Caitlin still felt groggy as she helped Adam get dressed. She had gotten out of bed roughly an hour ago—right around when Lance was leaving for work—but she felt barely awake. She noticed red marks on his neck as she slipped his shirt on. They didn’t look that bad—the skin wasn’t broken, at least—but they worried her.
Could he have done it to himself during one of his nightmares? She tried to picture him clawing at his own skin during one of the bad dreams. It was one explanation, but she didn’t think it was the only one. It was possible he hadn’t been asleep at all.
The first time Caitlin harmed herself was in college. She was fully awake when she deliberately tore her skin with a pair of dull scissors, but a dream was to blame.
For over a week she had been having a frightening nightmare. It was the same dream each time—a young woman attacked in an ill-lit parking lot. What she saw in terms of details varied from night to night, which was why it wasn’t until the third night of the recurring dream that she recognized the parking lot. It was the one between one of the dorm buildings and the student center. She went there the next afternoon just to be sure. She shivered as she stood there examining the lot. Even in the light of day, it felt like a creepy place.
She didn’t recognize the woman in the dream, and she never got a good look at her attacker. All she had to go on was the location. She walked down to the campus security office and tried to explain to the security guard manning the desk that they needed to keep a guard posted at the parking lot by the student center.
“Has something happened?” the guard asked. He barely looked up from the game of computer solitaire he was playing.
“Something will happen,” Caitlin said, but she was pretty sure if she told him she was getting her information from a dream, she would lose any chance she had of convincing the guard to do anything. “It’s not safe over there.”
“Could you be more specific?” the guard asked as he slid digital playing cards around on the screen. “Is there a light out? An uneven sidewalk?”
For all Caitlin knew, there might have been a light out or an uneven sidewalk, though she hadn’t noticed either. Something told her neither of those safety hazards would prompt any kind of immediate action. So she fudged the truth a bit.
“I’ve seen someone over there a few times,” Caitlin said. Technically this was true. It was just that she had only seen this in a dream. “He looked suspicious, just sort of hanging out in the shadows there.”
This was enough to cause the guard to turn away from his computer screen.
“Did he say anything to you? Did he try to follow you?” the guard asked. Caitlin shook her head. “What did he look like?”
Caitlin did her best to describe the shadowy figure she had seen in her dream. It was Culver Creek all over again, but the difference here was she was ahead of the game. Maybe with her report and her frustratingly vague description, they could actually catch this guy before anything happened. She allowed herself to believe this.
She wasn’t so much surprised as she was crushed when the news broke less than a week later. She wanted to blame the campus security guards for not doing more to prevent the senseless tragedy, but deep down she knew she bore the full responsibility for that innocent woman’s murder.
How could she have possibly thought that telling one solitary security guard was going to be enough? She should have gone to the police. What about the dean of students? Even if no one in a position of authority was willing to listen to her, she should have organized some sort of student version of a neighborhood watch. They could have made sure that parking lot was under surveillance. Instead, she had done the bare minimum and foolishly hoped this time everything would turn out different.
Stabbing her arm with a pair of scissors until she bled might not have solved anyone’s problems, but it helped to ease the burden weighing her down. She considered it her penance. Often it was her mother’s voice she heard as she stabbed the scissor blades into her flesh. Luanne’s chipper voice filled her head, reminding her she was like a superhero or telling her she had a gift. That was how Luanne had always seen it—a gift, not a curse.
Once again, though, Caitlin had been given the opportunity to be the superhero, and like always she had failed, squandered her precious gift. Those angry marks on her arm wouldn’t bring the dead girl back to life, but they did in a roundabout sort of way cure Caitlin of her peculiar malady.
If it weren’t for the marks on her arm, an astute professor wouldn’t have referred her to the campus mental health center, and if it weren’t for her therapy sessions, she might never have discovered her miracle drug of choice—Pacifcleon.
“Daddy is a bad man.” Adam’s voice wrenched Caitlin back to the present. She adjusted his shirt, but she wondered if she should try to find one with a higher collar. What would his nursery school teacher think if she saw those marks?
“What did you say?” Caitlin asked absently, his words finally starting to penetrate the tangle of thoughts taking up space in her head.
“Daddy’s a bad man,” Adam repeated.
Was this something from his nightmare? It must be.
“No, he’s not,” Caitlin said. “Remember what we talked about. Dreams aren’t real, right?”
Adam nodded his little head, but she could tell by the look on his face that he wasn’t convinced.
Caitlin had the house to herself and her mother-in-law wasn’t pestering her with phone calls, but she still couldn’t focus on her work. Those marks on Adam’s neck and his talk about his nightmare had rattled her. He was too young to be dealing with this sort of thing. Though, had she ever been old enough to deal with this thing?
She pulled up a new tab and did a Google search for Pacifcleon. It was one of her regular internet distractions. Some people procrastinated by reading social media posts, others played mindless games; she spent her time searching for discontinued sleeping pills. To each his own.
Her search proved fruitless. It didn’t mean that tomorrow or the next day she wouldn’t find someone on some corner of the web selling some expired boxes of her miracle drug, but it seemed like the stuff was getting more and more difficult to track down. Well, of course it was. Pacifcleon hadn’t been manufactured in years. There was no need to panic yet. She had plenty of the stuff in reserve, but it wouldn’t last forever, and now she felt the sudden need to take inventory of her stash. She wasn’t getting any work done anyway.
When she opened the linen closet, she remembered Lance’s bizarre decision to reorganize the bathroom. Lance tended to be a bit of a neat freak, and she couldn’t help but feel that his early morning bathroom cleaning had been some sort of personal attack on her and her sometimes disorganized ways. Still, she had been impressed. He had done a good job organizing things, and she was pleasantly surprised at how much less cluttered the linen closet looked.
Now, though, she realized a drawback to his mad organizing. She couldn’t find things. Maybe she wasn’t especially organized, but at least she knew more or less where everything was. Now, forget it. The only thing she really cared about, the most important item of all, was nowhere to be found.
She tried to get inside Lance’s head. Where would her neat-freak husband have decided to put her stash of sleeping pills? She had never exactly kept them hidden from him, but she always tried to disguise the fact that out of necessity she bought the stuff in bulk. He might have questioned her decision to continue to consume a discontinued, expired drug. Of course, he would have come across the stash in his organizing raid, but where would he have put the pills?
She searched the linen closet quickly, then turned her attention to the vanity drawers and cupboards, but other than her nearly empty current package, she hadn’t found a single Pacifcleon package. What the hell had he done with them?
They had to be in the linen closet somewhere. She must have missed them. She began to methodically go through the contents of the closet shelf by shelf, undoing much of Lance’s organizing in the process despite her best effort to be neat. But as she neared the last shelf, she gave up any attempt at neatness whatsoever and resorted to strewing the contents of the closet every which way in a frantic attempt to locate her missing pills.
Ten minutes later, she was on the phone with the Zooest receptionist, who told her Lance was in a meeting.
“Can you interrupt him?” Caitlin asked. “I need to speak to him. Now.”
The emphatic tone of her voice convinced the receptionist that this was an urgent matter, and less than a minute later Lance was on the phone breathless, asking her what had happened.
“I need to know where you put my Pacifcleon,” Caitlin said, “when you cleaned the bathroom.”
“What?”
“My sleeping pills,” she said.
“What?” Lance repeated. “Sheryl said it was an emergency. Wait, didn’t you take one last night?”
“Not the opened package,” Caitlin explained. “I had a whole bunch more.”
“Why do you need these now? Don’t you have to pick Adam up at school soon?”
Caitlin pulled the phone away from her ear for a moment to check the time. Crap. She had spent more time than she realized ransacking the bathroom. She needed to go pick up Adam. She heard Lance’s tinny voice coming through the speaker and pressed the phone back to her ear.
“Wait, were these the packages that were expired?” Lance asked. “I threw those out.”
“You what!” Caitlin’s voice was so loud it startled her. “What do you mean you threw them away? You didn’t even ask me about it?”
“Caitlin, they were really, really old,” Lance said.
“So! They were still good.”
“Look, can we talk about this later? I’ve got to get back to that meeting.”
She was too angry to reply. She ended the call.
Caitlin felt like a caged animal. Too restless to sit, she paced back and forth in their living room, checking out the window every few seconds for Lance’s car. The air was thick with the smell of dinner cooking, but she barely noticed it. All she could think about was the fact that she had less than a week’s worth of sleeping pills and no idea how she was going to find any more of her miracle drug.
Even if she was able to track some down online—and she didn’t see how, as apart from a quick interlude to pick Adam up at school, all she had spent the remainder of her day doing was searching for Pacifcleon—the likelihood that she could have it shipped to her house in less than a week’s time was slim. Out of desperation, she had ransacked the lone garbage bag in their pail, even though she was sure the garbage had already been collected after Lance’s cleaning spree.
When Lance’s headlights turned into their driveway, she ran to the door, fists clenched at her side as rage-fueled adrenaline made her jittery. It took him an interminable amount of time to leave his car and open the door, but when he did, she was ready. She attacked him with a volley of words that made him take a step backward into the garage.
“What gives you the right to throw away someone else’s possessions? You didn’t even think to ask me first? I was right in the next room!” Spittle flew from her lips as she shouted.
“Just calm down,” he said. “This isn’t the end of the world.” He stood in the doorway. “I’ll go to the store and buy some more, okay?”
“Ha!” was all she said.
“In fact, if you want, I’ll go right now. The car’s still warm.”
“There’s no point,” she said. Her rage had died down to a simmer. Lance’s offer was a perfectly reasonable one. Of course he didn’t know she had long since bought up every package of Pacifcleon in a twenty mile radius. Wasn’t this as much her fault as it was his? She heard Adam’s footfalls on the stairs and saw the way she had her husband pinned in the doorway. What was wrong with her? “Come inside,” she said.
“No, I’ll go get your stuff,” Lance said.
“You can’t buy them at the store,” she said. It was time to come clean, to tell him the whole story of the drug she was so dependent on. “They discon—”
“What’s that smell?” Lance asked.
“What?” she said, confused by the sudden change of topic.
“Mommy, the oven’s on fire!” Adam wailed.
She spun around just in time to hear the glass in the oven door shatter. Lance shoved past her as he ran to place himself between his son and the flaming oven. Lance grabbed the fire extinguisher they kept under the sink and wrestled the pin out before dousing the oven and the remains of their dinner in white foam. Caitlin clutched Adam as she watched the flames extinguish.
She had been too busy searching for expired sleeping pills to cook anything from scratch and resorted to baking a frozen pizza. It was a feta-and-spinach-flavored pie, so she reasoned it was borderline gourmet. She glanced at the clock. When had she put the pizza in to cook? She was drawing a blank. It felt like it wasn’t that long ago, but could she have cooked it so long it caught fire?
Lance examined the wreckage in the smoking oven.
“There’s no pan,” he said. “The cheese must have dripped down and caught fire.”
“There’s a pan,” Caitlin insisted. “I always use a pan.”
“Cait, I’m telling you, I’m looking right at it and there’s no pan.”
She walked over and peered over his shoulder. There was no pan beneath the now mostly black pizza. How had she forgotten a pan? Well, she had been preoccupied.
Everything would be okay. The only casualties were a not very inspired dinner and the oven door. A shiver of fear went through her as she saw the cracked glass in the door. What if the glass had exploded and shot across the room? It could have easily injured Adam or worse. She wouldn’t have been able to live with herself. She needed to pull herself together, and she knew the only way she was going to do that was if she replenished her Pacifcleon supply.