Dreamland (4 page)

“On your mark, get set, go!” he shouted.

After a single turn, she'd lost sight of him. Two more turns and she couldn't hear anything but the occasional gust of wind through the dry corn. Another two turns and she hit a dead end. She backtracked quickly. Her heart was going hard, skipping a beat here and there, then trying to compensate, spilling together into a constant thrum. It was too quiet. Even the clouds had stopped moving.

She was seized by irrational fear: what if, somehow, this was all still a part of Shawna McGregor's dream? What if she had never woken up? What if the conversation with her mom and seeing Connor and all of it was just a subplot, a random spool unraveling in Shawna's brain? Maybe this was the part where Connor disappeared and instead she found herself alone in a maze with Morgan Devoe or Keith, the bus driver. Or maybe no one would come. Maybe the sky would start melting and the corn would fall down around her like a series of dominoes.

She knew it was stupid, but she couldn't shake the idea. It was so bright. She started running. She hit another dead end. Not a whisper of breeze. She forced herself not to call out Connor's name. If it was a dream, it would end eventually. All dreams ended.

She didn't want it to be a dream, though.

She turned a corner and ran straight into Connor. Same T-shirt, same smile, same hair falling over his eyes. Not a dream, then. She nearly grabbed him to check.

“I found you,” he said.

“I found
you
,” she corrected him. “I guess we tie.” She realized they'd made it to the very center of the maze. The sun was almost directly above them.

If Connor noticed how hard she was breathing, he was too nice to mention it.

“If I ever needed a place to hide out, I'd come here,” he said, as they wound their way back to the parking lot.

She raised an eyebrow—or tried to. Gollum was teaching her but she hadn't mastered it yet. “Are you planning to go on the run?”

“Think about it! A maze is even better than a moat. It's like a built-in security system. No one would ever find you.”

“Except for the tourists,” Dea said.

Connor grinned. “Yeah. Except for the tourists.”

A few miles away from the corn maze, Dea spotted another billboard, this one just after a sign pointing the way to DeWitt:
THE RAILROAD DINER: WORLD-FAMOUS MILKSHAKES
.

“You hungry?” Connor asked.

“I don't have to be
hungry
for milkshakes,” she said. “That's like asking if I feel like breathing.”

They pulled over and got milkshakes (vanilla for him, strawberry for her). The diner looked like it had come straight out of a billion years ago. There was even an old cash register made of brass. The waitress, Carol, who seemed just as ancient as her surroundings, warmed to Connor right away and even let
him open the drawer and press a couple of the buttons when he asked. Dea realized that Connor was that kind of person. He could get away with anything. He belonged.

He made her feel like she belonged, too.

Next up was a fifteen-mile detour to Ohio's largest rubber ball.

“We're never gonna get to Cincinnati, you know,” Dea said.

“It's the journey, not the destination,” Connor said, making a fake guidance-counselor face. “And come on! Indiana's
largest rubber ball
.” He tapped her thigh with every syllable. “How could we punk out on that?”

By the time Connor had finished snapping pictures at the Biggest Rubber Ball in Ohio—which, true to its name, was enormous—the sun had rolled off the center of the sky and the fields were striped with purple shadows. As they headed back to the car, a dusty minivan pulled into the parking lot and a family poured out: mom dad kid kid kid, all of them wearing some combination of visor and shorts and flip-flops. Dea imagined, briefly, what she and Connor must look like to them. They probably thought Connor was her boyfriend.

It was after three, and Dea knew they should turn around. But she didn't want to. She felt fizzy with happiness, like someone had uncorked a giant bottle of soda inside of her. For once, she was glad she didn't have a real cell phone, except for the crappy pay-as-you-go one she'd bought one winter with the savings she pocketed from scraping off people's windshields. Her mom didn't even know about it, which meant that she couldn't call Dea and bug her to get home.

Miriam owned nothing: no cell phone, no property, no bank account even. She kept all their money in bricks of cash,
elastic-banded together, concealed in shoeboxes in her closet, stashed in the passenger seat of the car, camouflaged in a tampon box beneath the bathroom sink. (That was the emergency fund: when even the tampon box was empty, Dea knew, it was time to move.) The money came in spurts, like blood from a new wound, and Dea didn't ask where she got all of it, like she didn't ask why Miriam was so afraid and who Miriam thought they were running from.

“We're like wind,” Miriam always used to say, running her fingers through Dea's hair. “Poof! We vanish. We disappear.”

It had never occurred to her that someday Dea might grow up and wish instead to be visible. That she might want a cell phone and friends to call, apps and pictures and customizable ringtones.
That was why Dea had bought the phone, even though it was plastic and cheap and she hated to bring it out in public and half the time she forgot to charge it: she wanted to feel like everybody else.

But for once, Dea wanted to do exactly what her mom always talked about: vanish. If no one knew where she was, maybe she wouldn't have to go back.

“Where to next?” she said.
Don't say home
, she tried to telegraph in his direction.
Anywhere but home
.

Connor's eyes clicked to the dashboard clock. “I bet we can still make it to Cincinnati and back before dark.”

She put the car in gear. Her cheeks ached from smiling.

When they reached the outskirts of the city, Dea turned off the highway and onto local roads with no clear sense of where they were going. Houses clumped together, like water beading into a narrow stream: a blur of dingy white Cape Cods and low-rent trailers and patchy yards and garages fitted with
old basketball nets. Connor spotted another sign, this one handmade on poster board, propped against a telephone pole:
RUMMAGE SALE!! 249 WARREN, RIGHT ON ROUTE 9. SPORTING EQUIPMENT GOLF CHINA TOYS KITCHEN TOASTERS.

“Let's stop,” Connor said.
“Maybe I'll find an old toaster.”

“You want a toaster?” she said.

Connor leaned over.

“Listen to me, Dea,” he said solemnly, like he was about to recite a pledge. “You can never, ever, have too many toasters.”

She laughed. “Freak,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said, still smiling, touching his fingers to an imaginary
hat
.

A dozen folding tables, the kind found in school cafeterias and at cheap weddings, were set out on the lawn in front of 249 Warren. Behind one of them,
a girl a few years younger than Dea sat slumped in a lawn chair, punching her iPhone with a finger. Two barefoot kids made circles around the lawn, shrieking, smacking around a Wiffle ball.
An overweight woman, sweating through her dark T-shirt, was manning a cash box and periodically yelling at them to stop. A dozen people, mostly women, were picking through plastic bins filled with old lamps and lunchboxes, picture frames and plastic toys, with the same attentiveness of children searching the beach for the best seashells.

“Jackpot,” Connor said, gesturing toward one of the tables, where two rusted toasters were wedged next to an old microwave and a grimy coffee pot.

Dea felt a quick lift of happiness, like the soft rise of a moth's wings in her stomach.

She loved rummage sales—the strangeness of things grouped together that didn't make sense: children's clothes next to old smutty paperbacks next to kitchen equipment next to lawn mowers, like a long and glorious sentence full of mixed metaphors.
She'd always liked to imagine belonging to a family that dug through its closets and basement and garage once a year, and carted up all the broken and stained and useless things, expelled them like a disease.
Dad would complain about giving up his golf clubs; Mom would point out he never played. Little sister and brother would refuse to give up a beloved toy, even though it had long been retired to the bottom of a mothball-smelling trunk, underneath the winter sweaters.

If Dea and her mom had a rummage sale, practically everything they owned would fit in a single bin.

Connor pretended to be fascinated by the toasters, hamming it up to make Dea laugh and asking the heavy woman—who had succeeded in wrestling away the Wiffle ball from her younger children, and was trying to compel them to go wash up for dinner—questions about whether the toasters could be counted on to make toast crusty or just crunchy.

“Both. Neither. Whatever you want,” she said, pushing her hair from her eyes with a wrist.

Dea picked a bin at random and began flipping through it, sifting through the kind of miscellany that accumulated at the bottom of kitchen junk drawers: coins, scissors, unopened cans of rubber cement. She found a knitted potholder shaped like a hen, soft and often handled, and she wondered briefly whether she should pocket it, use it as a door to get into the fat woman's dreams. But in the end she dropped it and moved on.

The next bin was full of random housewares: old whisks and lightly stained tablecloths, bronze candlesticks and a snow globe featuring a figurine of a topless girl in a grass skirt, who wiggled her hips as the snow came down. Hawaiian vacation, she decided, or maybe Florida. The mom had always hated it, and had finally convinced the dad to trash it, or had done it behind his back.
She's topless, Don. What message are we sending the kids?

She shoved aside a tablecloth and froze. All of a sudden, she felt like she did in those floundering moments of dark and cold when she was fighting her way into someone's dream—as if she were falling, weightless, into nothing. For several long seconds, her heart didn't beat at all.

Two identical cheap laminate picture frames were stacked together at the bottom of the bin. Her father's smile beamed up at her from both of them, his teeth dentist-white above his red polo shirt. His dog was turned partly away from the camera, looking almost apologetic.

An advertisement. A stock photo used to sell cheap plastic frames.
Man Posing with German Shepherd.
How had she never seen it before?

The world came back in a blast of noise and heat. She could smell the bubble gum the girl with the iPhone was chewing, the booze-breath of the man rifling through an assortment of cutlery next to her, charcoal smoke on the air, sweat. She was going to be sick.

What had Miriam said when Dea had asked her what Dad's dog was named?

I don't remember.
Then:
Daisy, I think.

She thought of the other things her mother had told her
over the years, vague references to her father's importance, to his severity, to his sense of duty. Nothing specific—but ideas, suggestions that Dea had clung to for years, trying to wring meaning from them.

Lies. All lies.

“Find anything good?” Connor was behind her. She dropped the photos quickly, and shoved the tablecloth on top of them, as if they needed to be smothered.

“No,” she said. Little spots of color flickered in the edges of her vision. Her heart had lost its rhythm entirely. “I need to go.”

Connor's face got worried. “Is everything okay?”

“Fine.” She couldn't stand to look at him. She started speed-walking toward the car. “I just have to get home, that's all.”

Connor caught up to her quickly. His legs were much longer than hers. For a moment, he was quiet. “Did something happen?”

“I told you, no.” More seconds when her heart cut out totally, like a song interrupted by a power outage. Then a sudden flare and it was pounding high in her throat.

“Because you seemed happy, and then all of a sudden—”

“You don't know me,” she said. She knew she was acting like a crazy person, but she didn't care. She
was
a crazy person. It was genetic, inherited. All lies. He might as well know it. “You don't know whether I'm happy or not.”

That made him shut up. They drove back to Fielding, all one hundred and thirty-two miles, in silence.

The light was long gone by the time Dea reached Connor's house. Through the windows, she could see his dad and stepmom moving around the dining room table, clearing away boxes, occasionally stopping for a kiss. There was a tight belt of fury across her chest.

“Listen.” Connor spoke for the first time since they left the yard sale. “If I did something to, I don't know, piss you off—”

“You didn't.” She willed him out of the car, sick with jealousy, sick with guilt. It wasn't his fault. Obviously, it wasn't.

“All right.” Connor sounded
tired, or maybe disgusted. He got out of the car without another word—
see you later
or
that was fun
or
thanks for the tour—
and at the last second she had to
force herself not to call out after him.

She jerked the car into her driveway, climbed out, and slammed the door so hard it rattled. Good. She hoped the whole piece of shit fell apart. An illusion on top of an illusion.

It took her a few tries to get the key into the first lock. Her fingers were shaking, her heart still doing its jerky dance in her chest: she pictured valves opening and shutting desperately like the mouth of a dying fish. She slammed the front door, too.

“Dea? Is that you?” her mom called out, as if it could be anyone else.

Thick as thieves,
Miriam always said
,
putting her face right up to Dea's, nose to nose—practically mirror images.

She'd been lying forever.

“
I didn't think you'd be out so late. Did you remember to lock the door?” Miriam was sitting in the rented living room, on a rented leather sofa, listening to music on the crappy rented stereo. She straightened up when she saw Dea's face. Her mug of tea had left rings on the rented coffee table. They might as well just be renting space on this planet. “Dea? Is everything okay?”

The photograph of the man who was supposed to be Dea's father was sitting on the mantel above the defunct fireplace. Every time Dea and her mom moved, Miriam made a big show of swaddling the photograph, safe, at the bottom of her suitcase.
So it won't break,
she always said. And then, when they got to their new place, still smelling of paint and plaster or maybe of the old tenant, like cat urine and burnt coffee, she removed it carefully again, untucking it like a baby from a diaper.
Do you want to find a place to put Dad, Dea?

Dea was across the room before she knew she was moving.
She grabbed the picture from the mantel.

“Dea?” her mom repeated. Then, more sharply, when she saw what was in her hands: “Dea.”

“Tell me about this photo, Mom,” Dea said, struggling to keep her voice steady.

Miriam's eyes went wary, watchful, like the eyes of a wild animal when you get too close.
“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I want to know the story. Where were you?”

“
Oh.” Her mother pronounced the word exactly.
Oh
. If she were smoking, a perfect ring would be on its way
to the ceiling. “It was a long time ago.”

“What were you wearing?” she said. “Whose idea was it to pose?”

Miriam's hand fluttered to her hair, then returned to her lap
.
“It was your father's idea, I think. Really, I can't remember. . . .”

“Why this picture, and only this picture?” White spots were eating the edges of her vision and her heart was stopping for whole blank seconds, stretches of silence when her body hung, suspended, between alive and not. One time when Dea hadn't walked a dream for a month she felt just like this; she collapsed in the bus as she stood up to get off at her stop. She was hospitalized for two days and got better only after she stole a nurse's crucifix and pushed into a dream, hot and disorganized, of hospital rooms and babies crying behind every door
.

“Your father didn't like photographs,” her mother said. There was an edge to her voice now. “I don't understand the point of all these questions.”

“The point, Mom, is that you're a liar.” The words came out in a quick rush and left Dea feeling queasy—like throwing up
when you really didn't want to. “This isn't my dad. This isn't anyone. This is some random picture of some cheesy model you found in some cheesy discount store.”

For a second Miriam stared—white-faced, almost sullen. Then she cleared her throat and folded her hands on her lap, one on top of the other.

“All right,” she said calmly. That was the worst: how calm she was. Dea desperately wished her mother would yell. Then she could yell too, do something with the anger that was clawing its way into her throat. “You got me.”

Just those three words.
You got me.

Before Dea could regret it, she hurled the photograph across the room. Her mom screamed. The glass shattered. The frame thudded to the ground.

“God, Dea.” Now her mom
was
shouting. “Jesus. You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

“You. Lied. To. Me.” Dea could barely get the words out.

“I had to.” Miriam sounded impatient, as if Dea was the one being unreasonable. “There are things you don't understand, Dea. I've told you over and over. . . . There are things you'll never understand. . . .” She turned away. “And it wasn't all a lie. Not all of it. Your father was—is—a very powerful man.”

Dea ignored that part. More lies, probably, to make her feel better. “Oh yeah?” She crossed her mind. “So who is he? Some big shot lawyer? Some random guy you screwed?”

“Odea Donahue.” Her mom's voice got very quiet. Dea knew she had gone too far, but she couldn't stop.

“I don't even know my real last name. Maybe Brody Dawes was right about you,” she blurted out. “Maybe all those people
in Arizona were right.”

Her mom flinched, as if Dea had reached out and slapped her. But it was too late to take the words back so Dea just stood there, breathing hard, fighting the desperate open-shut feeling in her chest, pressing down the guilt.

Her crush on Brody Dawes had ended when, halfway through sixth grade, she was shocked to hear Brody say her name. For a second, she nearly fainted from joy. Then she realized what he was saying.
Donahue's mom's a whore. She gives it out in the parking lot of the Quick-E-Lube
. No one could figure out how Dea's mom was making her money that year—she'd been laid off at the insurance office—and the rumor had spread quickly. It was a small town.

Miriam opened her mouth, then closed it again. Her whole face was like a scar: pinched and white. “Go to your room,” she said, forcing the words out. Dea was grateful for the excuse. She couldn't stand to look at her mom anymore.

Upstairs, Dea tried once again to slam the door, to make a big statement, but the house was old and its joints swollen and instead she had to lean into the door just to get it to close. Toby looked up, blinking, from his position right in the middle of her pillow.

She lay down on the bed and let herself cry, feeling sorry for herself about everything, even the fact that Toby didn't move or lick her face, and instead just sat there purring like a motor on her pillow.

Practically, she knew it changed nothing. She'd never had a dad. But at least she'd been able to pretend. She had studied his image and cut-and-pasted it into memories so he was there, in
the background, watching her tootle along on her three-wheeler in a cul-de-sac in Georgia; beaming from the front row when she won a spelling bee in second grade in Virginia; nodding with approval while she flew down a soccer field in New Jersey, the one and only time she had been stupid enough to join a sports team. She'd been Photoshopping her past, tweaking it, aligning it just a little more closely with normalcy.

Why would her mom lie—why would her mom spend years lying—unless her real father was horrible, a criminal or a drug addict or someone who trafficked kiddie porn? Unless Miriam didn't know herself. Dea had never seen her mom with a guy except for in Georgia, but that didn't mean anything. She remembered plenty of nights she'd woken, thinking she heard the muffled sound of the front door closing, as though her mom had been out and just reentered. And her mom spent hours out of the house every day, working shit jobs, and would still show up sometimes with wads of cash, take Dea on a shopping spree to the local mall, spend three, four hundred bucks, like it was nothing.

She felt cold and her head hurt, as it always did when she cried, like she'd somehow snotted out her brains. She shook her bag out on her comforter—bad idea, it was full of old coins and petrified pieces of gum, lint balls and crumpled receipts and, mysteriously, some sand—looking for a pack of tissues her mom always stole from drug stores while they were waiting to pay. (That was another thing about Miriam—Dea didn't feel like thinking of her as Mom anymore—she stole. Stupid things, little things, but still.)

Connor's iPhone had somehow ended up in her bag. She must have grabbed it and shoved it automatically into her bag
when they'd stopped at the rummage sale. She reached for it slowly, as if it were a grasshopper that might bound away if startled. Phones made great doors. Pictures, texts, music—all of it was
personal
. Using his phone to walk would be like opening up his brain.

She knew she should go over to his house right away to return it, but she also knew she wouldn't be able to face him. Not yet. For the first time, she realized how shitty she'd been to him on the drive home. He was the first person who'd been nice to her in forever, and she'd totally screwed it up.

She swept the junk from her bed back into her bag, slapping the comforter to shake off some of the dirt. She shoved Toby over and he got up, yawning, before settling down again six inches from where he'd last been sitting. Then she turned off the lights and got under the covers, shorts and T-shirt and bra still on, not even bothering to wash her face or brush her teeth. She couldn't face going out into the hall, in case her mom decided to come upstairs. And she definitely wasn't going to eat dinner, even though she was starving. She hadn't eaten anything since the milkshake at the Railroad Diner in DeWitt.

Instead she lay in the dark, clutching Connor's iPhone, imagining it was a line that tethered her to him. She must have lain there in the darkness for at least an hour before she felt it—a softening of the boundaries of her body, and an opening, as though her bed had become a hole and she was dropping, or she was the hole and the world was dropping toward her. For a moment that could have been seconds or minutes or longer, she felt nothing but swinging, as if she wasn't a person any longer but just sensation and vertigo. This was the in-between space,
an awful space, untouched by thought, where nothing could exist. From the time she had started walking she had been terrified that one day she would get stuck here.

Then there was a parting, as of a curtain, and Dea felt a soft sucking pressure on her skin and suddenly she
had
skin again, and ribs and lungs expanding inside of them. She came out of the dark like surfacing after being underwater and she was in. She'd made it.

She was in Connor's dream.

She was standing in an empty apartment. She recognized it right away as a hastily constructed overstructure, not an element of the dream, exactly, but Connor's instinctive response to her intrusion. The details weren't filled in. The furniture was missing, and there were soft petals of plaster drifting from the ceiling, as though the whole place were in danger of collapse. The windows were missing, too, although as she approached, panes grew up out of the empty sills; the glass knitted itself together elegantly, like ice forming over a pond. He was trying to keep her out.

She estimated she was on the third or fourth floor: across the way, she could see four- and five-story apartment buildings, wedged together, and lights in several windows. Christmas music was piping from somewhere, a tinny sound, like the music that gets played in Hallmark card stores. Chicago. She knew it right away. She could
feel
it, could feel it in the cold air that made the glass chatter ever so slightly and see it in the wind, which spiraled a plastic bag down the block and made the street signs sway.

Below her, a Lotto sign was blinking in a deli window.
Colored Christmas lights dangled limply from its blue awning. It was dusk—there was a faint red smear on the horizon, like a small cut in the fleshy clouds knitted across the sky—and the light had a strange charcoal quality, like a drawing that had gotten smudged. Then she realized it was snowing. But the flakes were dirty, gray looking, almost like ash.

She wondered where Connor was. She assumed he would appear soon on the street, blowing into his hands, maybe, or trying to catch a snowflake on his tongue when he thought no one was looking, and was surprised when instead he appeared in the window of the apartment directly across from her. She ducked quickly. She counted to thirty before she risked peeking over the windowsill again. He was gone. Instead, she could see a brown-haired woman—his mom? Not his stepmom, definitely—hanging ornaments on a Christmas tree. The room was warm looking, practically glowing, and Dea had a momentary suspicion that she was
supposed
to be serving as witness to this: to the perfection of it, the completeness. That Connor knew she was there, somehow, and wanted her to see. But she dismissed the idea just as quickly.

Before she could second-guess what she had come to do, and decide it was a really fucking stupid idea to break the rules, she found the stairs leading down to the street level. Her footsteps were very loud, as they often were in dreams: Connor's mind was too focused. He was zeroing in on the room, on his mom, on the ornaments. There weren't neighbors to shout or cars to honk or babies to cry.

Outside, it was a dream kind of cold: it didn't hurt, didn't knock Dea's breath from her chest or make her hands swell and
stiffen. This, too, was because of Connor's focus. He wasn't putting enough energy into the world outside of his apartment. Her feet crunched on the accumulating snow as she jogged across the empty street. She kept glancing up at his window, paranoid that he might look outside and see her again.