Caitlin awoke to dim early morning light. Though it had been a month since she had last taken a Pacifcleon she still marveled at how amazing and restful she felt after a good night’s sleep. She couldn’t believe she had been missing out on that feeling all these years.
She looked over at the empty space beside her. The other thing she was still working on getting used to was the fact that Lance was dead. How many times a day did she pick up her phone to give him a quick call or shoot him a text before she remembered he was gone? Someday, Raquel had assured her, her pain and grief would become tolerable, but it would take a while. She might have bristled at her mother-in-law’s advice, but then she remembered Raquel had been about her age when she lost her first husband suddenly.
They had a few heart-to-hearts—Raquel and Caitlin—in the long days following Lance’s death. Raquel told her about the sleepwalking episodes that Lance had suffered from since he was a boy.
“He couldn’t help it,” Raquel assured her. “If anyone disturbed him while he was in the throes of an episode, he became violent. I was so frightened when he announced that you were getting married. I feared something awful would happen.”
“But I never posed a risk of waking him,” Caitlin said, “because of the pills I took. I slept like a rock.”
“Maybe if I had put him on some sort of medication,” Raquel mused. “I should have taken him to a doctor right away.”
“They probably wouldn’t have been able to do anything,” Caitlin said. She didn’t know if this was true, but she felt the need to reassure her distressed mother-in-law.
“Instead I tried to hide it, and made him ashamed of it,” Raquel said. “He must have thought I was ashamed of him.”
That he had been asleep when he killed that little girl made it easier for Caitlin to bear. Since realizing the truth about her husband, she had struggled to reconcile the sweet, caring man she knew with the monster she had seen in her dream. How could Lance have done such a thing? But though it had been Lance’s twelve-year-old body that had carried out the horrible act, something beyond his control had been at work. She of all people could understand the helplessness of a sleeping disorder.
To think that for all these years both of them had been suffering and hiding their shameful secrets. It made her want to travel back in time, to hold her husband and tell him that it was all right, that he didn’t have to be ashamed. She wanted to confess to him about the dreams she had banished from her life and regretted so much never sharing this with him when he was alive. Maybe if they had both been a little braver, they could have helped each other.
Now she had to be brave for Adam. She heard him stir in his bedroom, and then a minute or so later, she heard his feet pad down the hall to her room. He peeked his head in the open doorway, and when he saw she was awake, he bounded into the room and jumped up on the bed.
“Mommy, I had a dream!” he declared.
She felt herself stiffen. She had resolved, when Adam was a little older, to tell him all about the psychic dreams she had experienced when she was a kid. She didn’t want him to ever feel like his dreams were something abnormal or something to be ashamed of.
“What was your dream about?” she asked cautiously.
“I could fly,” he announced. “And I had a flying dog, who was purple with green ears, and there were balloons in the air that tasted like gummy bears.”
She smiled at his description of the perfectly harmless dream. Since she had started having dreams again, she found them to be pleasant nonsense. She had forgotten what strange things dreams could be.
“It sounds like a good dream,” she said. “Where did you fly to?”
“I don’t remember,” he said. “Can we have gummy bears for breakfast?”
“How about some pancakes instead?”
He gave her a little-boy sigh and said, “Okay.”
She tousled his hair and looked over the top of her head to give her husband a smile before she remembered Lance wasn’t there. Instead, she glanced up toward the ceiling and silently blew a kiss heavenward.