42. From the dream journal of Cassandra Whelan
42
FROM THE DREAM JOURNAL OF CASSANDRA WHELAN
I was surfing, and the water was bright and clean, the color of a freshly cracked aquamarine. It was like I was wrapped in a geode.
I drifted my fingers into the side of the barrel as my board skimmed through. The water was warm—something new. I’ve only surfed the cold waters of the Pacific Ocean and North Atlantic, which even in summer require a wetsuit. But here I was in nothing. Literally nothing. Naked. Just me, the board, and the water while the sun gleamed through. But I wasn’t self-conscious. This seemed right. It seemed like where I was supposed to be.
I dipped my hand farther into the wave, and the water dipped back, like a handshake. At least, that’s what it felt like. As my board continued through the never-ending tunnel of water, my body felt more and more liquid.
“No,” I said, though my voice was swallowed in the wet.
I gurgled. Choked. Air was sucked out of the barrel, though the wave wasn’t closing in. I could see it—a light at the end. Then a figure. A cat.
“Cassandra!”
A voice. I knew it well. Deep and solid. Stable. Yet a voice that shook me to the core.
I wobbled on my board, then toppled into the wave.
My feet were rocks, pulling me down, down. The kinship I had always felt in the water disappeared. This wasn’t peace,but war. Bubbles shot up toward the waning light of the sun. Darkness folded around me. Voices, so many voices shouted from the depths.
“Cassandra!”
His voice was strangely clear through the murkiness.
Kelp locked my ankles and wrists. I tried to shout, only to receive a mouthful of water. The black was closing in.
Why was this happening? Water was my friend, my solace, my refuge. Now it was my prison, my death sentence.
A hand found mine through the thickening deep as the darkness stole my vision.
Then…freedom. The seaweed released me, and I was carried to the surface, through the waves and the whitewash, then onto the rocky shore of an unfamiliar beach.
“Cassandra!”
Gasping, I opened my eyes into the mist swirling around me in place of that dark water. , though the water was gone. The rocks, the trees, the pebbles, the sand. Everything seemed tenuous, spinning, unreal.
In front of me was a big cat that maybe stood to my hip, its spotted yellow and black fur soft and sleek, lichen-colored eyes bright through the haze.
“Jonathan?” My voice was a warble.
The cat blinked and approached. It touched its nose to mine, then slid its face across my cheeks, marking me in its feline manner. A thrum emitted from its chest. The chaos around me disappeared as I threaded my fingers into its fur.
Cassandra.
My name was in its thoughts, its knowledge, that deep voice that seemed to calm me, the touch that seemed to know me to my core.
And the world stilled at last.