Wicked Game. Lisa Jackson
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Had it just been timing? A sense that, if not Ben, then who?
Then she learned he’d died in the arms of his new love. Heart attack.
Gone, gone…gone.
She was still processing. Still getting used to the fact that he’d left her for another woman. Left her…when she’d still believed that maybe, just maybe, there would be that chance for them. That chance to start a family. Have a child. A child of their own. A child of her own…
The window of Pink, Blue, and You, a combined baby and maternity store, materialized in front of her. She’d stopped into it earlier and picked out a gift for a pregnant coworker. It was a fine torture to be inside. She wanted a baby. She’d always wanted a baby. Her insides twisted with the memory that she’d lost an unborn baby a long, long time ago.
Yet, at times like this, the pain returned, as fresh and raw as when she’d miscarried.
Tears hovered behind her eyes. But she wasn’t going to break down, for God’s sake. Not now. She’d grieved far too long as it was. She held the stupid tears at bay, turning her face away from the display of pastel pinks and blues and lemony yellows. Was that why she’d married Ben? To have a baby? To replace the one who’d been taken from her?
Becca told herself to get over it. She’d asked herself the same question countless times, had toiled and fretted over the answer. But it was all moot now. Ben was gone. And he’d left his twenty-two-year-old new lover pregnant, something he’d never wanted with Becca.
“I don’t want children,” he’d said. “You knew it when you married me.”
Had she? She didn’t remember that.
“It’s just you and me, Beck. You and me.”
Maybe she had married him to have a child. Correction. To replace a child. Maybe she’d made up the “I love you” parts. Maybe she’d just wanted the whole thing to be so much prettier than it was.
“Damn it all.” She had no time to walk down this lane of self-pity. It was over. O-V-E-R! She turned away from the window. No need to torture herself further. No need at all.
A food court was on her left and she glanced over as she headed the other way. But as she tried to hurry on, her vision grew blurry, forcing her to slow down and finally stop short. Her pulse was suddenly rocketing. Damn. She was going to faint. She’d been down this route before, more times than she’d like to admit. But it wasn’t really fainting. No. More like…falling into a spell. A wide-awake dream. But it hadn’t happened in years. Not for years!
Why now? she asked herself a half-second before a sizzle of pain shot through her brain. She staggered and fell to her knees, packages tumbling from her arms. Becca bent her head, instinctively hiding her face from curious onlookers, one last moment of clarity before the vision overcame her.
In a transformation that was both familiar and feared, Becca was no longer at the mall, no longer feeling the wrench of loss of her baby. No longer in the real world but in a watery, in-substantial one, a world that had plagued her youth yet had been curiously missing and distant for most of her adult life…until now.
In front of her, a short distance away, a teenaged girl stood on a headland above a gray and frothy sea, her long, light brown hair teased by a stiff breeze, her shirt and jeans pressed to her skin from its force, her gaze focused across churning waves toward a small island, blurred with rain. Becca followed the girl’s gaze, staring past her to the island as well, a forlorn, rocky tor that looked as inhospitable as an alien planet. The girl shivered and so did Becca. The cold burrowed beneath her skin and gooseflesh rose on her arms.
The girl was familiar. So familiar…
Becca stared at her hard, putting a physical effort into it.
Is she someone I know?
Becca struggled to remember. Who was she? Where was she? Why was she pulling Becca into her world?
Distantly, she felt the light-headedness, the clammy warning that she was about to pass out. No, no, no! Caught between the two worlds, her body failing in one, her mind desperately searching for answers in the other, Becca focused on the girl.
“Who are you?” she called, but the rising wind threw the words back into her throat.
The phantom girl took a step forward, the tips of her boots balanced over the edge of the cliff. Becca reached out an arm. Her mouth opened in protest.
“Stop! Stop!”
Was she going to throw herself to her death?
Becca lunged forward just as the girl turned to face her. Instead of a profile, Becca caught a full-on view of her face. “Jessie?” she whispered in shock, her head reeling.
Jessie just stared at Becca and Becca, powerless, stared back. The wind danced through Jessie’s hair and around her small, serious face. Becca’s heart pounded painfully.
Jessie Brentwood? Her missing classmate? Gone for twenty years…
Except now, in Becca’s vision.
“You’re too close to the edge!” Becca warned.
The phantom girl lifted a finger to her lips, then mouthed something at Becca.
“What?” Becca tried to clear her mind. “What?”
In the gathering mist the girl’s image began to fade. Becca pushed forward but it felt as if her feet were mired to the ground.
“Jessie!” she cried.
The girl melded with the rain and the watery world dimmed into endless gray.
Becca sensed tears on her lashes and a dull throb in her head. Somewhere, a male voice was saying, “Hey, lady. You okay?”
With difficulty, Becca opened her eyes. She was in the mall. Sprawled on the tiled floor. Packages tossed asunder. No more ocean. No more wind. No more Jessie.
Oh, God, she looked like a fool!
Tucking her legs beneath her, Becca tried to pull herself together. It was difficult to come back to reality. It always was after one of her visions. The damn things. She’d thought they were behind her. A symptom of her childhood. She hadn’t had one since high school, and she was now thirty-four years old.
But she never forgot. Not completely.
“I’m fine,” she said in a voice she didn’t recognize as her own. Clearing her throat, she fought the blinding stabs of pain that flashed through her head. Another unwelcome part of the visions. “I tripped.”
“Yeah?”
The young man bending over her wasn’t buying it. A small crowd of “tweenagers” had gathered, small enough that Becca figured she hadn’t been out that long, maybe mere seconds. One of the girls was looking at her with huge, round eyes and Becca could still hear the reverberations of the girl’s scream as she’d watched Becca go down. She was holding a soda from the nearby food court. Vaguely Becca remembered glancing their way just before she was overtaken by her vision.
“You were, like, having an attack,” a different girl said. This one wore a hat that smashed her bangs to her forehead and she peeked out between the strands of blond hair. They all looked ready to jump and run. Briefly, Becca thought about yelling “Boo!” and sending them stumbling over themselves, away from the crazy lady.
Click. Click. Click.
Becca heard the snap of a cell phone being shut. One of the guys had taken a series of pictures of her fainting spell. That did it! Stupid punk kid. Becca climbed unsteadily to her feet and gave the boy the evil eye. He looked torn between bravado and fear. Becca was about to give him a piece of her mind but was saved the effort when a heavyset woman in a dusty blue uniform steamed toward them.
“Back off,” she bit out at the boy who attempted to swagger toward his friends, even though he was boiling to escape. They all half ran, half loped toward