by Joanne Rock
He slowed down as he turned the last corner before the new house, savoring the sight of the place he’d worked hard to build. An unnatural light shone ahead. The reflection of a streetlight distorted by the rainfall? Except there were no streetlights out here...
Police cars lined the front of his house. Three of them. Two with their headlights shining into the rain, each drop illuminated so clearly it could have been snow falling in front of the cars.
He noticed it every time he remembered this night. Every time he took those heavy, leaden steps toward the house. He might have been running, but each step was so slow it was as if he saw every detail. His own life flashing in front of his eyes, because he knew. He knew his happiness was too good to be true. His life too perfect.
He’d come too far, too fast. The boy from the bayou had gotten the princess, but then the dream had crumbled to ashes.
Yeah, he knew. Even before the lady cop tried her best to intercept him.
He started shouting at her to let him see his wife.
“Where’s my wife?” he yelled at every single face that tried to get in his way. Tried to tell him gently...
* * *
“REMY.”
A frightened voice pulled him out of the dream before he could see Liv.
He’d just sprinted from the house out to the studio in back, his feet sliding on wet grass. All the lights were on...
“Remy?”
Soft hands clutched his arm. Made him realize he wasn’t out in the cold rain, but in a warm bed. In sheets that smelled like amber.
Ah damn.
“It’s okay.” He forced his eyes open and remained in two worlds at the same time. “I’m awake now.”
“Sorry.” Erin knelt beside him on the bed, her hold on his arm easing. “I was worried about you.”
“Bad dream.” He sat up, cradled his head in his hands. “I’ve had it a million times.”
He didn’t want to talk about it and he was grateful she didn’t ask for specifics.
“Is it better if you sleep all the way through or wake up in the middle?” She hugged her pillow.
“I never wake up in the middle, so I’m not sure.” It felt strange having her here when he still had one foot in Lafayette.
But it wasn’t a bad thing. Erin’s warmth and her scent helped chase away the cold, metallic fear that always filled him after the nightmare.
“Would it help to talk about it?” She rubbed his knee through the sheet, her touch pulling him out of the dream more and more.
“No.” He didn’t want to linger in that dream. “I’d rather talk about anything else.”
He covered his face and waited for his heart rate to slow.
“If you’re sure.”
“God, yes.”
She was quiet for a minute. “I used to have a recurring nightmare that my family forgot me during a summer vacation.”
Absently, she threaded their fingers together. His and hers. He wondered if she could tell how grateful he was to change the subject. The ceiling fan ticked overhead, drying the cold sweat on his forehead.
The electricity must have come back on. Erin wore an oversize T-shirt and a loose pair of yellow cotton shorts.
“I pictured the Finley family as far too perfect to forget a kid.” He wanted to lighten the dark mood still fogging his brain. “Your dad was mayor for a decade, right? And I know your family owns a hardware store and a construction business.”
“I forgot how thoroughly you did your homework on the store.”
“It pays to know who you’re dealing with.”
“Wish I’d learned that lesson sooner in life.” She glanced at their clasped hands. “Anyway, the dream was based on a real Finley family vacation. We’d rented donkeys to view the Grand Canyon, and my mom had a mini-breakdown, which created a big drama, and everyone sort of flocked to help her.”
Remy tried to recall what else she’d said about her family. He didn’t know much about her other than the affair with the married guy that still tore at her conscience. How self-absorbed had he been to unload so many of his problems on her while she just listened.
“Your mom is scared of heights?”
“Mom is scared of lots of things. Being confined by a seat belt. Bridges. Avocados. I could list for a while. She’s bipolar, but she has some other issues that she takes better care of these days. Back then, there wasn’t the same awareness or care available, so we just walked on eggshells a lot and tried not to upset her.”
“That sounds like an impossible balancing act.” He remembered what she’d said about spending the whole day contemplating which candy to buy at the store. The story took on a darker cast as he imagined her and her siblings trying to stay away from their home. Avoid their mother.
“For her, too. I mean, she tried to keep herself together. I think that vacation was her idea so she could relax. But renting donkeys...” Erin shook her head. “Total disaster. I was trying to distance myself from her and the screaming because the sound rattled around the canyon and amplified a thousand times over. There was no escape.”
She held the pillow tighter and he realized it hurt her to remember this. Remy sat up in bed and put a hand on her knee, rubbing lightly.
“That must have been scary.”
“Yes. But it got twelve times scarier once the screaming ended and I had no idea where any of them went.” She traced the red stitching on the pillowcase with her fingernail. “Logically, I figured they went up, right? But I’d strayed so far off the path, I couldn’t tell what was the path anymore.”
“How long before they found you?”
She forced a dark laugh. “That’s the thing. I found them two hours later. They never noticed I was gone.”
“How old were you?” He hadn’t met all of her family yet, and right now, he wasn’t sure he wanted to.
“Nine. Heather swears she told Scott I was missing, but he was either too scared to process what she said, or Heather remembers wrong.” She shrugged and shifted positions so she sat cross-legged, leaning against the headboard. “So yeah, it was just two hours of scariness, but it’s all nicely preserved in my dreams from seeing the rattlesnake to the donkey’s refusal to move for about twenty minutes.”
“You stayed on the donkey the whole time?” He pictured Sarah when he’d first met her and how worried he’d been that he’d do something wrong as a parent because he had zero experience.
And he would have never forgotten her. She would have been scared to death.
“Yes, thank God. He knew the route even though I didn’t, apparently. And Dad explained later the tour probably took the same twenty-minute rest stop every time they made the trek, so the animal just followed the usual routine when he refused to budge all that time.”
“You were gone for two whole hours at nine years old?” He traced the pale network of veins on her foot, wondering how a whole family could overlook this vibrant woman.
“That really speaks to how much drama my mother is capable of creating.” Her obvious attempt to brush it aside didn’t come close to making him forget about it, but he sure as hell understood the need to ignore bad memories.
“You don’t deserve to be overlooked. Ever.” He squeezed her foot gently.
“It’s weird, though, because being overlooked is sort of what I strove for my entire childhood. If my mom didn’t notice me, I wouldn’t be the target of her next fury. So in some ways it was a victory that no one noticed I’d gone missing.”
He couldn’t believe that was how she would rationalize it, although it certainly explained a lot about how independent she was. “Erin.”
She must have heard the concern in his voice because she hurried to interrupt.
“I know. I mean, obviously I realize as an adult that wasn’t cool. Maybe it was one of those ‘be careful what you wish for’ moments.” She took a deep breath. “Anyway, it was a long time ago. I haven’t dreamed about rattlesnakes for years, but I always hated the way I could practically taste
the red dust of the desert on my teeth when I woke up afterward.”
She’d only shared it to help him forget about his nightmare. He rubbed her arms and up to her shoulders, kneading away the tension there.
“You let me know if the rattlesnakes come back,” he drawled in her ear to make her smile. “I’ll show them what I used to do to the water moccasins.”
“Ew. I don’t think I want to know, but thanks just the same.”
He slowed his soft massage of her shoulders. Skimmed a touch over her cheek.
“Thank you, Erin.”
Her cheeks flushed a little, this beautiful woman who wasn’t used to anyone paying enough attention to her. If he didn’t come with so much damn baggage attached, he would have liked to be the man who showed her how captivating he found her.
“Should we go try the quiche?” she asked, quite possibly looking to distract him from focusing on her.
His stomach growled in an answer too obvious to ignore.
“I’m taking that as a yes.” She darted from the bed, flipping some lights on in the house as she left the room.
Remy took his time finding his shorts and shirt. He was fairly level despite having the nightmare again. He’d thought he’d gotten a handle on them. But maybe being with Erin—getting involved with someone—was churning up the old feelings he’d tried to put a lid on.
He stepped into her bathroom to splash cold water on his face and pull himself together. A grief counselor had once warned him that two steps forward could also mean one step back as he tried to put the past behind him. Were the nightmares his step back?
Erin had woken him up this time—before things had turned really bad. He’d have to make sure he didn’t fall asleep around her again.
* * *
“THAT LOOKS AMAZING.” Sarah admired Ally’s deft skill with a toothpick as she steered the butterfly sticker into the center of her pinkie nail.
“I love watching the manicurist work at the salon. She’s so creative with nail designs. I can’t make the cool freehand art she does, but I can do stickers. They just take patience.” Ally sat cross-legged on a bright turquoise futon in one corner of her massive bedroom.
Her family owned a construction business, so her parents let her customize her room with a reading loft and a mini-fridge built into one wall. There was a curtain of feathers around the loft so you could read in privacy, and Sarah thought it was the prettiest thing ever. In the corner by the futon, Ally had a chest that turned into a game table and that was where all her nail art stuff sat. They’d been listening to a local band’s new music on Ally’s laptop. The computer was attached to a huge flat-screen TV that played the music videos on the wall next to them.
“Well, your artistic side shows in the room,” Sarah announced. “Have I mentioned that it’s totally sick?”
“Thanks.” Ally laid a new design on the next nail. “I didn’t get into it until recently, but my house has been kind of crazy this year while my parents go through—I don’t know—like ‘how to be married’ classes. When I complained about the arguments, my mother said I should make my room a sanctuary.”
“You really did, too.” Sarah’s gaze went to the birds and owls painted close to the ceiling like a border. “I think the little owls are my favorite up there.”
“Yeah?” Ally stopped painting on the top coat for a minute to look up at them. “That’s funny you say that because I did the owls and Aunt Erin did all the birds. Actually, the border was her idea because she said the feathers around the loft would look good if we made it a theme.”
“I had a dream room once.” Sarah didn’t think about it. She just said it. Maybe because she’d talked about the past a few times today—at the cop station and again at Erin’s house—and it hadn’t been bad. The moments at Erin’s had actually been pretty good because she’d shared some of the happy stuff.
“Did you move or something?” Ally went back to putting another butterfly on the next nail. Each nail was a different color with a contrasting set of wings.
“Yes.” She had hated that move. “My dad was in a hurry to leave the house where my mom died, so he had our stuff from Louisiana packed and shipped to the new place in Florida. It was weird. The last time I walked out of that house I didn’t even realize it would be the last time I was in it.”
“So why was the old room a dream room?” Ally put a pink butterfly on the blue nail. An orange butterfly on the green nail. She reached for the TV remote and turned down the volume on the country music. “What did you like best about it?”
“One wall had ten tiny mirrors in gold frames. Every frame was different. One had angels carved in it, and another one had a dragon. But mostly they were just really swirly. I liked those little mirrors.”
“But your dad didn’t pack those up?” Ally lifted her hand and tilted it to see the side in the light.
“No. None of the decor came with us.”
They were both quiet for a moment. Sarah was trying to figure out how she felt about that—her father leaving so much behind—when Ally spoke.
“I used to think that packing up and moving away would solve my problems.”
“As in...run away?”
Ally pulled another butterfly out of the jar with a pair of tweezers. “Yeah. I used to think about it a lot last fall when nothing was going right. But the thing is, you can’t run away from yourself.”
“I don’t get it.” She shook her head. “What do you mean?”
“You can move to a new place where everything around you is different. But if you’re no different, the problems are just going to come with you.” Ally shrugged. “Well, that’s how I worked it out in my head. I figured I’d wait and get a fresh start after I fixed me first.”
Sarah’s problems had definitely followed her to Heartache. Leaving Florida hadn’t fixed anything, although it had given her some time with her dad. Staying in Heartache might not necessarily make anything better for her. Theresa kept telling her she needed to face her grief about her mom instead of ignoring it.
That answer seemed so painful, though.
“I don’t think you need fixing, Ally. You seem pretty great to me.” She looked around the gorgeous bedroom. “Great home. Cute guy. Fun job at the salon. And you got into a really good college.”
“I put a lot of energy into making everything around me look perfect because I didn’t feel perfect inside. I was like this walking stress nightmare.” Ally slid a hand under hers and tilted it so she could see. “Look how pretty!”
“They’re beautiful. I love how bright the colors are.” But she couldn’t get as excited about her nails thinking about Ally stressing herself out. “So you’re better now?”
“Mostly. I mean, my parents are still walking a tightrope, and I’m scared they won’t stay together, but Ethan tells me that’s their issue, not mine.” Ally capped the topcoat and turned on a little fan so their nails would dry faster.
“It’s cool you can talk about it.” She, on the other hand, was not comfortable with sharing a lot of personal stuff. In fact, she’d pushed herself to stay quiet about so many things that she kissed boys instead of talking to them. Before that, she’d have drinks with them instead of having conversations.
There was something pretty messed up about it.
“It kinda helps working in a salon. The women there dish all the time, but it’s not mean and gossipy like at school. They give advice and try to help each other, or they just talk to...de-stress.”
A pounding on a door nearby made Ally jump.
“I hope that’s not my father,” Sarah said. “Every time I go somewhere lately he shows up to bring me home.” She followed her friend out of the bedroom and down to the living room, where Ally’s mother was pulling open the door.
It wasn’t her dad, though.
“Evening, Mrs. Finley.” Three guys dressed in work overalls stood on the porch. Behind them, a truck with Finleys’ Building Supplies painted on one side sat in the driveway. “We’ve
got a delivery to make if you don’t mind pointing us in the direction of the games room.”
“But I didn’t order anything.” Ally’s mom folded her arms. The woman was so thin Sarah had the urge to go cook her something to eat.
She might not know how to talk about her problems the way Ally had learned to, but she could cook comfort food like nobody’s business.
“Mr. Finley did, ma’am. He asked for you to call him if there was any problem.”
“No. No problem.” Mrs. Finley shook her head, her hair slipping out of a ponytail. “Girls, will you show them where to go?”
“Sure. It’s this way.” Ally waved the main deliveryman forward while the other two went back to their truck.
Sarah followed, careful not to let her nails touch anything as Ally brought the man past an in-home theater to a big, empty room with hardwood floors and leaf-green walls. A few framed photos of Ally as a young girl hung on the walls, along with some cute paintings that looked like school art projects.
“Great.” The dude turned in a slow circle and then knocked on walls in a few places. “We’ll try to be in and out as quickly as we can, but I think it’ll still take an hour or two to set things up. It might be a better surprise for your mom if she waits to come in until the end.”
“I’ll do my best, but Mom hates surprises.” Ally smiled at the guy. “Can we know what you’re doing?”
“Sorry, girls. It’s your dad’s orders.” He shoved some papers into his back pocket and hurried back into the hall. “We’ll have to make several trips through the house.”
“Ugh.” Ally grumbled and took a seat on a built-in cabinet under one window. “Does your dad do weird stuff like this?”
“He used to.” She hoisted herself up beside her friend. “I miss those days.”
“I’m sorry. I forgot about your mom.” Ally let the sentence hang for a long moment, maybe curious to hear more about how she’d died.
“It’s okay. I’m just ready for my father to have a life again. He’s spent so long being sad.” Sometimes it made her feel guilty. As though she didn’t love her mom enough and that was why she didn’t spend all her time feeling down about her death.