Dreamland (12 page)

“Yeah,” Dea said. “I heard.”

“She even showed up at school. She was waiting in the parking lot after last bell. She managed to corner me but I didn't tell her anything. I felt kind of sorry for her, actually.” Gollum shook her head. “She seemed pretty desperate. I think she really thinks she's going to figure it out.”

“When the cops couldn't?” Dea said.

“Cops are idiots,” Gollum said matter-of-factly, and Dea wasn't going to disagree. “And listen . . .” Gollum looked suddenly uncomfortable. She shifted in her chair, which gave a little squeak. “She has your name. Kate Patinsky. She knows about you.”

Dea's heart began to speed up. “Knows what about me?”

Gollum didn't look at her. “That you and Connor are . . . close.”

Were
, Dea almost corrected her. But saying that would make it real, and she couldn't.

“Anyway,” Gollum said. “I'm pretty sure he's avoiding her or something. I'll keep trying. I know he must be worried about you.”

Dea closed her eyes, remembering his look of horror, the way he'd said
what are you
? She had the urge to cry again, so she kept her mouth shut.

Gollum stood up. “I should go,” she said. “My dad had to drive me in the pickup. He's waiting in the parking lot.” Gollum, Dea knew, had flunked her driver's test three times in a row, despite her claim that she'd been driving tractors for years on her family's farm. “I'll come back tomorrow, okay?”

“Sure,” Dea said, still fighting the feeling she was going to break down at any second. “I'd like that.”

Unexpectedly, Gollum reached down and gave Dea a hug. They'd hardly ever hugged, Dea realized. Although Gollum was thin, she was surprisingly strong, and her hair smelled like mint.

“Everything's going to be okay,” Gollum whispered, and that did it: tears stung Dea's eyes before she could stop them. When Gollum pulled away, Dea swiped quickly at her face with a palm.

“Gollum!” Dea called Gollum back before she could slip into the hall. “My cat, Toby. He doesn't have anyone to feed him . . .”

Gollum grinned—the first time she'd smiled since entering the room. “Already took him home,” she said. “The chickens aren't too happy about it.”

She was gone before Dea could even say thank you.

The cops came in the evening. Briggs and Mr. Bigshot Connelly looked comically out of place in the small, bright room, like overinflated action figures.

“If you're here to talk about my mom, I have nothing to say,” Dea said quickly. She was getting better at maneuvering with the IV in her arm, and she managed to roll over, so she was facing the window.

“We just came to check in, see how you were getting on.” That was Briggs. Dea knew the cops had probably saved her life, but she felt nothing but resentment: they'd had her followed, they'd forced her to go tearing across Indiana like a maniac in the rain. If it weren't for them, she might never have turned on County Route 2. She might never have seen the monsters.

“I'm fine,” she said, which was so obviously a lie. “Did you find my mom yet?”

There was a short pause. “Not yet.”

That gave her some satisfaction. “You won't find her, you know. Not where you're looking.”

This time, the pause was weightier. “What do you mean?” Briggs said carefully.

“It means she didn't run away. She would never.” Dea drew her legs toward her chest. She missed her mom so hard in that second, she ached all over. “You're wasting your time. You should be looking for the person who took her.” She thought of the surface of glass littering her room at home. She thought of Toby. She wanted to cry. “Now please leave me alone.”

“Listen, Odea.” Briggs was staring at her hard now, as if he could frighten her into giving something away. “We did our homework. You're not eighteen until June. If you know something that will help us find her, it's in your best interest to tell us. Otherwise we'll have to put you into the system. And nobody wants that.”

“And if she comes home and you arrest her, I'll go into the system anyway, won't I?” Dea said. Briggs didn't answer. “
Please
,” she repeated. “Leave.” She hated herself for saying
please
to them when she should have just ordered them from her room. She was halfway scared of them, just because of their badges. She pressed the nurse call button to make a point, and a light started beeping and flashing in the hall outside her door. Briggs heaved a big sigh, playing the role of Disappointed Dad.

“We'll be back,” he said before leaving.

The nurse came—not Donna Sue, but another one, young, with smudgy eye makeup and an attitude—and asked her what she wanted.

“I forgot,” Dea said, which earned her an eye roll. The nurse withdrew, closing the door forcefully. At least they weren't locking her in. If the doctors really thought she was crazy, they'd probably confiscate her shoelaces and strap her down and make sure she wasn't trying to hang herself with her bed linens in the middle of the night. Dea's shoes were stacked neatly in the narrow cupboard near her bed, shoelaces and all.

Dinner was soup and gloppy mac 'n' cheese and came with a single plastic spoon—she wasn't sure whether the doctors were deliberately keeping knives away from her. She hadn't intended to eat but she did anyway, ravenously, realizing that she was starving.

She hadn't meant to sleep, either, but there was nothing else to do. The nurses flowed in and out, bringing new medication—pills to help the pain, pills to keep her calm, pills to help the pills to help the pain—and then she was falling through the warm, soft surface of her bed, and there was nothing but dark.

She woke up in the middle of the night disoriented. For one second she had no idea where she was or how she had arrived there, and her mind spun frantically through all of the places she had lived, trying to latch onto a familiar feeling, an impression of home. Then in an instant her senses sharpened, and she was aware of the constant beeping and the shuffling of footsteps outside her door, and she remembered where she was. Someone had drawn her blinds, but moonlight filtered in between them, striping the linoleum floor.

She was hot and her throat was dry. It was the air in the hospital—too dry, exhaled by too many people, cycled
through too many vents. She kicked off her sheets and sat up, her heart slamming hard, her head fuzzy, wondering why she had woken. Something was off—she had a tingling sense of unease, as if someone was standing behind her, breathing on her neck. As if someone was watching her.

Something dark skated across the mirror. Dea's throat squeezed. A shadow—a trick of the moon. Nothing more.

She swung her legs to the floor and stood up, carefully disentangling the tubes of her IV. Her body felt strange, as if she were made out of different component parts, some hopelessly light, some iron-heavy. She had to steady herself against one wall while the rush of blood to her vision passed. Then she made her way toward the sink, wheeling the IV stand next to her, as she'd practiced doing yesterday when she had to use the bathroom.

She was shocked by her own reflection. Her hair was greasy and matted in places. Her eyes were deep hollows in the dark, and her face was drawn and tight and white as a flame. She looked like something that should be dead. She had the stupidest thought: she was glad Connor hadn't come.

She drew water from the sink and drank it out of a plastic cup about the size of a thimble, refilling it several times before her throat began to relax. She was still uncomfortably hot, and she bent over to splash water on her face with the hand that wasn't chained to the IV, gasping a little from the cold, enjoying it. When she straightened up again, for a second she once again thought she saw a shadow move across the mirror—was someone behind her?—but when she turned around she saw nothing but the bed and the rumpled sheets and the looming silhouettes of machinery.

She turned back to the mirror.

A scream worked its way from her chest to her throat and lodged there.

The mirror was
moving
. It was rippling, like the surface of a lake disturbed by the motion of an animal below it. Her face was breaking apart, dispersing, on miniature wakes. And then, before she could shake the scream loose from her throat, before sound could crystallize on her tongue, her mother's face appeared: the big blue eyes, the dark hair, even wilder than it usually was. The bags like bruises under her eyes, the etching of smile lines at the corners of her mouth. She looked thin and tired and
real
.

Real. This was real.

Dea felt the floor swaying underneath her and had to grip the sink to stay on her feet. She hadn't realized, until then, how terrified she'd been that she would never see her mom's face again.

“Mom?” she whispered.

Miriam put a finger to her lips, shaking her head. Her eyes clicked to the left, in the direction of the hallway; Dea understood her mother was warning her against speaking too loudly. But Dea didn't care. Her mother was here and not-here. Her mother was behind the mirror,
in
it.

She wasn't dreaming.

“Where are you?” Unconsciously, she leaned forward and placed a hand on the mirror, as though she'd be able to feel her mother's face. But there was nothing but smooth glass beneath her palm.

Miriam looked temporarily irritated, as if Dea had failed to
produce the answer to a very simple math question. She leaned in and brought her mouth to the glass, exhaling. Then she brought a finger to the glass and quickly scratched out a few words in the condensation that patterned her side of the mirror, writing backward so that Dea could read it.

Where do you think?

Almost as soon as Dea read the words, they evaporated.

“Are you coming home?” Dea asked, feeling a rush of panic. She was separated from her mother by a thin pane of glass and by whole worlds. This was crazy. Maybe she did belong in a loony bin.

Dea's mother shook her head no. There was a pucker between her eyebrows, a deep worry line that Dea had called, when she was little,
the dumpling
. She was sure she had confused the word
dimple
for
dumpling
but the nickname had stuck. She wanted to laugh. She wanted to cry. Her mother's dumpling was out in full force.

Miriam repeated her trick—exhaling, drawing words backward in the condensation
. There isn't much time.

“Much time for what?” Dea said. Footsteps were squeaking down the hallway, and Dea stiffened. But they passed.

Her mother ignored the question. She swiped away the words with a fist and immediately breathed new vapor onto the glass and began scratching with a finger again.

The jagged lines of her writing, like piles of sticks, appeared quickly.

They know where you are.

Dea went cold. “Who?” she said. But her mom had suddenly gone very still, alert. She was no longer looking at Dea; her head
was turned slightly, like an animal listening for the approach of a predator. Dea leaned in and breathed on the glass.
Who
? she wrote, reversing the letters, as her mother had done for her.

But Miriam had turned away completely. For a second, Dea saw only the wild tangle of her mother's hair. Dea pounded once on the glass with a fist. “Mom,” she whispered. And then, a little louder, “
Mom
.”

Miriam turned around again, and Dea stumbled backward. Her mother's face was contorted now, drawn tight and white with terror. Her eyes were like two black pits. She was screaming soundlessly, her mouth working around words Dea couldn't hear. Dea was sweating, crying, reaching for her mother's hand beyond the glass.

Miriam shifted. For a quick second, Dea saw the faceless men behind her, ragged mouths open in a silent roar.

Then Miriam's face was back, pressed almost directly to the mirror. This time, Dea understood what she was saying.

Duck
.

Dea's mother drew back a fist. The monsters leapt and Miriam swung toward the glass. Dea just had time to launch herself to the ground. The IV stand clattered on top of her. When the mirror shattered it made a sound like a vast thunderbolt. Then a tinkling, fine as rain, as all the glass came down.

She was moved into a room with no TV, no mirrors, no hard edges of any kind. The room was gray and smooth and featureless, like a pebble worn down over time. Her door was locked by a nurse from the outside, and she had a single window, barred with steel, that looked out onto a short stretch of pavement and a brick wall: the windowless back of another portion of the hospital. Her food came with plastic forks and plastic spoons, and it was always inedible. All of her possessions were removed, carefully bagged, and secured in a locker. Only the nurses had the key.

Dr. Chaudhary came to check in on her more often, sometimes
as much as three times in a single afternoon. She no longer looked so pretty. She looked old, and very worried.

The one nice thing about being in the Crazy Ward, as Dea started thinking about it, was that she could avoid the police. No one was allowed to visit unless Dea gave her permission. When one of the nurses announced that a woman named Kate Patinsky had tried to gain access to Dea's room, Dea specified that the only people allowed to see her were Gollum, Connor, and her mother. Putting the last two on the list made her feel better, though she knew they wouldn't show up.

Dea was bored and exhausted all the time—whatever meds they were giving her were strong, and, because she hadn't walked a dream in days, she was weak. For two days she passed in and out of sleep. There was nothing else to do, and she didn't want to think about her mom or the monsters behind the mirror, and what it all meant.

On the third day, she woke up to an unfamiliar sound. A shadow flickered past her window, disrupting the thin daylight. She thought of her mother's hand, passing over a lightshade. She blinked. It was a bird: a bird hovering just beyond the bars that crisscrossed the heavy-duty glass. It was a lurid red, vivid against the weak gray light, and Dea felt a sharp ache as she watched it flutter, flutter, and then swoop away. The bird had brought with it some recollection, a memory of a memory of a word. She struggled to hold onto it even as her brain began to blur again, loosen at the edges . . . as she began to slip.

Harbinger. The word was
harbinger
.

Harbingers led the way out of dreams.

Her mother was trapped in a dream of monsters.

Dea struggled to sit up. Her body didn't feel like her own. It took a long time to get to the bathroom. Her arm was bandaged, spotted with old blood. She didn't feel it. She didn't feel anything.

She ran the water, bent over the toilet, stuck her fingers down her throat, and threw up.

It helped, but only a little.

Later, when the nurse came in with her afternoon dose of medication, Dea kept the pills folded neatly in her palm as she clapped a hand to her mouth and made an exaggerated point of swallowing.

“Good girl,” the nurse said. This one was older, Latina, and wore a cross around her neck. Dea thought if you spent enough time in the Crazy Ward, you'd need to pray for something.

When the dinner tray came, she pushed the pills she hadn't swallowed to the very bottom of the applesauce. After only a few hours, she already felt better, more alert. She was careful to yawn and look dazed, though, when the night nurse came—this one young, skinny, and frightened-looking, with a rabbit's protruding front teeth—so she wouldn't get pumped full of sleeping pills.

She couldn't if she had any prayer of getting out of there.

On the fourth day, she answered Dr. Chaudhary's questions humbly, eyes down. Yes, she had been trying to kill herself that day in the car. Yes, she had deliberately shattered the mirror, thinking she could use the shards of glass to hurt herself. But she wanted to live now. She was ready to heal.

Later that afternoon, Gollum came to visit again, and Dea was allowed to leave her room and go greet her. The hallway
was full of identical rooms, some of them continuously locked, others closed only at lights-out. Through the narrow windows she could see other patients moving around or curled up in the fetal position on their beds. A guy with feather-white lashes and bleached hair suctioned his face to the window as she moved past, rapped four times against the window, as if he wanted to be let out. She touched two fingers to his fist and moved on.

The hallway dead-ended in a reception area. Gollum was waiting for her there, not even bothering this time to try to seem casual.

“Hey,” she said, making no move to hug Dea. “I can't stay long.”

I don't blame you
, Dea nearly said. But she knew that was mean-spirited.

They sat side by side on plastic chairs bolted to the floor. Beyond the reception desk, mechanical swinging doors led off into other, less secure, portions of the hospital. They could only be opened with a code.

“Are you all right?” Gollum asked in a low voice.

“Been better,” Dea said, trying to make it a joke. Gollum didn't smile. She looked younger than usual today in an old Harry Potter sweatshirt.

She reached out as though to touch the bandages on Dea's arm. Then she withdrew her hand. “What'd you do to yourself, Dea?”

“I didn't—” Dea shook her head. She knew there was no point in trying to explain. “I'm not crazy, Gollum. Okay? But it's too complicated to get into.”

“I don't think you're crazy.”

“Good. Because I'm not.”

They sat in silence for a minute. In the corner, a TV was playing some grocery store game show, and one of the other patients was sitting in front of it, chin down, asleep.

“I talked to Connor,” Gollum said in a rush, as if she had to force the words out. Dea's stomach flipped completely inside out. “He told me to tell you he's thinking of you. He . . . he misses you, Dea.”

“Oh, yeah? Then why hasn't he come to see me?” Dea didn't mean to sound so bitter.

Gollum's expression turned guarded. “He's having a tough time,” she said carefully. “Besides, he thought you wouldn't want to see him.” She nudged Dea with an elbow. “What happened between you guys, anyway?”

Dea just shook her head.

Gollum sighed and stood up. “I got to go. My dad—”

“That's okay,” Dea said quickly. “I get it.” But when one of the nurses buzzed Gollum back into the hall, she was filled with an ache of loneliness so strong, it felt like her insides had been hollowed out.

There was nothing to do in the Crazy Ward—nothing to do but sit, and watch, and listen. She was a plant: unnoticeable and unnoticed, absorbing information through her skin. Over the course of a few hours, other patients drifted in and out of the waiting room. One girl was so thin her head, by comparison, looked like an enormous balloon about to pop; a fine fuzz of hair grew over her arms and even over the jutting peaks of her collarbones. Another girl—Kaitlyn, according to the nurse who eventually called her back to her room for a bath—shuffled back
and forth across the worn carpet in her slippers, her head tilted to one side, as if listening to an inaudible symphony. Then there was Roddy, a grown man with the smooth, hairless face of a baby, who plunked right down next to Dea and explained that he had once been secret service for the president.

In the late afternoon two more visitors arrived to the ward, identifiable because they were dressed normally instead of in the paper gowns or soft cotton pajamas the patients wore. The anorexic stood up to greet them. They disappeared together into her room. An hour later, Dea watched the visitors—mother and sister, she thought—reemerge. A member of the cleaning crew released them back into the general wing; the janitor barely glanced at them before punching in the key code. She didn't even ask for their guest IDs. She didn't have to; they were wearing street clothing, which meant
okay to pass go
.

At six o'clock there was a long lull, a shift change, when the day nurses were released into the world and the night nurses came on—a quick half an hour when the hallway was mostly empty, when the day nurses had fled back to their cars and homes and boyfriends and kids, when the night nurses were getting ready in the break room, slugging back awful coffee, reviewing charts, complaining about the long night to come. All the night nurses were old. Or maybe they weren't old, and only looked it. That must be the effect of years on the Crazy Ward, and long, dark hours filled with unnatural light, the stink of bleach, and the cries of people whose brains had turned traitor.

Dea didn't judge. She knew, better than anyone, that reality was a tricky thing: shifting, tissue-thin, difficult to grasp.

In the evening, she repeated her magic trick, keeping her
palm cupped around her pills even as she pretended to swallow. Those pills went under her mattress. For a long time after lights-out, she lay awake, listening to the murmurs and footsteps, the dull thud of something hard banging rhythmically against a closed door. Whenever she closed her eyes, she pictured her mother's face, her mouth torn open in a scream, and the men with their ragged mouths of darkness behind her. She pictured rainstorms made of glass, and snow that fell silently and smelled like human ash.

Every time she moved to the window, hoping to see a break in the darkness, a chink of light, she saw nothing but a narrow wedge of black between the steep gabled sides of the hospital roof. She began to worry that dawn would never come.

It did, of course. The sun clawed apart the dark. Light bled down the hospital walls. The nurses changed shift again. Carts squeaked down the hall. The air smelled like burnt eggs and old yogurt. Toilets flushed and showers ran. Slowly, the ward woke up.

This was reality: the day came, whether you wanted it or not.

She would have only one chance to escape. If she screwed up, she'd probably be strapped to her bed, like she'd heard a nurse say they did to Roddy at night and when he went into one of his rages. But she couldn't wait any longer. She needed to get out. She needed to find Connor.

And then she needed to get into his dreams.

Nina, the Latina nurse, returned a little after noon, wheeling Dea's lunch tray. “How're you doin', baby? You hungry for something good?” Nina said that to all the patients. Dea could
hear her singsonging it down the hall and had always assumed it was a rhetorical question, since the food in the Crazy Wing was even worse than regular hospital food. But she dutifully pronged a few grayish spears of asparagus, massed like elongated slugs at the edge of her plate. She needed the strength. She hadn't walked much in days, and she could feel it: she was weak, dizzy, nauseous. She could barely choke down her lunch.

Nina beamed at her. “I wish everybody on the floor was as good as you, sweetheart.” She was sweating a little, even though the ward was always chilled to an exact sixty-nine degrees. Dea felt as if the whole hospital was just a giant refrigerator, and she and the other patients were vegetables, shivering silently inside of it. “Make my job a whole lot easier.”

“Thanks,” Dea said. She took a deep breath. Now or never. “Nina? I need to ask you a favor. A big favor.”

Nina didn't stop smiling, but her posture changed almost imperceptibly. She was alert now, watching. She'd been in Crazyville a long time. She knew how quickly things could shift. “What's that, honey?”

“It's my best friend's birthday today,” Dea said, looking down at her lap, because this lie was the hardest. Not because she was being deceitful, but because before Connor, before Gollum, she'd never had best friends—she'd hardly had
any
friends. And now she didn't know where she stood with either of them.

She just had to pray that Connor would help her. He was the only one who could. Gollum was out of the question. She couldn't drive, and didn't even own a cell phone.

“I was hoping . . . well, she's my best friend, you know? And I haven't spoken to her at all. I was hoping I could maybe just send her a quick text . . . ?” She looked up, holding her breath.

Nina was still smiling, so wide Dea could see the lipstick on her teeth. “There's a phone in the hall, honey. Why don't you ring her up there?”

There
was
a phone in the hall: an ancient rotary phone, sitting on the counter by the welcome desk—stupidly named, since there was nothing welcoming about Crazyville. The patients were allowed to make a single call a day. Roddy sometimes spent an hour or more on the phone, the cord twisted around a fat finger, ranting about the government or EPA regulations or bioengineered corn. Dea had been vaguely jealous that he had someone to call, until Eva, the anorexic, had told her that he never dialed any numbers—just picked up and started speaking.

“She never answers,” Dea said. “Besides, her number's stored in my phone. Please,” she added. “I haven't talked to her—I haven't been able to see her. She'll never forgive me.” Dea thought of her mother, breathing words silently onto the glass, and blinked back sudden tears. “Please. I have to get through to her.”

Nina hesitated. Her lashes left black dust on her cheekbones whenever she blinked. “All right, honey,” she said. “One text. Let's be quick about it.”

Dea was too afraid to say thank you—afraid she might sound too grateful, too eager, and give herself away. When Nina bent over to work a key in the old padlock, Dea waited several feet away, worried that if she came any closer Nina might hear her drumming heart,
feel
her nervousness, and suspect something. But she didn't.

“Go ahead,” Nina said. In the small space, Dea's belongings looked pathetic, like the possessions of a bag lady on the street: her battered leather bag, which she hadn't even remembered taking into the car, piled on top of a stack of rumpled clothing—all
of it sheathed in plastic. Nina had backed up several feet, so she could give Dea privacy and still make sure she didn't grab a hidden knife or razor blade. Dea reached for the bag and pulled out her phone, panicking a little when she saw the screen was dark. She'd been in the hospital for nearly a week—her battery was most likely dead. But when she pressed the power button, the screen flickered to life. Someone must have powered the phone down before stashing it.