Dream Weaver (Dream Weaver #1)

by Su Williams

  “You must live now. You must find your own dreams and make them come true,” Mom said.

  “I just feel so cheated. I never got to say goodbye; never got to hug you or kiss you. I couldn’t even see you again because of the…” the words lodged in my throat, captive of my grief.

  “We know, baby.” My parent’s arms encircled me, surrounded me with their warmth and love. “That’s why we’re here, sharing your dreams, to give you the opportunities you were deprived of.”

  We stood in the lush green garden, a content little family. Like a sentient entity, kindred devotion and wisdom filled and overflowed me, a sensation so real, an energy that recharged my heart. I would have stayed there forever, if I could; would have died happy if my life ended in that moment. But, I couldn’t and wouldn’t and so—life must go on.

  My mother wrapped her arms around me and held me for a long time. Minutes ticked by and still, she held me. I knew she would have to let me go eventually, but at that moment I didn’t care if eventually ever came. “I love you, Emari,” she finally whispered. “I will always be with you as long as you hold me in your heart.”

  “I love you too, Mom. I don’t want you to leave.”

  She lifted my chin to look her in the eye as she did when I was a child. I smiled; I would forever be her child. She stepped away, held me at arm’s length, and gazed into my eyes with the warmth of the sun on verdant leaves on a late summer day. “You are my heart, alive and beating, the breath that filled my lungs. You are an enduring, abiding part of me. In that, I will never leave you.”

  I nodded with a tearful smile. “I love you.” I couldn’t say it enough; couldn’t catch up for all the ‘I love you’s’ I’d missed.

  “I love you, Emari.”

  “Goodbye, Mommy.”

  “Goodbye, Emari. I will always be in your heart.”

  My mother drifted away like mist into the heart of the garden and vanished.

  “Emari, my jewel.” Daddy stood behind me, his hands on my shoulders. I turned into his perpetually warm arms and sobbed. He held me until my crying ceased, then held me even longer. He, too, would have to go, eventually. Finally, his voice rumbled in his chest under my cheek. “Dare to dream, for in the daring there is defiance to live beyond your circumstances. Dream big, don’t settle for good enough. Follow your dreams,” he pinched the heart charm at my wrist between his fingers, “Because your dreams can take you places beyond your imagination and in their path you find freedom.” When he released the charm, it radiated warmth against my skin.

  I nodded silently against his chest, as I affirmed and memorized each of his words. “I love you, Daddy.”

  “I love you, Em.” He was silent for several moments. I couldn’t say the next words; they were a boulder in my chest. “Are you ready?” he finally asked.

  “No.” I laughed through my tears, tried to be brave.

  My father chuckled as he kissed my forehead and squeezed me in his arms again. He waited.

  “Goodbye, Daddy,” I said with a final resigned sigh.

  “Goodbye, my Jewel.”

  I awoke with a start. My body felt sore, stiff. I wallowed out of bed, stumbled to the bathroom and flipped the switch. The image in the mirror recaptured my attention. I launched myself closer and grasped the sink to steady myself. It seemed somehow wrong in my memory…I couldn’t explain it. My face, my eyes—they were—just wrong. My face was swollen, a lot more than I thought I remembered it. Crimson capillaries, spider-web fine shot through the whites of my eyes and a small explosion of burst veins orbited my left iris. I thought… I crushed my brain with the cavernous creases in my forehead. I couldn’t make sense of what I saw.

  The heel of my right hand ached but I didn’t remember hurting it. I staggered out toward the kitchen but as I passed the built-ins, I heard a soft crunch of glass and pain shot up the ball of my foot. After hobbling to a dining room chair, I flopped down and pulled my foot into my lap. Tiny dots of crimson blossomed across my white skin. I pulled glistening fragments of glass from my flesh, and pressed my hand to the wounds to stop the bleeding and searched for the culprit.

  The antique glass of one of the built-ins was shattered in pieces on the floor. My head spun, jumbled thoughts scrabbled to the surface, visions that pushed toward the surface only to disappear into the mire. Nothing clarified or made sense. I studied the bandage on my hand. A dark memory flashed through my mind. I tripped. I think. I must have put my hand through the glass. Damn it. That was antique glass. Irreplaceable.

  My mind grasped hopelessly at the fleeting images, groped for the one, any one that would anchor the rest in place and make it all lucid. Then everything turned to water and every picture contorted and fled from me, sifted through the fingers of my memory.

  I hobbled the rest of the way to the kitchen and washed the blood from my hands and foot. Crimson tinged water faded to clear and swirled around, down the drain. Blood, lots of blood. This was nothing. Probably my hand had bled a lot and I’d cleaned and bandaged it here. But, why hadn’t I cleaned it in the bathroom?

  My retro tea canister caught my eye and I lifted the lid, inhaled the licorice-herbal-sweet aroma of a long-gone and vaguely remembered tea. I closed my eyes. Images sparked and guttered, a foundering candle. I tried to wrap my head around something that wasn’t tangible or cohesive enough to capture. The canister slipped from my distracted grasp, hit the counter with a metallic clatter. I stumbled back to bed, ignored the pain in my foot, careless of the blood that I left in my wake.

  I flopped onto my bed and buried myself in heavy, familiar blankets. My throat constricted as I closed my eyes and pressed into my cold pillow. The tremors ripped through my body. I wished for someone to wrap themselves around me, to stroke my hair, to tell me all would be okay.

  “I don’t want to be alone,” I told my pillow through pinched vocal chords that ached from a suppressed guttural scream.

  There was nothing, no one to greet me but silence; no one to hold me, or pet my hair. No strong, safe body to cling to, to guard me. My body convulsed; the fissures in my crumbling composure widened and the tears eked out from under my lashes. There were no soft lips to speak my name, or kiss my face. No warm hands to caress away my despair. No strong, firm chest to lay my head on. No, there was nothing. Nothing at all for me.

  Images of angels and demons cavorted with my memory. An angel that loved me. Perhaps I dreamed of an angel sent from God to comfort me. Maybe I’d read a few too many vampire and immortal books; too many damsel-in-distress/knight-rides-in-on-white-horse-to-save-the-day novels. Like that ever happens in real life.

  I twined my fingers into my copper spikes, and pressed my knotty white knuckles into my scalp. If only I could force my brain to focus. I squeezed my eyes closed tighter. My life lay scattered around me, a thousand piece puzzle; all of those tiny little bits of memory littered my mind. So confusing. So jumbled.

  I was never any good with puzzles; they had never been any sort of an attraction for me. So how would I ever put this thing back together? It was such a mess and all the pieces were blank. I had to find the shapes that fit together, but every piece was identical.

  I sat blind to the world, and stared inward. But there seemed to be less to see there than with my eyes. It was as though every sense had shut down, as if memories had just—disappeared. Everything; sensations, images, emotions, events—everything that should have been there but just—was not. Deleted, like a picture from my digital camera. The press of a couple of shiny silver buttons and the pictures were gone. Sent to mega-pixel heaven.

  I closed my eyes and reconstructed the edges, built a base for the reality I knew for sure. My name? Emari Jewel Sweet. And? I am seventeen years old. An only child of my parents, Zecharias and Jane Sweet, who were now deceased; victims of a horrible auto crash on their way home from Cali. And? I worked at Cash’s in the Mall with my girlfriend Ivy. My heart skipped a beat. I remembered the attack—when the brother of my friend and coworker, Jesse,
savagely raped me. How could I be so amazingly calm recalling these facts?

  The frame completed itself in my thoughts. The basics I got, but that innermost part was a jumbled mess, like I ought to know what it was but didn’t, and I couldn’t decipher it. It was maddening.

  I opened my eyes and focused on the bundle of fur curled up at my side. His paws flopped wildly in the air as his dreams brought the joy of the chase. Sleep muffled his immature hound dog bays, his jowls drooped and vibrated with play-vicious snorts and snarls. If only I could find such joy within my dreams.

  After the attack, I had finally followed my father’s advice and gotten myself a dog. Not that a ten-week-old beagle pup was much of a guard dog. Or that he’d have done me any good at work. He did help to keep me sane, though there was no accounting for what transpired now.

  The bristle of Eddyson’s pelt was therapeutic as I raked my nails through it. Yet my fingers ached for something more, my arms were heavy with emptiness, my body—my being yearned for the something that was greater—though I couldn’t possess it, couldn’t even begin to define it.

  I remembered my Christmas gathering a few days ago. Just a few people from work came; Ivy, Jesse, Collin and his wife, Blake and his girl, and a few others. Jesse got plowed.

  Sparks of fire flashed at my throat.

  I reached for my neck, but it was bare; I didn’t have a necklace that sparkled like that. My charm bracelet dangled at my wrist, the metal warm against my skin, like in my dream, just released from my father’s fingers. I caressed the precious white-gold heart. FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS…Mom and Dad. Officer Molly brought it to me after they arrested Jesse’s brother.

  While he was drunk and drooling over my sweet sixteen picture, Jesse remembered seeing his brother, Rico, with a charm bracelet; the same charm bracelet I wore in the picture. In his inebriated condition, he couldn’t put the pieces of information together. Once he was sober and put it all together, he hadn’t hesitated to lead the police straight to his brother.

  Apparently, they weren’t close, Jesse and Rico. Jesse was mortified and infuriated over what his brother had done to me. The rape dredged up a long-buried dark memory for Jesse. I saw it in his eyes that night, and other times since. Something very bad happened in Jesse’s past, a past that formed him into the loving, gentle, happy man he’d become despite whatever darkness haunted him; and formed his brother into a hard, bitter, violent man that found pleasure in usurping women.

  Jesse’s silence since his brother’s arrest only augmented my pain. Except for a quick phone call to apologize—as if it was his fault—I’d heard nothing from him. I told him it wasn’t his fault, but he was too humiliated to say anything more, and refused to be consoled or forgiven. I hoped someday he would remember we were friends. I hoped he would understand I wasn’t the kind of person who would hold his brother’s crimes against him. I guess I understood how Jesse felt, though. I knew we were closer than ‘just friends’ and that he had a crush on me; nothing I took so seriously. But Jesse believed it was the fact that he had pointed me out to Rico, told him he liked me, that made Rico come after me. Which was ridiculous. Or not. But still.

  I also remembered the nightmares, horrible night terrors that plagued every sleeping moment. They were nightmares about the crash, the rape. There were vampires and angels and demons. I supposed in ode to my choices in literature and a few ‘hellfire and brimstone’ sermons as a child. I glanced up and smiled at Bela, and Lon and my other guardian monsters as they gazed down at me with their glossy eyes. No, these weren’t the monsters. The real monsters were out there somewhere, in the real world.

  My dreams typically circled the drain with sleep, but I remembered a dream of a beautiful South Pacific beach, a dream about my dad as a young boy, beautiful dreams that chased away the paralyzing phantoms in my head.

  Did other people live through stuff like this? I mused. Did they actually survive? In one piece? Sane? Or did they just find some way of escape? Alcohol or drugs could mask the pain, but it would never go away. Not truly away. It would always be there to torment me. Perhaps death was the only true antidote to the anguish that besieged me.

  I rubbed my wrist and closed my eyes, imagined again a shiny, razor-thin blade. Envisioned the quick, searing pain as it sliced the tender flesh; pain that was utterly insignificant in comparison to what my heart endured now. This kind of pain would ease, in time, and take with its crimson flow the memories that were a cancer to my heart.

  I searched my heart, pondered why I hadn’t already made that cut. It would be so simple. So relatively painless. I didn’t owe anybody in this life anything, let alone my life. I had definitely taken the plunge over the precipice and into the mire. The miasmic darkness had swallowed me. Yet, apparently, I had survived. Barely, it felt. I was still breathing, my heart still beat within my breast. Spit back out from its gaping maw, back into light and life.

  And what of Ivy? My loss—oh let’s not be delicate—my death—harsher yet, my suicide—would surely crush her tender heart. She so believed in the salvation of my happiness. And what about Jesse? My sweet, charming Jesse would definitely blame himself, especially now, after what his brother did. And I couldn’t bear the responsibility for the extinction of his solar smile.

  Eddyson’s rough little paw brushed the back of my hand and shattered my morose reverie. Raucous dreams of fluttering quail, as frantic wings beat the brush in a hasty escape. Squirrels romped and taunted with the flick of a bushy tail in his intrepid puppy fantasies. What would become of my sweet little pup if I ceased to be?

  A rumble of mirth built up deep inside my chest and migrated to my throat where it burst out as the revelation of truth erupted inside me. I found the key; I did want to live. Eddyson was my heart’s excuse, my anchor to this life, because deep down, I truly did not want to die. I just wanted a life with less pain. I wasn’t asking for a past. Not even a future. Just a few less painful memories to make surviving the present a bit more bearable.

  I lay motionless in my warm bed, and stared at the ceiling. My eyes drifted with the swirls of texture and a rogue piece of the puzzle drifted into place. I remembered conjuring dramatic scenes when I was child to help me escape when my reality became too stressful. I imagined cantering down a beautiful sunset beach on a golden palomino, the wind raked my hair, the salty sea kissed my face. I endured death bravely in the arms of my lover. I conjured images more frightening than my reality, so reality didn’t seem so bad after all.

  So, that was it. It was all me. It was all about escape from the horrors that were my life; all a vivid figment of my overactive imagination. No butterfly effect magic to make me live in any possible alternative reality I could summon from my fantasies. No vampires with cruel immortality and super human powers; lamia that could suck out human life and even frailer human thoughts. No angels, no demons and maybe not even God. No, there was always God. He was never the issue. As usual, no knight in shining armor to ride in and rescue me. In my reality, there would be no knight on his brilliant white steed to rescue me at the last possible moment. No, in my reality, he would show up just moments after my last breath escaped my lungs and my heart came to a crashing halt. The truth was no one in this world could save me. What salvation was there for me, then?

  It was an extremely rare moment that I was glad my parents weren’t there. I was glad they couldn’t see what a wuss I was, that they couldn’t see me as I fell to pieces instead of standing strong and confident like they taught me.

  Yet somewhere deep inside me, unfathomably deep and dark, lay an icy cold twinge. A hint that everything was not right.

  The phone rang, utterly shattered my contemplations. The caller ID flashed Adrian’s number. I hesitated, not sure if I had the strength for this conversation, but knew I couldn’t put him off forever. I answered, finally, with a faint, “hello.” Maybe he’d think he’d awakened me and want to call back later.

  “Emari? It’s Adrian. How are you, honey?”

  “Um�
��I’m all right, I guess.”

  “Merry Christmas,” he said quietly, unsure of the sentiment.

  “What? Christmas?” I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples. Wasn’t Christmas still, like, a couple of days away?

  “I know you probably don’t feel like celebrating it much, but—Celeste and I were hoping you’d come up to the house for a visit today.” He was quiet for a couple of heartbeats as he awaited my response. “Listen,” he continued when I remained silent. “I know things have been really rough on you the last…well, for a long time now. You know, part of this comes down to the decisions you make.”

  “I know.”

  “How are the nightmares?” Adrian slipped easily from Daddy mode to therapist mode.

  “Well, actually, I haven’t had any for over a week.” I told him, triumph only mildly colored my voice. My world was still a jumbled mess that I couldn’t quite reconcile, but a nightmare-free week was a commendable accomplishment.

  “Really? What do you think brought that about?”

  “I guess I made a choice. Or a few choices,” I explained, but it was as much revelation to me as to Adrian.

  “Oh?” So Adrian. Ask little, listen a lot.

  “I guess—I decided not to be a victim anymore.”

  “And?”

  “I guess I decided that I really do want to live.”

  Adrian exhaled as though he’d been holding his breath for a year. Or, right around nine months. “Good girl.”

  “I did have a dream last night, though.”

  “Oh?” I could hear the tension creep like a shadow back into his voice.

  “I dreamed about Mom and Dad.”

  “Uh huh?” The strain crept up a notch.

  “I met them in Daddy’s garden. We talked. I got to tell them I love them and say goodbye. It was so real I can almost still feel it,” I said as I fingered the still-warm heart on my wrist.

  Adrian was silent for a moment. “It sounds like a very nice dream. Did it help? To say ‘goodbye’?”