The Space Between

by Thompson, Nikki Mathis

  Cassie made a face. Georgia wasn’t sure if it was because she was leaving, or because she mentioned Brady.

  “You sure? There’s some serious talent over by the dart boards. And singing hottie sure seems to have taken a shine to you.”

  Georgia nodded. “I’m sure. You okay by yourself? I don’t want you walking back alone.”

  “I’m fine. I’ll call a cab. Who knows, maybe I’ll get lucky and get a ride.” Cassie humped the air a few times. Georgia choked on a laugh.

  “Well, if you do find a ‘ride,’ be safe if you know what I mean. No randoms!”

  “Okay, Mom.”

  It was strange to feel sad about not seeing someone again, someone you’d never met nor would never meet. But she felt sad nevertheless. She pulled Cassie into a boob squishing hug. “I’ve had a great day…thanks.”

  Cassie looked surprised at first, but a cool smile spread across her face. “No problem, roomie. You be safe, too.” She turned and pushed into the crowd surrounding the stage.

  Georgia sat out on the curb feeling impaired, but reflective. It had been the perfect day. If college was this fun, she was sorry she missed out, but was grateful for this chance, if only in a dream. She’d soaked in a little of the college experience—walking around campus with a faked sense of purpose, and the obligatory binge drinking with her roommate. The last tick on the list must be Brady. But what with Brady? This wasn’t like other dreams where decisions and scenarios were chosen for her. She had full control of this one, so wouldn’t it be cheating if she got physical with Brady? But that was stupid. It wasn’t real. Maybe the dream would end when she got back into bed and went to “sleep.” She’d wake up in her bed and what? Nothing life changing had occurred. Gwen and her “all will be revealed” nonsense. What a crock.

  She watched the cars drive by. Each one that slowed made her heart beat a little faster, she was nervous about being alone with Brady. She looked down at her boots and rubbed a scuff off the toe. She looked up and Brady was leaning on the top of his car, grinning at her. She couldn’t help but return his smile, but getting up proved more difficult.

  “Need some help there, drunky?”

  “I got it.” She rolled to her side a bit and then made her way to her feet, looking like a weeble wobble.

  He opened her door, helping her get in, then trotted over to the driver’s side.

  “Hey, where’s your truck?” She loved that truck. So many memories. Now he was driving a four door sedan of some sort. Boring.

  “Babe, you know I got rid of that thing last year. Nothing screams hick like a pickup truck.” He shook his head and pulled into the stream of light traffic in front of the strip of bars.

  “That’s not true, Brady. Lots of people drive trucks.”

  He gave her look out of the corner of his eye. “Yeah, hicks.” She decided to drop it.

  “Where to?” he asked.

  “”Well, I was hoping to spend some time with you, I’m not really ready for the night to end.” Georgia grabbed his hand.

  He sighed. “Your place or mine?”

  He was a good kisser, enthusiastic without being sloppy. His hands were strong and his mouth urgent against hers. Unfortunately she just couldn’t get with the program. Not only was her buzz gone, but after a few hours in Brady’s presence she’d learned a few things.

  One: Brady was no longer the poetry quoting dreamer she’d once fallen for. Nope, he was a card carrying member of the young Republicans. She was used to conservative viewpoints, growing up in a small Texas town and all. It wasn’t that. It was that he was extreme and rigid in his views for one so young. There was right wing and then there was getting GOP tattooed on your ass. When he started getting riled up about illegal immigration, she found herself kissing him just to shut him up.

  Well, at least he was passionate about his beliefs…but so was Hitler.

  Another thing was, she got the impression that Brady had become arrogant. Every faction or demographic outside of his narrow vision was beneath him. How did this happen? Was he always like this and he just hid it well? She wasn’t sure. At least now it made sense why her roommate’s face would twist into a cringe when his name came up.

  When his hand made it past the button her pants, she pulled back. “Brady, I’m sorry, but I’m not feeling very good. I think I just need to sleep.” Dream or not, she had no desire to spend one more second canoodling with Brady Carmichael.

  “You want me to stay with you?” His voice soft and caring.

  “No, that’s okay. You have class in the morning and this bed is so tiny.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time we both slept in this bed. I can spoon.” He smiled and kissed her on the forehead. So, he wasn’t all bad. She was sure he’d make someone a good husband one day. She was just glad it wasn’t going to be her.

  He must have noticed her resolve and pushed off the bed. He grabbed his shirt and pulled it back over his head. Georgia walked him to her door and kissed him gently. His felt like a goodbye, a once and for all kind of goodbye.

  “See you tomorrow, G.”

  “See you tomorrow, Brady.”

  When she said tomorrow, she meant their next high school reunion.

  Georgia wasn’t sure what she was expecting to happen. Would the dream just end?

  “Okay, I’m done now,” she called to her empty room. Who she was talking to, she wasn’t sure.

  “Wakie, wakie.”

  Was she supposed to fall asleep here and wake up back home?

  “Beam me up?”

  Nothing happened, so she just burrowed into her covers, her thoughts drifting to Brady. She wasn’t sure if this was how he would’ve become if they’d gone off to college together as planned. But she had the feeling, knowing the career path he chose, that the adolescent promises made in the back of a pick-up truck all those years ago would have given way to ambition and Ralph Lauren button ups.

  Georgia would have always come in second or maybe even a distant third. He cared for her, he may even think he still loved her, but she knew the fire in his eyes would not be for her, but for goals, and the desire to shed his small town skin. The idealistic boy she fell in love with no longer existed. The boy who wanted to work in government to make a difference would be swept away in the tide of the political machine and the trappings that came with it.

  It made her sad, but it helped her close that door. It was becoming evident that it wasn’t Brady she’d been missing all these years. It was what he represented—her youth, the future she could have had, choices that were taken away from her. But college…she could have gone anyway, kids or no. People did it every day. No one liked to take the blame, but she realized that she deserved most of it.

  Maybe all of it.

  She needed to change her ways and readjust her priorities. She’d felt a glimmer of her old self thanks to this dream. She should put that at the top of her list—becoming Georgia again.

  Well, maybe not the top of her list, she had a lot to do when she woke up.

  Amelia has soccer practice after school and we need to get started on her science project. It’s my turn to bring the snack to Bonnie’s preschool. I could whip up something in the morning, or just bring Goldfish. I have to go to the bank and take Nate his lunch. He wanted roast beef tomorrow…no, he wanted chicken noodle soup. Need to start a pot of that before I leave. I’ll need to reschedule lunch with Lucy. No time tomorrow.

  That was the last thing she remembered, her list of to-do’s, none of which included herself.

  ~Chapter Fifteen~

  Six months…

  Six months, two weeks, and 4 days.

  That’s how long Georgia had been “dreaming.”

  Her list of what to do when she woke up now filled an entire journal.

  Four hypnotherapists. Three psychics. Two psychiatrists. One acupuncturist.

  That’s the number of people who offered no applicable explanations— only frustration. The second shrink wanted to have her commi
tted due to her “propensity toward delusion.” Georgia said she’d take it into consideration and hauled ass.

  That had been the last straw. She decided to abandon the the whole idea of professional help. Not that she would call Theodora LeMont, the large dark-skinned psychic, a professional. Theodora had informed her, in a thick, glaringly fake, Jamaican accent, that Georgia was stuck in this parallel dimension because of some residual karmic debt stemming from her time as an assassin during the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

  O-kaaaay.

  On top of that nugget of wisdom, it was all putting a serious dent in her already anemic pocket book.

  Yes, she was forced to get a dream job, literally. Cassie got her a job working at the hospital as an emergency room tech. Lots of pushing gurneys around and inserting catheters. Long hours and not much money, but it was as close to seeing patients as she could come without medical school. Which according to her new reality was right around the corner.

  So, Georgia was left to devise her own theories, one being she was in a coma. Culprit being the tea, whether an allergic reaction or straight up drugged. Maybe Gwen was a psychotic sociopath, who got her jollies off drugging innocent women. That young girl, her fiendish sidekick…She imagined herself in a hospital gown, impaled by tubes and surrounded by beeping equipment. The sucking sound of the oxygen machine. Nate and the girls holding a bedside vigil.

  Another theory was that she was still in bed and this was the world’s longest dream.

  Dreams. She’d spent countless nights in the library researching everything she could get her hands on, sticking to the more scientific rationale. She’d discovered that a dream that seems to last for hours, passes in mere seconds. And in REM sleep one can experience a lucid dream, where a person is aware they are dreaming. So it was a strong possibility she was still in bed with Nate, and only minutes had passed. Again the culprit for this seemingly never-ending lucid dream had to be Gwen and her tea.

  The third was the most far-fetched, but after all she’d been through anything could be possible. It was that she wasn’t dreaming at all, that she was somehow living in an alternate reality. Some scientists believe there are parallel universes, or what they call the multiverse. Georgia studied the complex theories and papers written by renowned theoretical physicists until her eyes burned and her mind was numb. But in the end it was all theory and postulation. She found nothing that could help her get home. She felt like Dorothy. Don’t think she didn’t click her heels on several occasions.

  There were countless mornings she’d open her eyes hoping to see the faded curtains of her master bedroom, only to feel the sorrow that followed the sight of the now hated poster of Bora Bora.

  She prayed. Prayed until her knees ached and her throat was sore. Screaming, begging to wake up in her own bed. Pleading with God or any deity listening to give her back her old life, that she’d learned her lesson. She prayed for her girls most of all. That they were okay, that they weren’t sad, that they knew how much their momma loved them.

  And always, always regretting the day she walked into that bookstore where she met Gwen. Drinking her damned tea. But when she tried to hold on to the details of that day, to the circumstances that led her there, they seemed blurry. When she thought on that day, it was almost as if fate had led her to that red awning.

  But did the whys and hows really matter?

  She had no answers and no alternative but to carry on with this existence. The existence where there was a hole in her heart as big as the state she lived in. Her babies—she couldn’t quantify the depth of her grief. It was as if they’d died. Her only solace was that they were living happily with her in that other universe, not that she had somehow erased them with her avarice for the ‘what might have been,’ and quest for contentment. Now her what might have been had the faces of her two girls. The ones she’d never hold again. Even if she married again and had kids in this reality, they wouldn’t be Amelia and Bonnie. The ones that she would trade everything to see one more time.

  She had Lucy, but couldn’t confide in her, not on this. She stopped calling her all together. It hurt too much to pretend. Another loss.

  Nate she missed in a different way. There wasn’t the gaping hole that was the absence of her children, but a piece of glass imbedded in her chest that made it hard the breathe. She could see him again.

  It had taken two weeks of the dream, or whatever it was, for Georgia to admit that she may be stuck. And with that, she went from enjoying the college experience to becoming desperate for answers. She started combing the internet for Gwen, but with no last name and no idea what the book store was called, that had been a dead end.

  After a series of fruitless searches and several double espressos, she drove into Clive. Hoping against hope that she may find what she was looking for. The dusty alleyway was the same, but there was no awning and no sign of the store that started this dream turned nightmare. She’d screamed and cried. Threw a handful of pebbles against the darkened glass. The old man was still in his chair. She asked him if he knew anything about the book store, but he said nothing, just rocked back and forth, his silence mocking her torment.

  That had been demoralizing, but she would live that day a hundred times over. That day, was nothing when compared to what would happen next.

  Back in her hometown.

  ~Chapter Sixteen~

  Clive had been a bust. And after three weeks sleeping in her tiny dorm room bed, she’d had it. If her old life wasn’t going to be returned to her, she would go out and get it for herself. Motivation, and an invigorated sense of purpose filled her. She could barely contain giggles as she threw some clothes in her pack and jumped in the car she borrowed from her roommate, after telling her it was a life or death situation. The traffic was light so she was able to zip on the highway putting the large buildings of the university in her rearview.

  She leaned onto her arm that was propped on the open window and thought about Nate. A montage of memories flooded her mind. Him walking towards her in that small stuffy church, with a confident, crooked smile. Their little house and the first time she’d admired their shiny metal mailbox, held aloft by a thin piece of wood.

  It’d been a terrifying feeling for Georgia, walking up to their new house after the wedding, new husband in tow—an intimate friend at best. She’d looked over at him and did her best to smile despite her trepidation. The tan-bricked house had belonged to Nate’s grandmother. His mom didn’t have the heart to sell it once she passed. It was modest and dated, but paid for. “Where’s the white picket fence?” she’d joked.

  Nate and his dad built one the following week.

  She pulled in front of Bristol and Sons repair shop. Her palms were sweating, and her stomach rumbled with nerves.

  “Hi-ya, Nate. Long time no see…No, that’s horrible. Who the hell says hi-ya, dumb ass…Hey, Nate, want to change my oil?” She rested her head on the steering wheel. “What the hell am I going to say to him?…You don’t know it yet, but we’re supposed to get married and have two of the most beautiful baby girls on the planet…Just kiss me before you drop me off at the mental institution.”

  She inhaled a few times and got out of the car. She pulled the ends of the deep green blouse she wore. Nate always loved when she wore green. He also loved her legs, so she made sure to show them off with a short jean skirt. Her hair was down in soft brown waves that fell past her shoulders.

  She could do this.

  Just be natural…and try not to tackle him, or hump his leg.

  Her steps were tentative. She couldn’t remember a time she’d felt so nervous. Even her wedding day paled in comparison. The sound of hydraulic lifts and drills usually soothed her, but today they only reminded her that Nate was in there somewhere and he wasn’t hers. The oldies station his dad loved was playing over the noises of the shop. Georgia walked into the bay, her hands clenched in front of her.

  Nope, no sign of him. Maybe she could come back another time. That sounded like a fa
ntastic idea…but then, he slid out from under a black Corvette.

  “Can I help ya, ma’am?” He stood and wiped his hands on a black towel he’d pulled from his back pocket. Tight t-shirt, tighter jeans, and a dark smudge on his jaw. His sandy blond hair sticking up in different directions. Were his eyes always this blue? Yes, she remembered when she first noticed them at the party, the night that they conceived their daughter. The night that now never happened.

  Her knees buckled.

  “Georgie Porgie, is that you?” The sound of his soft twang was like a symphony. He was so familiar. She knew every inch of his body and he knew hers. He just didn’t know it.

  “Hey, Nate.”

  He hugged her. She missed his arms around her so bad she had to bite her lip to keep the sigh bubbling in her throat. He smelled like he always had. Soap and mild cologne, with just a hint of motor oil. He called it Eau de Grease Monkey. That always made her laugh.

  “Wow, you’re as gorgeous as ever. You home from school?”

  “Yes, I needed to see some familiar faces.”

  “I’ll bet you missed your momma’s home cooking too.” He rubbed his belly with exaggerated circles.

  She laughed. “That too. Dorm food sucks.”

  “Well, good to see you. You need your car worked on?”

  “No, it’s fine. I came to see you actually.”

  “Me?”

  “Don’t sound so surprised. We were friends in high school.”

  “Yeah, I guess. You were kind of in another league though.”

  “Whatever, Nate. All the girls had their eye on you.”

  “Well, all but one pair,” he teased. Did he have a crush on her in high school? He never told her that. That might explain why he’d approached her at that party—which now never happened.