I stick my hand in my pocket and come up with two Juicy Cute Bears stuck together like a candy sideshow act. “Just these guys.”
“Fork ’em over. Minus the pocket lint.”
I defuzz the bears, and Dulcie peels them apart, offers me one. When I decline, she pops the red one in her mouth and closes her eyes in a swoon. “God, I love sugar. Greatest invention ever.”
“Getting back to the tree. ‘Sort of’ sounds pretty random, if you ask me.”
“Well, you have to know what to wish for. Take this one.” She plucks a wish from high on a branch. “I wish I were famous. Okay, first question: Why does this person want to be famous? To be worshipped? Adored? To get noticed? To make gobs and gobs of money? You have to look inside the wish and find the heart. So maybe what this person really wants, the heart of it, is to find somebody who adores her. She goes out to wherever it is people go to become famous and just gets knocked down and out and around like a pin-ball flipper. And one day, as she’s walking on the beach totally bummed, this person comes along, and to him, she’s a rock star. He adores her, and with him, she feels adored, famous. In a roundabout way, she’s gotten what she really wanted. Wish granted.”
The rain dribbles down again, hitting the ground in a soothing patter.
“What kind of self-help-philosophy-lite bullshit is that?” I ask. “Somebody puts her wish up here expecting to have it come true and this … tree makes a completely arbitrary decision about what may or may not be the ‘heart’ of the wish? That’s retarded!”
Dulcie bites the head off the other Juicy Bear. “Your skepticism is duly noted.”
“How about this? How about if the Wishing Tree grants people their freaking wishes exactly as they requested?”
“Doesn’t work that way.” She picks some Juicy Bear out of her back teeth.
“Well, the way it works is stupid.”
Dulcie looks at me—I mean really looks at me. It’s like she’s seeing straight through to my cells. “No guts, no glory, cowboy,” she says quietly.
“What do you mean?”
“Make a wish. See if it comes true.”
She comes nearer, and I can smell her along with the rain and the pine. She has a scent that’s familiar and comforting, like all the things you wish you could take with you on your travels to make you feel less alone. Dulcie tilts her face up to mine. Her eyes remind me of the ocean in winter—gray, stark, a calm surface hiding a serious undertow; something you only go into if you’re sure you can handle it, and if you can’t, well, too late now.
“I … um, I don’t have any paper,” I say.
She leans in. Her whisper warms my ear. “Pocket.”
“Huh?”
She hops over a twig, balances on one foot. “That thing at the back of your pants.”
I reach into my back jeans pocket and find Junior Webster’s cryptic note to me: to live.
“Pen?” I say.
She hops to the other foot. “I don’t do pens. You’ve got one in your jacket. It’s leaking.”
A large inky splotch stains the left side of my Windbreaker. Annoyed, I wipe the pen off and sit on the only dry patch of ground. For the longest time, I listen to the soft percussion of the rain while trying to word my wish airtight. None of that “I want to be famous and instead I get a guy on the beach” crap for me.
“How ya doin’?” Dulcie asks. She’s stretched out on a branch Cheshire-cat style.
“Do you mind? I’m thinking. This is for the big money.”
She spreads her hands in a no harm, no foul gesture. “Don’t let me rush genius.”
Finally, I write down the only thing I can think of and stick it on a branch. My wish disappears into the tree, and a baby leaf pokes out. In the veined paper, I can see the words struggling to be born.
Dulcie hops down. “What did you wish for?”
“Use your X-ray heat vision super angel powers to find out.”
“Just a messenger, remember?” Dulcie winks. “Well, whatever it is, I’m sure it’ll come true.”
“Sort of,” I say.
“Sort of.”
Suddenly, she reaches her arms around my neck and just as quickly, she jumps back. I feel the empty space between us like an extra person.
“Got it!” she says, waving something in her hand. It’s a really old one. A last plea to the universe from some weary traveler passing through Hope on the road to wherever he’s going.
“Ah,” she says, smiling. “Now, this is brilliant.”
