Some Faraway Place

by Lauren Shippen

  A man, about ten years older than me, maybe, walked through, mouth already open like he was about to say something, before Dr. Bright jumped in with a—

  “Mark!” She sounded genuinely surprised and the quick change in tone gave me the weirdest whiplash. She sounded … human. Not the perfect therapist that she’d been in the few hours I’d spent with her over the past month. “What are you doing here?”

  “I was in the neighborhood, thought I’d stop by,” the man—Mark, I guess—said, looking between Dr. Bright and me. “Sorry, I didn’t realize you had a patient.”

  “We just finished up, actually,” Dr. Bright told him before turning to me. “I’ll see you in two weeks?”

  She said it like a question, back to the polite, neutral doctor, but her eyes were apologizing for the intrusion, the tightness around her mouth telling me that she didn’t like surprises. I could relate.

  “Sure thing.” I nodded and I could feel a small smile lift the corners of my mouth, somewhat pleased at the fact that, maybe, my therapist’s life was sometimes as chaotic as my own. “Thanks, Dr. Bright.”

  “Bye, Rose,” she said as I stepped through the doorway into the reception area. I gave another nod and smile as she closed the door behind me, a beat of silence before I could hear low voices as she and the man talked.

  I wonder who he was—a boyfriend? Husband? I didn’t notice a ring on Dr. Bright’s finger as I watched her hands sit in her lap throughout my session, but that’s not necessarily an indication. But thinking back on it … I only saw him for all of a minute, but Mark had the same high cheekbones and warm brown eyes as Dr. Bright … a brother maybe? I wonder if he knows about Atypicals, if Dr. Bright shares that part of her life, the fact that she works with people who can do remarkable things. I wonder if her whole family knows, if they talk about it. If they talk about everything.

  I really expected to talk to my family about this stuff. To come back from the AM and get to partake in all the conversations I assume they have about the wonders of being Atypical. Maybe they’ve never had those conversations, maybe I’m not missing out on anything at all, but it feels like I probably would be getting inducted into some kind of family Atypical club if it weren’t for the bomb the AM dropped on my dad and, therefore, the rest of us.

  If I’m not going to talk about being Atypical with them, if it’s not going to be something I tell the girl I’m dating, if I can’t actually belong anywhere, I may as well belong to dreams.

  NOVEMBER 10TH, 2016

  I hate this I hate this I hate this I HATE THIS.

  I feel like I’m thirteen again, storming up the stairs after having a fight with my mom, except this time I’m basically a fully grown adult, lingering “-teen” attached to my age completely irrelevant when I have a job and a girlfriend (maybe?) and the problems of someone much, much older than me.

  “Nice of you to come home in time for dinner,” my mom said as I walked into the kitchen, not even turning around from her position at the counter. She was putting dishes in the sink, and I could see the remnants of a meal packed away in open Tupperware. Message received. Loud and clear.

  “Things ran late at the restaurant,” I said. Why didn’t I just say sorry? Do the usual routine: apologize, sneak whatever food I could, and run upstairs to watch Netflix?

  Snap. She put a lid on one of the leftovers containers.

  “Have they let you get back on the line yet?”

  Snap. Another lid.

  “Not yet,” I said. “Chef is worried about me falling asleep while manning the deep fryer.”

  “A valid concern,” she grumbled under her breath.

  Snap.

  She stacked the three containers on top of one another and turned to put them in the fridge, her leg going up at the same time to close the dishwasher. The silent language of my mother—always moving, efficient and exacting, ice positively radiating off of her shoulder.

  “I’ve been doing better,” I said. Tiptoeing across the ice. Crouching down so that I can more evenly distribute my weight. Sliding over to her across the chilly expanse, all the while hoping that the ice beneath me wouldn’t crack and send me plummeting into the freezing depths.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” she said, closing the fridge and turning to me. “Did you eat?”

  “Yeah, I’m good,” I lied. Chef doesn’t like us eating on shift and I missed family meal so … yep, still hungry. I’m hoping in fifteen minutes or so my mom will be locked away in her own room and I can sneak back down into the kitchen for a midnight snack.

  God, tonight is really just full of kid clichés, huh? Guess I’m not as much of a grown-up as I’d like to think.

  “I know your dad and brother would be glad to hear it too,” she said after a moment where the two of us just stood on opposite sides of the kitchen, in an awkward standoff.

  “What?”

  “That you’re doing well,” she continued. “They worry. We all do. Especially since you’re hardly around these days to tell us you’re okay.”

  “I’m not the one you should be worried about,” I mumbled. It struck me as pretty rich that my mom was just now taking issue with me not being around all the time, now that I’m Atypical, now that my dad is sick. Instead of pushing that feeling down, putting it into kneading some dough later, I just let it bubble up.

  “And who exactly do you think we should be worried about?” she asked.

  “I’m not the one who’s sick,” I pointed out, instantly regretting addressing the nine-hundred-pound gorilla that had been sitting in the corner of every family conversation for the past six weeks.

  “Worrying is not an exclusive thing, Rose,” she said as I reached to get a water glass, keeping my hands busy so I didn’t have to talk directly to her face. “I’ve been a mother for twenty years and a psychic for far longer than that—worrying is my expertise.”

  “Bully for you,” I muttered.

  Snap.

  I let the cabinet door swing closed, moving to the fridge to fill the glass I’d pulled down.

  Ice. Ice spreading across the room, cracking beneath my feet.

  “Must not be hereditary,” she went on, “seeing as you don’t seem to be concerned about anything at all. I’m glad nothing fazes you, honey, but a little care for your family, especially given the past few months, would not go amiss.”

  I wanted to say, “If you’re the professional worrier, why should I bother?” but I knew the ice would crack completely if I pushed back.

  “Things faze me,” I said instead, taking a sip of water.

  “I just want to know what’s going on in that head of yours,” she said, her voice calm and completely unnerving.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve barely been at home since you got back from the AM, you’re sleeping all the time—”

  “I have supernatural narcolepsy!” My voice rose so much faster than I had wanted, my mom’s few words like a knife straight between my ribs, stabbing a response out of me. I know. I know I haven’t been around, but I’d just been hoping that no one was noticing, as usual.

  “I understand that you’re still learning how to control it,” she said, “but we could help with that! You’ve barely told us anything about your ability, about your time at the AM and we want to help. We’re worried about you!”

  There it was. Wasn’t that what I had wanted? To talk to them, be a part of the Atypical Family Atkinson? But “we’re worried about you”—is there a single more condescending phrase in the English language than that one?

  “I’m fine!” I said. “I’m in therapy and I’m doing my AM-mandated meditations, being the good Atypical, and I’m going to work and I’m dating a girl—who I really think you would actually like by the way,” I added when I saw my mom ready to jump in with some probably snarky comment. Okay, so I haven’t dated the nicest girls in the past, but I also haven’t brought any home since junior year of high school because of the disastrous dinner where Phoebe, a girl in my cl
ass, had interrupted everyone throughout dinner and then absconded with my mom’s favorite teakettle—a weird ritual that Phoebe had, it turns out, done to everyone she dated.

  I got the kettle back but … still.

  “I’m sure I will,” my mom said, offering me an olive branch.

  I didn’t want to take it. I wanted to shout more at her, ask why she was demanding things of me when I’m hurting too. I wanted to ask why she didn’t know about Dad before, if she did know and just didn’t do anything. I wanted to demand that she tell me exactly what to do because I have no idea.

  But I didn’t say any of that. I just nodded, agreeing to the truce that she’d presented to me.

  And then I turned and hightailed it out of the kitchen and up here as fast as I could, like the coward that I am.

  LATER

  I recognized the smell before I recognized the place. I guess I really never recognized the place, not really, just the feeling of the place. A school is a school. They all have the same essence of chalk, linoleum, fluorescents, anxious minds, and nervous, hopeful hearts. It didn’t matter that I had never been in this particular school. The hallway, echoey and poorly lit, felt exactly like the hallway I’d walked for four years of my life.

  I walked like a ghost, like I was hypnotized, down the hall to an open doorway, a light rectangular cutout in the otherwise blank and unremarkable walls. I could hear voices—a singular voice—distant and watery.

  When I turned into the room, I saw a classroom. Or, a semblance of one. Dreams aren’t exacting or particularly detail-oriented, I’ve found. I couldn’t tell you a single thing about the other faces in the room—or even if they had faces and weren’t just blank dream mannequins. But there was only one figure I cared about, the person my eye was immediately drawn to, the moment I entered the classroom.

  It was my mom. A younger version of her—my age, maybe, or no, must have been even younger than that, a stiff school uniform hanging off her body. She had her head buried in her notebook on her desk, her dark bangs falling into her eyes, when the teacher called on her.

  “What?” There was pure terror on her face, her eyes wide, skin white as a sheet, sweat immediately forming on her brow, making her hair stick to her forehead.

  “Weren’t you paying attention?” The teacher’s voice was, quite literally, like nails on a chalkboard.

  “Oh, I-I—” my mom stuttered, her hands starting to shake, her damp palms crinkling the pages of her notebook.

  Then suddenly I was behind her. I hadn’t moved, not consciously, but that happens sometimes—a dreamworld is so strong it makes the decisions for me. I could see over her shoulder now, see what she had written in her notebook and found … it was the same thing that was written on the board. A mathematic formula that I’m not sure was even real, but that Dream Mom had solved already. If she knew the answer, why was she panicking?

  “Still too slow to keep up, I see.” The teacher sneered and I wanted to punch him in his stupid face.

  “No, I-I—” she stuttered again. I’ve never heard my mom stutter. Is this something that happened a lot when she was younger? Was this a typical high school stress dream (and god, great to know those never go away) or was it based in a real memory?

  The kids in her class laughed and laughed and soon the teacher was laughing too and I could feel the red hot humiliation, the suffocating shame, radiating off of my mom. It tasted like pennies and dirt and anger rose up in me.

  “Rose?” My mom had turned around in her chair, looking up at me with big, scared, teenager eyes. Did she know that I was here? Or was this just her subconscious speaking to me through the dream?

  “Rose, you have to help me,” she pleaded. “You have to make them go away.”

  I did try. But I couldn’t move, was stuck to the floor behind my mom’s desk, couldn’t wave away all the people. I tried finding the seams along the corner of the dream with my mind, pull down the classroom so I could build something else, but it was welded shut.

  “Rose,” she insisted, “do something.”

  “I’m trying—”

  “Try harder—”

  “Am I never going to be good enough?” I snapped suddenly.

  “Do something!” she shouted.

  “Why didn’t you!” I screamed back and all the other people vanished in an instant, blown away by the power of my shout. My mom’s face flickered, the dream version of her morphing in front of me, changing in size and age as my frustration just kept pouring out of me.

  “Why didn’t you see anything about him?” I said. “Why couldn’t you help him!”

  “You know that’s not how it works,” she mumbled, looking smaller and smaller in the chair. “I don’t get to choose what I see, when I see it—”

  “Then what’s the point?!” I shouted. “If you can’t see the future in time to change it, then what’s the point!”

  “There is no point,” she cried. “We have these abilities just because we do. It doesn’t make us better or more equipped for the hard things in life—”

  “Maybe when you don’t try,” I said. “But there are Atypicals who use their powers to get things done. Who use them to make their lives better—”

  “Well, good for them.” She finally stood from her seat, growing taller and older in front of my eyes. “But that’s not the hand that I was dealt. Your father gets to have the fun ability, gets to use it for work, to make you and Aaron laugh when you were babies, to pour us another glass of wine when we’re already all comfortable on the couch.” Her voice cracked, and I could see the sob rising up physically through her body. “But my visions don’t work like that. It has always been a curse. To know what’s going to happen before it happens, but randomly, without reason or purpose, to be haunted by every stray thought or errant anxiety because you wonder if that was a vision, if you’re somehow manifesting these things, making the future fold out in front of you in horrible inevitability—”

  She stopped. At first I didn’t know why but then I realized—I stopped her. Her mouth snapped shut because I didn’t want to know this. Didn’t want to know that my mom’s magical ability was like this. I didn’t want to look down the barrel of my own future, be forced to think about a version of my life where my dreamdiving isn’t just an unwieldy nuisance, isn’t an interesting new part of my life I get to explore, isn’t a place for me to belong or be useful, but is instead something that plagues every moment.

  I tried to relax, to concentrate on just being in the dreamworld, not controlling it. I tried to feel my feet on solid ground, focus on rolling my toes one by one and my hold loosened, my mom’s jaw relaxing.

  “I won’t apologize for not having the answers to everything, Rose,” she finished. “I wish I had known, I wish that there was something I could have done. But we know now. And you running around as much as possible, avoiding this family like we’re a chore you don’t want to do, will not fix this.”

  “Nothing will,” I snapped. “So what’s the fucking point?”

  Before I could hear her reply, I was pushed back from the dream, sent hurtling through the nether realm and back into the black void.

  I don’t know what to think. I woke up feeling … relieved? Less heavy than I felt when I went to sleep. Like saying all those things, hearing my own roaring voice in my mom’s dream, hot air pushing down the walls of her carefully constructed classroom, lifted a weight from my chest. But a big part of me is terrified that Dream Mom was somehow my real mom, and she’ll remember all of this in the morning.

  I think I understand her a little better now, at least. Always struggling to be taken seriously when everything is stacked up against her. People overlook her at work because she’s a nurse, not a doctor, and people are dumb and cruel and think that nurses aren’t as important even though they do, like, 90 percent of the work. And then in the Atypical community, she’s shunned because she’s a psychic and for some reason, in a group of people who can, like, READ MINDS, and TIME TRAVEL and shit, being p
sychic is too hard to grasp!?!?

  Watching her sitting there, in the middle of a high school classroom, panicking over the fact that she had the right answer but just couldn’t, for the life of her, figure out how to articulate it, was like seeing her for the first time. It wasn’t just that I was seeing her when she was just a few years younger than me—or, at least, her mind’s eye of what she looked like as a high schooler—but it was also feeling every emotion that she did. It was pouring out of Dream Teen Mom like shockwaves, bowling me over with its strength.

  I didn’t go about it the right way, but I did get rid of my mom’s nightmare. I replaced it with me shouting at her, but maybe … maybe I could do it right next time. And maybe letting out my feelings in the dreamworld is healthier than letting them bubble up inside me. Maybe I can help my family dream more peacefully and their dreams can help me in return. I think my mom is wrong—I think there is a point to these abilities. And I’m going to find out what it is.

  NOVEMBER 16TH, 2016

  The monster breathes. It steps forward out of the darkness, heavy footfalls rattling the black expanse.

  It’s awake.

  LATER

  I can’t do this. I really, really cannot do this.

  I was in the kitchen, going through all of our cookbooks with a notepad and pen in one hand and Post-its in the other, ready to tackle the choosing and strategizing portion of the Thanksgiving recipes. My mom encouraged me to invite Emily for Thanksgiving, seeing as her family is all the way in Arizona. I’m not sure if it’s a ploy to get me to spend more time with the family or to make up for the fight we had in her dream. She didn’t give any indication that she remembered the dream at all but I still … I worry. The next day, after I had gotten some distance from it, I realized how not great that was. Yes, I should be more honest with my family, but making their nightmares worse is probably not the best way to achieve that.

  I had more or less lost myself in the intricacies of the pros and cons of different turkey brining methods when my dad came in. He moved silently around the kitchen for a moment before going to the fridge and pouring himself a glass of water, peering over the books I’d laid out on the counter as he went.