Lost in Dreams

by Roger Bruner

  “I …” I sighed. “I can’t pretend that’s not true. I was concerned about complete strangers then, but this is something in my own family.”

  “Uh-huh. And don’t you know that proves his point, girl? If you got that upset about strangers’ troubles, how would you react to your dad’s?”

  “I … know better than to react that way again. Don’t you think my experiences in Santa María strengthened me both spiritually and emotionally?” She didn’t say anything at first. “Please, Aleesha.” I pled with my eyes as well as my voice. “What’s going on with Dad?”

  “Girl, I have mixed feelings about telling you this, but Mr. Scott didn’t ask me not to. I can’t stay here forever, and he needs your help as much as you need his.”

  I hugged her.

  “Here goes. He has this crazy idea that Miss Terri’s death is his fault.”

  “What? That’s—”

  I didn’t realize I’d gotten too loud again until Aleesha put her hand over my mouth. For all the sense that bit of information made, Aleesha might as well have told me the sky was falling.

  “He should’ve postponed his meeting with Dr. what’s-his-face and driven with Miss Terri to Atlanta to pick you up.”

  “Why? What difference would—?”

  “He would have been in the driver’s seat. So the accident

  wouldn’t have happened.”

  “That’s crazy, Aleesha. What makes him so sure of that?”

  “Crazy or not, he’s convinced it’s true. Reason or no reason. That’s not something you can talk a man out of believing once he’s got it in his head.”

  How can Dad be responsible when I’m the guilty party?

  “There’s something about this I still don’t get,” I said. Aleesha aimed a puzzled look at me.

  I shrugged. What good would it do to confess my crime to her—to explain that Dad couldn’t be guilty because I was?

  Aleesha caught on that I wasn’t going to explain. “It was so sad.” She paused to wipe her eyes. “You know what Mr. Scott kept saying over and over?”

  Unsure whether I wanted to know, I barely shook my head. A twister like the one that destroyed Santa María had gotten loose in my brain, and it wasn’t leaving any of my thoughts and feelings intact.

  “He said, ‘If I’d been driving, Terri could have answered her cell phone safely. Then none of this would have happened.’”

  No, Dad. It wasn’t you. It was me. If I hadn’t phoned Mom … if I hadn’t left voice mail, she’d still be alive. It’s my fault, not yours. And you’ll hate me for it if you find out. I can’t let that happen.

  “Uh.” That involuntary grunt made its way to the surface from deep within me.

  “Girl! What’s wrong?”

  “I …” Did I dare to reveal the truth? I could barely hear myself thinking over the pounding of my heart. I needed to tell someone, but … no, I couldn’t. “It … it’s nothing.”

  I looked away. Aleesha knew my statement couldn’t have been further from the truth. Even unsubtle Jo would have caught on. I hoped Aleesha would lay off now instead of pushing for the truth.

  She changed the subject. Thank you, Lord. “You must have been dreaming something awful last night.”

  I nodded slightly and closed my eyes tight for several seconds. But I couldn’t shut out the memory of what had kept me awake almost all night.

  “I could hear you all the way downstairs,” she said. “Sounded like you were thrashing around, maybe wrestling with the devil. I didn’t think you were winning. I came upstairs to make sure you were okay. Bedcovers were everywhere but over you, and you were, well, you were lying in a pool of sweat.”

  I’ve never believed a person can be held accountable for her dreams. The dreamer has no control over plot, theme, or characters. She can’t specify the setting or influence the dialogue. Neither can she determine whether dreams are good, bad, or indifferent.

  Most dreams are neutral, I suppose, and we forget them almost as soon as we wake up. If we remember them that long. Even the most vivid dreams—good or bad—don’t remain with us long.

  But last night’s dream had been different. The nightmare was so vivid that just thinking about it now made me start trembling and sweating all over again. I hoped Aleesha wouldn’t notice.

  Attacking me with relentless fury not long after I went to bed, this nightmare terrified me so completely I fought to stay awake for fear I might dream it all over or—worse still—have it continue from where it had left off. The sleep that finally took control of my body did nothing to erase my fears, and I felt wiped out now.

  Aleesha and I could discuss anything—no holds barred—but I wasn’t sure I wanted to share the details with her. Not if it required me to relive what I feared I’d never forget.

  Aleesha could almost read my mind, though … or my body language. Far too accurately.

  “Girl”—her tone was somewhere between compassionate and frustrated—”if a problem bothers you so much you can’t talk about it with your best friend—or even your second-best friend—that’s a sign you really need to discuss it with somebody.”

  Aleesha’s father was a psychiatrist or psychologist at a Christian counseling center in inner-city Baltimore. No wonder she was so good at reading people and knowing just what to say. She’d probably learned how to do that from her father, even though she’d once claimed that her psychobabbological savvy wasn’t as good as her medical knowledge, which—though iffy—was better than mine.

  If father and daughter were as much alike as I suspected, they probably practiced on each other. In spite of the seriousness of my quandary, that thought nearly made me smile.

  “Do you want the door closed?”

  I nodded.

  “You know that dream I had on the bus last week when we were leaving Santa María?” “The one about heaven?”

  “You remember how joyful and encouraging it was?”

  “It gave you hope for the villagers’ salvation and made you decide to major in Spanish. Nothing special about it that I can recall.” White teeth gleamed from ear to ear, and I shook my head at her playful, understated commentary.

  I welcomed that brief moment of levity.

  “If that dream was a ten-plus on the scale of worthy and wonderful dreams, last night’s dream was a minus one-million. It was horrible. I’ll never forget it.”

  Aleesha sat down on the bed and took my hand. “What I said a minute ago … don’t tell me if you don’t feel up to it.” Her

  sensitivity was a welcome relief.

  “Thanks, but you were right. I do need to talk about it.” Aleesha nodded almost imperceptibly. “When I heard that Mom had her phone in her hand at the time of the accident, I was like, ‘Mom, you didn’t lose control of the car because you were trying to answer one of my impatient calls, did you? Or because you were listening to my voice mail?’”

  Aleesha’s lips parted slightly. Her eyes focused on mine. She was listening with head, heart, and spirit.

  “I can’t be sure about that, of course, but the possibility that it’s true has been tearing me up.”

  Aleesha looked like she wanted to say something, but she didn’t interrupt.

  “I was doing a fair job of not dwelling on it until that dumb cop talked to us just before the funeral. He said the cell phone records showed she’d been connected to voice mail at the time of the crash.”

  Aleesha looked as if a clichéd feather would have knocked her over.

  “The guilt has gotten a million times worse since then. I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. To somebody else, this might sound as crazy as Dad feeling responsible. It’s not crazy to me, though, and I can’t rationalize my way out of feeling guilty.”

  “And that’s what your nightmare was about?” She spoke in a softer tone of voice than usual.

  I nodded.

  “In the dream, I was waiting for Mom at the airport, but it was San Diego International part of the time and Dallas/Fort Worth th
e rest. Never Atlanta. I called her every thirty minutes and left voice mail each time until I filled up her voice mailbox. I was nasty and impatient. ‘Where are you? Hurry up. I’m sick of waiting.’

  “Two days passed, and I hadn’t heard from her once. I was still at one of the two airports, living off pizza, killing time by finger painting on my sweatshirt with pizza sauce, and dozing while I lay across the laps of four sleeping passengers who were also waiting for someone to pick them up.

  “Then this big bruiser of a policeman—he bore an uncanny resemblance to Millie Q—waltzed up to me with his handcuffs open. ‘Kim Hartlinger,’ he said, ‘you’re under arrest for the murder of your mother.’”

  Aleesha grunted. Tears glistened. Telling her the nightmare was tough on me, but hearing it was obviously tearing her up, too.

  “‘My mother’s not dead,’ I told him, jerking my hand away before he could cuff me. ‘She’s on her way to pick me up. She has to drive across the whole country, you know. She’ll be here any minute now.’

  “‘Have you checked your voice mail recently?’ he asked. I pulled out my cell phone and punched a few buttons. ‘I have one message.’ ‘Listen to it,’ he said. I did.”

  I couldn’t continue. Aleesha blotted my face with a tissue and then slipped wordlessly into the bathroom. She returned with a wet washcloth and proceeded to wipe my face. That helped. But only physically.

  “You don’t have to tell me the rest,” she said. “It must be horrible.”

  “I need to finish, Aleesha,” I said in a more insistent tone of voice than I normally use. “The voice message was actually a recording of the accident. The sounds of skidding. Landing. Crashing into the tree. Glass breaking.” I hesitated and then lowered my voice. “Mom’s groan at the instant of her death.

  “Then the policeman said, ‘If you hadn’t phoned her, she’d still be alive. We’re only going to charge you with involuntary manslaughter, though. We know you didn’t mean to kill her, but

  that doesn’t change the fact she’s dead now. Shame on you!’”

  Aleesha and I were both blubbering by then. There’s no better word to describe it. We must have made more noise than we realized, though, because Dad came bounding up the stairs—sounding like he took two or three at a time. He knocked and then opened the door without waiting for a response.

  Aleesha glanced at me as if asking permission to explain. I mouthed okay.

  “Bad nightmare,” she told him. “Horrible nightmare.” That was the last thing I heard.

  chapter eleven

  I don’t know what happened to me, but when I came to, Dad was hovering over me like a mother robin that sees a predator coming too close to her little ones.

  “Are you okay, Kim?” Dad said. He kissed me on the forehead. “You—what’s the current word?—you zoned out for about ten minutes.”

  No matter what I’d experienced, I felt slightly more awake than before. I didn’t hurt anywhere, and I didn’t feel faint, dizzy, or nauseated. Concluding that I must be all right, I nodded at Dad’s question.

  “I thought you might have fainted, but Aleesha said you must have just fallen asleep again. She told me a bad nightmare kept you from sleeping well last night. You looked pretty lifeless just to be asleep, though.”

  I wrinkled my eyebrows in a questioning look. “Aleesha checked your temperature. It was normal. So was your pulse. We couldn’t determine any other symptoms. But I was so worried I told her I was going to hand-carry you to the ER if you didn’t come out of it soon.”

  Worried? If your quick breathing, trembling hands, and the ghostly look on your face are any indication, I think ‘scared to death’ is a more accurate description. Even though I hate seeing you this concerned over nothing, it makes me feel good.

  He looked past me at the sweaty, crumpled sheets. “How did your linens get pulled out like this?”

  He started urging one very uncooperative corner of the fitted sheet back into place, but it kept slipping off. Since

  Aleesha didn’t have any trouble with the side she was working on, she came around and fixed his side, too. She gave me her “Men!” smile.

  Dad’s question had just been another way of expressing his concern. He probably remembered from my early childhood that I usually woke up in the same position I’d gone to sleep in. Restlessness and crumpled bed linens weren’t the norm for me.

  “How …?” I said, fishing for an explanation, “Uh, I had a bad dream.”

  After he nodded two or three times, I remembered he already knew that. “So you wrestled your covers off while you were dreaming? Don’t feel you have to hold back. Aleesha explained that your dream was … serious.”

  I sighed. I didn’t want to discuss this with my father. Especially now that I knew he was wrestling with his own guilt—we were flip sides of the same coin.

  “Uh, it was a terrible nightmare,” I said. “Worst one I’ve ever had.” I hoped I wasn’t sounding defensive or elusive, although I was probably both. I quit talking. I’d said all I could safely say.

  “Aleesha wouldn’t tell me what you dreamed about. She said it was personal, and I don’t want to pry. I wish you felt comfortable telling me, though. I’m here to help.”

  “Dad. Daddy …” I threw my arms around his neck and clung to him the way I probably hadn’t felt comfortable doing in years. “I know you want to help, but I … I’m not sure I ought to explain why I can’t say any more.”

  “Please. If it’s that important, you need to share it.”

  Hmm. Sounds like somebody’s been talking to Aleesha. Or the other way around.

  “But I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Dad.”

  How could I soften the blow? What I said had probably

  hurt his feelings. At the end of the longest and most painful five minutes of trying to figure out how to explain diplomatically, I was no closer to a safe, satisfactory answer than when I started.

  In the meantime, Dad stared at me as if I were the fuse on a stick of dynamite, burning and ready to explode any second. How could I assure him it wasn’t like that?

  I had to say something, though. Increasing his anxiety level by delaying any longer wouldn’t be right.

  “Daddy, I love you so much.” Safe beginning. “I love being with you … and talking with you. Last night was the greatest.” I’m sorry, Daddy, but you asked. “But it hasn’t always been that way. Until Mom’s death, you were always so … preoccupied. Teaching … church activities … reading and studying. I’m proud of you, your career, and your responsibilities at church, but”—do I have to tell you?—”you haven’t always seemed sufficiently accessible.”

  At least I’d said, “haven’t seemed” and not “haven’t been.”

  But that hadn’t helped. If the stricken look on his face was any indication, I’d punched him hard in the stomach of his conscience. I’d so wanted to avoid that. I couldn’t have felt like a worse daughter if I’d slapped him in the face. So I skip-skipped to what I hoped would make him feel better.

  “You’re not like that anymore, though. You’ve changed so much. I like—I love—this new you.” Although he wasn’t quite smiling, I could see his facial muscles starting to relax. “But the changes have come so quickly. Almost overnight. I don’t know how to react to them yet. Not completely. That’s why I can’t tell you the specifics of my nightmare.”

  Dad’s breathing was almost back to normal, and his face had regained most of its normal color. “I hope that makes sense to you, Daddy.”

  “I’m probably saying this all wrong, Kim. A doctorate

  in medieval literature isn’t apt to make a man an expert at expressing his feelings. What I’m trying to say, though … we still have the rest of a lifetime for correcting past mistakes.”

  A statement like that from some other middle-aged man might have sounded a tad cheesy, but the tears in his eyes supplemented the message he’d attempted to express in words. I just hoped his lifetime would be longer than Mom’s.
>
  Dad kissed me and walked to the door. He turned back.

  “Kim, I never realized how much I loved you until you got on that plane for San Diego. I prayed for you many times daily. Then when you called about the broken arm …”

  I could barely speak. “You sounded like you were glad to hear from me when I called. And those messages you left …”

  “I love you, Kim.”

  He nearly sprinted back to the bed, and we threw our arms around each other. In my failure to be more responsible, I knocked him in the head with my cast—how I looked forward to getting rid of that thing in another month or so—but that didn’t appear to faze him.

  “I love you, too, Daddy.”

  Once we heard him reach the bottom of the steps, Aleesha closed the door again and sat down beside me on the bed. I’d fiddled with the fitted sheet during the tensest part of my talk with Dad, and one side had pulled loose again. She looked at it and shook her head.

  “Miss Kim,” she said in the kind of quiet, formal voice that sometimes made me uneasy, “you know I’m not always diplomatic.”

  Although I giggled at her understatement, she continued in a serious tone. “I’ve never seen anyone sleep as soundly as you did a few minutes ago. Mr. Scott didn’t tell you that both of us tried to wake you. You groaned without responding. At first I thought you might be having that nightmare again.”

  Her eyes began twinkling. Was she about to transition from serious to silly?

  “You were obviously still alive, though, and that was a good thing. I only brought enough dress clothes for one funeral, and I didn’t think I’d fit into one of those preppy outfits of yours. I’m too tall.”

  Too tall and too well filled out.

  She paused. The twinkle was still there, although she hadn’t smiled yet. I kept staring at her. Surely she didn’t expect me to laugh at such a horribly tasteless joke. She wouldn’t have intentionally hurt my feelings for anything. Yet Mom’s funeral was barely over, and she didn’t seem to take it seriously anymore. What was with her?