Caitlin stood at the bathroom counter and slipped the blister pack from her current box of Pacifcleon and pushed out the evening’s pill. There was a week’s worth remaining in this box, and five more boxes were stashed at the back of the linen closet, but they wouldn’t last forever. She needed to track down more. She would check eBay again in the morning. As she put the box back into her drawer, she noticed the expiration date on the flap. It was nearly a year past its recommended date. She wondered if the date really mattered. Would the pills lose their efficacy at some point? Most likely she would run out long before that ever happened, but she didn’t want to think about that.
Adam had another bad dream the previous night, and she had slept through it. Lance was the one who had gone in and comforted Adam. She felt guilty about the whole thing even though Lance tried to reassure her that it wasn’t all that bad.
“He was back asleep in minutes,” Lance had said.
Still, she should have been there to comfort him. She should have at least heard him. It made her hesitate just a moment before swallowing the pill. It chased away dreams, but it also made her sleep soundly—so soundly that she didn’t always hear her son crying out in distress down the hall.
Well, maybe they would get lucky and there would be no nightmare tonight. At least she could guarantee that she wouldn’t have one. She swallowed down the pill and went into the bedroom.
Lance was already in bed. The door was shut, and Caitlin could see that Lance had gone and locked the door. It was one of his quirks. It made no sense to her that the same man who routinely left his car unlocked in a crowded parking lot would also lock their bedroom door inside their own house. She had always found it a weird but tolerable habit. Since Adam had started having his nightmares, though, the locked door bothered her. She had said something to Lance before, but he didn’t listen.
“I don’t want to keep the door locked in case Adam has a bad dream,” she said.
“I’ll wake up and go to his room if he does,” Lance said.
“Or I might,” Caitlin said.
“Unlikely,” Lance muttered.
She could remind him that just last week she had been the one who woke up and went to Adam when she heard him screaming, but she still felt guilty about last night. How had she not heard a thing?
“Still, there’s no need to lock the door,” Caitlin said.
“Fine, whatever,” Lance said.
She went over and unlocked it. Lance didn’t exactly sigh, but he exhaled a little louder than normal. It reminded her of her father.
Caitlin missed her father. She missed so many things about Raymond Gordon Pendergast. She missed the cherry-tinged scent of his pipe tobacco. She missed the way he would sit in that worn-out recliner in their living room playing endless games of solitaire on a little folding tray table. His quiet, easy-going manner had been the perfect balance to her mother’s loud hyperactivity. Growing up, Caitlin had always seen her father as an ally. They were kindred spirits, doomed to live in a household dominated by loud, brash Luanne Pendergast. Only later did it occur to Caitlin that her father had, for whatever reason, elected to spend his life with Luanne, whereas she had no choice in the matter.
This was also around the time she realized that his customary way of dealing with her mother’s erratic mood swings and crazy plans was to sigh and shrug things off. How would things have been different for her if just once her father put his foot down and stood up to Luanne? What if he had intervened at the very beginning—the first time she had one of those terrible dreams?
When Caitlin was four years old, she had a nightmare about her Grandma Mimi. It was vivid and horrifying. Even now, twenty-six years later, she could still recall snatches of it if she closed her eyes. She remembered the sound, a horrible screeching noise, metal on metal. She saw broken glass and then vividly bright red blood. It stained her grandmother’s pink blouse. It dripped onto the ground. It was the sight of that blood that made her wake up screaming and sent her running into her parents’ bedroom. Her mother soothed her and comforted her and told her it wasn’t real, but her mother was wrong.
Two days later, Caitlin was eating a bowl of Froot Loops at the kitchen table when the phone rang. Her mother set down the towel she had been using to dry dishes to take the call. Caitlin watched the stricken look on her mother’s face. She turned slowly to face her daughter, and there was both awe and fear in her expression.
Grandma Mimi had been in a car accident. Another car had run through a stop sign and crashed into hers. She was in the hospital with broken ribs and a lacerated spleen.
“It’s just like your dream,” her mother said as she drove them to the hospital later that morning.
Her grandmother had two black eyes and a bandage around her head when they stepped into the hospital room, but Caitlin was relieved to not see any blood.
“I’m going to be just fine,” Grandma Mimi said when she saw the worried look on her granddaughter’s face. “It takes more than a little car accident to take this old gal down.”
After that, her mother made it a point to ask Caitlin about her dreams each morning. At first, Caitlin enjoyed telling her mother about the harmless dreams she could recall from the previous evening, but then there were the dark, ugly dreams. The ones she didn’t want to relive again. Although it wasn’t a particularly awful dream, she had a dream about her father suffering an injury, and then a few days later while trying to hang up a shelf, he cut his hand. It was nothing serious, but her mother claimed it was proof that Caitlin had a gift.
Luanne bought a notebook, and she would write down the dreams Caitlin described each morning. Caitlin soon tired of the exercise, but her mother was insistent. And her father? Caitlin recalled the disapproving sighs and his sense of dissatisfaction with the whole business, but those had little bearing on her mother’s crusade.
It was more than a year after she had the dream about her grandmother that Caitlin had the awful dream about the woman with the red hair. Caitlin had never seen the woman before in her life, but she could see her clearly in her dream. What she could also see clearly was the violent struggle with the man with the beard, and then the worst part of all, the gun. The explosive sound was even louder than the horrible screeching from her Grandma Mimi dream, but just like that dream, there was blood. Lots and lots of blood.
Caitlin woke up screaming. Her mother was there to comfort her, but she hadn’t come empty-handed. She had her notebook, and in the dim glow from Caitlin’s bedside lamp, she scratched out notes, frowning at the words on the page.
“A woman with red hair? A man with a beard? Who can that be?” her mother asked.
Caitlin didn’t know, but soon she would. It was a few days later when the news came out about the murder that had occurred in their quiet suburban town. A domestic argument had turned deadly when a man turned a gun on his ex-girlfriend. Her mother showed her the pictures from the newspaper.
“That’s them, isn’t it?” her mother asked. “That’s the man and the woman from your dream.”
Caitlin recognized them right away. She was horrified, but her mother seemed delighted.
“Don’t you see what this means?” Luanne said. “You can see the future! You’re like a superhero.”
When Caitlin was in elementary school, her mother became a regular at the off-track betting place a few towns away. She would search for horses with names that matched things Caitlin had described in her dreams. Sometimes the connections were a stretch. In one dream, Caitlin described seeing a small man, and her mother bet on a horse named Pot of Gold under the assumption that this small man must have been a leprechaun. Sometimes the horses would win, and Luanne saw this as confirmation, but it seemed that just as often the horses lost.
The horses were Luanne and Caitlin’s secret until the day Luanne bet the $300 that was supposed to pay for the new water heater on a horse named Canadian Pride after Caitlin had a dream about a moose. Canadian Pride came in dead last. Luanne had no choice but to tell her husband what had happened to the water heater money. It finally happened. Her father did more than sigh and shrug.
Though her parents were behind their closed bedroom door, she could hear her father’s stern shouting. It was memorable because Raymond Pendergast never raised his voice, but the other thing Caitlin remembered was that even then, when he could have put an end to the whole dream business once and for all, what he chose to focus on was Luanne’s gambling. He forbade Luanne from betting on any more horse races. Caitlin knew this would not end Luanne’s fascination with her dreams.
Was it fair to blame her father for his failure to call an end to Luanne’s endless recording of Caitlin’s dreams? Couldn’t Caitlin have stood up for herself? It’s true she was just a child, but she could have refused to participate in Luanne’s scheme. She didn’t have to share all her dreams with her mother. So why did she?
Was it because she felt uncomfortable lying to her mother? Caitlin liked this explanation, but she knew it wasn’t true. Even by the age of ten, she was quite accomplished at lying to Luanne, whether it was simple fibs like saying she had completed her homework or cleaned her bedroom when she hadn’t, or more serious lies like the one she told about that scrape on her knee that hadn’t come from tripping in the kitchen but from riding her bike down the road at night, when she was supposed to be in bed, or that time she ate all the cupcakes for the bake sale and blamed it on her friend Mara Mooney. Caitlin had no problem lying to her mother, so why didn’t she lie about the dreams? Maybe it was partly about the attention. Her mother loved her and patiently listened to her stories about school or her favorite television shows, but there was definitely a different level of attention that Luanne paid to Caitlin’s descriptions of her dreams. It did make her feel special to have what her mother felt was an amazing gift.
Caitlin had always felt more comfortable talking to her father. He took things in stride and seemed to genuinely listen to what she had to say, except where dreams were concerned. He never came straight out and said he didn’t care about her dreams. That wasn’t his way. Instead he indicated his impatience with the sort of sighs that he generally reserved for Luanne.
Where dreams were concerned, Luanne was Caitlin’s ally. Luanne was the only one who really understood how significant Caitlin’s dreams were. Still, Caitlin was miles ahead of her mother in understanding how her dreams worked.
Long before Canadian Pride lost that race, Caitlin had realized her mother was all wrong with the horse betting. Not all of her dreams came true, but when they did, they were never the nice, happy dreams. It was only ever the dark, frightening ones that came true.
Caitlin’s dreams terrified her. They were graphic, horrifying nightmares, but they were more than just nightmares. Her dreams were real things. The burden was too great to carry on her own. Sharing them with Luanne was one way to lessen the load. The other thing about her dreams was that she only ever had these psychic dreams about someone close to her—a friend or relative or someone in close physical proximity—someone in town or close by. Sometimes she wondered if it was because even if she didn’t recognize these people, it was someone she had come in contact with at some point. Maybe she had passed by them in the grocery store aisle or they had been walking through the park when she was there riding on the swings.
At least that was how it had always been, but then she dreamed about the little girl.
Lance didn’t understand that Adam’s dreams were more than just harmless nightmares, and Caitlin fully intended to keep it that way. If there was some way she could stop her son from ever having to experience another terrifying dream, she would, but short of drugging him, the next best solution was to convince him that his bad dreams were nothing to be scared of, that they weren’t real. She would never force him to divulge the details of his dreams to her while she jotted them down in a notebook. She would never heap praise on him for having some supposed gift. And under no circumstances would she ever drag him to some police station in some godforsaken Pennsylvania town to help solve a murder.