He had adopted something he’d heard the guys calling me. Which begged the question, was that because this was my dream and Dream Toby was just my imagination, or Toby had been watching over me since he’d been gone.
“You’re exhausted. I think you were just too tired to fight yourself and your belief that I’m really here.”
“Toby,” I whispered to him, “Are you really here though?”
“I am. I want to help you find Deck and bring him back home, Sis. I can’t do that without your help though. There’s something blocking me from seeing where he is.”
“I don’t know where he is,” I whined.
“I know you don’t, but I think the person you need to go see will be able to tell us how I can find out.”
“What person?”
He laughed then, whether it was at me or himself I didn’t know until he started talking. “Don’t make fun, and don’t decide it’s too stupid to go if I tell you.”. I didn’t agree or disagree with him, just waited for him to carry on. “I was told she can talk to the dead,” Toby explained.
“A psychic? You want me to go see a psychic about Deck? Are you nuts?”
“No, I’m not. Hear me out. She’s not a psychic. She can speak to the dead, that’s something different. Don’t get hung up on the titles, Ev. We both need her.”
“How do you know about her?”
“I tried to get her father to deliver a message to Jay after,” I didn’t let him finish that thought.
“After you died?”
“He refused. Said if Jay ever came looking for answers he could give them to him, but that he wasn’t an errand boy for any damn ghosts.” He laughed about the memory then and I didn’t honestly know how to respond for a minute so I left him to his thoughts, whatever they were.
“If he wouldn’t help you, what makes you think this other person will?”
“You, showing up there on your own, should do the trick.”
“If I do this, you’ll be there watching?” He agreed by tipping his head up and down slightly. “What if I get killed?” Toby laughed at me again and this time it squeezed at my heart, making it ache. God, I had missed his laugh. I hadn’t heard it enough in the years before he died.
“Ever, I wouldn’t send you somewhere dangerous. Please, you have to try to remember this conversation, and you have to go there. It’s the only way.” He repeated the address with me over and over again so that I would remember it when I woke up and just before the real world came crashing in he left me with his beautiful words of comfort. “I love you more than you can possibly know.”
“I love you too, Toby. Always have.” He bent over and kissed my cheek before he whispered, “I know.”
I woke to my daughter wanting me to go downstairs and make breakfast, but before I moved any further, I picked up my cell phone off of the nightstand and I typed the address Toby had made me repeat in my dream. It was real. There was also an ad for a psychic medium. What the absolute fuck? I had no clue what a medium was. Toby had mentioned that they spoke to ghosts, but I wasn’t sure I really believed that was possible. Actually, I felt like I was losing my mind a little bit. The only bonus to that was, debating my own sanity kept my mind off of what the clubs were doing to bring Deck home.
If my dream was real, then that meant I had spoken to my brother and he had been checking in on Deck. It took me two days to work up the courage to go see the woman whose address he had given me. During those two days, my prevailing thought had been to ask him what was really going on between Deck and the woman who kept sending me the photos. I knew it was wrong to have doubts, but I was only human, and my heart had been battered to hell and back over the past year. I honestly didn’t trust it any longer. It wasn’t about anyone else in my life. I simply didn’t trust myself, my judgment, or whether or not I was still clinging to false hope. Going to see a fucking psychic screamed bad decision. There I was though. I stood on her weather-battered porch that seemed as though it hadn’t seen