Dreamland (6 page)

The
this
Rina was referring to was my mother's new Victorian decorating scheme, which consisted mostly of wreaths, sprigs of dried flowers hanging from the walls, and various knicknacks—thimbles, tiny tea sets, families of glass swans—cluttered on every flat surface. The worst, however, were the Victorian-era dolls she kept ordering from QVC, all of them with porcelain white skin and spooky eyes. They came with their own stands and were suddenly just
everywhere:
in the living room by the magazine rack, on the credenza, with a pack of swans, and even in the guest room, where they were lined up across the bureau, staring blankly at the closet. Sometimes when I couldn't sleep I'd think of them there, just staring in the dark, and shudder all the way down to my toes.

“I told you,” I said to Rina, “my mother's going through some kind of weird adapting phase.” She was out, for once, probably buying more ceramic plaques shaped like apples and houses to hang on the walls.

“What?” Rina said.

I shook my head. “I don't know.” I opened my bedroom door to see a Victorian-style teddy bear sitting on my bed. He was wearing spectacles, a bow tie, and a period vest. Another QVC special.

“Man,” Rina said in a low voice, walking over and picking it up. “Get out the Prozac.”

“Shut up,” I said, grabbing my sweater off the chair. “Let's just go.”

There really was no stopping my mother. Boo had tried, convincing her to take that pottery class at the Community Arts Center on Tuesday nights. The teacher was a woman artist with dreadlocks and a tattoo, and my mother reported to us in a worried tone that she did not shave her legs or underarms. This did not, however, seem to hinder her ability to teach my mother how to make lopsided bowls, ashtrays glazed with smeared reds and greens, and a ribbed tall vase for me that leaned like the Tower of Pisa.

I truly believed that my mother thought she could replace Cass if she filled the house with enough clutter. But no matter what she brought in there was still something missing, which led to more swans, dolls, sprigs, tea sets, ashtrays. My father sighed when he saw the UPS truck pulling away, frowned over the credit card bill, and when my mother was out or not looking, turned the dolls in the living room to face the wall.

“There's something unsettling about all this
staring
,” he explained sheepishly when I caught him one night, crouched by the magazine basket, furtively rearranging the dolls. He looked embarrassed to be even holding one in his arms, the School Marm, her book and slate stuck to her hands with heavy-duty wire.

“I know,” I said. But by breakfast the next morning she, the mother with two children, and the baby in the christening dress were all turned back the right way, as if they'd done it themselves during the night.

My father missed Cass, too, but his loss was more subtle. Things kept coming from Yale: Obviously we were still on the mailing list, so the parents' newsletter and fund-raising requests arrived with regularity. My mother left them on the table by the door without comment and I'd figured my father was throwing them away, until I went into his office one day to look for a pencil sharpener and found them all neatly stacked in a drawer, envelopes not even opened.

The truth was, I was trying not to look too hard at anything. Not at myself, the swans, my mother mouthing the cheers along with me, the crooked ashtrays, the tired look on my father's face when another Yale bulletin came in the mail. It was easier to just float along as if sleeping that whole first part of the year, going through the motions and staring like one of those ghostly dolls, waiting for something to wake me up.

 

It was a game night in October, right around Halloween. We were playing our biggest rival, Central High, at home, and the crowd was huge. We'd been working on a big halftime number for a couple of weeks that involved not only a pyramid but some heavy-duty dancing, a can-can line, and a row of subsequent backflips. This was a Very Big Deal, at least for everyone else.

We were up at the half, and the squad had gone back to the dressing rooms to change into our purple-sequined tops, which my mother, of course, had helped to design and sew. Everyone was nervous as we stood waiting to run out onto the field from the opening under the bleachers. I was cold and convinced that I would blow my backflip as I'd done in practice just the day before, when I landed with a resounding
whump
on my back, knocking the wind out of myself. I just lay there, feeling oozy and strange as I stared up at the rows of retired basketball jerseys, fluttering from the ceiling overhead.

“You'll be fine,” Rina said to me now, grasping my hand and squeezing it. Rina, of course, loved cheerleading. She was a natural. We had still been in pre-season when she started dating the quarterback, and she was the clear crowd favorite, eliciting cheers—mostly male—just for walking out onto the field. Eliza Drake hated her, too.

The band started playing “My Girl,” the squad theme song, and I knew Boo was in the stands, her face twisting, disgusted. The girls in front of me began psyching up, jumping up and down and shaking their pom-poms, as we all started running down the slope to pop out onto the field to the cheers of the crowd. There was a pack of people that was especially into the cheerleaders—mostly guys, girls who hadn't made the squad, and parents—who were sitting right at the overhang where we came out, and as we ran forward they chanted each of our names.

“Eliza!”
they yelled, and Eliza Drake did an impromptu handspring, showing off.

“
Angela!
”

“
Rina!
” And the crowd went wild, screaming and cheering, as Rina turned around and waved one pom-pom, smiling at her public.

I was the last one out.

The music was loud as the cold air hit me, and I was already thinking of my backflip when I heard someone over my head yell,
“Cass!”

I stopped dead in my tracks, causing Caroline Miter, the mascot, to crash right into me. I don't know if everyone was yelling my sister's name: The one voice was the only one I could hear. And for one fleeting, crazy second I thought she must be there, somewhere close, in the places I'd always searched for her in my dreams.

“
Cass!
” the voice yelled again, and I looked up to see a man pumping his fist. He was talking to
me.
His breath was coming out in small white puffs.
“Cass!”

“Come on,” Caroline said to me, her voice muffled under her tiger head as she yanked me by my sleeve out onto the field. “Hurry!”

I scrambled behind her into formation, but I couldn't stop looking at that guy as he yelled my sister's name at me again and again. I was barely aware of the dance routine as I did it, everything in slow motion as the girls squatted and built the pyramid and I climbed up. When I stood, knees wobbling, the crowd was a blur of noise and color in front of me. It was so cold as I reached up to touch the scar over my eye, tracing its length and feeling my pulse there. I tilted my head back and looked up at the stars; I could still hear Cass's name in my head, and suddenly I felt wide awake.

The world is speaking to you every day,
she'd said to me so many times.
You just don't always know how to listen.

I was listening, then. I could hear everything.

“
Cass!
” The guy was still shouting, or maybe he wasn't and I was only dreaming, really dreaming now. I closed my eyes.
“Cass!”

And that is the last thing I remember before falling.

 

It is nothing short of a miracle that Eliza Drake happened to look up and see me begin to fall backward. Regardless of her feelings for me, she jerked out from under Lindsay White, who fell and broke her nose, to stagger backward and catch me. Those new fifteen pounds in her butt and hips most likely saved my life.

When I opened my eyes, my ears were ringing and the first thing I saw was a circle of cheerleaders standing around me in purple sequins, pom-poms limp at their sides. I wondered for a second if I'd died and gone to hell.

“Caitlin?” I turned my head to see a man in a paramedic outfit. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes,” I said, and sat up, slowly. I found out later I'd been lucky enough to fall square on Eliza, who suffered only a bad hip bruise and scraped elbows from catching me. I'd escaped pretty much unscathed, other than some scratches, a bad scrape on my arm, and a cut on my knee that didn't even require stitches. My mother, who herself had almost passed out after seeing me fall, kept telling everyone it was nothing short of a miracle.

When Eliza, Lindsay, and I all finally stood up to walk to the ambulance to get bandaged up, the crowd stood and gave us a standing O. We went on to win the game big, but my topple made everything else anticlimactic.

“It's a miracle,” my mother said to me again as we stood watching the ambulance drive off, a new white bandage wrapped around my knee. I'd already thanked Eliza Drake, who was now somewhat of a hero and suddenly popular, and apologized to Lindsay, who was forced to wear nose splints for two months and subsequently kiss her teen modeling career good-bye. My temporary pyramid insanity, clearly, had serious and far-flung ramifications. “Can you imagine how bad it could have been? What if you'd been seriously injured?”

“I know,” I said.

“You're just so lucky,” she said again, squeezing my arm. “And next game, you'll be right back out there.”

But something had changed in me, even if I didn't know what it was just yet. All I could think was that I felt alive for the first time since my birthday. From wherever she was, Cass had finally spoken to me, reaching out from dreamland to where I stood in this waking world, half-asleep and wobbly, under those bright, bright stars.

 

My mother had wanted me to come right home, sure I had a concussion or at least some broken limb the paramedics had missed, but my father let me go to the team party over her objections. On the way, me, Rina, and another cheerleader named Kelly Brandt stopped at the car wash to vacuum out Kelly's Camaro. The car was trashed; the night before her boyfriend, a tailback named Chad, had gotten sick in the backseat. She'd done the best she could with towels and Lysol spray, but at the car wash we had to get down to business.

“This is so disgusting,” Kelly said between clenched teeth, wiping the seat with the towel. As she did so she sprayed a cloud of Lysol around her head, to balance out the smell. Kelly was a nice girl, kind of a mother hen, and had taken me and Rina on to show us the ropes since she had a year over us and therefore some kind of squad seniority.

She looked out at me and Rina where we were sitting by the vacuum station, smoking cigarettes. I didn't usually, but after the game everyone had been pressing around me, talking about my fall, and I needed something to calm me down. I still felt strange, as if everything was crackling and alive all around me. Kelly said, “I can't believe you're not even helping me.”

“Chad's your boyfriend,” Rina pointed out. “If he was mine, I'd be on puke patrol.”

“Funny,” Kelly growled. She hit the Lysol again, the smell wafting out into the cold air. We were all still in our cheerleading uniforms and the cut on my leg was throbbing a bit under my bandage. The car wash was deserted.

“You know he's just going to do it again,” Rina said to Kelly, blowing out a huge cloud of smoke. She tossed her hair, drawing out one curl to inspect the ends. “I don't even see why you're bothering.”

“Because it stinks,” Kelly snapped. “And he's not going to do it again.”

“Whatever,” Rina said. She was in a hurry to get to the party and Bill Skerrit, the quarterback, a short little guy, all pointy and pock-marked, but whenever I asked her what she saw in him she just smiled and shook her head.

“You'll see someday,” she'd say, and I'd look at Bill again and wonder what she meant. She'd spent all week pushing me together in the courtyard and on the bus with Mike Evans, a running back who was tall and a little dopey with pretty blue eyes. We were meeting him and Bill at the party and I was under stern instructions to accept his letter jacket—which would signify that we were now
officially
dating after the past couple of weeks of flirting—if it was offered to me.

There was another spurt of Lysol from inside the car and Kelly said, “Hey, Caitlin, grab that dollar out of the ashtray and go get some quarters, okay?”

“Okay.” I hopped down and reached into the car for the money, then walked down past the washing bays to the change machine. There were no other cars except a BMW convertible, at the very end. It was black and parked crooked, with the top down.

I put the dollar in the machine and four quarters clanked out into my hand. As I turned around to walk back, my breath clouding out around my face in the cold, I got my first look at Rogerson Biscoe.

He was standing next to the black BMW, arms crossed, looking down at the car. He was in a short-sleeved shirt with a kind of tribal print, and old khaki pants with worn cuffs. His hair was brown, a mass of curls thick enough that they were almost like dreadlocks, and he had a dark, kind of olive complexion. He wore a leather cord necklace around his neck and penny loafers with no socks on his feet. He didn't look like Bill Skerrit or the rest of the guys I knew. He didn't look like anybody.

As I passed he looked up and watched me, staring.

“Hey,” he called out just as I passed out of sight. Around the corner Rina was talking, her voice high and light, and I could smell Lysol.

I took a few steps back and suddenly he was
right there;
he'd moved to catch up with me. Up close I could see his eyes were a deep green. I realized I was staring but somehow I couldn't stop.