She should let it go to voicemail, but now her concentration was broken and she was annoyed. She grabbed the phone and gave it an angry swipe to answer it.
“I’m working,” Caitlin said. “This better be important.”
There was a moment of silence before Raquel said, “Caitlin? Hello?”
Caitlin sighed and reined in the anger enough to at least make a half-hearted attempt at civility. “Yes, I’m here. How can I help you, Raquel?”
“Oh, good. I hope I haven’t caught you at a bad time,” Raquel said. Before Caitlin could say that it was in fact a very bad time, Raquel continued, “I was just speaking to Lance, and he told me about the problems you’ve been having with Adam and his nightmares.”
A new wave of anger overtook Caitlin. Apparently while she was hard at work (she ignored the little voice in the back of her head that reminded her that she had accomplished absolutely nothing all day) her husband was spending his day at work calling his mother so he could discuss their personal life with her.
“It’s really no big deal,” Caitlin said. “Adam’s pediatrician said as much.”
“Well, it’s been my experience that you can’t really trust these small-town doctors.”
Caitlin resisted the urge to snap and tell know-it-all Raquel that the pediatrician in their affluent New Jersey town was Harvard-educated and highly respected.
“Raquel, we have everything under control,” Caitlin said.
“Oh, I’m sure you do,” Raquel said. “It’s just I was speaking to someone the other day at the club, and he’s a psychologist who specializes in sleep disorders. I think you should at least take Adam in for a consultation. What could it hurt?”
“He’s four years old. He had a few bad dreams,” Caitlin said. “He doesn’t need a psychologist.”
“And that will probably be what Dr. Franklin concludes too, but you at least owe it to the boy to take him in,” Raquel said.
“Right, well,” Caitlin said. “I’m kind of in the middle of a project here. So I’ve got to go.”
She clicked off the phone before Raquel had a chance to say anything else. Her hands shook with rage when she tried to return to work. Plus, when she looked at the clock, she noticed she had less than fifteen minutes before she had to leave to pick Adam up at school. There was no sense in starting anything now.
She was still steaming from Raquel’s call when she got behind the wheel of the Land Cruiser. There was plenty of time before she needed to be at the school, but she didn’t have the patience to deal with other drivers. She beeped at anyone who didn’t hit the gas the second the lights turned green and anyone else who mildly annoyed her.
A psychologist was the last thing Adam needed right now. She understood that better than anyone. He shouldn’t be made to feel like there was something wrong with him. Taking him to a shrink would send the wrong message. It would only make him focus on the dreams, which was exactly what Caitlin didn’t want him to do. There was nothing a psychologist could do to help anyway. Caitlin should know. She broke down and went to one a decade ago.
Caitlin went to see her campus psychologist after Delia Chambers. Of course, she didn’t know the girl’s name until she read the newspaper article about the brutal murder. It was the only new information the article had given her. She already knew all the other details and then some about the horrible crime.
The psychologist spoke with a soft voice and did his best to radiate understanding and compassion, but he was light-years away from grasping Caitlin’s predicament. When she explained how upset she was after Delia’s murder, the psychologist assured her she wasn’t alone.
“My office has been unusually busy lately,” he said. “A lot of students and faculty have been shaken by this event. What you’re feeling is perfectly normal.”
“But do any of them feel like they should have done more to prevent it from happening?” Caitlin asked.
“No one could have known what was going to happen,” the psychologist said.
“I did,” Caitlin said. “I had a nightmare.”
The psychologist misunderstood her. He thought she meant she had a nightmare after the news broke. “A lot of students have been having nightmares and interrupted sleep, but you’re doing the right thing by opening up and talking to someone about what you’re going through.”
She debated trying to clarify things, but she knew it was pointless. This guy wasn’t going to get it.
“If you’re having difficulty sleeping, I can write you a prescription for a sedative,” the psychologist said.
Caitlin didn’t want to go to sleep. She had been deliberately forcing herself to stay awake and avoid her dreams. It meant she found herself falling asleep during class or nodding off while studying.
After a few weeks of that, it was taking a toll on her grades and her immune system, but she had trained herself not to sleep at night, and now despite her sheer exhaustion, when she laid her head down at night, sleep refused to come.
She considered taking the psychologist up on that sedative prescription, but instead she went to the drug store in town and perused the collection of over-the-counter sleep aids. The large variety was a bit overwhelming. She grabbed a package more or less by chance. She would have grabbed one of each package just to try them, but that wasn’t in her budget.
So it was then that Caitlin began to experiment with drugs in her junior year of college, but these weren’t the recreational narcotics favored by many of her peers. Her experimentation was limited solely to over-the-counter sleep aids. She tried them all, both individually and in combination. She was several weeks into her experiment when she discovered Pacifcleon. It was a miraculous and amazing product.
It was the only one of the many sleep aids she had tried that consistently delivered a deep, dark, completely dreamless sleep. It was pure heaven. The drug changed her life. On Pacifcleon she became a new person. She was self-assured and confident. It gave her a new perspective on things, and she became more energetic and hopeful. She could never go back to the way things had been before.
She made sure she always had a ready supply in stock, which used to be no problem. Back when she was in college, it seemed every store with even a modest pharmacy section stocked those little blue-and-green Pacifcleon boxes. Even the little convenience store gas station around the corner from her college sold the stuff.
By the time she was married, Pacifcleon’s popularity had dwindled. She could still pick it up at Rite Aid or Walgreens but was less likely to find it on grocery store shelves or in other general retailers. The writing was on the wall, but like an idiot she ignored it. She had been lulled into a false sense of security.
It was about two years ago when she went into the Rite Aid in town and found they were sold out of Pacifcleon. That was unsettling, but worse than that, there no longer seemed to be a space on the shelf for it. There was a Walgreens in the next town over. They had just two boxes, both marked with clearance stickers. She bought them both, then she went to the CVS down the road and found one more box.
She looked up the website for the company that made the pills and searched it extensively. She couldn’t find any information about Pacifcleon or any other sleep aids. In an emotional state, she fired off an email to the customer service address. The corporate reply made her cry.
“We regret to inform you that we have ceased production of Pacifcleon. There are no plans to bring this product back to market.”
At least she had the foresight to go on a drug store shopping spree. She hit every store within a thirty-mile radius and was rewarded with what amounted to a fifteen-month supply. It seemed like plenty at the time, but she regretted her lack of further foresight soon enough. Why had she limited herself to thirty miles? Why hadn’t she covered the whole state or multiple states? Hell, she could have turned it into some cross-country expedition. Of course she had a two-year-old son and a husband who would never understand her need to make a pharmacy-chain tour of the country. So she had hun
kered down with her measly fifteen-month supply and set up an eBay alert. She bought just about every box of Pacifcleon that enterprising resellers listed, but it was not enough. It could never be enough. She had stretched her fifteen-month supply into a thirty-eight-month supply, but that was nothing in the grand scheme of things.
She only hoped that before she ran out, somehow someone would decide to start producing her precious Pacifcleon again. Maybe they would change the name, but if she was lucky, they wouldn’t alter the formula. This was the slim hope she clung to fervently.
She pulled into the nursery school parking lot a full ten minutes early. Was Pacifcleon the answer for Adam? She was pretty sure the drug wasn’t recommended for children, and the single pill was likely too big of a dosage for her small son. Of course, pills could be cut in half, and this was something she had considered for herself. It wasn’t an ideal solution, but if she cut back to half a pill a night, she would suddenly find herself with a six-year supply. Then again, if she started sharing her pills with Adam, that would do away with her surplus. But that wasn’t really her concern. She didn’t like the idea of drugging her son. It was all fine and good if she decided to self-medicate, but she wasn’t going to force this on Adam.
On the other hand, she saw how tense he had looked when she went in to check on him last night. What she wouldn’t give to be able to save him from the fear and ugliness, to give him the peaceful sleep and confidence she had found for herself when she was twenty-one. She wanted to save him from all those years of suffering.
The only other solution was to ignore the nightmares as much as they possibly could, to play it down. If they made it clear the bad dreams were no big deal, then maybe the dreams would somehow lose their power.
5
Lance stepped into the house from the garage, and Caitlin sprang out from the kitchen with a wild look in her eyes. She had been waiting for him. There was a time, early in their marriage, when such a greeting might have preceded a passionate lovemaking session, but those days of carnal spontaneity seemed to be behind them. He might not have been able to tell just what that look was in Caitlin’s eyes, but he knew it wasn’t lust.
“I’m surprised you didn’t decide to swing by to visit your mother on the way home,” Caitlin said.
Lance tried to decipher the remark. His mother and stepfather lived in Atkins, Pennsylvania. It wasn’t exactly a place he could swing by on his way home from work, nor had he ever done so. Was Caitlin suggesting he was late getting home? It was true he had been working some longer days lately, but he had texted her to let her know he was on the way.
“Sorry, the traffic was bad,” he said in an attempt to placate her. He still had his jacket on. He hadn’t taken more than two steps into the house.
“Don’t try to change the subject,” she said.
“And what exactly is the subject?” He managed to edge past her. He set his keys in the little dish on the hallway table and went to the coat closet. She followed so close on his heels that he had to take care not to elbow her as he slipped off his jacket. He hung it on a hanger and placed it in the closet, then turned to look at his fiery-eyed wife. He tried to defuse the situation by saying in a half joking, half serious way, “Hi, honey, how was your day?”
“Oh, I’m sure you’d love to know so you can give Raquel a full report.”
Damn it. His mother had called. He had specifically instructed her not to, but when had his mother ever done as he asked?
“She cares about you,” Lance said. His mother had been the subject of more than one argument, and a big part of the reason was that Caitlin seemed to think Raquel didn’t really like her. Perhaps at first his social-climbing mother had regrets about Lance’s choice of a partner, but she had come around and saw that Caitlin was a supportive wife and a good mother.
“Well, maybe that’s what I can tell Brittney when she asks where the project I was supposed to finish today is,” Caitlin said. “My mother-in-law cares about me. That should go over well.”
“Look, I’m sorry,” Lance said. He slipped past her again and went into the kitchen. He flipped through the slim pile of mail on the counter while Caitlin watched him from the doorway. There were no pots on the stove, and the oven was cold.
“It’s like she doesn’t even understand that I work for a living. She must think I hang around here all day eating bonbons.”
“She doesn’t think that,” Lance said. “She just—”
“Loves to stick her nose in where it doesn’t belong?” Caitlin supplied. She saw him glancing around the kitchen. “Yeah, well, you can thank your mother for dinner not being ready. I’ve been trying to finish up that project I was working on when she interrupted me.”
“She shouldn’t have called you when you were working,” Lance said. “I’m sorry about that. I’ll talk to her.”
He hugged Caitlin and smoothed her hair with the palm of his hand. It had the desired effect. She softened in his arms, and he could feel some of the tension leave her body. He kissed her lightly on the lips and, when he pulled back, was surprised to see tears glistening on her cheeks. An uneasy feeling came over him without warning.
“Where’s Adam?” he asked. It suddenly seemed strange and worrisome that his son hadn’t come running to greet him when he arrived home.
For an instant there was a look of panic on his wife’s face, then she relaxed. “He’s up in his room playing with his trains.”
“I shouldn’t have texted her about Adam,” he said. “I’m worried about him, and I was just hoping she could help.”
Caitlin made a dismissive sort of snort noise. “She gave me the number of some shrink who belongs to her country club.”
“Well, maybe we could—” Lance began but didn’t get to finish.
“I’m not taking our son to a shrink,” she said, “and I’m not about to take parenting advice from a woman who sent her eleven-year-old son away to boarding school so she could shack up with her new boyfriend.”
“That’s not how it was,” Lance said, but he knew with Caitlin’s current mood it would be a waste of time to attempt any further explanation. “I’m going to go check on Adam.”
Caitlin didn’t know the full story about why his mother sent him to Ryerson Prep, mainly because Lance hadn’t told her. To do so, he would have to explain how he spent his first twelve years in Culver Creek. He would need to explain that strange summer—the way he and the rest of the kids in his small Pennsylvania town had been on a sort of house arrest. The bikes and skateboards stayed locked up in garages. Trampolines and above-ground swimming pools went unused. Everyone seemed to be waiting around with held breath. He could still remember his mother standing at their front window for what seemed like hours, chewing on her fingernails as if she expected the boogeyman to show up at their door.
Though never a fan of school, he had actually been looking forward to the start of classes that year, when his mother dropped her bombshell news on him. There was a pamphlet sitting by his place at the table that night. Boys in ties and blazers beamed at him against a backdrop of perfect fall foliage and old stone buildings. He stared at those pictures as she spoke her incomprehensible words.
“Private school?” Lance asked, confused. At the time, his biggest concern was the uniform. He wasn’t going to go around dressing in those dorky clothes like the boys in the brochure. He could already hear the taunts and jeers from the other kids in the neighborhood when they saw what he was wearing. He wasn’t exactly the most popular guy to begin with, but something like this would be a complete disaster. “Wait, will there be a different bus?” Lance asked. “Will I have the same bus stop?”
His mother sighed and shook her head. He recognized her look of impatience. It was the way she looked at him when she thought he was being dense.
“You won’t take a bus,” she said, and from the slow deliberate way she spoke, he guessed she had already explained this, that he had missed it while he stared at the stupid brochure. “Ryerson is
a boarding school. You’ll live there.”
He crumpled up the brochure and threw it at the wall. He stormed off to his room.
A few short weeks later he sat in the passenger seat of his mother’s car as she drove through the wrought iron Ryerson gate. He thought it was the end of his life. It would take him a full year to recognize that it was the beginning.
Lance was painfully aware that he had nothing in common with his fellow Ryerson classmates. Fearing the ridicule that never really came, that first awkward semester he kept to himself, answered in monosyllables when spoken to, and more or less tried to be invisible. He hit the jackpot with his first-year roommate. Maxwell had allergy-related breathing issues and slept with a special air mask with a pump whirring away all night. To drown out the sound of the pump, Maxwell wore a pair of earplugs to bed each night. It meant Lance could have thrown a raucous party on his half of their shared room and his roommate would never have been the wiser. It meant Lance’s secret remained safe.
Lance had a vague plan that he would go home for Christmas break and simply never come back. That plan fell apart almost at once, when his mother picked him up at school and announced that she had rented a North Carolina beach house where they would spend their Christmas break.
“Remember that summer when we went to the Outer Banks?” his mom said in a perky voice as she steered her old, tired Volvo out of the Ryerson gates. “That was a lot of fun, wasn’t it? I thought we should go back, and you wouldn’t believe the deals you can get on a beach house during the winter.”
It turned out that maybe the reason his mother had gotten such a good deal on the beach house rental was because the Outer Banks were not nearly as fun to visit in the winter as the summer. A lot of places were shuttered for the season, and the weather was something short of desirable. Still, Lance was happy not to be at school, and he figured when the holidays were over, they would head on back home to Culver Creek.
Up the Creek Page 3