The Last Day of Emily Lindsey Read online

  I knew it was a fluke—gaps like that had happened in the past, but the dreams always came back. Nell and Mike didn’t know that, though. I heard them talking about it in hushed, excited tones that Saturday morning.

  “They’re getting better,” Nell said, and I stood just outside of the kitchen door, straining forward to hear them. “He hasn’t woken up all week.”

  “That’s right,” Mike said as he crunched through some cereal. “’Bout time the poor boy got to enjoy the feeling of a good night’s sleep.”

  “I bet this is a real turning point,” Nell said. “In fact, I know it is. I can feel it.”

  As I scurried back to my room, I felt the panic rising in me. I so wanted to prove her right—I had to. I’d only been with Nell and Mike for a short time, but already, I knew it was different. It wasn’t just how they handled the dreams. They laughed at my jokes and asked me what I felt like doing on the weekends. Mike watched Fat Albert with me, and Nell packed surprises in my lunch. Nell and Mike didn’t just love me like parents should; they liked me, and that made all the difference in the world. It didn’t matter that we didn’t look like any family I’d ever seen—Nell slim, five foot one, and African American; Mike massive and Irish by way of Charlotte, North Carolina; and me, a scrawny kid with pale skin, dark hair, and dark eyes who quite obviously hadn’t been borne from either of their loins. We were a family, and I wasn’t going to let the dreams come and mess that up.

  So I got good at hiding them. Really, really good.

  As soon as I opened my eyes, I’d roll over and bury my face in my pillow and scream silently until the fear subsided. I’d lie there, my face tucked into the fabric that was wet from sweat, tears, and spit, and I would just cry until the images went away. It hurt more than just screaming out loud, but it was worth it. It wasn’t a perfect plan by any means—I’d slip and let the screams escape every other week or so—but Nell and Mike thought I was getting better, and that was all that mattered.

  Nell asked me about them occasionally. “You haven’t had the dreams as much anymore,” she’d say. “Only a couple of times a month. That’s great.”

  “Yeah, it is,” I’d say and then quickly change the subject, because I hated lying to her.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t trust them or that I didn’t believe they wanted to treat me like their own child. But the fact was, I wasn’t, and previous experience had taught me that there was only so much they’d put up with. My last foster mother, Belinda, would hover near my bedroom door until the screams subsided, as if she were afraid to get too close to me.

  “Are you all right?” she’d ask, one hand on the doorknob, one foot still in the hallway.

  “Yes, sorry,” I’d say, and then she’d be gone. That lasted eighteen months.

  Before that, it was Billy and Brie, a nice enough couple who “tried to make it work but had to do what was best for everyone involved,” or something like that. And before that, well, it’s mostly a blur—just visits from Rose at the sterile but nice enough group home.

  Nell and Mike were different.

  I had to make it work.

  Nell tried a few times to get me to tell her what the dreams were about.

  “Oh, they’re all different,” I lied, certain that it couldn’t be a good thing that I dreamed about the same dusty prison and the same dead body so often.

  Then, right before high school, things got a lot harder.

  I was thirteen the first time that the nightmares—or visions, rather—happened during the day. I’d be in the middle of a conversation with someone, or just at home watching TV, when suddenly, I’d start to see flashes of distorted objects or people. The visions were rarely about the prison, but I always experienced the same dry mouth and racing heartbeat that I felt in the dreams.

  I was at school taking a test the first time it happened. Suddenly, all of the numbers on the paper jumbled together and sat in the middle of the page in a big, curvy heap. I remember staring at the paper for a few moments, sure I’d fallen asleep or that it would go away in a second. When it didn’t, I started to panic, and I stood up from my desk, my pencil still in my hand.

  “Steven, what’s wrong?” my teacher asked.

  I pointed at the paper, unable to form words.

  Nell had to leave work early to pick me up that day, but she didn’t seem annoyed, just concerned about whether I was okay.

  “Just a stomachache,” I lied as we rode home in the car. “I thought it was going to go away, but it didn’t.”

  “We’ll get you home so you can lie down,” she said, reaching over and touching my hair.

  Later that afternoon, I heard her on the phone with her boss at the clinic, arguing about when she could make up her hours. I made up my mind that day that I would figure out a way to hide the visions, just like I’d done with the nightmares.

  It didn’t matter what it took. I wasn’t going to give them any reason to send me back.

  • • •

  The worst of the dreams happened later that year, when my uncle Baxter was visiting us from Canada. At twenty-nine, Bax was Mike’s youngest brother and a real shit, but I was thirteen, and I desperately wanted him to like me.

  He didn’t share the sentiment.

  Bax was sleeping on the living room couch, just outside of my bedroom. On his last night with us, I wasn’t able to stifle the screaming in time, and the next thing I knew, I was clutching the wet sheets to my chest and staring at him, Nell, and Mike as they stood at the foot of my bed.

  After I changed and they all went back out into the living room, I crept up to the door where I could hear my uncle still talking to my father.

  “How often does that happen?” Bax asked.

  “It’s really quieted down,” Mike said. “It used to happen a lot, but now it’s every other week or so.”

  “Every other week?” my uncle asked. “Did you try therapy or something?”

  “We tried, but I don’t think it was helpful,” Mike said. I could tell from his tone that he was trying to end the conversation. “I’m going to head to be—”

  “I wonder what kind of trauma he went through before he got here,” Uncle Bax said, not wanting to let it go. “Do you ever think about that? Did you ever call the adoption agency or whatever?”

  “What for?”

  “Well, to tell them what’s going on.”

  “Why would we call them?” Mike asked. “Like I said, we tried the therapists, the doctors, and they all said to give it time. The only other option is medication, and I’m not going to put him on anything now. He’s too young.”

  “Well, you should still call them,” Bax said. “I’m sure they knew.”

  There was a long pause, and I wasn’t sure if Mike was still there.

  “Knew what?”

  My uncle lowered his voice, but not enough.

  “That they gave you a lemon,” Bax said with a chuckle, and I felt my stomach lurch. “No, I’m just kidding. But I mean, that kind of thing doesn’t go unnoticed. All I’m saying is that they should have told you what you were getting into. They definitely knew something was up with him.”

  “Yeah, well—” Mike started.

  “But I guess you guys have sort of exceeded the return period.”

  I remember crawling back into my bed and staring at the ceiling for the rest of the night.

  The next morning, Uncle Bax was gone. Nell asked what happened to him, and Mike looked over at me before answering.

  “Nothing,” he said. “He just had to leave early for his flight.”

  “Aww, I didn’t get to say goodbye.”

  I saw them talking later on that day in hushed tones, and I knew Mike was telling Nell about the conversation I’d overheard the previous night.

  I didn’t hear anything else about it for about a week, but one afternoon, Nell was vacuumin
g the living room when she stopped and leaned over to pick something up. She held a small, white object in her hand and raised it up above her head, squinting at it against the backdrop of the light in the ceiling fan.

  “Mike!” she called out, still staring at the object.

  Mike walked into the room. “Yeah?”

  “Do you know what this is?”

  Mike looked up at the object in her hand for just a moment and then shrugged in his very Mike way. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s a piece of Bax’s tooth.”

  I saw my mother blink, and her expression went from confusion to surprise to understanding. “Oh,” she said simply. And then, as if he’d told her it was nothing but a crumpled, old gum wrapper: “I’ll throw it out.”

  Chapter Three

  Nell’s great-grandmother was born in Haiti. Over the years, Nell would toss out various phrases she’d heard her father say when she was growing up—phrases that he’d no doubt interpreted in his own way after hearing his mother or grandmother say them. Nell had visited Haiti only once, when she was six, but she let the butchered proverbs flow from her lips as if she’d made them up herself.

  “Levisy tay-glees,” she’d say with a shrug whenever Mike or I faced a problem that couldn’t be solved. I looked it up one day during college. She was trying to say “lavi se te glise,” which translated to something like “life is a slippery land.” When I first told them that I wanted to be a police detective, Mike’s jaw had locked, and I could see the concern in his eyes. But Nell had just placed a hand on her husband’s shoulder and nodded.

  “All we ask is that you’re careful,” she’d said softly. “Levisy tay-glees. We don’t know what’s going to happen, but if that’s your dream, then we support you.”

  The broken proverb was one of the first things she said three months ago, when I called to tell her about the shooting at Glenwood Bank. Actually, that was all she managed to say.

  I talked her through the critical details.

  One, there’d been an attempted armed robbery at a bank in the quaint suburb of Glenwood, about twenty minutes from where we lived. I’d been inside at the ATM when the robber walked in.

  Two, I was okay.

  Three, he’d shot one woman in the back, but no one had been killed.

  And four, the assailant was dead because—

  Five, I’d shot him.

  That should’ve been it. That should’ve been the whole story—tragic certainly, but final.

  Instead, I had to tell her the rest, because it wasn’t over. In fact, it was just beginning.

  “I had one of my episodes.”

  “What?” Nell choked out. “When? You mean, during…”

  “Right after I shot him,” I said, and I could barely keep my voice from cracking. “Right there in the bank. In front of everybody.”

  “Oh, Steve…” was all she could say.

  Life was, indeed, a slippery fucking slope.

  I’d spent my entire life hiding the nightmares and the visions, screaming into pillows at night, ducking around corners, and hiding in my car. My parents had found out about the visions near the end of high school, but they’d accepted them just as they did the nightmares. We did therapy, tried medication for a while, and then we all sort of silently decided that this was my lot in life, my big hurdle, my burden to bear.

  I’d even developed a simple, three-part test for the visions. Whenever they started, I’d ask myself a series of questions. If any of them could be answered with a yes, it told me that what I was seeing was real; if I got to the end, and all three were nos, chances were it was a figment of my imagination.

  One: Can anyone else see it?

  Two: Can you touch it?

  Three: Does it interact with you?

  The nightmares and visions were a part of my life that I kept close, so close, only my parents, my partner, and my ex-wife, Lara, knew about them. And even then, none of them really understood the true extent of it.

  Until Glenwood Bank.

  After the shooting, everybody knew.

  They didn’t know about the visions, per se. They called it a blackout, a momentary lapse in consciousness.

  “He just got really still,” I heard one of the bystanders telling a cop on the scene, as if she were describing a wild animal. “He was still holding his gun, but he wasn’t saying anything, wasn’t looking at anybody. It’s like he blacked out or something.”

  Her words had stuck. I’d been fine a few minutes later, but it didn’t matter.

  After months of ongoing evaluation, I was down to only six more weeks.

  Six weeks of mandatory sessions with the department therapist.

  Six weeks of the Douglas County Police Department pumping my partner, Detective Gayla Ocasio, for information about me and my “mental state.”

  Gayla has known about the nightmares for a few years but not the visions. She’s had to wake me from the dream a handful of times, most recently about a month ago, when I fell asleep on her couch after we wrapped up a case. “That is not normal,” she said, handing me a glass of water and perching on the armrest while I pushed the sweat from my forehead with the palm of my hand. “I tried to wake you up for at least a full minute.”

  I took a sip of the water and struggled to catch my breath. The sounds, the smell—in the immediate seconds after I woke from the dream, they stayed with me, making it difficult for me to separate the real world from the imagined.

  “You’re still not going to tell me what it’s about?” she asked. “Your infamous recurring nightmare? Not even with everything that’s going on?”

  I shook my head, pressing the glass to my forehead. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Steve, you said you’ve had the same dream for the past thirty years,” she said, and she cleared her throat, looking uncomfortable. “Not to mention what happened in Glenwood. You’re going to have to talk about it at some point. Maybe not with me, but with someone.”

  “I’m fine,” I said, but my hand was still trembling.

  “You sure it had nothing to do with the case?” Gayla asked. She was searching for an explanation, anything at all. We’d just wrapped up a double homicide—a seeming gang-related shooting that had actually been a domestic dispute gone bad. Or gone worse, since they’re always bad. The jealous husband had murdered his wife and her boyfriend before tagging the house with the symbol of a local gang to remove himself from suspicion. “Seems like the dreams get more frequent when we’re in the middle of the case, right?”

  It wasn’t that. Gayla and I saw each other more when we were on a case, sometimes around the clock, but the dreams were there all the rest of the time, too.

  They wouldn’t go away.

  They’d been there throughout all four years of my marriage. Early in the relationship, Lara had been there with a glass of water, too, her eyes showing both concern and love. But she got tired, as people do. Her career was taking off, and she had a beautiful six-year-old son—she should’ve been happy. But at least once a week, I woke up beside her, choking on my own screams.

  The nightmares were harder to hide when someone was in the bed with you.

  I think it was those moments when I hovered between the dreams and real life that had been the hardest on her. When I was fully awake, I could fix things. I could say something to make her laugh, to diffuse the situation. To remind her that it wasn’t so bad after all. They were just bad dreams—it could be worse, right? I could have cancer. I could get into some terrible accident and need her to feed me and clean me three times a day. I was her husband, and during the day, when I was fully awake, I could convince her that people fucking stayed for things like bad dreams.

  But in those shaky moments just after I woke up, I couldn’t do any of that. I could see her face. I could hear her voice, sad, tired, and full of the creeping doubt that she couldn’t do
this for the rest of her days, couldn’t mop the sweat from my forehead and pray that my screams didn’t wake up Kit, just a room away.

  I couldn’t stop her from spinning, couldn’t slow her down.

  “What about Kit?” I’d choked out when Lara made the final decision to leave, the look on her face that of someone who’d made up her mind but felt guilty about it nonetheless. What about him? He was her son, not ours, a distinction that meant everything and nothing at the same time. We’d started dating when Kit was fourteen months old, and he was six when we separated.

  Maybe I could have done something more than nothing at all, but probably not.

  • • •

  As I sat in Gayla’s living room sipping from the glass of water, she stared at me as if I were a science experiment. Since the shooting, she’d been trying to link what happened in Glenwood with my nightmares, but I’d convinced her that what happened at the bank was a one-time thing. She seemed to believe it.

  For now.

  “What do you dream about?” I asked her, desperate to change the subject. “I can’t imagine what goes on in your head when you’re sleeping.”

  She frowned, leaning back against the wall. Gayla is thirty-nine years old, five foot six, lean and muscular, with biceps for days and calves that look like half-moons. She’d been a dancer all the way through high school, a fact she rarely talked about but was evident in the graceful, powerful way she moved. I’d seen her take down men twice her size, men who underestimated the strength and coordination packed into her small frame. Her husband, Kevin, is tall and massive, but I’d rather be in a ring with him any day over Gayla.

  “What do I dream about?” she muttered, running her hand through her short, curly, reddish-brown hair. Her eyes had lit up, and she leaned forward. “Oh! Buffets.”

  “What?”

  She shrugged and repeated herself. “Buffets. I hate that dream. I’m in this long line, filling up my plate at this party, and it’s just overflowing with food. Ham and corn on the cob and meat pies, and my grandmother’s arroz con gandules, which I haven’t had in years. And there’s just so much food, and it looks so freakin’ good, and right before I sit down to eat it—”