Dream Escape

by Sal Conte

  “There you go with that question again. You know why I’m here, darling. I came to jog your memory. We love each other. She needs to know.”

  He cast a quick glance over his shoulder to make sure Emma hadn’t followed him down. He closed the door and moved farther into the room.

  “How are you here?” he said in a loud whisper.

  “You missed me so much, you wanted me so badly, you conjured me up. Isn’t that why I’m here?” she offered as a teasing explanation.

  The fight was going out of him. He could feel the fight heading out the door, and up the basement stairs. “Yes, I missed you. I shouldn’t have, but I did.” He said softly.

  “We can’t help how we feel about each other, darling. Don’t fight it anymore.” She took a step toward him, held her hand out to him.

  “Don’t!” he said, his voice rising. The fight was coming back now. “You’re right, I did love you, but that was a dream. You were a dream. It wasn’t real. You were a fantasy I created to get through a rough patch.”

  “You did love me?” She seemed insulted. “Peter you do love me. You need to admit it to yourself. You love me and I love you. We can be happy together. All you have to do is admit it to yourself and tell Emma the truth.”

  “Kim, I have to live in the real world. I can’t go back there with you,” he said, appealing to her.

  “So I will stay here with you,” she replied.

  He took a breath, steadied himself. “You’re great… wonderful. I couldn’t have gotten through that time without you. But I love my wife. I love Robbie and Dinah. They are the most important people in my world, my real world.” His voice lowered. “I don’t love you.” The words rasped up his throat.

  Once he spoke them, he knew they were true. What he loved was the idea of being in love with her, the fantasy of it. Some men fall in love with supermodels they’ve seen on TV. Women do the same with handsome movie stars or the young guy with the rippling six pack who cleans the pool. They go to bed with these fantasies on their minds, make love with the image of the beautiful people hovering before their eyes, but it isn’t real love. Its fantasyland.

  “Liar!” she cried out.

  “No, it’s the truth. Look into my eyes, and you’ll see. I don’t love you. I don’t believe I ever did. I loved the idea of you. But, Kim, I live in the real world. You don’t belong in this world. I need you to go back to your world, and leave me in mine.” The words were spoken with true regret, but he knew he was over her.

  ‘Come to bed.’

  He’d been afraid that when she called for him, he’d be too weak and give in. That might have happened in a dream, but not in the real world. In the real world he had a wife and kids, and a job that he loved. In the real world he had Horace Booker who was depending on him, and Molly who was helping him prepare his argument to free the man. He wasn’t weak for her in the real world. He couldn’t afford to be.

  She peered deep into his eyes, and hers began filling with tears.

  “You’re mine!” she cried out in an attempt to refute what she saw in his eyes.

  He didn’t see the picture frame hurtling toward his head.

  BAM!

  It hit him flush on the forehead. He saw momentary stars, could feel blood seeping from the gash in his head. It began trickling down his face.

  His hand went up in defense. He dodged the paperweight, the stapler, and the scissors.

  “Kim. Stop it.”

  “YOU’RE MINE!” she repeated. Her voice was high, loud, and frenzied. She’d become a hellion, a one woman tornado hurling everything within arms-length at his head.

  Peter began backing toward the door as clothing, hangers, shoes came flying at him.

  “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. But you have to go now.”

  He reached the door, pulled it open. A hardbound book careened into the door jamb before falling to the floor.

  Peter exited the room, and pulled the door shut behind himself.

  Thud, thud, thud.

  Item after item slammed into the door. He two-timed it up the stairs. Emma was standing in the hallway, panic in her eyes. Her cell phone was in her hand.

  “You’re bleeding,” she said.

  He wiped a stripe of blood from his face with the sleeve of his shirt. “It’s nothing,” he replied, still stunned from what had just occurred.

  “I called the police. They’re on their way.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Kim had vanished.

  The police told them to wait outside while they searched the house. The officer who did most of the talking was named John Trilden. He was older than his partner, Officer Bill White, and clearly the more experienced of the two.

  Peter and Emma stood at the curb as they were told, awash in twirling beams of blue and red light while Officers Trilden and White gave their home the onceover. Gawking neighbors piled up along the curb near them like dumpsters on trash day.

  Kim was gone. Her things were all there, but Kim had vanished into thin air.

  “Are you sure the last place you saw her was in the basement?” Officer Trilden asked.

  “Yes,” Peter replied.

  “There’s no way out down there. She must’ve come upstairs and slipped out during the confusion.”

  Peter didn’t want to say there was no confusion. He and Emma hadn’t taken their eyes off the basement door until the cops arrived. He couldn’t say she vanished because she wasn’t real to begin with, so he went along with them.

  “I guess,” he said.

  Once the house was secure, the police let the family back inside.

  “If she comes back give us a call and we’ll come right out. She probably won’t return, but you never know. I don’t want to alarm you folks. She’s probably just a nutbag, but she could be dangerous.”

  Peter and Emma promised if they ever saw her again, they’d call, and the police left.

  By the time they got the kids down, it was nearly ten o’clock. A cranky Robbie asked to say goodnight to Shay.

  “Shay isn’t here right now, Trooper,” Peter said as he tucked the boy in.

  “Where is she? Is she coming back? I want Shay.” Robbie began to whine.

  “He’s tired,” Emma said over his shoulder.

  Peter told Robbie a Dinosaur Train story that he made up on the spot. He talked until the boy fell asleep.

  Then Peter and Emma retreated to their bedroom.

  He went into the bathroom and surveyed the wound on his forehead in the mirror. There was a huge knot on his head, and a jagged gash just above his right eyebrow, but the bleeding had stopped.

  “What happened down there?” Emma asked.

  She was standing behind him, peering at him in the mirror.

  He knew the question had been on the tip of her tongue all night, could see it looming in her eyes as they waited for the police to finish their search.

  He raked a hand through his hair. His hairline felt as though it had receded a few centimeters more since the ordeal had begun.

  “I have to tell you something. It’s about Shay. Her real name is Kim.” His words were labored, and long coming.

  “Okay,” is all she said, but her voice had gone to that place where husbands never want their wives’ voices to go.

  He took her hand and led her back into the bedroom, feeling as though he were a lamb being led to slaughter. Dead man walking. He sat her down at the foot of the bed, and told the entire story.

  He told how he’d discovered Dream Escapes online; told how unhappy she was, and how helpless it made him feel; told how he needed something in his life, adventure, romance, and had created a fantasy in the image of his favorite film, “Casablanca.” Kim was part of the fantasy. He told her about the affair, leaning heavily on the words but it was all a dream.

  “You had an affair?”

  “Did you hear anything that I said aside from the word affair?” He was getting annoyed. He knew he shouldn’t, but he’d just poured his heart out to
her, and she jumped past everything to affair.

  “I heard what you said. Do you really think I’m dumb enough to believe a woman jumped out of your dreams, and wound up in our home? You’re better than that, Peter.”

  “I know it’s hard to believe—”

  “Hard to believe, is that what it is? How about impossible? You had your girlfriend living with us.” The accusation raged from her lips. “What an idiot I was. I knew there was something off right from the start, but I never would have believed you were having an affair.”

  “Not an affair, a dream.”

  “And you started this sordid affair while I was pregnant with our daughter, Dinah?” she added, blowing right past his defense. “How could you?”

  “It wasn’t real. A person can’t have an affair with a dream. If they could, every married man in the world would be guilty of cheating on his wife.”

  “I think you should spend the night at the office. You can finish your dreaming there.” Her tone was harsh. He knew she was hurting.

  “Emma, no,” he said, the words was coming from a far off place. “I didn’t even want you to hire her. Remember that? I did everything I could to avoid her.”

  “So what are you saying, your girlfriend moved into our home against your wishes?”

  He stopped, raked an exasperated hand though his hair. He was beginning to feel like the captain of the Titanic. The ship was sinking, and he was going down with it. “I know I should have said something, but—”

  She held up a hand. “I need to think about my next move, and I can’t do that with you here. I can’t even look at you right now,” she said in a tone of disgust.

  “I know it’s hard to believe, Emma. I know it’s impossible to believe. But you have to believe me. It’s the truth.” He looked at her, eyes beseeching. “I’ll take you to Dream Escapes and prove it.”

  “Pack a bag,” she said. “I want you out of here within the hour.”

  He realized reasoning with her tonight wasn’t going to work. The ship had sunk.

  “Okay,” he said, feeling lost and alone.

  He reminded her that Officer Trilden had warned that Kim might come back—she could be dangerous—and he wanted to make sure the family was safe, at least for the night.

  She gave in, just for the night, allowing him to bed down on the sofa. He didn’t sleep. No surprise there. He lay on the lumpy couch, staring at Robbie’s toys scattered around the living room floor, trying to figure out how it had gone so bad so quickly.

  He should have said something sooner. He should have said something the day Kim showed up in their kitchen. But what do you say? Hey, honey, the nanny you want to hire came out of my dream. That’s the reason I don’t want to hire her. We need to send her back to dreamland.

  He would have sounded like an escapee from the looney bin.

  Emma spent the night in their room with the door closed. He was certain she wasn’t sleeping, either. She was figuring out her next move.

  He cleared out just after sunrise. He hoped that his absence would help her come around, help her listen to his side.

  He didn’t say goodbye.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Molly felt a sense of poetic justice to what was occurring in her life.

  All the pieces were falling neatly into place. She couldn’t have predicted that the stupid nanny would work to her benefit, but she had. The nanny was gone, and Peter was spending all his free time at the office with her.

  On Tuesday, they got the word that Judge Toliver had read their brief, and agreed to allow Peter to argue his motion to free Horace Booker in front of him. They celebrated that night in the office singing to The Zac Brown band on the radio, and drinking cheap champagne from plastic cups. He kissed her.

  “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Molly.”

  “Good news. I’m not going anywhere.”

  The kiss wasn’t on the lips, or anything. It wasn’t at all the way he’d kissed her in the dreams. Peter was still grief stricken over Emma’s reaction to the nanny situation. He had to show a little decorum. But she could tell it was more than just a friendly peck on the lips. He was as much in love with her, as she was with him.

  They’d be spending weeks together in Houston presenting to Judge Toliver. By that time, Emma and the kids would have moved back to Palo Alto. Emma could start her new life with a new job, and Peter would be free to pursue her openly.

  It had taken Molly several months to find the startup, Mobilsift, in Northern California. They were a new company, and like many Silicon Valley startups, leaking cash like water through a sieve.

  When she told them she’d pay a premium for them to hire Emma, plus her first year’s salary, they jumped at the opportunity to get a free employee, and put some cash in their coffers at the same time.

  “Just drag it out a bit,” she told them. “Make her sweat. I don’t want her to think the job is just being handed to her.”

  The day after they got the Horace Booker news they were huddled together working at Peter’s desk. His nose glanced against her neck.

  “What’s that perfume? It smells familiar,” Peter asked. He straightened, got an odd look in his eye.

  “You like? It’s something that was popular a long time ago, but it’s hard to find these days. I picked it up on Ebay of all places. It’s called Evening In Paris.”

  “To sleep perchance

  to dream”

  Several months earlier…

  Something was wrong.

  Peter had been acting strange for several weeks, disappearing in the middle of the day, two days a week, for hours at a time. When he returned to the office, he sometimes smelled of cigar smoke and perfume.

  “Is everything okay?” Molly had asked on several occasions.

  “Everything is perfect,” he’d say with a goofball expression on his face.

  Is he having an affair? she wondered.

  Molly was not one to be duped by a man, so she started following him. She followed him to a small office building just east of downtown where Peter would disappear inside for hours.

  Is he a gambler? Is there a poker game going on inside?

  After several trips to the building, Molly’s curiosity got the best of her, and she went inside.

  Dream Yourself A New Reality the sign read. Molly didn’t realize when she first read the sign that her dreams were about to come true.

  With a little financial prodding she discovered that Peter was there for a Dream Escape. It took a lot more prodding and quite a bit more money to convince the proprietors to alter the program and allow her into Peter’s dream.

  Her first trip inside the fantasy changed everything.

  One moment she was lying on a gurney with a contraption strapped to her head, the next she was in bed with him. They were in a tiny room above a café in Casablanca. He called her Kim, and made toe curling love to her.

  After that, she couldn’t get enough of him. Molly only had a few sexual relationships in her life before then, and never had experienced the kind of earth-shattering love making that she had with Peter in the dream. The result: she visited Dream Escapes almost as often as he did.

  Before she knew it, they were crazy in love with one another. She didn’t plan it. She knew he didn’t either. It was something that just happened.

  For Molly, it was perfect. She’d found a man who had the same calling to help free innocents from prison that she had. She imagined the life they could have together, working passionately for the cause by day, making even more passionate love all night.

  She recalled telling Emory Holmes, all those years ago, while he lay at her feet, clutching his stomach in the throes of death, that his would not be in vain. She hoped he was looking up at her from his place in hell, witnessing how she’d turned his bad thing into something very, very good.

  *

  Emory Holmes had been an attorney for the Enron Corporation. In 2001 Enron became known as the biggest fraud scandal in US history. By
the use of accounting loopholes, and poor financial reporting, Enron was able to hide billions of dollars in debt from failed deals and bad projects from their shareholders.

  By the time the justice department had stepped in it was too late. The damage had already been done to stock portfolios and the pensions and savings plans of Enron’s employees.

  One such employee was Molly’s father, Bill Taylor. Taylor had worked in the gas fields of the south, at first, operating a drilling rig, but ultimately winding up as a foreman in the very sensitive fracking phase of the operation. Taylor was proud of his accomplishments. The employee pension and savings that had been washed away in Enron’s fraud was all he had.

  Forty-two million dollars of what had been washed away from Enron employees washed up into Emory Holmes’s bank account. He served no time for his part in the deception.

  The Taylors were rural people, country folk. Bill Taylor was a good man, a proud man, a family man. He took the wiping out of his pension and savings as a failure to his family.

  Bill took to drinking, and when alcohol failed to ease the pain, on a Sunday afternoon while the family was at church, he went out to the woodshed, picked up his Winchester bolt action model 70, and put a bullet in his own head.

  He’d done a fine job of it because when the family returned home they found more than a bullet in his head. Fragments of Bill Taylor’s skull had been embedded into the walls of the woodshed.

  Molly, who had just begun fighting for the little guy, took her father’s suicide more than hard. She took it personal. She made an abrupt detour from her calling. She knew she had to find some way to avenge her father’s death.

  *

  Emory Holmes was a widower.

  The year of Bill Taylor’s death was hard on him as well. He suffered a massive heart-attack in the spring of that year. After quadruple bypass surgery, he wound up convalescing at home in his sprawling Alabama mansion. Molly finagled a job working for him as a caregiver, and after six months of being in his presence every day, she charmed her way to becoming his personal assistant.

  By that time, Holmes was becoming even more infirm, and in need of round the clock care. Molly provided that care.