by Beth Goobie
Beth Goobie
The Dream Where the Losers Go
Copyright © 2006 Beth Goobie
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage
and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission
in writing from the publisher.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Goobie, Beth, 1959-
The dream where the losers go / Beth Goobie.
Originally published: Montreal: Roussan, 1999.
ISBN 1-55143-455-5
I. Title.
PS8563.O8326D74 2006 jC813’.54 C2005-907728-X
Summary: Trying to escape the horror that forced her to attempt suicide,
Skey dreams of a dark tunnel, a place where she is safe and alone.
First published in the United States 2006
Library of Congress Control Number: 2005938899
Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing
programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada
through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), the
Canada Council for the Arts, and the British Columbia Arts Council.
The author gratefully acknowledges the Canada Council
grant that funded the writing of this book.
Cover design and photography: Danielle Hogan
Orca Book Publishers Orca Book Publishers
Box 5626, Stn. B, PO Box 468
Victoria, BC Canada Custer, WA USA
V8R 6S4 98240-0468
Printed and bound in Canada
Printed on 50% post-consumer recycled paper, ancient forest friendly,
processed chlorine free using vegetable, low VOC inks.
09 08 07 06 • 5 4 3 2 1
for scott
CHAPTER ONE
SHE BEGAN DREAMING about him in the dark dream, the one with the endless tunnels, stone walls that slid by cold under her fingertips, invisible because it was too dark to see. In this dream, there was no light. Everything came to her by touch or feeling—sadness a heavy salt in her mouth, fear ringing loud bells in her ears. In this dream she was always alone, in air that smelled of damp stone and mildew, her bare feet wet from small puddles, trickles of water that ran down the walls. Hand outstretched, she would touch her fingers to the wall and begin to move forward, never knowing if she was progressing toward an exit that would get her out of this place or if at some point she had turned around and begun moving back toward the place she had come from, a place she could not remember. Dreaming this dream, she had two choices—to move or not to move. She could stay forever lost in one place in the dark or feel herself forward by fingertip along the cold stone walls, moving toward some kind of meaning, some possible place of hope.
Sometimes a draft blew across her and she would think she was approaching a door or gate, perhaps a crack in the wall through which she could look out onto another world and call for help. Every now and then she would hear the shifting or rattling of stones and stop, shock ricocheting through her, but the stones always silenced themselves. Nothing more came with them, no footsteps, no voice.
Until the night she heard him for the first time. She had been feeling her way along a tunnel, stopping at intervals to trace the etchings and hieroglyphs carved into the rock. Messages from another time, another mind. Had they been carved by candlelight or in the dark, the artist deciding by fingertip where to place the next line or curve? Sometimes she could tell she was feeling out a human figure, sometimes it seemed to be a bird, sun or moon. This particular tunnel had been rich with carved figures, stories under her fingers she seemed close to understanding, meaning just beyond her grasp. Then, abruptly, she arrived at a meeting place, a small open area where several tunnels met. She had come across this setup before and had learned to feel her way around the central area, counting the tunnel mouths. There could be any number—as few as four or six. Around one huge cavern, she had counted twenty-one, in another, thirteen. It never seemed to matter which tunnel she chose to enter. Her journey continued always the same, the slow stumbling onward, led by the feel of rough stone and the unseen carvings that slipped by under her fingertips.
When the wall under her right hand disappeared, she edged to the left, checking to see whether the tunnel was ending or widening, then began moving slowly around the outside of the open area to count the tunnel mouths. For the moment, she avoided the center of the meeting place. A few of these places had opened onto large pits, and she had learned to listen ahead of herself for a growing echo on her footsteps, a deepening of sound. There had been none this time, but still she knelt, searching for a rock to roll forward into the center so she could listen for the drop.
From the other side of the meeting place, she heard him. The sound of his breathing seemed to rise out of her own, as if they breathed in parallel rhythm, his slightly heavier, harsher. There was a small grunt, then the sound of a rock rolling across the floor until it came to a gentle stop against her foot. Still on one knee, she froze as if caught in sudden headlights, as if she could be seen by anyone come hunting through these tunnels. Someone who could see in the dark. She waited, listening to the sound of the other, his breathing, the shuffling of his feet as he felt his way around the outside of the meeting place, slipped into a tunnel mouth and continued on.
Still on her knees, she listened to his sounds fade. When fear stopped slamming through her, she closed her hand over the rock that had rolled against her foot. Small with rough edges, it was slightly wet, as everything in this place. She stood, warming it in her palm, then continued around the outside of the meeting place. Five tunnel mouths passed until she thought she had found the one he had taken. There was no sound of him now, but she moved into the sixth tunnel, feeling her way along with her left hand, the rock gripped in her right, following him further into the dark.
SKEY WOKE HOLDING the rock in her hand. At first she didn’t notice it. She had been jolted out of sleep by the muffled sound of Ann’s radio in the next room. “Win a free trip to Disneyland,” blared through the thin wall. Ads about success, fame and fortune. Lying in her narrow bed, Skey watched the elm tree outside her window, its stripped branches riding the wind. Gradually the dark tunnels and the endless feel of stone slipping under her fingers faded, and she rose out of the dark of her dream into the uncertain light of an early November Saturday morning.
Loud laughter came from the unit’s kitchen. Some of the girls were making breakfast. Through her closed door, Skey could smell toast and eggs. A flicker of thought crossed her face and she frowned slightly. Five months in this place and Monday, finally, they were going to let her return to her old school. She could come and go into the world beyond her bedroom window again. Dully, Skey stared at the elm branches lifting and falling. More thoughts flickered across her face. An in-between place—that was what it was, lying in her bed like this, watching the elm before she got up. It always told her something about her life. The way it had been. The way it was going to be. Keep going, keep going, it seemed to say. Skey lay in her bed and watched until the very lift and fall of those black branches moved into her and she began breathing their rhythm.
Keep going.
Someone knocked on her door and a male voice called, “Skey?”
“Yeah yeah,” she mumbled. It was staff, telling her to rise and shine. “I’m up,” she stressed.
“All right,” said the voice.
As the staff moved on to Ann’s door, Skey began to inch her body toward a sittin
g position. Bad as her dreams got, the day wasn’t anything she wanted to move into. So she usually started it by playing with the concept of getting up, practicing for the actual act. Did this foot belong to this leg? Did this bum belong underneath this back? Did this head belong on this neck or had the wind blown it on by mistake? Was this really someone else’s hand stuck on her arm and was it reaching for her throat, about to strangle her?
Skey noticed she was holding something. Drowsily she focused on her right hand and saw the rock. She remembered. She had been dreaming the dark dream, and there had been someone else there. He had rolled this rock across the floor of a meeting place to check for a pit, and she had picked it up. She must have come out of the dream still holding it in her hand.
Jerking upright, Skey stared at the rock. This was impossible. Motionless, she sat and stared at the impossible rock until staff knocked at her door again. Somehow she managed a second, “Yeah yeah.” Then, when she heard the staff walk away, she got out of bed and took the one full step that covered the width of her small room. Here she set the rock carefully on her dresser. Gray with white markings, it had a few rough edges—a very average looking rock. Pushing it with her finger, Skey listened to the slight scraping sound. Gradually, her bright fear subsided. It might be an impossible rock, but it wasn’t dangerous. It wasn’t going for her throat, at any rate.
As she dressed, she watched the rock sit on her dresser. Remnants of the dream still clung to it; she thought she could see several hazy tunnels stretching out from it in various directions. Perhaps her room had become a meeting place, the rock its center.
“Rock, you are the last thing I need,” Skey muttered. “Day and night mixed together. Day’s bad enough on its own. Night’s worse.”
Opening her socks-and-underwear drawer, she buried the rock under a pile of cotton and polyester. The dark hazy tunnels wavered and almost wisped out. Not quite.
It’s an improvement, Skey thought grimly and opened her door onto yet another day on the inside.
THAT NIGHT SHE heard nothing of the other traveler and woke Sunday morning having spent another night alone, feeling her way through the dark. Lying in bed, her eyes closed, Skey could still feel the tunnel wall pressed against her palm. At the same time, she could hear some of the girls making breakfast and the unit’s stereo blasting. As she lay motionless, the dream began to fade, but not completely. It never faded completely. During the day, she could tune in and out of it. It was a matter of changing focus—tune out the real world, tune in the dream. She could be anywhere, playing pool with staff or at the school run for the girls in this lockup. She could be here in this room, staring through her bedroom window which had been strengthened by crisscrossing wires so a girl couldn’t break her way out. All she had to do was focus inside, and the real world would disappear and the dark tunnel move in to surround her, solid and dense, slowed like a dream.
Skey liked to play with this. In daylight the dream seemed safer, more like a game. She would sit in the middle of a class, tune everything out and find herself standing in a tunnel, tracing a design carved in the rock wall. While she was doing this, she could still see the classroom, but it would look hazy and indistinct, as if it was a dream and the dark tunnel was real. Sometimes, as she sat in a classroom, tracing an outline in a tunnel wall, she couldn’t decide what the carving looked like, but a meaning would creep into her skin.
This is a human heart, she would think. This is a sigh. This picture is crying.
SUNDAY EVENING, Terry called her into the office. The small, brightly lit room looked out onto the unit’s open area, its large window strengthened by wire so no girl could break her way in. When a girl was called into the office, the rest of the girls would gather in the unit and watch her talk to staff, read her lips. Skey sat in the chair farthest from the window, avoiding Terry’s eyes. Terry was tough, in her forties. Her body had the shape of a woman, but she carried it like a man, holding her shoulders straight and wide, swaggering her hips and scuffing her feet. When she spoke, her voice was jovial and loud, full of tease, but her dark eyes watched carefully, always assessing. Warm, Terry was warm. When someone said something to her, she took it in. She listened to a girl the way she listened to another staff.
“So, you ready for your first day back at school? Your own school?” Leaning back in her chair, Terry grinned and watched.
Skey sat curved in a chair opposite, shoulders so tense they hurt. “I guess,” she mumbled.
“It’d make me kind of nervous going back to my old school after I’d been gone a few months,” Terry said easily.
“Yeah, I guess.” Skey fixed her eyes vaguely on the office’s locked medicine cabinet. It was one thing having a laugh with staff while playing a game of pool, but that didn’t mean she wanted to be hauled into the office so she could spill her guts on command.
“So, you feel all right about it?” Terry probed. “You know where your homeroom is?”
“I’ve been going to that school for two years now.” Skey shrugged.
“And you’re comfortable with the visit we made to your school principal?” Terry asked. “The guidelines he laid out for you?”
“I guess,” Skey said.
Terry paused, searching for a way to open her up—the correct combination of words, the right tone of voice. There might be one. Skey held herself stiff and waited.
“Did you know,” Terry said slowly, “that there are five people employed full-time just to scrape gum off the Statue of Liberty?”
“Huh?” Startled, Skey glanced at Terry’s grinning face.
“Yeah,” said Terry. “I read that somewhere. So if you ever need a job scraping gum off a wall, just fly to New York and apply to work at the Stature of Liberty. Forty hours a week. Probably minimum wage.”
“Maybe when you let me out of this place,” Skey said with a slight grin. “Give me a reference?”
“You bet.” Without losing a beat, Terry twisted the subject back to school. “You sure you’re okay with everything?”
Skey closed down, dropping her eyes. “I guess.”
“Skey?” If Terry was waiting for a response, she wasn’t going to get one, but her voice ambled on cheerfully. “What’s your favorite color?”
Skey sat, thinking her way through the options. She knew it wasn’t black—she got more than enough of the dark in her dreams—but it wasn’t white either. White didn’t help you see things any better. “It depends,” she said slowly.
“On what?” asked Terry.
“On my mood.” Skey spoke hesitantly, thinking out loud into Terry’s listening silence. “I guess it’s this color you can find sometimes between a peach and a pink. Not exactly peach and not exactly pink. Some days I like green, other days it’s blue.”
“Like the sky?” asked Terry.
“Like the sky around three o’clock in the afternoon when it’s really hot,” said Skey.
Terry gave her a slow smile. “Now you’re talking.”
“It’s really hot,” said Skey, “and the radio’s playing. And you’re lying in the sun, and you’ve got nothing to do, and you could do anything you wanted. That’s the color of sky I like best.” She paused, still thinking. “But most days I like gray. Gray because it’s quiet.”
Terry nodded. “Skey, help me with something. When I’m working the morning shift and you’re leaving for school, tell me what color you’re feeling.”
Briefly, Skey’s eyes flickered across Terry’s. “Why?”
Terry shrugged. “When I wonder how you’re doing at school, I’ll think of that color.”
Skey moved in and out of Terry’s gaze, leaving it, coming back, leaving it again. Coming back. “That’s weird, Terry,” she said finally.
“Hey, I thought of it myself,” said Terry.
THAT NIGHT SKEY stood at her window, holding the rock. There was no wind. The elm’s branches reached out sharp and clear, motionless against the stars. As motionless as the large black iron gate that stood at th
e far end of the lock-up’s parking lot, dividing the grounds from the street. The gate’s purpose seemed to be decoration—it stood open day and night, cars and people coming and going. Skey’s eyes skimmed the staff-and-visitor parking lot, then settled on the concrete building that housed the school gym and classrooms beyond it. She had lost the previous September and October in that building. Autumn had been a daze of green leaves turning amber in the windows, the buzz of flies growing slower against window glass until they died. Floor hockey games, roller-skating, arts and crafts— she had done what she had been told to do, fulfilled their expectations for good behavior. Tomorrow morning they would have to open one of their precious doors and let her out.
The moon was somewhere in the middle of itself, half dark, half light, the ground shadowy with dead grass and leaves. No snow yet. How she longed to walk out into those stars and feel the breeze move over her skin, feel herself move inside like something in the dark you can’t see but know is there, going on about its business. Unseen but always going on, like a heart.
The rock seemed to pulse in her hand. Skey half expected it to glow with a strange light, but it had come out of the dark. It was impossible and a mystery, but it held no messages—just a gray rock with rough edges that had accidentally bumped against her foot. A dream rock.
A dreaming rock, Skey mused, turning it over. Maybe she was the rock’s dream, and the rock was hers. She laughed softly.
“You’ve been here too long, loser,” she whispered. “Soon you’ll belong.”
Leaving the window, she crawled into bed and turned to face the wall. Sometimes she and Ann tapped back and forth, but tonight she could hear the other girl’s snores. Gently Skey tightened her grip on the rock, and suddenly she was in the dream tunnel, standing somewhere in the dark. Stretching out her left hand, she located the wall and began to feel her way along. Almost immediately, she heard him—the other one. Everything in her stopped. Abruptly, from nearby, came the sound of a heavy stone shifting, followed by a muffled curse.
