Brittney’s office looked like it had come straight out of a catalog. Her desk and the bookcases held a small assortment of accent pieces, giving it just the right amount of color, but the whole room had an impersonal feel. Caitlin had never really noticed the lack of photographs and mementos in her boss’s office before, and realizing it now made her feel pity for Brittney, who had devoted her life to her business. The pity didn’t last long.
“I don’t suppose you know why I asked you to come in here today,” Brittney said. She sat behind her desk. Caitlin sat in one of the expensive but uncomfortable chairs across from her while Adam played quietly on the floor beside her. She had picked him up from school a little early so she could make it to this afternoon meeting on time.
Caitlin had misread Brittney’s neutral tone on the phone and assumed the meeting was to discuss some new, upcoming project, but now she wasn’t so sure. She shook her head because she felt too nervous to speak.
“Look, you’re a hard worker, and your work is good, top-notch,” Brittney said. “I’ve always thought so.”
“Thank you,” Caitlin said, still confused about where Brittney was going with this.
“But I think you also understand how important this business is to me, and how I can’t afford anything that jeopardizes our accounts,” Brittney continued.
“Of course,” Caitlin said. Beside her, Adam asked her something, but she tried to silently signal to him that now was not the right time.
“Last week, you mistakenly sent an email to our liaison at the lottery commission that should have been sent here to the office,” Brittney said.
Panic seized Caitlin. She had no recollection of making this error, but she realized it was a real possibility. She searched her memory for emails she had sent last week. Could she have made some sort of disparaging remark about the lottery people or the campaign? But nothing came to mind.
“I’m sorry,” Caitlin stammered. “I didn’t mean to.”
Brittney waved the comment away. “It was no big deal, nothing damaging in the message. This time.”
Adam was on his feet now, tugging on Caitlin’s sleeve to get her attention. She couldn’t gracefully ignore him. She held up a finger to pause the conversation with her boss and turned to her son.
“What is it?” Caitlin whispered to him.
“I’m tired of playing with my dinosaur,” he said.
Caitlin dug through the tote bag she had brought with her and found some paper and a box of crayons, which she handed to Adam. Satisfied, he sat back down on the floor and began doodling.
“Sorry,” Caitlin said, turning back to Brittney.
“Right, well. It’s not the first mistake I’ve noticed,” Brittney said. “And I’m worried that the next time you mistakenly send an email like this, it will be far more damaging.”
“Honestly, it was just a stupid mistake,” Caitlin said. “It won’t happen again.” She glanced at Adam humming to himself as he colored quietly. “We’ve been having a difficult time lately. It’s Adam. He’s been having these nightmares.”
Brittney nodded in a way that Caitlin supposed was meant to be sympathetic, but it felt hollow.
“You know, I was going to say that you looked exhausted,” Brittney said, “but I didn’t want to be rude.”
Caitlin nodded slowly. The truth was, thanks to her Pacifcleon, her sleep hadn’t really been affected by Adam’s nightmares. She slept soundly and tended to get a minimum of eight hours of solid sleep each night, but no way was she going to mention that now after her young, perky boss told her she looked tired.
“It’s just a phase, I’m sure,” Caitlin said, glancing again at Adam. He pressed so hard on the paper with the red crayon in his fist that she was sure it would break.
“You know, sometimes you just can’t do it all,” Brittney said. “You have to pick between being a mother and having a career.”
Caitlin tried to tamp down the rage that began to boil inside of her. What did childless Brittney know about being a mother? And what kind of antiquated, sexist bullshit was this women-can’t-be-mothers-and-have-careers philosophy of hers?
There were a lot of choice words Caitlin could have said, but all that came out was, “Are you firing me? Is that what this is?”
“No, absolutely not.” Brittney acted mock-horrified at the very suggestion, even though that had clearly been the implication of her words. “But I can’t stress enough that we can’t afford to have any more errors like this. Maybe for now it’s best that you don’t email the clients directly, at all, just in case. We can do everything through an intermediary here at the office.”
“It will take more time.” Caitlin didn’t often have reason to email clients, but when she did, it was usually to ask a quick question about a design she was working on. Having to do this through a third person here at the office would just add to the time it would take to get a response.
“It will,” Brittney said, “but for now I think that’s the best solution.”
Her sentence was light, but still Caitlin bristled at the idea of being punished. Brittney began talking about some upcoming projects they would be working on, but Caitlin barely heard her as she silently fumed. It was only when Brittney rose from her desk that she realized the meeting had mercifully concluded. Caitlin stood as well, then leaned down to gather up Adam’s things.
“Come on,” she said to him. “We’ve got to get going.”
“I drew you a picture,” Adam said.
He handed her the masterpiece he had been working on, and at first glance all she saw was a page full of crayon scribbles, but soon the drawing resolved itself into an all-too-familiar picture. Her attention was drawn first to the intense red scribbles. Blood, she saw now. It spurted from the top of the little girl’s head. It dripped from the rock held in the tall man’s hand. It ran into the blue squiggles of water. Beyond this was another girl, a little shorter than the bleeding one. Caitlin could clearly see the tears on the girl’s face. In an instant she was seeing not Adam’s drawing in front of her, but the image that was so seared in her memory. This was exactly how it had looked, but how could Adam have known this? She knew how. He was drawing a picture of his nightmare, but why would he have a nightmare about this now?
“Caitlin?” From a million miles away, she heard Brittney saying her name. “Is everything okay?” Brittney asked.
Caitlin finally looked up from the drawing. She shoved it quickly into her tote bag, creasing its corner in her haste, not that this was a drawing she would be hanging on the refrigerator.
“Fine,” Caitlin said. “We’ve got to go.”
She bustled Adam into his windbreaker, but her hands were shaking too badly to zip it, and she left it undone as she led him out of her boss’s office.
“Don’t forget to stop in with Tonya and fill out that updated form,” Brittney said.
Caitlin nodded even though she had no idea what form Brittney was talking about, and she had no intention of going to see Tonya. She just wanted to get the hell out of there.
As Caitlin drove home, her mind was a million miles away, or more accurately, nineteen years away. She was ten years old, but she could remember it as if it happened yesterday. She awoke in the dark with her heart racing from a terrifying dream. None of her psychic dreams were especially pleasant, but this one had been truly awful, maybe the worst one yet.
In her dream, she had watched a little girl get attacked by a man wielding a rock. They had been beside some sort of river or stream, and she had watched the girl collapse to the ground and saw with frightening clarity the way the blood flowed from the wound on her head and ran into the water. There was another little girl there as well, and she stood there silently, frozen with fear, her eyes wide as saucers.
Caitlin wanted to go back to sleep and forget all about the awful dream, but the dream didn’t want to be forgotten. She tossed and turned until the sky turned to the purply-blue of early morning. The house was still silent, but she rose and dressed before heading downstairs. When she couldn’t find anything good to watch on television, she put her Little Mermaid tape into the VCR, but even Ariel couldn’t distract her from the frightening nightmare.
She didn’t want to tell her mother about the dream. She didn’t want to speak or think about the awful, ugly thing. So when her mother came down and made breakfast for her and inevitably asked if Caitlin had any dreams the previous evening, she shook her head no. Was it the way she shook her head? Was it the haunted look in her eyes? Whatever it was, her mother was not fooled by her denial. She knew Caitlin had a dream, and she wanted to know all about it.
Caitlin let her cereal turn to soggy mush in the bowl as she shared the details of the frightening dream. Her mother jotted them down in her notebook, and though she made an effort to remain impassive, Caitlin noticed the little shudder that went through her when she described the attack.
“Who was the girl?” her mother wanted to know. “Did you recognize her?”
For the second time that morning, Caitlin shook her head, but this time she was being honest. She had never seen the girl before. Her mother wanted to know what the girl looked like.
“She had dark hair,” Caitlin said.
“Was she your age? Could it be someone you go to school with?”
Caitlin shook her head to both questions. The girl was younger, definitely.
“She looked like maybe she was in first or second grade.” Caitlin closed her eyes and pictured the terrible dream even though she really didn’t want to, and she noticed another detail. The dress the girl was wearing had ruffled cap sleeves and an illustration on the front, and Caitlin realized it wasn’t a dress at all. “I think she was wearing her pajamas,” Caitlin said when she reopened her eyes, “a nightshirt.”
Her mother dutifully noted this detail in her notebook. She pressed Caitlin for more details about the man in the dream. What did he look like? Did Caitlin recognize him?
Caitlin hadn’t spent as much time in the dream looking at the man as she had the little girls, but she had caught a glimpse of him. Except for the fact that he was wielding a rock as a weapon, he didn’t seem that scary at all.
“Did you recognize him?” her mother asked. “Maybe he’s the dad of one of the kids you go to school with.”
To Caitlin this seemed like a strange suggestion, but just like with the girl, she was sure she had never seen him before. Caitlin was relieved when her mother finally ran out of questions. She thought it was all over, but in truth it was only beginning.
Because that night her mother was watching the news when she saw the story about the little girl in Pennsylvania who was killed in a brutal and shocking murder. The news story offered scant details, but the school portrait of the little girl with the dark pigtails and the information that the murder had occurred outdoors near a creek, in the middle of the night, made her shout Caitlin’s name.
Caitlin looked up from the picture she had been coloring to see the all-too-familiar face on the screen.
“What’s going on?” her father asked as her mother ran to grab a pen and paper to write down the phone number to call for tips.
“Caitlin saw the murder,” her mother said, “in her dream.”
Her father looked over at Caitlin, and his look was both sympathetic and concerned. Maybe if he had spoken up and said something right then, everything would have been different, but as usual he said nothing, and within seconds Luanne had their cordless kitchen phone and was dialing the tips number.
Caitlin slammed on her brakes, and the Land Cruiser lurched to a sudden stop, but it was a fraction of a second too late. The bumper had connected with the fender of the small black car. She blinked in surprise as she tried to make sense of what had just happened. She knew the intersection well. They were just a couple of blocks from home. Had she not seen the black car before proceeding through the stop sign? But as she tried her best to recall the last minute or so, she had the sudden awful realization that she had gone straight through the intersection without stopping.
Someone rapped on her window, and she jumped. She stared at the woman standing there in surprise.
“Are you okay?” the woman asked. Caitlin nodded her reply.
The driver of the black car stepped out, and he was swearing and waving his fist in the air. Two other cars had pulled over to the curb, and now their drivers stepped out to assist. One of them, a large man, intervened before the angry, shouting driver made his way over to Caitlin. The woman at Caitlin’s window said she should move her car out of the intersection and wait for the police, which she did.
“What’s going on?” Adam asked in the backseat.
“It’s going to be okay,” Caitlin assured him, and she hoped she was right.