Overheard in a Dream

by Torey Hayden

  “Conor hadn’t really been a problem before this. He was a sensitive kid. And a bit of a mama’s boy maybe. Laura adored him so she fussed over him a lot. I decided to start taking him out on the ranch with me some, just to give him a little time in a man’s world. I’d sit him up in front of me in the saddle and we’d ride together.”

  “How old was Conor then?” James asked.

  “I dunno. Hardly been walking. Eighteen months, maybe? But he loved that. He was just the most enthusiastic little guy then. And smart. I’m not just saying this because I’m his dad. He really was quick to learn things, and he’d remember everything you taught him. Like, for instance, he loved the wild birds, and so I’d tell him their names. He’d sit in the saddle and say, ‘Bluebird, Daddy! Meadowlark!’ and he was always right. He was a little sponge.”

  Alan’s expression darkened. “Then everything started to change …

  “It was strange how the change happened,” he said. “The first thing I noticed was that Conor started getting clingy. Not all at once, but a bit more and a bit more until it got serious. Until he got to the point where it wasn’t Laura hanging onto him all the time, but instead him hanging onto Laura.”

  Alan ran a hand over his face and let out a long breath. “Laura and I had been married about three years by then and the honeymoon was very definitely over. I’m not saying our marriage was on the rocks or anything. We were doing okay. But I’d realized by that point that the woman who’d sat there talking to me all night in the Badlands wasn’t really the woman I married.”

  “How do you mean that?” James asked.

  “What I’d loved about her that night was how easy and open she was. But once the first glow of love wore off, I realized that like an iceberg, nine-tenths of Laura is below the surface, that most of her is just never going to be visible to me.”

  “So in saying nine-tenths is not visible, are you saying you feel that Laura was shutting you out of large parts of her life?”

  “Well, I don’t know if it’s purposeful. That’s the trouble. I don’t think she does it to hurt. It’s just that everything’s a story to her. Real and unreal blend together so seamlessly in her mind that you never know which is which. You never know if what she is saying is authentic or simply her version of things and has no substance. It’s like a mirror image. Like a reflection of what’s real.

  “When we first married, I didn’t even appreciate it was happening, but after a while I started catching her out. And they are often the silliest little matters, but she just seems to want to keep this labyrinthine maze around herself for the sake of doing it. You ask her something and if she’s in the mood, she’ll tell you the truth; if she’s not, she’ll tell you whatever story’s in her head. After a while it just felt evasive to me. It gives me the feeling that she doesn’t want me to know what’s really happening to her.”

  “Can you give me an example of this lying behaviour?” James asked.

  “I can give you a very good one. It was during this time when I had all this stuff going on with the ranch and my financial problems and Conor was starting to go downhill. I discovered something pretty strange. I answered the phone one day and this policeman was on the other end of the line. They wanted to talk to Laura about an injunction she’d just taken out. I’m, like, what?!” Alan stared at James. “It turns out, Laura was being threatened by some demented fan. He was actually stalking her. But she never told me a single thing about it. Never mentioned it once. Can you imagine that? Doesn’t that seem weird?”

  “Do you suppose that with Conor and your financial problems and everything, she was simply trying to protect you?” James asked.

  “This guy was threatening her life. And I’m her husband, for Christ’s sake. She was being so supportive of me during this financial crisis on the ranch. She never criticized me or made me feel like I was failing her, so I thought we were really close. I mean, doesn’t it seem bizarre to you that someone who lives with you, who ostensibly loves you, wouldn’t share this kind of thing with you? That’s bringing self-reliance to new heights. And it made me feel like shit when I found out. I was already feeling half a man, and now she wouldn’t even let me give a hand in protecting her.”

  Silence followed.

  “I think this added to Conor’s problems,” Alan said. “He’s such a sensitive kid. I’m sure he must have picked up on Laura’s anxiety about this guy. Maybe this was why he started getting so clingy at that time, because he sensed she was threatened and her fear made him afraid.

  “Anyway, once I knew about the stalker, I didn’t mess about. I got hold of the police myself and told them they better make sure that injunction worked, because my deer-hunting rifle was right there in the cabinet beside the phone and I had absolutely no qualms about defending my family. That worked, because this guy buggered off after that and we never heard from him again.”

  Alan leaned back into the soft cushions of the sofa. “So you get the picture of what I’m dealing with.”

  James nodded. “Yes, it does sound like Laura’s behaviour is challenging. And like that was a very stressful period in all your lives.”

  Alan sighed. “And then right in the middle of everything, Laura got pregnant with Morgana. It was the last thing in the world we needed right then. We were so desperate for Laura’s income. Plus, we’d already made the decision not to have more kids. I’d actually wanted Conor to have a brother or sister, but one was enough for Laura. She wanted to go back to her writing. That’s her real world. And since I already had three girls from my first marriage and now a little boy, I caved in. I agreed to get a vasectomy and I did.

  “Anyway, I guess you’re supposed to keep on using protection for about three months after the snip. It takes a while for all the sperm to die off apparently. We didn’t figure out what had happened initially. She was four months along before the possibility of pregnancy even crossed our minds.

  “But wow. Laura was so upset when the test came out positive. She was absolutely adamant she was going to have an abortion. I kept telling her we’d manage. No, it wasn’t a good time at all to be bringing another child into the family, but to be honest, when I found out she was pregnant I was thrilled. Then everything got taken out of our hands, or so we thought, because before she could arrange the abortion, she miscarried.”

  Alan shook his head in faint astonishment. “Just goes to show you how some things are meant to be. The fact is, Laura did miscarry. She had a horrible experience. Lots of pain, lots of blood loss. She was really unwell for about six weeks afterwards, so it was a shock to find out after all this she was still pregnant. The doctor told us it had been fraternal twins and she only miscarried the one, which is something we’d never realized could happen. But Morgana hung in there. Laura carried her to term and she was a strong, healthy baby. And despite all our struggles beforehand, we fell in love with Morgana immediately. Both of us. And, of course now we are so grateful we have her. Morgana is just such a gift.”

  James smiled. “Yes, she’s a little character, isn’t she? I’m thoroughly enjoying my time with Morgana in here.”

  “I’m glad we’ve decided to bring her in,” Alan replied. “I know things haven’t been easy for her either. She’s so worried about the divorce. And I know that sometimes Conor takes so much of our attention that Morgana misses out.”

  “Yes, I got the impression she plays on her own quite a lot,” James said.

  Alan nodded. “Yeah. But saying that, I don’t think she’s lonely. Morgana has a fair share of Laura’s temperament. She likes her own company. We’re always asking if she wants friends over but Morgana usually prefers playing on her own.”

  “Who’s the little boy she often plays with?” James asked.

  A look of surprise crossed Alan’s features. “Little boy? What boy is that?”

  “An eight-year-old. I’m assuming it’s a neighbour’s child,” James replied.

  “We don’t really have much in the way of neighbours out where we
live. Certainly no one within walking distance. Did she say where he was coming from?”

  “I didn’t ask. But I got the impression they didn’t live far away. They sounded rather ‘alternative’ in their lifestyle.”

  “Oh fuck,” Alan muttered. “‘Alternative’? God-damned New Age squatters again. I’m always having problems with them. We had a bunch in a teepee last summer and it took me about eight weeks to evict them.” He paused and considered. “Or maybe it’s Bob Mason’s people. His land runs against mine on the north. He sold twenty acres last year to some folks from back East who want to play mountain men. Anti-everything, you know? No plumbing, no electricity. I told him he was being stupid for doing it, that they’d be nothing but trouble. But they had money and no local person would have paid that price for 20 acres.”

  Alan paused. His brow drew down. “You know, I’m really not at all happy with the idea of someone coming close enough to the house that they’re meeting up with Morgana when she’s on her own. Did she tell you where this was happening?”

  “She mentioned being down by a creek where she’s allowed to play.”

  “Creek? The only creek Morgana’s allowed to play around is Willow Creek. That runs just below the house. We can see her the whole time she’s down there, so nobody could approach her there without our knowing about it.”

  “Strange,” James said with concern.

  Suddenly an expression of understanding spread over Alan’s features. He broke into a smile. “You know what it is, I bet? She’s pretending.” He laughed warmly. “Believe me, Morgana has a full working version of her mother’s imagination. You’ve never seen a kid play make-believe like she does. So I’ll bet that’s what it is. I’ll bet you good money this boy isn’t even a real person. He’s just an imaginary companion.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “I was no work of art at thirteen,” Laura said. “My hair was lank and greasy. My face was full of zits. My boobs were nonexistent. I was half a head taller than any boy in my class and clothes hung on me with the same elegance as a coat hanger. But to Marilyn I was just one, big, irresistible possibility.

  “Within a month of my going to live with my father, I’d been taken to the hairdresser, signed up for a make-up course at the department store and enrolled in ballet lessons to make me graceful. If I dared complain about any of this, Marilyn always answered that while I might not like it now, I’d be terribly grateful in the future that she’d made me do these things.” Laura looked sidelong at James and laughed mockingly.

  “My social life was her next concern. ‘Why don’t you ask your friends over, Laurie? There’s a football game on Friday night. What about asking everybody over for a little pre-game party?’

  “I’d only just moved there. I didn’t have any friends, but I knew better than to admit that. I tried to deflect her by explaining it was a high school football game and, as we were only seventh graders, no one I knew would be going anyway. So there wasn’t much point to a party.

  “‘Laurie,’ she cried in this tone that implied a particularly serious deficit of grey matter in my head, ‘Fun! A get-together to have fun! Teenage fun! These are the best years of your life. You need to take advantage of them!’

  “Worse was the sock hop. In a misguided effort to socialize us, the junior high school held a sock hop in the gymnasium every other Friday after school. I would have preferred demonstrating toothbrushes to lions to attending one of these dances but when Marilyn found out about them, there was no peace.

  “‘You must go, Laurie! It’s just for two hours. No, don’t worry if no one dances with you. No one ever dances in junior high. The point is to go! Be seen. Show your face. It’s the only way to be popular.’

  “But the very worst was yet to come. One afternoon Marilyn picked up a copy of my school newspaper, which she’d found lying with my books. In it she saw an announcement for cheerleading try-outs. She had been a cheerleader in high school herself and she couldn’t imagine anything nicer. ‘Oh, cheerleading! Oh Laurie, how exciting!’ She said this as if she’d just read about the Second Coming. ‘I bet if we look through my things, we can find my old pompoms. Then I can teach you some cheers and you can knock ’em dead!’”

  Laura looked over with a sardonic smile. “The trouble was, Marilyn never understood that I had no desire to knock anyone dead. The idea of being a cheerleader mortified me. The thought of doing such a vacuous thing in public was enough to raise the hair on the back of my neck. No, I wasn’t glamorous. I wasn’t exciting. And I certainly wasn’t popular. But I didn’t give a damn.

  “All I really wanted was to be left alone and that was the one thing that didn’t happen. Marilyn pestered me constantly. I was powerless to stop it,” Laura said and shrugged in a way that indicated futility but not remorse. “It became intolerable. How I ended up handling it was wrong. I knew that even then at the time, but I was young and desperately unhappy. So I did the only thing I could think of. I lied to her.

  “To get Marilyn off my back I fabricated this whole clique of friends to provide me with all the teenage fun she expected me to want. I created them from among real kids at school, kids who lived too far away from us to run into, but kids I knew well enough that I could talk to if we did chance across them downtown or something and they wouldn’t think I was a complete weirdo. I made sure they were good-looking, well-liked kids, but not the school stars, because I knew that might be pushing my luck. Then I started saying I was going out with them after school to dances or over to their houses on Saturday mornings. I’d dress the part and then change back into my jeans in the restroom at the gas station before going off to spend time on my own.”

  “So you were away from the house?” James asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “So what did you do? You were still quite young, weren’t you? Thirteen?”

  Laura nodded. “Yeah. And I didn’t really do anything. Go downtown mostly and just walk around. Or to the park. But an awful thing came from it – I discovered that I liked lying. I could open my mouth and out flowed the most preposterous stuff, but Marilyn always believed me. This, in a way, egged me on. I developed a real eye for the kind of details that would make the lies substantial. Notes in fake-friend Cathy’s handwriting would be left on the table with my school books so that Marilyn and I could have a girlish giggle over them when she brought my books to me and ‘accidentally’ happened to look at the note. I’d show her the necklace I’d borrowed from fake-friend Sally, which I then allowed Marilyn to fasten for me as I got ready for the school dance I wasn’t going to attend.

  “Marilyn’s gullibility actually became a source of self-esteem for me. She wasn’t stupid; therefore I knew I had to be pretty good. Moreover, it worked. Marilyn was content that I was now ‘popular’ and she left me alone.

  “About a year later, Marilyn got pregnant,” Laura said. “The news galvanized my dad. After years of hazy promises and no action, he finally decided we needed a proper house instead of an apartment. We ended up in this boxy little place in the suburbs with a chain-link fence going around the perimeter of a perfectly square yard and a single pine tree growing in one corner. The house had only two bedrooms, but there was an unfinished basement and Dad said I could have that for my room if I wanted, because they wanted the baby close to them in the other bedroom. The basement had hardly any natural light, was nothing but concrete walls and plumbing pipes, and I would have to share it with the washer and dryer, but I leapt at the chance. Like my attic on Kenally Street, it was enough out of the way to give me my much-longed-for privacy. So I didn’t care what condition it was in.”

  A pause crept in. “Because, of course, what privacy meant was that at last I could be with Torgon. I could spend my free time in the Forest.” Laura was pensive a moment. “Torgon had become a bit of an obsession by that point. Hard to describe. Some of it, I think, was just being fourteen. You know how some girls that age are infatuated with singers in boy bands or movie stars? For me, it was Torgon.
I thought about her all the time. I dreamed about her. I idolized her. I couldn’t get her out of my mind … It was an odd sensation, the way I felt about her in those years. Like an awareness of not being in her world, but of not quite being in my own world either, of being in neither one place nor the other. That aura permeated my teens, that sense of being stranded between here and a place no one else could see.

  “I suppose I turned to Torgon for comfort. I was incredibly unhappy in those first couple of years with my father and Marilyn. I don’t think they were ever aware of just how unhappy. As a consequence I began desperately wanting Torgon and the Forest to be real. Tangibly real. The reason was simple. I wanted to go there to the Forest myself, which I couldn’t do if it wasn’t a real place. I wanted to leave Rapid City and my family behind and live there.

  “I couldn’t figure out how to do this, of course, but I did hit on the idea of making a catalogue of all my knowledge about the Forest, as if that might somehow peg it down as a real place. I started with mapping the countryside. I drew a diagram of the compound where Torgon and the Seer lived. I made pedigree charts for various families in the village. I even tried to make a dictionary of Torgon’s language, although this was much harder than I thought, so I didn’t get far. I spent hours and hours and hours doing this, and kept everything very carefully together in this loose-leaf binder in my bedroom. It quickly became the most treasured thing I owned.

  “What I longed for most, however, was a picture of Torgon. I wanted to see her with my eyes, not just my mind. Unfortunately, I’m a rotten artist, so try as I might, I couldn’t draw her. Besides, I wanted photographic quality. So I started combing through magazines, looking for pictures of people who looked like her.