Gone (8 page)

She sleeps. It’s delicious.

For a while.

3:03 a.m.

He dreams.

They are in Cabel’s house, the two of them, snuggling up together on a couch, playing Halo, eating pizza. Having fun. There is a muffled noise in the background, someone calling out for help from the kitchen, but the two ignore it—they are too busy enjoying each other’s company
.

The cries for help grow louder
.

“Quiet!” Cabel yells. But the calls only grow more intense. He yells again, but nothing changes. Finally he goes into the kitchen. Janie is compelled to follow
.

He yells out. “Just shut up about your stupid problems! I can’t take it anymore!”

There, lying in a white hospital bed in the middle of the kitchen, is a woman
.

She’s contorted, crippled
.

Blind and emaciated
.

Hideous
.

It’s old Janie
.

The young Janie on the couch is gone
.

Cabel turns to Janie in the dream. “Help me,” he says
.

Janie stares. Gives a slight shake of her head, even though she is compelled to try to help him. “I can’t.”

“Please, Janie. Help me.”

She looks at him. Speechless. Shudders, and holds back the tears
.

Whispers, “Maybe you should just say good-bye.”

Cabel stares at her. And then he turns to the old Janie
.

Reaches out with two fingers
.

Closes her eyelids
.

Janie struggles and pulls out of the dream
.

Frozen.

Panting.

The world closing in around her again. She struggles to move. To breathe.

When she is able, Janie stumbles on numb toes across Cabe’s basement floor and up the steps, out the door. Across the yards and to her tiny, stifling prison.

Lies on her side, counting her breaths, making herself feel each one, in and out. Staring at the wall.

Wondering how much longer she can hide it all.

August 6, 2006, 10:10 a.m.

She stares at the wall.

And pulls herself out of bed to face another day.

Janie finds Dorothea in the kitchen, fixing her mid-morning cocktail. It’s the first time Janie’s seen her since they talked.

“Hey,” Janie says.

Janie’s mother grunts.

It’s like nothing happened.

“Any word on Henry?”

“No.”

“You doing okay?”

Janie’s mother pauses and gives Janie a bleary look. She fakes a smile. “Just fine.”

Janie tries again. “You know my cell phone number is here next to the calendar if you ever need me, right? And Cabel’s is here too. He’ll do anything for you, like, if I’m not around or something. You know that?”

“He’s that hippie guy?”

“Yeah, Ma.” Janie rolls her eyes. Cabel got his hair cut months ago.

“Cabel—what kind of name is that?”

Janie ignores her. Wishes she hadn’t said anything in the first place.

“You better not get knocked up, alls I can say. A baby ruins your life.” Janie’s mother shuffles off to her bedroom.

Janie stares at her as she goes. Shakes her head. “Hey, thanks a lot,” she calls out. She pulls out her phone and turns it on. There’s a text from Cabel.

Didn’t hear you leave. Where’d you go? Everything okay?

Janie sighs. Texts back.
Just woke up early. Had some stuff to take care of
.

He replies.
You left your shoes here. Want me to bring them, or?

Janie debates.
Yeah. Thx
.

11:30 a.m.

He’s at the door. “Mind if we go for a ride?”

Janie narrows her eyes. “Where to?”

“You’ll see.”

Reluctantly, Janie follows him to the car.

Cabel heads out of town and down a road that leads past several cornfields, and then acre after acre of woods. He slows the car down, squinting at the occasional rusty mailbox, scanning the woods.

“What are you doing?” Janie asks.

“Looking for two-three-eight-eighty-eight.”

Janie sits up and peers out her window too. She says suspiciously, “Who lives way out here in BFE?”

Cabel squints again and slows as they pass 23766. He glances in his rearview mirror and a moment later, a car zooms by, passing them. “Henry Feingold.”

“What? How do you know?”

“I looked in the phone book.”

“Hunh. You’re smart,” Janie says. Unsure. Should she be outraged or eager?

Or just ashamed that she didn’t think of it first?

Another mile and Cabel turns into an overgrown two-track gravel drive. Bushes scratch the sides of the car and the track is extremely bumpy. Cabel swears under his breath.

Janie peers out the windshield. The sun beats down between the tree branches, making it a striped ride. She sees something blurry about a quarter-mile away, in a clearing. “Is that a house?”

“Yeah.”

After a couple of minutes, Cabel driving agonizingly slow over the bumpy driveway, they come to a stop in front of a small, run-down cabin.

They get out of the car. In the gravel turnaround there’s an old, rusty blue station wagon with wood panels. A container of sun tea steeps on the car hood.

Janie takes it all in.

Bushes surround the tiny house. A wayward string of singed roses threatens to overtake a rotting trellis. A few straggling tiger lilies are opened wide, soaking up the sun. All the other flowers are weeds. Outside the front door sits a short stack of cardboard boxes.

Cabel steps carefully through pricker bushes to the dirty window and peers inside, trying to see through the tiny opening between curtains. “Doesn’t look like anybody’s here.”

“You shouldn’t do that,” Janie says. She’s uncomfortable. It’s hot and the air buzzes with insects. And they are invading someone’s privacy. “This place is creeping me out.”

Cabel examines the stack of boxes in front of the door,
looking at the return addresses. He picks one up and shakes it near his ear. Then he sets it back down on the pile and looks around. “Want to break in?” he asks with an evil grin.

“No. That’s not cool. We could get arrested!”

“Nah, who’s going to know?”

“If Captain ever found out, she’d kick our asses. She’s not going to go easy.” Janie edges toward the car. “Come on, Cabe. Seriously.”

Cabel reluctantly agrees and they get back into the car. “I don’t get it. Don’t you want to know more? The guy’s your father. Aren’t you curious?”

Janie looks out the window as Cabel turns the car around. “I’m trying not to be.”

“Because he’s dying?”

She’s lost in thought. “Yeah.” Knows that if she doesn’t invest in Henry, she can write him off as a problem solved when he dies. He’ll just be some guy whose obituary is in the paper. Not her father. “I don’t need one more thing to worry about, I guess.”

Cabel pulls the car out onto the road again and Janie glances over her shoulder one last time. All she can see are trees.

“I hope his packages don’t get all wet next time it rains,” she says.

“Does it really matter if they do?”

They ride in silence for a few minutes. And then Cabel asks, “Did you get anything from Henry’s nightmare yesterday? I was afraid to ask after our little misunderstanding of doom.”

Janie turns in her seat and watches Cabel drive. “It was mostly the same as before. Static. Colors. Woman in the distance and then I saw Henry in the dream too. Always sitting in that same chair. He was watching the woman.”

“What was the woman doing?”

“Just standing there in the middle of a dimly lit room—it was like a school gymnasium or something. I couldn’t see her face.”

“He was just watching her? Sounds creepy.”

“Yeah,” Janie says. She watches the rows of corn whiz past in a blur. “It didn’t really feel creepy, though. It felt . . . lonely. And then—” Janie stops. Thinks. “Hmm.”

“What?”

“He turned and looked at me. Like he was maybe a little bit surprised that I was there. He asked me to help him.”

“Other people in dreams have seen you too, right? They talk to you.”

“Oh, totally. But . . . I don’t know. This felt different. Like . . .” Janie searches her memories, thinking back through the dozens of dreams she’d experienced in her life. “Like in most people’s dreams, I’m just there, and
they accept that, and they talk to me like I’m a prop. But they don’t really connect—they look at me but they don’t really
see
me.”

Cabel scratches the scruff on his cheek and absentmindedly runs his fingers through his hair. “I don’t get the difference.”

Janie sighs. “I guess I don’t either. It just felt different.”

“Like the first day I saw you at the bus stop and you were the only one who would look at me, and our eyes sort of connected?” Cabel’s teasing, sort of. But not really.

“Maybe. But more like when Miss Stubin looked at me when I was in her dream back in the nursing home and asked me a question. Sort of a recognition thing. Like, somehow she just knew I was a dream catcher too.”

Cabel glances at Janie and then back at the road. His forehead crinkles and he tilts his head quizzically. “Wait,” he says. “Wait a minute.” He presses down on the brake and turns to look at Janie again. “Serious?”

Janie looks at Cabel and nods. She’s been wondering it.

“Janie. Do you have any reason at all to think this dream thing could be hereditary?” The car slows and comes to a stop in the middle of the country road.

“I don’t know,” Janie says. She glances over her shoulder nervously. “Cabe, what are you doing?”

“Turning around,” he says. He backs into a three-point turn and hits the gas. “This is important stuff. He might have some information on this little curse of yours. And we might not have another chance.”

12:03 p.m.

Cabel stands at the front door of Henry’s house and pulls his driver’s license from his wallet. He works it into the crack of the door next to the handle and begins to move it side to side. He presses his lips together as he works, trying to get to the bolt to move aside so they can break in.

Janie watches him for a moment. Then she reaches out and grabs the door handle. Turns it. The door opens.

Cabel straightens up. “Well. Who doesn’t lock their doors these days?”

“Somebody whose brain is exploding, maybe? Somebody who lives out in the middle of nowhere and has nothing good to steal? Somebody who’s half-crazy? Maybe he told the paramedics not to lock it because he didn’t have his keys.” Janie steps into the little house, making room for Cabel to follow. “See?” she says, pointing to a key rack on the wall with one set of keys hanging from it.

It’s stuffy inside. Kitchen, living area, and bed are all in the main room. A doorway in the back corner appears to lead to a bathroom. There’s a radio on a bookshelf and a
small TV on the kitchen counter. Hot air plunges into the room through an open, screened window at the back of the house. A thin yellow curtain flutters. Below the window is a table where an old computer sits. It appears from the coffee mug and bowl that the table serves as both an eating place and as a desk. Under the table is a three-drawer unit that looks like it once belonged to a real desk. A few papers rest on the floor as if they’d been carried there by the breeze.

Flattened cardboard boxes lean against the wall near the back door. The bed is disheveled. A nearly empty glass of water stands on a makeshift bedside table made from a cardboard box.

“Well,” Janie says. “There’s goes my dream of a magical surprise inheritance. Dude’s poorer than us.”

“That’s not an easy feat,” Cabel says, taking it all in. He walks over to the desk. “Unless maybe he owns this property—it could be valuable.” Cabel shuffles through a few bills on the desk. “Or . . . not. Here’s a canceled check that says ‘rent’ in the memo line.”

“Damn.” Janie reluctantly joins Cabel. “This feels weird, Cabe. We shouldn’t be doing this.”

“You’ll never find out anything if you wait until after he’s dead—the state will take over and the landlord’s going to want a tenant who can actually pay the bills. They’ll clean this place out, sell what they can to pay the hospital, and that’s that.”

“You sure know a lot of random shit.” Janie looks around.

“Random,
useful
shit.”

“I suppose.” She wanders around the little house. On top of the TV there are a variety of over-the-counter pain relievers. The refrigerator is half-stocked. A quart of milk, half a loaf of pumpernickel bread, a container of bologna. One shelf alone is filled with string beans, corn on the cob, tomatoes, and raspberries. Janie glances out the window to the backyard and sees a small garden and, off to the side, wild-looking bushes dotted red.

The cupboards are mostly bare, except for a few nonmatching dishes and glasses. There’s a light layer of dust all around, but it’s not a dirty house. In the living area, there’s an old beat up La-Z-Boy recliner, an end table with a wooden lamp on it, and a large, makeshift shelving unit filled with boxes. Near it is a small bookcase. Janie pictures Henry sitting here in the evening, in the recliner, reading or watching TV in this almost-cozy house. She wonders what sort of life it was.

She walks over to the bookcase and sees worn copies of Shakespeare, Dickens. Kerouac and Hemingway and Steinbeck, too. Some books with odd lettering that looks like Hebrew. Science textbooks. Janie removes one and looks inside. Sees what must be her father’s handwriting below a list of names that had been crossed out.

Henry David Feingold
University of Michigan

She squats down and pages through the textbook, reading notes in the margin. Wonders if those are his notes, or if they belonged to someone before him. The binding is broken and some of the pages are loose so Janie closes the book and returns it to the shelf.

Cabel is looking through papers on the desk. “Invoices,” he says. “For all sorts of weird things. Baby clothes. Video games. Jewelry. Snow globes, for Chrissakes. Wonder where he keeps it all. Kinda weird, if you ask me.”

Janie stands up and walks over to Cabel. Picks up a notebook and opens it. Inside, in neat handwriting, is a list of transactions. No two are alike. Janie puzzles over the notebook and then she goes to the front door. Pulls the packages inside and looks at the return addresses. Matches them up in the notebook.