Caitlin Walker had not had a dream in over nine years. It was hard to believe she had experienced nearly a decade of beautiful, dreamless sleep, but maybe that was why she could still remember bits and pieces of the nightmares she had when she was younger with such vivid clarity. There was another explanation; a memory popped into her head of her mother seated at their kitchen table frantically scribbling down Caitlin’s words in a notebook as she dutifully described her latest dream.
It was better if Adam didn’t describe his nightmares. Better for who? Caitlin ignored the voice in her head. This wasn’t about her comfort. This was about not making the dream real by describing it. It would be that much more difficult to forget once he framed it with words.
Certainly that was the case for Caitlin, who had spent the better part of the morning obsessing over the dream Adam had described to her the previous night, or at least replaying a scene in her head that looked an awful lot like the ugly dream Adam had described. The creepy shadows could not obscure the little girl standing beside the creek, the fear on her face as she looked up at the big rock bearing down on her. Caitlin saw the girl’s crumpled form lying in the mud beside the creek. She saw the blood that ran down her pale face. Adam said there had been a bad boy that hurt the girl, but that wasn’t right. It was a man, Caitlin was sure of it.
Her phone pinged with a notification, and she abandoned the memory and returned to the real world. She glanced at the phone to make sure it wasn’t any kind of alert from Adam’s nursery school. It wasn’t. She saw her mother-in-law’s name on the display and decided she could safely ignore it. Raquel was probably busy planning her latest party and wanted to brag to Caitlin about the menu she had ordered from the caterer or some other inanity.
Instead Caitlin returned to her work, or in this case the blank screen she had been staring at for the better part of the day. The graphic design firm Caitlin worked for was generous enough to allow her to work from home most days. This was perfect because it meant she didn’t have to hire a babysitter for Adam or send him to daycare. And in an ideal world, it meant that the three days per week he had his full-day pre-k, she had hours of distraction-free time to get work done. Distractions managed to find her all the same. Even in a quiet house, she was capable of distracting herself by worrying about Adam and the nightmares that plagued him on a near daily basis.
“Enough,” she said to her empty office, and reread the project notes for what must have been the tenth time.
They were working on an ad campaign for a state lottery commission. It was a huge account and a major score for the agency. Caitlin was honored and proud that Brittney had entrusted her with the ad design, but stupid doubts and her old sense of inferiority were interfering with her ability to create. Then there was the slogan. “Dreams come true.” On the surface it was a simple, maybe even banal slogan, but every time Caitlin read it, she found herself taking it literally. That image of the little girl lying dead in the mud came back to her, and it was all she could see. She tried to conjure up visions of someone gleefully driving an expensive car or waving from the window of a palatial home, and for a moment she saw these things, then the dead little girl chased them from her mind.
Maybe she should tell Brittney she wasn’t the right person for this ad campaign. How would she put it? She could say she wasn’t feeling it. She knew how well that would go over with her business-minded boss. Plus, if she turned down a major project like this, they would be that much less likely to give her big accounts going forward. No, she had to knuckle down and get this done. She wouldn’t get distracted by the slogan. She would leave that part until the end, get everything else set first.
She took a deep breath and got as far as opening her artwork folder when her phone rang. Unless it was the school, she wasn’t picking up. She looked at the display. Oh, good. It was her mother-in-law. Was she calling because Caitlin hadn’t responded to her text message quick enough? Caitlin had asked Lance on more than one occasion to tell his mother not to bug her during the day when she was working, but it was useless. Raquel didn’t seem to understand that what Caitlin did was actual work and not some sort of quirky hobby. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Raquel spent her days surrounded by women who were fellow members of the Flower Arranging Society or the Lunching Ladies or any of the dozen or so social clubs she belonged to.
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 hunkered 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.