Dreamland (5 page)

That would be very bad. That was majorly against the rules. And even though she was technically,
technically
, about to break the rules, she didn't see how this would hurt. He wouldn't know she was responsible.

She stopped in front of the deli, stretched onto her tiptoes and curled her fingers around one end of the Christmas lights. One sharp pull, and they were down, blinking in her hand. She would have to hurry. She had no idea how long this dream would last. Any second, it might morph into something else, and she might find herself on a battlefield or in the middle of an ocean.

She knelt. Moisture seeped into her jeans. It gave her a small thrill. She loved the way Connor's unconscious mind expanded, reacted to her presence, pushed back and made things difficult.

It took her a while to get the Christmas lights just right. The wires were stiffer than she'd expected, and in the end she had just enough material to work with. She straightened up, her knees now aching and her shoulders sore. She imagined Connor moving to the window again and seeing the words she'd written out in blinking letters, nestled in all that gray snow.

I'm sorry
.

She woke up to simulated church bells, one of her mom's favorite clocks sounding dolorously through the house. Sunday. The down part of the wave. The shore was hurtling toward her—Monday, seven thirty a.m., first bell—and she couldn't do anything to stop it.

Overnight, the seasons had shifted. Summer was gone. Rain was pounding the window, as if it were trying to get in, pasting blackened leaves against the glass like flattened palms. Dea could hear the wind, like the distant whistle of a teakettle, and the air was cold. The shimmer of gold was washed out of the fields, replaced by a dull, flat monochrome, a wet mulch-y
color. When she went to the window, she could see Connor's dad make a quick dash from the front door to the car, sloshing through puddles, holding a paper over his head as a makeshift umbrella.

She pulled on jeans and her favorite sweatshirt, which she'd had since Chicago—even though there were now two fat holes at the elbows and a coffee stain by the hem—hoping it might serve as good luck. She finger-combed her hair. When she checked her reflection, she saw she looked good, rested and relaxed, and felt a brief moment of guilt. Sometimes she felt like a giant leech: she fed on other people's dreams.

She wasn't speaking to Miriam. She'd decided that, definitively, this morning. Since her mom was the primary person Dea talked to, it seemed like a drastic measure. But deserved. She didn't even want to
see
Miriam, but she was starving and she could already hear Miriam banging around in the kitchen, like she was trying to startle Dea into forgetting she was mad.

Dea's mom looked good, too—she looked as if she'd gained weight overnight. Her skin was smooth and her eyes were clear. Dressed in a big cashmere sweater and leggings and big socks, she looked like a model from a magazine about Healthy Mountain Living. She was almost through a plate of eggs. Dea knew that meant that Miriam had walked a dream the night before—her mom never ate in the mornings unless she had—and felt even more resentful. After their fight, after Dea had called her out on being a fraud, it was a direct reminder of how screwed up everything was.

Of how screwed up she, Dea, fatherless dream-walker, was.

“Dea?”

Dea didn't answer. She banged the cabinets loudly when she got her cereal, which she ate plain, shoveling it into her mouth with a serving spoon.

“Don't you want some milk with that?” Silence. “I can make you some eggs. Why don't I make you some eggs?” Her mom sighed and rubbed her forehead. “Listen, Deedle”—an old nickname—“I know you're angry at me. But you have to know that everything I do—everything I've always done—is for your own protection. You have to believe that. I love you very much. You're all I have.”

Dea clattered her bowl in the sink.

“Come on, Dea.”

It was awful to ignore her mom but also gave her some sick pleasure—like when she flossed too hard and her gums bled a little. In the hall, she shrugged on a Windbreaker and stuffed her feet in an old pair of rain boots.

“You can't ignore me forever!” her mom called.

Dea stepped out onto the porch and slammed the door behind her. Her breath steamed in the air. Rain poured off the overhang, a solid sheet of water that distorted the view, and turned the world into a wash of browns and grays.

Strange how quickly the weather turned here, in this vast bowl in the middle of the country where nothing ever happened—like the sole reminder that the world was actually unpredictable and wild.

Seasons turn. Patterns get broken. People change.

She had successfully made it out of the house without saying a single word to her mother.

As soon as Connor opened the door, Dea saw that he'd forgiven her, and felt a small thrill. She wondered if in some dark corner of his unconscious, her message to him was still blinking:
I'm sorry.

“Jesus,” he said, as soon as he saw her. “Come in, before you drown.”

He shut the door and the noise of the rain was suctioned out. His house was cool and half-dark. Most of the lamps weren't set up yet, although several of them stood, encased in thin plastic, like alien birds. She stood awkwardly just inside the door, overly conscious of the fact that she was dripping onto the wood floor.

But Connor didn't seem to mind. “Is it always this nice in Fielding?” he said.

“Just be grateful it isn't snowing.” She crossed her arms and her Windbreaker squeaked, a tiny farting noise. She quickly uncrossed them. “Last winter, Toby got out and nearly froze in a drift. Thank God his ears are so long. Otherwise I would never have found him.”

Connor laughed. The noise was loud and echoed. Most of the furniture wasn't set up yet, and all the rugs were bundled in a corner. But Dea could imagine, already, the shape that the living room would take: the comfy leather couches, worn in from years of Super Bowl viewing parties and Sunday afternoon veg-out sessions; the big flat screen TV and the just-shabby-enough throw pillows and the family photos, clustered across every available surface, sprouting like weeds on side tables, mantels, bookshelves.

Dea reached into her bag and took out Connor's iPhone. She couldn't look at him. “Here. I must have grabbed it accidentally.”

“Hey, thanks. I was about to put out an Amber Alert.” Connor was wearing track pants and a soft-looking T-shirt. It occurred to Dea that he was wearing his sleep clothes. That she had gotten him out of bed. Then she thought about
being
with him in bed and immediately had to think of something else. Ice cubes. Poison ivy. Heat rash. “Listen, about yesterday . . .”

“That's why I came by, actually,” she jumped in. “I wanted to apologize.”

“You don't have to,” he said.

She already had, of course. But she plunged on, “I do. I'm sorry. I freaked out.” Then, without planning the words before she was speaking them: “My dad loved rummage sales. We used to go, when I was little.” The lie was immediate and convincing. She latched onto it, coaxed it into life. “I guess sometimes I just get . . . overwhelmed.”

“What happened to him?” Connor asked.

“He died.” She had a bad taste in her mouth, like the lie had soured there. But she dismissed the feeling of guilt. Her dad probably was dead. Might as well be, whoever he was.

“I'm sorry,” Connor said quietly. He reached out and touched her arm. “My mom died, too.” The words came out kind of strangled, as if he wasn't used to saying them. Dea thought of the pretty woman in his dream, stringing lights on a Christmas tree.

The idea flashed: now they had something in common. The second she thought it, she felt ten times worse. What kind of fucking person was she?

“I'm sorry,” she echoed.

“Thanks.” For a second, Connor just stood there, awkwardly fiddling with his phone, as though verifying it still worked. He
looked so cute in his track pants, and Dea couldn't think of a single thing to say that wasn't stupid. But then Connor looked up. “So . . . you want a tour or something?”

“Are you trying to pay me back for yesterday?” she asked.

He smiled, and his face did that puzzle-piece-rearranging thing again.
Click
,
click
,
click
, and it was perfect. “I can't promise you Ohio's largest corn maze,” he said. “But I can promise you an excellent view of a whole lot of boxes.”

“Sounds great,” she said, happy for the excuse just to stay a little longer.

They moved through the downstairs, which was big, and seemed even bigger with hardly any furniture. Everywhere, Dea saw signs of a normal family growing out of the soft, mulch-y boxes, the way mushrooms sprout from dirt. And the more she saw, the more she wished that what she'd said about her dad was true; and the more she wished it, the more she could imagine it. Her dad. A lawyer. No—a doctor. A cardiologist. Flattened by a heart attack one day. Ironic. He shouldn't have worked so hard, but he just loved saving other people.

Connor took her from room to room, showing off random features of his home, acting as if Dea were an interested buyer and he was a broker, and making up ridiculous terms like “scrolled spigoting” and “twentieth-century post-modernist classicism” to describe the sink and the toilet. In the kitchen, he actually showed off the inside of the refrigerator, which so far contained nothing but milk, several Chinese takeout containers, and three family-size bottles of ketchup.

“What's with the ketchup?” Dea asked. The house phone had started ringing—a shrill, startling sound—but Connor
ignored it. “You preparing for Armageddon?”

“You can
never
have too much ketchup,” he said. “I think that's written in the Constitution somewhere.”

“Hmmm. I don't remember that part from history class.”

The phone stopped ringing, but a second later the voice mail kicked on, making Dea jump.

“Hello,”
a woman's voice said; amplified by the speakers, her voice seemed to be coming from several places at once,
“this is Kate Patinsky again, from the graduate school of criminal justice at Howard Jay University. I've tried several times to reach—”

Connor practically leapt across the room and punched off the answering machine. “Courtesy call,” he said breathlessly. “I keep telling my dad and stepmom we should just chuck the phone out the window.”

“Where
are
your parents?” she thought to ask. They left the kitchen and started up the stairs to the second floor.

“Church,” Connor said. Even though he was walking ahead of her, Dea could sense the eye roll in his shoulders.

“You got off the hook?” she said. Everyone in Fielding went to church, at least on Christmas and Easter. Everyone but Dea and her mom.

“I don't believe in God.” Connor had reached the top of the stairs and he turned around to look at her. His face was in shadow, but she could tell he wasn't smiling.

“You believe in ghosts, but you don't believe in God?” She tried to make a joke out of it. She didn't know whether she believed in God—but the way he looked, with his face carved out of darkness, and his hand gripping the banister, made her suddenly uneasy. “‘There are more things on heaven and earth' . . . ?”

“I don't believe in heaven, either.” For a second, his voice sounded alien. Then he reached out and turned on a light, and his face reappeared. Now he was smiling. “Plus, I like sleeping in on Sundays.”

She thought of Connor asleep, his legs tangled in navy blue flannel sheets—and a quiet snow falling in his dreams.

“Welcome to Casa Connor,” he said, pushing open a door at the end of the hall. She followed him into his bedroom: a small, pretty room with three big windows that would let in lots of light, when there was any light to let in. The rain drummed against the glass like thousands of tiny feet making a run for something better.

There were boxes heaped on the ground. One of them was filled with old sports trophies and swim team medals, another with video games and wires and a few water-warped books. Clothes were piled on the desk—mostly balled-up sweatshirts and jeans, from what she could tell—and the room smelled like new paint and pine trees. Dea nearly burst out laughing when she saw navy blue flannel sheets. Maybe, somehow, walking his dreams had brought them closer. Maybe she understood him, at least a little bit.

The idea came to her, immediate and overpowering: she needed to walk his dreams again. Tonight. As soon as possible.

But she had already disturbed the course of his dream—touched something, made something. Walking a person's dream more than once was majorly against the rules.

Who cares?
a little voice in her head spoke up
. Why does it matter?

“What's so funny?” Connor flopped down onto the bed, leaning back on his elbows. Dea suddenly realized that she was
alone with a boy—a cute boy—in his bedroom. She had no idea whether this was a thing—whether he'd asked her up here for a reason. What would Gollum tell her to do? Probably to go kamikaze-style on him, hurl herself into his arms and try to kiss the cute off his face.

Instead, she stood, stiff-backed and awkward, by the door.

“Nothing,” she said quickly. “I like it.”

“Thank you.” Connor actually looked pleased.

“I should probably go home, though,” she said, and then didn't know why she'd said it: because there was a pause that went on a fraction of a second too long; because she didn't know whether to keep standing or sit on the bed. Because she wished she could slip into his dream and move around in safety and write a new note: I want to kiss you.

“Really?” Connor sat up. Now that she'd looked at him longer, she decided his chin was her favorite part of his face: it was a chin that no one would mess with. “You don't want to watch a movie or something?”

“A movie?”

“Yeah.” Connor smiled. “Popcorn, couch, a movie. Sunday classic.”

“All right.” Dea thought about her mom, who would probably be pacing the house, peeking out the windows, waiting for Dea to return. Planning her next lie, and what she would say to get Dea back on her side.

“Awesome.” Connor stood up. “I don't have any popcorn, though. We'll have to pretend. I'll even buy you a pretend soda.”

“How chivalrous,” she said. “But I'm a modern girl. We can go dutch.”

They watched an action film, sitting side by side on the couch, their thighs just pressing together. She couldn't understand one of the leads, who had an Irish accent, and couldn't follow the plotline—but she decided it was the best movie she'd ever seen. When Connor's dad and stepmom came home, Connor introduced her as his friend. The word sounded sweet to her, like a long, sunny dream about a picnic.

Before she left, she pretended to get lost on the way to the bathroom and pocketed one of Connor's swim medals. Just in case.