Lost in Dreams (6 page)

“Fair enough. And, Kim …”

“Yes, Dad?”

“What Aleesha said about you in Mexico sounds amazing. I want to hear every detail.”

My word, Dad. Not only do you still hear fine, but your listening skills are a trillion times better, too
.

The three of us talked about the mission trip for hours. He and Aleesha were still talking when I went to bed. I couldn’t stay awake any longer.

If I’d known what my night was going to be like, though, I would’ve forced myself to stay awake.

D
awn, Kim … time to get up. That rubbish isn’t going away by itself.”

I rolled over toward the voice. Was I back in Santa María? No, wait. The rubbish cleanup was over. And so was the reading of
Lucas
.

I yawned a couple of extra times between normal yawns, but I couldn’t open my eyes quite as wide as I’d been opening my mouth. I couldn’t have felt more worn out if I’d just completed a day of rubbish cleanup in Santa María.

Aleesha knew me too well. She waved a mug of coffee under my nose. Mmm. That opened my eyes. Then I sat up so she could hand it to me.

“Thanks.” I cradled the mug in my hands and passed its steaming scent beneath my nostrils once more. Real coffee like this would taste a lot nicer than the coffee candy she’d shared with me my first morning in the village. It would have more caffeine, too.

Another yawn escaped before I could take a sip. “What time did you go to bed, Aleesha?”

“Haven’t been there. Didn’t have time.” She made a clucking noise with her mouth that sounded remarkably like a horse’s clop. I had no idea what that was supposed to signify.

My clock read 8:37. That must’ve been a.m. I hadn’t gone to bed until 10:15 the night before and felt too dragged out to have slept around the clock.

Thanks for not really waking me up at dawn the way you always did in Santa María
.

“You haven’t been to—?”

“It’s all Mr. Scott’s fault. Your dad’s a great talker.”

My dad? Aleesha, you’re a big talker. Yes, maybe even a “great” one. But Dad? Dad the professional introvert? Maybe you’re right, though. He’s been coming out of his shell a bit this week, and he shocked the daylights out of me last night by being such an interested listener
.

He asked question after question about my adventures in Santa María, and each answer seemed to inspire two new questions. This new him seemed to have improved both his talking and his listening skills.

What could have caused a change like that? Surely not Mom’s death.

“Don’t look so shocked, girl. You just need to know how to wind him up and start him ticking. That part is easy for me. Stopping him is something else. We talked all night, until”—she glanced at her watch—”approximately 8:35, to be precise.”

Approximately … precise?
I refused to let myself giggle.

I wanted to make a smart-aleck comment about who couldn’t stop whom, but she barely stopped talking long enough for me to open my mouth.

“Don’t tell him I said anything”—she lowered her voice almost to a whisper—”but we spent a lot of time talking about his feelings. Don’t let that cheery exterior fool you. He’s hurting plenty, too.”

I closed my eyes for a moment.

“Why did he share his feelings with you?” I hoped I didn’t sound jealous, but I couldn’t take back my question then. “Instead of with his own daughter, I mean?”

“Because he knows you’re hurting, and he doesn’t want to make you feel worse.”

“Worse?” I must have spoken louder than I realized, because Aleesha shushed me before I continued. “We’ve been

supporting one another. We should bear one another’s burdens. Like a Christian, uh, father and daughter.”

“That’s exactly what I told him. But Mr. Scott said you weren’t up to dealing with his problems. He explained that you’d overreacted to the plight of the migrants when you worked at the House of Bread. According to him—and he admits he’s no psychologist—you almost had a nervous breakdown over things you had no control over.”

“I …” I sighed. “I can’t pretend that’s not true. I was concerned about complete strangers then, but this is something in my own family.”

“Uh-huh. And don’t you know that proves his point, girl? If you got that upset about strangers’ troubles, how would you react to your dad’s?”

“I … know better than to react that way again. Don’t you think my experiences in Santa María strengthened me both spiritually and emotionally?” She didn’t say anything at first. “Please, Aleesha.” I pled with my eyes as well as my voice. “What’s going on with Dad?”

“Girl, I have mixed feelings about telling you this, but Mr. Scott didn’t ask me not to. I can’t stay here forever, and he needs your help as much as you need his.”

I hugged her.

“Here goes. He has this crazy idea that Miss Terri’s death is his fault.”

“What? That’s—”

I didn’t realize I’d gotten too loud again until Aleesha put her hand over my mouth. For all the sense that bit of information made, Aleesha might as well have told me the sky was falling.

“He should’ve postponed his meeting with Dr. what’s-his-face and driven with Miss Terri to Atlanta to pick you up.”

“Why? What difference would—?”

“He would have been in the driver’s seat. So the accident

wouldn’t have happened.”

“That’s crazy, Aleesha. What makes him so sure of that?”

“Crazy or not, he’s convinced it’s true. Reason or no reason. That’s not something you can talk a man out of believing once he’s got it in his head.”

How can Dad be responsible when
I’m
the guilty party?

“There’s something about this I still don’t get,” I said. Aleesha aimed a puzzled look at me.

I shrugged. What good would it do to confess my crime to her—to explain that Dad couldn’t be guilty because I was?

Aleesha caught on that I wasn’t going to explain. “It was so sad.” She paused to wipe her eyes. “You know what Mr. Scott kept saying over and over?”

Unsure whether I wanted to know, I barely shook my head. A twister like the one that destroyed Santa María had gotten loose in my brain, and it wasn’t leaving any of my thoughts and feelings intact.

“He said, ‘If I’d been driving, Terri could have answered her cell phone safely. Then none of this would have happened.’”

No, Dad. It wasn’t you. It was me. If I hadn’t phoned Mom … if I hadn’t left voice mail, she’d still be alive. It’s my fault, not yours. And you’ll hate me for it if you find out. I can’t let that happen
.

“Uh.” That involuntary grunt made its way to the surface from deep within me.

“Girl! What’s wrong?”

“I …” Did I dare to reveal the truth? I could barely hear myself thinking over the pounding of my heart. I needed to tell someone, but … no, I couldn’t. “It … it’s nothing.”

I looked away. Aleesha knew my statement couldn’t have been further from the truth. Even unsubtle Jo would have caught on. I hoped Aleesha would lay off now instead of pushing for the truth.

She changed the subject.
Thank you, Lord
. “You must have been dreaming something awful last night.”

I nodded slightly and closed my eyes tight for several seconds. But I couldn’t shut out the memory of what had kept me awake almost all night.

“I could hear you all the way downstairs,” she said. “Sounded like you were thrashing around, maybe wrestling with the devil. I didn’t think you were winning. I came upstairs to make sure you were okay. Bedcovers were everywhere but over you, and you were, well, you were lying in a pool of sweat.”

I’ve never believed a person can be held accountable for her dreams. The dreamer has no control over plot, theme, or characters. She can’t specify the setting or influence the dialogue. Neither can she determine whether dreams are good, bad, or indifferent.

Most dreams are neutral, I suppose, and we forget them almost as soon as we wake up. If we remember them that long. Even the most vivid dreams—good or bad—don’t remain with us long.

But last night’s dream had been different. The nightmare was so vivid that just thinking about it now made me start trembling and sweating all over again. I hoped Aleesha wouldn’t notice.

Attacking me with relentless fury not long after I went to bed, this nightmare terrified me so completely I fought to stay awake for fear I might dream it all over or—worse still—have it continue from where it had left off. The sleep that finally took control of my body did nothing to erase my fears, and I felt wiped out now.

Aleesha and I could discuss anything—no holds barred—but I wasn’t sure I wanted to share the details with her. Not if it required me to relive what I feared I’d never forget.

Aleesha could almost read my mind, though … or my body language. Far too accurately.

“Girl”—her tone was somewhere between compassionate and frustrated—”if a problem bothers you so much you can’t talk about it with your best friend—or even your second-best friend—that’s a sign you really need to discuss it with somebody.”

Aleesha’s father was a psychiatrist or psychologist at a Christian counseling center in inner-city Baltimore. No wonder she was so good at reading people and knowing just what to say. She’d probably learned how to do that from her father, even though she’d once claimed that her psychobabbological savvy wasn’t as good as her medical knowledge, which—though iffy—was better than mine.

If father and daughter were as much alike as I suspected, they probably practiced on each other. In spite of the seriousness of my quandary, that thought nearly made me smile.

“Do you want the door closed?”

I nodded.

“You know that dream I had on the bus last week when we were leaving Santa María?” “The one about heaven?”

“You remember how joyful and encouraging it was?”

“It gave you hope for the villagers’ salvation and made you decide to major in Spanish. Nothing special about it that I can recall.” White teeth gleamed from ear to ear, and I shook my head at her playful, understated commentary.

I welcomed that brief moment of levity.

“If that dream was a ten-plus on the scale of worthy and wonderful dreams, last night’s dream was a minus one-million. It was horrible. I’ll never forget it.”

Aleesha sat down on the bed and took my hand. “What I said a minute ago … don’t tell me if you don’t feel up to it.” Her

sensitivity was a welcome relief.

“Thanks, but you were right. I
do
need to talk about it.” Aleesha nodded almost imperceptibly. “When I heard that Mom had her phone in her hand at the time of the accident, I was like, ‘Mom, you didn’t lose control of the car because you were trying to answer one of my impatient calls, did you? Or because you were listening to my voice mail?’”

Aleesha’s lips parted slightly. Her eyes focused on mine. She was listening with head, heart, and spirit.

“I can’t be sure about that, of course, but the possibility that it’s true has been tearing me up.”

Aleesha looked like she wanted to say something, but she didn’t interrupt.

“I was doing a fair job of not dwelling on it until that dumb cop talked to us just before the funeral. He said the cell phone records showed she’d been connected to voice mail at the time of the crash.”

Aleesha looked as if a clichéd feather would have knocked her over.

“The guilt has gotten a million times worse since then. I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. To somebody else, this might sound as crazy as Dad feeling responsible. It’s not crazy to me, though, and I can’t rationalize my way out of feeling guilty.”

“And that’s what your nightmare was about?” She spoke in a softer tone of voice than usual.

I nodded.

“In the dream, I was waiting for Mom at the airport, but it was San Diego International part of the time and Dallas/Fort Worth the rest. Never Atlanta. I called her every thirty minutes and left voice mail each time until I filled up her voice mailbox. I was nasty and impatient. ‘Where are you? Hurry up. I’m sick of waiting.’

“Two days passed, and I hadn’t heard from her once. I was still at one of the two airports, living off pizza, killing time by finger painting on my sweatshirt with pizza sauce, and dozing while I lay across the laps of four sleeping passengers who were also waiting for someone to pick them up.

“Then this big bruiser of a policeman—he bore an uncanny resemblance to Millie Q—waltzed up to me with his handcuffs open. ‘Kim Hartlinger,’ he said, ‘you’re under arrest for the murder of your mother.’”

Aleesha grunted. Tears glistened. Telling her the nightmare was tough on me, but hearing it was obviously tearing her up, too.

“‘My mother’s not dead,’ I told him, jerking my hand away before he could cuff me. ‘She’s on her way to pick me up. She has to drive across the whole country, you know. She’ll be here any minute now.’

“‘Have you checked your voice mail recently?’ he asked. I pulled out my cell phone and punched a few buttons. ‘I have one message.’ ‘Listen to it,’ he said. I did.”

I couldn’t continue. Aleesha blotted my face with a tissue and then slipped wordlessly into the bathroom. She returned with a wet washcloth and proceeded to wipe my face. That helped. But only physically.

“You don’t have to tell me the rest,” she said. “It must be horrible.”

“I need to finish, Aleesha,” I said in a more insistent tone of voice than I normally use. “The voice message was actually a recording of the accident. The sounds of skidding. Landing. Crashing into the tree. Glass breaking.” I hesitated and then lowered my voice. “Mom’s groan at the instant of her death.

“Then the policeman said, ‘If you hadn’t phoned her, she’d still be alive. We’re only going to charge you with involuntary manslaughter, though. We know you didn’t mean to kill her, but

that doesn’t change the fact she’s dead now. Shame on you!’”

Aleesha and I were both blubbering by then. There’s no better word to describe it. We must have made more noise than we realized, though, because Dad came bounding up the stairs—sounding like he took two or three at a time. He knocked and then opened the door without waiting for a response.