That’s a literal statement. You don’t know the half of it.”

“So tell me. What don’t I know? What does it have to do with the woman in Snow River? Is she connected to you somehow?”

“That’s what I’m trying to get through your thick skull. Are all young people in your generation so dimwitted?”

“ Dimwitted ?” Outraged, Lila wrenched herself out of her sleep paralysis and sat up.

The woman was gone.

“Coward!” Lila shouted.

Then she remembered that Molly was spending the night on the sofa bed in the living room. She had to fly out first thing in the morning for a hearing in the Chilkoot case, and didn’t want to make the half-hour drive from her and Sam’s place when the roads were icing up every night.

“Lila?” Sure enough, Molly padded into the room in her footie pajamas, which Sam had given to her as part of a “first winter in Alaska survival package.” Her hair was in two pigtails, a style Lila remembered from elementary school. “Are you okay?”

Lila put a hand to her throat and swallowed hard. That weird half-paralyzed feeling still clung to her. “Mmm-hmmm.”

“You don’t look okay. Mind if I turn the light on?”

“Mmm.”

Molly switched on the light, which flickered, as if it wasn’t sure it wanted to work in the middle of the night. She came and sat on the edge of Lila’s bed. “Bad dream?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Not exactly bad. And not exactly a dream.”

Molly laughed. “Why does that sound like a perfect Lila answer?”

Lila rubbed her hands across her face. It was too sudden, this light, this living human energy in the form of Molly. Part of her was still in that murky other world with the cranky dead woman calling her out.

“Do I run from my problems?” She dropped her hands and fixed her gaze on her friend’s face.

She and Molly had known each other for so many years. Ever since that fateful day in high school, when she’d insisted her friends stay home from a track meet where a former student had opened fire, Molly had seen herself as Lila’s protector. Every time Lila needed money, or a couch to crash on for the night, or a sternly worded legal letter to a harassing supervisor, Molly took care of it. She was like a big sister to Lila, two years older and a thousand times more capable and successful.

“I wouldn’t say that,” Molly answered carefully.

“No. Don’t do that. Don’t try to shield me from the truth. Do you think I run from my problems?”

Molly let out a sigh, her eyes closing briefly, as if saying a silent prayer that she could find the right words. “I really wouldn’t put it that way. I think you’re more sensitive than some other people, like myself. I have tough skin. You don’t. So if a situation becomes painful or difficult, maybe someone else could stick it out, but you can’t. You have to put your mental well-being first. I support that, no questions asked, no second-guessing. Does that make sense?”

“I’m more sensitive ?” Lila made a face at that phrasing. “I’m a grown woman.”

But was she? Sometimes she didn’t feel like it. Shouldn’t a grown woman have more money in her bank account? Or under her mattress, in her case, since Bear paid in cash? Shouldn’t a grown woman have a career she was trying to develop? Or a spouse? Children? A family? Why didn’t she fit into any of those roles?

“What’s this all about?” Molly asked gently.

“I don’t want to be coddled.”

“Okay. Is someone coddling you?” Molly’s eyes widened. “Am I coddling you?”

“No, no.” Lila rushed to reassure her. “This isn’t about you. You’re a true friend, you always have been. I’m just trying to…” She pulled her covers up to her chin. The cold air found ways to sneak into this old building at night. “Trying to figure out where I belong, I guess. That’s why I always leave. I start to feel like it isn’t the right place for me to be, that I’m supposed to be somewhere else. It always seems so clear that I can’t ignore it.”

“Maybe you’re better at listening to your inner voice than most of us.”

“It is pretty deafening.” Lila managed a smile. “But now you’re coddling me. You don’t want me to be self-critical because you love me.”

“And because you’re an incredible human being.” Molly held up a hand before Lila could protest. “If you want to criticize yourself, you can do that. Just don’t expect me to join in. Fair?”

It didn’t seem totally fair to Lila. She was a human being like everyone, with all the flaws that went with the territory. She didn’t expect anyone to think she was perfect. Nobody was. Then something occurred to her. “Sunshine bomb.”

“Excuse me?”

“You guys always say that I ‘sunshine bomb’ you when I’m looking on the bright side of things.”

“That’s exactly what you do. By the time you’re done, we can’t even remember what we were sad about.”

Lila pointed an “a-ha” finger at her. “See? That’s a flaw. It’s called ‘toxic positivity.’ I listened to a podcast about it. It means being so relentlessly positive that you don’t allow any space for other feelings.”

“But you don’t?—”

“Nope.” Lila stopped her with a gesture. “I think I have a tendency toward toxic positivity, and I want to work on it. Can you live with that?”

Molly nodded, though she still muttered under her breath something about sunshine being a good thing. She got to her feet and pulled the hood of her bear pajamas, complete with fuzzy bear ears, over her head. “I’ll tell you one thing, Lila. It never bothered me when you did the sunshine bombing thing because I know what it was like living with your mother. It made sense to me. So if you’re going to criticize yourself, you should also look at what’s behind it. I’m just saying. Something to think about while you critique yourself.”

As if Lila wanted to think about her mother. Whenever she did, it felt like quicksand dragging her down. Her mother had suffered from clinical depression for Lila’s entire childhood, but of course none of them had understood that until she’d gotten diagnosed after Lila left home. If she’d had a word for it back then, maybe it would have been easier.

On her way out the door, Molly snapped her fingers. “Almost forgot. Who were you yelling at for being a coward?”

“Oh…” Something told her not to explain—some strong warning that seemed to come from the direction of the living room. “It must have been something from my dream. I can’t even remember it now.”

Clearly, Molly didn’t believe her, but she nodded and turned to go. Lila hated lying to her friends, and tried her hardest not to. But sometimes it was just kinder. How would Molly react to the news that apparently the spirit of the murder victim Allison Casey still clung to that dress displayed in the living room where she was sleeping?

“I could use your help with something,” she said, loving how Molly’s face brightened.

“Anything.”

“When the Snow River Murders happened back in the eighties, there must have been official records, right? Police reports, coroner’s reports, that sort of thing?”

“Sure, it’s not like that was the Dark Ages. Some of it might not be digitized, depending on how tech-savvy the local authorities are. Want me to dig it up for you when I’m in Blackbear?”

“You could do that?”

“Sure. I’m meeting Sam in Blackbear, and he still has a good relationship with the FBI from when he was working with them. They would have been involved since there were multiple victims.”

“Thank you, Molly. Tell Sam thanks too.”

“Is there a reason you’re curious about the case?”

“Who wouldn’t be? Especially considering one of the victims lived here.”

Molly shivered. “Please don’t remind me. I have to block that out every time I stay over.”

And that was exactly why Lila didn’t want to tell Molly who she’d been calling a coward. Maybe some people were just too ‘sensitive’ to handle certain information.

Smiling at her own internal joke, Lila snuggled back under the covers—a heavy quilt and two comforters. As good of a friend as Molly was, there were some things she would never understand.

Like why Lila had reacted to kissing Bear as if she’d just touched a hot stove.

If Molly heard the story of their blistering kiss, she would urge Lila to take the next step. To open her mind to the possibility of some kind of relationship with Bear.

It would be easy for her to say that. All of her friends would probably say the same thing. Take a chance. You can do this. It’s worth the risk . They’d all opened their hearts to love, and all of them were now sublimely happy with the results.

But they hadn’t seen what Lila had during that kiss. They hadn’t felt what she’d felt. They didn’t know what she now knew.

She’d sensed a wounded boy. Deep scars. Love and kindness that went so deep, but that had been betrayed over and over. As they’d kissed, emotions had flooded through her. They belonged to him, she knew, because she’d experienced that kind of transference before. Alongside them were a few images—a dark-haired boy alone in a dirty apartment, wondering how long until someone came back. A younger Bear, hands linked behind his back, listening with head bowed as his superior flung lies at him. Breaking bad news to a heartbroken Alaska Native family.

What did it all mean?

Bear was so much more than what he showed the world. He deserved the best of everything, especially when it came to love. Someone like her, who never stuck around, who was only here because some strange impediment kept her from leaving, would be a terrible match for him. She couldn’t trust herself to be what Bear needed.

She cared about him too much to be one more betrayal in his life.