by Steven James
No, this time he woke up all at once. And the images didn’t fade, just remained stark and vivid in his mind.
Trevor.
The lake.
Emily Jackson.
And, though it was frightening to dream of her like that, he felt compelled to find out more, to see what would happen next.
He closed his eyes again and tried to return to the dream to see how it would unfold.
But it was like trying to climb into someone else’s thoughts—everything was indecipherably smudged and marred around the edges and he wasn’t able to reenter the story.
At last he gave up and opened his eyes.
And thought about the dream.
He’d seen the events of that night through the eyes of someone who’d killed her. A nightmarish version of what might have happened. An explanation for the broken glasses, the missing lens, the words Emily had told him at the funeral about Trevor being in the car. The way she might have died.
But she might have just fallen in the water.
Or jumped. Or been pushed.
Or it might have happened just like Daniel had dreamt it had, as his mind tried to make sense of everything that was going on.
It’d all seemed so terrifyingly real.
But that’s the nature of nightmares. Sometimes you think you’re awake when they happen. Sometimes you know you’re asleep and you want nothing more than to wake up, but when you’re experiencing them they seem to be actually happening.
Just like the visions you’ve been having.
For some reason he’d pictured Emily alive again. And her dog Trevor was in the car. It was as if his mind was sorting through the facts and then filling in details no one would have known unless he was there.
Still, it was chilling to discover that the dead girl who was haunting him during the day was also starting to pursue him in his dreams at night.
When he finally got up, it was after nine.
His dad usually took Sundays off, but it hadn’t worked out that way this week, and when Daniel made it to the kitchen he found a note from him saying that he’d be back at four, that there was some fresh OJ in the fridge, and that he loved him.
Daniel was processing the dream and pouring some milk in his cereal when he got a phone call.
It was from someone he hadn’t heard from in over a month.
His mother.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
“Daniel. How are you?”
“Good.” Getting a call from his mom was unusual enough, but getting one at this time on a Sunday morning was even more out of nowhere. It made it hard to figure out what to say.
“Your father told me you’ve been having headaches. That you actually passed out at that church—at the funeral. And then at the game Friday night? You were hit so hard you got knocked out?”
“I’m okay, Mom. Don’t—”
“But is that true?”
“I blacked out for a few seconds at the game, that’s all. It’s not that big of a deal. And the funeral was a fluke. I don’t know. The headaches are over now. I’m fine.”
“Your father said they took you to the emergency room after the game.”
“It’s just what they always do when that happens to someone.” He figured that saying the phrase “gets a concussion” would make her worry more, so he left that part out. “They looked me over and didn’t find anything wrong.”
He poured himself some orange juice, then stuck the pitcher back in the fridge.
“I want you to see a doctor.”
“I told you, Mom, I’m fine.”
“I’ve spoken with your father about it. He agrees with me.”
His dad hadn’t mentioned anything about that to him, and it seemed like something he definitely should have filled him in about.
“They looked me over at the hospital already. I’m fine.”
“I’m thinking of coming back. To visit.”
“What? Back here?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“This coming weekend. That way maybe I can see your game on Friday night.”
He plopped down at the table. “Did you talk to Dad about any of this? About coming back?”
“Not yet. I wanted to talk to you first, see if it was alright with you if I came.”
“You want to come to my game.”
“Yes.”
This was the first time all year she’d expressed interest in coming to any of his games. “So you’re asking if it’s okay with me if you come to my game Friday night?”
“That’s what I was wondering.” She sounded a little taken aback that he was pressing her like this. “Yes.”
“And you want me to be honest?”
A small pause. “That sounds like a no.”
“It is.”
“You don’t want to see me?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“Then what are you—”
“I don’t want you to come back unless you’re going to stay.”
“That’s not possible, Daniel. Your father and I, well, we—”
“My father and you what? What is it? It’s been six months and you still haven’t told me why you left.”
“It’s complicated.”
“No, it’s not. You married Dad. You had a son. Then one day you moved out and left them. What part of that is complicated? What am I missing here?”
“This isn’t the time to talk about it.” Irritation had edged into her reply.
“It’s been six months. When exactly were you planning on explaining yourself? I’m just asking because I want to make sure I’m ready for it when the big day arrives.”
“Your father and I have our reasons for why we’re separated. When the time is right we’ll explain them to you.”
As far as Daniel knew, his dad didn’t have any reasons for why the two of them were separated. It was only his mom who had hers.
He felt his hand tighten around the phone. “When did Dad call you? I mean about the doctor.”
“Friday night.”
“He called you on Friday night and you waited until now to check up on me?” Daniel didn’t even try to remove the barbs from his words.
“Don’t use that tone with me, Dan. I—”
He hung up.
And stared at the phone, waiting to see if she would call him back.
She did not.
He ticked off the seconds.
A minute passed.
Still nothing.
He wasn’t sure if that disappointed him or not.
When he looked at the bowl of cereal he’d set on the table he realized he’d lost his appetite.
Shoving back his chair, he dumped the cereal into the sink and, even though it was only soggy flakes and he didn’t really need to, he turned on the garbage disposal and listened to the harsh blades work their way through his breakfast.
They spit up churned bits of cereal and splatters of milk, which he washed back down the drain.
He wasn’t supposed to meet Kyle until noon, and he wasn’t in the mood to work on his homework in the meantime, so he went online and searched for information about hallucinations instead. At least it was a way to get his mind off the conversation with his mom, and the fact that she wanted him to see a doctor.
Something Dad agrees with her about.
Daniel scoured the sites that talked about hallucinations—the different types, their causes and treatment strategies. He printed out some articles, scanned others, took notes on what he read.
Evidently, sometimes people saw things, others heard voices speaking to them, and sometimes people also felt things that weren’t there, particularly having the sensation that they had bugs crawling all over them.
Well, at least he
hadn’t had to deal with that.
Yet.
Just burn marks on your arm.
But how was that only a hallucination? He’d felt Emily actually grab his arm, had undeniable evidence of it when he went to bed that night and woke up the next morning.
Seeing. Hearing. Feeling.
He was three for three.
What caught his attention the most wasn’t the types of hallucinations as much as what caused them. Something was affecting him, something was wrong with him, and when he read about the reasons people had hallucinations, none were very encouraging.
It’s just in your head.
No.
Leave out the just.
It was in his body too.
The first articles he came across listed what seemed like obvious enough reasons: alcohol and drug use. Meth, coke, crack, LSD, ecstasy—any hallucinogenic, even marijuana, could make you see things.
But Daniel wasn’t on drugs.
Withdrawal could also do it, but obviously he wasn’t going through that.
Sometimes the line between reality and fantasy got blurred when you were falling asleep or waking up; hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations, they were called.
It was like this shadowy mental state that scientists didn’t fully understand but that could cause people to believe they were seeing or hearing things that weren’t actually there.
That might possibly explain the weird dream he’d had this morning, but the times he’d seen Emily he hadn’t even been close to falling asleep. In fact, the second time it was just the opposite—he was in the middle of playing a football game.
Sometimes hallucinations were caused by a cranial injury—although, apart from getting knocked around a little on the field over the years, he couldn’t think of anything along those lines that might have happened to him.
Seizures sometimes caused hallucinations. So did migraines.
So that could possibly account for his headaches, but they didn’t fit the typical pattern of migraines, and the detailed, elaborate things he was seeing and hearing wouldn’t have happened with simply a migraine, or even a minor seizure.
Stress, exhaustion, sometimes sleep deprivation could cause people to be unable to distinguish between dream states and reality.
He hoped maybe that was it.
Not enough sleep.
But that didn’t explain the marks on his arm.
Maybe he had a brain tumor—particularly one in the temporal lobe. Apparently, there were parts of your brain that processed your sense of sight and sound. If there was pressure on them, or impulses sent to them that weren’t supposed to be, you could end up seeing or hearing things.
One website Daniel stumbled onto told how some scientists had done research on people in surgery and made them laugh, made them hear voices that weren’t real, made them see things just by triggering different parts of their brains with mild electrical currents.
Brain disease could explain the headaches he was having.
There weren’t a lot of other possibilities left.
Except the major one: schizophrenia.
Slowly going insane.
Even though headaches weren’t usually a precursor to schizophrenia, he was the right age and he had other symptoms, or whatever you wanted to call them: visual and auditory hallucinations, disorganized thinking, delusions . . . .
So. Schizophrenia.
Or maybe a brain tumor.
Two really thrilling prospects.
When he got a text from Kyle asking where he was, Daniel realized it was already quarter after twelve and he was late for his lunch meeting with his friend.
Last night Kyle had texted that he had something he needed to talk about.
Daniel replied that he was on his way, and left for the restaurant.
CHAPTER
THIRTY
Rizzo’s had a faux-Italian look going on, with checked tablecloths, Italian music in the background, pictures of the Sicilian countryside on the wall. Next to one of them hung a framed dollar bill that was apparently the first one Rizzo had earned back in 1989 when he opened the restaurant.
If Rizzo wasn’t Italian himself, he sure fit the stereotype—thick boned, black haired, a bushy mustache, prone to talking wildly with his hands. He was one of those dough throwers, and part of the experience of eating at his restaurant was watching him spin and flip the pies.
The smell of fresh dough inside the place was amazing and was almost worth the price of a pizza.
Daniel and Kyle ordered an extra-large pepperoni-and-jalapeño pie and went to the soda machine for their drinks.
“You ever think about North Dakota?” Kyle said.
“North Dakota?”
“Rizzo. It’s where he’s from.”
“Really.”
“Yup. I don’t know why it just struck me, but most states have something they’re famous for. Even South Dakota has Mount Rushmore. I think North Dakota might be the only state that’s not unique.”
“Wouldn’t that make it unique?”
“Ah. True. So maybe their motto should be: ‘The only thing that sets us apart is how nondescript we are.’ ”
“The people of North Dakota might not like hearing you say that.”
“They’re good-natured folks. They won’t hold a grudge.” Then he added, “Besides, they can claim being the birthplace of Rizzo, world-famous pizza-dough thrower, at least, world-famous within a ten-mile radius of his restaurant.”
They took a seat in a booth at the back of the restaurant.
Kyle set down his Pepsi, then said soberly, “Well, it’s officially one week.”
“Since Emily’s body was found.”
“Yeah.”
“In a way it seems like it was a lot longer and in a way it seems like it just happened.”
“I know what you mean.” Kyle gulped down some soda. “It’s weird.”
“Grain by grain.”
“What?”
“That’s what you wrote the other day for Miss Flynn’s class about how, grain by grain, the sand erodes through our moments.”
“Slipping down the fragile slopes of our days,” he said reflectively. Then he quoted the rest of his poem word for word: “‘And I wonder, as I tumble down the side, who will change the weather and give my life another shot at glory?’ Yeah, I did.”
“Man, you have a good memory.”
“Well, you remember numbers, I remember words. Especially phrases I make up.”
Daniel decided that before he asked his friend why he’d wanted to talk with him today, he would fill him in on what had happened the previous evening.
“Hey, listen, last night I ended up taking Nicole back to her house. On the way, Ty and his friends tried to attack us.”
“What do you mean, tried to attack you?”
“They’d left something in the middle of the road. When I stopped to drag it out of the way, they stepped out from where they were hiding. One of them went for a rock. I think they were going to try to break through the window of the car, maybe go after Nicole.”
“That’s crazy. What did you do?”
“I got the rock from the guy. Ty had a knife. I thought he was gonna come at me, but in the end he backed off.”
“I’ll bet Nicole was freaking out.”
“She was rattled; she’ll be okay. But before they drove away Ty said something about Emily’s notebook, about what was in it. Have you heard?”
Kyle shook his head. “Uh-uh. Did he say?”
“No. I’ve been wondering why he even brought it up. Also, he must have been out at Lake Algonquin yesterday morning when I was there with Stacy. He mentioned he saw me by the lake.”
“Well, I doubt he was out there to go fishing.”
“What do you mean?”
; “You know him. He’s not exactly an outdoorsman.”
“Why do you think he went out there?”
“To drink. To party. Who knows.”
“At that time of day?”
He shrugged. “Why did you go out there?”
“I guess to . . .” He didn’t exactly want to bring up the hallucinations. “Well, process what’s been going on. I thought I might find some answers.”
“Maybe it was the same with him.”
Daniel didn’t know what to say to that.
They sat for a while, and he tried to mentally sort things out, replaying what had happened the night before—Stacy not showing up, Nicole meeting him outside school, Ty and his friends waiting for them beside the road.
“What are you thinking?” Kyle asked him.
“Well, for one thing I’m thinking that I have no idea what I’m gonna say to Stacy when I run into her at school tomorrow. I mean, she invites herself to come to the lake with me, then when I ask her to go to the dance, she accepts, tells me to call her, and then doesn’t answer the phone or show up. She doesn’t call, doesn’t text. Nothing. I mean, how am I supposed to take that?”
“How do you want to take it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean do you want an apology or excuses or what? What could she tell you that would make you happy?”
Daniel absently pulled off the paper covering his straw. “I don’t know. I guess just the truth.”
“Sometimes the truth hurts.”
“Sometimes it’s all we have.”
“A good reply, sensei. I will be your pupil forever.”
“I’ll remember that.”
The conversation shifted to stuff that was going on at school and the events of the last week. Kyle still didn’t bring up the reason why he’d texted that he wanted to meet today, and the whole time they spoke Daniel wondered about it.
He also wondered how much he should tell Kyle about the weird things he’d been seeing, hearing, and feeling—how reality had become obscured to the point where it was hard to know what was real and what wasn’t.
Time passed, the pizza came, and they dove into lunch.
Eventually, Daniel realized that if he couldn’t tell his best friend about some of the things he was experiencing, he couldn’t tell anyone.