Read Online What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay by Amanda Cockrell - Free Book Online

pretty awful dreams; I couldn’t think what it would be like to have them all the time. “You were a medic?” I asked.
    “Yeah. I was in pre-med when my lottery number came up.”
    “Lottery?” Who would want to win a prize like that?
    “There were so many protests about rich kids getting draft deferments for being in college and poor kids going to Nam that the government started a lottery. They drew birthdates, and the guys with the first birthdate drawn, they went first.”
    “What did your family do?”
    “My mom wanted me to go to Canada, but my old man said no way. He put me on a bus for the induction center.”
    I thought about Jesse’s mom and the way she’d looked at his father. “What was it like?” I asked.
    “Trust me, you don’t want to know.”
    “I didn’t want to dream about it, either. Did you do this to me to scare me away from Jesse?”
    “I told you, I didn’t do it. I wouldn’t do that.”
    “Well, something did it. Somebody did it.”
    “God moves in mysterious ways,” Felix said.
    “You think God is giving me your dreams?”
    “Well, he cancelled my sainthood. If he can do that, he can do what he wants to. Maybe I’ll get your dreams.”
    “ No !” I said. I did not want him poking around in my dreams. Dreams are too personal. Not to mention embarrassing. I’ve had dreams I wouldn’t even tell Lily about.
    “No, I probably won’t,” he agreed. “I’d like to be fifteen again, though. I’d like to have those dreams back.”
    “If you’re St. Felix of Valois, you were studying in an abbey when you were fifteen,” I pointed out.
    “We dream anyway,” he said.
    “What happened after you got drafted?”
    “Goats.” He didn’t seem to have any trouble shifting back and forth between lives. “Boys. Boys with their feet blown off. They took ’em away so fast in the dust-off chopper, I never knew whether they lived or not. Except for sometimes. Sometimes if they died they came back and saw me.”
    “Ghosts?” I had a horrible vision of a soldier with his guts taped to his chest, leaning over Felix’s bed. No wonder he was crazy.
    “Yeah. There’re two or three I see pretty regularly. Kid with a sucking chest wound—the one you dreamed about.”
    “I don’t want to dream about that again,” I said. Something occurred to me. “Are you a doctor now? Did you finish med school when you came home?”
    He shook his head, staring down at the pew. It was old, dark wood, shiny with two hundred years of people’s butts. “I lost my taste for it. I thought I could save the world, you know, and I couldn’t even save some kid who stepped on a booby trap.”
    “What did you do?”
    “This and that. I worked construction some. Cut trail. Planted trees. I stayed home till my old man got tired of me.”
    “Felix? What am I going to do about the dreams?” I was dead tired from not getting any sleep, and totally scared of them coming back.
    “I don’t know,” he said. “Pray?”

7
    It was Friday night and Grandma Alice had lit the candles and said the Sabbath prayers, so I thought maybe that would do. But I still thought about the dreams all the way through dinner, scared to death I was going to have them again. Finally, Grandma Alice patted my hand and said, “Angie? Honey? You look like you don’t feel so good.”
    “I don’t.”
    “In the stomach? Or up here?” She pointed at her forehead.
    “It’s kind of hard to tell,” I said. “I’ve been having bad dreams.”
    “What about, kiddo?” Ben looked worried too, now.
    “About war, sort of.” I didn’t say which war. I didn’t want them to think I was as crazy as Felix. “And it’s not because I’ve been hanging out with Jesse,” I added before Ben could open his mouth.
    “No, wars just do that,” Grandma Alice said. “They get in the air. I remember when Ben’s father was overseas, during the war.”
    I knew she meant World War II.
    “I was a hostess at the Hollywood Canteen,” she