Remember Me (20 page)

Upstairs, Jimmy's door was the only one not closed all the way. I counted my blessings.

If it had been shut, I would have been out of business for the night.

With the rest of forever ahead of me, I shouldn't have been concerned about wasting one night. Yet I was, and it wasn't just because I was worried that the Shadow would get to me before I could communicate with my brother. I just had this feeling that I had to hurry.

Dreams were not my expertise. I knew that people's eyelids fluttered when they had them and that they supposedly aided in the release of stress. That was it. I certainly didn't know how to climb into one. Jimmy was sleeping on his back, the sheet tangled around his waist, his chest bare.

Sitting on the bed by his side, I silently cursed Peter for deserting me in my hour of need.

I had no idea what to do next. Yet Peter had said I should be able to figure it out. I decided to experiment. I reached out and touched Jimmy's hands.

The brush of mental dullness caught me by surprise. It was not strong, and it stopped the instant I let go of Jimmy, but it gave me a rush of hope. I assumed it must have been caused by a partial merger with Jimmy's unconscious mind.

I couldn't think of another explanation. I sat back to wait for his eyelids to begin to flutter. I figured he should be in the midst of a full-fledged dream before I made a determined effort to say hello.

A half-hour must have gone by before his long black lashes began to twitch. I immediately reached for his hands. The wave of dullness returned, but this time it was mixed with a sinking sensation. The feeling was far from pleasant.

Internally, I could sense Jimmy's presence, although he seemed light-years away. I was caught between two universes, split in two, and the desire to be whole again wrenched at my heart.

His world was so painful!

But I refused to let go. I wanted to get closer to him. I wanted to pull him up.

Instinctively, I moved my hands up his arms toward his face, and the light-years changed to miles, and then to mere feet. Spreading my fingers over the crown of his head, I glimpsed him wandering lost along an endless corridor of shadows, and I felt the same weight on top of my chest that I had on the floor of Beth's condo when my so-called friends had tried to bury me before my time.

The bedroom vanished. The new background was thick with smoke and dust, devoid of color or definition. He was dressed in black. His eyes were open. He was looking at me.

No, he was looking for me. And he couldn't find me. Tears ran over his sunken cheeks, and then fell, mingling with the pale clouds that dogged his weary feet.

"Jimmy," I called to him. "I'm here, Jimmy. Over here."

He didn't look up. There was a veil between us made impenetrable by his sorrow. I didn't want to let go, but I had to. I simply could not bear it! I felt for my invisible hands and yanked them upward.

I landed facedown across his chest as he turned uneasily in his bed.

"Oh, Jimmy," I whispered, brushing his cheek and kissing him goodbye. Maybe we were still partially connected.

I could feel the dampness of his skin, and it was no dream.

There was a window downstairs in the laundry room that had been left open. I used it to climb outside. It was almost a relief, I thought, that my parents had closed their door. I doubted that I could stand to be that close again to grief caused by me.

But I was frustrated by what little I had accomplished. I did not leave the vicinity of my house right away. Crossing the backyard, I noticed another window open. It was on the second story, and it led to my bedroom. A peek behind Amanda's cool gray eyes, I thought, might be educational.

I needed a ladder. I really needed to get my ghostly wings flapping. I had to settle on a network of ivy and the frail wooden framework it entwined to help me up the side of the wall.

Being the psychologically inhibited ghost that I was, I expected my support to break beneath my feet with each upward step I took.

It was with a sigh of relief that I climbed through the window and plopped down on the floor.

Amanda was sleeping snug and secure beneath the quilt

Mrs. Parish had knitted for me on my fifteenth birthday. She looked so beautiful with her long black hair spread over my pillow that I couldn't help but feel disgusted.

I waited for a half-hour for her eyelids to flutter, as I had with Jimmy, but the best her gorgeous lashes would do was bat every now and then. 1 finally decided to grab her head and just go for it.

My awareness began to alter. It was different this time.

There was no crushing grief, no sudden change of location.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the room around me was overlaid with the faint image of a flat gray landscape riddled with thousands of narrow poles that reached high into the sky. As I held tight to Amanda's forehead, the image grew in clarity and depth, and I began to realize that the poles were actually tall steel needles. They glittered bright and hot beneath the light of an unseen sun.

There was no feeling associated with the scene. It was simply there, although Amanda was not. I understood I was seeing the landscape through her eyes, despite the fact that I was still aware of the dimensions of my bedroom.

One by one, gigantic bubbles of air began to form at the tips of the needles, breaking off and drifting into a hard white sky toward a long translucent pipe, which floated miles above the ground, stretching out of sight in both directions.

Flowing with a dark pulsating liquid, the pipe appeared to draw the bubbles toward it.

But even though the bubbles bounced harmlessly off the side of the pipe, I sensed they were anxious to get inside it and flow with the liquid.

I wondered if there was a particular significance for Amanda in the scene, and why, no matter where I looked, there wasn't a trace of color.

The image started to fade a few minutes later, and a wave of drowsiness began to overcome me. I let go of Amanda's forehead. The night was getting on, I thought. I had other dreams to walk. I stood and turned toward the window. I did not kiss her goodbye.

My next stop was Daniel's house. A Hell's Angel unknowingly gave me a ride most of the way there on the back of his Harley-Davidson. The dude was most gracious. He knew Jimi Hendrix's songs word for word and sang several for my personal entertainment. He had a pretty good voice.

The open kitchen window I had used that afternoon to walk in on Daniel and Beth's sexual sinning was still available. I hoisted myself inside without difficulty and headed upstairs.

Daniel had his door shut, however. I was about to leave when his mom got up for a drink of water and stopped to have a peek in at him. I'm sure she would have been shocked to know she had just let her offspring's supposed love into his bed. But I did not enter the room without first checking that there was an open window I could jump out of in the event she closed the door on me—which she ended up doing.

Daniel lay in the center of his bed with his arms and legs wrapped around a big stuffed teddy bear. I laughed, thinking the poor boy must be in desperate need of affection. As I made my way toward his bed, his eyelids were twitching. I didn't wait. I grabbed his head and dived in.

I probably should have gone slower. His bedroom instantly vanished and was replaced by his dream bedroom. This one had a naked blonde with Beth's chest and my face lounging on a circular waterbed. A silver tray stocked with caviar and champagne sat beside it. Hundreds of lights were on, and the ceiling was all mirrored. Better to see you with, my dear, I thought. Or was it Daniel saying it in response to the girl's question? He stood to the side of the bed with his mouth hanging open and his eyes wide. He had on a full black wet suit and flippers.

If only I'd brought Freud along for the ride.

"I love you, Danny Boy," the girl on the bed crooned, shifting provocatively on top of the satin sheets. It pissed me off that she sounded just like Beth. I mean, if he was going to steal my mouth, why didn't he take my voice as well? The guy was disloyal to the core—as well as being a pervert. He flapped his flippers on the red velvet floor like a fish in heat.

"1 love you, Marsha," he said, excited.

"Who the hell is Marsha?" I asked.

He heard me. He looked over and almost fainted.

"Shari," he said. "What are you doing here?"

I strode toward him. "What am I doing here? I'm your girlfriend!" I pointed to the bed.

"What's she doing here?"

"Who?"

"Her!"

He put his hands to his mouth and began to bite his nails, his teeth chattering as if he were a cartoon character. "I don't know," he mumbled.

"Get rid of her," I ordered. "And take off that stupid suit. You look like a senile penguin."

He turned to Marsha. "Could you come back later?"

"Later?" I yelled. "You cheating bastard! Here, I'll tell her myself. Miss, get your tight ass out of this room and never come back."

She took the hint. She gathered up her clothes—they were all over the floor; he had probably torn them off her—and hurried from the room. Daniel sat down on the edge of the bed and began to pull off his flippers.

"Gee, Shari," he said. "I didn't know you were coming over."

"Who's Marsha?" I demanded, sitting beside him. He had really fixed the place up since he had been awake.

Besides the velvet carpet and the mirrors, there was a plush lavender Ioveseat near the closet and a swirling blue Jacuzzi in the corner. There was, in fact, color everywhere, like in an ordinary dream.

"She's a cousin of mine visiting from Florida," he said.

"Did you have sex with her?"

He looked guilty. "We took a shower together once."

"You took a shower with your cousin! Were you going with me at the time?"

He hesitated. "No."

"Liar!"

"I wasn't."

"Then what are you doing with her now?"

He appeared confused. He couldn't get his stupid flipper off. It looked like it had melted on his toes. He finally gave up on it and put his foot back down.

"Shari, you're supposed to be dead."

Here was my big chance. "How did I die?" I asked.

He scratched his head like a cartoon character, his nails on his scalp sounding like files rubbing against wood. It was

getting to be too much. "I don't remember," he said.

Just my luck, his subconscious was as dumb as his conscious state. Yet he had told me something. If he'd murdered me, he wouldn't have forgotten.

"Somebody killed me," I said.

He suddenly snapped his fingers. I couldn't believe it when I actually saw an exclamation point zoom off the top of his hand. "I know what happened!" he said. "You jumped off the balcony!"

"No, I didn't!"

"Yes, you did!"

"I did not!"

"I saw you!"

I froze. "You saw me jump?" I asked softly.

His face fell. "You were lying in a puddle of blood."

"But before that, what did you see?"

He lowered his head between his knees. He was having trouble breathing. He began to cry. "Oh, Shari. Your head. Oh, God."

"Dan! Tell me, what happened?"

"Crushed. Splattered. Oh, Jesus."

"What did I do!?" I screamed, reaching out and grabbing his hands. And as I did so, his eyes swung toward me, and a look of pure horror filled his face. For an instant I saw everything from his perspective. I saw the girl I had found lying on the table in the morgue, minus the green towel that had hidden the worst of the damage. Had I a meal in my stomach and a stomach in my body, I would have vomited.

Then I was back in his bedroom, his real bedroom, sitting by his side in the dark as he stirred restlessly in a nightmare I knew intimately. I had accidentally removed my hands from his head. Perhaps it was just as well. I touched my own head gingerly, drawing small comfort from the fact that it appeared to be all in one piece. Shaken, I stood and ran to the window. I had to get out of that room.

Jo's was my next stop. I walked the whole way there, hoping the exercise would calm me down, quiet my fears. It didn't help a bit.

Jo's mom, Mrs. Foulton, was sitting on the front porch in the dark smoking a cigarette.

She had probably just gotten off work; she had on her uniform. I estimated the time at about four-thirty. The sun would be coming up soon.

A newspaper lay across Mrs. Foulton's lap. I could read it without a light, even though she couldn't. The paper was a couple of days old. She had it open to page three. There was a picture of me in the upper right-hand corner beneath the headline, "HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR

JUMPS TO HER DEATH."

They'd plucked the photo right out of my junior year annual.

I looked all right.

I sat in a chair beside Mrs. Foulton and noticed she was using her cigarette for more than just smoking. Between puffs, she would hold it close to the picture.

Either she wanted to bum out my eyes, or else she was trying to get a better look at me.

Remembering back to the indifferent tone she had taken with Mrs.

Parish before my funeral, I wondered why she would bother one way or the other.

Her hands were trembling slightly, yet her face betrayed no emotion. After a while she ground out her cigarette and went inside, leaving the paper on the porch chair. Naturally, I followed her.

Mrs. Foulton went straight to bed. She didn't even bother to remove her uniform; she just lay on top of the sheets and closed her eyes. I reasoned that she had to return to the hospital in a few hours. Because she hadn't been at the party and couldn't possibly have pushed me from the balcony—if I had, in fact, been pushed—I didn't try to probe her dreams.

Jo's door was wide open, which struck me as unusual. Jo normally guarded her privacy vigorously. Entering the room, I found her sleeping with her blanket thrown off, her head buried under her pillow. I had to wait for several minutes until she turned to get even a glimpse of her head. But as I let my fingertips brush close to her hair, I almost passed out. Yet Jo had to be dreaming, I thought; her eyelids were twitching violently. Moving cautiously, I gently touched the top of her head with my right hand.