PROLOGUE
New York City
January
Â
It always begins with the dizziness.
In her office high above East Forty-Sixth Street, Camden Hastings is editing yet another inane fashion article, “Not Your Grandmother's Belts and Brooches,” when the words begin to swim on the page.
Lightheaded, she looks up warily. The desk lamp is glaring; the small room distorted and tilting at an impossible angle.
Oh, no.
She braces herself
.
Here it comes.
It's been awhileâa month, maybe moreâsince the last episode.
Sometimes after that much time has passed, she actually allows herself to relax a little. She'll lower her guard, wanting to believe she's free and clear; that she'll never have to deal with the unsettling visions again.
But they always come back.
Cam's fingers involuntarily release her pencil. It rolls off the desk onto the floor. Ignoring it, she rolls her chair back slightly, just enough to rest her elbows on her lap and lower her face into her hands to stop the spinning sensation.
She can hear her heart beating, hear her own rhythmic respiration . . . then someone else's.
Inhale . . .
Exhale . . .
Inhale . . .
Cam's head is filled with the sound of erratic, shallow breathing, in some kind of bizarre syncopation with her own.
“Please, you have to let me go.”
The thin, uneven pitch of the voice is typical of male adolescence, but she can't see the speaker yet. Can't see anything at all; her eyes are tightly closed against her palms and her mental screen remains dark.
“Why are you doing this? Who are you?” she hears the boy ask brokenly.
He's so afraid, she senses, so terribly afraid, it's all he can do to just stay conscious, keep breathing . . .
Inhale . . .
Exhale . . .
Cam's own lungs seem to constrict with the effort.
But that's crazy. You can breathe. You know he's only in your head, like the others.
All of themâall the characters she alone can see and hearâare figments of an exceptionally vivid imagination Cam's English teachers liked to call “a gift,” back when she was in school.
Ha. A
gift
?
Hardly.
But then, her teachers didn't know about the strange visions she's endured for as long as she can remember. If they knew, they might have understood that a vivid imagination can beâmore than anything elseâa curse.
They'd have suggested a shrink for her, instead of creative writing courses. Because that's what you do when you hallucinate on a regular basis, right? You see a psychiatrist.
That's what her sister Ava did at college, well over twenty years ago.
But no one in Cam's world ever realized that she had stumbled across the truth about beautiful, brunette Ava. About her mental illness. For all she knows, Pop never even knew about Ava's troubles in the first place.
In any case, no one in her life has ever suspected that Cam is aware she might have more in common with her older sister than an uncanny physical resemblance. She might also have the genetic potential to go stark raving mad, just as Ava so obviously did over twenty years ago.
Why else would a personâperched twelve stories in the airâtake a head-first dive to the ground?
You don't kill yourself just because your mother abandoned you when you were a teenager, or because your college course load is overwhelming . . . do you?
Okay, some people might. But Cam found her sister's diary years ago. She's suspected, ever since, what was going on with her. She's come to believe the voices in Ava's head told her to jump.
Funny, thoughâthe voices in Cam's aren't anything like that.
For one thing, they're invariably laced with fear. Terror, even. They never speak directly to Cam; they're always addressing someone else, some shadowy person who intends to hurt them.
And most of the time, those voices belong to mere children.
Cam knows that because she can usually conjure their faces if she focuses hard enough.
Funny . . . even though she's the one who dreams up these tortured characters in the first place, she can never quite anticipate what they're going to look like, or whether she'll even get to see them at all.
For instance, this boy today, the frightened boy with the cracking voice, sounds like he's going to be small and pale.
But when he begins to take shape in Cam's mind's eye, he's older than she expected. Dark-skinned, tooâHispanic, maybe, or Native American. He has a mop of curly dark hair and big brown eyes.
He's huddled in a confined spaceâshe can see carpet, and metal, and a small recessed light, as if . . .
Yes, it's a car trunk. It's open. Broad daylight. Dappled, fluid shade spills in, as if trees are gently stirring overhead.
Then a human shadow looms over the boy; someone is standing there, looking down at him.
Cam's heart races, her throat gags on the boy's panic.
Calm down,
she tells herselfâand him. Even though he's not real. Even though he exists only in her head.
Is he wearing some sort of uniform? Boy Scouts, maybe? Khaki shirt, badges, and pins. A kerchief is tied around his neck. On his sleeve, a couple of sewn-on numbers, but Cam can't make them out.
Which doesn't make sense because she's the one who made him upâso she should know which numbers he's wearing, shouldn't she? She should know his name, and his age, and, dammit, she should be able to make him stop sounding so helpless.
But no. He's crying now. Crying and cowering in the car trunk, his elbows bent on either side of his face, his hands clutching the back of his head.
Cam can't bear to see him like that, can't bear to listen to the unnatural, keening sound.
Stop
, she commands her over-imaginative, gifted brain, lifting her head and shaking it back and forth.
Stop doing this to me.
Mercifully, the boy's voice gradually grows fainter. The image begins to fade.
Cam breathes deeply to calm herself.
There. That's better.
She sits up in her chair.
Sips some tepid tea from the mug on her desk.
Slowly, her breathing returns to normal.
That was a bad one.
They usually are. Bad like a nightmare that grips you when you're having it . . .
And end when you wake up.
But lately, the hallucinations stay with her. She doesn't forget them the way you would a nightmare. They seem more real than ever before. Why?
Who knows? It's hard enough for Cam to believe she's capable of creating such emotional drama out of thin airâlet alone comprehend
how
and
why
she does it.
Lord knows she's got enough to worry about without her mind being cluttered by imaginary people in trouble.
Her promotion from associate editor to editor is on hold until the next fiscal year begins. Mike's been laid off for almost a month. They're running out of money.
That's
real
stress.
That's what she should be worrying about.
Not daydreaming, or hallucinating, or whatever one would call the unsettling visions that pop up in her head.
Maybe I should go see someone about them
, she thinksâsame as always, whenever she comes out of one of these episodes.
Thenâ
no. No way,
she tells herselfâsame, too, as always.
She can't go see a shrink. They can't afford it, and anyway, what would Mike do if he realized he were married to a crazy person?
Probably the same thing Pop did, all those years ago:
Make himself scarce.
I can't lose Mike. I need him. I love him.
She can barely remember her parents' married era. Not that Ike and Brenda Neary had ever divorcedâthough they often spoke the word.
Spoke? Ha.
Screamed
it.
Back then, they still lived in Camden, a New Jersey suburb of Philadelphia and Mom's hometown, for which she named her second daughter. Obsessed with glamorous old Hollywood and lingering girlhood dreams of becoming an actress, Brenda had named her firstborn after her favorite movie star, Ava Gardner.
The irony: the real Ava Gardner lived a long, gilded life. A different brand of irony: once-thriving Camden, New Jersey has steadily deteriorated into poverty, urban blight, and staggering crime rates, notoriously dubbed the “most dangerous city in America.”
Cam dimly recalls her mother's face, her voice, her tears. Not much more than that, though. On rare occasions her father was around; there were arguments and accusationsâusually ending with her mother hysterical and Pop slamming the door behind him as he left.
Then came the day that her mother was the one who leftâfor good. Cam was three years old; Ava, a college freshman at NYU. When Ava arrived at their small Camden apartment, summoned in the crisis, she gently told her little sister that they'd never see their mother again.
Pop protested.
But as it turned out, Ava was right.
“Don't worry, baby girl,” Pop reassured Cam that night, holding her close as she sobbed. “I'll take care of you. Lean on me. You can trust me.”
“But you always have to leave.”
“Not anymore. I never will. Never again. I promise. Not unless I take you with me.”
That was what he did.
And she leaned on him. Trusted him.
Yet in all those years the two of them spent together on the road, or down the shore, or in between gigsâsomehow, she never found the nerve to tell Pop about the visions.
Nor can she bring herself to tell her husband.
Or, God forbid, her friends or coworkers.
Cam wonders sometimes if she might have eventually confided in her big sister. But she never had the chance.
Ava's “tragic accident,” as everyone chose to call itâher “falling” to her death at NYU's Bobst Libraryâhappened less than a year after Mom left.
As for Cam, she has no choice but to deal, silently and alone, with her hallucinations whenever they strike, reassuring herself that she has no reason to fear something that only exists in her imagination.
Â
November
Â
The day's weighty stack of mail in her hand, Cam sinks her bulky form onto the maroon brocade couch.
Ahhh . . .
That's better.
Much
better than the hard plastic seat someone offered her on the downtown No. 6 train a little while ago. Not that it wasn't preferable to standing, as she's been forced to do more times than one might expect lately.
As Cam told her husband just the other day, it's amazing how invisible an eight-months-pregnant woman can be, on board the subway in New York City.
Mikeâthe sort of guy who gives up his seat not just for pregnant women, but for any random passenger who might need itâwas predictably outraged.
“You need to start taking a cab home from work,” he decidedâas if they could possibly afford the rush-hour meter fare between the magazine's offices on East Forty-Sixth and their apartment on the unfashionable fringes of Chinatown.
“Okay, I'll take a cab, don't worry.”
“No, you won't. You're just humoring me. I can tell.”
“Well then,” she said, “how about if I promise to take a cab on nights when I'm so wiped out that I really don't feel up to the subway?”
That would be every nightâif she meant it.
Of course, she didn't.
Mike has been treating her like an eggshell throughout her pregnancy, but Cam can handle the physical symptoms. Just as she can handle the fact that she and Mike are pretty much broke, same as always, even now that he's working again.
So she'll have to suck it up and brave the subway until the baby comes. An extra mouth to feed will be enough strain on their budget.
The pregnancy wasn't unplanned. It just happened sooner than they expected.
Cam had readâand edited, and yes, even writtenâher share of articles on conception. She knew going in that a woman shouldn't count on getting pregnant right away. Figuring it was probably going to take a few months, at least, she told Mike they should start trying the minute he got a job.
So they did.
Just weeks later, there she was: knocked up, due around Christmas.
So much for the best laid plans: scraping up enough money for skiing in Utah this winter, and taking Mike's parents up on their offer for two plane tickets to visit them at their winter home in Florida over the holidays.
Speaking of Mike's parents . . .
Here's an envelope that bears the familiar loopy blue ballpoint handwriting of Cam's mother-in-law, with a Vero Beach postmark and return address.
Cam is struck by a familiar, and perhaps ridiculous, pang of wistfulness.
It's been years since she went through her mail thinking there just might be something from her own mother.
Mom, wherever she is, intentionally erased herself from the shattered family she left behind. Still, Cam used to fantasize that one day she'd simply show up again, as abruptly as she vanished.
Ava's death made the papers in New Jersey and New York. Surely if Mom had seen it, she'd have come back. At the time, Cam felt as though she, and Pop, too, were holding their breaths for thatâconstantly looking around at the wake, the funeral, for Mom's face in the crowd.