Writers of the Future, Volume 29 (39 page)

It's the guy from earlier, the one I ran into. “It's okay,” he says. He
looks kinda like David, with dark hair and soft gray eyes. “It's okay.”

Why's he tellin' me it's gonna be okay? Then I realize I got tears
running down my cheeks, and I'm shaking so hard I don't even feel like me anymore,
like I'm just ridin' in this other girl's skin and I left the steering up to someone
else. I barely even feel it when he puts an arm 'round me and guides me away from
the crime scene. Damn, that's what it is, ain't it? Funny that I never thought of it
as a crime 'til I saw the cops.

He sits me in the passenger side of one of 'em black cars, and tells me
to put my head between my legs and to breathe. I try that, and the world slows down.
He's talkin' over me, talkin' to someone else, all the while he's got his hand on my
shoulder.

“Call the coroner out here. Tell him we've got a body.”

“What about the girl?”

The man's hand shakes me a little, like he's trying to wake me up. “Hey
sweetie,” he says gently, “how old are you?”

I still can't talk. Closest I can get is a moan.

When I lift my head, I see Mama bein' led outta the motel room in cuffs,
a sheet wrapped 'round her body. She's still covered in blood. How's she gonna cope
without her juice, the one that makes her forget, the one that helps her when she's
mad? Right now she's dull from feeding, her eyes glazed, her steps heavy.

And then the guy's coaxing my feet into the car, and closin' the door.
In the silence of the cab, I can hear my ragged breathing, like someone tore into my
lungs.

The man tries to get me to talk on the way to the station. “I'm
Detective Carlson.” “What's your name?” “Was that your mother?” “How long have you
known her?” “Do you have any other family?” I just stare out the window and don't
say a word. I wish he'd crash, and I'd die, right now.

But he don't.

Some middle-aged lady with a clipboard meets us at the station and asks
all the same questions. I keep hopin' I'll wake up with Mama next to me, that none
of this day happened at all. The lady tells me she's takin' me to a foster home and
they're gonna look for my family. By then, I get strength enough to nod. She reaches
out, squeezes my hand, and gives me a smile. I wanna wipe it right off her face. If
she'd been there, seen Mama eatin' that man's brain, she'd never smile again.

I don't think I will.

M
y foster parents are nice
enough, but I still don't get the urge to talk to 'em. It's summer, so they don't
make me go to school. I'm glad for that. I stopped doin' the workbook pages when I
was fifteen.

I hear 'em talking sometimes, like if I can't talk, I can't hear
neither.

“Has she said anything to you?” my foster mom asks.

“No,” my foster dad says. “She's traumatized; give her time.”

“Poor thing. I saw the news. Her mother's been killing men for years,
and all in that awful fashion. Can you imagine?”

“I'd rather not.”

I kinda wanna burst in on 'em, tell 'em what a good mother Mama's been,
takin' care of me herself all these years, but I feel like I'm waiting for something
that hasn't happened yet.

A week after Mama's arrested, the social worker comes to see me. She
asks if I wanna see Mama in prison. I shake my head no. Still waiting.

It takes a month before I know what it is, and I don't know it 'til I
hear it. Mama's juice wears off slowly, 'til she starts remembering things.
Remembering everything. The social worker comes again, and tells me what I've been
waitin' for.

Mama's remembered who my daddy is.

H
e lives nearby, and for that
I'm lucky. Mama's driven me all over the continental states, one to the next, never
stayin' in one spot long enough to get our bearings. So I'm surprised when it turns
out he's only a couple hours from the foster home I'm stayin' at. The social
worker's so pleased she found my daddy that when she drives me out there, she's
hummin' show tunes the whole way.

I think I'm gonna be mad when I see him, or maybe just sad and broken. I
ain't never seen his face—how can I go live with him? She pulls into a long
driveway, with potholes in it. The house at the end looks nice enough though, and
it's on a lot of land. I don't look around too much, 'cause my daddy's standing on
the porch.

I know it as soon as I see him. He's got long black hair, like Mama, and
it's pulled into a ponytail. He's got a nose like mine, and the same jaw. When I
step outta the car, he walks towards me, his eyes shinin'. He tries to smile and
can't, he's so choked up.

“Alexis.”

There's so much meanin' in that one word. I'm not angry, not even sad or
broken. Before I know it, I'm huggin' him and crying, like I'm in a stupid Hallmark
movie. He's crying too. He pulls back and puts his hands on either side of my
face.

“My daughter. You don't know how long I've dreamt of meeting you.”

Suddenly I wanna talk again, 'cause I've got questions, so many
questions.

I
t's not like my heart ain't
still broken, but my daddy does his best. He sets me up in his spare bedroom and
cooks dinner. I ain't had a home-cooked meal in practically forever. He lets me
serve myself. He don't urge me to take more or less, or place things on my plate I'm
not sure I want. I can feel him watchin' me out the corner of his eye, like he's
afraid I'm gonna make a run for it.

“I'll take you shopping tomorrow,” he tells me, once we start eating.
“You'll need new clothes, shoes.”

I wiggle my toes. I'm still wearin' those flip-flops, same ones I ran
across the street in. Moving my feet makes me realize how cold they are. I don't
know how to thank him when he ain't done anything yet, so I just focus on eatin'. He
talks 'bout how his week was as we eat, his voice deep and steady. I didn't think I
was tense, but as he talks my muscles relax, one at a time.

“How'd you meet my mama?” I ask him, once I've taken the edge off my
appetite.

“At a laundromat. We lived in the same part of town,” he tells me. His
shoulders stiffen up, the way mine do when I'm gettin' ready to lie. “Your mother
was the prettiest thing I ever saw. I won't say I loved her. I barely got the chance
to know her. But I'm glad we had you.”

And there it is, the lie, at the end. It confuses me. It's not like he
seems unhappy I'm here—he seems to really like me, and I think he's glad to meet me.
But he's hidin' something. “Did you know she was crazy when you met her?”

A shadow passes over his face. “Alexis—there are things I need to
explain to you. Things that you won't want to hear.”

“Look, you may be my daddy, but you don't really know me. Mama didn't
tell me nothin', so I wanna hear what you gotta say.”

He gives me a long look before he stands up. “Hold on, I'll be right
back.”

I don't eat anything else once he leaves. I don't have an appetite no
more. When he comes back, he's holdin' something in his hands. He tips it onto the
table and it drops with a rattle of beads. It's a dreamcatcher—one of those kitschy
ones that looks like it's been made in someone's fifth-grade craft class. “Do you
know what this is?”

I ain't stupid, so I just glare at him. He laughs. “Yeah, well, I don't
know how much your mother told you about your heritage.” He reaches back and undoes
his hair. It's black as night, shimmering 'neath the chandelier's light. If I look
hard enough, I think I see stars in it.

“I'm a dreamcatcher,” he says. “I can sort of hypnotize people. I make
sure they have good dreams, and no bad ones. It has other benefits. I'm stronger,
and no one notices me much until I let my hair loose. Dreamcatchers run in my
family. They run in your mother's too.”

“Mama's family,” I whisper. “How come Mama's different?”

“I don't know how much you know about genetics,” my daddy says, “but
sometimes things go wrong. When they do, you get disorders—illnesses. Those run in
the family too. Your mother isn't a dreamcatcher. Something's messed up in her
genetic code. She takes all dreams, not just bad ones, and eats them. She's not
dangerous to women, just to men. The more she eats their dreams, the more she
wants.” He stops, swallows. “It's why she did the things she did. Once she's had a
taste of a man's dreams, she wants the whole thing. She's a dreameater.”

I'm still puzzlin' things out, putting things together and seein' the
big picture. “Mama's juice?”

“A medicine. My brother's a doctor. He made it for her. It dampens her
urge to eat. It doesn't always work, and it's not foolproof. And it's got bad side
effects. It makes her forget things, lots of things. But the first few times my
brother brewed it up, it worked like a charm. When it stopped working as well, she
left, probably started making it herself.”

“She ever eat your dreams?”

“Yes,” he says, and now he's whisperin', just like me.

And then the last pieces click together, and I see why he didn't wanna
explain things to me in the first place, why he lied. “If you're a dreamcatcher, and
Mama's a dreameater, what's that make me?”

He takes a deep breath, like he's fortifyin' himself against his next
words. “Like I said, it's genetic. Your mother wrote to me after you were born, the
only letter from her I ever got, before she forgot who I was. When I found out I'd
fathered a child, I went to my brother and he helped me figure out the chances.
There's a twenty-five percent chance you didn't get any of this, twenty-five percent
chance you're a dreamcatcher, and a fifty percent chance you're a dreameater.”

ILLUSTRATION BY LUCAS DURHAM

Not only am I not hungry anymore, I think I'm gonna puke. Fifty percent
chance I'm gonna be just like Mama.

T
he chair I'm sittin' in ain't
as comfortable as it looks. I flip a quarter, watch it turn in the air, and catch it
when it comes back down. Heads. I do it again. Tails. This is how my life's been
decided. I just don't know yet which one it's gonna be. Heads or tails.

“Alexis?”

The lady at the desk's callin' my name. Daddy's waiting outside, in his
car. He didn't think it a good idea for him to get any closer to Mama, not with her
craving his dreams. I gotta leave everything in the waiting room, includin' the
quarter I was tossing around.

When I see Mama, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, I feel sorta numb. She's
got her hair in a ponytail. She gives me this sheepish little smile when she sees
me. Like being in jail's not as big a deal as I thought it was.

She picks up her phone on her side of the glass, and I pick up mine. For
a while, neither of us says nothin', and all I hear is her breathing and mine,
in-out, in synch.

“I'm sorry, honey,” she says finally.

And just like that, the numbness goes outta me. “Sorry for killin' all
those men, eatin' their brains, or sorry for getting caught? Sorry for draggin' me
around all those years when I got a daddy? Or sorry you had me at all?”

“Alexis,” she reaches out, touches the glass near my face. I don't move
an inch. Mama looks frail, her fingers delicate, the lines in her face deeper'n I
remember.

She opens her mouth, but I ride on over her, 'cause I'm gonna finish
what I gotta say before she soothes away my anger. “Daddy told me what you was. He
told me what he is, too. And he told me how much a chance I got of bein' just like
you. Fifty percent, Mama. Fifty!”

Her fingers trail down the glass, her eyes distant, like she don't even
hear me.

“Why'd you do it?”

Her eyes focus again. Mama and I've spent so much time together, she
knows I'm askin' 'bout me, and not the men. “Lots of reasons, honey. I thought maybe
someone'd come up with a cure by the time you were grown. I wanted a baby—I didn't
think it fair I'd be denied having my own children for somethin' that ain't my
fault. When I was pregnant, I didn't think it'd be fair to not give you a chance at
life. And when you was born, Alexis, it was like the sun risin' in the sky after a
long, cold night. I weren't lonely no more, and I've been lonely a long time.”

“But I'm the one who's gotta live with this. How long I got?”

“I started feelin' the urges when I was twenty. Didn't know what it was
'til I was twenty-two.”

Four more years before I find out what I am. A few years after that, and
I might be just where Mama is right now. “It's not right, what you done.” I wanna
say it with strength, but I hear the wobble in my voice.