“Night terrors,” says the psychiatrist. “A symptom of post-traumatic stress. Perfectly normal.”
He smiles at me with polished teeth, gleaming white. Blond hair that’s slicked back in perfect little lines, spotless expensive shirt, manicured hands. I’m slumped in a leather chair in jeans and a black T-shirt, feeling like the big wooden desk between us is more like a barrier between worlds. He’s from a different planet. No way am I going to talk to this guy, no matter how much my parents want me to. The silence drags on.
“I can help you, but you need to open up,” he says. That’s why my parents brought me here—to get some help. Because they can’t handle the screaming at night. Can’t handle the way I’ve unplugged from everything, everyone, around me.
Like this plastic-faced shrink is going to help. There’s no way I’m going to “open up” to this guy. Because if I tell him the truth, he’ll think I’m crazy. The truth is, I sleep for four, maybe five, hours every night. And then the dream wakes me up. The dream is always the same, every time. It starts with me in my bed.
I open my eyes and see him standing there, watching me. Just a little shadow in the doorway. Six years old, small for his age. My little brother. I grunt out his name, wondering why he’s woken me up.
“Sammy?”
He doesn’t answer. Just watches me. I notice he’s wearing his clothes, not pajamas. His Superman T-shirt is soaked through, and his hair is plastered down, wet. Then I smell damp leaves and the putrid scent of something rotting.
“Sammy—where the hell have you been? You know what time it is?” I whisper. He doesn’t say a word but starts to shuffle toward me. And then I remember.
Sammy died months ago. I was in the river next to him when the current pulled him away. I tried to grab him, my hands scratching his slick wet back. Sammy was way out of reach downriver when he went down the first time. His head reappeared, looking back at me. Then he was gone under the black water, forever.
The worst part is, they never found his body. The search-and-rescue guys said it was probably pinned down at the bottom, under a log or something. I can’t stop thinking about Sammy, lying down there at the bottom of the river, looking up at the daylight. Trapped.
So there is no way he survived. There is no way he can be here right now, sliding his feet across the floor, shadowy eyes fixed on mine. Sam stops at the edge of my bed, and his tiny hands reach up to me, scrabbling against my naked chest. Wanting me to pick him up. His hands feel like cold dead meat.
That’s when I wake up screaming.
A week after the visit to the psychiatrist, the nightmares are worse than ever. My dad comes in and finds me in sweat-soaked sheets, my throat hoarse and sore. He sits close enough to me that I can smell the whiskey on his breath. The accident wasn’t easy on him either. He listens as I mumble through tears, explaining the dream to him. When I finish, he takes his glasses off and just looks at me for a while.
“You remember when we saw that zombie movie last year?”
I nod, not sure where this is going. The film scared the crap out of me, although I tried not to show it to my dad.
“Right now, your mind is like a movie projector,” he says. “It’s throwing pictures on the wall. But they’re just… images, ghosts. You’re making yourself see scary stuff.” He pulls up the sheets, smoothing them around me like I’m a little kid again. “You just need to turn the projector off. And the pictures…the ghosts…they’ll go away.”
He walks to the door. Looks back at me, one hand on the light switch.
“It’s all in your mind,” he says, “and ghosts can’t hurt you.”
He means well. But Dad is wrong. I don’t find that out until a couple of months later.