The Dream Thieves (38 page)

Gansey replayed the argument from the night before. It felt worse this time around.

“I can’t find Adam,” Gansey told Helen. She’d been dozing in an armchair in the upstairs study, but when she saw his face, she sat up without complaint.

“Does he have a cell phone?” Helen asked.

Gansey shook his head and said, in a smaller voice, “We fought.” He didn’t want to have to explain further.

Helen nodded. He didn’t say anything else.

She helped him look in the trickier places: the cars in the garage, the attic crawl space, the rooftop patio on the east wing.

There was no place for him to have gone. This wasn’t a walking neighborhood; the closest coffee shop or retail area or congregation of women in yoga pants was three miles away, accessed by busy four- and six-lane northern Virginia streets. They were two hours from Henrietta by car.

He had to be here, but he wasn’t.

The entire day felt imaginary: the Camaro news this morning, Adam lost this afternoon. This wasn’t happening.

“Dick,” Helen said, “do you have any ideas?”

“He doesn’t disappear,” Gansey replied.

“Don’t panic.”

“I’m not panicking.”

Helen looked at her brother. “Yes, you are.”

He called Ronan (
Pick up, pick up, for once pick up
) and he called 300 Fox Way (
Is Blue there? No? Has Adam — Coca-Cola T-shirt — called?
).

After that, it was no longer only Gansey and Helen. It was Gansey and Helen, Mr. Gansey and Mrs. Gansey, Margo the housekeeper and Delano the neighborhood gateman. It was a discreet call placed to Richard Gansey II’s friend at the police department. It was evening plans silently shunted aside. It was a small force of private vehicles canvassing the nearby shaded streets and crowded shopping districts.

His father drove a ’59 Tatra, a Czech specimen rumored to have once belonged to Fidel Castro, while Gansey cradled his phone in the passenger seat. Despite the air-conditioning, his palms sweated. The true Gansey huddled deep inside his body so that he could keep his face composed.

He left. He left. He left.

At seven p.m., as the thunderheads began to build over the suburbs and as Richard Gansey II once more circled the beautiful, green streets of Georgetown, Gansey’s phone rang — an unfamiliar northern Virginia number.

He snatched it up. “Hello?”

“Gansey?”

And with that, relief melted through him, liquefying his joints. “Jesus, Adam.”

Gansey’s father was looking at him, so he nodded, once. Immediately, his father started looking for a place to pull over.

“I couldn’t remember your number,” Adam said miserably. He was trying so hard to make his voice sound ordinary that it sounded dreadful. He either didn’t or couldn’t suppress his Henrietta accent.

It’s going to be all right.

“Where are you?”

“I don’t know.” Then, a little quieter, to someone else, “Where am I?”

The phone was passed to the other person; Gansey heard the sound of cars rushing by in the background. A woman’s voice asked, “Hello? Are you a friend of this kid?”

“Yes.”

The woman on the other end of the phone explained how she and her husband had stopped by the side of the interstate. “It looked like there was a body. No one else was stopping. Are you close by? Can you come get him? We’re near exit seven on 395 south.”

Gansey’s mind shifted abruptly to adjust his image of Adam’s surroundings. They had been nowhere close. It hadn’t even occurred to him to look that far away.

Richard Gansey II had overheard. “That’s south of the Pentagon! That’s got to be fifteen miles from here.”

Gansey pointed to the road, but his father was already checking the traffic to make a U-turn. When he turned, the evening sun suddenly came full in the windshield, blinding both of them momentarily. As one, they both threw up a hand to block the light.

“We’re coming,” Gansey told the phone.

It’s going to be all right.

“He might need a doctor.”

“Is he hurt?”

The woman paused. “I don’t know.”

But it wasn’t all right. Adam said absolutely nothing to Gansey. Not while curled in the backseat of the car. Not while sitting at the kitchen table as Margo brought him coffee. Not after standing by the sofa with the phone clutched to his ear, talking to a doctor, one of the Ganseys’ old family friends.

Nothing.

He’d always been able to fight for so much longer than anyone else.

Finally, he stood in front of Gansey’s parents, chin lifted but eyes faraway, and said, “I’m very sorry for all the trouble.”

Later, he fell asleep sitting up on the end of that same sofa. Without any particular discussion, the Gansey family in its entirety moved the conversation to the upstairs study, out of earshot. Although several engagements had been canceled and Helen had missed a flight to Colorado that evening, no one had mentioned the inconvenience. And they never would. It was the Gansey way.

“What did the doctor call it?” Mrs. Gansey asked, sitting in the armchair Helen had slept in earlier. In the green light through the verdant lampshade beside her, she looked like Helen, which was to say she looked like Gansey, and also to say she looked a little bit like her husband. All of the Ganseys sort of looked like one another, like a dog that begins to look like its owner, or vice versa.

“Transient global amnesia,” Helen replied. She had listened to the phone conversation and following discussion with great interest. Helen very much enjoyed climbing down into other people’s lives and muddling about there with a pail and a shovel and possibly one of those old-fashioned striped bathing suits with the legs and arms. “Two- to six-hour episodes. Can’t remember anything past the last minute. But the victims — that was Foz’s word, not mine — apparently know they’re losing time while it’s happening.”

“That sounds dreadful,” said Mrs. Gansey. “Does it get worse?”

Helen doodled on the desk blotter with a two-inch pencil. “Apparently not. Some people only have one episode. Some people get them all the time, like migraines.”

“And it’s stress related?” Richard Gansey II broke in. Although he didn’t know Adam well, his concern ran deep and genuine. Adam was his son’s friend, and so he had inherent worth. “Dick, do you know what he might be stressed about?”

It was clear this was a problem that all of the Ganseys were intent on solving before Gansey returned to Henrietta with Adam.

“He just moved out of his parents’ house,” Gansey said. He had started to say
trailer
, but he didn’t like to think of what his own parents would do with that visual. He thought for a moment and then added, “His father beat him.”

“Jesus Christ,” his father remarked. Then: “Why do they let these people breed?”

Gansey just looked at his father. For a long moment, nothing was said.

“Richard,” his mother chastised.

“Where is he staying now?” his father asked. “With you?”

He couldn’t know how much or why this question smarted. Gansey shook his head. “I tried. He’s staying at a room that belongs to St. Agnes — a local church.”

“Is it legal? Does he have a car?”

“He’ll be eighteen in a few months. And no.”

“It would be better if he stayed with you,” Richard Gansey II observed.

“He won’t. He just won’t. Adam has to do everything himself. He won’t take anything that looks like a handout. He’s paying his own way through school. He works three jobs.”

The other Gansey faces were approving. The family as a whole enjoyed charm and pluck, and this idea of Adam Parrish, self-made man, appealed to them immensely.

“But he has to have a car,” Mrs. Gansey said. “That would surely help. Can we not give him a little something to help him get one?”

“He won’t take it.”

“Oh, surely if we say —”

“He won’t take it. I promise you, he will not take it.”

They thought for a long moment, during which Helen drew her name in large letters and his father paged through
A Brief Encyclopedia of World Pottery
and his mother discreetly looked up
transient global amnesia
on her phone and Gansey contemplated just throwing everything he possessed into the Suburban and driving away as fast as he could. A very small, very selfish voice inside Gansey whispered,
What if you left him here, what if you made him find his own way back; what if he had to call you and apologize for once?

Finally, Helen said, “What if I gave him my old college car? The crappy one I’m going to donate to that broken-car charity if he doesn’t want it. He’d be saving me the trouble of arranging the tow!”

Gansey frowned. “Which crappy car?”

“Obviously, I would
obtain
one,” Helen replied, drawing a fifty-eight-foot yacht on the blotter. “And say it was mine.”

The older Ganseys adored the idea. Mrs. Gansey was already on the phone. The collective mood had buoyed with the implementation of this plan. Gansey felt it would take more than a car to relieve Adam’s stress, but the truth was that he
did
need a vehicle. And if Adam really did buy Helen’s story, it wouldn’t hurt a damn thing.

Gansey couldn’t shake the image of Adam by the side of the interstate, walking, walking, walking. Knowing he was forgetting what he was doing, but unable to stop. Unable to remember Gansey’s number, even when people
did
stop to help.

I don’t need your wisdom, Gansey.

So there was nothing he could do about it.

O
kay, Princess,” Kavinsky said, presenting a six-pack to Ronan. “Show me what you can do.”

They were back in the clearing near the fairgrounds. It was hazy, shimmering, dazed in the heat. This was a place for more dream math. One hundred white Mitsubishis. Two dozen fake licenses. Two of them.

One day.

Two? Three?

Time had no meaning. Days were irrelevant. They marked time with dreams.

The first one had been just a pen. Ronan woke in the frosty air-conditioning of the passenger seat, his fingers motionless over a slender plastic pen balanced on his chest. As always, he hovered above himself, a paralyzed non-participant in his own life. The speaker thumped out something that sounded good-natured, offensive, and Bulgarian. Biting flies clung hopefully to the exterior of the windshield. Kavinsky wore his white sunglasses, because he was awake.

“Wow, man, this is … a pen.” Taking the pen from beneath Ronan’s unprotesting fingers, Kavinsky tried it out on the dashboard. There was something dazzling about his total disregard for his own property. “What’s this shit, man? Looks like the Declaration of Independence.”

Just as in the dream, the pen wrote everything in a dainty cursive, no matter how the user held it. Kavinsky quickly bored of its single-minded magic. He tapped the pen on Ronan’s teeth along with the Bulgarian beat until feeling came back to Ronan’s hands and he was able to knock it away.

Ronan thought it wasn’t bad for a dream object produced on command. But Kavinsky regarded the pen scornfully.

“Watch this.” Producing a green pill, he flicked it into his mouth and washed it down with some beer. Pulling off his sunglasses, he pressed his knuckles into one of his eyes, grimacing. Then he was asleep.

Ronan watched him sleep, head thrown to the side, tapping pulse visible through the skin of his neck.

Kavinsky’s pulse stopped.

And then, with a violent start, Kavinsky jerked awake, one of his hands fisted. His mouth cracked into a grin at Ronan’s surprise. With a theatric twist of his hand, he presented his dream object. A pen cap. He twitched his fingers until Ronan handed over the dream-pen.

The cap, of course, fit perfectly. Right size, right color, right sheen to the plastic. And why shouldn’t it be perfect? Kavinsky was known for his forgery.

“Amateur,” Kavinsky said. “
This
is the way to dream back Gansey’s balls for him.”

“Is this going to be a thing?” Ronan demanded. He was angry, but not as angry as he would’ve been before he started drinking. He put his fingers on the door handle, ready to get out. “Like, is this going to be what’s funny to you? Because I don’t want this that bad. I can figure it out myself.”