What the hell was that about? she wondered, but again the vision of Tanya flooded her thoughts.
“Ronnie?”
She looked up and saw Tanya waiting for her outside the door and she exhaled with relief. But then she noticed that Tanya’s eyes were red and her mascara was smeared. She slipped into the room and over to Ronnie. Before Ronnie could say anything, her friend wrapped her arms around her and started to sob.
“Oh, Ronnie,” she wailed, sniffling loudly, “I’m so sorry.”
Ronnie froze. She felt her insides turn to ice, the blood leaking from her face. Her heart seized up.
“What— For what? Tanya, what’s going on?”
Tanya’s sobs grew. She was now hanging on Ronnie, her whole body shaking. People were watching, helplessness in their eyes. Ronnie now noticed that a lot of the other kids were also crying.
“Tanya, you’re scaring me! What’s going on?”
But something inside of her already knew. It was screaming at her, threatening to expand until it was too big for her to contain. She willed it away, but it wouldn’t go. “Tanya, please!”
“P-P-Paul,” Tanya sobbed.
“What? What about him? Tanya, what—please!”
A teacher grabbed Ronnie’s arm and started to pull her away. Ronnie resisted.
“Everyone, please,” the teacher said, urging students away, “go to your classes.”
Tanya wouldn’t let go of Ronnie.
Ronnie looked up at the teacher. She recognized her, but for some reason her brain wasn’t working this morning and she couldn’t recall her name.
“Come with me,” she said to the girls.
Ronnie let herself be led down the hall, Tanya still clinging to her, still crying uncontrollably. They went into the nurse’s office, where the nurse took the two girls and sat them on adjacent chairs.
“Where’s Paul?” Ronnie asked. “I need to see him.”
“Veroni—”
“Where’s Paul!” she screamed. “I need to see him! Please, I need to see—”
“He’s gone, Veronica.”
Tanya wailed, collapsing against the teacher before slipping to the floor.
Ronnie felt numb, numb and cold. “No.”
“There was a fire—”
“No! No, it’s not true! Stop it! STOP IT!”
She was crying now, too, crying and shaking and there was nothing she could do to hold herself together anymore. She sunk to the floor, joining Tanya. “No!” she screamed. “Nooooo!”
They had to sedate her. She barely remembered her father coming to get her, carrying her close to him and her face pressed against his pressed white shirt, her father smelling of aftershave and laundry detergent. Her tears and snot getting all over him and neither of them caring about it at all. He was crying, too, and that’s what scared her even more. She had never seen him cry before. But she couldn’t stop. It was like something inside of her had broken and couldn’t be fixed. She would never stop crying.
She barely remembered the drive home, lying on the back seat of the car, the sound of her father’s voice as he explained about the fire at Paul’s house last night and how quickly and how hot it had burned, consuming everything and how it was only hours after it had been extinguished and was cool enough for the firefighters to go in, when they found the bodies, three of them, and her pain being so deep and so big that it consumed her, and the bumps and jiggles of the car as her father turned left and right and left until she lost count of the turns and felt only the swaying until the final bump and the rise as they stopped on their inclined driveway.
She barely remembered him carrying her up the stairs, laying her on her bed, covering her.
She barely remembered the afternoon sun spreading the shadows across her walls until they too disappeared, swallowed by the shadow of endless night.
She barely remembered the cycle of darkness and light and darkness that followed. In her mind, it was all darkness.
On the morning of the third day, she woke to see her mother sitting beneath the window, looking out.
“Mom?”
Her mother turned, rose, came over to her.
“What are you doing here?”
“A look of hurt flashed across her face, and Ronnie noticed for the first time how much older she looked. She’d never noticed it before. “I’ve been here the whole time, honey,” her mom said. “We all have.”
Ronnie rolled over and saw that her father and step-mother were there, too.
“We’re worried about you,” her father said. “You’re not eating. You’re not going to school. A little grief is normal, but—”
“A little grief?” Ronnie shouted. “Little? Do you even hear yourself, Dad? Paul’s gone! He was…” She stopped and looked from one to the other. All she saw was the same thing: sadness and pity, but no understanding. They could never understand. The world could never understand because the world had forgotten how to. The fabric had finally unraveled; Paul had been the thread holding it together, and now he was gone. “He was everything to me.”
“You’re going to have to get up sometime,” her mother said, holding a hand up to stop her father from speaking. “Honey, none of us can know the pain you’re suffering right now, but it doesn’t mean we don’t hurt, too. We didn’t know Paul like you did, but we do know you, and none of us wants to see you hurt like this.”
“I can’t help it,” she cried.
“We know. We’re on your side. We’re trying to help.”
“Then leave me alone.”
“You need to get up and eat. You need…” Her mother exhaled. “Honey, as much as it pains me to say this, and as much as it will be for you to hear it, you need to move on.”
Ronnie felt her mother’s hand on her side. She didn’t want it there. She didn’t want to do any of those things: get up, eat. She didn’t want to move on. Life before Paul had been so…empty. Life with him had been so full. And now there was nothing to look forward to anymore except more emptiness.
“Come on downstairs and we’ll fix you up something to eat,” her stepmother said.
Ronnie looked at her mom, who nodded. It was strange to see them all like this, in the same room, agreeing on the same thing.
She nodded, once, and closed her eyes. “Give me a few minutes.”
She heard the three adults leave, gently shutting the door behind her and leaving her alone once more.
She knew they were right. She hadn’t eaten much of anything in three days—some dry toast, some milk, a few slices of apple—but she wasn’t hungry. Her stomach was empty and she didn’t want to fill it. It was like that for her soul: empty. Her parents wanted her to get up and live, to fill it up once more. But she knew that no matter what she did, no matter how much she tried to fill it, she would never feel full again.
With a sigh, she lifted herself off the bed and straightened her hair, which she hadn’t brushed in three days. She stopped in the bathroom to brush her teeth, then went down to begin her new empty life.
† † †
She didn’t go to the funeral. She just couldn’t make herself go. Tanya told her all about—well, not all, but enough to know the details. “We missed you, Ronnie.”
The whole town was in mourning, both for Paul and his family, as well as for her. It helped a little. But it didn’t even begin to fill the hole inside of her.
And as the days began to pass and the town healed, Ronnie acted as if she was moving on, but inside she felt just as hollow as she had the morning she’d found out. She didn’t think she would ever be right again.
The nightmares returned nearly three weeks to the day after the fire. She’d expected them, had wondered when they might begin to trouble her.
At first she’d wake with her heart in her throat, feeling out of breath, peering out into the darkened room and straining her ears for a sound she expected to hear but didn’t know what it would be. The shadows of the tree outside her window did their silent dance across her wall. Sh
e refused to get up and turn on her light. She wasn’t a baby anymore. She wasn’t going to let the nightmares scare her.
The next night she dreamed of fire. It was all around her, burning, and when she woke, she was sure she smelled smoke. But, of course, there was no fire, just the wavering shadows once more on her walls.
The third night was when Paul came to her.
She woke, just as she had the previous two nights, breathless, feeling like she was seconds away from a panic attack. The shadows caressed the far wall at the foot of her bed and she watched them before turning her head. The smell of smoke in her dreams had been strong, and it had only grown stronger since she’d woken.
He was outside her window, standing as if on solid ground though there was nothing for a person to stand on out there. He was as solid as the trees, yet he cast no shadow.
“Paul?”
He opened his mouth as if to speak, but nothing came out. There was only the sound of the wind in the trees.
“Paul?”
She was terrified, terrified that she might be going crazy, terrified that he had come back. Terrified that he wasn’t really dead and that she had betrayed him.
His mouth made the shapes of words, but she couldn’t hear them. She didn’t know what he was trying to say.
She turned away, burying her face in the pillow and counting to ten, then twenty, before pulling it away and looking up again. The window was empty and the smell of smoke had dissipated.
She didn’t say anything to anyone about the vision, not even to Tanya. She wasn’t even sure what she’d seen hadn’t just been her imagination. It was the only reasonable explanation.
The next night, while her father and stepmother sat downstairs watching television, she sneaked into their room and found her stepmother’s sleeping pills. She took one, hoping it wouldn’t be noticed, then went to bed.
There were no nightmares that night. Nor were there any in the chemically-assisted sleeps that followed, at least none that she could remember. But she knew she couldn’t go on like this. Sooner or later her stepmother was bound to notice her sleeping pills disappearing.
At school, she fell back into a routine. It was easy: get up, get ready, get on the bus, attend class, come home, sit in the dark.
She lost weight, a half a pound here, another half pound there. Barely noticeable. Except it was.
One day she overheard her mother talking to her father at the front door.
“Well, what do you want me to do about it, Shar?” she heard him say. “I can’t even talk to her anymore without her biting my head off. She’s moody, angry.”
“You have to try harder.”
“Harder?” He laughed that old bitter laugh that Ronnie had heard a lot of during the divorce. “If I tried any harder I’d be forcing food down her throat in a tube.”
Her mother said something, but it was too low for her to hear.
“She’s been stealing Mag’s sleeping pills. I haven’t wanted to say anything, because at least she’s sleeping. For a little while there, she was screaming in the middle of the night and calling out his name. It scared the hell out of me.”
“She’s dying right in front of us.”
“Oh, don’t be so melodramatic.”
“She’s your daughter! How can you be so blind?”
“I’m not blind, Shar, I’m helpless. Ronnie’s in a shell. I can’t reach her. I—I don’t know how.”
Ronnie stopped listening after that. Fifteen minutes later, there was a knock at her door. She heard it open and the sound of someone coming in.
“Honey?” It was her mother. “What would you think about coming to live with me for a while?”
She thought about the sleeping pills and how she wouldn’t have them anymore. But the truth of the matter was, the nightmares had returned anyway, scarier and more real.
Her mother lived on the other side of town, in a small, two-bedroom condo. The second bedroom was her mother’s office, but it had a futon and it was where Ronnie slept when she was visiting.
“But all my stuff is here,” she said.
“It’s only temporary.”
In the end, there was no arguing. Ronnie knew it as soon as her mother had come in and proposed the idea that she’d already decided it was going to happen. She knew because of the tone in her mother’s voice and the look on her face. She’d made up her mind and there was nothing Ronnie could say or do that was going to change it. And Ronnie just didn’t have the strength to fight her about it.
“I think a change of scenery might help you get through this,” her mother said.
Well, maybe she was right. Maybe she’d stop having the nightmares.
And maybe Paul’s nightly visitations would stop.
It hurt her to admit this. It felt like a betrayal, for as much as she wanted to see him, as much as she longed for and missed him, the truth of the matter was, he terrified her.
She’d woken one morning with the distinct memory of Paul standing beside her in the night, his pale skin glistening with night dew and glowing a sickly shade of gray. His mouth opened and closed as he tried to speak, but all she could remember hearing was the sound of air passing through his dead lips. And the smell of smoke.
She’d jerk upright and looked about, but there was no sign of him anywhere, and only the faint musk of wet dirt and ash lingered in the room.
“Just a dream,” she tried to convince herself, but the dream repeated the next night and the next until, desperate to escape it, she’d doubled up on the dose of pills, but the nightmares still came, growing in intensity and this time she couldn’t wake, she couldn’t escape from Paul. This time his cold fingers caressed her cheek, drawing back her hair from her face as she lay immobile, unable to move, paralyzed so that even her heart felt as if it had stopped.
His fingers combed through her hair and cupped the back of her head, ice cold fingers and a palm as clammy as that of a fish. He lifted her, drawing her ever closer to his own ghastly face.
She’d wanted to scream, but there was no breath inside her. She’d wanted to ask him why he was doing this to her, haunting her like this. Why? Why when he had promised never to hurt her.
But she knew the answer. He had also promised never to leave her and, fool that she was—no, not a fool, but rather recklessly in love—she had reciprocated the promise. “I’ll hold you to it,” he’d said. And now she knew that all his vain attempts to communicate with her were to remind her of that promise. He wanted her to keep it.
But how could she?
The pills trapped her in that nightmare, and yet she continued to take them, drawn to Paul even as she began to resent him. Her longing for the boy she loved overrode all sense and fear and resentment. The conflicting emotions were tearing her apart. It scared her that she hadn’t been able to wake from her drug-induced nightmares. But scarier still, she realized she almost didn’t want to.
So it was actually a relief to acquiesce to her mother’s wish. She was glad to have the choice taken from her. No more pills. No more being trapped in sleep. And maybe, just maybe, Paul would not be able to find her.
It hating thinking this, knowing what a hypocrite she was, rescinding the promise she had made. But Paul had also made a promise never to hurt her. They could both keep them.
She let her mother pack a duffle, directing her from the bed where she felt almost too weak to move. She pointed to her laptop, to her school books, a few other things. Two bags: all her life meant anymore, and half of that dispensable.
They talked on the ride over. Or, at least, made the effort to talk. The topics were mundane, neutral. Ronnie replied to her mother’s questions but couldn’t recall what those questions were a moment later. She was drifting. As the scenery passed them by, so flowed her thoughts unremarked, unremembered.
She didn’t take a sleeping pill that night. There was no dream.
In the morning, she rose feeling almost reborn. For the first time in weeks, she was hungry, and she wolfed do
wn the pancakes and eggs her mother cooked.
“Let’s go shopping,” her mother said. “Just you and me. We’ll go downtown and wander the shops and just buy whatever we want. What do you think?”
“But what about school?”
Her mother laughed. “It’s Saturday, silly.”
And Ronnie frowned. She’d lost track of the days.
Her mother gathered up the dishes and washed them while Ronnie sat, content to simply watch and listen to her mother jabber away. The sunlight streaming through the kitchen window was bright and warm on her and it made her feel drowsy and comfortable. When the kitchen was clean, her mother prodded her and told her to get ready. She rose and went up to do just that.
It was a good thing she had a hold of the back of the chair, because her knees gave out and she slipped to the floor.
Her mother rushed over and helped her back into the chair. “Maybe tomorrow,” she said, a look of concern on her face. “You’re still weak from not eating.”
“I’m fine, Mom.”
“Tomorrow. Today you rest. I’ll be right here.”
She spent much of the day on the couch watching television while her mother cleaned the house, full of nervous energy. She checked in on her every fifteen minutes or so and asked if she needed anything. Each time Ronnie would smile weakly and shake her head and say no, and her mother would give her a sad look, even as she plastered a wide smile on her face, and then she would nod once before disappearing into another room for another quarter of an hour.
Ronnie was touched by her mother’s concern, but she was beginning to feel all right. Really. A few more days of rest and eating and her body and spirit would finally be replenished enough that she could actually face the world. She really did feel like she was done grieving. She even began to realize her visits from Paul had been nothing but her distraught mind trying to cope with the pain and the guilt.
But when she saw him that night, she knew that she had just been kidding herself. He was as real as she was. And he had come for her.
She had stayed up late with her mother watching a movie. Her mother had tried to get her to go to sleep at eight, but Ronnie insisted she wasn’t tired and wanted to stay up.
Insomnia: Paranormal Tales, Science Fiction, & Horror Page 25
