Mine (16 page)

T
HIRTY-SIX

A
CQUIESCING TO HIS
mother’s wishes, Joel accepted a position in the medical program at Johns Hopkins University. She was too happy to notice he didn’t share her joy.

Though his grades during his final months at Stanford didn’t fall, a few of his professors did notice a curtailing of his involvement in class discussions. Joel was just doing time.

At graduation, he went through the ceremony for his parents’ sake. Afterward he and his mother and father, who had flown in for the event, had a nice dinner at a seafood restaurant in San Francisco, overlooking the bay. They discussed Joel’s cross-country move to Maryland, and his mother’s reluctance to let him go alone.

“He’s only eighteen,” she argued. “And he’s going to be busier now than ever. He’s going to need someone around.”

His father insisted it was time for their son to “spread his wings” and “embrace his independence.”

Joel nodded when he needed to nod and smiled when he needed to smile, and politely agreed that maybe it was time for him to be on his own.

Back at the apartment, they opened champagne. Joel took a few sips to make it look good. His parents, on the other hand, finished off the first bottle and made a pretty good dent in a second.

When Joel rose the next morning, he was not surprised to find them still asleep. He showered and dressed and picked up the backpack that held the few things important to him.

Then he walked out the front door and never returned.

T
HIRTY-SEVEN

Leah

L
EAH STAYED HOME
“sick” for three days after the death of Sandra Wilson.

She knew Joel’s inability to get to the girl on time was her fault. She had guided him to the alley behind the yogurt shop to stop the kidnapping, when what she really should have done was send him directly to San Jose, so he would have been there when the killer arrived.

Leah wasn’t sure what Joel had done to the man. She had kept yelling at him to get out of there. But she could feel he was no longer listening, and then, as he closed in on the man, her connection to Joel simply stopped.

The answer was only a few clicks away on her computer, but she couldn’t bring herself to check. Reading a news story about Sandra would only add to Leah’s devastation.

She returned to school numb to nearly everything but her personal torment, and had to focus harder than ever to keep her grades from slipping. She couldn’t jeopardize her move to California. She knew Joel would be as distraught as she was, and would need her as much as she needed him. So she labored through the final months of her senior year, aced all her finals, and graduated with honors.

June and July were spent cleaning out her room, figuring out what she was going to take to college, and earning a little extra money at her summer library job. Not once during this time did she have a single enhanced dream. She tried not to let that bother her, told herself it was a normal lull, but in her quiet moments the lack of the dreams terrified her.

On August 18, exactly four days before she was allowed to move into her dorm room, Leah and her father set out in her used and jam-packed Honda Civic on the thirteen-hundred-mile drive to Berkeley.

When the big day came, her dad helped her transfer all her things to her room. She met her roommate, Naomi Dinh, and Naomi’s parents. Like most of the other students moving in, Naomi was all smiles and excitement. Leah shared some of that feeling, but mainly she was anxious to drive down to Stanford.

From the missions she’d undertaken with Joel, she’d been able to finally piece together where he lived, so she planned on going straight to his apartment at her first opportunity. But that trip should wait until after her father had left for home. She went out to dinner with him and made plans to meet for breakfast the next morning, after which she would take him to the airport.

The urge to head to Stanford took hold of her moments after she dropped off her dad at the hotel. She fought it for a few blocks, but soon found herself on the I-80, driving across the Bay Bridge.

It was just past 8:30 p.m. when she reached the street where Joel lived. After spending a few minutes finding a parking spot, she walked to his building. If she’d had any lingering doubt about her dreams being real, they were gone now. She recognized everything. Even many of the cars parked along the road were ones she’d seen before.

Her plan, what little she’d come up with during the drive, was not to visit him tonight. If she did, they might end up talking until morning and then she’d be a wreck when she met up with her father. She wanted to just
be
on his street, and
see
his place, hoping that would ease some of her impatience.

But hasty plans were easy to break, and it didn’t take much to convince herself she could at least check out the lobby of his building. As she knew it would be, the front door was unlocked. The lobby was exactly as she’d seen it, large with a locked door opposite the entrance that led to the rest of the building. She was actually here.
Inside
.

Beside the locked door hung a directory of residents, with call buttons by each name. As she ran her finger down this list, the names seemed to come alive—
BAUDLER, BROUGHAN, DOLPHUS, GORMAN, HILDRETH, KURDLE, GABOURY, MAJOR, STUFFLEBEAM, UTTERBACK
.

Wait.

She stared at the list, her eyes momentarily unfocused. Though she still couldn’t remember Joel’s last name, she was positive none of the ones here belonged to him.

Panic started to set in.

Hold on, hold on. Apartment number.
She closed her eyes and pictured the door outside Joel’s apartment:
203
.

She looked for the corresponding number on the list.
STUFFLEBEAM
. That was definitely not his last name. Did his mother have a different one than he did? Leah had never seen his father around so maybe his parents were divorced and his mother had gone back to her maiden name.

Go home, Leah. Send your dad off, then settle in and come back when you have some time.

It was a good thought, maybe even the right one, but her feet wouldn’t budge.

She checked the time—8:43. Bordering on late for a visitor, but not too late, right?

Before she could talk herself out of it, she pushed the button next to
STUFFLEBEAM 203
.

A ring blared from a tinny speaker, then a click. “Yes?”

The voice was female, adult but young sounding.

“Hi, yes, um, I’m looking for Joel,” Leah said.

“Sorry, you got the wrong place.”

“Hold on, is this apartment two-oh-three?”

“Yeah.”

“May I ask how long you’ve lived there?”

A pause, but then instead of an answer, the line went dead.

Leah pushed the button again, but this time it only rang and rang.

She took another look at the list, searching for a building manager, but found nothing.

As she walked back to her car, a thought hit her. Joel was eighteen now like she was. He would have likely not wanted to live with his mother anymore, which meant he’d probably moved into his own place, something smaller, maybe closer to the other students.

Of course.

It would take a little more work to find him, but she headed back to Berkeley feeling that everything would be fine.

__________

L
EAH’S FEAR OF
spending most of that night awake came true, but instead of missing out on sleep because she was catching up with Joel, the time was spent getting to know Naomi and a few of the girls from nearby rooms. In the morning, once she’d had breakfast with her dad and taken him to the airport, she dragged herself back to her dorm and fell fast asleep, wasting a whole day she could have used to find Joel.

It turned out not to matter, though. Joel wasn’t living in another Stanford-area apartment or a dorm room. He had
graduated
the spring before, finishing school in near record time.

It had taken Leah two and a half weeks to dig up that fact. The only helpful bit of information she learned was his last name: Madsen.

She didn’t give up. She was sure someone at Stanford knew where he’d gone. But another month filled with back-and-forth trips between Berkeley and Stanford proved her wrong. Joel had been accepted into several graduate programs, including one right there at Stanford, but he had apparently not joined any of them and no one had a clue as to where he was now.

Desperate, she turned to the only resource she had left—her dreams. Up to this point, she had never tried to force herself into one of them. They’d come to her at will, and she’d always assumed she had no control over them. But it had been nearly nine months since her last one. Nine months since she’d had any contact with Joel.

Starting that night, she tried to bring one on. If she could reestablish contact with him, she could hopefully figure out where he was. But night after night her attempts ended with her falling into an exhausted, dreamless sleep.

After a while a thought began creeping into her mind. What if the failure to save Sandra had been too much for Joel? What if it had crushed his will to go on?

What if he, too, were dead?

No! He can’t be!

But what if?

On the twenty-second consecutive day of trying, a Tuesday, Leah closed her eyes, concentrated her thoughts, and focused on rekindling the dream. This time something was different about the darkness that encompassed her. It had always been empty before. Tonight, something was there. Something as black as the void, but solid.

A wall, she realized, that seemed to run forever in both directions.

She rubbed a hand against it. It felt miles thick and as solid as anything ever made, like nothing real or imagined could ever dent it. She pounded on it anyway. It didn’t even make a sound. Moving along the surface, she kept knocking on it, knowing she had to get to the other side.

A crunch, so slight she was already moving on before she registered it. She looked back and stared at the black mass where she’d last hit it and saw a crack, no thicker or longer than an eyelash.

She hit it again. And again. And again.

The crack spread and divided until it filled the shape of an arched doorway.

One more hit and the wall within the arched space crumbled, revealing a tunnel.

Without hesitation, she stepped inside.

She seemed to walk for hours, before she finally emerged on the other side and entered what turned out to be a small room lit only by the glow of a laptop computer. The device sat on a desk, the chair in front of it empty. Tucked in the corner of the room was a narrow bed, unmade and unoccupied. Spiderwebs hung from the walls, and the only window looked out at a dark night through grimy panes.

“Go away.”

Leah twisted around.

Joel stood near the room’s only door. Like the first time she’d come to him through her dreams, he was looking toward her but not quite at her.

“Joel?”

“Go away.”

“Joel. It’s me…” She tried to say her name, but as in the past, her voice went silent.

“I don’t care who you are. Go!”

With a sudden roar, he threw his arms up and ran in the direction he’d been looking. Reflexively, Leah jerked to the side.

He stopped a few feet past her and yelled without turning back. “Go away! Get out of my head!”

A flash of light, the most intense ever. She threw an arm over her eyes as her whole body clenched.

“Leah? Leah? Are you okay?”

Leah lifted her arm and found Naomi kneeling beside her bed.

“You scared the crap out of me,” Naomi said.

“I did?”

“You started mumbling, then all of a sudden you screamed.”

Someone knocked on their door. “Is everything all right in there?” It was Lucy, their resident advisor.

Naomi looked at Leah, raising an eyebrow to silently ask the same thing.

“I’m okay,” Leah said. “Just, um, just a bad dream.”

“Hey,” Lucy called. “What’s going on in there?”

Naomi looked at Leah for a second longer, and then went over to the door. She and Lucy talked for a moment, the RA glancing at Leah a couple times before giving Naomi a nod and leaving.

When Naomi returned, she said, “You
are
okay, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Please tell me that’s not something that happens a lot.”

“I’ve never had a dream like that before,” Leah said.

“Good.” Naomi sat on her own bed. “My heart’s still pounding.”

“I’m really sorry.”

“It’s okay. I’m glad you’re all right.”

“Thanks.”

After Leah was sure Naomi had fallen back to sleep, she climbed out of bed, pulled on her robe, and went down the hall to the communal bathroom. At this hour, it was mercifully empty. She took the stall at the very end, sat on the toilet, and wept.

She’d been so focused on finding Joel that his rejection gutted her.

“Get out of my head!” he’d screamed.

He doesn’t know who you are
, she told herself.

“Get out of my head!”

He doesn’t know.

“Get out of my head!”

When she could cry no more, she returned to her room, telling herself,
Give him time
.

What other choice did she have?

T
HIRTY-EIGHT

L
EAH GRADUATED FROM
Berkeley after four years, with a double major in Psychology and Molecular & Cell Biology.

Her choices of study were purely selfish. She wanted to find answers to what was going on with both her and Joel, and thought the two majors would give her the best tools to do so. She realized fairly early on, though, that to get to the real meat of things, she would have to go to grad school. Luckily for her, Berkeley had programs in both fields. After much contemplation, she decided to focus on molecular & cell biology, as she could more easily continue learning about psychology on her own.