Lost in Dreams (8 page)

“I thought you’d fallen asleep.”

“I was actually thinking for a change.”

“That sounds dangerous.”

Although his teasing made me feel loved, no amount of playfulness could hide his concerns. That’s why he’d insisted

on taking me to our family doctor, Dr. Holly.

But I didn’t want to think about that now.

“Daddy, I’m glad you asked Aleesha to stay.”

“And I’m glad you’re glad.” He smiled. “I was afraid you’d be disappointed about having someone else do the things you want to do for me.”

Disappointed? You’ve turned into quite a diplomat, too. You know the right word is j
ealous.

“Baby girl”—my eyes popped open at hearing him call me by a pet name, probably for the first time ever—”we need to find out what’s wrong with you and get you well again.”

“I told you I probably just picked up some kind of bug in Mexico.” I wasn’t trying to argue, but I didn’t want to admit how worried I was.

“Dr. Holly doesn’t think so, Kim. You took shots for everything before going to Santa María, and she’s tested you for every disease Mexican tourists come home with. Most of the tests are back—all negative. She doesn’t expect the rest to be any different.”

I sighed. I could have told him that, but I didn’t want to believe it.

“You ate packaged foods and drank bottled water. No chance for contagion there. Were any of the villagers sick while you were there?”

I sighed again. He knew the answer without my having to tell him again. We’d had this discussion before. Several times. But I loved him for exerting so much effort to find a solution.

“No.” I didn’t have the strength or the heart to argue. I knew what was coming next, and the thought of it brought bile into my throat. When it went down again this time, I barely noticed the bitter aftertaste.

“Dr. Holly wants you to have more tests. She’ll probably refer you to some specialists, too.”

I groaned. Not because the tests might hurt or be unpleasant, but because I grew hopelessly tired and weak whenever I had to walk farther than the distance from my room to the bathroom. The last time I’d gone anywhere with Dad and Aleesha, they had to lug me home between them just to get me inside. They probably looked like they were carting home a prodigal drunk.

Dad listed some of the tests Dr. Holly had ordered. Most of the names were meaningless to me. But one tickled a few hairs of curiosity.

“Sleep apnea?”

“Yes. Or some other sleep problem. Dr. Holly wonders if sleeping the way you did in Mexico has somehow affected your ability to get the rest you need from your sleep now.”

“Huh? How do they test for that?”

“You go to sleep.”

Hmm. I might be able to handle that one.

J
o was sitting on the front porch when Aleesha, Dad, and I got home from Dr. Holly’s office. After several months of nonstop lifelessness, I’d just received the final diagnosis—four separate diagnoses along with Dr. Holly’s, that was—and I wasn’t the least satisfied. Neither were Dad and Aleesha. We learned that the only thing our family doctor and four renowned specialists could agree on was that none of them knew what was causing my fatigue.

One of them had removed my cast, though. My right arm—weak as it was from disuse—might have been the only normal part of me. Or at least the healthiest part.

At least they’d ruled out leukemia and every other life-threatening disease under the sun. They saw eye to eye on the symptoms, but not the cause.

At first, a specialist in teen medicine thought it was mono, but Dr. Holly had already ruled that out. Then the specialist considered fibromyalgia, but I wasn’t suffering muscle aches. So he concluded my problem was anxiety and depression and prescribed adult-strength medication.

Another specialist suggested chronic fatigue syndrome, but he couldn’t be sure until my condition remained unchanged for six months. If that was the problem, it might last the rest of my life. Not what any normally active girl of almost nineteen wants to hear.

The sleep study had been soundly conclusive. That was, I slept soundly through the night with electrodes stuck to various parts of my body while a technician monitored

everything from heart rate to body twitches to eyelid movement on a computer in another room.

In the morning when they woke me up—with great difficulty—I talked with both the technician and the doctor. Not a sign of sleep apnea. In fact, neither one of them had ever seen anyone sleep more soundly. According to the computer, I should have felt wonderful. But I didn’t.

Good thing I didn’t have a recurrence of my nightmare that night.

The fourth and final specialist said what I’d half-expected all of them to say. “It’s in your head. Go see a psychologist or maybe even a psychiatrist.” He probably thought me crazier still for requesting a referral to a Christian, but he did it.

And Dr. Holly admitted she was still as baffled as she’d been when we started. Probably more so.

Dad and I had planned to talk about the referral to the psychiatrist or psychologist—I never could remember which was which—when we got home, but the discussion would have to wait until Jo left. Dad went inside, leaving Aleesha and me to deal with Jo. The autumn temperature was brisk, but refreshing. Jo’s unexpected visit would probably be brisk, too—she never stayed long—but I had little hope that it would prove refreshing.

“Hey, guys!” she said with a smile. She looked me up and down. “You look like you’ve lost your best friend.” She laughed.

You’re referring to yourself, Jo. Or don’t you know that? You’ve known about my fatigue problem all along, but you haven’t shown any concern about it. You may not want to believe this problem is real, but I guarantee you I didn’t dream it up to get attention. If this is the best you can do as a best friend …

Why expect this visit to be any different from the two or three she’d made since fatigue took over my life and squashed

the daylights out of almost everything that made my life enjoyable? Too exhausted to keep making excuses for her, I would have been just as happy if she’d stayed home. She’d perfected the art of doing that.

I remembered too well how her parents—mostly her mama—made her cancel the mission trip at almost the last minute because they were afraid of Mexican drug wars, even though they were nowhere close to Santa María … or to Ciudad de Plata, our original target city. I couldn’t blame Jo for that.

But I couldn’t believe Jo’s mama kept her from visiting me. If she’d thought I was contagious, she wouldn’t have let Jo come at all. And no matter what, she wouldn’t have forbidden Jo from calling, texting, or Tweeting me.

So I accepted Aleesha’s assessment. Only her ongoing presence in our household explained Jo’s ongoing absence. If she allowed prejudice to keep her from supporting an old friend and accepting a new one, that was unfortunate, but I was powerless to change her heart.

Only God could do that, and He wouldn’t do it unless she was willing.

Aleesha had been using my car while I was incapacitated, and I’d begun wondering if Jo checked for its absence before coming over. None of her previous visits had included Aleesha.

Frankly, I hoped Aleesha’s presence would drive Jo away this time, too. I had too much on my mind, and her visits hadn’t been very uplifting, anyhow. As strange as it might sound, she made me think about some of the things I’d heard divorced women say about their ex-spouses. Things like
“I grew up, but he didn’t”
or
“We grew apart”
or
“We just didn’t have anything in common anymore. “

I couldn’t accuse Jo of failing to grow up any more than I could claim to be completely mature. I wouldn’t achieve that goal until my next birthday.

We had grown apart, though. Maybe because we didn’t have Santa María in common when we should have. We’d done everything together in planning for it. Everything from filling out applications to getting shots to buying those dual-language Bibles that turned out to be Spanish-only.

But when Michelle Snelling made Jo drop out, that left me on my own. Not having my favorite little guardian angel nearby to protect me from myself had seemed disastrous at first, but it turned out to be a good thing. Jo’s absence helped me to integrate into the team better than I would have if she’d been there, and I learned to rely more fully on God.

When I told Jo about my experiences on the trip, she reacted the way I’d expected. Half-fascinated, half-envious. My reaction to the project change made her laugh, but she could barely believe the part about my reading to the villagers in perfect Spanish.

Although she’d expressed some pleasure about Rosa’s conversion, she didn’t act thrilled about it. Maybe I’d been wrong to expect her to care deeply about someone she should have gotten to meet, but didn’t.

On one of Jo’s visits, I was about to ask her to run home and get her Spanish Bible so I could give her a sample of my pronunciation skills.

But Aleesha got home first. “Hey, girl,” I said. “How was—?”

“Whoops!” Jo said as if she didn’t care about interrupting me. “I need to go home.”

What had happened to the old Jo? What besides us growing apart, that was? I could live without any more visits like those, and today’s wasn’t likely to be any better despite her cheery greeting.

Cheery? Perhaps
stupid
would be a more fitting description of joking about losing a best friend. Then again, maybe she didn’t realize how she’d sounded. Oh, great, here I was making excuses for her again.

Yet she did sound different this time.

Jo stood up. “Kim, you look exhausted.” She guided me to the rocking chair she’d just gotten up from. “What did you find out from the doctor today?”

She sounded deeply concerned. Like the Jo I used to know and love. If she kept this up, I might yet enjoy her friendship again, but I wasn’t going to make any quick and easy assumptions about that happening.

“Four doctors—”

“Five,” Aleesha said, keeping an eye on Jo as if watching a mosquito that was hovering too close. “Don’t forget Dr. Holly.”

“My family doctor, four specialists, and a ton of tests have determined that I’m not dying.”

“Praise the Lord!” Her sigh of relief was almost as loud as the sound of cars going by. Her mouth curled into a cautious smile.

“That’s the
good
news,” I said with a weary grin. The visit to Dr. Holly’s office had worn me out. Then I snorted at the thought of that. I
lived
worn out.

Jo’s eyes narrowed and her mouth twisted in concern. Yes, maybe the old Jo had returned. “The bad …?” she mouthed.

“The
bad
news is they don’t agree about anything. One thinks I’m depressed and prescribed some potent medication. Another thinks I may have chronic fatigue syndrome, but he won’t be sure for another six months. The third one says it’s not sleep apnea, and the fourth has referred me to a fifth specialist—a Christian psychiatrist.”

Or was he a psychologist?

“And what do
you
think it is, Kim?” Hmmm. Not even Aleesha had asked me that.

Did I dare to admit to my two best friends that I
knew
what it was?

God was using my guilt to punish me for killing my mother.

A
lthough I’d told Aleesha about my guilt feelings months earlier, I hadn’t talked with her about them since. If she suspected that I was not only harboring, but nurturing those negative feelings, she didn’t say anything.

So I dodged the issue in responding to Jo’s question. “Your guess is as good as mine. I’ll take the antidepressant, and maybe I’ll go see the psychologist, too.”

“Psychiatrist,” Aleesha said. Why couldn’t I keep those two straight?

Jo bent over and hugged me. Old times were back. That’s what I wanted to believe, anyhow.

“Alice, uh, I’m sorry. Aleesha, how are you doing? I didn’t mean to ignore you. I understand you’ve become indispensable around here. Like a member of the family.”

I couldn’t deny that Jo’s words were amazingly friendly. Accepting. Approving. And highly unprejudiced.

But I still had a slight suspicion that—regardless of her choice of words—she preferred thinking of Aleesha as a servant and not a family member.

“Only until Kim is up to taking over. I’ll teach her all of my housekeeping tricks, and then Mr. Scott will be so pleased he won’t even notice it’s not me anymore.”

“Not unless he looks at the person doing the work,” Jo said.

Strange comment. I decided to try something. “He still won’t be able to tell. He’s color-blind, you know.”

Ahhh … Jo wasn’t able to squelch a major frown. Hitting below the belt might not have been fair, but I found out what

I wanted to know.

So Aleesha had been right about Jo all along, and the restoration of a good relationship between Jo and me wasn’t apt to bring her any closer to a friendship with Aleesha. I wondered why she’d bothered pretending to be nice to Aleesha. Probably to gain my approval.

And it had almost worked.

During those rare times I could focus enough to pray, I asked God to convict Jo of her prejudice—or could it just have been a strong dislike?—and to make ours a genuine, three-way friendship.