Dream Boy (11 page)

Before Martin, the old Lucas house had been a faded gray. The green roof was flaking, the shutters dangling off their hinges. Each summer, the neighbors reported the lawn as a rat hazard and the town came with a John Deere to mow it down.

Now the lawn was short. The green roof was newly shingled, and the rest of the house was painted a sunny daffodil that still looked wet. I rang the bell and waited for the house to dissolve in a puff of fairy dust.

“You look perfect!” Martin grinned when he opened the door. He probably would have said the same thing if I’d shown up in a clown suit, but I’d worn a green T-shirt and a black skirt—the flouncy kind, like hippies wear. “What do you think of the house? It’s great, right?”

“It’s great,” I said. And it was, like something from a magazine. I stood on the porch, suddenly afraid to go inside. What if the house really
did
disappear, and we all disappeared with it?

“You’re probably the whole reason I’m even in this house,” Martin said.

I gave him a blank look.

“You know,” he said, leaning against the door. A real door. Oak.

“Uh…” I said, not sure why it was so hard to be straight with him. I took a breath. “No, actually, I don’t.”

“That dream,” he lowered his voice, “with my house.”

I racked my brain. I remembered a week or so ago waking up with the feeling that something was about to happen in a dream, something about Josh…Josh, who was of course Martin. But Nick had burst in and started talking to me before I was even fully conscious, and the dream, like so many others, had drifted away—a snowflake, one of thousands.

“You don’t remember,” Martin said. “You had the dream. It was
yours
. But it’s
my
memory?”

“Lots of people can’t remember their dreams,” I said. I could still hear the hissing from the last dream I
did
remember.

“But it’s funny, isn’t it? You make everything happen, but it isn’t real to you. I’m the one who remembers.”

“I don’t make everything happen,” I said. If I did, I’d have done some home improvements of my own. “I don’t make
anything
happen. What was it about? The dream?”

“We were on the street, walking toward each other. You were wearing an old-fashioned dress and I was in a sailor uniform. Everything looked like the color had been drained out of it. Just white or gray. Except the house. It was lit up, golden. When we got close enough that we could almost touch, you turned and started up the walkway. I went after you, but the dream washed out.”

I could see every detail. In my mind, I translated it to a sketch, the house colored in like my childish drawings that my grandma kept on her refrigerator even after the colors faded and the edges curled. I wondered, briefly, about the way dreams faded and curled under the light of morning—what I remembered, what I didn’t. It was like I had a whole other life I didn’t know about, a life someone had erased.

“Martin, is she here? I thought the idea was for her to meet
us
.”

“Coming!”

Martin led me down a hallway and into a large, airy kitchen where his mother stood over a cutting board piled with fresh herbs. She wore her hair red and spiky and she had these thin, rectangular glasses that made her look like a German architect. Which, of course, she was. (An architect, anyway, not German.)

“Welcome!” She came over and shook my hand. Warm. And real. “Martin’s told us everything about you.”

“A lot of things,” Martin said. “Not everything.” He smiled at her almost the way a kid would smile at a mother, but not quite.

“Pretty,” his mother said. “And not overdone. I like that. You know, Annabelle, I feel like I know you from somewhere…Like I’ve known you forever.”

I smiled, but my smile wasn’t exactly normal, either.

“I’m Lynn,” she said. “Bob will be down in a minute. He’s just finishing something in his office.”

“What’s he finishing?” I didn’t mean to be too nosy, but I was curious. I’d asked Martin about his parents, but his answers had been incomplete and he kept changing them, like when you’re filling in a multiple-choice question on a test and you can’t decide between A or D.

“He’s writing a magazine essay about home renovation,” she said. She snorted in a way that made me feel somehow better. “‘Write what you know,’ they say.”

“The house is lovely,” I said.

“Thanks to my lovely wife,” said Martin’s dad, who appeared at the door in a black T-shirt and jeans. He was tall and had the same blue eyes as Martin, the same wavy hair that looked like he’d just combed his fingers through it. “She always has just the right touch. You should see what she did to our place in Philly.”

“Was that a big house, too?” I asked.

Lynn froze, her eyebrows together. She craned her neck around to look at Bob. “An apartment, wasn’t it?”

He nodded. “Right. An apartment in Philly. You know, the rat race.” He dropped his hands and took a seat at the counter. “That’s why we came here, a fresh start. Out with the old, in with the new. Or, in this case, I suppose, in with the remodeled. All it really needed was some fresh paint, some Mexican tiles, and new toilets.”

“Don’t talk about toilets in front of Annabelle,” Lynn said. “We just met her.”

“It’s okay. You said you felt like you’d known me forever,” I said. They both laughed, like I was on late-night TV.

“Well,” Lynn said, “the gazpacho is ready and I just need to finish up the spinach tartlet. Martin, why don’t you show Annabelle around? But don’t take her away for too long.”

“Your parents,” I said, when we were out of earshot. “They’re really—nice.” Which was, I guess, what I’d have said about anybody’s parents. But they genuinely
were
. They seemed to really like—love?—each other. Yeah, they were a little hazy on where they’d lived last week. But so what? “They’re so happy.”

“They’re my parents,” he said, with a shrug.

“But they haven’t
always
been your parents.”

“As far as they know, they have,” he said.

“Don’t they remember anything from before?” I asked.

“I don’t think so. They have memories,” he added, watching my face. “I’m just not sure the memories are real.”

“But
you
remember where you really came from. Why do you remember when they don’t?” I finished.

“I have a theory,” he said. “Come on. We can talk in my room.” I had a million questions, but my old questions kept getting replaced with new ones.
Do
all
dream-people know when they’re in someone’s dream? Do they wear clothes when they arrive or do they show up in their birthday suits? What was the deal with that freaky girl and all those snakes?

I followed Martin upstairs to his bedroom—a generic, catalog bedroom. Inside was a single bed, neatly made, a rolltop desk, where his schoolbooks were stacked, a wooden wardrobe, and heavy navy curtains that blocked the light.

“So what’s your theory?” I asked.

“I think they came with me,” Martin said, “like it’s part of what happens. I know for a fact that Bob was a dream. I remember him. But it’s like both he and Lynn got blanked out. They know nothing about where we really came from, but they have these odd recollections of our ‘real’ life as a family. A vacation we took to the Grand Canyon, stuff like that. Only I’ve never been to the Grand Canyon, at least not that
I
can remember. Lynn says I rode a mule named Juliet, but then, well, you saw it—both she and Bob have no idea where we supposedly lived in Philadelphia. There are things they just avoid talking about. I think their memories are…what was it you called me that first day? Prepackaged?”

I walked to the window and looked out. Someone’s sheepdog was on the loose and peeing on the boxwood hedge across the street. “So how—”

“You know what a wake is?” he cut in.

“Yeah.” I turned back to face him. “We had one when my grandma died.”

“I don’t think so,” he answered, confused. “Wake: you know, from a boat?” Which got me thinking about the snakes again.

“That’s what Stephanie calls it—the wake. She thinks her mom was swept along in the wake of her arrival. Just kind of plucked from the slipstream.”

I had seen Stephanie’s mom at a Back-to-School night. Serena said she’d been a beauty queen. She was all done up and glossy. But also somehow flat—no laugh lines. I’d heard Stephanie complain about her a thousand times, which is a lot given that we didn’t really speak.

“They have a…I guess you’d call it a ‘backstory,’” Martin went on. “But they get confused if you ask too many questions.”

“Weird,” I said. And it was. “Speaking of questions. I had a dream last night. A really vivid one. I was on a boat with these snakes and—”

“It wasn’t our boat, was it?” he asked.

“I think it was. And then the snakes all got together and formed this ginormous snake, only I think it was really her. It’s like they were all laughing at me.” Even though they sounded absurd when I heard the words spilling from my mouth, it was a relief to finally get them out. Like once I did, they didn’t have the power to hurt me.

“It’s stupid,” I said. “I’ve had nightmares before. Just not like this one. At least not since you.”

His smile melted me. “Was I a nightmare, then?”

I shoved him, playfully, the way I shove Will. “You know you weren’t.”

He stepped closer then, taking my hand and drawing it slowly back to his shoulder. He placed it where I had pushed him a moment before—but so gently that it was like a small bird landing on a stalk of wheat.

“Can you make them stop? The nightmares?” I asked.

“I wish. But how can I? I’m here now.”

We sat down on his perfectly made bed and he held my hand in his, rubbing my palm with his thumb. How many times had my mother eased me back to bed after a nightmare with those very words?
It
was
just
a
dream. I’m here now.

I thought about Martin’s theory and what else might be here in the wake of his arrival. Like a single stone tossed in a lake—the ripples just keep spreading out.

Martin leaned in for a long, hard, movie kiss.

“I’ve been waiting all day to do that,” he said.

I tried to get my breath back but it didn’t come. He pressed his face to mine again and I was back in a dream, a good one. But something about it didn’t feel right. It was too perfect, if that’s possible. Like I wasn’t me sitting there, but some ideal version of me—and his kiss could make me forget the other me, the one who’s not ideal.

“Here. Let me show you something.”

Standing, he went to his wardrobe and pulled out a dress. “For homecoming,” he said, holding the dress out to me. “It’s perfect, right? I thought it was perfect. I picked it out myself.”

So now Prince Charming was my fairy godmother, too? I thought about him on one knee in the cafeteria. Maybe all of his dreamers had wanted a fairy tale. Maybe I had, too. But not this part.

The dress was a puffy chiffon explosion in Pepto-Bismol pink. “Oh!” I exclaimed, standing up. I took the dress in front of me and studied myself on the full-length mirror attached to the inside of the wardrobe door. It looked like I should be starring in a douche commercial.

“It was my mom’s idea,” Martin said. “Because I told her things were…tight at your house.”

I hadn’t mentioned that to him—at least I don’t think I had. But maybe I’d been thinking about it more than I realized. “How did you know my size?” I said. “Most guys wouldn’t.”

“I’m very observant.”

“Well, thanks. This is great.” I lay the pink ruffled monster down on the bed and hugged Martin.

“So you like it?”

I answered with a kiss, so I wouldn’t have to lie. A part of me wondered if Martin had been doing the same thing.

Martin was waiting on my porch when Serena pulled into my driveway the next afternoon. She and Talon were dropping me off after our standard Wednesday post-school hangout at the coffee shop. The Doctor had recommended a weekly “gal friends decompression session,” so Talon’s father paid for our lattes and pastries. Serena got her sugar fix, I got more C
8
H
10
N
4
O
2
than was good for me, and Talon got “enhanced mental health,” aka, the pleasure of using her dad’s credit card with abandon.

Leaning back against the porch post, Martin looked like he belonged in the Men of Chilton superstud calendar that the Junior League puts out each year. “Ladies!” he said as Talon stepped out of the passenger seat.

He bounded up to Serena’s Beetle and helped me out of the backseat like he was escorting Cinderella from her carriage. Then, with a flourish, he presented me with a large paper shopping bag.

“Your dress!” he pronounced.

When I looked clueless, he added, “The one I got you for homecoming.”

“Right!” I tried to sound enthusiastic. I don’t know if it was my subconscious talking to me or not, but I’d ended up forgetting the dress at Martin’s house when he’d driven me home. And I’d spent a good bit of the morning purposefully continuing to forget it.

But here it was, like a homing pigeon, back in my hands.

“I thought you picked the perfect dress.” Talon turned to Martin. “She’s already picked the perfect dress.”

Martin looked at me. “You didn’t tell me that last night.”

“I had other things on my mind,” I said. “Anyway, it was a beautiful gesture and I didn’t want to hurt your feelings by telling you I already had a dress.”

“But now it’s like I’ve hurt yours.” His shoulders visibly slumped.

“Aw,” said Serena. I could tell it was taking all her self-control to keep from springing out of the driver’s seat and giving him a hug.

“Well, listen, Martin.” Talon was speaking for me again. “What you did was nice. I mean, nobody does it, but it was lovely. And, Annabelle, not saying anything about it was also lovely, but I think you two need to stop being lovely and talk to each other.”

“Thanks for the insights, Doctor,” I said. “We talk.”

“All of the time,” Martin agreed.

“You know what?” I said. “I’m wearing Martin’s dress.”

“Only if you want to,” Martin said. He looked at Talon as if for guidance.

She nodded. Beside her, Serena nodded, too. Of course, they might not have if they’d seen what was inside the bag.

“So, we gotta get,” Serena said, as Talon climbed back in the passenger seat. “But I want to see you in your dress, Annabelle. Send me pics!”

Serena’s Beetle backed out of the driveway. I waved. Martin waved. I watched him from the corner of my eye, amazed at how perfectly he fit onto the canvas of this world. The soft rise of the mountains behind him, the sun lowering toward the horizon, the sky a lacy blue—and there, below, Martin. Perfect, beautiful Martin, waving like a politician on a parade float.

We went inside; Nick was doing his homework at the kitchen table. I was half hoping he would call Martin “fart breath,” but he just said “hey” and went back to his math.

“Martin and I are going to my room,” I told my mother.

“You can’t stay down here?” my mother said.

“I want to show him something.”

“Leave the door open.” She smiled, but not with her eyes.

“Why does she want us to leave the door open?” he asked when we were upstairs. He sat down on the edge of the bed, but I pulled him down so we were both sitting on the floor—which seemed safer, considering my mom’s exceptional radar when it came to me and boys. I hoped he couldn’t see under the bed. It had been too long since I vacuumed under there, and the dust balls swirled like small galaxies.

“Because she doesn’t want us fooling around,” I said.

“Oh.” He smiled a little.

“What?”

“There’s a lot of that in dreams, you know. Things are different here.”

“In a good way or a bad way?” I asked.

“I like it here. But there are some things I miss.”

“Tell me more about
there
,” I said. “The place you come from.”

He let out a puff of air. “I don’t even know where to start.”

“The beginning’s usually good,” I suggested.

“That’s just it,” he said. “For most dreams there are no real beginnings. Only middles. Then we just sort of…drift.”

“It sounds…” I searched for the right word. “Peaceful?”

“No,” said Martin. “It’s like being empty, but there’s an awfulness to it, too. Limbo. But worse than limbo. You’re not your own.” His eyes turned dark, and his right hand clenched and unclenched like a pulse. “Even when you’re in a dream, living, sometimes you might as well be invisible. A girl might dream she’s on a train. She sits there with an empty notebook on her lap and a Miss Piggy toothbrush sticking out of the backpack and she hardly even notices all the people around her. But they’re there.”

Wait. I’d had that toothbrush when I was eight. I was pretty sure I had also had a dream about a train, though I couldn’t quite recall it. It hovered carefully on the edge of my memory like one of those tiny plastic toy birds that balances on its beak.

“And those people stay there,” he went on, “riding train after train. They don’t just show up in her kitchen the next morning.”

“So you’re saying I was lucky.”

“I’m saying
I
was lucky. It was…listen, you know how you feel about Chilton?”

I thought about my map-dot of a town. Beautiful enough, but nothing happening. No energy. No pulse.

“But how would you feel about it if you couldn’t,” he reached out for my lucky river rock from my bedside table and held it between his finger and thumb, “if you couldn’t even decide whether or not to pick up a rock? Maybe you’d want to pick it up, just hold it for a second, but that wasn’t your role. Or maybe you’d be compelled to pick it up, and then in another second, it might turn into a feather or a bullet or a chunk of ice. You couldn’t decide about anything. And that’s the
good
time. Most of the time, you’re…nowhere,” he said. “You wait and drift. It’s like you’re not alive.”

I thought about my recent dreams, when I’d tried to yell, but with no sound, when I’d tried to move, but my wrists remained trapped. I thought about the people at my mother’s nursing home, the people who just sat on chairs, their walkers in front of them but nobody going anywhere. They were like statues that breathed. Alive, but not.

“And you couldn’t go anywhere,” I said.

His eyes got a lighter, mischievous look. “We did find a few ways to pass the time,” he said. “Diving. We weren’t supposed to.”

“Diving. Like diving in water?”

“Sort of,” he said. “It’s more like…Have you ever had a dream and all of a sudden someone shows up who doesn’t fit in? Maybe you’re in your elementary school and a fireman drops from the ceiling and does the hula and then disappears.”

I knew exactly what he was talking about. I thought about the first time I’d seen Martin in a dream. He was Josh, then. I was dreaming about my dad in Alaska, and all of a sudden Josh showed up, just for a few seconds, like an eagle on top of a glacier. Then he’d disappeared. I always thought that was just the nature of dreams.

“That’s dream diving,” Martin said. “It’s kind of like bungee jumping or something, but without the cord. We push ourselves into someone’s dream, just to see what’s happening, just to live—or almost live. It’s a rush, like football. We can’t sustain it, though.”

“You dove into my dream?”

He nodded.

“Just popped in out of the blue?”

Martin smiled self-consciously. “I’d seen you before, on that train. But you didn’t notice me.”

“No way,” I said, taking a long look at him. His perfectly sculpted face, his muscular body. “How could I have
not
noticed you?”

He shrugged. “Guess you were looking at something else.”

“So that time in Alaska, you were in my dream
on
purpose
. It wasn’t just chance. I didn’t invent you.”

“You did and you didn’t,” he said. “I was already there, or someone like the person I am now. But your dreaming gave me…
more
, if that makes sense. And those other times—on the street outside my house, at the lake—you called me back. I didn’t mind,” he added quickly. “I was glad to go. More than glad. I wanted to see you. And I wanted to…I wanted to get out.”

“Yeah, I know that feeling,” I murmured, thinking of all the hours I’d fantasized about leaving the grit of Chilton, Virginia, behind me. Like my dad. Why couldn’t I follow my bliss for a change?

“It’s a rush, you know?” he said. “A release. Once you do it, it’s kind of addictive—it’s hard to stop. There are some dreams—the bad ones—that don’t stop with diving. They want it to be
their
dream. To own it. Control it.”

Like the girl, I wondered. Was that what she wanted?

“Why did you keep coming back?” I said. It was a leading question, but I wanted to hear him say it.

“You were special,” he said. “I guess maybe I got addicted. To you.”

He leaned forward to hug his knees, and I studied the tattoo of little waves at the back of his neck, the one I’d seen in Will’s photograph.

“Those waves. Do they stand for anything?” I asked. Again I had the feeling that I’d seen them somewhere before.

“What?” He sat up, slapping his hand over the tattoo, as if it were a mosquito.

“Well, like Talon’s tattoo. She’s got a Celtic friendship wheel. It represents the complex lives of friends.”

“Oh. Do you have one?”

“My mom won’t let me,” I said, though to be honest I was kind of glad. I hated needles. “What does yours mean?”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” he said.

“Maybe it has something to do with the water,” I said. “That’s where we first kissed.”

“That could be it,” he said. His voice sounded funny, but I didn’t push it. “You told your mom you wanted to show me something,” he added, clearly changing the subject.

“My drawings,” I stood and walked over to the bulging cardboard portfolio on top of the table in the corner of my room. He couldn’t read my mind anymore, but maybe looking at these would let him back in.

Martin joined me at the table and hefted the portfolio into his arms.

“You did all of these? That’s amazing.” He put the portfolio down and started to unwind the cord that held it shut.

“Thanks,” I said, stilling his hand, second-guessing myself. Half the time I didn’t let Will see my drawings, even after they were done. “Let’s look at them later. I don’t know why I brought it up.”

“But I’d like to—”

“No, really,” I said. “Later. Please.” I took him by the wrist and led him back with me to the window seat. “Hey, I have a question: what about stuff?”

“Stuff?” he asked.

“You know, like all the stuff in your house. Where’d it come from? Did it just show up as part of the whole ‘wake’ thing?”

He shook his head. “I guess you’d say Lynn is…efficient. The woman can shop.”

“But it must have cost a fortune. The house, the repairs, everything.” I knew it was tacky to mention even the concept of cash, but I couldn’t help myself. “Where’d the money come from?”

“I asked my parents the same question when we bought my car, but they just act like it’s all taken care of. They got a loan.”

“How could they possibly—”

“Lynn can be pretty convincing. It’s sort of like the mind-reading thing you and I had going. When we first got here, Lynn was pretty hard—okay, let’s say impossible—to resist. You just did what she said. You just did.”

“Geez…” I whistled.
Introducing
the
Amazing
Lynn
Zirkle, hypnotist extraordinaire.

Martin scooted me closer and then slipped his hand down to my hip. “Look, I know a bunch of this doesn’t make sense. But that’s not the most important thing, is it?”

He was right. The most important thing was that he was here. With his hand on my hip. He leaned in, brushing his lips against my ear.

My mother’s make-out radar went off like a buzzer.

“Annabelle!” she called from downstairs.

“Yeah?” I called back.

“Will’s here.”

“Oh,” I said quietly.
Oh.
Will and I got together every Wednesday to watch
The
Wild
Side
. Tonight they were releasing a geriatric game show host, a singer, and a slutty reality show star in the middle of the Grand Canyon with nothing but a loaded backpack, a llama, and a camera crew.

Martin’s hand slid from my body. “Will’s here,” he repeated.

I stood and pulled Martin to his feet. “Come on.”