Dreamland (7 page)

She didn't know if she was angry or not. She couldn't think straight.

“I won't go,” she managed to say.

“Yes, you will,” Miriam said matter-of-factly. She paused with her hand on the doorknob. For a second, Dea thought she might apologize. But she just said, “Your suitcase is in the attic,” and passed into the hall, closing the door behind her.

Dea sat in her bed for a long time. She heard the front door close and the locks turn, one after another. She heard the growl of the car engine. She heard Toby, mewling to be fed. She didn't have the energy to move. She didn't have the energy to cry.

Eight o'clock. Toby yowled a little louder, and clawed Dea's door. Thin shafts of sunlight, fine as silk, passed between her curtains. It was going to be a nice day. She, Connor, and Gollum were supposed to go to Lesalle to check out the Fright Festival, a cheesy Halloween-themed carnival that would last all the way until Thanksgiving. Connor had promised to win them each a stuffed goblin from one of the shoot-'em-up booths.

By nine o'clock, she'd made a decision.

She got out of bed. Toby was still mewling outside the door, but she ignored him. She didn't have that many clothes, and many of the clothes she did own were scattered across the bedroom floor. In both closets there were maybe a dozen sweaters and ratty thrift store sweatshirts, a few skirts she never wore, and a dress her mom had given her a few Christmases ago, which was shaped like an inverted martini glass and had beaded skulls embroidered all over it. She'd never had anywhere to wear it.

She could have worn it to prom. Maybe Connor would have asked her officially, like as a couple.

She pulled down all the clothes, and the hangers, too, for good measure. She dumped them all on the floor, kicking a pair of jeans under her bed, tossing a sweatshirt over the radiator. In the hall, she nudged Toby out of the way with a foot.

She hardly ever went into her mom's room. Whenever she did, she felt like she was seeing the stage lights come on after a play, and suddenly noticing all the bolts and screws keeping the whole thing together: a sense of awe and also of embarrassment, because the deception had been so easily believed. The room was spotless, as always. Two clocks hung side by side above the headboard and clucked their tongues at Dea. Two suitcases, already half-filled, were open on the bedroom floor. The closets were empty. The bed was stripped, the comforter rolled back to reveal the mattress.

She inverted the suitcases onto the floor, kicking and hurling the neatly folded clothing into various corners of the room. She pulled the comforter and pillows off the bed. She shook out the contents of her mom's vanity drawer—used tubes of cream, nail files, sample perfumes from department stores—onto the
rug. In the bathroom, she found two plastic ziplock bags filled with toiletries. She squeezed the toothpaste all over the sink and uncapped an old tube of her mom's lipstick.

I'm not going
, she wrote on the bathroom wall, where a mirror had once hung.

Feeling slightly better, she went downstairs and fed Toby. Instead of returning the cat food to the pantry, she shook the bag out all over the kitchen floor. Toby watched her, uncertain, crouched over his bowl. She knew she was being immature, but she didn't care. If her mom wanted to leave, fine. But Dea was sure as hell not going to make it any easier for her.

“Go nuts,” she said to Toby, once the kitchen floor was covered with a surface of hard brown pellets, so it was impossible to walk without crunching. She didn't bother to throw out the empty bag—just tossed it in a corner. The kitchen clock sounded nine-thirty, dinging shrilly, as if in protest. For good measure, she wrenched it off the wall, tossed it onto the kitchen counter, and smashed it to pieces with an old meat tenderizer that had been abandoned by the house's previous tenants. It let out a faint whine before it died completely, like something alive.

Feeling all the way better, she went upstairs and took a long shower. It took her a while to sort through the clothing on her floor to find her favorite pair of jeans, a thin T-shirt, and an oversize cashmere sweater with leather patches at the elbows, which always made her feel like she should be living on a real farm and not just an imitation of one.

Outside, it was cold, clear, and very bright: one of those days that looks like a child's drawing, the sun shooting daggers at the ground out of a radiant blue sky. She jogged across the road, her
breath steaming in the air, pushing aside a sudden memory of Connor's nightmare—the cold, the snow, the men with no faces.

Connor was shirtless when he opened the door, and wearing only a towel around his waist. She was momentarily too distracted to speak. He smelled like soap, even from a distance of three feet, and his chest was beaded with water. She thought about the lights she'd arranged in the snow of his dream:
Kiss me
.

“You're early,” he said. He didn't look like he'd been kept awake by nightmares. He looked the same as he always did—easy, smiling. Maybe a little more tired than usual, but not much.

She knew she was early, and she knew he would comment on it, and she'd planned a few funny responses in her head:
Fried dough is a great motivator
and
The Ferris wheel waits for no man.
The kind of things that the lead girl would say in a romantic comedy.

But confronted with Connor in a towel she just said, “I know,” and tried very hard not to look at him.

“Give me ten minutes.” He stepped back to let her inside.

She'd been over to Connor's house a few times—because they were friends, she reminded herself, never tiring of the way the words sounded in her head—and every time it was closer to perfect: carpets unrolled, lamps perched prettily on side tables, potpourri poured into wooden bowls, filling the house with a faintly spicy smell. She never got tired of admiring how much Connor's family owned, how much they'd accumulated together. She thought again of her father—her real father, not the stranger in the red polo shirt—and wondered whether he was somewhere out there, and living in a house like Connor's, filled with coffee tables and pretty statuettes, candlesticks and porcelain vases. For one delirious second, she imagined tracking
him down and showing up on his doorstep, imagining he'd be happy to see her.

Her mom would be so pissed.

Connor went to get dressed and Dea waited in the living room and looked at the family photos, which had been newly set out, partly so she wouldn't have to think about Connor naked upstairs. There were pictures of Connor at every age—one where he was grinning, practically toothless, in front of an enormous cake with two candles on it; one where he was standing, scrawny and proud, in front of a pool with a medal strung around his neck—and several photos of Connor's dad and stepmom and various other old people Dea assumed were relatives or friends.

In the very back of the arrangement of photographs, Dea spotted a photo of an infant wrapped in a blue blanket decorated with giraffes. She felt a quick shock of recognition: she'd seen that pattern before. She'd seen it in Connor's dreams, on the curtains in one of his windows. She picked up the photograph, squinting.

“That's my brother.” Connor was behind her; she hadn't heard him approach. He plucked the photograph out of her hands and replaced it on the table.

“What happened to him?” Dea asked.

He looked faintly annoyed. “Dead,” he answered, as if it were obvious.

Dea thought of the screams that had chased her out of Connor's nightmare, and felt suddenly cold. “I'm sorry.”

“
I'm
sorry,” Connor said, and then sighed, looking away from her. “I just don't really like to talk about it.”

“Okay,” she said. “I understand.”

Then he was easy again, all smiles. Sometimes that annoyed her about him—he was like water jumping over stones, all surface, too quick for her. He slung an arm around her shoulders. “Ready to get your ass kicked at bumper cars?”

“Dream on,” she said.

Connor and Dea met up with Gollum just outside the festival entrance. Gollum had been at the festival for an hour with her younger brothers, Richie and Mack, and had already won a small stuffed ghoul. Both Richie and Mack had had their faces painted: Richie, who was small and serious and had Gollum's triangular face, was a cat; Mack, who was older and bigger and a goofball, was a skeleton.

The carnival grounds were packed with people. Mud squelched underneath Dea's sneakers. The Ferris wheel loomed in the sky like the domed back of a monster. It was loud. The ancient rides creaked and groaned under the weight of their
passengers. Periodically, screams erupted, a constant rhythm that took on the quality of waves heard from a distance. The air smelled like smoke and meat and spun sugar. Connor kept a hand on Dea's lower back whenever the crowds got especially thick.

She wondered if her mom had returned home yet, then pushed the thought out of her mind. Deep down, she knew that if her mom insisted on moving, Dea would have no choice but to go with her. But Miriam
wouldn't
insist. Not when she knew how miserable it would make Dea.

Would she?

They ate hot dogs at a paint-splattered picnic table, enjoying the November sun, while Mack and Richie ran circles in the damp grass with kids costumed like vampires and demons, and Gollum explained her theories on the metaphorical significance of the Ferris wheel.

“It's all about the futility of ambition,” she said, stabbing the air with a plastic straw. “You try as hard as you can to get to the top, but you don't realize that striving will just topple you and bring you right down to the bottom.”

“So let me get this straight: you
don't
want to ride the Ferris wheel?” Connor struggled to keep a straight face.

Gollum sniffed. “I don't ride metaphors,” she said. “Too unstable.”

They played three rounds of zombie hunter, shooting fine sprays of water into wooden figurines fitted with targets on their stomachs. Connor won the first round. Mack beat him in the second. Dea was on her way to victory in the third, but Connor reached out and started tickling her.

“No fair.” She laughed, breathless, as he raised his arms and declared himself the victor. “You cheated.”

“I strategized,” he corrected her. For a second they were close—so close she could see his individual lashes and streaks of green threaded through the brown of his eyes and the soft planes of his cheekbones. So close she was sure he would kiss her—there, in front of everyone.

“He's got a point, Donahue,” Gollum said, and the moment passed. Connor reached out and knuckled Dea's head, like she was his kid sister.

Happy. She was happy. She forgot about Connor's nightmare-visions, and her mom banging on her door saying
pack your stuff
, and the lies about her father. She forgot about anything except arcade games and the taste of sugar, the smell of corn dogs in the air, and Gollum chasing after Mack to keep him from rampaging Godzilla-style through the candy stall, and Connor's hand on her back. She wanted to extend the day, blow it up like a glass bubble that would keep them enclosed forever. Only now did she understand how lonely she'd been for years. It was like washing up on a shore and then realizing how close you'd been to drowning. She wanted to grip her happiness hard, like it was something solid, like if she didn't it would go away.

But time passed. The sun withered on the ground. It got colder. The crowd changed: parents hustled their children out to the parking lot, and Richie got cranky, and started crying when he didn't win at a darts game.

“That's my cue,” Gollum said, hauling Richie onto one hip. She was surprisingly strong for someone so thin. Dea guessed it came from working on a farm. “I'm going to head back before we
get to emotional Armageddon. Say bye, Richie. Say bye, Mack.”

Mack shadowboxed Connor in response. Richie buried his face in Gollum's shoulder and let out another wail. With an eye roll, Gollum disappeared into the crowd.

Leaving Dea and Connor together. Alone.

On a date
. Dea quickly forced away the thought.

A group of guys wearing football jackets from a rival high school, obviously drunk, wove through the crowd, jostling one another, competing over who could be loudest. Two girls with thick black eyeliner and boobs practically to their chins smoked cigarettes by the fence, and waited to get hit on.

The sun reached up a final arm before drowning behind the horizon. While Connor went to buy more tickets, Dea waited just outside the small bumper car rink, watching the random collision of vehicles, thinking about Toby escaping and how she might never have met Connor if he hadn't. Thinking life was like that: random collisions.

“Hey.”

Dea turned around and was shocked to see Morgan Devoe and Hailey Madison, who had never spoken to her once, who had never acknowledged her at all except to throw empty cans of soda at her head from the window of Tucker Wallace's truck. Hailey was chewing on a straw, watching Dea curiously, like she was an ancient artifact whose use Hailey was trying to determine.

“What do you want?” Dea said. She wasn't stupid. She knew they didn't want to chat, and she wanted them to leave before Connor came back.

Morgan Devoe was supposedly the prettiest girl in school.
Dea had never understood it. She had a wide face, blank as a dinner plate, and the dull eyes of a pig pumped full of tranquilizers. She always looked bored.

“You should be careful,” Morgan said, which wasn't what Dea had expected her to say. She leaned up against the fence next to Dea. She smelled like butterscotch and menthol cigarettes and alcohol. She was holding a cup. Dea wondered what was in it.

“What?” Dea said.

“Connor,” Hailey said, like it was obvious, which was how Hailey said everything.

“What about Connor?” Dea said. She felt like she'd stepped into a rehearsed act. Dea was the only one who didn't know her lines.

Morgan leaned closer. She was drunker than she'd first seemed. She put a sweaty hand on Dea's arm. “Aren't you worried he might go crazy again? Slit your throat when you're not paying attention?”

“What—what are you talking about?” Dea said.

Morgan gaped at her. “You don't know?” she said. She made a face at Hailey.

“She don't know,” Hailey drawled, and giggled, working her straw between her teeth.

“
Everybody
knows.” Morgan turned back to Dea. She smiled big, so Dea could see the gum in her mouth. “He killed his mom. His brother, too. Beat his mom's brains out, then shot his brother in the head the day before Christmas. He was, like, seven.”

“That's not true.” Dea wrenched her arm away from Morgan's
grip. “That's—that's insane.”

“Cooked up some bullshit story about some men who busted in and did it. It doesn't make sense though, does it?” Morgan's teeth were very white. “Nothing was stolen. What kind of robbery is that?”

Dea's stomach tightened. She was suddenly too hot. And nauseous.

“He was too young to go to trial,” Heather said. Her nails were painted hot pink, and had tiny decals of Playboy bunnies on them. “But everybody knows he did it. Some woman's even writing a book about it. Bet she'll call you soon, 'specially when she finds out Connor's your boyfriend. She's calling
everybody
.”

“Connor's not my boyfriend,” Dea said automatically, and then wished she hadn't. It made her sound ashamed of him. She remembered the message she'd heard on Connor's answering machine the first day she'd gone over to his house. Someone calling from a university . . . a school for criminal justice . . .

“Will Briggs says Connor was jealous of the baby. Just lost it one day and . . .
bam
.”

“Shut up.” Dea squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again. The girls were still there; still staring at her, swallowing back their fat, stupid smiles, sucking in their cheeks, waiting to burst out laughing the second she turned around. And she was on the verge of tears. She wouldn't cry in front of them. “It's not true. You're making it all up.”

“We're just looking out for you, Odea,” Morgan said, fake-nice. And before Dea could stop her or move or react, she'd licked a thumb and reached out and swiped Dea's cheek with her saliva. “That's for good luck,” she said, leaning close, breathing
hot on Dea's face. “You're going to need it.”

Then they were gone—asses bumping right to left, the smell of booze trailing them—and Morgan's spit was drying on Odea's cheek, and Dea was fighting the urge to cry. She wiped her face with a sleeve and took three deep breaths.

“I'm back.” Connor was fighting his way through the crowd, holding a fistful of tickets in the air. He faltered when he saw her face. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I'm okay.” It was stupid to let Morgan and Hailey get to her. They'd probably made the whole thing up. Connor hadn't killed anyone. Of course he hadn't. But she kept thinking of the faceless men and their black-hole mouths and the screaming. “Just not sure I'm up for bumper cars after all.”

“Chickening out, huh? I'll take it easy on you. I promise.” Connor reached out and touched her shoulder with two fingers, like he was afraid she'd break. “You sure you're okay?”

“I'm sure,” she said. She had a sudden memory of Connor's face, narrow and angry, appearing at the window. His mom stringing up ornaments behind him. Was there a baby crying somewhere in the apartment? How often did Connor dream about his family dying?

“Okay, no bumper cars,” Connor said. “But you can't punk out on the Ferris wheel. Especially now that we know it's a metaphor. You promised,” he added, before she could protest.

“All right,” she said. But evening had come and the magic of the day had been shattered.

Maybe, she thought, a move wasn't such a bad idea. She could get a clean start.

Then she realized that a teeny tiny part of her believed what
Morgan and Hailey had told her—that Connor had murdered his family. She felt an immediate rush of guilt. Connor was the nicest guy she'd ever met.

He was more than nice. He was amazing.

The Ferris wheel was old and the seats were narrow. Connor's thighs pressed against Dea's when they sat down; their elbows bumped when he looped his arms over the guardrail. She hadn't been on a Ferris wheel in ages and was surprised by the sudden lifting in her chest, the swooping sense of happiness and fear, as the seat began to rise, stopping every six feet while the operators collected tickets and admitted more passengers onto the ride.

Up and up, until Dea's swinging feet looked like a giant's, as if she could squash the small smudgy people on the ground. Until the whole scene looked like a child's toy, and she imagined Morgan and Hailey were just toys, too, little plastic models instead of people.

They were stopped at the very top of the Ferris wheel. The view made her breathless. Connor swung his feet, making the whole seat sway. He turned to face her. “You scared?”

“No,” she said, which was true. Funny how leaving the ground could change everything, make the whole world feel remote and small and insignificant. No wonder birds made the best harbingers. Even in dreams, they couldn't be contained.

“I'm glad I met you, Dea.” He was smiling. In the darkness, up here, she couldn't see the color of his eyes. “You're . . .”

“What?” They were close again. He had twisted around to face her.

“I don't know. Different.” Something changed in his face—a
nuance she couldn't have described, a definite switch.

“Connor,” she said suddenly, and she had not been planning to ask but she did, before she could stop herself. “What happened to your mom and little brother?”

He stopped swinging his feet. He stared at her. All the lightness in his face fell away—it was like watching a plaster model disintegrate.

And it was only then, when he turned away, that she realized with a sinking feeling that he'd been about to kiss her.

“Why are you asking me that?” He wouldn't look at her. His hands tightened on the safety bar.

He'd been about to kiss her. They'd crested the highest point of the circle and were descending now, into the bones of the scaffolding, under the shadow of other couples. “I just . . . I don't know. I was curious.”

“Did Patinsky get to you, too?” As they skimmed over the ground again, the noise of the carnival rushed at them like a physical force. “She's writing a book, you know. She says she just wants the truth. But she doesn't. No one does. No one gives a shit.” Connor's face passed temporarily into the light. “Did she tell you how I went psycho when I was a kid and bashed my mom's head in with a lamp? How I splattered her brains across the pillow?”

They were rising again and Dea's stomach was lurching. The shrieks from below were transforming into the screams from Connor's dream. “Connor—”

“No, no. Don't tell me. Let me guess. Then I took my dad's gun and put a bullet in my brother's brain. Just held it up to his little head.
Bam.
Who else could have done it, right? Who else
knew where the gun was kept?”

“Connor.” Dea's throat was so tight she could barely get out his name. “I'm sorry. I shouldn't have asked. I shouldn't have said anything.” He still wouldn't look at her. “Nobody . . . nobody
got
to me. I mean, I haven't spoken to anyone about you. I wouldn't.”

“Fuck you,” he said, but instead of sounding angry, he just sounded tired.

They sat in silence. Although their thighs were still touching, Dea felt as if he were a thousand miles away. She fumbled desperately for something to say.

“I'm leaving,” was what came out. “Moving again. My mom told me this morning.” He didn't say anything. They glided over the highest point of the Ferris wheel. Somewhere, out in the darkness, her mom was probably sweeping up the cat food, refolding her clothing. “I don't want to go. I'm sick of it—all the moving. How I never have a choice. But mostly I don't want to go because of you.” She hadn't been sure she'd be brave enough to say the last words, so she said them all in a rush, pushing them out on one long breath. “I . . . like you. A lot.”