Dream Country by Luanne Rice Page A

what matters. I’ll go crazy if I stay here. I will. In fact, I almost am already. Right now, just writing you this note, I feel dizzy, as if I’d just eaten pencil lead. I’m dying of love for Ben, Mom, and we have to be together. He’s dying, too. Don’t worry. I’ll call and write a lot.
    Love, Sage

    “Oh, God,” Daisy said, when she’d read it through a second time.
    “Where’s it postmarked?” Hathaway asked, checking.
    “Silver Bay. She must have mailed it before she left.”
    “She’s smart, our baby.” Hathaway sounded almost admiring.
    Daisy stared at the back of the envelope. There, pressed into the paper, were the imprints of two faces. They were almost invisible, like ghosts staring out of the trees. Daisy could make out the eyes and mouths she had once carved into a disc of cow bone; she could see which was the boy’s face and which was the girl’s.
    Touching the spot where Sage had pressed her necklace into the paper sent electricity through Daisy’s body. She closed her eyes and let the current flow, and when the telephone rang she knew it wasn’t Sage. Caressing the imprints of her children’s faces, her fingertips tingled and burned. The phone rang again, and Hathaway hurried to answer it. Her voice drifted across the kitchen.
    When Hathaway turned around, Daisy felt calm. She opened her eyes and saw tears brimming in Hathaway’s light blue eyes.
    “They have a clue,” Hathaway said, a hopeful, terrified smile reaching from ear to ear. Her lower lip trembled as she spoke. “That was Detective LaRosa, and she said they questioned some men who work at the railroad depot. A girl who looks like Sage was asking questions about some freight cars, about which ones were going west.”
    “Going west—”
    “She asked about the train’s route, the man said.”
    “She wants her father,” Daisy said. “She’s going to James.”

    Ben had watched his mother’s cat circle round and round just before she had kittens, building a nest out of scraps of paper towels pulled from the garbage, old socks dragged down from the bedrooms, the chamois Ben used to polish his mother’s car. Sage was acting just like that now.
    She was pacing around the boxcar, tidying up their sleeping area, plumping up their bedrolls, trying to make a nest from a bundle of rags she’d found in a wire basket. From his seat on a crate off to the side, Ben watched her and wished she would stop moving.
    “Sage, hey. Come over here.”
    “In a second,” she said. “This floor’s so hard—maybe you’ll sleep better if I pile up some of these old cloths under your bedroll.”
    “Don’t worry about it.” Ben yawned again, wishing he hadn’t told her he couldn’t sleep. Whenever he mentioned any discomfort, any problem, Sage always tried to fix it. He’d been amazed, at first, that anyone would be so concerned about his comfort. Back in Silver Bay, when things were still normal, she would always give him the best seat at the diner, buy him cranberry muffins from the bakery, sew buttons back on his shirts, draw him cards and write him poems.
    But now he wished she’d just stop. It was making him crazy, watching her try to improve something that couldn’t be fixed. She could pile a thousand rags—calling them cloths only made it worse—on that hard, cold floor, and he still wouldn’t be comfortable. He was sore and hungry, a thousand miles from home and getting farther away every minute.
    “Sage, will you stop?”
    She turned to look at him. She’d been smiling, her freckled face radiant as she tried so hard to please him, but at his sharp tone, her face fell. He wished he could say it again, take the impatience out of his voice, put the smile back on her face.
    Crushed, she knelt down. She pretended to be plumping up his pillow, but she was crying. Ben could tell by the way her shoulders were quaking. Sliding off the crate, he went to her, wrapped her in his arms. Her sobs were silent, the tremors running