LOST

The Kasey’s stayed all night in the ICU waiting room, as did Alex. Carolyn didn’t sleep at all, choosing instead to chat away her anxiety with the mother of a woman who was in a car accident. They shared story after story—broken bones, baseball games, and beach trips. The more they shared, the emptier the box of tissues became.

The first signs of morning peeked through the windows around 6:30, as the day shift nurses started to roll in. James began to stir, on his makeshift bed of two chairs pushed together front to front, when Carolyn put on a pot of coffee, followed closely by Alex.

“One of us should go get Becca. She’s probably worried sick by now. I’m surprised she hasn’t called yet,” Carolyn noted quietly.

“I’ll go. I’ll get some breakfast on the way back,” James said as he stood up and stretched.

“Okay, Hon. Have some coffee before you go.”

“Alright,” he said, kissing her on her cheek. “Did you sleep at all?”

“Ha! Sleep. You’re funny,” she replied, sardonically. “Oblivious to the unwritten laws of motherhood, but funny.”

“Nothing new on your son, I’m guessing,” Alex interrupted, steering the conversation away from thoughts of exhaustion.

“No. He’s still unconscious,” Carolyn responded, fighting back tears. “His vital signs are normal, though, which is good. It just means it’s a waiting game. Wait. Pray. And hope.”

Sensing that Carolyn was getting emotional, Alex went over to her, took her hand and held it. “He’s going to be fine. I normally get a feeling when something bad is about to happen. I have none.”

“He’s not your son, though,” Carolyn said sharply.

“No, he’s not. But I still feel connected to him somehow and I don’t know why. Previous life or something like that.”

“Don’t feed me that New Age crap,” Carolyn barked back, pulling her hand away from Alex. “I’m not in the mood.”

James took his wife in his arms, motioning for Alex to give them a minute.

“Alex was just trying to help. You’re exhausted and emotional and she was simply making an effort to share some positive thoughts. That’s all.” he explained.

“You’re right. I know you’re right. I’m just so frustrated and angry,” she replied, dabbing her eyes with a tissue.

“I know you are, Sweetie,” James said, trying to calm her down. “You want to go over there and choke the doctor and make her fix your baby, but you know she’s done all she can.” Carolyn silently nodded in agreement. “And you want to find whoever did this and run over them with a steamroller, but you know we’ll probably never know who did this. There are some things in life that we can control, and a whole lot of things we can’t. We can control how much sugar we put in our coffee. We can control how fast we drive down the interstate… mmm, sometimes. But we can’t control what choices other people make. And we can’t control the natural order of life. Bad things happen everyday. People get hurt everyday. We’re not immune to these things. But… how we react to these things reveals who we are.”

“My husband the sociology professor.”

“It’s true, but go ahead and make jokes. It’ll lighten up the mood.” James turned, “I shall return… with my daughter… and two dozen doughnuts,” he announced.

“Ooh glazed!” Alex shouted gleefully.

“Excuse me,” one of the ICU nurses said, touching Carolyn on the shoulder. “Is one of you named Alex McDaniel?”

“Yes. That’s me.”

“Do you know a… Wiz?”

“Why does this seem like a bad case of déjà vu?” Alex wondered as she rode the elevator down to the lobby. “Not trouble-bad or danger-bad. Somewhere between eerie-bad and milk-past-the-expiration-date-bad.”

The stainless-steel doors opened and as she exited, she noticed how much noise her hard-soled shoes made against the marble-tiled floor of the hospital lobby. The loud clomps of her shoes began to slow as she hesitated and thought, Maybe meeting Wiz down here wasn’t such a good idea. Wasn’t it awfully weird that he didn’t want to talk to the cops? Certainly, he couldn’t have actually had something to do with the attack. I’ll just talk to him and see what he says. This is a safe place. Right? She walked toward the information desk and there he was, wearing the same clothes he was wearing the night before.

“Wiz. Fancy meeting you here.”

“Can we go outside and talk?” Wiz gestured to the courtyard beside the cafeteria.

“Yeah, sure.”

Alex followed Wiz out to the benches beside the rosebushes and sat down. It was a little breezy, but not terribly cold. “Okay. I’m listening,” she said as she crossed her arms.

“I know I shouldn’t have given you such a poor excuse not to talk to the police yesterday,” Wiz admitted, “but you need to know that there is a good reason. I just can’t tell you what that reason is.”

“Okay. That isn’t increasing my trust in you at all, Wiz,” she said as she flicked her fiery red hair out of her face.

“That’s fine. Can you just tell me how he is?”

“He’s stable. His vital signs are normal. He’s unconscious still, though. We don’t know when he’s going to come out of it. It could be awhile, Wiz.”

Faeries were forbidden to bother the sick, injured and dying and so could never enter a hospital. That didn’t stop Regan from sitting on top of the wall surrounding the hospital courtyard. Goose lay on the ground beneath her. She hoped Wiz would, at least, give her a wink or nod, letting her know Xamn was okay, if not physically come over and tell her so. She had helped Wiz in his search for his brother for so long and he had told her so much about him that, even though she had never met Xamn, she felt as if she already knew him.

“I ought to be used to it by now. Wiz finds a woman friend his size and forgets about his faithful faerie friend, Regan,” she said. “He’s forgotten about you, too, Goose.” Goose lifted his head up and yelped a reply, then whimpered as he lay his head back down on top of his paws.

As she stared out into the still waking morning, past the streetlights and into the shadows, her thoughts drifted back to when she had first met Wiz, back to her family, back to when her name was Luma of the Firefly Clan.

“Papa,” begged Luma, “there’s a bard coming into town. May I go play with him? Please, please, please.” She clapped her hands together in joyful desperation.

“Baby Bug, why must you bother every entertainer that comes into Carmarthen?” Cyndyn Firefly, Luma’s father, was a handsome faerie with dark blue hair and an ash grey face. He was always dressed smartly—usually in a brightly colored vest and brown knickers. He had nine children and Luma was the youngest and most rambunctious of the bunch. “One of these days, you’re going to mess with the wrong person and they’re going to see you and they’re going to squash you as if you were nothing more than a troublesome little dragonfly.”

“But I will be careful, Papa. I promise. Don’t make me miss out on all the fun.”

“Don’t pull that one with me, young lady. Your mother would say you have too much fun as it is.”

“Papa…”

He cocked his head slightly and tried hard to look stern, but it never lasted long. Not with his Baby Bug. “Go, already. If you get a wing torn off, don’t come crying to me.”

Modeos was on his way to Talley and had stopped in Carmarthen for the night. He was inside the inn procuring a room when he heard a crowd gathering outside. He bought a pint of mead and took it with him to see what was going on. As he left the inn, he saw everyone heading toward the center of town where a traveling minstrel sat on the back of a cart, playing a lute. The troubadour seemed to be getting frustrated with a string or two that didn’t want to stay in tune, for some reason. He would tune it, strum and the tuning pegs would go right back out of tune, sending the chord spiraling toward wherever musical notes go to die.

“This is hilarious!” exclaimed the villager who was standing next to Modeos. “Have you seen anything like it?”

“There was one time…” Modeos stopped as he tried to get a closer look.

“Is he a bard or a jester?” the villager laughed, not noticing that Modeos was no longer standing beside him.

As Modeos made his way to the front of the crowd, the troubadour was getting angrier and angrier. The minstrel raised the lute high over his head and just before he brought it back down to smash it to bits, Modeos saw what was ailing the instrument.

“Stop!” Modeos yelled.

“Excuse me?” the lute halted, just inches above the ground. “I think the audience has been tortured enough.” Again, he brought the instrument back over his head to destroy the object of his suffering.

“I can fix it,” Modeos pointed to the lute. “May I?”

“You can fix it? You mean, you can take the hex off?”

“Yes. Let me see it.”

The bard handed over the instrument and folded his arms, not believing that he was in the presence of a musical curse breaker. Modeos held the lute in one hand and with the other, removed something from the neck—apparently, something so tiny it was not visible to the naked eye. He gave the instrument back to the minstrel, who then tuned it and strummed a chord, completely confident the hex was still there. The lute proved him wrong as the chord remained in tune. In shock, the minstrel stood and stared at his instrument as everyone else cheered for Modeos and ushered him into the tavern. After the bard’s ego recovered as much as it was going to recover, he decided to join his audience inside and buy his hex remover a drink.

The troubadour sat down next to Modeos, slid a pint of mead to him and asked, “So, how did you do it? What did you do, exactly?”

“You wouldn’t believe me.”

“How do you know I wouldn’t?”

“Fine. Do you really want to know?”

“Well, yes.”

“There was a faerie playing tricks on you and your lute and got caught in your strings.”

“A faerie?” he said in disbelief.

“I told you you wouldn’t believe me.”

“It’s not that I don’t believe you. It’s just that I don’t believe in faeries. Not since I was a small boy, hunting for one so I could stomp on it and study it.”

“How magically ironic, then, that your reputation as an artist would be put in jeopardy by one. Excuse me. I’m going to retire to my room now.”

“But…” he said as Modeos walked away and went upstairs. With his ego now fully deflated, he had not the desire, nor the words, to carry on the argument.

Modeos entered his room, closed and locked the door and sat down on the bed. As he removed his outer garments—boots and traveling cloak—he did his best to rid his mind of the fact that he brought so much attention to himself. The last thing he needed, as an eight-hundred year-old immortal, was attention. He felt a fluttering by his ear and as soon as he turned his head toward it, he saw an orange tuft of hair he recognized as that belonging to the faerie he plucked from the bard’s lute strings.

“There you are. I was wondering where you flew off to. You almost got yourself mashed into the ground today.”

“I know. I want to thank you for saving my life.”

“You’re welcome.”

“My name is Luma of the Firefly Clan.”

“Hello, Luma of the Firefly Clan. I’m Modeos… son of the Thórólfr.”

“I also came by to tell you that you are now my charge, if you’ll have me. And if I may say so, it would be an honor.”

“Your charge? What do you mean, your charge?”

“My father says it is now my duty to protect you.”

“Protect me?” Modeos laughed. “By the looks of what happened today, it is not me, my little, orange-haired one, who needs protecting.”

“Let me be your servant, then.”

“I don’t need a servant.”

“Your assistant?”

“In other words, constantly in my way?”

Luma shrugged her shoulders and grinned sheepishly.

“Fine. You can be my assistant. You are stubborn.”

“Thank you. You won’t regret it. I promise.”

“Oh, I’m sure I will, many times over.”

Luma ignored this last remark, “Now, you must give me a name.”

“I thought you had a name. Luma of the Firefly Clan.”

“As my newly appointed charge, you must give me a new name.”

“A new name, huh? This is getting complicated. Let’s see…” He looked at her orange hair, purple tunic and bright, pink wings, “You remind me of a rainbow. But, where I come from, there are no rainbows… only rain and snow.”

“No rainbows? Where do you come from? The land of demons?”

Modeos laughed, “No. It’s called Norway now, but at the time, it was known as Scandinavia. How about Regan? Good Gaelic name. Very close to the Old Norse word for rain.”

“You’re naming me after the most depressing thing this side of death?”

“Rain is not depressing. Not for me. It reminds me of home. Besides, without rain, you would have no flowers.”

“That’s true. You win. Regan, it is. So, is there anything I can help you with, being that I am now your assistant?”

“I need sleep.”

“Would you like me to sing you a lullaby? There’s a lovely one my mother used to…”

“No. I would like you to be quiet.”

Regan flew, disappointed, to the windowsill and sat, staring at Modeos as he lay down on his bed and drifted off to sleep.

The Firefly Clan had a long history of mischief and mayhem, playing pranks on countless court jesters and bratty princes. Now, the faerie who was Luma of the Firefly Clan found herself the assistant of this strange, moody man who liked the rain.

She developed quite a crush on him over the years, despite his sometimes somber attitude. He wasn’t bad looking for a human. She knew there was no way for a human and a faery to be intimate, but that didn’t keep her from flirting every chance she got—flitting his ear with her wing, tripping over thin air to land in his hand. He found it amusing but slightly annoying. He had thought her feelings would fade with time, but after twelve hundred years, he was beginning to think that they would not.

And, so, she sat on the brick wall facing the street, watching the occasional noisy, flashy thing go by, and every so often glanced over her shoulder at the two sitting in the courtyard, the one she adored but could never have and the other she didn’t even know but already hated.

She looked at the parking lot and at all the people going to work—the world she wanted desperately to be a part of—but no one looked back at her. The only faeries anyone saw in that world were drawn on paper and sold.

“I can’t shake this feeling that I know you from somewhere,” Alex said as she got up from the bench.

“I have a familiar face. I get people telling me all the time that I’m a dead ringer for their second cousin or old co-worker.”

“Huh… strange. So, what am I supposed to tell the detectives when they ask me if I’ve seen you? Am I supposed to lie?”

“No, Alex. I can’t ask you to do that. You can tell the detective I’ll most likely be at Kristy’s. You know where that’s at?”

“Yeah. But why don’t you just wait for them here?”

“Because there are beat cops in there, too. I told you, it’s complicated and I can’t explain it right now. I’m sorry.”

“Okay. Well, I’ll see you later, Wiz.” Her head drooped a little as she went back into the lobby. Sad because she still couldn’t bring herself to trust Wiz and also because she thought, if Wiz was close friends with Stew, his family could use all the positive energy they can gather. Her shoes clomped back across the lobby and onto the elevator. She buried her face in the top of her brown pullover, so, all that was visible was her bright, red hair. The stainless-steel doors closed slowly, shrinking the red hair to a thin line. And then it was gone.