In Nightmares We're Alone (32 page)

One night last winter as I left the school late at night, I passed the office as Julie Coughlin and Victor Van Burkem sat inside laughing about something I’d just missed. I waved to them and they waved back, and for the briefest of instants I thought I smelled sex, and it passed just as quickly.

This is Victor’s story as I know it, and this is Julie’s story as I know it. But this is neither Victor’s story nor Julie’s. This is their story through the prism of my story, as two side characters with little importance, the same way I am a side character in either of their stories.

I have often wondered whether Julie is an important character in Victor’s story, and whether Victor is an important character in Julie’s. But like all stories, it is unknowable except to them.

As recess ends and I exit the building, I glance through the office. Through the window I can see Victor sitting at his desk with Macie Giddings in front of him, trying to understand her, or perhaps trying to make her understand him. And as he glances up at me and Macie cranes her head to look back, I wonder about their stories.

Victor regards me with a twitch of his eyebrows, not displeased by my presence, but not having expected to see me today either. He is indifferent, perhaps because I am an uninteresting character in his story—that annoying woman who quotes great writers and thinks she knows everything because she is well read.

Macie rolls her eyes and turns away from me and I’m quite sure I’m a villain in her story.

We are each alone behind our eyes. We cannot truly connect. And no individual’s story is more legitimate than that of any other.

I consider going in. I consider trying to understand them. I could ask Macie to tell me about the doll in her story, and her mother, and why she’s scared. I could ask Victor why he takes off his ring when he drinks. I could try to be the deus ex machina in their stories who jumps in and resolves their woes.

But I don’t. I nod to them and leave the building.

That great thing—That Thing We Don’t Quite See—looms over us at all times.

Whether it is only my own mind that seeks to destroy me in my childhood home, or whether it is That Thing We Don’t Quite See, it is not something from which a person can run.

But every once in a while, when someone else does their best to share a little perspective, your own perspective can take on a little more detail.

On the front steps of the school, I get out my phone and call Casey back.

* * * * *

“Well, do your thing then. Talk to my dead husband and ask him what he needs to say to me.”

Casey Hart’s so-called office is what you’d expect from a man who claims to be a medium. He dims lights and lights candles, seats us around a table… I’m surprised I don’t see any talismans or a pentagram but it all feels set up to fool the uninspired.

In spite of it, I try to hold back judgment. He isn’t lying about his deteriorating body. One of his eyes is stuck shut and swelling and his hands are raw, scabbed-over flesh.

“I realize you’re a smart woman and skeptical about this stuff. I am too. I know it all looks ridiculous. It’s… I
feel
ridiculous. But I know what I’ve been seeing and I… I don’t know. If the dead are torturing me maybe it’s to get him to speak to you, so…”

“Just do it,” I say. “You’re a grown man. If I judge you, I judge you. Get it over with.”

He nods and shuts his eyes and it would be embarrassing to watch him if there wasn’t some part of me holding out hope.

“Arthur? Arthur, can you hear me? I’m with your wife. I… I don’t know if this is what you want, but I’m… I’m trying it on a hunch. Is there anything you have to say to her? Or to me, even?”

I notice I’m not breathing. One of my hands has tightened around my shirt and I’m searching the room for… for what?

What happened? How did I get here from three nights ago when I lectured Arthur in the car and asked him what was the harm in a few friendly, familial spirits.

“Arthur?” asks Casey again. “Anything at all. I saw you earlier. We spoke. I know you can hear me and I know you know I can hear you. If there’s anything you want to say to your wife you can do it through me. If there’s anything you want to say to anyone… I’m here to help you, Arthur. I’m here to help anyone who asks me. I just… I just need you to tell me what to do.”

He sits in silence with his head bowed. There’s something earnest about him, something I didn’t expect. It’s almost as if establishing a connection is more important to him than it is to me.

“Nothing?” I ask.

“No, I… I’m sorry. I don’t know what to tell you.”

I realize how badly I want to go. This isn’t my world. I thought I could learn something more about Arthur in a place from his life, but there’s nothing to be learned here. I met the medium, I saw the office, I can go.

Except that wasn’t all I came here for. No matter how hard it is to admit, the typewriter, the words on the chalkboard, the hairpin… I was hoping to find something here.

“Well,” I say, “you know how shy the dead are.”

“I don’t, actually. I don’t know anything anymore.”

I laugh a little. “Yeah. That’s about the size of it.”

For a second I wonder about Casey’s story. He’s young, but not that young. This isn’t his first brush with death. I wonder why he’d fall apart this badly for Arthur, how my husband got to play that important a role in his life.

I almost ask, but instead I turn for the door. I’ve let myself fall too far into this spook show. The world is not full of magic things. Our eyes just grow more weary.

“If he finds the words to say something to me you think I need to hear, you have my number.” I start to open the door.

“Wait!” shouts Casey. “Edna, are you seeing this?”

He’s gesturing to an empty doorway, but he’s sincere. Either he is sincere, or I was unfair to Arthur for believing this kid because he should be in pictures.

“He’s here! Arthur is here! Arthur, can you see your wife?”

There is madness in his eyes. He is stuck in his own mind, tormented by something the rest of us will never see nor understand. He is Macie Giddings. He is Arthur. He is Mom and Dad.

“I made the connection!” he screams. “You got taken away from your wife and I put you in a place where you can speak to her! Tell her what you never got to tell her in life!”

And now it seems clear to me why this visit felt worthless. Twenty-six years. Together every day. And Casey Hart is going to tell me what Arthur never did? There’s nothing. I can’t believe there’s anything.

“Then I’m crazy?” shouts Casey. “That’s all it is? Something that snapped loose in my mind? Schizophrenia? Ordinary, everyday psychosis?”

This seance isn’t for Arthur. Not
my
Arthur. This is for Casey.

An arm wraps around my side. A loving arm. Not where Casey is looking in the doorway, but here at my side. I can feel it, but I can’t see it. And after all these years I know that touch as Arthur’s. Then Dad’s from the other side. Mom’s kiss on my forehead.

Something clicks.

Perspective.

Julie Coughlin’s lost child.

Victor Van Burkem’s marriage.

Casey Hart’s… whatever.

It’s the same story for all of us. Different perspectives. Different details. But always the same story. Always the torture of seeing only one piece of the infinite puzzle. Seeing what others don’t and missing what others do. The struggle against aloneness.
 

Maybe that’s who
they
are. Everyone. Everyone who ever wondered about That Thing We Don’t Quite See.

“Yes!” shouts Casey. “Yes, I wonder, goddamnit! I wonder how to stop wondering!”

That pressure on my back. Arthur’s arm around me. I don’t know what to do for myself and I’m not sure I know what to do for Casey, but I think I see something clearly for the first time.

“Casey,” I make myself say, “it’s not the same Arthur. You knew Arthur and I knew Arthur, but they were two different Arthurs. This one is yours.”

His face turns to mine, tears streaking his face. “Can you see!?”

I shake my head no.

He turns his gaze back to the empty room and screams, first in terror and then in agony.

Then I do hear Arthur’s voice. His lips touch my ear as he whispers, “We are all alone… together.”

“Help me!” screams Casey. He curls up on the floor with his fingers laced over the back of his head and he howls and I expect him to stiffen, to lie there, dead of horror in the same way Arthur was.

Then his breath steadies and a quiet passes that lasts for ages.

Arthur’s voice in my ear whispers, “Come home.” And the pressure around my waist is gone.

“Help me,” Casey whispers again as I stand over him.

“I wish I knew how,” I tell him as I go to the door.

I don’t know if I found the answer here I was hoping for. Nor do I hate Casey Hart like I thought I might. I pity him, as I would like to pity everyone.

Everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

Before I leave, I say sincerely, “I’m sorry you’re hurting.”

* * * * *

They
do not give me peace.

I feel them around me as I move through the house, as I sit still, as I cry or scream or rage. But they tell me nothing. They answer no questions. They only let me feel them. They only grab out for me.

The typewriter sits still, with a blank sheet of paper in the carriage that I put there to make it simpler for them. I shout at them to speak to me. After an hour, as I lie on the floor shivering, as I feel them biding their time, preparing to take me, I realize they have no answers to give.

My phone rings. I want it to be an unknown number. I want it to be the person, the thing, that’s been writing on my board and typing on that old typewriter. But when I look at the ID it’s Ellen’s name that comes up.

My self-preservation instinct kicks in. This suffering, this battle with the mind, it’s all there is.

I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to leave this house. But whatever it is, my mind, my world,
them
,
they
won’t let me go. They’re stronger now. I will die within the same walls I was born.

I answer the phone. “Hello?” I try to make it sound casual. I try to hide the suffering from my voice. Sometimes I think that’s what we’re all doing all the time.

“Hi Edna. I just thought I should call to check on you.”

“Ellen,” I say. I have to pause. I can’t tell her anything I’m feeling. I won’t allow myself to speak a word of it to anyone. I cannot be the sick and crazy woman, go out playing the role in someone else’s story that Mom and Dad and Arthur went out playing in mine. “I need somebody here. I can’t be alone.”

“I’ll be right there,” says Ellen, almost like she’s making a show out of being understanding. But she can’t understand. She can never understand the half of it.

No one can.

That is the great tragedy of our individual lives.

No one can ever understand.

Period.

“We’re doctors!” Ellen said to me the day we graduated.

It was all that her life was about. School. Since she was a little girl, she told me, she dreamed of getting a doctorate. Other kids wanted to be astronauts and cowboys and firefighters and parents. Ellen just wanted a slip of paper that said she was smart. She just wanted the word ’Doctor’ at the beginning of her name.

But after all those years in school together, after I’d fallen behind in credits as the result of planning a wedding, when she could have graduated and achieved her dream a semester ahead of me, she deliberately held back on a few credits and stretched her time out for an extra semester so we could graduate together. She wanted us to have the experience at the same time. To achieve our dreams.

The problem was, it wasn’t my dream. I dreamed of holding a Pulitzer or a Nobel Prize. I dreamed of champagne galas, rubbing shoulders with celebrities, shaking hands with Steven Spielberg as he optioned the movie rights to my latest bestseller. I dreamed of interviews with famous journalists, seeing my name in headlines, my picture on magazines. I dreamed of sitting at typewriters in Parisian hotel rooms, smoking cigarettes with young French men and bantering in a language of which I still can’t speak a word.

The only part of that dream I ever achieved was the cigarettes.

When we stood there and collected our doctorates, smiled for photos with each other’s families, drank wine and talked about our futures, about the schools we hoped to teach in, her milestone meant more than mine. She’d done something she’d spent her whole life planning. I’d succeeded in laying the foundation for my failsafe. I’d hardly written a word of prose in the last eight years, but I was qualified for a job I’d never given a damn about.

That’s why in all the photos, Ellen’s smile looks so much broader than mine, and even though it’s the same future we’re looking toward, hers looks brighter. She had a dream and she let nothing stand in her way. I had a dream and abandoned it because the people in my life told me I should.

When Ellen comes to the house to sit with me, that’s all I can really think about. The fact that this woman is the only person left in my life and she got everything she ever set out to find. And here’s me. A sad old woman working to pay off debts she racked up trying to pay for a life she didn’t even want. A stupid woman who let laziness get in the way of becoming the person she wanted to be, trying only to please a few loved ones so they could be happy for a little while before they croaked and left her alone in a house full of bad memories.

If you look back at those pictures from the day we graduated, you can almost see today written in our eyes.

“You want to go out for some fresh air?” asks Ellen. “Walk around? Clear your head?”

I light a cigarette. “No.”

We’ve not been in separate rooms for over thirty hours, since she came over yesterday evening. The sun has set now and we’re in the living room together and Ellen is trying her best to stay sympathetic and not show how frightened she is. She saw Arthur behaving like this. She saw Mom and Dad like this. She has to know I’m next. She can see it.