by Amy Martin
Chapter 13
The wind that cuts across the prairie in April isn’t quite the same wind that blows in December or even March. The winter wind in the Midwest slashes through the fields and levels knifepoint stabs against your exposed skin, but by the beginning of April, the wind barely grazes your cheeks, and even though you might shiver occasionally when a real gale blows up, the breeze holds the promise of the warm days to come if you can hang on a little longer. The winter wind blows nothing but decay, but an April wind always brings hope—it even smells warmer somehow.
Kayla, however, seems anything but hopeful as we walk behind my house through the fallow field leading to the art workshop behind my grandparents’ place. She buttons up her jean jacket and folds her arms across her chest, a human battering ram forging ahead into the wind. “What do I do if he won’t talk to me?” she asks, like I’m some sort of expert in settling sibling disputes. Not only am I no expert, but this particular brother-sister rift also extends into territory that doesn’t even seem like part of the real world.
“Then you go back home and wait until he does,” I suggest. “I’ll make sure he gets home okay.”
“You shouldn’t have to do that.”
My shoulders hunch involuntarily. “Well, whatever. I’m a part of this thing, remember?”
Apparently, I was a part of this thing long before the Laniers told me I was involved, long before I’d laid eyes on Kieran Lanier for the first time standing in the front entry at school. I was a part of this all the way back when he was sitting in his room in North Carolina drawing me in his dream journals. A shiver travels up my spine from something more than the wind, and I mirror Kayla’s walking posture of arms folded across my chest. We don’t say anything else until we’re outside the workshop and my hand’s on the doorknob.
“Your grandparents don’t keep the door locked?” Kayla asks, as I open the door a crack, rays from the yellow porch light over my grandparents’ back door creating a triangle shape on the floor.
“Can’t remember the last time someone reported a burglary around here. Tweakers are more likely to steal from their own or from someone in town than to come all the way out to the middle of nowhere. Plus, they’d take one look at the stuff in here and figure they couldn’t get anything for any of it.”
Kayla stands behind me as I peer around the edge of the doorframe. “Kieran?” I say, my voice only slightly above a whisper.
Nothing. For a second, I debate whether or not to flip the light switch inside the door, but decide not to risk my grandparents’ passing by their kitchen window and coming out to investigate lights on in the shed. I pull my phone from my jeans pocket and activate the home screen, which allows us to survey the area in a ghostly white light that only adds to the overall creepiness of the place. My mother’s unfinished wind chimes dangle from the ceiling over a workbench like spider webs, and her wire sculpture projects snake up from the floor over by the side wall, in this light looking less like art and more like barbed traps. I shine the light past Gramps’ lithography press and find Kieran in the back corner of the shed opposite the wire sculptures, snoozing away against a half-finished wooden bear carving Gramps has been working on lately. Holding the phone off to my side, I cross the distance between us to crouch in front of him.
“Kieran?” I whisper, grabbing his shoulder and shaking him.
“Mmm.” Kieran blinks awake, the faint glow from my phone showing me his eyes, swollen and red from crying. He turns his head rapidly from side to side and nods, remembering where he is and, more importantly, why he’s here. “Zip,” he murmurs. “You came from my house?”
“Yeah. I was downstairs talking with your parents and Kayla while you were asleep. We couldn’t find you, and I thought you might be here.”
“I needed to be alone for a while,” he explains, reaching over and rubbing his hand along the rough stump Gramps will, one of these days, carve into a set of bear claws. “I like it in here. My head’s already clearer somehow. I can’t explain—it’s like my thoughts make more sense or something.”
“My mom says the same thing. She always comes out here and starts working and loses track of time. Gram usually has to come out and tell her she should go home and get some sleep. She says sometimes she can sit in here staring at a canvas and even if she doesn’t get anything done, she always ends up in a better mood than when she came in. Must be some artist thing you guys have.”
Kieran’s face glows at my referring to him as an artist, but the moment quickly disappears as behind us, Kayla clears her throat, reminding me she’s standing a few feet away in the doorway. Kieran leans to look past me at his sister, but he doesn’t say a word to her before he moves back to where I’m blocking her from his view.
“Kieran,” she says, and doesn’t get anything else out before he starts in on her.
“I can’t talk to you right now. Okay? Leave me alone.”
“Fine,” she snaps. “But you can’t stay mad at me forever, you know.”
“Bet me?”
Kayla exhales so loudly she sounds like she’s kneeling next to me. I twist around to her. “You should probably—”
“Yeah.” She cuts me off, voice quivering. “I know when I’m not wanted.”
“I’ll text you when we’re on our way back to your house, okay?”
Kayla shuts the door so only a tiny sliver of light splits the darkened concrete behind me. I shut off my phone and turn to Kieran, sitting down in front of him with my knees pulled to me. “She feels really bad, you know,” I tell him.
“For lying to me for years? She should feel bad.”
I don’t have any good evidence to plead Kayla’s case to him other than what he already knows—that Kayla loves him and wants to keep him safe—so I let my inappropriate sense of humor take over. “Well, anyway—happy birthday!”
Even in the near darkness, I can see Kieran’s teeth when he laughs as they practically glow against the shadows. “Yeah. You, too. I keep waiting for someone to jump out and yell ‘April Fool!’ and we can pretend everything’s a total joke.”
“Probably not happening,” I mumble.
“Nope.”
Neither of us rushes to fill the silence, and I decide to get down to the serious stuff. “So, how are you dealing with this?” I ask.
“How am I dealing with finding out my parents and my sister aren’t my real parents and my real sister? Or with finding out my real mother was drugging me in the womb? Or with the fact my real dad’s a crazy felon?” Kieran’s voice grows increasingly bitter as he lays out the evening’s revelations. “Or how am I dealing with the fact my not-sister and not-parents have done nothing but lie to me about everything for most of my life?”
“Yeah. Any of it.”
Kieran stares down at his hands in his lap. “I’m kind of overwhelmed, to be honest.”
“Understandable.”
“And I’m pissed as hell, and confused…but at the same time…” He shakes his head. “Well, it’s weird, but I’ve been sitting here thinking—when I’ve been awake—about how as mad as I am, I kind of get why Mom and Dad…the Laniers, I mean…whatever…I get why they and Kayla did everything they’ve done all these years, keeping me kind of isolated and cut off from stuff. I mean, what else could they do, right? Even without the whole future dreams thing and the jailbird dad, I’m pretty helpless on a normal day because of the narcolepsy, or whatever it is. So in my head, I understand they’ve been trying to protect me from myself and from…whatever else. I go over and over things and on some level, everything makes sense. But that doesn’t mean I don’t still feel like crap.”
“Uh huh,” I mumble, mostly to tell him I’m still listening because I can’t in a million years comprehend his emotions right now.
“And, I mean, I’ve always told them about my dreams from time to time, but those journals were supposed to be private. They were my place to work stuff out when I needed to. So for them to look through them without my permissio
n, and lie to me about how I was seeing some version of myself and not my real father?” Kieran sits with his mouth open, trying to form an answer to his own question. Apparently, he doesn’t get one, because he changes the subject slightly. “My biggest regret in this whole situation is you. You shouldn’t have anything to do with this, but thanks to me, my parents had to tell you…both of us, I guess…everything.”
My mind wanders back over those descriptions and drawings of me in his dream journals, and I can’t help but wonder how much choice I truly had in the matter, which goes against all I’ve learned about how the world works. People make their own choices and determine their destinies. I woke up today, and I chose to wear a long black sweater and jeans. Kieran invited me to come over after dinner tonight, but the decision about what to do with my evening after considering his invitation was mine. I decided to sit in his kitchen and listen to his parents explain the true story of Kieran’s life and illness, when I had the choice to get up and run out screaming at the top of my lungs.
Still, I can’t deny everything I’ve seen in his dream journals. I can’t deny the fact that he dreamed of me months before he met me, and I can’t deny that almost nothing makes any sense to me anymore.
“Kieran, don’t worry about me. I’m fine,” I tell him. But I’m lying. I’m nowhere near fine. “Fine” and I aren’t even on the same planet right now, and Kieran seems to read the fear in my voice.
“You shouldn’t have to be involved in this. If Morgan Levert can find me, it’s going to impact everyone around me. I pulled you into this and now I can’t keep you safe, if there’s even anything to keep you safe from. God, I’m so sorry.”
“I’m not,” I tell him, meaning what I say. “I’m kind of confused right now, I guess, but I’m definitely not sorry. You didn’t pull me into anything. You had no idea sharing things with me would cause any problems, because your parents were keeping secrets from you. And I wouldn’t rewind the last three months back to when you weren’t a part of my life for anything.
He smiles. “Me, neither.”
“And like you said, we have no clue if we should be afraid. Maybe it’s like Gram always tells me—we shouldn’t be borrowing trouble by assuming something bad’s going to happen when we don’t know.” A thought occurs to me as I’m getting this last sentence out. “Or, I guess we don’t. I mean, does Morgan Levert actually do anything in your dreams?”
“No—I just kind of see flashes of his face. So unless he plans to bore us to death by just hanging around, I don’t get enough information from my dreams to find out what he might be capable of. All I know is what Dad…Jim...told me.” Kieran gathers his legs to his chest and lets out an unsteady breath. Without asking whether he wants me to or not, I get up and slide the bear sculpture over towards my mom’s tangled wires so I can sit next to him, our shoulders touching. He brushes the back of his hand against my arm, eventually weaving his fingers together with mine. “At least now I’ve got an explanation for why I am the way I am, though. Even if I can’t do anything about it, I guess we can be pretty sure Morgan and Jenna messed me up,” he whispers, resting his head on my shoulder. “So that’s something.”
“I asked your dad if Morgan had told him how he made this…substance,” I say. “He said Morgan basically lied about not remembering. If someone just knew what was in this stuff, then maybe we could figure out how to help you.”
“So you’re saying I need help?” I can hear the teasing in his voice even though at this angle and in the shadows, his expression is a mystery.
“I think in some areas, you’re seriously beyond help.” I tell him, making sure to laugh a little so he’s sure I’m kidding. “You understand what I mean, though.”
“If we knew without a doubt what was in the stuff that caused my condition to begin with, then maybe we could treat it, you mean. No more narcolepsy, or whatever’s wrong with me. No more dreams.”
Kieran sounds almost regretful at the thought of changing his condition. I tilt my head to rub my cheek along his hair. “You wouldn’t want to be cured? Or treated or whatever?”
“Only falling asleep when I really want to would be nice. Then again, I’ve never had any other life, so thinking about not being the way I am is weird. Like, waking up in the morning and going to bed at night and not having to sleep at some point during the day is a totally foreign concept.”
His non-answer answer makes me keep pushing the topic, even though I’m not sure I want to find out his decision. “So if you definitely could, like for real, stop the…stop everything for good, you don’t think you would?”
Kieran doesn’t say anything, obviously thinking through the possibilities. “The sleep disorder? As much as I can’t imagine living without it, I’d figure out how to deal. I think I’d totally end that insanity in minute.” My silence speaks for me, and he responds with “But that’s not all you meant, right?”
As if we both sense the conversation has come to some kind of important crossroads, we shift and sit up so we can look at each other directly. “Would you stop the dreams, Kieran?” I whisper. “Knowing what you know now?”
I may have no idea how I want him to answer my questions, but I can’t un-ask them. They’re floating in the night air between us, drifting in the shadows, waiting for him to shed some light.
“I don’t know,” is the response he gives me, which may be the best of all possibilities, mostly because the answer’s not final and keeps us both in the comforting darkness we’ve grown used to. “It’s scary,” he goes on. “Knowing I could get a flash of something I don’t want to see, and realizing I don’t know enough to stop it? I’d turn that off in a second. But I dream about so many good things, though. The little moments I remember seeing before…when I finally get some context for those moments, I can’t describe the feeling.” Even though he’s turned toward me now rather than sitting up against me, Kieran’s still holding my hand. He gazes down at our fingers laced together and rubs his thumb along the delicate skin between my thumb and forefinger. “I mean, I think about seeing you before I met you, and getting to meet you later in real life. I can’t even explain what that’s like, dreaming about someone and wondering who she is, wishing she’d show up and hoping that she’s a cool person. So to actually meet her…you…and find out you’re even more amazing than I ever could have thought…these aren’t the kinds of things I’d want to give up.”
Swallowing hard, I raise a hand to his face, fingers fanning out across his cheek. “Sometimes I wish I’d seen you coming,” I whisper.
Kieran lifts his eyes. “So you could’ve run away screaming?”
“So…so I could’ve been prepared. So I wouldn’t be fumbling my way through this whole thing.”
“And so you’d have some idea of what you’re supposed to do next?” he asks, unblinking.
“So I’d be sure what you’re going to think about what I do next after I do it,” I say, confidence coming from a reserve inside me that only opens up when I need to react quickly, like when four seconds are left in the game and we’re down by one, and I have to decide whether I can successfully drive the lane for two or whether I should dish the ball to the wing for one of my teammates to take a shot.
In this particular case, I drive the lane. I slide my hand around from his cheek to the back of his head and pull him to me. His hands weave into my hair, and I shut out every nagging doubt threatening this moment, such as whether or not my hands are in the right place or if I’m the World’s Worst Kisser. My anxiety fades to static waves bumping up against an invisible force field, just like I’m at the free throw line in a game. When the ball’s in my hand, I shut out the crowd and ignore my teammates jockeying for position against the opposing players along the lane. I don’t even remember the score when I’m in that moment. It’s only the ball, the basket, and me. And right now, it’s only Kieran and me—and a half-formed bear I’m trying to forget is watching over us. I refocus on the sensation of Kieran’s lips on mine, and all tho
ughts of the bear, of everything but the physical impulses of what we’re doing, fade away. My hand travels to Kieran’s chest and clutches at his t-shirt, feeling his heart beating beneath the cotton. He pulls a whisper away from me, and my eyes angle downward to glimpse his mouth widening to a smile.
She shoots. And she scores.
