Fiction River: Fantasy Adrift (19 page)

My scientist sister used to discuss the dreams with me, back when she was studying time travel theories.

Alternate dimensions, she’d said once.

Branching universes, she’d said later.

Severed possibilities, she’d said that last time, the time she said she no longer believed.

Severed possibilities. My brother liked that one, but I don’t. Because my Real Cousin Ruby isn’t a severed possibility.

She exists. She has a life—a real and solid life, even if it is in our dreams.

She has a better life than the woman posing as my cousin Ruby, the changeling child.

Although my physicist sister Debbie did correct me once:
She can’t be a changeling
, my sister said,
because changelings get traded one for the other. If she were a true changeling child, then that means something can travel from our dreams into our world and back again, plucking children out of them and replacing those children with something else…something not quite right.

Like my supposed cousin, Ruby. Something not quite right.

Although my husband says that it’s snobby of me to think my so-called cousin Ruby isn’t quite right because she chose to climb down the economic ladder.

So I’m snobby.

And deceitful.

Because, in 21 years, I’ve never ever told my husband about my Real Cousin Ruby.

Nor can I talk to him about her fiancé.

Whom I hate.

You’d think a woman at the age of forty-seven would pick an appropriate man. You’d think after decades of consideration, after decades of adulthood and self-knowledge, someone as brilliant as my Real Cousin Ruby would find the kind of man who enhanced her.

But this guy—this guy detracts.

First of all, he’s homely. I know, I know, one shouldn’t judge on appearances, but I firmly believe that old adage that the face you have at fifty is the face you deserve.

His face is set in frown lines, with angry edges to his beady little eyes. His teeth are yellow from too much coffee and his hairline is receding.

His name is Lon. He runs a drive-through espresso stand that he built with his own hands, and which I’m sure he’ll close soon with those self-same hands, since he undercharges Starbucks by a dollar on every coffee drink, no matter what it does to his bottom line.

He brings a six-pack to every gathering, whether appropriate or not, and if no one else drinks it, he finishes it alone.

My Real Cousin Ruby wants me to approve.

First she said I’d like him better after I spent time with him. Then I spent time with him, and liked him worse.

So she gave me the old tried and true line—the one every teenager uses on her parents about that rebel boyfriend:
Don’t you understand? He makes me happy
.

Yes,
I said. And then, because I have more courage in my nighttime world than I do in my daytime one, I added,
That happiness’ll continue, so long as the sex remains good.

She didn’t show up in a single dream for nearly two weeks. When she finally did, she waved a diamond at me (this from the woman who thought diamonds an abomination just the year before) and said in a strangely calm voice,
I’m marrying him. You can be my maid of honor or you can stay far away from both of us.

I chose maid of honor—after I explained to the poor woman that I was a matron; I hadn’t been a maid in nearly thirty years.

The following morning, in that groggy sometime between opening my eyes and my first cup of coffee, I realized that my Real Cousin Ruby was naïve. Two boyfriends (that I knew of) in twenty years, a traumatic abortion, and an assault by a graduate assistant had put her off the male side of humanity for quite a while.

Which left her vulnerable to the likes of Lon.

It also struck me that my Real Cousin Ruby and my so-called cousin Ruby actually had something in common.

Bad taste in men. Only my so-called cousin Ruby has outgrown her bad taste. The latest guy—maybe the last guy—adopted her myriad children and urged her to open her own beauty shop and has quietly supported every single thing she’s done for the past ten years. His name is Delmar, and he’s actually kind.

Yep, he’s a keeper. And that morning, I actually found myself wondering if she’s kept him because she knows his value, or if she’s kept him because the bouncing ball landed on red and she doesn’t have the energy to bet again.

Then I found myself wondering if everyone has a dream self and a real self, if everyone has a different identity in the realm of dreams.

Which then brought me back to the question my siblings and I used to ask about my so-called cousin Ruby. Is she real or is the dream Ruby the real one? Back then, we had decided that the dream Ruby was real because we liked her better. She was much more a member of
our
family than the fat and sloppy bottle blond who lived in our world.

Revisiting that question is the thing that got me in trouble.

Revisiting that question opened a door a child would never have even seen.

Revisiting that question led to the inevitable:

If something happened to the Ruby in our world, what happened to the Ruby of our dreams?

***

I became, in a word, obsessed.

First I tried to solve the conundrum myself.

I retired to the upstairs office that my husband had designed for me in a fit of guilt. We have a five-bedroom home, but only two children. They have their rooms, we have our master suite, we have an office, and then we have a junk room.

As the office became his, my husband felt guiltier and guiltier. He believes in equality, does this wonderful man I married, so he cleaned out the junk room, found me a desk, put up some shelves, and presented it to me as a
fait accompli
.

I didn’t bother to tell him that I felt the whole house was my personal domain, a domain that he and the kids visited from time to time. Instead I graciously accepted the office and never used it.

Until that day.

The office overlooks the back yard, which I have designed for maximum pleasure—perennials that bloom from May to September, mixed with hedges and lots of comfortable outdoor seating arrangements. The office and the garden face east (east of the sun, my husband used to say, quoting the title of one of the kids’ favorite fairy tales. And west of the moon, I’d say, finishing the phrase. We are steeped in fairy tales here).

I opened that window, sat in the window seat, and thumbed through all the books on dream analysis that have found their way into my house. (Many of them are signed with birthday or Christmas wishes from one of my siblings. Go figure.)

I found representational imagery. I found puns. I found directed dreaming. But I didn’t find anything about the dream world crossing into our world or vice versa.

So I left the volumes on the floor beside the window seat, and went to my computer. There I found a lot about dreams crossing into the real world—if I wanted to see analysis of the Freddy Krueger movies or Clive Barker’s fiction.

I found very little actual research on the dream world itself. Everyone who examined dreams started from the premise that dreams were random images of events, real and imagined, that played in a sleeping person’s consciousness. The purpose of those images, real and imagined, are the subject of debate. Are they coherent stories? Random memories? An attempt to clear out the flotsam and jetsam of a day’s accumulated thoughts?

It seemed that most people believed their dreams were figments, whether of the imagination or of the subconscious mind. No one else seemed to have an entire life going on in their dreams.

No one except my siblings, that is.

And while I liked to believe we were unique, I couldn’t. Not entirely. Because that either meant a genetic predisposition toward insanity or a shared hallucination like my siblings believed or the beginnings of some form of true schizophrenia.

Since we were mostly too old to fall into schizophrenia (and we didn’t take drugs, which often sent previously stable [a word we could argue] adults into schizophrenic behavior), then we were either insane or having that shared hallucination.

Or we actually experienced another world, one we could only access in dreams.

I spent days in that office. Days of reading, days of researching, days of staring into the garden, hoping to find an answer.

What I did figure out was this: If other people had the kind of dream life that I did, they didn’t admit it. And they weren’t the type to study such things. Because, if they were the type to study things—like my physicist sister—then by the time they had enough training to investigate this part of the psyche, their scientific background made them deny the possibilities that existed for them each and every night.

If they weren’t the type (like me) they had no idea how to prove what they thought to be true.

In other words, my research gave me no answers either.

Which meant I had to rely on myself.

And that proved to be my second mistake.

***

Sometimes I dream about my Real Cousin Ruby’s world without seeing my Real Cousin Ruby at all. I spend my dream time in our favorite coffee shop, or I find myself shopping on our favorite street, both of which have counterparts in my awake world.

Sometimes I’m in an apartment, which is more of a penthouse suite—the kind you see in upscale movies about New York. This apartment isn’t all cold modern furniture done in black and white; it’s art deco—black and white with touches of bright red and a vibrant turquoise. I find the place stunning.

It’s also comfortable—the kind of place I would design if I lived in the city without any children at all. Because the place is never messy. It looks lived in—the magazines and books on the glass-topped coffee table are different every time I’m there (and often they’re the same as the magazines and books on my coffee table at home)—just not the scattershot level of slop that even the cleanest home has when a busy family resides inside.

I’m scared to go into the bedroom of that apartment. I’m afraid of what (who) I might find.

So I relax in the living room, read a book or watch a movie on the incredibly huge flat screen television that hangs like modern art on the far wall.

Sometimes my Real Cousin Ruby is there. Once I arrived in the middle of a dinner party, filled with people I only partially recognized (a few of whom were famous), and I forced myself to wake up, heart pounding.

For some reason, I didn’t want to be part of that event. Even now, memory of it makes me uneasy, as if I had become the hostess of a party I hadn’t even known was going on.

Then, one night I dreamed I was in the coffee shop.

It’s a funky place in both the dream world and our world. I prefer the dream world version. The layout is better—tables across the front, and beneath the flight of brick stairs that lead to an actual coffee bar where you sit on high stools and watch the baristas make your lovely cuppa. You can also see yourself in an ancient wavy mirror, trimmed in silver.

The coffee bar in my wide awake world has the same stairs and the same general floor plan. Only the tables are up a flight and the workstation is against the west wall. There is no bar or ancient mirror, no comfortable place to sit and watch the baristas work when you’re alone.

The coffee recipes are all the same, even the house blends, and as far as I can tell, they taste the same in both worlds.

In the dream, I was in the coffee bar alone, but I wasn’t at my usual place at the end of the counter. The counter was full of people, mostly men, all of whom are watching the new barista toss silver mixing cups as if she’s in a real bar, not a coffee place.

A coffee mocha with extra foam sat in front of me, and judging by the pile of empty artificial sugar packets beside it, that mocha was my second of the day. I tapped the stirring stick and forced myself to think.

I knew I was in a dream. I recognized the dream world.

If I recognized it, then, maybe, I could control it.

The books called that dedicated dreaming.

I decided to give it a try.

I wanted to see if other people existed in this world as well. Besides me and my siblings and our Real Cousin Ruby.

First, I checked to see if my Real Cousin Ruby was anywhere near the place. She wasn’t at the ordering station, and it didn’t appear that anyone else had been sitting across from me.

So I grabbed my mocha, and went to one of the free internet computers.

It was already logged onto the coffee shop’s website. I went to one of those people search pages, like the white pages in the phone book, only the ones that access places all over the United States, and I typed in the name of my supposed cousin Ruby’s boyfriend/husband/partner in the real world.

Delmar Musslewhite.

I’d already checked out Delmar in the real world. There was only one other Delmar Musslewhite in all of the United States, and that was Delmar Musslewhite Senior, the father of the Delmar Musslewhite I knew.