In Nightmares We're Alone (21 page)

“You called me, so I’m not paying anything,” says Edna. “And if you don’t have anything but empty encouragement or prattle or something to sell, then I’m leaving.”

“I don’t know what I have to say. I don’t even know if I can get Arthur to come to me. This is all new.”

My eye is more or less stuck shut and my fingertips are red and swollen. She probably thinks I’m on something but she doesn’t comment.

“Well, do your thing then. Talk to my dead husband and ask him what he needs to say to me.”

I shut off the lights and light a candle, mostly out of habit. Atmosphere for the patient, not for the dead. My life’s work seems so distant now.

I shut my eyes and take deep breaths. When I open them I see her looking at me with a cautious pessimism, like she wants to judge me but needs a minute to pass for me to give her the chance.

“I realize you’re a smart woman and skeptical about this stuff. I am too. I know it all looks ridiculous. It’s… I
feel
ridiculous. But I know what I’ve been seeing and I… I don’t know. If the dead are torturing me maybe it’s to get him to speak to you, so…”

“Just do it. You’re a grown man. If I judge you, I judge you. Get it over with.”

I nod. I shut my eyes again.

“Arthur? Arthur, can you hear me? I’m with your wife. I… I don’t know if this is what you want, but I’m… I’m trying it on a hunch. Is there anything you have to say to her? Or to me, even?”

A moment of silence passes and I see nothing. I open my eyes and look around the room. Edna glares with that patient but cynical look. I shut my eyes again.

“Arthur? Anything at all. I saw you earlier. We spoke. I know you can hear me and I know you know I can hear you. If there’s anything you want to say to your wife you can do it through me. If there’s anything you want to say to anyone… I’m here to help you, Arthur. I’m here to help anyone who asks me. I just… I just need you to tell me what to do.”

Another long silence. I bow my head for a minute and wait. When a long time has passed I look up again at the same room I shut my eyes to. Not a change.

“Nothing?” asks Edna, unsurprised.

“No, I… I’m sorry. I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Well,” she says sarcastically, “you know how shy the dead are.”

“I don’t, actually. I don’t know anything anymore.”

She laughs slightly and nods her head. “Yeah. That’s about the size of it.” For the first time I realize how exhausted her eyes are. In spite of everything, part of her held out hope it was real.

I almost lie. I almost go back to what I ran away from. Not for the money, but just to bring peace. Just to help her cope with the loss. To take a little of that exhaustion out of her eyes.

She stands up and turns toward the door.

“If he finds the words to say something to me you think I need to hear, you have my number,” she says. She opens the door and just before she walks through it I hear Arthur’s voice.

“Is this what it’s come to, Casey? After all that’s happened to you, you’re still pulling out all your old tricks?” He walks out of my kitchen, limping with his cane, shaking his head at me.

“Wait!” I shout and she stops and turns. “Edna, are you seeing this?”

She looks back and forth between me and Arthur, but it’s clear I’m a madman screaming in an empty room. A madman for once, instead of a liar.

“He’s here!” I say. “Arthur is here! Arthur, can you see your wife?”

Arthur keeps shaking his head with that judgmental look. “Casey… I just don’t know what to say to you.”

“Then say it to her!” I scream. “I made the connection! You got taken away from your wife and I put you in a place where you can speak to her! Tell her what you never got to tell her in life!”

“Casey, this isn’t about her. Or me. That’s why it’s happening to you.”

“Then I’m crazy?” I ask Arthur. “That’s all it is? Something that snapped loose in my mind? Schizophrenia? Ordinary, everyday psychosis?” No one has ever begged like I am to be told he’s gone off the deep end.

I can’t tell what Edna’s thinking from her stare. I don’t know if she’s scared I’m telling the truth, or if she’s scared I’m out of my mind. And either way, I don’t know if she’s right.

Arthur looks down at his hand and my eyes follow his, down his arms, to his hands.

No.

What does it mean?

The plants are growing from his hand too, growing down from his fingertips and wrapping around the cane. He looks up at me and I swear I see them growing in the irises of his eyes.

“Do you think when you see me, you see the same me that Edna saw?” he asks. “Or do you ever wonder whether you’re projecting? Do you wonder if, no matter who you look at, you’re projecting? Do you wonder if the whole world as you see it, is projection?”

“Yes! Yes, I wonder, goddamnit! I wonder how to stop wondering!”

“Casey,” says Edna, summoning up strength from her place by the door, “it’s not the same Arthur. You knew Arthur and I knew Arthur, but they were two different Arthurs. This one is yours.”

She seems sure of it, beyond fear. I wonder where her newfound certainty comes from.

“Can you see!?”

She shakes her head no.

Arthur lets go of his cane and the growths unwind from it. The cane drops to the floor and he extends his hand to me, opening his fingers with his palm facing up.

There’s something resting in the middle of his hand. A nut or a bean. Something small and grey-brown. I look a little closer and my stomach contracts.

A miscarried fetus.

A guttural scream escapes my throat. I recoil and my hands catch on something and stop me from falling. I look down at them and realize the growths have sprouted once again. My growths have intertwined with Arthur’s. Arthur’s are growing to absorb little Beth.

I scream again and pull with both arms, trying to tear myself free of Arthur and Beth. I turn to Edna for help and it’s then that I notice her growths as well. They sprout from her face and her hands and they lock with the growths on Arthur and me and we’re all connected in this twisted, ugly, agonizing thing.

“We are all alone… together,” says Arthur.

Our growths sprout faster, thicker. We consume each other in clumps of vines and leaves.

“Help me!” I scream to anyone who can hear me.

And just as quickly as the vines have grown, they disappear. Arthur and Beth and me, the three of us become one plant, and the plant becomes me, and I am alone in a room with Edna, and it is as though a bad trip has worn off entirely at once with the snap of fingers. The excruciating snap of swollen fingers.

“Help me,” I say again, this time a whisper. Tears down my face.

“I wish I knew how,” says Edna. She backs out of the house and before she shuts the door she whispers, “I’m sorry you’re hurting.”

“Why!?” I scream into my empty home, but Arthur doesn’t answer. “Why? It was the one way I had to be useful. The one thing I had to offer. Why couldn’t you let me have it?”

And nobody answers a word, but as my eye goes to the sliding glass door and I see the sycamore standing there, I feel I almost understand.

For as long as nobody else sees, the question of reality is irrelevant. We are Schrödinger’s cats, all of us. Everything is real and unreal unless somebody else collapses the paradox. In matters of the mind, we are alone. It’s why we have nightmares even sleeping next to loved ones. And we are stuck in our minds. Always. Stuck in our nightmares. Alone.

* * * * *

Maybe the tree is laughing at me out there. Maybe it’s made its point. I can’t hear it anymore tonight and it doesn’t draw my eye.

The growths grow. That’s what growths do. I’m not fighting them anymore. The fight I’ve been fighting, I think, is a fight that could never have been won.

I still call Elaine. Despite everything.

“Hello?” comes that pretty voice in my ear.

“Hi, Elaine. It’s Casey.”

The next second takes five minutes to go by. Maybe this is the last conversation I’ll have with her. If it was Heather who called her when she was sitting there with that uncomfortable look on her face, she’ll hang up on me now, or she’ll tell me not to call her back, or she’ll curse at me and call me a pervert. If not, well…

“Oh. Hi, Casey. Sorry we got cut short at lunch.”

It seems like I’m breathing for the first time I can remember. In my reflection in the window I notice I’m smiling, and behind that smiling face is the sycamore, framed against my reflection as though through a two-way mirror.

“No problem,” I say. “Today was a weird day.”

“Yeah, you can say that again. Did everything work out okay? You seemed to leave in a hurry.”

“I don’t really know yet. Everything’s been so overwhelming lately. Life, you know? What about you? You didn’t look so happy on the phone.”

“I’m fine. Just more misbehavior from my youngest. She was fighting at school.”

“Bad?”

“Yes. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I understand. Do you want to try it again? I thought we did really well there for, you know, like the first ten seconds.”

She laughs and sighs. “I don’t know.”

“I got a little weird, I know. I’ve been having a rough week, a rough month. Let me make it up to you.”

A pause and then a hesitant, “When?”

“Tomorrow night? Dinner at my place?”

“Wow. Dinner? Your place? I thought we were going to be slow and casual about it.”

“Let’s not just try and squeeze it into our daily routines. Let’s take a few hours, you get a sitter for Macie, we’ll shut our phones off. Let’s give ourselves a night to be young again.”

“That sounds like a bit much.”

“Then just let me cook you dinner and forget about being young.”

We laugh together and then there’s a heavy silence on her end.

“I’m sorry, I just I can’t do dinner. Not tomorrow. You’re a nice guy, but I feel like I need to sort out my daughter’s behavior problems before I can think about serious dating. Maybe…” she sighs. “I’m sorry. Maybe this whole thing isn’t fair to you.”

I shut my eyes and nod. This was never going to work. Growths go. Seeds sprout. Paint falls on canvass. C’est la vie.

In Martin’s terms, “Whatever, dude.”

I would like to tell her everything in person. More than that, I’d like to feel like I mattered. I’d like to touch her life in a meaningful way. I’d like to be a good man. But if this is the last we speak, the least I can do is tell her.

“Elaine…”

“I’m sorry, hold on a sec,” she says, and then I hear her exchanging a few words with her daughter. Her voice comes back and she says, “Casey, I’ll call you back in five minutes.”

I hang up and stare at a wall for five minutes that feels like an hour. Damn it, Macie. I don’t know you, but don’t dick me on this. I know she’s your mother and you need her too, but right now I need her more. You’ll have her for her whole life. I just need her for what’s left of mine.

When the phone finally rings I answer on the first ring, “Elaine?”

“Hi Casey. So Macie and I just talked about it and she’s making a promise to be good so I think…” she takes a deep breath. “I think dinner tomorrow at your place would be great.”

“Yes! Yes!” Thank you, Macie.

“Just dinner though. Don’t go thinking… you know. We’re not
that
young again.”

“Last time I was
that
young I got myself in a whole lot of trouble.”

“Point taken.”

“Eight o’clock?”

“Seven? I’d hate to get caught up and leave the girls alone too late.”

“Even better.”

We say goodbye and hang up. And if there weren’t so many hideous, curling sticks protruding from my body, everything would be pretty swell.

I have to work one hand like a lobster claw and pick up a pencil just to dial Martin. I need him to come to lunch with me, no matter how much he still holds Tuesday against me, no matter how much he’s still disgusted that I don’t want to help him con people and I want a woman to love me.

The thing in the mirror in no way resembles the me I grew up knowing. The growths on each finger are as thick and long as the fingers themselves. And the thing sticking out of my eye curves upward like a hook, strong enough I bet I could hang my coat on it if I wanted to, aside from the fact that I’d probably rip out my eyeball.

Four new growths have started from my gums and there’s a little something sticking out of my left ear. There’s pain in my chest making it hard to breathe and I have to assume it’s the first of the internal growths I’ve been dreading. I barely look human anymore, if I even qualify as one.

“I have lunch detention,” he says. “I don’t think I can go.”

“Ditch it,” I say. “What’s the worst that could happen? You do two or three next week instead?”

“Mom said I’m not supposed to go anywhere with you for a while.”

“So since when do you do everything Mom says?”

“I think I’ll just do the detention.”

“Why do you have lunch detention anyway? What did you do?”

“Just smarting off. I got it on purpose because the girl I like has it. That way we can be there together.”

I have to smile. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Although I pray to God it doesn’t always turn into one.

“So you’ve finally got a special girl, huh?”

“Uh-huh. She’s gonna let me see her naked tonight.”

I cringe. For Christ’s sake, the kid’s ten years old. Isn’t holding hands and the odd closed-lipped kiss enough for at least a couple more years?

“Jesus, Martin. I mean, I know I’m nobody to tell you what to do and what not to, but… Take it from a guy who made a lot of mistakes with girls, you’ve got tons and tons of time to go slow. Cherish the hand-holding while it’s still exciting.”

“You didn’t ask me her name,” says Martin. There’s a tinge of malice in his voice, a tone that scares me.

“What’s her name?”

“Macie Giddings.”

I have nothing to say for a long time. I stare at the cell phone, sitting there on my desk with that SPEAKER light flashing. My lip would be trembling if the branches in my mouth weren’t forcing it so far from my face.

“You there, Dad?” asks Martin. It’s the first time he’s called me ‘Dad’ in a year and a half and at the moment I think ‘dude’ would be more appropriate.