The Snowball Effect

by Holly Nicole Hoxter

  That would have been twenty more minutes I had with her.

  I pushed my face into Riley’s shoulder and cried.

  8

  THE DREAM AND WHAT IT DOESN’T MEAN

  I paid attention to my dreams because of Mom, like a bad habit I’d accidentally picked up. She had the women in her groups write down their dreams in their journals and interpret them every week.

  “What do you think the snake represents?” Mom would ask one of the women. Lots of women dreamed about snakes.

  “Maybe my husband,” the woman would guess. That was usually the right answer.

  Mom would nod. “Yes, I think it could be your husband. And when you consider the snake as a symbol of your husband, how can you relate that back to your waking life?”

  Mom could interpret their dreams to mean absolutely anything. One woman who had the snake dream decided to divorce her husband and go back to nursing school, because that’s what Mom told her the dream meant.

  She bought me a fancy leather-bound journal for my fifteenth birthday. “Write down your dreams,” she said to me.

  “I don’t dream,” I told her.

  “Everyone dreams!” she said. “Write it all down. The dreams you have when you’re asleep and the ones you have when you’re awake.”

  “Okay,” I said. But I most definitely rolled my eyes.

  I actually did try a few times, but I felt stupid about what I’d written, so I tore the pages out and threw them away. I still had the journal somewhere in my closet, but I couldn’t remember anything I’d ever written in it.

  For the first time since she’d died, I had a dream about Grandma Elaine that I actually remembered. She and I were at Dad’s house visiting. It wasn’t a real house he’d ever lived in—just one of those dream places. There was a creepy man sitting in a recliner. Sometimes he looked like Carl and sometimes he looked like a stranger. I didn’t like the guy in the recliner, so I took my paper dolls out to play in the yard.

  The paper dolls were something I’d really played with when I was a kid. Mom would never buy me the paper dolls I wanted from the drugstore, but when we got back home, she’d draw me a paper doll family on a piece of notebook paper, and I’d name them and cut them out. I kept them all in a Ziploc bag. I lost them when I was about twelve, a long time after I’d stopped playing with them.

  In the dream, my paper dolls were blowing into the street, and my father came outside and we ran to catch them. As I grabbed the paper dolls and shoved them into the bag, I recognized their faces.

  After we’d rescued the paper dolls and secured them in their plastic bag, we went back inside. The creepy man gave me a funny smile, and suddenly I wanted to leave, so I decided to pretend Grandma Elaine was sick and needed to go to the hospital.

  “What hospital do you need to go to?” I asked her. I went over to where she was sitting on the couch and I put my arms around her, like she needed to be held up.

  Grandma Elaine mumbled something that I didn’t understand. Then suddenly her body felt heavier in my arms, and I realized that she was sick and we really did need to get her to a hospital.

  I held on to her. “What hospital?” I asked again.

  “Michaela Davis,” Grandma Elaine mumbled. “Michaela Davis.”

  And then Collin climbed over me, kneeing me in the stomach, and I woke up. I opened my eyes in time to see Collin run out of the room.

  Riley rolled over and smiled at me. “Good morning, sunshine. Don’t rush. You don’t have to be at work for two more hours.”

  I rolled over onto my elbow and looked at him. “I had a weird dream,” I said. I explained about the paper dolls, the creepy guy in the recliner, Grandma Elaine, and Michaela Davis. I didn’t know anyone named Michaela Davis. I didn’t know why that name would pop into my dream, or why it would stick with me after I’d woken up.

  “What do you think it means?” Riley asked.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know who Michaela Davis is. I’m pretty sure it’s not a hospital.”

  “I’ll go home and Google it while you’re at work.”

  “All right.”

  “Go back to sleep.”

  “I have to go watch Collin.”

  “He’ll be a good boy and watch TV,” Riley mumbled. And then he was asleep again.

  After Grandma Elaine died, I had a lot of crazy thoughts. I thought maybe this would be like Heartstrings, and she’d show up at my front door one day explaining that the evil Santiago Villanova had faked her death and held her hostage, but now she was free. Whenever our land line’s caller ID showed a Florida area code, my heart skipped a beat, but it was usually a telemarketer, sometimes my aunt, never my dead grandmother. I waited for her to appear in my dreams and send me a message, but it didn’t happen, and I didn’t know what kind of message I wanted her to send me anyway. A lot of times I woke up remembering that I had dreamed about her, but I couldn’t remember the dreams. Since the Michaela Davis dream was the first dream that I could remember vividly, I wanted it to mean something. I thought it had to mean something.

  Riley called me at Perfume World a few minutes before he had to go in to work. “Here’s what I got on Michaela Davis,” he said. “There’s a musician and an actress named Michaela Davis. They might be the same person but I’m not sure. There’s also a student at Bowling Green State University—she has a really obnoxious website. Then there’s a disc jockey for a classic rock station in Wisconsin. There’s a character in this book called Another Day—”

  “Wait,” I said. “We have that book.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah. That must be what it means.”

  About a year ago Mom had read Another Day and then had all her groups read it—even bought them all copies to keep. She begged me to read it until I finally gave in and started it, but I never finished. I hadn’t remembered the character’s name. I didn’t remember very much about the book, period.

  “So what do you think it means?” Riley asked.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  When I got home from work, I went into Mom’s bedroom. Well, Vallery’s. As Vallery settled in, she’d packed more of Mom’s stuff in boxes and trash bags and shoved them into the closet, and more of her own stuff ended up on the floor. She took down Mom’s pictures—a print of a clown that she’d loved for some ridiculous reason, and a picture of a sad Indian she’d bought because Carl liked it and said he was part Indian, though I think he was lying, or maybe he had a great-great-great Indian grandfather, but I bet everyone in America had a great-great-great-somebody who was Indian. Vallery didn’t put anything in their place. The walls were bare and there were two little holes where the nails had been.

  I didn’t see the books piled up on the floor under the window anymore, so I looked around and found them stacked up in the closet. I scanned the titles until I found Another Day. I pulled it out of the pile, and the other books toppled over but I didn’t pick them up. I grabbed the book and ran back to my room.

  I sat on my bed and looked at the cover—a close-up of a woman’s face with the silhouette of a different man on each one of her cheeks. I tried to remember what the story had been about. I tried to remember Michaela Davis and figure out what my grandmother had been trying to tell me in my dream.

  Nothing came to me. I opened the book, and something fluttered to the floor.

  I stared down at the small piece of paper that had landed between my feet. A note? Why would Grandma Elaine leave a note for me in one of Mom’s books? I closed my eyes and picked it up.

  Then I opened my eyes slowly and looked at it.

  It was a receipt for a Slurpee from the 7-Eleven. The date was smudged off.

  I laughed and rolled my eyes and then picked up the phone and called Riley.

  “Did you find the book?” he asked.

  “I found it.”

  “So any idea what the dream means?”

  “Well, this piece of paper fell out, and I thought that it might be something
important. But it just turned out to be a receipt from the 7-Eleven.”

  “Huh. That’s kind of a letdown. Why do you think it was in there?”

  “I think it was just my bookmark. I started reading it a few years ago.”

  “You don’t think it means anything?”

  I crumpled up the old receipt and tossed it at the trash can. “Absolutely nothing.”

  There was a knock on the front door that afternoon while I watched my taped recording of Heartstrings. I’d started taping it every day so I could fast-forward through the commercials.

  I ignored the knock. No one I had any interest in seeing would be randomly knocking on my door in the middle of the day. If it was Mabel, she would have just walked in after the first knock.

  There was another, louder knock at the kitchen door. I got worried that all this knocking might wake Collin. After Vallery had left for another job interview, Collin had fallen asleep on the floor in his room while playing with his LEGOs, but it was Vallery’s night to keep him, so I didn’t care if he napped. And then I heard the door creak open.

  “Hello?” a woman’s voice called out.

  “Uh, who’s there?” I yelled, and walked to the kitchen, holding the remote control in front of me like it might protect me from an intruder. A little woman with a ridiculously long braid down the middle of her back stood by the kitchen door.

  “Oh! I wasn’t sure if anyone was home,” she said.

  “Then why did you walk into my house?” I asked, still holding up the remote, although I doubted this woman posed any real threat. She was a little younger than Mom, thin and demure-looking, dressed in a red blouse, white shorts, and white sandals. She could have been a black belt in karate, but probably not.

  “Are you Vallery?”

  “No. How do you know Vallery?”

  “I had a few questions about her mother’s…business.”

  It was funny how quickly gossip traveled. Two months ago no one in Baltimore had ever heard of Vallery Lancaster, and now people were sending this woman to Vallery instead of me with questions about Mom.

  “What about it?” I asked. “I’m her other daughter. I can help you.”

  I knew the polite thing would have been to offer the woman a seat and a glass of lemonade, but I let her stand there awkwardly by the door. I still held the remote up like I might hit her in the face with it at the slightest provocation. I had to tell Vallery that we should start locking the doors.

  “Well, I’d been taking sessions with her last year. And of course I think it’s such a tragedy what happened to her. We were all praying for her to get through it, but I guess the Lord had other plans. Anyhow, I loved your mother like a sister and I want to carry on her memory.”

  I shrugged. “Okay.”

  “I want to continue her work. I want to inspire women the way she inspired me. I want to teach like she teached.”

  Taught, I thought, but I didn’t correct her. “Well, you can teach whatever you want.”

  The woman smiled. “I’m glad you feel that way. I came here to ask if your mother left anything behind. Any new lessons or speeches, any words of wisdom she jotted down? I have my notes from the sessions I attended, but I thought maybe she had left other things behind that might be helpful to me.”

  I knew Mom had left notebooks. At least one, but probably a lot more than one. But I shrugged. “I really have no idea.”

  “I understand those writings would be precious to you, so I’m prepared to write you a check for any amount that you think is appropriate. Maybe you could take a look through her things and let me know what you find?”

  “I can look around. I’m not sure there’s anything here, though.”

  “I remember she often had a blue binder with her. Maybe you remember seeing her with a blue binder?”

  “I can check.”

  “Journals, computer files, just anything you can find. I’ll leave you my number.”

  I found a pen and paper, and she wrote it down.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll let you know if I find anything.”

  The woman left and I stood there in the kitchen holding her number. Deborah, she’d written. Deborah wanted to be just like my mother. She wanted to buy my mother’s notebooks and computer files. I looked at the clock. Vallery had been gone for over an hour. She’d be back soon.

  I went upstairs to Collin’s room and nudged him with my foot.

  “Nap’s over,” I said. “Vallery will be home soon.”

  I went to Mom’s/Vallery’s bedroom and stood by the door. I heard Collin clanging his LEGO bricks together. I went back to the closet where I’d found Another Day and looked through the boxes where Vallery had been throwing Mom’s stuff.

  I found a stack of composition books full of Mom’s handwriting and the blue binder that the Deborah woman had mentioned. I looked through the rest of the room—twice—to make sure I hadn’t missed anything.

  I took Mom’s stuff back to my room and sat on the bed and looked at the pile. Any amount that you think is appropriate, the woman had said. What would she agree to, though? Certainly not thousands of dollars. Maybe a few hundred.

  A few hundred would help with the apartment Riley and I wanted to get.

  I wondered what Vallery would have done, how much money she’d want in exchange for Mom’s lifework, the only thing she’d ever been good at. Vallery would have called Deborah back already. No, Vallery would have checked for the notebooks before she let Deborah leave the house.

  But for some reason it wasn’t that simple for me. For some reason I stuck her phone number inside one of the notebooks and then I slid the notebooks, one by one, underneath my mattress.

  Later that night I crawled out of bed and went to the kitchen. I looked through the refrigerator to see what we had. Milk? Probably sour. Crystal Light lemonade? That was Vallery’s—better not to touch it. Then I knew what I wanted: a Slurpee. I put my shoes on and grabbed my wallet.

  I drove to the 7-Eleven on Corben Avenue. There were new ads in the window for hot dogs. The hot dogs on the posters were enormous, but I knew the real hot dogs rolling around on the warming rack were practically as thin as my fingers. When I got inside, I realized I didn’t have any cash. I went back outside to the ATM.

  The prompt to enter your PIN popped up, and I froze. What was my PIN? The four-digit code that I’d punched in a million times had suddenly fallen out of my head. I stood there with my fingers hovering over the buttons. Which looked familiar? Four, maybe. There was definitely a nine in there. Somewhere. I hit a few numbers that looked right. No good—the machine beeped at me. I tried another combination of numbers. And then I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  “I wouldn’t suggest trying again. If you enter your PIN wrong one more time, it’s going to keep your card.”

  I stared at the man with his hand on my shoulder. He wore an olive-green camouflage coat and had longish brown hair and a scruffy beard. For a second I thought he was a homeless person, but then I doubted a homeless person would speak coherently or know much about the ATM.

  “How do you know?” I asked. I took a step back and he let his arm fall to his side. I glanced back at the 7-Eleven to see if there were people inside to hear me scream and come to my rescue if he tried to abduct me. But I couldn’t see anyone. The huge hot dogs blocked my view.

  “I forgot my PIN one night and it kept my card,” he explained.

  “Oh,” I said. I hit a button and the machine ejected my card. I shoved it in my purse real quick in case he wanted to rob me. Not that it would do him any good to steal my bank card, since I couldn’t tell him the PIN.

  “You’ll have to go to the bank tomorrow and get them to issue you a new PIN. It’s a huge hassle, though. They have to call some home office and then you have to wait for it to come in the mail, which takes about a week.”

  “I’m sure I have it written down somewhere. You know, when they first sent it to me in the mail.”

  He grinned. “You kept
that? You were supposed to memorize it and destroy the evidence.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s a good thing I didn’t.” When he smiled, I realized he wasn’t actually as old as I’d first thought. Probably just a few years older than I was. The beard just made him look thirty. And a little crazy. But that grin changed everything.

  “What brings you out at this hour, anyway?” he asked. “You work the night shift?”

  “No, I just really wanted a Slurpee.”

  “And now you can’t get any cash.”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, let’s go,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “Inside. On me.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Oh, come on!” He threw his hands up in the air. “You’ve already spent five minutes out here talking to me. We’ll just walk in and I’ll pay for your Slurpee and we’ll go our separate ways. Tell me how that’s dangerous.”

  I shrugged. “Okay. But when I remember my PIN, I’ll hunt you down and pay you back.”

  “Fair enough.” He held the door open for me, and we walked inside and headed for the Slurpee machine. I filled my cup with piña colada. He mixed all six flavors into his. Kara and I used to do that with fountain sodas back in middle school, when it was the cool thing to do. It was called a Suicide. I don’t know why.

  We went up to the register, and the cashier put her romance novel facedown on the counter and rang us up. He paid and we went outside. He sat down on the curb in front of the pay phones, right next to the big NO LOITERING sign.

  “No loitering,” I said as I sat down beside him.

  “They only frown upon loiterers on skateboards. We’re cool.”

  He held his Slurpee out toward me, and I thought for a second that he wanted me to take a drink.

  “Cheers,” he said.

  “Oh.” I tapped my cup against his.

  We sat there and sipped our Slurpees. He kept stirring his with the straw. I didn’t feel like grasping for topics of conversation and he didn’t start any, so we just sat there and watched the cars on the street, and the occasional customer turn into the 7-Eleven parking lot. Finally I heard slurp slurp slurrrrrrrrrrp, and he was finished. I swallowed the last few sips of mine, and we stood up and tossed the empty cups in the trash can.