Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Jasper
The pickle doesn’t have ears, but it’s listening anyway.
I can tell because it’s leaning toward me as I pull a card for it, the same way people do when they’re anticipating life-changing news or exceptionally juicy gossip.
Unfortunately, I pull the Five of Cups, which is not ideal.
Not because bad cards exist. They don’t. But because the Five of Cups is grief, regret, emotional avoidance, and generally the card that starts sentences with “we need to talk.”
I really don’t have the emotional bandwidth to deliver difficult news to a pickle today.
“Okay,” I tell it, very seriously, because you don’t disrespect a reading because the querent is a vegetable. “So this is about something you’re avoiding.”
The pickle doesn’t object, and I look down at the card, giving myself a moment to think about the wording, because I want to get this exactly right.
Huh.
It’s not the Five of Cups anymore.
It’s the Sun.
I look at the deck in my hand, fan it out, find the card again, and it’s something else entirely now, some card I don’t even recognize, gold foil edges I definitely don’t own.
That’s not how cards work.
“You’re not real.”
The pickle somehow manages to look offended.
I sit up straighter.
“Oh my.”
The crystals hanging from the trees.
The tarot-card paper planes overhead.
The fact that I’ve spent the last ten minutes providing emotional support to a cucumber.
“Oh. My. God.”
My pulse kicks hard when I look down at the cards one more time.
They’ve changed.
Again.
This is a dream…
…I’m dreaming.
The pickle is gone, but there’s a paper plane made from a tarot card lodged in the dirt three inches from my knee, vibrating as if it had just landed.
I am dreaming, and I’m still here, fully present behind my eyes, not floating off into static like I always do when I try to turn lucid.
I don’t move or breathe, afraid to spook this out of existence, because two days of napping like it’s my full-time job, two days of forums and YouTube videos at three in the morning, of Mabel asking gently if I was eating, have led directly to this exact moment.
I refuse, on principle, to fumble it now because I got excited.
The sky is thick with tarot-card paper planes looping and diving, occasionally colliding into tiny papery explosions before reforming and going again, completely undisturbed by the fact that I’m having the single most important psychic experience of my entire life below them.
I’m lucid.
I’m actually, finally, factually lucid, and nobody is here to see it, which feels deeply unfair given how much manifesting I’ve done about this outcome.
“Jasper.”
I turn around so fast I nearly trip over my dream feet.
Mom stands in the gold light with her silver hair loose around her shoulders, the scarf on her billowy skirt drifting like it’s underwater, every crystal she owns absorbing the golden light and throwing it back twice as bright, and her eyes are here.
Focused. Looking right at me like she knows exactly who I am and where we both are, which she has not done, not once, not really, in years.
“Mom?” My voice comes out smaller than I mean it to.
She crosses the distance between us and wraps her arms around me, smelling like sage and something warmer underneath it. It’s something I don’t have a word for because it only ever existed in this spot, against this collarbone. I haven’t smelled it in years.
“I’ve been waiting for this,” she says into my hair, and her voice cracks right down the middle. “For so long. You don’t understand. I’ve been waiting.”
“How long?” I ask, my old-soul brain already knowing the math is going to be bad. “How long have you actually been in here?”
“Over a decade.”
Over a decade.
I spent years thinking she was disappearing into a disease, and I could never talk to her again, when actually she was here.
The whole time.
“How did that even happen? Why would you… why would this be where you…”
She tucks a curl behind my ear, the same gesture she’s done since before I can remember, except this time her hand doesn’t shake. “That’s a long story, my little world walker.”
“World walker, so you do think that I have a special aura?”
Sometimes, when she says things in waking life, I don’t know if she means them, means them for me, or if she’s saying out loud what wanders into her mind without it having any meaning. Sometimes they do, sometimes they’re simply words.
“You do.” She smiles, and it reaches all the way up into her eyes. “I’ve always known what you were, Jasper. And I watched you grow into the man you are today. Just from here.”
Something in my chest does something I don’t have a crystal for.
“You watched,” I repeat. “All this time. You saw me in here and you never…”
“I couldn’t reach you how you needed me to.” Her thumb brushes under my eye, catching something I didn’t know had already escaped. “I thought this was the only place I had left to love you from, even if you’d never know.”
I don’t say anything because if I open my mouth right now, it’s going to come out as a sound, not a word.
She’s the mother I built a religion around when I realized I couldn’t have her.
Tarot, crystals, and astrology weren’t a phase.
They were me reaching, every single day, for whatever piece of her I could still get my hands on while the rest of her sat in a chair in the garden looking at something none of us could see.
And the whole time, she was here. Clear-eyed. Present. Watching me build a dreamscape big enough to hold both of us, and never once getting to tell me she was proud of it.
“I’m so glad,” I finally manage. “That you’re you right now.”
She pulls me back in, and for one entire, uninterrupted minute, I get the thing I have wanted since I was seven years old, standing at the edge of a hospital corridor, not understanding why my mother kept looking through me instead of at me.
I get to be held by someone who knows exactly who’s hugging her back.
“We have to help them,” I say, because the second the hug ends, my brain decides this is the moment to remember why we’ve actually tried so hard to find her.
I need spiritual backup.
I need her help to help them.
“Lenny. Tessa. All of it. I don’t know how, but I know it has to be now. I’ve felt it for weeks, like a frequency I can’t tune into.”
“You don’t have to know how.” She brushes a curl back from my face again. “You have to ask.”
Right. Obviously. Why ask the universe for the answer when I’ve got the actual oracle standing right in front of me, holding my face?
“Okay.” I think about my deck that has somehow vanished, but new cards arrive in my hand as if they’d been there the whole time, and I forgot to notice.
“You know what I’m talking about? Lennon? And her friend Tessa? Who is stuck in her dreams?” I told her the whole story, at least three times, when we were both awake, but all she did was ask me for more tea.
“I remember enough.” She nods. “Pull a card.”
She takes the deck from me, shuffles it twice, then cuts the deck without looking and offers it to me.
I pull a card, and she takes it from me, turning it over.
The Lovers.
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Don’t look at it as lovers, look at it as twins,” she murmurs, as something in her expression goes very far away, very fast. “Oh.”
“Oh, what? Oh, good or oh, no?”
“Mirrors.” She’s not really talking to me anymore. She’s talking to the card, or through it, or past it to wherever this stuff actually comes from. “He won’t know which reflection is real if there’s more than one of it.”
She’s lost me.
“Mom. English. Please.”
She looks back up at me, her focus snapping back into place. “Elsewhere is a place you can visit briefly. A night, maybe less, before it pulls too hard and you have to choose to stay or leave. You can’t get stuck in elsewhere if you don’t untether.”
“Okay.” I knew that. “And what does that—”
“They all have to step into elsewhere. As her.”
“As Tessa?” I stare at her. “What, dressed as her? Mom, that feels like a layer of weird even for us.”
“Not dressed.” Her mouth twitches, almost a smile. “As her. The way dreams let you be someone else. They’d all be Tessa to him. All of them, at once, standing in front of him, and he would have to be able to know which one was real. To choose correctly.”
“You want to trick him.”
“I want to test him.”
“That’s not the same.”
“It’s exactly the same, my little world wanderer. I simply phrased it nicer.”
I actually laugh. I didn’t know my mom could be funny, but then it dies out when she looks over my shoulder, and her eyes lose focus. It scares the hell out of me, because that’s the waking face, the face she wears at the inn when Mabel has to repeat a question twice.
“Mom?”
She blinks hard, refocuses on me with visible effort, like she’s hauling herself back up a slope.
“I’m here. I’m sorry. Even in here, I don’t always get everything that happens when I’m awake.
There are whole days I can’t account for.
It’s like watching you through frosted glass sometimes, even from inside your head.
It’s eating the parts of me that know things, and that’s the worst part.
Not that I’m losing my mind. That I’m losing the me that would know how to fix it. ”
Fuck. I didn’t come in here to make her relive her disappearing act.
“Hey.” I take her hands. “We don’t have to.”
“We do.” She squeezes back, hard enough that I feel it.
“So, we get him to choose. Out of all of them standing there as her. But why?”
“He has to prove it.”
“Prove what?
“Prove he actually knows the real one, the actual woman, not the version he built in his head. That is the stipulation. They will have to tell him that if he wants her to agree to staying, he has to prove that he loves her by choosing the right Tessa.”
“Okay, so he chooses…”
“And he has to release every promise that has ever been made to him.”
I blink a few times. “What?”