You Were There Too

by Colleen Oakley

  Sighing, she opens the door and stands, placing her hand on her colostomy bag. It’s secured to her stomach, but she’s still not used to it yet and lives with the general anxiety it will fall off at any second. A colostomy bag! She sighs again and wonders how her life came to this.

  She lets herself into the house with the key Holly made her and locks the door behind her. Holly has fallen asleep on the couch—and no wonder, Whitney thinks as she recognizes Antiques Roadshow on the screen.

  Wearily she pads down the short hall and into the bedroom she’s sharing with Gabriel. She gently sits on the double bed beside his tiny sleeping frame and puts a hand on his cheek, feeling her heartbeat slow, her entire body calm with the nearness of her son. Before becoming a mother, she didn’t know it was possible to love anything the way she loves her son. And though she adores his snaggletoothed smile, the overenthusiasm with which he delivers poorly constructed knock-knock jokes, even the manic repetitive noise of him practicing the drums, there’s something about her sleeping boy that particularly tugs at her heartstrings.

  And it’s in this moment, she simultaneously knows that though it is right to leave Eli, it was also right to marry him. Because how could she possibly regret a decision that resulted in this most perfectly imperfect boy? She doesn’t deserve Gabriel, she knows that much. But she’d do anything in the world necessary to keep him.

  She carefully changes out of her silk blouse and designer jeans—an outfit wasted on her no-show date—and retreats to the bathroom to empty her bag, brush her teeth and scrub her face. Then she tugs on a loose T-shirt and pajama pants and goes back into the den to turn off the television and rouse her sister.

  Holly yawns and sits up after Whitney softly jostles her shoulder. “How was your date?”

  “Nonexistent. I got stood up.”

  “Oh. Sorry,” Holly says, reaching for a Dorito from the open bag on the coffee table.

  And then something occurs to Whitney and she’s startled it’s the first time she’s thinking it. “Hey—did Eli call you? Did you tell him where I was tonight?”

  “What? Of course not.” Holly crunches the chip and then licks the powdered cheese off her fingers.

  And that’s when the fear from the parking lot grips her in earnest; the same fear she has felt in flashes over the years, when Eli’s temper boils over. When he does things she never thought him capable of. And yet, he’s proven her wrong, time and again.

  And now, he’s proven one more thing: He knows how to find her, even when she doesn’t want to be found.

  Chapter 14

  The Jerome L. Greene Science Center looks like a Frank Lloyd Wright creation on steroids: all glass and metal and right angles. Oliver came to the city yesterday for some dinner meeting with Penn Carro, so I drove to Philly at the crack of dawn and took the train into Manhattan to meet him for our ten a.m. appointment. I’m fifteen minutes early. I slide onto a bench and watch the college students, laden with book bags, curved over their phones, amble by on their way to class. And even though the campus is like a completely different world—expansive bright walkways and vibrant green spaces separating the stately Gothic buildings—dropped in the middle of New York City, I revel in the bustle, the spark of energy absent in sleepy small towns like Hope Springs. I realize just how much I miss it. How isolated I’ve felt.

  At ten o’clock on the dot, Oliver comes rushing at me. “C’mon,” he says. “We’re gonna be late.” I follow him through the glass door and we squeeze into the elevator behind two girls, one wearing black lipstick, the other in plaid pajama pants. When they get off at the third floor, Oliver and I ride in an awkward silence.

  The doors slide open and I follow him to room 427. As he raps on the door, I finally think of something to say: “I can’t believe the magazine liked your story idea.”

  “Um,” he says. We hear a “Come in” from the other side. “They didn’t.”

  “What?” I whisper. But he’s turning the handle and then we’re in the office, face-to-face with the woman from the photo, except she’s in full color—wearing a light pink tunic and a smile that stretches her thin lips until they’re nonexistent.

  “Oliver, I presume?” she says, sticking out her hand over her desk.

  “Yes.” He fits his hand into hers. “Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me.”

  “It’s a pleasure,” she says, turning to me.

  “This is Mia.”

  “Hi,” Dr. Saltz says, staring from me to Oliver as if she’s waiting for an explanation as to why I’m there. Oliver doesn’t offer one. I wiggle my fingers at her as she lowers herself into her desk chair. She sweeps a hand magnanimously at us to follow suit. “Well, like I told you,” she says when we’re seated across from her, “I’ve got this twenty-five-minute window before my next class, so fire away.”

  “Right,” Oliver says. He rubs his palms on his jean-clad thighs.

  “What magazine did you say you were from again?”

  “Um . . . we’re not. From one.”

  My head snaps toward him, eyes wide, and then up at Dr. Saltz.

  She cocks her head like a questioning bird, eyes narrowed, then looks up toward the ceiling, as if searching for help. More to herself than us, she mutters: “I told Janine to vet these interview requests, but does she listen? No. No, she doesn’t.” She drops her eyes back in our direction. “Let me guess,” she says, her voice steady, laced with a not-small hint of anger. “You’re having strange dreams and want to know what they mean.”

  “Er . . . yes.”

  She rolls her eyes and starts shuffling papers on her desk. “Thank you so much for wasting my time—and yours. But there are therapy offices all over the city of New York and I’m sure one of them can help you decipher what being chased by a Tyrannosaurus rex or showing up naked to your family reunion means.”

  She stands up with such force, the leather chair rolls back, slamming into the cinder block wall behind her.

  Oliver half stands, too, holding a palm up. We come in peace. “No, wait. Please,” he says. “We don’t know each other—” He gestures to me. “We just met a few weeks ago. But we’ve been dreaming about each other. For months.”

  “Years,” I say.

  “Years,” he repeats, and then his head swivels. “Years?”

  I nod, holding his gaze. His have only been for the past few months?

  “Congratulations,” she says under her breath, but she doesn’t move to leave. “So you guys are obviously soul mates destined to be together. There. Is that what you wanted to hear? I have things to do now.”

  “What? No—no! I’m married!”

  She fixes a look at me. A cocked eyebrow; and I feel all the shame she’s directing toward me. The judgment and guilt dealt in one swift blow—You’re married, yet you’re here? With another man? I drop my head. “C’mon,” I say to Oliver. “We should go.”

  “SHE KEEPS DYING,” he says, the fervor in his voice jerking my head up. “She dies. In my dreams—nightmares. And I can’t go on like this—I have to know what it means. Or how to make it stop.”

  I blink slowly. And then blink again. The air-conditioning unit squeaks and rattles to life beneath the window, before growing into a steady hum. And then I flash back to the conversation on my porch—how I asked him what he dreamt and he got so uncomfortable. But then, what about the elevator one? Surely I don’t die in all of them?

  “Most of them,” he says quietly to me, and I wonder if I asked the question out loud, or just with my expression. Harrison says I’m transparent. That it doesn’t matter what I say, because what I think is always written right on my face. “The elevator, the waterslide. They end the same.”

  And suddenly I feel so foolish. Here I am harboring a borderline teenage-girl crush on this man I’ve been dreaming about, while I’m actually—literally—his worst nightmare. Harrison w
ill be so relieved to know the reason Oliver looks at me so intently is because he’s waiting for me to choke on a noodle, a spring pea, to drop dead of a sudden heart attack.

  I become aware once again of Dr. Saltz still hovering behind her desk. Her eyes dart from me to Oliver and back to me again. Realizing we have no intention of leaving—I’m not sure I could stand up if I wanted to—she takes a deep breath, exhaling slowly. She pinches the bridge of her nose, directly between her eyes. She licks her lips. She mutters something that sounds like, “Jesus, be a fence.” Then she sits down.

  “You’ve got five minutes,” she says. “What do you want to start with?”

  “Um . . .” I say, slowly. “I think the dying bit would be good?”

  “Great.” She places her hands together in front of her. “Dreaming of death often doesn’t literally mean that someone is going to die.”

  “Often? So sometimes it does.”

  She shrugs. “There are not really any statistics I can point to here. But the general consensus is that it’s symbolic of the ending of something—whether it’s a job, a relationship . . .” She pauses, looks pointedly at me. “A marriage.”

  “Hey,” I say, but before I can defend myself further, Oliver speaks.

  “I did just break up with my girlfriend. Around the time the dreams started.”

  In my peripheral, I see Dr. Saltz lift her hands, palms to the sky, as if to say, See? I rest my case, but I keep my eyes trained on Oliver. Girlfriend. After learning he wasn’t actually married to Caroline, I didn’t even think about him being in a relationship with anyone else—not that it’s any of my business.

  “OK, so what about this whole dreaming of each other before we met? That’s not normal, right? I mean, is there any research where that’s happened before?”

  She turns to me, expression bored, her voice monotone. “In dream science we refer to that as psychic dreaming, the idea that some dreams have a predictive quality to them, or can tell the future.”

  “Like . . . a premonition?”

  She dips her chin. “So, in your case, you dreamt about a man and then, allegedly”—she gestures to Oliver—“met that man. Other examples are people who had nightmares about the twin towers falling in the months and weeks leading up to 9/11. Or people dreaming of earthquakes only to experience one days later. It’s even said that Lincoln dreamt of his own death, just weeks before he was assassinated.”

  “What? I thought you said death was symbolic.”

  “I said it’s often symbolic.”

  I clench my jaw, inhaling deeply through my nose.

  “Is that true?” Oliver asks. “Did people really dream about 9/11 before it happened?”

  “It depends on your definition of true, I suppose,” she says. “Are these people lying? I don’t think all of them are—there are just too many stories for that to be possible. But is their perception of what’s occurred accurate?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, don’t get me wrong, I think these anecdotes are all very intriguing. But I also think coincidence and perception can play a big role. In other words, people can see what they want to see sometimes. Maybe they want to believe someone is their soul mate”—again, her hawk eyes dart back and forth between us—“and so in retrospect they think, say, that man with the gold medallion walking on the beach in their dream must be the exact same person they meet a year later with a gold medallion walking on the beach and are now falling in love with. But perhaps it’s just a strange coincidence. I mean, there are a lot of men on the East Coast that wear gold medallions—especially near Jersey.” She pauses, but doesn’t crack a grin at her own joke. “Or, in the case of 9/11, maybe the nightmare was just of an explosion in a building, but again, in retrospect, it’s very easy to think that it must have been the World Trade Center.”

  Oliver leans back, jabs his fingers into his hair. But I sit still, processing what Dr. Saltz is suggesting, which is similar to what Harrison said—that I didn’t actually dream of Oliver, just someone who looked like him. And that upon seeing him, I made the connection, because I what—want it to mean something? The whole idea is preposterous and the irritation that has been building is now full-blown anger.

  “This is bullshit.”

  Oliver turns to me, eyes wide.

  “What? It is. You know this isn’t just a weird coincidence. I dreamt of you—not someone who looked like you. It’s not my mind playing some trick on me.”

  The air conditioner shuts off and a tinny silence fills the room.

  The wheels of Dr. Saltz’s chair squeak as she shifts in her seat. “Look,” she says. And when I do, really look at her, her features have rearranged themselves into a softer kindness. “My grandmother used to have this friend, Harley Dean. And whenever anybody lost something, they called Ms. Harley Dean, because she would know how to find it. One time my grandmother moved houses, and lost a pair of crystal candlesticks that my grandfather had given her. She told Harley Dean—who lived two full states away—and the next day Harley Dean called her and told her to look in a cabinet underneath the stairs in the basement. Sure enough, my grandmother found a box there, and in that box were the candlesticks. Now, mind you, Harley Dean had never been to my grandmother’s new house.”

  My brow wrinkles. “So how did she—”

  “Said she dreamt it. That’s how she found other people’s lost things—she would dream about them. Where they were.”

  I sit back, not understanding.

  “What I’m trying to say is, I can’t explain that. I believe that it happened—I know my grandmother wouldn’t lie about it—but I have no explanation. I would love to sit here and tell you the how and why of it, but I deal in science. And from my research and the fifty years of research before me, the science backing up this type of predictive dreaming just isn’t there.” She holds my gaze for a beat, shifts her eyes to Oliver. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not real.” She starts moving papers around on her desk and stands up. “Now if you’ll excuse me.”

  Oliver stands up and holds the door open for her. “Thank you for your time, Dr. Saltz,” he says as she passes. She grunts and then pauses.

  “You know, I’m surprised you didn’t call Denise Krynchenko.”

  “Who?” he asks.

  “You don’t know of Professor Krynchenko? She’s Harvard. Studies all that psychic stuff. Look up her book. It’s a doozy.”

  Oliver stretches away from the door, holding it open with his foot, and grabs a pen from Dr. Saltz’s desk. Scribbles the name on his palm.

  “Thanks,” he repeats. And then Professor Saltz is gone and we’re alone. “C’mon,” he says to me.

  “Where are we going?” I stand up, my knees a little wobbly. “To a library?”

  “No. I need a drink.”

  * * *

  Another thing I love about big cities: You can find a bar that’s open and serving at literally any hour of the day. Back in the bright sunshine, the first restaurant we come to off campus swells with brunchers at sidewalk tables, laughing over their smoked salmon tartines and Bellinis. We pass it, as if in silent agreement that the atmosphere doesn’t quite fit our mood, and Oliver reaches for the heavy wood door pull of the next establishment—no patio, no brunchers. No brunch, apparently, as one staffer is in the middle of pulling the chairs off the tabletops in preparation for the lunch service. Our eyes adjust to the dim light, we hop up on barstools and, seeing as we’re the only patrons seated at the long, scuffed wood bar, the bartender gets our drink order right away.

  “Dying?” I say to Oliver the second our cocktails (old-fashioned for him, vodka tonic, two limes, for me) are placed in front of us.

  “Yeah,” he says, twisting the highball glass slowly on the bar top.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I don’t know. How do you tell somebody that?”

>   He has a point. He rubs his hands over his eyes and temples. “This is all so weird.”

  “So—how do I die?” I mean it as a joke to lighten the mood. But it hangs in the air, heavier than I intended.

  “Different ways,” Oliver says. “The two of us hiking in the woods and you willfully stepping off a cliff, your body colliding with the rocks below. Masked man eerily laughing while peppering your chest with copper-tipped bullets from his artillery of weapons. Walking across train tracks, not hearing the locomotive whistle as it barrels toward you, leaving your head bloody, neck half—”

  He stops when he sees my face.

  “I know you’re a writer and all,” I say, once I find words again. “But sometimes . . . less is more.”

  “Sorry,” he mumbles. “You know that’s not even the worst of it, though—it’s that I can’t ever get to you. That awful feeling in dreams when you’re trying to run but your legs feel like they’re stuck in mud or you scream and no sound comes out? That’s how it is every time. I’m right there, but I can’t help.”

  I suppress a shiver and take another sip of my drink through the tiny black straw, the strong taste of vodka flooding my mouth. Exhaustion creeps into my bones, weighing them down. And not just because I got up at the crack of dawn. I’m tired of the dreams. Of thinking about them, dissecting them, feeling no closer to finding out what in the world they could mean.

  I pluck the straw out of my drink, flick it onto the bar top, pick up the glass and swallow a proper mouthful. “Enough about all that.” I wave my hand in the air between us. “Tell me about this girlfriend.”

  “Who—Naomi?” He shrugs. Scratches his cheek. “Not much to tell.”

  “How long did you date for?”

  “Five years.”