Lance glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Adam in his car seat in the back happily singing a little song to his stuffed kangaroo.
“Just you and me, right, kiddo?” Lance said. “Having a fun boys’ day together.”
“Mmmhmm, Daddy,” Adam said without looking up.
That’s what Lance had told Caitlin, and she seemed to welcome a Saturday all to herself. Things had been tense since the night of the flaming pizza, and Caitlin seemed out of sorts. Maybe she had been under too much stress with work. He envied the fact that she could work from home, but it had to be difficult balancing work with taking care of Adam and the house. She had that big project she was working on for the lottery commission, and probably that more than him throwing out some expired sleeping pills had been at the root of her outburst the other night.
She hadn’t said any more about the sleeping pills, and he hadn’t dared to bring it up, but maybe today while they were out he could stop at a Rite Aid and pick some up. He couldn’t remember the name of the stuff she took, but maybe he would recognize it when he saw it.
Lance had been vague about what he and Adam had planned for the day. So it wasn’t like he was lying to her. He had never specifically said he wasn’t taking Adam all the way out to Culver Creek to see some dream psychic.
“We’ll have a fun boys’ day,” Lance had told her. He liked the idea of he and Adam doing their own thing together. They would have to do this more often. It gave Caitlin a nice break, and it was a good chance for he and Adam to do some male bonding. He would be the father he’d always wished he had.
No one would ever mistake Culver Creek for a posh town, but there was something almost charming about this old town that seemed so far removed from the hustle and bustle of modern life, or maybe that was Lance’s own nostalgia coloring his opinion. He had been under the impression that he had no memories of the town where he spent the first twelve years of his life, but as he drove toward the center of town, he recognized some of the different sights and landmarks. There was the elementary school he had gone to, and the public library where his mom used to take him for story time.
The road went around a bend, and sunlight sparkled like gemstones on running water. It was the eponymous Culver Creek, and just like that, a memory kicked off in his head.
He couldn’t remember how old he was, but he and another boy were standing ankle deep in the running stream. Their feet were bare, and their jeans were rolled up to their knees. The water was icy cold. A few feet away on dry ground stood a third boy with a stopwatch in his hand. It was a challenge to see who could stay in the still-frigid early spring water the longest. A small crowd had gathered on the bank—other boys and girls from the neighborhood. They shouted and laughed as Lance and the other boy fought to keep their numb feet planted in the ice-cold water—Allen, that was the other boy’s name. He lived two doors down from Lance, and they used to ride bikes together all the time.
Allen let out a yelp and splashed toward the shore. Lance was declared the victor, while Allen shouted that a fish bit his toe and it wasn’t fair. Lance wasted no time running toward the shore to pull his dry socks onto his soaked feet. Lance’s memory jumped ahead to later that day, when his mother caught him trying to secretly strip off his wet clothes in the bathroom, but no, that wasn’t right. That must have been a different time, because the clothes he was wearing were different—summer clothes, not spring clothes.
“Turn right, Daddy,” Adam said from the backseat.
Lance snapped back to reality and realized Adam was mimicking the GPS directions that he hadn’t been paying attention to. He missed the turn and had to turn around and backtrack. They were already running a few minutes late, but he suspected a dream whisperer wasn’t the sort of person who would worry too much about punctuality.
The dream whisperer’s office was on the second floor of a tired old building a block off the town’s main drag. The ground floor space was leased to a lawyer, and Lance and Adam had to climb a creaky, dimly lit staircase to reach Phelicity Green’s door.
“Where are we?” Adam asked. “Is this a haunted house?”
“No, of course not,” Lance said. He hadn’t explained this part of the day to Adam, and he knew he had to choose his words wisely. Adam could very well repeat anything he said back to Caitlin. “Daddy just needs to stop in and see someone for work, but after we talk to her, then we can go do something fun. Do you want to do something fun?”
Adam nodded. They reached the top of the stairs. The door was locked, but an index card taped to the wall instructed him to press the doorbell. They waited a few seconds.
“Nobody’s home,” Adam said. “Time to do something fun.”
“Hang on there, bud,” Lance said, and at last he heard someone approaching the door. There were a few more seconds of waiting while it seemed several locks were being undone, and then finally the door swung open and a woman with an unruly mane of hair and a purple tunic top with a long greenish-colored batik skirt stood there staring at him. Lance noticed right away that her feet were completely bare.
“Sorry we’re late,” Lance said.
“Oh, no worries,” she said. “Come in.”
She waved them into a room even more dimly lit than the stairway. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw a tiny room cluttered with shelves filled with assorted rocks and crystals and various figurines.
“You must be Adam,” the woman said, leaning down to talk to Adam at eye level.
“Yes,” Adam said. “Do you work with Daddy?”
Lance regretted his little white lie.
“Heh-heh, no, sport, I didn’t mean to confuse you like this. I don’t work with this nice lady.” Then to Phelicity he added, “Sorry.”
She gave him a slight nod, but he noticed the way she was studying him. Was she trying to determine what sort of parent would confuse his child with dumb lies?
“There’s a mat here where you can leave your shoes,” she said to them. It was said in an offhanded way, but he understood it was meant as an instruction. So he slipped off his own shoes before bending down to remove Adam’s as he wondered what kind of new-age nutjob factory this place was.
At Phelicity’s instruction, they sat on a rug on the floor because clearly this woman wasn’t using her dream whisperer income to buy furniture. Lance regretted his decision to come here. This was not his sort of thing—crystals and the cultural appropriation of Eastern philosophy. As Phelicity launched into some mumbo jumbo about dreams being a portal to another realm, which was all going way over Adam’s head, Lance realized that this quackery was never going to be able to do anything for Adam and his nightmares.
Would it be rude to leave now? He could pretend to get an important text on his phone. It was another lie, and another tale Adam could tell Caitlin. So in the end, he struggled to arrange his legs comfortably on the mat as he breathed patchouli-scented air and listened to Adam dutifully tell the dream whisperer about his nightmares.
Lance had heard Adam talk about his dreams before, but it was like he was hearing the words for the first time. Maybe it was something about all the crystal energy in this room, or more likely it had to do with being in Culver Creek, dredging up memories that had lain dormant for so long, but as Adam described a girl in a river who was hurt by a bad man, Lance was struck by how much the story resembled the one that had been on everyone’s mind that last, awful summer he spent in Culver Creek. That year, a little girl who lived down the road from him was senselessly murdered, and it filled the entire community with fear.
As Adam described an attack on a young girl in frightening, graphic detail, Lance wondered where the boy could have come up with such ugliness. Was Caitlin allowing him to watch inappropriate television shows? No way was he picking up the stuff he was describing from Thomas or any of the other cartoon shows he watched. Lance noticed the serene expression on Phelicity’s face had slowly morphed into one of horror, and the color seemed to have drained from her skin.
“Okay, Adam,” Lance said with a touch of a chuckle to defuse the dark mood in the room. “That’s probably enough for now. I think we all get the picture.” He tried his best to offer the woman a friendly smile, but she still looked horror-stricken. She was probably assuming he was the one letting his kid watch violent television; that or she had decided Adam was some sort of psychopath.
“Adam, maybe you can tell me some more about this bad man in your dream,” Phelicity said. She acted calm, but Lance heard the tremble in her voice.
Adam looked over at Lance as if to ask his permission before speaking more about the dream, and Lance decided this was his cue. From his cramped position on the floor, he wrestled his phone out of his pocket and pretended to read a message on the screen before slipping it back into his pocket.
“I’m sorry,” Lance said as he began to rise from the ground. “Something’s come up, and we’re going to have get going.”
“But you can’t go,” Phelicity said. “I haven’t had a chance to—”
“Sorry,” Lance said. “I’ll still pay you for the full session.”
Over the phone she had quoted him $100 for the initial session, and he had been smart enough to bring cash, no questionable credit card charges for Caitlin to quiz him about. He peeled the bills from his money clip and handed them to her as he led Adam to his feet.
“But—” Phelicity said, flustered.
“Is it time to do something fun?” Adam asked.
“Well past time,” Lance said.
“What?” Adam asked.
“Yes,” Lance said. “Come on, let’s get your shoes on.”
As he fought to get shoes back on his son’s feet before putting his own on, he regretted ever taking them off in the first place. It was difficult to leave quickly when one had to first put on footwear.
The memory hit Lance as soon as he stepped into the ice cream parlor. He had been here before with his mother. He remembered the pastel-colored walls and the swivel seats and that sickly sweet smell in the air. It was strange to him how so many things were coming back to him as he traveled around Culver Creek—stuff he hadn’t thought of in years.
After they left the dream whisperer’s, he took Adam to play a round of miniature golf, and as they teed off at the first hole, he remembered going to the mini golf place for a classmate’s birthday party. The familiar obstacles and the video game noises that emanated from the arcade dredged up memories he thought had been lost forever. And now here at the ice cream parlor, he felt a dizzying sensation as his childhood memories merged with the present day.
“Daddy, I want ’nilla,” Adam said.
“But they’ve got so many different flavors to pick from. Why don’t you try something new? Look, they’ve got banana. You like bananas.”
“’Nilla,” Adam insisted.
Lance sighed but capitulated, ordering a vanilla cone for Adam and a cone with a scoop of peach and a scoop of mango for himself. They sat down at a table by the window, and Adam was as taken with the spinning chairs as Lance had been as a boy.
“Less spinning, more licking,” Lance said. “It’s all going to melt if you don’t eat it quicker.” He watched in dismay as streaks of white ice cream dribbled down Adam’s face and began to form a vanilla-flavored lake on the table. Caitlin always ordered Adam cups of ice cream instead of cones, and Lance now saw why.
So he had made a few mistakes on this father-and-son day together. Ordering a cone instead of a cup was the least of it. Certainly the whole dream whisperer thing had been a colossal mistake. He saw the look of abject horror on Phelicity’s face as Adam described in way-too-graphic detail his horrible nightmare.
“Hey, bud,” Lance said, “we can’t be telling everyone all about our dreams, okay? You know the way your bad dreams frighten you?”
Adam nodded. There was ice cream smeared all around his mouth and streaks of it on his shirt.
“Well, when you tell all the scary parts to other people, that scares them too.”
“Dreams aren’t real,” Adam said before slurping some more soupy ice cream from his cone. Lance estimated maybe twenty percent of it actually ended up in his mouth.
“Right, exactly,” Lance said. “So there’s no need to tell people all about them, right?” Lance grabbed a wad of napkins from the dispenser on the table and began to spread them on top of the vanilla puddle. “Besides, it doesn’t really make for good conversation. People don’t want to hear about other people’s dreams. It’s about as exciting as describing watching paint dry.”
“I like painting,” Adam said.
“Sure, painting’s fun, but watching it dry is boring, and talking about watching it dry is even more boring. See what I’m saying?”
“Are we going to do painting next?” Adam asked.
“Next we’re going to find a bathroom and get you cleaned up,” Lance said. “Then we’re going to head back home, because I bet you Mommy misses you.”