Sky Rider by Springer Nancy

Author:Springer, Nancy [Springer, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781497689121
Publisher: Open Road Media Teen & Tween
Published: 2014-12-30T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

That night, sleeping on her straw-bale bed in the barn, she dreamed of her mother.

She was sleeping in the barn because she liked it out there. It felt cleaner there than in the house, where Daddy lay drunk with his AA buddy babysitting him. Outside, the night air was fresh and cool, the night sky, so deep. The stars, so white—angel eyes, Mom used to call them. Dusty had made her bed with her head almost outside the big barn door so that she could sleep amid stars, velvety sky, a chalky hoof-paring of crescent moon, shadowy pasture and indigo hills.

In the dream, Mom was a dead person, like Skye yet not like Skye. Always Skye seemed vivid, supercharged, made of shadows and electricity, like a thunderhead filled with heat lightning. But Mom—Julia was her name, beautiful name, Julia Grove—Julia/Mom was a gauzy presence, a breeze caught in white organza, the fragrance of lilacs in the rain. Dusty knew Skye to be beautiful, but he was a crayon drawing compared to Mother in the dream. Her eyes were purple witching glasses. Yet they were fireflies. Yet they were her eyes. Her voice was a wren singing. Yet it was green corn rustling. Yet Mom.

Mom, as warm as fresh-baked bread, giving her the same old loopy smile. “Sweetie,” Mom said as if continuing a conversation they had started long before, “you have no idea. Aaak, the responsibility.”

Gazing into her mother’s starwhisper face, Dusty wanted to say something, but she couldn’t. She was asleep.

“Keeping the logs,” Mom prattled on, “and reporting to the arch-supervisor, and trying to guide without interfering, and it’s not just Skye, either, it’s all those other struggling souls.”

In her dream, Dusty floated face to face with her mother, elbows on the air, as if they were sitting at the kitchen table—in the air? Her mother was talking to her as she used to converse with spirits. Were there wings? If Mom had wings, they were made of moonfire. Dusty wanted to look for her own wings, but she did not want to take her eyes from her mother’s face.

“Although I must say I worry about Skye the most,” Mom confided. Mom’s voice was the distant chiming of spring peepers. Wind in trees on the far hills. A whippoorwill calling. “The afterlife is so terribly permanent,” she said. “I know you’re having problems, Dusty, but even if your father goes to jail, it’ll be just for two years, five years. That’s an eyeblink. Just a wink in eternity. Time will pass and you will be fine. But Skye … you have to understand, sweetie, he could be doomed for all time.”

It seemed to Dusty in her dream that the kitchen was kind of a mess, as always, even though it was made of air and starlight, but from somewhere there were flowers in Mom’s hands, moonflowers to be arranged in the crystal vase of night.

“He needs to transcend, he needs to fly away to eternity,” her mother was saying as she sorted the flowers.

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