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Blue Moon 6.5

by Donna Lamb

"It's a m-message," said Jo. She had the expression of someone completely convinced by a new truth.

"What's a message?" Richard asked cautiously.

"Dunny is. He's a message from my sister." Jo sat on the edge of the bed and stroked the soft faux fur of the yellow-brown toy rabbit. "She's okay and she's happy and she doesn't need him anymore so she sent him back to me." Jo smiled up at Richard. "She didn't want me to be scared."

Richard stared at her. "Jo, that doesn't make much sense?"

"I don't care," said Jo. "It's not about m-making sense." She hugged the rabbit again and played with its loose limbs and floppy ears. "It's about things working out. I know why I gave Dunny to M-miriam and now I've got him back, so somebody sent him. I think it she did it. And he's a m-message only I could understand."

"Uh," said Richard. She does look all happy and relaxed now. "I guess. But, didn't they make thousands of those rabbits? I'm sure I've seen them before."

"B-but this is Dunny," said Jo. She turned one ankle of the bunny up to show a spot mended with dark brown thread in a curiously angular hourglass-like pattern. "See? And the ears are stitched with w-white thread where I chewed on them."

"Okay," said Richard, unconvinced but willing to concede. "But why is the -- bunny a message?"

"You don't think everything that's happened to me is random, do you? That w-wouldn't m-make sense at all. Joel is dead and I'm alive and I've got every good reason to be scared out of m-my m-mind but Dunny here m-means that things are going to be okay. I'm supposed to b-be here, I b-bet." She turned to look at herself in the large lighted mirror over the vanity, leaning a bit closer to make the image less blurry. "M-maybe it's like Quantum Leap and I'm supposed to do something to m-make things right."

Richard opened his mouth but then closed it. Shut up, he told himself. Her ideas are just as good as yours on this because you really don't have any.

But she reminded him."You thought it might be a w-wish one of us m-made. M-maybe it w-was." She stopped to touch her short hair which at sometime had stopped looking like a boy's haircut and more like the sort of shearing that might have been done in an emergency room. A narrow swatch above her left ear seemed to have been shaved with six or eight weeks of slightly redder re-growth showing. She could feel a narrow ridge of scar tissue there and wondered what might have happened.

Richard made a decision. Pulling out his own cellphone, he speed-dialed his dispatch office. "I need to cancel my run this morning, Carmen, in fact, my whole shift for a couple of days," he said. He listened patiently while Carmen told him just why he couldn't do that. "Doesn't matter," he said into the phone."There's no way I can make a pickup at the airport and run all over the county today, a personal emergency has come up."

Jo knelt to replace the tea-colored rabbit in the glass case, remembering that she should keep her knees together. It didn't feel at all awkward to do so. "You stay here, Dunny," she said to the rabbit. "It'll b-be safer. I'm a b-big girl now and just knowing you're safe is enough. I'd look silly carrying you everywhere." She giggled as she re-latched the door of the case. Some of the other toys in there looked familiar, too. Later, she promised them.

"I don't care," Richard told Carmen. "Dock my pay, I'm taking at least two days off and you can fine me another day to hire someone else in my place. Uh-huh. Okay." He closed the phone, looking at Jo. "I may have to make that pickup at the airport, after all, then meet someone somewhere and trade vehicles, they need that bus." Bus being the word limo drivers at Richard's agency used for the oversize, stretched Lincolns and Mercedes they used.

"I'm sorry," Jo told Richard. "I didn't ask you to stay w-with m-me. But I appreciate it." Looking at Richard she did feel gratitude and something else -- something that made her lips tingle, and other parts of her, too. Confused, she turned away. He's so tall and good-looking, -- well, I knew that before. But it sure as heck is different now.

He could see her blush in the mirror and his guess as to why made him smile in a self-satisfied, testosterone-laced, but essentally confused way. "Don't worry about it. Some of the drivers pull worse stuff all the time. My job is safe." But maybe you're not, he added to himself. She looks less like Joel all the time.

"Can I ride along with you? I don't w-want to stay here alone right now." She didn't turn back to look at him. Too many things going on she didn't understand. If he looked at me and grinned like I've seen him grin at some women.... She avoided completing the thought.

"Sure," said Richard. "Maybe we can find you some black slacks and jacket with a white shirt. Then you'd look like a spare driver deadheading along, instead of..." He trailed off. His phone rang and he answered it.

Jo felt grateful for the idea of changing clothes, as a distraction. She began trying doors in the large bedroom. The first opened on a long room the blurry outlines of which seemed to contain electric pianos, computer desks, music stands and amplifiers. The second door opened on a dressing room with a luxury bath at one end and a walk-in closet at the other. Scattered across one counter, Jo discovered contact lens equipment -- packages of disposable lenses, solutions and such -- and on a funny little rack shaped like the face of a kitten, a pair of gold-framed glasses.

Jo tried them on then turned to look at her own reflections in the numerous mirrors. She hadn't really seen herself without some blurring and double vision. "Oh crap," she muttered when the full impact of her new looks soaked in. "I'm not just p-pretty, I'm dangerous!"