Once again, though, Caitlin had been given the opportunity to be the superhero, and like always she had failed, squandered her precious gift. Those angry marks on her arm wouldn’t bring the dead girl back to life, but they did in a roundabout sort of way cure Caitlin of her peculiar malady.
If it weren’t for the marks on her arm, an astute professor wouldn’t have referred her to the campus mental health center, and if it weren’t for her therapy sessions, she might never have discovered her miracle drug of choice—Pacifcleon.
“Daddy is a bad man.” Adam’s voice wrenched Caitlin back to the present. She adjusted his shirt, but she wondered if she should try to find one with a higher collar. What would his nursery school teacher think if she saw those marks?
“What did you say?” Caitlin asked absently, his words finally starting to penetrate the tangle of thoughts taking up space in her head.
“Daddy’s a bad man,” Adam repeated.
Was this something from his nightmare? It must be.
“No, he’s not,” Caitlin said. “Remember what we talked about. Dreams aren’t real, right?”
Adam nodded his little head, but she could tell by the look on his face that he wasn’t convinced.
Caitlin had the house to herself and her mother-in-law wasn’t pestering her with phone calls, but she still couldn’t focus on her work. Those marks on Adam’s neck and his talk about his nightmare had rattled her. He was too young to be dealing with this sort of thing. Though, had she ever been old enough to deal with this thing?
She pulled up a new tab and did a Google search for Pacifcleon. It was one of her regular internet distractions. Some people procrastinated by reading social media posts, others played mindless games; she spent her time searching for discontinued sleeping pills. To each his own.
Her search proved fruitless. It didn’t mean that tomorrow or the next day she wouldn’t find someone on some corner of the web selling some expired boxes of her miracle drug, but it seemed like the stuff was getting more and more difficult to track down. Well, of course it was. Pacifcleon hadn’t been manufactured in years. There was no need to panic yet. She had plenty of the stuff in reserve, but it wouldn’t last forever, and now she felt the sudden need to take inventory of her stash. She wasn’t getting any work done anyway.
When she opened the linen closet, she remembered Lance’s bizarre decision to reorganize the bathroom. Lance tended to be a bit of a neat freak, and she couldn’t help but feel that his early morning bathroom cleaning had been some sort of personal attack on her and her sometimes disorganized ways. Still, she had been impressed. He had done a good job organizing things, and she was pleasantly surprised at how much less cluttered the linen closet looked.
Now, though, she realized a drawback to his mad organizing. She couldn’t find things. Maybe she wasn’t especially organized, but at least she knew more or less where everything was. Now, forget it. The only thing she really cared about, the most important item of all, was nowhere to be found.
She tried to get inside Lance’s head. Where would her neat-freak husband have decided to put her stash of sleeping pills? She had never exactly kept them hidden from him, but she always tried to disguise the fact that out of necessity she bought the stuff in bulk. He might have questioned her decision to continue to consume a discontinued, expired drug. Of course, he would have come across the stash in his organizing raid, but where would he have put the pills?
She searched the linen closet quickly, then turned her attention to the vanity drawers and cupboards, but other than her nearly empty current package, she hadn’t found a single Pacifcleon package. What the hell had he done with them?
They had to be in the linen closet somewhere. She must have missed them. She began to methodically go through the contents of the closet shelf by shelf, undoing much of Lance’s organizing in the process despite her best effort to be neat. But as she neared the last shelf, she gave up any attempt at neatness whatsoever and resorted to strewing the contents of the closet every which way in a frantic attempt to locate her missing pills.
Ten minutes later, she was on the phone with the Zooest receptionist, who told her Lance was in a meeting.
“Can you interrupt him?” Caitlin asked. “I need to speak to him. Now.”
The emphatic tone of her voice convinced the receptionist that this was an urgent matter, and less than a minute later Lance was on the phone breathless, asking her what had happened.
“I need to know where you put my Pacifcleon,” Caitlin said, “when you cleaned the bathroom.”
“What?”
“My sleeping pills,” she said.
“What?” Lance repeated. “Sheryl said it was an emergency. Wait, didn’t you take one last night?”
“Not the opened package,” Caitlin explained. “I had a whole bunch more.”
“Why do you need these now? Don’t you have to pick Adam up at school soon?”
Caitlin pulled the phone away from her ear for a moment to check the time. Crap. She had spent more time than she realized ransacking the bathroom. She needed to go pick up Adam. She heard Lance’s tinny voice coming through the speaker and pressed the phone back to her ear.
“Wait, were these the packages that were expired?” Lance asked. “I threw those out.”
“You what!” Caitlin’s voice was so loud it startled her. “What do you mean you threw them away? You didn’t even ask me about it?”
“Caitlin, they were really, really old,” Lance said.
“So! They were still good.”
“Look, can we talk about this later? I’ve got to get back to that meeting.”
She was too angry to reply. She ended the call.
Caitlin felt like a caged animal. Too restless to sit, she paced back and forth in their living room, checking out the window every few seconds for Lance’s car. The air was thick with the smell of dinner cooking, but she barely noticed it. All she could think about was the fact that she had less than a week’s worth of sleeping pills and no idea how she was going to find any more of her miracle drug.
Even if she was able to track some down online—and she didn’t see how, as apart from a quick interlude to pick Adam up at school, all she had spent the remainder of her day doing was searching for Pacifcleon—the likelihood that she could have it shipped to her house in less than a week’s time was slim. Out of desperation, she had ransacked the lone garbage bag in their pail, even though she was sure the garbage had already been collected after Lance’s cleaning spree.
When Lance’s headlights turned into their driveway, she ran to the door, fists clenched at her side as rage-fueled adrenaline made her jittery. It took him an interminable amount of time to leave his car and open the door, but when he did, she was ready. She attacked him with a volley of words that made him take a step backward into the garage.
“What gives you the right to throw away someone else’s possessions? You didn’t even think to ask me first? I was right in the next room!” Spittle flew from her lips as she shouted.
“Just calm down,” he said. “This isn’t the end of the world.” He stood in the doorway. “I’ll go to the store and buy some more, okay?”
“Ha!” was all she said.
“In fact, if you want, I’ll go right now. The car’s still warm.”
“There’s no point,” she said. Her rage had died down to a simmer. Lance’s offer was a perfectly reasonable one. Of course he didn’t know she had long since bought up every package of Pacifcleon in a twenty mile radius. Wasn’t this as much her fault as it was his? She heard Adam’s footfalls on the stairs and saw the way she had her husband pinned in the doorway. What was wrong with her? “Come inside,” she said.
“No, I’ll go get your stuff,” Lance said.
“You can’t buy them at the store,” she said. It was time to come clean, to tell him the whole story of the drug she was so dependent on. “They discon—”
“What’s that smell?” Lance asked.
“Wh
at?” she said, confused by the sudden change of topic.
“Mommy, the oven’s on fire!” Adam wailed.
She spun around just in time to hear the glass in the oven door shatter. Lance shoved past her as he ran to place himself between his son and the flaming oven. Lance grabbed the fire extinguisher they kept under the sink and wrestled the pin out before dousing the oven and the remains of their dinner in white foam. Caitlin clutched Adam as she watched the flames extinguish.
She had been too busy searching for expired sleeping pills to cook anything from scratch and resorted to baking a frozen pizza. It was a feta-and-spinach-flavored pie, so she reasoned it was borderline gourmet. She glanced at the clock. When had she put the pizza in to cook? She was drawing a blank. It felt like it wasn’t that long ago, but could she have cooked it so long it caught fire?
Lance examined the wreckage in the smoking oven.
“There’s no pan,” he said. “The cheese must have dripped down and caught fire.”
“There’s a pan,” Caitlin insisted. “I always use a pan.”
“Cait, I’m telling you, I’m looking right at it and there’s no pan.”
She walked over and peered over his shoulder. There was no pan beneath the now mostly black pizza. How had she forgotten a pan? Well, she had been preoccupied.
Everything would be okay. The only casualties were a not very inspired dinner and the oven door. A shiver of fear went through her as she saw the cracked glass in the door. What if the glass had exploded and shot across the room? It could have easily injured Adam or worse. She wouldn’t have been able to live with herself. She needed to pull herself together, and she knew the only way she was going to do that was if she replenished her Pacifcleon supply.
14
Lance glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Adam in his car seat in the back happily singing a little song to his stuffed kangaroo.
“Just you and me, right, kiddo?” Lance said. “Having a fun boys’ day together.”
“Mmmhmm, Daddy,” Adam said without looking up.
That’s what Lance had told Caitlin, and she seemed to welcome a Saturday all to herself. Things had been tense since the night of the flaming pizza, and Caitlin seemed out of sorts. Maybe she had been under too much stress with work. He envied the fact that she could work from home, but it had to be difficult balancing work with taking care of Adam and the house. She had that big project she was working on for the lottery commission, and probably that more than him throwing out some expired sleeping pills had been at the root of her outburst the other night.
She hadn’t said any more about the sleeping pills, and he hadn’t dared to bring it up, but maybe today while they were out he could stop at a Rite Aid and pick some up. He couldn’t remember the name of the stuff she took, but maybe he would recognize it when he saw it.
Lance had been vague about what he and Adam had planned for the day. So it wasn’t like he was lying to her. He had never specifically said he wasn’t taking Adam all the way out to Culver Creek to see some dream psychic.
“We’ll have a fun boys’ day,” Lance had told her. He liked the idea of he and Adam doing their own thing together. They would have to do this more often. It gave Caitlin a nice break, and it was a good chance for he and Adam to do some male bonding. He would be the father he’d always wished he had.
No one would ever mistake Culver Creek for a posh town, but there was something almost charming about this old town that seemed so far removed from the hustle and bustle of modern life, or maybe that was Lance’s own nostalgia coloring his opinion. He had been under the impression that he had no memories of the town where he spent the first twelve years of his life, but as he drove toward the center of town, he recognized some of the different sights and landmarks. There was the elementary school he had gone to, and the public library where his mom used to take him for story time.
The road went around a bend, and sunlight sparkled like gemstones on running water. It was the eponymous Culver Creek, and just like that, a memory kicked off in his head.
He couldn’t remember how old he was, but he and another boy were standing ankle deep in the running stream. Their feet were bare, and their jeans were rolled up to their knees. The water was icy cold. A few feet away on dry ground stood a third boy with a stopwatch in his hand. It was a challenge to see who could stay in the still-frigid early spring water the longest. A small crowd had gathered on the bank—other boys and girls from the neighborhood. They shouted and laughed as Lance and the other boy fought to keep their numb feet planted in the ice-cold water—Allen, that was the other boy’s name. He lived two doors down from Lance, and they used to ride bikes together all the time.
Allen let out a yelp and splashed toward the shore. Lance was declared the victor, while Allen shouted that a fish bit his toe and it wasn’t fair. Lance wasted no time running toward the shore to pull his dry socks onto his soaked feet. Lance’s memory jumped ahead to later that day, when his mother caught him trying to secretly strip off his wet clothes in the bathroom, but no, that wasn’t right. That must have been a different time, because the clothes he was wearing were different—summer clothes, not spring clothes.
“Turn right, Daddy,” Adam said from the backseat.
Lance snapped back to reality and realized Adam was mimicking the GPS directions that he hadn’t been paying attention to. He missed the turn and had to turn around and backtrack. They were already running a few minutes late, but he suspected a dream whisperer wasn’t the sort of person who would worry too much about punctuality.
The dream whisperer’s office was on the second floor of a tired old building a block off the town’s main drag. The ground floor space was leased to a lawyer, and Lance and Adam had to climb a creaky, dimly lit staircase to reach Phelicity Green’s door.
“Where are we?” Adam asked. “Is this a haunted house?”
“No, of course not,” Lance said. He hadn’t explained this part of the day to Adam, and he knew he had to choose his words wisely. Adam could very well repeat anything he said back to Caitlin. “Daddy just needs to stop in and see someone for work, but after we talk to her, then we can go do something fun. Do you want to do something fun?”
Adam nodded. They reached the top of the stairs. The door was locked, but an index card taped to the wall instructed him to press the doorbell. They waited a few seconds.
“Nobody’s home,” Adam said. “Time to do something fun.”
“Hang on there, bud,” Lance said, and at last he heard someone approaching the door. There were a few more seconds of waiting while it seemed several locks were being undone, and then finally the door swung open and a woman with an unruly mane of hair and a purple tunic top with a long greenish-colored batik skirt stood there staring at him. Lance noticed right away that her feet were completely bare.
“Sorry we’re late,” Lance said.
“Oh, no worries,” she said. “Come in.”
She waved them into a room even more dimly lit than the stairway. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw a tiny room cluttered with shelves filled with assorted rocks and crystals and various figurines.
“You must be Adam,” the woman said, leaning down to talk to Adam at eye level.
“Yes,” Adam said. “Do you work with Daddy?”
Lance regretted his little white lie.
“Heh-heh, no, sport, I didn’t mean to confuse you like this. I don’t work with this nice lady.” Then to Phelicity he added, “Sorry.”
She gave him a slight nod, but he noticed the way she was studying him. Was she trying to determine what sort of parent would confuse his child with dumb lies?
“There’s a mat here where you can leave your shoes,” she said to them. It was said in an offhanded way, but he understood it was meant as an instruction. So he slipped off his own shoes before bending down to remove Adam’s as he wondered what kind of new-age nutjob factory this place was.
At Phelicity’s instruction, they sat on a rug on the
floor because clearly this woman wasn’t using her dream whisperer income to buy furniture. Lance regretted his decision to come here. This was not his sort of thing—crystals and the cultural appropriation of Eastern philosophy. As Phelicity launched into some mumbo jumbo about dreams being a portal to another realm, which was all going way over Adam’s head, Lance realized that this quackery was never going to be able to do anything for Adam and his nightmares.
Would it be rude to leave now? He could pretend to get an important text on his phone. It was another lie, and another tale Adam could tell Caitlin. So in the end, he struggled to arrange his legs comfortably on the mat as he breathed patchouli-scented air and listened to Adam dutifully tell the dream whisperer about his nightmares.
Lance had heard Adam talk about his dreams before, but it was like he was hearing the words for the first time. Maybe it was something about all the crystal energy in this room, or more likely it had to do with being in Culver Creek, dredging up memories that had lain dormant for so long, but as Adam described a girl in a river who was hurt by a bad man, Lance was struck by how much the story resembled the one that had been on everyone’s mind that last, awful summer he spent in Culver Creek. That year, a little girl who lived down the road from him was senselessly murdered, and it filled the entire community with fear.
As Adam described an attack on a young girl in frightening, graphic detail, Lance wondered where the boy could have come up with such ugliness. Was Caitlin allowing him to watch inappropriate television shows? No way was he picking up the stuff he was describing from Thomas or any of the other cartoon shows he watched. Lance noticed the serene expression on Phelicity’s face had slowly morphed into one of horror, and the color seemed to have drained from her skin.
Up the Creek Page 9