“But it was your daughter, Donna. You and your holier than thou attitude about trying to save every miscreant on the planet.”
“For crying out loud, Howard. What do you honestly think I do every day? I work for DFS, if you’ve forgotten. Do you know how many families I see that are ripped apart because of some stupid mistake that one of the parents make? Much of the time, it could have been avoided. It’s not some attitude that I have. It’s what I do. It’s who I am.”
Donna was fluctuating back and forth between anger and concern. I didn’t blame her, but I didn’t like it either. She only called me Howard when she wasn’t happy with me, and I had a feeling there was more to come.
“As far as our daughter is concerned, I had a long talk with Kate and she told me that Jim did leave, but he came back. He threw some stones at her window and when she opened it, he convinced her to let him back in. At least, climb up the trellis and come in through the window, anyway. They actually did do quite a bit of studying on Thursday, but they also did a little kissing and petting, you know?”
“No. And I really don’t want to know.”
“Come on, Howard. She told me two weeks ago she was having serious feelings about Jim. She actually had wanted that to happen. She didn’t want anything further to happen, though. I know you know how she feels about that, right?”
I nodded. “But I was perfectly content thinking she didn’t do anything at all,” I wanted to say, but kept it to myself.
“After he came back in, Kate was already in her pajamas and Jim, being a teenage boy, he thought he could get her to go a little further, but he just went too far. She wanted him to stop, and kept telling him to stop but he just didn’t. I think he would take it all back if he could.” She paused and stared at the clock on the microwave for a moment.
I noticed the wrinkles on her forehead form and when she looked right at me and squinted, I knew that I wasn’t going to like what she was about to say.
“But, then again, it’s a good thing that Brandon walked into the room and hit him with a baseball bat, or it could have been worse. A lot worse, Howard. At least he was coherent enough to help.”
“Wait a minute. That’s not fair,” I said.
“Really, Howard? You drink two highballs, take a sleeping pill and let a boy stay in your daughter’s room while you go off to sleep?” She was winding up.
“He left before I went to bed, Donna.”
“Yes, but he came back. He threw rocks at the window. You should have heard that, if not Kate’s voice talking to him through the window, at the very least.
“But that’s not the point. The point is that you knowingly mixed alcohol with a sleeping pill that you had no idea what it was made of, and when Kate needed your help, you couldn’t get your butt out of bed because you were passed out.”
“But, Donna, I, well, you know I didn’t mean to. I wasn’t sleeping and I hadn’t had a good night’s sleep for almost three weeks.”
“Listen to you, you sound like a little boy trying to rationalize the situation and convince his mother that he didn’t do anything wrong. Our daughter was screaming for help in the middle of the night and it took an 11-year-old boy to help her because you couldn’t get out of bed!”
“I’m sorry, Donna.” I began to weep. “I’m sorry.” I took a couple of deep breaths to try and retain some composure. “Nobody feels worse than I do about it, honey. I wish I could take it back, but I was so tired.”
“Whatever, Howard. Just let me handle it, okay? I’m pretty sure that Kate is not going to have too much trouble working through what happened. She is very upset right now, but she has a very good healing ability. She understands what happened. She doesn’t want to see Jim anymore, so don’t worry about that. But she is not, as you might understand, very happy with you right now. So, please don’t make it any worse and leave her alone for a bit, okay?”
I nodded my reply.
“And leave Jim alone, too, okay?”
I don’t know what made me feel worse. The fact that I failed my daughter or the fact that she was unhappy with me. I have never in my life wanted a drink more than I did at that very moment.
~
I walked upstairs to use the master bath, and stopped to look in on Kate. She was sleeping rather restlessly and I felt completely powerless to help her.
We were always very close, Kate and I. She was the first child, and Donna and I did everything we could to give her a good start in life. I think we actually spoiled her some, by our constant attention, but Donna would totally disagree.
She had pretty much a normal childhood, at least as normal as a child could have in the early 21 century. Didn’t it seem like the odds were so stacked against kids in those days? I mean, kids were reaching puberty earlier; they were exposed to drugs and alcohol in school at a much younger age. Take smoking, for a simple example. Everyone knew that it was bad for you, but teenagers still started to smoke. I could never figure that one out. But, then again, Donna and I hadn’t smoked for 20 years, so Kate and Brandon weren’t exposed to it at home. Donna would have most likely advocate that that was the biggest reason.
Kate wanted to do what little girls wanted to do. She tried ballet, piano lessons, singing, and acting. She was always good at what she tried, but never had enough motivation to be great at any one thing. I think that she was still trying to figure out just what she was good at. I was parroting Donna there, but I agreed.
She was sixteen when all of that happened, and she was starting to blossom into her own person. She hadn’t made any difficult life choices, yet, but she was developing her personality as one of motherly concern and nurturing. Which was probably what attracted her to Jim, I mean, outside of the raging teenage hormones. Jim wasn’t a very good student. Jim’s home life wasn’t ideal. And Kate wanted to help him succeed and have a happier life. As you might have guessed, those were Donna’s words.
She also told me about some things that I didn’t want to know about. I guess as Kate became older, she became closer to her mother because fathers just didn’t have the skills to deal with the problems of a sixteen-year-old girl. At least I knew that I didn’t.
The girl lying in the bed that afternoon was still my sweet little precious girl. I had always promised to protect her and care for her and I failed her. I felt miserable watching her toss and turn. I felt miserable much of the time those past few weeks, but that was the clincher.
“Maybe by next weekend she’ll want to go with me and Brandon to the mountains and we could heal some, together,” I thought.
I sounded more and more like Donna every day. “Heal. I wish I could heal myself before I tried to heal my relationship with my daughter, but there just isn’t room for me to be selfish about it right now,” I told myself.
“In due time,” I said to the bedroom door.
9
“How are things, Howard?” Dr. Morrisey asked me.
I was at my final checkup before being released back to work. Monday morning. Dr. Morrisey’s office. He had an upscale office in the downtown area. A bank building, third floor. I was sitting in a corner room that had a large corner window that overlooked the river. The clouds had been hanging over the city since I woke up that morning. Which didn’t help my mental health, but I physically felt pretty good. Healthy enough to get back out on the job sites and find out what my men had really been doing those past few weeks.
“Pretty good, Sal. Pretty good,” I replied.
He looked into my ear with his otoscope. “You look good physically, Howard, everything looks to be healing just fine, but I’ve been your personal physician for almost 20 years and I know that something is on your mind,” he said as he finished with one ear and looked into the other.
I hesitated, and then opened my mouth to speak.
He beat me to it, “How about that head of yours, Howard? Is the fog lifting any? Are you getting any of your memories back? Are you still having the nightmares?”
“You don’t real
ly want to know the answer to that question,” I thought as I pondered just how I should tell Sal about my experience on Thursday last. I’m not sure I wanted to talk to him at all about it. The whole thing was yet one more nightmare in my never-ending supply of nightmares lately.
“Well, doc, I’m not really sure what’s real and what’s made up anymore, you know?” I finally said.
“No, I don’t know. But why don’t you explain it to me a bit more?”
I laughed. “Well, I’ve been having these weird dreams. I think I told you about some of them. On Thursday last, I dreamed about something that was actually happening. At least, I think it was a dream. I took one of the sleeping pills and…”
“Oh shit, I didn’t tell him about the pill substitution,” my voice reverberated through my head.
“What sleeping pills?” he asked.
“The ones that you prescribed for me,” I lied.
“Oh, right, and?”
“And, well, some of what I dreamt I know was a dream because it just couldn’t happen in real life, but other parts of my dream actually did happen, I found out when I woke up. Or at least, well, you know, when I thought I woke up if I wasn’t awake already.
“Can you be a little more specific?”
“I don’t know if I want to, Sal. It’s kind of personal and it involves Kate.”
He gave me one of his polite smiles. “Sure, Howard, sure. I understand. Did you take anything with the Lunarest?”
“Um, well, yeah, I had a highball. I know I shouldn’t have, but I hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in two weeks.”
“Well that could account for some of the feelings that you were describing. But if you were awake and thought you were dreaming or if you were dreaming and thought you were awake, that sounds like a type of psychosis, and that would be a very rare side effect for Lunarest. Even with alcohol, Lunarest shouldn’t do that. It’s based on your body’s natural chemicals that help you to fall asleep. It isn’t a narcotic,” he explained.
“Now this is getting out of hand,” I thought. “I really should tell Sal what happened with the prescription. He’s my doctor and he should know. But then again, since I’m not going to take it anymore, maybe it is best I don’t. Maybe he can…”
“Just for purposes of discussion, Sal, is there something else that I could take? Let’s say that this Lunarest actually did that to me, is there something else that would help me sleep?” I asked.
“Outside of a narcotic, like Valium, or Ambien, which I don’t think would be a good idea with your amnesia and such, no, but I could recommend maybe a melatonin supplement, or an OTC nighttime sleep aid, like diphenhydramine hydrochloride, or Nytol, which is really the same as the allergy medication Benadryl, and much cheaper if you buy it that way.”
“Okay, I might try something like that, I don’t know.” I had really hoped that he might have given me another prescription.
“By the way, Howard, I don’t think you told me if you were getting any of your memories back. You started talking about your nightmares, but skipped the memory question.”
“Oh, right. I’m still at a loss for most of the details. The more I think about it, though, the more I realize that if I was flying through the air, I must have been somewhere in front of the semi that hit my truck, either in front of my truck, or in front of the Honda? Wait, the Honda hit the car in front of it. That would mean that I had to be in front of the first car, or on top of the Honda.” I shook my head and continued, “Sal, I’m trying to remember, but it just isn’t coming. I can hypothesize about it over and over, but nothing seems to strike me as reality. I wish it’d come back. I wish it’d come back, soon.” I continued to shake my head.
“It will, Howard, it will. As far as you going back to work, though, feel free to. Just don’t overdo it. Your head is healing fine and your arm looks good. I would recommend that you only work half days to start, unless you do nothing but supervise. I know how you are though, so I’ll be checking up on you with your wife, okay?”
~
“What is happening to me?” I thought as I was driving home from Sal’s office. I could feel a tightening in my chest and I started to breathe in short gasps.
“It seems like the more I think about the accident, the more I believe that it was me who actually ran up on top of that poor woman. My dreams are starting to show me that. My daydreams are starting to show me that.”
I could visualize her head popping open as my oil pan settled on top of it, gray matter and bone fragments splattering in a four foot radius, sliding down the metal that surrounded her. The blood that was dripping onto the wet pavement blended into the watered down pools of oil and gasoline underneath the dreadfulness. Turning the dark magenta into a light pink.
“Only problem is, I couldn’t possibly have seen that. I’d have to be in the Honda with her. But the visions are so real. The sounds are so real,” I said to myself.
The tightening in my chest increased, and I pulled over to the side of the road to try and calm myself.
“I know that the sound I hear over and over again is her head popping, it’s what keeps me awake all night.”
The visions in the dreams weren’t half as bad as the sounds of the dream. The sound of metal tearing. The popping. The splat of gray matter hitting the pavement. The sound of maggots as they showered down to the ground. The screeching tires, the screams, the gurgling.
“I don’t know what I’ll do if I can’t remember what happened and I keep on thinking that it was me who drove on top of the girl. I can’t for the life of me see how it could have been any other way. I drove on top of her. I got out of the truck and went to look under the front of it to see if I could see anybody and when the semi hit, the front of my pickup knocked me for a loop. But where did the gurgling sound come from and how do I hear the pop? Did I just make that up? I couldn’t have heard it inside the pickup, could I? Well, it isn’t the quietest vehicle I own, as far as road noise penetrating the cab. I might have been able to hear it if it was close to the floorboard.
“And, why do I visualize blood seeping through my fingers as I hear a gurgling sound? Where did the blood come from? It wasn’t my blood, I wasn’t losing that much, or so I was told. Blood, lots of blood, seeping blood, what significance can that have? Was it her blood? How is that possible? I couldn’t have been on top of her car, could I have? I would have ended up under my pickup, too. Unless the semi was traveling full speed and didn’t see the accident until the last second.
“Hmm. I need to find out about that. How would I find out about that? The police report didn’t mention anything about the pile moving. But it would have had to, even at a slow speed, right? I need to find out more about that. Maybe I can Google something like that.
“I can’t visualize myself being knocked into the air if I was on top of Janie’s car unless I was standing up on top of the car when the semi hit, or the semi was traveling at such a high rate of speed that the Honda buckled as the truck went through it, instead of up on top of it. That makes more sense, doesn’t it?
“And my clothes? What happened to the clothes that I was wearing that night? Was there blood all over them or was it mostly on my shirt? Could that be in the police report? I wonder if I can I get a copy of the police report. I’ll have to see. I’m sure that they would allow me to have one, wouldn’t they? I am one of the victims. Does that matter?” My thoughts trailed off.
“It wouldn’t hurt to ask,” I said to the seat next to me, put the car in gear, and drove home.
~
I was sitting on the pavement under my truck. The rain that found its way to the engine compartment sizzled as it hit. I could smell rain mixed with a copper smell. I knew that smell, but I couldn’t quite place it.
I was sitting under my truck and wondered why I was there. I heard a long screech as if something big had slammed on its brakes. I felt the impact and grabbed onto the tie rod on the passenger side.
I was pulled upward and forward when t
he truck moved in that direction, and I caught sight of something that made me snap my head back in that direction.
A woman was lying on the door frame of her car. It was a dark red color. I noticed that the red was streaked with blue, but then I realized that the red was from blood running down the side of it.
The scene unfolded in front of me as if it was happening one frame at a time. I saw my truck bound high in the air. I held onto the tie rod as it flew up and went with it.
It came down on top of the woman and the oil pan landed on the back of her neck. There was a wet squishing sound as the force of the oil pan severed her head on the door frame and her neck sprayed blood as her head toppled onto the rain soaked pavement. When it settled and rolled to a stop against my leg, the back of her head was facing me. I heard her whisper, “Help me, Howard. Help me.”
“How could she be talking?” I thought.
“You killed me, Howard. The least you could do is help me.”
I reached down and picked up her head as carefully as I could, my whole body shaking from fear. As I turned her head around in my hands her eyes opened and began to turn blood red. The redder they became the larger they got, bulging out from her eye sockets, until they popped open like a zit and splashed me with a mixture of blood and white mucus. I dropped her head and turned to expel my lunch on the pavement beside me.
“How did you like that, Howard? You deserved that. Didn’t you? I didn’t deserve to die, but you do. I didn’t deserve to die, but you do. But you do. But you do,” she repeatedly gurgled into the puddle that her mouth had landed in.
A hand grabbed me on the shoulder and I heard a voice telling me to get up. I turned around and saw my wife lying beside me, in our bed, in our bedroom.
“Honey, wake up, you were having a nightmare,” she said.
“Oh, wow,” I mumbled in return.
Dream Sweet Page 4