The lady stepped inside and Opal hurried to follow her. She could not go as fast as she liked because hooves were noisy on the wood floor, so she had to drop to her hands and knees to crawl. To her surprise, once she was close, she could feel that this lady had dreamstuff in her. She was not all dreamstuff — in fact, she seemed to be very little dreamstuff. She was mostly animalness. This was the first person Opal had met beside Ronan who shared both.
The lady took her time journeying through the halls, looking at photographs on the walls and opening drawers. She lingered at the computer where Ronan had been doing much of his work those days when he was not driving his car in big muddy circles in the flat rear field. The lady clicked the mouse several times and then paged through the notebook filled with his handwriting that he used as a mouse pad. Opal did not know what it said because she had not learned to read and was not interested, but the lady seemed very interested. She took her time with it before moving to the next room.
Opal was filled with the anxiety that came from feeling she was meant to be preventing the lady from looking, but also with the anxiety that she was not meant to be seen. She wished Ronan and Adam would come back, but they did not come back. The lady went to Aurora’s room where Opal was not allowed to eat anything, and she opened all the drawers and looked in all the boxes. To Opal’s relief, the lady did not eat anything, but she did sit on the edge of the bed and look at the framed portrait of Ronan’s father and mother for a long time. Her face did not seem to have an expression on it, but eventually, she told the portrait, “Damn you.” That was a swear that Opal was also not supposed to say (but sometimes did, over and over again, to the sleeping cows, at a whisper, to see if the shock would wake them). Then the lady left the farmhouse and began to explore the garage and the other outbuildings.
As she got close to the long barn, Opal’s anxiety growled higher and higher. Ronan was not home to stop this lady from touching or taking or eating whatever he had made in the long barn, and even if Opal was strong enough to stop her, Opal was meant to be secret. The lady strode through the damp field grass to the long barn, humming with her own dreamstuff, and Opal fretfully pulled handfuls of grass from the ground, warring with herself. She whispered for Ronan or Adam to return, but neither did.
For the first time, Opal was furious to be in the animal world instead of the dream world. In dreams, Ronan was always getting into trouble, and even though he often died, equally as often Opal saved him because she was an excellent dreamthing and a psychopomp (which is the proper name for an excellent dreamthing). As a psychopomp, she could sometimes make the dream into something else, or convince Cabeswater to intervene on Ronan’s behalf. Even if the bad dream was too intense for Opal to change it, she could still often rescue Ronan from harm by making things in the dreams do things they wouldn’t have thought to do on their own. She could make a rock into a snake and throw it at a monster or she could make a sword out of some dirt or she could build Ronan’s sadness into a raft when he was drowning in quicksand. There were no rules in dreams so you could try anything.
But the animal world was full of rules, and all of them were rules that made things smaller and more expected. Opal had no power here.
The lady tried to convince the doorknob of the long barn to say yes to her, but it did not agree with her as easily as the farmhouse door. Ronan had designed a dream object on the other side of it to make the door say no to as many people as possible, no matter what they might have in their purse. But this lady was both dreamstuff and animalness, just like he was, and Opal didn’t know if that meant she might be able to get in eventually.
If only this were a dream, she could tug the edge of the field and shake it out like a blanket. She could scream the lady blind. She could clap her hands until a hole appeared for her to fall in.
But rules.
But wait.
With sudden inspiration, Opal realized she did have a way of shifting Ronan’s dreams in this animal world. She ran up into the woods and she fetched all of Ronan’s stags and does and badgers and foxes, all of them humming and singing like the ley line to Opal’s ears, and then she herded them down through the fields. They galloped and pranced and careened down to the long barn. They were not easy to steer. When they lost their path, Opal had to bite at the larger animals’ heels and kick at the foxes and rabbits. They all made a terrible commotion. The lady looked up in time to see that she was going to be killed — Opal did not mean to kill her, of course, although on the way she had realized that it was a possibility and if it did happen, she had already decided where to bury her so that wildflowers would cover the hole. With a stiff, unpracticed run, the lady vaulted back to the driveway and slammed the car door behind her just in time for the smaller animals to hurl themselves over her hood and disperse.
Opal felt quite out of breath as her anxiety washed out, slowly replaced with victory. She had done it. She had really done it.
But then, terribly, the lady looked up from behind the wheel of her car.
This was not a dream day. It was an animal day. That meant that no one woke up when victory was achieved. The dream didn’t vanish, the scenery didn’t change, the curtain didn’t go down. The lady was still there, and the creatures were still there, and Opal was still there, and so when the lady looked up, she was just in time to lock eyes with Opal where she stood among the milling herd. It had begun to rain a little, the sort of rain that made one happy and sad at the same time, all fast misty drops and silver moving light. Opal had lost one of her boots in the running, and even though her furry legs were mostly hidden by grass and the remaining boot, she was nonetheless prickled by the sense that this lady was looking at her and seeing the dreamstuff inside her, too. This was so against the rule, the rule of being secret, that she found she could not move, only bare her teeth nastily at the lady.
The lady drove away.
Opal never told Ronan or Adam about her. She was too humiliated to admit that she had been seen. It had been quite a lot of days since she’d gotten punished.
Opal superstitiously began to roam the days when Ronan and Adam were gone. If she was not home to see it, she thought, no strange ladies would come back, and she would not have to decide whether or not to intervene. As soon as the car doors closed and the sound of the engine died, she would take off exploring. Sometimes she would go roaming even if Ronan was home, if he was locked up in the long barn where she could not see him.
She roamed at first to the gasoline-scented place, but after awhile, she discovered that the appeal wore off as she learned the rules of it. All of the sameness became boring and so she explored farther along the edge of the woods. There she found a new favorite thing to watch, which was a bench by a creek. It was a good creek, sharp-edged and black-watered and busy-flowing, with grass and moss growing right up to the lip of it and sometimes a fish or a plastic bag picturesquely floating in it, and the bench had been placed at a turn in it where the water sometimes turned over white and frothy. The bench was occupied by different people at different times and they were all right. But really her favorite was a person who returned again and again, always at the same time of day, except if it was raining. She was a fluffy, cloud-shaped lady with fluffy, cloud-colored hair, and she always came to the bench with a book and a food. The books were never the same book. They were fat and brick-shaped and the fronts always bore images of men who didn’t seem to have any shirts or other possessions. Sometimes all they seemed to have was another man or sometimes a lady or sometimes both, who they held tightly. The foods were also never the same food. Sometimes they were things that made crunching sounds, short and fast, and sometimes they were things that made soft clucking sounds, and sometimes they were things that made no sound at all except for the cloud lady’s satisfied “ahh” after she finished them. Opal enjoyed watching the foods and the books and the cloud lady’s enjoyment of both. It felt a little bit like a dream, in the way that her happiness was so large that the feeling made it all the way across t
he creek to where Opal was hiding. It was agreeable. It was a scene that she liked to return to often. Plus, the bench was close enough that she could return to the Barns each night without having to make a nest, which was convenient as it was raining nearly every evening.
On one of her trips back from watching the cloud lady, Opal encountered Adam. Shockingly, brilliantly, he seemed to be arriving at the Barns on foot. People did not come to the Barns on foot. They came by cars that would smash her flat and not feel bad about it so stay out of their way, according to Ronan. But here was Adam on just his legs, slowly coming into view through the mist rolling down the dark tunnel of trees out to the road. Opal was delighted to discover him traveling in the same way she did. She met him halfway down the long driveway and frolicked all around him as he put one foot in front of the other while the last of the late afternoon’s light dappled over both of them. He said nothing as she grabbed his hand and then danced around to grab his other hand.
Ronan was less thrilled to discover Adam’s inventive way of travel. “What the hell, Parrish? I was just about to leave to get you. Who dropped you off?”
“I walked.”
“Ha ha.” Ronan’s real laugh did not sound like ha ha, but this was not Ronan’s real laugh. When Adam didn’t explain the joke, he said, “Walked. From where?”
“Work.” Adam had ceased frolicking and instead removed his shoes and then his socks before sitting at the round table in the kitchen.
“Work. What. The. Hell. I told you I was going to pick you up.”
“I needed to walk.” Adam put his head on the table.
While Ronan ran tap water into a glass and set it on the table like he might be able to smash a hole through the wood with it, Opal climbed beneath the table to prod at Adam’s bare feet. Legs that ended in feet were strange and interesting to her. Adam’s feet were long and hairless and vulnerable looking. His anklebone protruded like his wristbones did, as if his feet were just very strange hands. He had little bits of dark sock lint stuck to his skin, and it came off in a stripe when Opal rubbed at it.
“It’s not the only place you applied,” Ronan said, continuing an earlier conversation.
“But it was what I wanted the most. Opal, stop.”
Ronan ducked his head under the table and caught her eye. “For God’s sake. Get a jar and go outside and catch twenty fireflies. Don’t come back in until you’ve caught twenty fireflies.”
She went outside. There were a lot of fireflies in the waning light, but she was not good at keeping them in the jar while catching new ones, so it took her quite awhile. She did not go back inside when she was done, because by this time Adam and Ronan had come outside — Adam first, head down, walking fast, hands stuffed in pockets, feet still bare, not looking back, and then Ronan, pausing to jerk on his jacket before following Adam. Ronan called Adam’s name twice, but Adam didn’t turn or respond, even when Ronan caught up to him.
The two of them walked in silence up the dirt road to one of the barns in the upper fields, barely visible against the dark. The trees that surrounded the valley were already blacker than black.
“I might not get into any of them,” Adam said. “It might have been for nothing.”
“Whatever. Then you make a new list.”
“You don’t understand. I’d miss a semester unless I went for rolling admissions and that completely screws up the financial aid. Look, I don’t expect you to care about this.” Right after saying this, Adam said, in a different voice, “I’m being a shithead.”
“You are. And a shitfoot. Where are your shoes?”
“Still under the table.”
“Opal, could you get them for him?”
Opal could not, because it was too boring to go back to the house when they were out here being exciting in the dark. What she could get them was that jar of twenty fireflies, which she released in Adam’s face as she scampered by him. He reared back while Ronan enjoyed the scenery.
“She’s so useful,” Adam said. Opal preened.
“I know. Hold up.” Ronan paused to kick off his own shoes and stuff his socks in them. Leaving them by the side of the track, he continued alongside Adam with matching bare feet. All of his dream creatures were slowly starting to assemble in the fields, more sound than sight in the darkness. Opal increasingly thought these animals were stupid. They were simple creatures, not as excellent as her. But Ronan seemed to like them anyway. Opal was a little worried that they would tell Ronan about the lady they had chased but then she remembered that things didn’t work that way in the animal world. In any case, when the creatures saw that Ronan didn’t have any buckets in hand and that Opal was close, they remained at a distance, cropping the grass or rooting in the dirt.
Adam and Ronan only stopped walking when they got to the rearmost field. Adam was never there when Ronan went out to drive his car in circles there and he seemed surprised to see what Ronan had done to the landscape. He stared at the flattened grass and muddy tire tracks for a good long time without saying anything. Possibly he was feeling excluded. Opal had ridden with Ronan once when he drove in the field, not because she wanted to ride in the car, but because she didn’t like being left out. The experience had been jostling and loud. The car complained the entire time, and the stereo sang along with electronic chirrups. Ronan had told her she was not allowed to ride with him anymore after she had been sick behind the passenger seat, but she found she didn’t mind. She would rather be excluded.
“You’ll get into one of the others,” Ronan told Adam eventually. “You’re not going to have to make another list. It won’t be what you imagined, but it’ll be just as good.”
“Remind me of that later.”
“Count on it.”
Adam looked a little less crumpled. He prodded a clod of mud with one of his bare toes. “Is the new Cabeswater going to have a place to do this?”
Adam wasn’t looking at Ronan and so he did not see the complicated expression that flitted across Ronan’s face, but Opal did.
“It’s going to be a one-stop shopping experience,” Ronan said. “I’m living the dream.”
This made Adam laugh, and then he let out a deep breath. He appeared a lot less crumpled now. They held hands and it all became less exciting. Opal waited to see if there would be any more raised voices or discussion of her usefulness, but they remained quiet until they turned back around to return to the farmhouse. Then the only thing they talked about was how their feet were sore and dirty, which wouldn’t have been a problem if they had been made with hooves.
Summer arrived. Summer made things hot, and both Adam and Ronan smelled more in the summer, though they didn’t seem to notice or care. Ronan accidentally started a fire in one of the smaller outbuildings, and although this started out shouty it ended up wild and joyful, with both Adam and Ronan hurling things into it while music galloped in the background. Adam’s car got off the blocks and almost immediately returned to them. There were a lot of mice, which Opal enjoyed catching and occasionally eating. The cloud lady continued bringing books and foods to the bench by the creek and also began to bring a suitcase with tubes that went in her nose, which was interesting and made Opal stick things up her nose for a few days after she first saw it. Adam got one of the Lynch family’s old backhoes running again and dug a strategically placed hole out in one of the fields. A natural spring slowly began to fill it and an unnatural hosepipe finished the job; the boys stripped and leapt into the resulting body of water on the hottest of days. Opal did not want to swim but Adam taught her until she was fearless, and then Ronan threw buoyant objects for her to fetch until he got tired of being on the shore. He had dreamt himself a pair of tattered black wings that did not quite hold him and he used them now like a temporary diving board, letting them lift him half a dozen feet over the water before dropping him with a muddy splash. Opal floated on her back and kicked her legs like Adam had shown her to do while the boys clung to each other in the water and then separated. The heat in the air
made everything smell and look more like itself. Everything was very good.
Summer had animalness in it, though, just like a human, and so it too eventually had to die.
The end of the summer was good and bad. Good: Adam invented a ball game that used cricket wickets but that was better than cricket, and Ronan played it with her sometimes while smoke from the grill drifted past them and made Ronan’s clothing smell delicious. Bad: Ronan and Adam had more and more conversations about whether or not they’d find the cure for shitbox before Adam went away for the fall and whether or not Adam should just take Ronan’s car. Even though Opal went away herself plenty, she did not like the idea of Adam going someplace because he might get old and die without coming back. Good: Ronan spent less time in the long barn doing dreamstuff and instead spent time repairing other outbuildings and cleaning the house and typing away at the computer the lady had looked at, which meant Opal often got full days of him, only having to share with Chainsaw, who Opal resented hugely and sometimes daydreamed of eating. Bad: Twice Ronan got a phone call from his Ganseyfriend and both times he did not say anything to the phone, just listened to the ebullient patter on the other end and made grunting sounds in response. Both times after this Ronan went and lay down, once in his own room and once in Aurora’s room; the first time, he was very quiet for a long time, and the second time he held his parents’ photograph and cried a little without making any sound.
By the end of summer, Opal could not remember the last time Ronan had been to the long barn. The dreamstuff sound in him was becoming a different one, a scratchy one, one she had heard long ago, back when she was still in a dream. Once Adam asked, “Are you going to do it before I go?” and Ronan answered, “Not if I can’t get rain.” Adam started to say something then instead said only, “be that way,” and let it go. They went on more long drives and Adam stayed at the Barns more than ever, but Opal knew this was only because he was about to go away for a long, long time instead. She raged around and stole everything from the kitchen cabinets and buried all of it in the upper field where she had intended to put the dreamstuff lady’s body if it came to that. When Ronan and Adam returned and told her this was unacceptable, she bit Adam and ran away.