by Theresa Weir
After it was over, she could never be completely certain if it had really happened, or if she’d somehow put herself into a sort of dream state and had imagined the entire thing.
The first step was self-hypnosis.
Night after night, she practiced faithfully, carefully following the instructions. She would sit on the floor in the living room of the one-bedroom apartment, light a large white candle, and stare at the flickering flame, going through the hypnotic steps. She reached a point where she could put herself into a trance almost instantly. But that was all she could do. Until one night…
As she felt herself slipping away, she repeated Jordan ’s name, her lips moving silently. In her mind’s eye she pictured his face, willing him to come to her.
She heard a loud roar in her head, like the sound of a million fans. The room spun, and she seemed to tumble through a dark tunnel.
A few moments later, everything stopped.
Quiet, like being inside a movie with no sound.
She found herself standing on a roadside. Cold rain beat down. In the distance stood a two-story house with lighted Halloween decorations. Beyond the house, a car moved toward her, headlight beams cutting through the rain.
Cleo stood rooted to the spot where the road curved sharply into a bridge. She tried to step back, but she couldn’t lift her feet. She couldn’t close her eyes. Suddenly the car was almost upon her, its headlights reflecting off her white shirt. She saw the driver’s face, saw his look of surprise and heard his cry of alarm. In his haste to miss her, he jerked the wheel. The car skidded, the rear coming around. There was a crash, a grinding and squeaking of metal, the sound of shattering glass. The driver’s side had taken most of the impact, hitting the cement footing head-on.
Silence rang in her ears.
This time she was somehow able to move until she was next to the car.
There were two people inside.
Jordan and Cleo.
Cleo came to on the wooden floor of her apartment. Her body ached. The candle had gone out, leaving nothing but a puddle of wax. An acid taste collected in the back of her throat, a familiar sensation. She lurched to her feet. With the floor tilting like the deck of a ship, she staggered to the bathroom, making it just in time. Afterward, she half crawled from the room, and dragged herself into bed. She didn’t wake up until the next day.
Remembering what had happened when she was in the trance was nothing like trying to remember a dream. Dreams were vivid upon awakening, but quickly faded until they often became impossible to recall. This was different. Like remembering something she’d done the day before. Something she’d really done.
My God, she thought. What if I made it happen? What if I killed Jordan and our baby? Had he seen her standing there and swerved to avoid her?
Cleo put a hand to her mouth, letting out a sound that was half cry, half sob. She thought back to the night of the crash, to a scene she’d replayed in her head again and again. They were in the car on their way home. They were arguing about cleaning the apartment. Jordan didn’t do his share. They were both working and going to school, so it was only right that they share the household chores. Jordan always said he would help, but when his turn came, he never seemed to have time, and Cleo always ended up doing his work too.
At one point in the argument, Jordan had glanced over at her, then back at the road. It was the briefest of seconds, but when he looked back up he let out a cry, as if something beyond the car had startled him. Cleo thought she saw a flash of white, then the cement wall was directly in front of them.
Minutes later, Jordan took his final breath.
With the last of her money, Cleo bought a supply of candles and tried the trance again.
Nothing happened.
For two weeks, nothing.
Not a damn thing.
During that time the phone rang until she jerked the cord from the wall. During that time she forgot to shower, and forgot to wash her hair, and forgot to eat.
Then one day someone pounded on her door. It was angry knocking. Furious knocking.
She didn’t answer.
The knocking stopped. Footsteps moved back down the stairs. A short time later she heard a key turning in the lock. The door opened, then caught, stopped by the safety chain. Through that three-inch opening, someone shouted her name.
“ Adrian?” She got to her feet.
“Cleo, unlock the door!”
“What are you doing here?” Seattle was a long way from Madison, Wisconsin.
“I’ve been trying to call you. Open up!”
It took her a while, but she finally got the chain unfastened.
Normally Adrian would have hugged her, especially since they hadn’t seen each other in almost a year. It seemed as if he started to, then stopped. She saw the shock go through him.
“Christ,” he mumbled.
Cleo put a hand to her matted and tangled hair. She looked down at a long-sleeved top that had once been white, but was now smudged with candle smoke. Her jeans hung on her hips, her bare, bony toes poking out under the frayed hem.
He came in and quietly closed the door, as if he thought the sound of the latch might set her off. Adrian wasn’t a big person, not much bigger than Cleo herself, but when he walked into that room there was something huge about him, something almost bigger than life.
She was so proud of him.
So glad he was her brother.
They had been through a war together, the battle of growing up, of finding themselves, of making sense of the senseless. They’d been through a massacre and survived.
Adrian grasped her gently by both arms. “I came to get you.” He spoke slowly.
She nodded, wondering what the hell he was talking about and where he was taking her.
“You’re going to come back to Seattle with me.”
“ Seattle?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t.” She couldn’t leave this room. It was the place where she’d made contact. It was part of the equation.
He looked around at the mess, the candle wax on the floor, at Cleo. “What have you been doing?’
She smiled a little, remembering. “Transcending time and space.” Adrian would understand. Adrian would be proud of her.
She didn’t know how it happened, but suddenly she was sitting at the kitchen counter with a bowl of soup in front of her. It was cream-colored, with flecks of something.
“Eat,” Adrian commanded.
She stared at it. And stared some more. What were those things?
While she stared into the bowl, she felt him lift her hand, felt him wrap her fingers around the cold metal of a spoon.
“Eat,” he repeated. “Or I’ll force-feed you.”
And he would.
She ate, trying to avoid the dark things. She did pretty well until she got about halfway done and the concentration of dark things began to overpower the liquid. She accidentally got a dark thing.
It had a strong taste.
A mushy texture.
Mushy…mushroom. She was eating mushroom soup.
The spoon clattered to the floor as she ran for the bathroom to throw up.
That was the beginning of Cleo’s eating problems.
Adrian helped her pack her stuff. Actually, Adrian did most of it. Cleo sat, staring at nothing.
She didn’t know why he was going to all this trouble. “I can’t leave,” Cleo told him.
“You can’t stay.”
He was her older brother. He knew about such things. She nodded, realizing he was right. At least for the moment.
While they packed, he discovered that she would drink milkshakes if they didn’t have any pieces of anything in them. So he plied her with shakes until she got diarrhea and had to stay in the bathroom for hours. Two days after his arrival, all of her belongings were packed and put in storage and they were on a flight to Seattle.
She woke the next morning to find herself face-to-face with a small child who stood staring at
her, a wet finger dangling from her pouty mouth.
“Are you Macy?” Cleo asked haltingly, her voice broken from sleep and the weakness that was so much a part of her now.
“That’s my bed.” Macy dragged the wet finger from her mouth and poked at the mattress with its Winnie-the-Pooh sheets. “My bed.” She patted the woven pink blanket flung carelessly over her pajama-clad shoulder. “My bankie.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t take your bankie.”
With the sober seriousness of the Pope, Macy dragged the blanket from her shoulder and tucked the bulk of its pink softness under Cleo’s cheek.
Cleo could only blink back tears and try to smile.
Adrian didn’t believe in waiting. That morning he got Cleo in to see his shrink.
“She’s good,” he told Cleo as he drove her to the office. “I no longer feel guilty about things I have no control over.”
“You mean you’re now able to forgive yourself for not living up to Mother’s agenda?”
“Nothing to forgive.”
“But are you able to forgive her for having that agenda?”
“I said my shrink was good. I didn’t say she worked miracles.”
Cleo told the shrink about how she could transport herself through time and space.
“Grief,” said Dr. Mary Porter, “can do strange things to a person’s head. Remember that, at the time, you were on painkillers, you were sleep-deprived, and you were most likely suffering from post-traumatic stress.”
They discussed many things, but often the conversation would swing back to dreams Cleo had had as a child. There was one dream in particular that, no matter how many years passed, remained solidly ingrained in her memory.
“I’m little, and I’m alone in the woods,” she told Dr. Porter. “But I’m not scared. I’m skipping and chanting jump-rope rhymes. Old lady, old lady, turn around. I’m wearing a red velvet dress with black patent-leather shoes. I can feel the breeze on my skin, I can smell the heavy vegetation. And suddenly I come upon three people, two men and a woman. They’re standing there in the middle of the woods. An intrusion on an otherwise happy moment. One of the men turns around and yells at me, and his face is pretty and ugly at the same time. And then I see he has a gun in his hand.”
As a child, Cleo would come out of the daydream with her body covered in sweat. It always seemed so real. So vivid.
“What do you think that was about?” Cleo asked Dr. Porter. Even though she hadn’t had the dream in years, she could still remember it the way someone else might remember a wedding or a graduation.
“No one really understands the intricacies of the human mind,” Dr. Porter told her. “Personally, I think dreams, daydreams included, are a way for us to subconsciously heal ourselves. A way for us to make things right. There may have been something going on in your childhood, something you may not even remember now, but whatever it was, your subconscious wanted to fix it, make it better. And since you quit having the dream, whatever it was that was bothering you must have gone away.”
It seemed like a good enough answer to Cleo.
With continued counseling, Dr. Porter helped Cleo get past her eating disorder and her grief, but Cleo could never convince Dr. Porter that one January she’d transported herself back in time. And Dr. Porter could never fully convince Cleo that she hadn’t.
Chapter Fourteen
It was officially his day off, so after dropping Cleo at the motel, Daniel swung by the gas station to pick up a six-pack of beer and cigarettes. He’d quit smoking three years ago, but his nerves were frazzled. He ordered the cigarettes from the clerk, then, at the last minute, took a detour down a nearby aisle, picked up a package of condoms, and tossed them on the counter along with the beer and cigarettes. He stared at the clerk, daring him to say something about his purchases.
Admirably poker-faced, the clerk rang up the items, bagged everything, and gave Daniel his change.
Daniel grabbed the stiff paper bag and left, figuring everybody in town would know that the town cop was not only drinking on duty, he was getting laid and enjoying a good smoke afterward as well.
Outside, he almost mowed down a woman with two little kids. He sidestepped, mumbled an apology, then looked directly at the woman.
Julia Bell.
That was the bad thing about a small town. Your past was always jumping up, smacking you in the face. “Julia?” he asked, even though he knew it was his old girlfriend. He’d kept reluctant tabs on her. Years ago, his mother had written to let him know Julia had gotten married. And written again when she was pregnant with her first child. After his mother’s funeral, he’d spotted Julia’s name in the guestbook and knew she’d been there, even though he hadn’t seen her.
She was heavier now, but not overweight. And she’d lost the sparkle, but she had something else, something that was maybe better-contentment. Daniel knew contentment was what Julia had wanted out of life.
Back then, sharing a can of cold spaghetti hadn’t cut it, hadn’t been the adventure for Julia that it had been for him.
“Hi, Daniel.” She smiled up at him in a calm, happy-to-see-an-old-classmate sort of way, while his heart thundered in his chest.
“Yours?” he asked, even though he knew they were. Two girls. He’d caught their names in the county paper a few times. School stuff.
“Sara’s five and Jessie’s six.”
“Are you still teaching school?”
“Second grade. I love it. I was sorry to hear about your mother,” she said. A look that was part pity, part understanding crossed her features. “And I know how badly you always wanted to get out of this town. I think it’s great what you’re doing for Beau.”
She would understand. And it was a weird feeling knowing she was possibly the only person on earth who would, because thinking back to when they’d been together was like remembering two completely different people.
One of the girls made a little squealing sound. He looked over to see the older one sticking out her tongue. The younger one swung a fist and Julia had to intervene. “Don’t hit your sister.”
“She’s making faces.”
“Are you making faces, Sara?”
Sara shook her head. As soon as Julia turned back to Jessie, Sara stuck out her tongue again.
“It was nice seeing you,” Julia said, distracted now with the battle taking place. “I’d better get going.”
“Yeah, nice seeing you.”
He stood there a moment, the cold beer chilling his arm and chest. I could have been part of a life like that, he thought. If only I hadn’t always been reaching for something that wasn’t there.
At home Daniel took a beer bottle from the six-pack, put the cardboard container in the refrigerator, grabbed a book of matches, and went outside for a smoke.
Premonition greeted him, happy to have the company, even if it was only Daniel. Daniel swung his leg over the lounge chair and sat down, adjusting his hips and legs until he was comfortable. He put the open beer beside him on the cement patio then pulled the cigarette pack from his shirt pocket. He opened the cigarettes and tapped one out. At first he just held it, enjoying the smooth feel of the paper and the smell of tobacco. He finally stuck the cigarette in his mouth, fished the matches from his pocket, and lit the cigarette, drawing the sweet smoke deep into his lungs.
There had been a spread of several years in his childhood when he’d wanted to become a priest. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t Catholic. He’d been taken with the majesty of high mass and the mysterious, old-world feel of the Catholic Church before it decided to go hip. But then, several years later, he found out priests couldn’t have sex, so that was the end of that.
He met Julia Bell upon returning from his year in Scotland. While he was gone, her parents had moved to Egypt from St. Louis, looking for a safe place to raise Julia and her two younger brothers. She had a smile that could knock a guy sideways.
He told her of his dreams to see the world. He talked to her about Scotland
and his family crest and how he wanted to go back there someday, maybe live there. He told her that he wanted to go as far north as Siberia, as far south as Tasmania. And even though she didn’t know a lot about the places he spoke of, she begged to hear his stories, begged to hear his dreams.
“Let’s go to Europe when school’s over,” he said a few months before they graduated from high school. “We can stay in hostels.”
Ever since getting back from Scotland, he’d been working his butt off, saving every penny he made so that he could return. Julia wasn’t as excited about it as he thought she’d be. That was something he should have taken as a warning.
“It’s so far away,” she said.
“Don’t you want to see new countries?”
“How about someplace closer? Someplace in the United States. California, maybe.”
That’s what they did. Not only did they go to California, they moved there.
She waited tables. He got a job working on a deep-sea fishing boat where rich people spent the day going for that trophy catch. And while he didn’t go along with the idea of pulling such beautiful creatures from the sparkling blue water so they could die in the blinding sun and later end up on someone’s wall, he loved the sense of freedom. At twenty years old, he could ignore the bad and embrace the good, and it was good feeling the salt spray against his skin. It was good having a rolling deck under his bare feet while sea birds cried and circled overhead, begging for the chopped-up fish they used as bait.
His body got hard, his skin turned a deep golden brown, and his hair was bleached white by the sun until he looked like someone born to water and sky.
When he and Julia weren’t working, they made love and talked about going to college. Julia would marvel at the hardness of his body and how he’d adapted so well. He looked pure California, while Julia, with her dark hair and light skin, continued to exude the wholesome Midwest.
