by Joe Hart
“What was that?” Ellen’s voice rang across the large room as she sat bolt upright and startled Lance again. His heart knocked against his breastbone as if it wanted to be let out, and his breath hitched in his chest but seemed to give him no oxygen. He blinked into the darkness of the room. His room. His own room. There was nothing moving ahead of him toward the large bay windows that filtered moonlight through their curtains. He listened over the sound of blood rushing in drumbeats but heard nothing else. No scraping footsteps hissed across the wood floor. Lance’s head dipped forward so that his chin nearly touched his chest, and he let out a stuttered breath of relief.
“Nothing. Just a dream,” he finally said.
“A nightmare, you mean.”
Lance stood fully from the bed and nearly fell over, disoriented from sleep.
“Just a dream,” he repeated, and strode to the dark doorway of the master bath, the air conditioning cooling the damp skin of his bare chest as he walked. After closing the door behind him, he flicked the second switch on the panel to his left and the “mood lighting,” as his architect had called it, glowed inside the Jacuzzi tub and above the long expanse of mirrors on the wall over the dual sinks. The bathroom became a fuzzy shade of yellow through his sleep-crusted eyes as he sank to the edge of the tub. Lance leaned forward and rested his elbows on his thighs as he rubbed his face with both hands, feeling the two-day growth of beard there.
Unbidden, the images from the dream assaulted him again, almost as real as they had been during sleep. He could hear the sliding of feet on the floor and feel the sweat-encased doorknob slipping in his frantic hand. The words in his father’s broken and blood-choked voice: Welcome home, son.
Lance lurched off the edge of the tub and gripped the side of the yawning toilet just in time to release his half-digested dinner onto the smooth white porcelain. His stomach rolled into a ball so tight he feared it would tear itself loose inside him. He breathed in only to be assaulted by another racking cramp as his guts tried to will themselves out into the dim light.
When the final tremors faded and the sense of relief that only the aftermath of vomiting can bring was upon him, Lance fell back against the nearby wall and flushed the steak and sweet potatoes out of sight. He breathed in and tasted the acid that coated his tongue and teeth, and was nearly sick again.
The sensation of the dream continued to hang over him, and he imagined that if he looked up he would see it there, a black-clouded tumor with tendrils that reached down and clutched at his skull. Instead, he stared at the gray-tiled floor and tried to breathe deeply, but the taste in his mouth reduced his calming inhalations to mere gulps of air. Dejected, with his father’s voice still whispering in his ear, his hand slid to his wet forehead, and as quietly as he could, he began to cry.
The sunlight blazing into the room through the thrown-open curtains was a physical thing that pushed against Lance’s face, nudging him from sleep. He blinked his eyes and stared up at the white spackled ceiling of his bedroom. He looked to his right and studied the height of the sun out the window. Nearly nine o’clock, he thought, guessing by the angle of the rays. He slid a hand out to his left and wasn’t surprised not to feel Ellen’s soft form beside him. At the same moment he heard a clatter of pans being dragged from beneath the kitchen counter downstairs and smelled the faint aroma of coffee.
Lance swung his feet to the floor, and for a moment he knew that something was wrong but couldn’t put his finger on it. It felt like walking out of the grocery store after forgetting your list at home, knowing you were leaving something key behind in the aisles. The dream from the night before came rushing back with all its splendor and queasiness slid through his stomach once again. He let the images run through his mind on a high-speed reel, not letting any stay for more than half a second. The film ended and he breathed out, trying to dispel the tension he felt gathering in his chest.
“Nope, not gonna spend another morning like this,” he said to the empty room, as he heard Ellen turn on the flat screen in the living room. Absentmindedly, he opened his mouth wide and moved his jaw to the left. A loud snap echoed in the room and his jaw loosened considerably. He reached up with one hand and rubbed the right side of his face as the pain that was a constant morning companion faded away.
Sloughing off the remnants of sleep and nightmare, Lance walked to his bathroom and flipped on the powerful showerhead in the large stall. The satisfyingly normal sound of the water hitting the tile comforted him, and by the time he stepped into the hot spray, he had begun to feel better.
After toweling off and dressing in a pair of light shorts and his favorite cut off T-shirt emblazoned with the words Hell waits for no man in archaic script, Lance opened the door to his bedroom and bounded down the carpeted stairs outside.
The house sprawled out around him in nearly every direction. It was as open as a floor plan could get. When it had been built, he had made sure there were no narrow halls or rooms that felt small or confining. Instead each and every space in the house was airy and light.
Lance stepped off the last stair and turned into the open kitchen outlined by two perpendicular stone counters. Ellen leaned against the far edge of the counter housing the sink and dishwasher, sipping a cup of coffee. He could see her blue eyes above the cup’s rim through the steam. Her blond hair was pulled up tight behind her head, and she wore the skirt and blouse she had arrived in yesterday afternoon. Here we go, he thought as he put on his best “good morning” smile and sat on the edge of the nearest stool. Ellen finished sipping her coffee and lowered the cup to reveal a mouth that was prettily pink, but unsmiling. She turned and set her coffee down near the sink to tend to a hot pan on the stove. Her movements were jerky as she scraped a well-done egg off the bottom of the nonstick pan and flopped it onto a nearby plate, next to a solitary piece of turkey bacon. She set the plate in front of Lance with a bang, and he feared for a moment the impact with the stone countertop had snapped the glass into pieces.
“Breakfast,” she said as she turned and began to cross the kitchen back to the refuge of her coffee cup.
“Ellen, what’s wrong?” Lance asked, his voice low.
Ellen responded by snorting air out of her nose as she picked up her cup. God, he hated it when she did that.
“What’s wrong? Lance, if you really have to ask that, we have more problems than I thought.” Lance raised one eyebrow but remained silent. Sometimes silence answered questions that hadn’t yet been asked. “I heard you in the bathroom last night, throwing up. You had that nightmare again, didn’t you?”
Lance exhaled and stared down at his plate. The one egg and slice of turkey bacon seemed so pathetic and small that he nearly broke out into laughter, but instead tried to follow the well-worn track he had taken all the times before. “I had a dream. It was a bad one, yes, but just a dream.” Ellen rolled her eyes and sipped angrily at her coffee, as if it were the one holding things back. “It’s nothing, can’t we just have a nice breakfast together and figure out something fun to do today like we’d planned?”
“Yeah, that’s typical Lance. Just shove things aside and do something else. That’s how you function. Have you ever actually been to a therapist?”
The words drove down into his stomach and sent runners of guttural anger radiating outward. He breathed in, trying to calm the rage that bloomed in the back of his mind. “Yes, Ellen. I’ve been to a therapist. I told you that before. I also—”
“You told me just what you wanted to tell me, and nothing more. You’ve never told me anything about your past. Do you not think I’m worthy? Is that it?”
“No, that’s not it. I told you before, it’s a pretty sensitive thing with me and I’m just really not ready to open up about it yet.”
Ellen stood with her arms crossed, running her tongue over her front teeth, something she did when she was irritated. Lance had once watched her do it for an hour when their flight to Colorado had been delayed unexpectedly. He had wondered then if she wou
ld rub her teeth right out of existence.
“Andrew knows though, huh.”
“Yes, Andy knows. He’s also my oldest friend. Please don’t take offense to this. Can’t you just leave it alone until I’m ready to talk about it?”
“We’ve been together for over six months. We’ve been sleeping together for five. How long do you need to wait?”
“Why do you care so much?” Lance said, raising his voice several decibels. Ellen’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t regret letting her know how he felt. He was through being badgered.
“I care about you,” she said, the tone of her voice saying anything but. “How am I supposed to understand when you won’t tell me anything?”
“You care about being in control, nothing more, nothing less. If you can’t have it, you rage against it,” Lance said, finally losing the battle in caging off the anger. Ellen’s eyes widened in surprise, and Lance knew then that he’d gone too far. Not by saying anything wrong, but by putting his finger directly on the truth.
She turned and dumped the remainder of her coffee into the sink and walked past him to the entry. Lance sat for a few seconds, not looking at her, not wanting to. Finally, he felt reason wade its way into the chest-deep fury of his thoughts and try to calm him.
“Ellen, wait.” He rose and walked over to where she stood, her hand already on the doorknob, the too-high heels strapped dangerously to her feet. “I’m sorry. I just can’t go through it all with you now; it’s not the right time. There’s so much. I can’t …” His words trailed off, and he hoped she would take the cue in this play they had rehearsed so many times before. Ellen turned her head just enough for him to see both of her eyes, her eyebrows drawn down in anger, with a hint of sadness.
“You’ll never let me in. I know that now. I won’t wait around for someone who can’t face his fears.”
“I’ve faced my fears!” Lance yelled. “I’ve seen things that would break you!” Ellen grimaced and closed her eyes as she turned away from him. For some reason he very much wanted to see her face, maybe to know if she’d opened her eyes or not. She kept her back to him when she spoke again.
“You faced your past, you just can’t bear to look at the future.” Without favoring him with another glance, Ellen turned the knob as if it were an emergency exit on an airplane and stormed out of the house, into the brightness of the summer day.
The slam of the door was like a bold exclamation point at the end of an angry sentence. Lance stood with his hand pressed against the cool wall and waited for the boiling anger in his center to subside. It didn’t.
With a yell, he spun, grabbing the closest object at hand—a vase he had received as a gift from Andy when his second novel won a Bram Stoker award—and flung it as far and as hard as he could. The heavy blue vase glittered in the sunlight as it flew and shattered into a thousand sparkling pieces on the far wall. The tinkling patter of the shards hitting the floor snapped the trance of his anger. The rage that had been so sharp and crystalline seconds ago now seemed foolish and alien, as if he had been playing surrogate to someone else’s emotions.
Sighing deeply, Lance went about vacuuming up the glass on the floor, and then remembered the broken lamp from the night before. I’ll have to redecorate entirely if I don’t get a handle on this, he thought idly, and a halfhearted smile surfaced on his face. When he went to clean up the lamp, he found that Ellen had already swept it up and disposed of it, seemingly while he slept deeply that morning. The sight of the clean floor made his heart sink a little as he returned the vacuum to its place in the closet downstairs.
Lance shoveled the lonely egg along with the turkey bacon into the garbage, and set about making a protein shake in the blender. He had consumed half the shake when his iPhone buzzed briefly. When Lance picked it up, the text message that graced the screen didn’t make sense for a moment. You ready? Andy was nearly always short and to the point in his messages, but even this was succinct for him. Then the date came to Lance’s mind: a picture of the number 24 on his desk calendar and the words Meeting w/Ellington & Field scrawled in blue ink just below it.
“Shit,” he said to the empty room. His voice sounded flat, his emotions only fumes of before. How had the meeting slipped his mind? The morning just kept getting better. Another sigh escaped his parted lips as he mounted the stairs yet again and heard the sliding of tires on the concrete drive outside his house, which coincided with two short beeps of a horn. Andy’s here, Lance thought as he ignored another impatient burst of sound from his best friend’s car and tried to decide what shirt went best with disappointment.
“You said you wanted me to pick you up, and then you make me wait out here for fifteen minutes?” The door to the Audi had barely opened an inch when Andy’s voice started to pepper him with accusations. “I suppose you forgot all about the meeting, didn’t you? Typical fucking writer. Typical.”
“It wasn’t fifteen minutes, you asshole. I got your message at ten and now it’s ten twelve—you do the math.” Lance slid into the black leather interior of the car and looked over at the man who sat in the driver’s seat. Andy could have passed for a young Aidan Quinn if the actor’s hair had been a lighter shade of brown and he swore almost constantly. Andy’s eyes were the only feature that ruined the likeness; color was nearly nonexistent. It seemed as if a blue-green had tried to bend the irises to its will but had lost and settled for a watered-down gray. Andy’s slight build looked out of place in the Armani suit tucked into the plush interior of the car. A joke about being a malnourished limo driver surfaced in Lance’s mind before being shoved away. He was pretty sure Andy wouldn’t appreciate it.
“Yeah, excuses. Always excuses. Sometimes I wonder if the world would be a better place if everyone was an Aspie,” Andy said, monotone, as he deftly flipped the car into drive and tore out of Lance’s turnaround as fast as he could go. The tires spun and caught as the landscape fled outside Lance’s window while he struggled to buckle his seat belt.
“Christ, can you slow down? I’m gonna get air sick over here,” Lance said as he finally snapped the buckle home.
“No time, my friend, no time. We’re late and your publishers are going to be very angry when we get there. What’s the expression you like to use? ‘Crawl up your ass’?”
“Jump down your throat, seriously. I’m surprised you haven’t picked that one up yet.”
“Yeah, well, I have more important things to do than learning expressions that don’t really make sense. Like figure out why my star author isn’t done with his rough draft that should’ve been turned in to his editor a month ago.”
Lance turned his head away from his friend and watched the small neighborhood that he resided in mesh with an on-ramp and then transform into a bustling divided two-lane. He opened his mouth and a loud snap filled the car as his jaw clicked into place.
“I hate it when you do that,” Andy said.
“I know.”
“So, are you going to tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“Tell me why your draft isn’t done.”
Lance sighed and gazed ahead at the asphalt rapidly disappearing under the nose of the Audi. There wasn’t an easy way to explain. He was about to try to describe what had transpired in his mind and in the study of his home over the past six weeks when Andy spoke again.
“You got writer’s block, didn’t you? About the same time the dream started, I’m guessing.” Andy looked over at him, his watery gray eyes looking through Lance the way no other person’s could. Lance’s mouth opened and then closed as Andy went back to watching the highway. “I figured as much. Tell me about it.”
Lance began to retrace the events that had unfolded in the past month, beginning with Ellen slamming the door in his face and ending with the first night he had woke from the nightmare, sweaty, a scream echoing off the walls of his dark bedroom. He started to speak, the sound of the tires singing on the road beginning to resemble scraping footsteps. “I told you I had the dream t
he first time about six weeks ago.”
“Nightmare, go on.”
“Yes, okay, nightmare. I had it in the middle of the night, just like I’ve had it ever since. I wasn’t able to sleep the rest of that night. Ellen was staying over, so I just went downstairs and thought I’d write a little until I was tired enough to go back to bed.” Lance paused, as if saying the words out loud would make them true. A childish belief system, but nonetheless, he hesitated. “I couldn’t think of anything. I’ve never had that happen before. Never. It doesn’t matter if I’m sitting down without a single idea in my head and staring at a blank page, I’ve never not been able to write.”
“How’d that make you feel?”
Lance looked over at Andy as if he’d just made reference to an intention of desecrating his neighbors’ plaster impression of Jesus in their front yard. “It felt horrible. I felt lost. Everything I’d written to that point didn’t seem to fit together. And the ending …” Lance rubbed his jaw and shook his head in exasperation. “It didn’t work anymore. I felt like I’d spent the last six months writing complete shit.”
Lance fell silent and the dull hum of the car pervaded the air between them. Andy chewed the inside of his cheek, just as he had been doing the first moment Lance saw him standing alone in the lunch line at St. Cathleen’s orphanage twenty years before.
“Do you think it’s a coincidence that you got writer’s block the same night that you had a horrific nightmare about your father?”
“No, believe it or not, I made the connection. I just don’t see why a dream would stave off my creativity. I’ve lived worse than that. I’ve always been able to write …” Lance’s words trailed off into silence.
