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“Honey, wake up. Erin, please wake up.”
Joe was dead. Newbie was dead. Kris was dead.
Please, don’t let me be next.
Hands on my shoulders shook me. I swung my arms, screaming that I wasn’t ready to die.
“Honey, please, you’re okay. It was just a bad dream.”
“Betty, is that you? Why am I dreaming again? Why can’t you just leave me alone? If you’re not going to take me with you, then go away!”
My throat burned, but I wasn’t going to let them take me. I wouldn’t let them hold me down and hack me to pieces like they had Joe. I squirmed, kicked, and punched. If they wanted to kill me, they’d have to catch me first. Tears flooded my eyes.
My body shook. I was being moved. “No! Don’t put me back! I don’t want to go back in there!”
Their plan for me was worse than dying—they were putting me back into the crawl space. If I kept kicking and screaming, help would come. Someone would hear me. They’d have to.
“Erin, stop it! It was just a bad dream! Now wake up, it’s me. It’s Mom. Please, baby, wake up.” I was being rocked like a baby not carried back to my tiny prison cell. A smell wafted up to my nose. It reminded me of a perfume I used to know.
“Please, baby, come back to me.”
The voice was persistent and familiar. “Mom, is that you? Please say it’s you.” I begged behind bleary eyes.
“It’s me, sweetie.” I squeezed her slim frame until I feared I’d break her, then I squeezed a little more. I could stop screaming. Stop fighting. Someone had finally come for me. I was safe. “You just had a bad dream.”
A dream? Like the ones where Betty visited me? I clamped my eyes shut. I was tired of seeing her, of being taunted by an escape that never came.
“I came over to bring you something to eat. I figured you hadn’t gone shopping yet, but when you didn’t answer the door, I got worried. I let myself in with the spare keys you gave me. Please don’t be upset. If your car hadn’t been here, I wouldn’t have come in.”
“I’m not upset in the least.”
“As soon as I walked in, I heard you screaming. I’ve been trying to wake you for the last five minutes.”
Memories of Kris having a similar problem when waking me forced me out of Mom’s lap.
“Mom, where’s Kris? Did they find Joe, Doris, Andy? Please tell me they didn’t get away? Andy drugged me again, that explains why you couldn’t wake me.” I threw bedsheets off me and jumped to my feet. My arms swung wildly in the air. “They drugged me so they could get away! We have to find them!”
“Honey, there was no one here. There has been no one here. The house is just as I left it, and the doors were all locked. No one could have gotten in. You’re safe, sweetie.”
“But I’m not safe. Don’t you see?” I laughed at the façade they were able to create for everyone, including my mother. “They are here somewhere, hiding, waiting to capture me again. But they won’t catch me, never again.”
Mom’s worried, sympathetic eyes began to tear up. “No one is going to catch you, sweetie. I promise you. Everything is okay now.”
There was no way for her to know that. She was lying to me, filling my head with wishful thoughts.
“I don’t believe you,” I said, noticing for the first time that the bedroom was bare. The nightstands tucked in the corner, the bedding still in its packaging, and the windows stark but for a curtain rod.
I ran downstairs, leaving Mom alone on the bed. I needed answers like why the spare bedroom was no longer decorated or why, if this was all a dream, was I not sleeping in my own bed?
When I rounded the corner into the kitchen, it was just as I had left it. The boxes I’d intended to take to the basement were by the back door where I’d left them. Kitchen cabinets clashed against each other as I opened every door and drawer. There were no dishes stacked in my cabinets. My drawers were still empty, and the kitchen window had no curtain.
The great room yielded the same results. There were no chairs situated in a circle or books lining the built-in shelves. In a partially opened box, the corner of the “C” encyclopedia stuck out.
In my bedroom, I opened my dresser drawers, my closet. What I had unpacked was all there just as I had left it. There was no blood in the bathroom, none in the tub or on the vanity.
As I was leaving the bedroom, the sheets on the bed captured my attention. They’d been changed back to my original white set.
It was Mom. It had to be. She was attempting to convince me no one was ever here. The only reason she’d do that would be to protect me from discovering they’d gotten away. She wanted me to believe I’d made it all up, that I’d been alone the entire time.
But she was wrong. They had been here. I was held captive in my own home. I had seen a man die at the hands of his son and wife. It was all true. Mom couldn’t make me consider otherwise.
“Mom, how dare you do this to me!” She stood in the bedroom doorway with an astonished and confused expression on her face. “I know they were here. Why did you let them get away, and why are you trying to cover up the sordid details of my life of the last three or more weeks?” I raised my voice to the woman who had always been my best friend, my protector.
In a slow, steady pace, she walked toward me. “Honey, you have to listen to me. There was no one here. There has been no one here. You just fell asleep, probably after having read some of the papers I told you about in the crawl space and now...”
“That’s it.” I stopped her mid-sentence with my hand in the air. “That’s how I’ll prove that I’m telling you the truth.”
She was close behind as I sprinted up the steps, two at a time, back into the spare room. I landed on my knees in front of the crawl space door.
My hands shook as I combatted nerves of seeing the hole where I’d been confined for many days and nights, along with the chance that Newbie’s dead body still laid inside. Andy never explained what had happened to Newbie’s or Kris’s body. If he was still inside, that would prove to Mom that I wasn’t lying.
I released the latch and my trapped breath and opened the door. I pressed my hand to my forehead. Not only wasn’t there a body, there was only one stack of papers unlike the many that had been there before. Mom had moved them, but for what purpose?
I tugged at a paper clipping from the top of the single stack. My trembling hands pulled back a heavy pile of newspapers. They’d been bound by string unlike the loose sheets before. The heap landed on the bedroom floor with a loud thud.
I removed the string, tossing it aside to read the top paper. It was an award Betty had won for the best flower garden in the county. I tossed it aside. The next page was a birth announcement of a son to Susan Daly, daughter to Betty and Arthur Daly. The baby’s name was Mark Andrew Baker. His father’s name was Joe Baker.
I flipped through one paper after another, expecting to find the ones I’d read mentioning a serial killer or Betty’s husband dying a gruesome death, but even her daughter’s obituary was missing. All of the clippings were of happy things: births, awards, and celebrations.
Whoever repacked my belongings and changed my sheets had tossed the original clippings so I wouldn’t discover the truth that Joe was likely the serial killer, that Doris may have been his accomplice, and that Betty’s husband and daughter had been murdered. Betty couldn’t have known about Newbie. If she had, she’d have introduced me or at least shown me pictures.
I shoved aside the papers sprawled out around me. I stretched my legs out with my back resting against the foot of the bed. A conversation I had with Betty years ago stirred inside my mind. She’d explained that she preferred to be surrounded by her family when she slept as opposed to while she was awake.
“Loved ones protect you from bad dreams,” she’d said. Could that explain why I never saw Newbie? Was his picture in Betty’s room, a room I never entered?
“Mom, I don’t get it, everything is gone. The papers are different. My boxes aren’t unpacked. It isn’t right.” My head pounded in steady beats. “I just don’t get it.”
She played with my ponytail while sitting behind me on the foot of the bed. “Sweetie, I’ve been trying to tell you, it was all just a dream. Your house is exactly how it was when I left last night. Instead of rifling through the papers, you slept after a long, draining day of moving. You’re okay, though. No one is after you.”
Mental and physical exhaustion threatened to overtake me. My body wanted to sleep. I doubted I’d ever sleep again, knowing that my mind was capable of weaving such a detailed and deranged nightmare.
“Come on, honey. Why don’t we go downstairs and watch some TV for a while? I’ll stay here with you for the day. Does that sound good?”
“Sure,” I said, willing to agree to anything in the hope that it would erase the horror of my nightmare from my mind.
She stood in front of me and helped lift me off the floor. We walked downstairs in silence. Once in the living room, I slid down the wall opposite the front door. She sat down beside me, coaxing my head onto her shoulder.
Running her fingers through my hair like she’d do when I was a child after I’d had a bad dream, she said, “I love you. Everything is going to be okay now.”
With her free hand, she turned on the TV, which was placed on the hearth of the fireplace. It hadn’t been there in my dream, or maybe it had. The longer I was awake, the less clear some of the details of my dream became, though enough of it had stuck around and would for as long as I lived.
The first channel that came on was the last channel I’d been watching. It was a news channel. Mom flipped the channel to a rerun of a ‘90s sitcom.
I crawled to the TV. “Turn it back.” I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. On the screen flashed a picture of a woman I’d watched die in my arms.
“There is still no word about the woman who’s been missing for five days now,” the news anchor said. “The police are asking for anyone who may have seen this woman to contact the local police department or to call the toll-free number listed at the bottom of your screen.
“Again, her name is Kristen Anne Thomson. She is thirty years old and goes by Kris to those closest to her.
"While it is unconfirmed whether she is officially involved in Ms. Thomson's case, Liza Bowen, a well-known psychic from Oklahoma, was spotted with local police at Ms. Thomson’s home. Liza Bowen has worked with police in the past, helping to solve open cases as well as cold-case files."
“Mom, I know this girl. She was here.”
Tears welled in my eyes. When I turned to Mom, she was a blur.
“She’s been on the news for the past five days, ever since she went missing.” Mom sat down beside me, hugging me close to her chest. “It’s probable that you’ve seen her on TV and just don’t remember it.”
“But she was here.” Tears poured down my cheeks. “In this house. She died in my arms.” I sniffled, gasping for air. Mom stroked my back, assuring me Kris had never been inside my house, nor did I watch her die.
“Erin, listen to me, she was probably in your subconscious, which worked its way into the nightmare you had. You need to calm down and take deep breaths. The police will find her and bring her home safely. She’s going to be okay, just like you will be. I’m going to make you some tea. Stay here a minute.”
I released my hold on her as she lowered her arms from around my neck. She dried my cheeks, smiling in her reassuring, comforting way. She hoisted herself off the floor using the hearth as leverage.
“I’ll be right back.” She kissed the top of my head before disappearing into the kitchen.
When she was gone, a fray in the carpet revealed itself. It was there just as it had been the night Joe tore my soul apart. If the fray was real and Kris was missing, then I was right. It had all happened the way I’d said. I had been beaten, slapped, raped, tortured, and confined to the crawl space.
My reflection would show me the truth.
I jumped up from the floor. I passed Mom, holding two mismatched mugs of steaming tea, on the way into my bathroom. In the mirror, I stared at the woman whose face wasn’t marred with bruises, cuts, or scars of any kind. I lifted my shirt. There were no bruises or cracks on my ribs. I ran my fingertips across my ribs and stomach but suffered no pain.
I was drugged, suffering from a hallucination, that was the answer. Andy had injected me with more tranquilizer. What was happening at that moment was a dream. Soon I’d wake to Andy and Doris hovering over Joe’s dead body. Mom was coming to me as Betty had. She was comforting me at the lowest point in my life.
I turned my back on the mirror. I walked out of the bathroom, where Mom was sitting on my bed, watching me through worried eyes.
I wished she was real. I prayed she’d come to save me from Joe’s family. My prayers and wishes had never come true; now was no different.
“I don’t want to wake up, Mom.” I knelt before her, resting my palms on her knees. “You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for you to rescue me, to free me from his captivity. Now you’re here, but, like Betty, you’ll soon fade away, leaving me behind, alone and afraid.”
Her eyes laced with pity and anguish. “What will it take to convince you this isn’t a dream, that you are awake?”
“There’s nothing you can say or do that will prove to me you aren’t a dream. Even if you could, it would mean you’d proven me certifiable. No sane person is capable of creating an elaborate world filled with violence and wickedness. It’s better for us both if you don’t bother trying. Admittedly, it’s a nice change seeing you as opposed to Betty. I’ve missed you.”
She released an exhausted sigh. “Why don’t we go into the kitchen, drink our tea, and you can tell me all about your dream? If you talk about it, maybe you’ll come to accept you’re awake and living your real life.”
I rose to my feet, grabbed a cup from my mother’s hand, the woman I thought I’d never see again, and with a smile said, “Why don’t we skip the kitchen and go outside? It’s been ages since I’ve been free to go outdoors. We’ll save the rest for another day.”
“But don’t you want to find answers to prove you’re no longer asleep?” Concern for my well-being etched itself in the corners of her eyes.
“Whether I’m awake or not isn’t important. At this moment, I’m at peace. I’ve known what it’s like to be helpless, hopeless, and full of despair. Those emotions no longer fill me. For however long it lasts, I want to enjoy this time with you because life, like dreams, doesn’t last forever. Instead of living like we’re dying, we should try living like we’re dreaming, aware that at any second it could all come to an end.”
“Whatever you need from me, I’ll do.”
“I need to sit on the porch, drink some tea, and imagine a world without angry, hateful people.”
“You’re scaring me, sweetie.” She tilted her head to her side, examining me with pinched brows and narrowed eyes.
I tugged her by her free hand toward the door. “No offense, Mom, but you have no idea what true fear is, and, for your sake, I hope you never find out.”
Sunlight warmed my face the second I opened the door. I breathed in the autumn air as a soft breeze blew past me, tangling my hair over my face.
Awake or asleep, I’d never been happier or more content.
I tucked my wayward hair behind my ear and sat beside Mom on the top step of my porch. In the distance, I saw the familiar face of a kind, caring woman who’d comforted me when I needed it most. I squinted, but her image had disappeared.
Mom patted me on my left knee. “I love you, sweetie.”
“I love you too, Mom. Thank you for being here.”
“You mean in your dream?”
“No.” I laughed, loving that she doubted the possibility that she was nothing more than a visitor in my subconscious mind. “Here.” I held her hand over my heart.
She sat her cup of tea down beside her. “If this delusion doesn’t fade by tomorrow, we’re going to the doctor.” Pressing the back of her hand to my forehead, she checked to see if I had a fever.
I laughed to myself, allowing her to love me in the overprotective way that she always had.
Across the street, standing by a welcome flag hanging by a mailbox, stood Betty, smiling. When Mom lowered her arm, Betty was gone like ashes of a nightmare. She’d return when I needed her again, when Mom was no longer there to chase the bad dreams away.
Until then, I’d live like I was dreaming.