Before I Wake (19 page)

At four thirty a.m., Arden was at the wheel of Eli’s station wagon. The other occupants of the car were asleep, lulled by the sound of tires moving over pavement and the voice of night radio. Between weather reports of a far-off winter storm possibly moving in from Canada came the ramblings of ‘a guy with a deep, soft, hypnotic voice that made you feel as if he were speaking just to you. As if he were visiting in your living room, sitting in front of the fireplace, everyone all tucked under comforters.

Going home…

It seemed the logical solution.

The only answer, really.

Yet Arden couldn’t get over a sense of fate. The feeling that she’d been moving toward this point, this place, for many, many months. Ever since her parents’ murders. Even when she was in New Mexico mixing drinks, she’d subconsciously known this time was coming.

A return to her roots.

A return to the past, to Lake County, Ohio,

Unanswered questions and home always called you back.

Trepidation had been hammering deep in her belly for a long time now. If she were to unzip her sweatshirt she felt sure she’d be able to see the outline of her heart, thudding away.

She hadn’t seen another car for thirty minutes.

When she was young, she never noticed how claustrophobic the landscape was. How the hills and trees seemed to cave in on you, push you down, how they hid so much of the sky. When she was a child, they’d felt sheltering.

Now, as she moved down the highway, passing familiar signposts, the dark shadows that lined the road seemed threatening. Seemed to be hiding something from her rather than protecting her. From the corner of her eye, the shadows assumed familiar shapes.

Of people.

Faces. Arms. Hands. Fingers.

Suddenly, there was the McRainy farm on the left. Carson’s on the right. A white cross with plastic flowers where three high school kids had stepped from this life into the next.

It made her think about church and vacation Bible school. Sitting in a pew as a kid, hair wet from her morning bath, singing hymns.

Was life just one giant brainwash? From the cradle to the grave? One giant magician’s trick of illusions and delusions? With a reality that was always shifting depending on the light and your mood and what you’d eaten for breakfast that day? Were the dark shapes at the side of the road something sinister that came out only at night? When the sun rose, would they shift, change, become acceptable and non-threatening?

Did every human being have the capacity to be a monster?

Quit thinking. Just quit thinking.

But the feeling of despair that was wrapping around her chest kept swelling until it was almost too big for her body.

She wanted to wake somebody up.

Who?

Eli?

And tell him what?

Franny?

She needed to sleep.

Harley?

Harley’s reality was so skewed right now that he probably thought they were on a field trip.

Night was sad.

Just past midnight wasn’t bad, because it was almost the old day. One a.m. and even two a.m. weren’t bad, because the bars were still open. People were still out, imitating the celebration of life.

But the hour that hit somewhere around four a.m… That hour was brutal. That was when the world shut down and people went into a twisted, troubled realm of sleep. That was when your soul seemed to drown and despair became something you could taste…

No wonder children were so afraid of sleep, of dreams. Because dreams could be so much more solid, so much more vivid than real life. How did you explain that to a child? Explain that a world you’d just left, the one you could taste and feel, the one with emotions bigger than you could ever possibly experience in waking life… how could you explain to a small child that that wasn’t the real world? That
this
world, the world of softer edges and guarded emotions, was the real one? How could anyone accept that kind of logic?

Go back to bed. It’s only a dream.

Right. File that along with the things your parents tell you and expect you to believe. File that with the tooth fairy and Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

Go back to sleep. It’s only a dream.

Headlights. Far ahead of her, on top of a hill. They disappeared as the vehicle dipped into a valley, then reappeared.

At first Arden found the light reassuring. Someone else was awake in the middle of the night. Someone else was alive.

But then, as the car drew near and the bright lights weren’t dimmed, the comfort changed to a threat, to a stranger behind the wheel. Maybe drunk. Maybe crazy as hell. Because you never knew. You never knew who was coming at you in the dark.

She flashed her lights.

No response.

She tried to focus on the side of the road, but her gaze kept going back to the car, to the blinding beams heading in her direction.

And then the car flew past, quickly becoming taillights in the rearview mirror.

An asshole in the night.

The darkest hour is just before the dawn.

She’d always taken that aphorism literally. Now she understood it meant sorrow, grief, and loneliness were most intense in those last few minutes before sunrise.

Maybe constant darkness would be best. So you never had to deal with the reminder of time, of the death of the night.

Suddenly she was there. At the one-room schoolhouse that marked where she turned south onto the hard road.

Hard road was what they called the country roads that weren’t gravel or pavement. Hard roads fell apart in the spring. If the ground froze especially deep, they got soft spots in them that could swallow a tractor.

Arden used to imagine a world underneath the black surface. Everything hollow, like a shell, with tracks that led from building to building.

Maybe the idea wasn’t so far-fetched. A hidden world like that.

She kept the little hatchback wagon going at about thirty-five miles per hour. You never knew when you might come over a hill and see a deer in the middle of the road. Or turn a corner to find that someone’s cows had gotten out during the night.

Cattle could see at night. A lot of people didn’t know that.

When she was little, she used to ride in the pasture with her dad, making one final late-night check on the calving heifers before her father would turn in for a few hours of sleep until the next round.

At first you wouldn’t see anything, because the cows were black. Then, suddenly, the headlights would hit their pupils just right, and it would look as if they had no eyes, just these pits that seemed to swallow the light.

“Why do their eyes look like that, Daddy?” she would ask.

“So they can see at night.”

“They can see us, but we can’t see them?” she asked.

“That’s the ticket.”

“I don’t like that.”

He’d laughed at her fear.

As she slowed the car, she peered hard, trying to see into the darkness, watching for the gravel lane that led to the house.

Something moved in front of her. She slowed the car to a crawl. A possum, waddling across the road. Another nocturnal creature.

The gravel road appeared.

She turned. The car bounced down a steep hill, then leveled out. Her passengers groaned and shifted uncomfortably, but didn’t wake.

The lane was in bad shape. There was only one house on it, and nobody had paid for fresh grading or gravel after the last spring thaw and rains. Tree branches and brush had grown in from both sides, making the narrow road much narrower. Plants had sprouted from the roadbed. Trumpet vine and milkweed, winterkilled but still nasty. To the car’s left, she spotted a cluster of thistle that had gone to seed. It gave her a sick feeling in her stomach.

Thistle could take over an entire pasture in no time, leaving nothing for the cattle to eat. Her dad had fought it most of his life, using a spade to attack each individual plant. Of course, that didn’t do much good when your neighbor sat on his porch, playing his guitar, letting his damn thistle take over the countryside while his cattle stood gaunt and waterless in feedlots with no shade.

People are stupid. People deserve to die.

Not her voice. Somebody else’s.

Albert French.

The neighbor’s dead-pile could get ten feet high at lambing time. Her dad had called the Humane Society on him several times, but he’d never been charged with anything. He poisoned the streams and killed the fish with his hog confinement runoff, but all he ever got was a warning.

There was a brotherhood in the country, and neighbors tended to look the other way when they saw signs of animal cruelty and neglect. And who cared about the pesticides? It was the nation’s best-kept secret that Midwest farm country was one huge toxic waste dump.

The man on the radio was still talking, now about the moon and the tides and how humans were made up of sixty percent water. How the brain was seventy percent, and the lungs were ninety.

“Did you ever think about that?” he asked seductively. “What effect the moon has on your body? Because it has to have a powerful effect. Consider the woman’s body. Consider her monthly cycle. It’s the moon. Way up there, doing things to you way down here.”

She believed him, because he had the kind of voice that made you believe.

Like Albert French made you believe.

She spotted the rusty wire fence that marked the boundary of the farm.

The mailbox was still there, with the name Davis in rough black letters. She could make out the faint, backward
S
her brother had painted when he was six or seven.

She turned, guiding the car between the corner posts covered with bare vines. Poison ivy, which choked everything and could get as big as a tree. You’d spray it and chop it and think you were rid of it, but it never went away. The roots just hid deep in the ground, spreading out for thirty yards, right under your feet.

The two-story farmhouse stood in the glow of the twin headlight beams. Like everything else, the house seemed to be sprouting out of the ground, the crumbling chimney giving the structure a cartoony list, like a plant in heavy bloom.

There was the massive oak in the front yard, complete with tire swing that would fill with water when it rained. Sometimes snakes liked to curl up in the cool darkness of the tire.

Oh, the illusion of the bucolic.

They’d all bought into it. The idea that a farm could be a special place, an oasis from the rest of the world where bad things didn’t happen.

But she’d brought the bad things with her.

Who had said that? Who had told her that?

Who had blamed her for everything that had happened there, when she was already blaming herself?

Her brother. Daniel.

Daniel, who had painted the backward S.

The house stared back at her with black, empty eyes.