Overheard in a Dream

Her cheeks flushed. She ducked her head and James saw tears come to the corners of her eyes. He sat back in a casual manner to lessen the intensity of the moment, because this wasn’t the time or the place. Indeed, he was deeply relieved that the girls had remained occupied playing in Becky’s room.

“Sorry,” Laura murmured. “I hadn’t meant it to get this far.”

“Not to worry.”

“I think it was the ‘relationships stopped working’ comment.” She was tearful again. “Sorry.”

“Not to worry.”

“It’s just … well … ‘relationships not working’ is a bit of an understatement,” she said wearily. “Because it’s not just Conor …”

James knew he ought to stop her right there. The appropriate place for this conversation was the office. Here at his own kitchen table, with the girls chattering in the next room and apt to burst in at any moment, was most definitely not the place to encourage the conversation in the direction it was going. But James sensed a rare chink in Laura’s armour, and if he had learned anything from that whole tragedy in New York, it was to recognize that sometimes you had to break the rules. So he said, “What’s happened?”

“Alan left me.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It’s given me such a shock,” she said and tears thickened her voice.

“So how did this come about?” James asked.

“We had the stupidest argument. Over a lawnmower, would you believe?”

James smiled sympathetically. “That must have been upsetting.”

“It was so stupid. Al had been in town and found this lawn-mower on sale. It was a good price, but it was this huge, heavy thing and wasn’t self-propelled. I’m the one who cares for the yard, so any lawn-mower we get, I’m the one who’ll be using it. I wouldn’t even be able to push that beast. So I said he needed to take it back.

“Al flatly refused. We’ve got this weird relationship regarding money. We always have. And that’s what this was about. He’d paid for it, so he wasn’t going to take it back, because then it was as if I’d said he made a bad choice with his money. It escalated from there, because I didn’t want to get stuck with this crap machine and he didn’t want to take it back. So in the end I just said, okay, I’m going to take it back. I went out and got in the pickup, because the lawn-mower was still in the back of it and I took off for town.

“This isn’t like me,” she said and looked over. “I’m normally not at all confrontational. Before I even got into town, I was regretting I’d made a big deal out of it. I almost turned around then …” Her voice caught. “But I didn’t. I’d gone all that way, so I thought I might as well make use of it. So I went to the grocery store. When I got back to the ranch, he was gone. And, of course, he’d taken the kids.”

Laura’s shoulders dropped. She let out a long, slow breath. “That was the very worst moment I’ve ever had.” The tears glistened yet again. “Coming into the house, finding it empty, realizing they were gone.”

“When did this happen?” James asked.

“Last Friday. Alan’s come back since. He was only gone over the weekend. Took the kids to his mum’s. But it made me realize I’ve got to do something. We’re in serious trouble.” She paused and looked over at James. “I’m thinking, okay, maybe I’ll do this with you. Maybe I’ll come in.”

“Lawnmower?” Alan said in disbelief. “Laura thinks this was all about a lawnmower? She thinks I moved out of my house because I was upset over a fucking lawnmower?” Leaning back into the sofa, he shook his head. “Well, there’s a beautiful example of just why we’re going to hell: Laura lives in another world. She completely misses what’s happening in this one.”

“You’re saying Laura commonly misinterprets things?” James asked, curious. Surely a good writer would be skilled at insight and interpretation.

“Not ‘misinterprets’. Laura’s not misinterpreting. It’s more that she’s got her own version of the world. Things aren’t true and untrue to Laura. Not the way they are for most of us.” Alan paused and lowered his head, thinking. “How exactly do I explain it? I don’t want it to come off sounding like I think she’s a pathological liar or something, because it’s not that clear cut. Lying means there must be a truth somewhere and you know you’re not saying it. With Laura, it’s all much more fluid than that. Almost as if no truth exists and so you create it as you go along.”

Like a storyteller does, James thought.

“In the early years that’s why I loved her so,” Alan said. “I mean, you’re around Laura for a while and you realize she isn’t quite like other people. She’s got this weird, wonderful way of thinking, not the sort of thing you can get at with just intellect. There’s a passion about creative people, don’t you think? Growing up in a family of bankers and accountants, I admired that. Maybe even identified with it a little, because I think what gave me trouble as a kid was that I was just that bit more free-thinking. Nothing like Laura, of course, but enough to know there was something better to be had than just making money. And I got off on the idea that she wanted to be with me. In a way, that’s what attracted her in reverse. She wanted ordinary. That’s actually what she told me once. That I was ‘real’ to her. I was her anchor …

“But this fey quality, it isn’t special anymore. It’s just frigging hard work. These days I feel like one of those game show contestants who has to guess what’s behind the curtain. You know? Guess between this one and that one and you win the prize. But when the curtain opens, there’s another curtain behind it. Or a box to be opened. And inside is another box. Nothing is like it looks. Everything just hides something else. I’ve never found the real Laura. To the point that I’m not sure she even exists.

“I’m fed up with it. With all the lies and evasions. You ask her something and she’ll tell you whatever story is in her head at that moment. And she’s so good at it. You never know if it’s the truth or not.”

Finally Alan looked over at James. “You want to know the real reason I left. It had nothing to do with lawnmowers whatsoever. Shall I tell you what happened?”

“Yes, of course,” James said.

“Our daughter, Morgana, is six. She was supposed to go to this kid’s birthday party right after school last Friday. She was so excited about it, because she doesn’t get invited to a lot of birthday parties. Morgana seems to get on with kids okay, but she plays by herself a lot. Mostly just because we live so far out. Anyway, so this was special. Morgana kept chattering on about what she wanted to wear and what she wanted to get this little girl for a present and all that. It’s all she talked about.

“The day of the party happened to be the same day Laura threw her tantrum over the lawnmower. I was pretty fed up and didn’t want to be around when she came back. Since we’d already arranged that I was going to pick Morgana up from the party, I decided to go into town early. I popped Conor in the car and thought I’d take him to the car wash with me. He likes that.

“Anyway, there were roadworks on the main street, so I took a different way that goes down around the park. As I’m driving by the park, who should I see there but Morgana, playing there all on her own.

“I thought, what the hell? I jammed on the brakes and leaped out and grabbed hold of her. I said, ‘What are you doing here?’ She started crying right away – bawling – and I just felt such relief that chance had taken me down that road.

“Morgana was so upset I couldn’t really get an explanation out of her as to what had happened. All I could reckon was that whoever was in charge of this little girl’s birthday party had taken the children to the park and then hadn’t done a very good head count when they left. This got me fuming, so I stormed over to their house.

“I was rattling the door and saying ‘What the hell is wrong with you, leaving a six-year-old alone in the park?’ and this girl’s mother looked at me like I was a madman. She says, ‘Caitlin isn’t having a birthday party today. Her birthday’s in August.’”

Alan’s shoulders dropped in a defeated way. “Anyhow, so then the story came out.” He looked over at James. “Turns out Morgana had made the whole thing up. She was desperate to be able to play in the park on her own, because that’s what the town kids did. She’d wanted to wear that new outfit to school but Laura had told her she couldn’t, that it was for special occasions like birthday parties. And the damned set of marking pens we’d bought for this girl’s birthday present was something Morgana had been wanting for herself. So she cooked up this whole birthday scenario and carried it off. This is a goddamned first-grader we’re talking about.

“Something inside me just snapped when Morgana told me that. I thought, here she is, at six, doing just what her mother does. Showing that same devil-may-care attitude towards the truth. Acting like you can just make it up as you go along and it’s the same as if it were real. I thought, hell, this is the fucking future. Morgana is going to become another Laura. So since Conor was already in the car with me, I just took off. I thought, I’m not going to let this happen. I’m not going to let Laura fuck both these kids up. So, I didn’t go home. I took the kids and went to my mother’s house in Gillette.”

Alan drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “The problem is, it was just a gesture. I can’t leave the ranch. Not really. It’s my ranch. I’ve got too many responsibilities there to be able to just walk out altogether. Besides, walking out would hurt the kids too much. Laura and I have to sort this out like adults. But it was a gesture that needed to be made, because it finally got the point across to her that I’m fucking serious. Things have got to change or else I will take Conor and Morgana away from her.”

Chapter Six

Clad in jeans and running shoes, her hands sunk deep into the pockets of an oversized grey sweatshirt jacket, Laura looked to have just come from the gym the day she arrived for the first session.

“Won’t you come in?” James said, pleased that she’d kept her promise to show up.

As before, Laura eschewed the carefully laid-out conversation centre in preference to the chair beside his desk. Sitting down in it, she kept her hands in the pockets of the open sweatshirt jacket, crossing them over in front of her to closely wrap it around to her as if the room were chilly. Such a contrast, James thought, to the confident woman he’d met at the deli.

“How are your kids?” she asked. “Did Mikey get better in time to enjoy some of his visit?”

“Yes, they’re both fine, thank you. It was just a twenty-four-hour thing. He was his normal tornado self the next day,” James said and smiled.

“Did they get back to New York okay? That’s a long way for little ones to travel?”

“They’re a couple of little adventurers. They enjoy the excitement of going on their own and all the fuss the airlines staff make of them.”

Laura wrapped the sweatshirt jacket even more tightly around herself. “I’m feeling very nervous,” she said at last and smiled apologetically.

“Why is that?” he asked gently.

She shrugged slightly. “I dunno. I guess because I know Alan’s already been in. You’ve already heard his version of everything. I worry I’m disadvantaged.”

“I’m not here to take sides,” James replied. “Remember the other week at my place? When I was saying that what this is all about is simply getting things working again? That’s the truth. I’m not here to judge either of you. That wouldn’t be helpful. I’m only here so you and Alan and Conor can untangle things.”

“Yeah,” she said, sounding unconvinced.

A moment passed in silence. Laura glanced around the room. Finally she gave him a brief moment of eye contact. “What do you want me to talk about then? Conor? Alan?”

“In here you decide. You’re in control of the session.”

“If I were actually in control, I’d control it by not being here,” she said and grinned.

“You have that choice as well. If you need to leave, you can. In here you do decide. That’s what it’s all about.”

James could tell from her expression that it had not occurred to her that she actually did have the freedom to get up and walk out. Now she seemed even more unnerved.

“You really are feeling uncomfortable,” he said to give her a way into talking to him.

“Yes.”

A couple of moments of silence passed.

“I wish it were more natural, this. Like the night at your place. I mean, I can talk.” She laughed self-consciously. “It’s just when I get in a situation like this, I lose it.”

“That’s okay,” he said gently. “Don’t worry about it.”

The room grew quiet. She was looking down at her hands as they rested one on top of the other on her lower abdomen. They were still inside the pockets of the sweatshirt jacket, so she stared at the grey material.

“What’s making this hard …” she started tentatively, “… is … that before we discuss Conor or Alan, I want to tell you about something else. Because it’s informed my whole life … you need to know, if you’re going to understand what’s happening. But I don’t know how to start telling you.”

“That’s all right,” James said. “Take your time. The pace is yours. There’s no hurry.”

“It’s just, well, more that I’ve never really told anybody about it.” She frowned. “No, that’s wrong. I have. I’ve told quite a lot of people, actually. But never in a context like this. Never in a way that acknowledges its legitimate place in my life. Never truthfully, from beginning to end.” She shrugged apologetically. “That’s what’s actually kept me so long from coming in. I just can’t figure out how to start this without making everything sound crazy. Yet, at the same time I know I’ve got to. Because what if I really did lose Alan? Or Morgana? Or Conor? That can’t happen. So I’ve got to start with telling you about this one thing, because otherwise, nothing else will make sense.”

James nodded.

There was total silence, so complete that the subtle noises of the outer office and waiting room flowed into the room like an incoming tide.

Laura finally took a very deep breath and let it out with measured slowness. “It starts the summer I was seven. In my home town, which is west of here in the Black Hills. In June. Early evening, maybe about 7 pm. I was walking alone along this little dirt path that ran from the end of our street, which is called Kenally Street, through an empty lot that bordered the lake and then out to meet the next street over, which is Arnott Street. It was just a kids’ path through a vacant lot that belonged to an old man named Mr Adler. You know the kind. We used the path as a shortcut to school and as a quick way to get down to the pier at the end of Arnott Street.

“Anyway, that particular evening we’d had thundery showers in the late afternoon. When the clouds finally parted, the sun was left hanging just above this low, humpbacked mountain that everyone calls the Sugarloaf. I was walking directly into the sunlight and I recall looking up at it and wondering why it was that you could look directly at the sun when it is that low in the sky and it doesn’t hurt your eyes.

“Then just to my right, I caught motion in my peripheral vision, stopped, turned my head and found myself still sunblind. I couldn’t see clearly for a moment or two, but when I could, there was this woman standing there.”

Laura paused and drew in a deep breath.

“She was like no one I’d ever seen before. Not even in my dreams. She was in her twenties, tall, with broad, bold features and dusty-coloured skin. Her hair was a soft black colour like charcoal, thick and very, very straight. It hung loose just past her shoulders. This caught my attention straightaway, because this was in the early 60s, before the Flower Power generation, so women wore short Doris Day ’dos or Jackie Kennedy bouffants. If their hair was longer, it was done up in a chignon or French roll. I’d never seen a grown woman who had her hair loose and unstyled.

“The other really noticeable thing was her muscles. She was quite thin but she had these taut, prominent muscles. I remember thinking that if I reached out and touched her, her flesh would feel hard like my brother’s, not soft and mushy like Ma’s.

“More than anything else, though, the feature that defined her most was her eyes. They were deep-set, beneath dark, ungroomed eyebrows, and they were the most extraordinary colour. A light, light grey that towards the edges of the iris was vaguely yellowed, like the eyes of a wolf.

“All her clothes were creamy white. The top was loose and blousy and had an elaborate design embroidered down the front and on the cuffs, but the embroidery was white on white, so you couldn’t actually tell what it was without looking closely. Her pants were like these baggy shorts boys wear now that end just below the knees, but they were made of the same white woven material as her top. On her feet she was wearing Roman-style sandals, the kind that lace up over the ankles.

“I remember staring at her because she looked so strange. And also because she looked really very beautiful in a wild sort of way. She stared right back at me. Not discreetly, the way adults usually look at people they’d interested in. She stared. The way young kids stare at each other. She had this bewildered expression on her face, as if she were as startled to see me there trotting along the path through Adler’s vacant lot as I was to see her.

“That moment of staring felt like forever to me. We just stood, locked in one another’s gaze. I wasn’t frightened of her at all. If anything, I felt a wary excitement.

“Finally she turned away and started moving towards the corner of the lot. There wasn’t a way out onto the street there. Just an old, untended lilac hedge. The lilacs were tall and scraggly but even so, you still couldn’t get through them. I never bothered to wonder why she was going that way. All I knew was that she was getting away and I couldn’t let that happen. I had to follow her. So I did.”

Laura stopped.

James raised his eyebrows. “And?”

“My next memory was of getting hit by crab apples that my foster brother was throwing. When I looked around, I was standing in the alley at the other end of the path. Over by the gate into our backyard. This was more than half a block away from where I’d seen the woman.

“I remember looking down and seeing the knee-deep weeds in the alley, seeing their colour. They were that pale yellow everything goes when it is baked dry in the summer heat, and there was hard, rutted soil beneath them. For a moment I wondered if this woman had magicked me there because it was quite a way away from the path through the empty lot. I was seven and still hopeful about things like fairies and magic. But I wasn’t a naïve kid. I think I already knew by then that those things didn’t really exist. I was also experienced enough with my imagination to know that it did. This wouldn’t have been the first time I’d become so engrossed in playing an imaginary game that I’d lost track of where I was and ended up somewhere else.”

“So you recognized seeing this woman as an imaginary experience?” James asked.

“Oh yes. Definitely yes. I’m not talking about aliens or the paranormal or anything like that. I imagined her. Real as she looked to me in Adler’s lot, I knew even then that if I’d reached my hand out, I could never have touched her. I knew she had come from inside me.”

“So what do you think happened to you during that period between seeing her and your ending up at the gate into your backyard?” James asked.

“Simple. I’d followed her. I walked into another world that evening,” Laura said quietly. “A world inside my head. Nowhere else and I knew it was nowhere else. But it was another world, nonetheless, and no less real for being in there instead of out here. I experienced it with immense clarity. As vividly, as vibrantly as I can see this room around us right now.”

She looked directly at James. “Does that sound crazy?”

James smiled gently. “No, not crazy. Many children are gifted with astonishing imaginations and can create some very detailed fantasies.”

“It was astonishing all right. But it proved to be much more than a child’s fantasy because it didn’t end there with my childhood. That’s why it’s so hard to talk about. Because there is a type of craziness about it and I do know that.” She studied her fingers a moment. “But I also need to tell you about it. Because that night on the path through Adler’s lot has influenced everything that’s ever happened to me since.”

This had not been what James had been expecting at all. Fascinated, he leaned forward towards her. “Fantasy tends to be a reflection of our lives, of needs that aren’t being fulfilled, of desires we have,” he said. “I’d be very interested to hear what your childhood was like at that point.”

Laura grew thoughtful for a moment. “Most people stereotype my childhood straightaway when they hear that I was a foster child,” she said at last. “They assume it must have been unsettled and full of traumatic events. The truth is, for the most part, it was actually quite a good childhood. I was happy.

“I only ever lived with one family. I had been with them since I was only a few weeks old, so it always did feel like my family. My foster parents had four sons of their own, all older than me, so I was the daughter they’d never had and I felt very cherished. Mecks was their name. I called them Ma and Pa and they always treated me as if I were their own child. I was well loved and knew it.”

“How did you come to be in foster care?” James asked.

“My mother developed an embolism and died only two days after I was born. I was a bit of an accident anyway, as my two brothers are eight and ten years older than I am. This was not an era when men were very domestic. My father felt he could cope with two school-aged boys but not with a tiny baby. So, I went to the Meckses very early on.”

Laura grew pensive. “In many ways it was an idyllic life for an imaginative child. I was essentially a last-born child, which meant I was spoilt a bit, given my way, left largely free of expectations. And it was an amazing environment to grow up in. The Meckses had this huge, old, turn-of-the-century house with a big staircase in the front hall and a banister you could slide down, just like kids do in the movies. Everybody in town called it ‘the lake house’ because it was built right at the very end of Kenally Street and so backed onto Spearfish Lake. We even had our own bit of shoreline. Thinking back on it now, I suspect the house wasn’t as grand as I remember it. In fact, it was probably downright shabby by adult standards, because there was a lot of peeling paint, stained wallpaper and squeaky floorboards by that point. But it was a kid’s paradise.

“Pa had converted part of the attic into a bedroom for me when I was five. It was gigantic – this huge, dark, draughty space that baked in summer and froze in winter, I couldn’t stand upright in three-quarters of it because of the slope of the roof – and I thought it was heaven on earth. I was one of those kids who was always making things, always had a ‘project’ going. And always collecting things. I was big into collecting. Rocks, leaves, horses – you know, those plastic Breyer horses that were so popular in those days – all sorts of things. Pa built me shelves under the eaves for everything and made a desk out of an old door.” She grinned charmingly at James. “It was wonderful.”

“And into all this came your imagination,” he said.

“Oh god, yes. That was my favourite thing of all – pretending. At seven I was in my horsy stage. I desperately wanted a real one, but there was, of course, just no way to have one. So I spent about two years pretending to be one myself. ‘Butterfly the Trick Pony’.” She smiled. “I used to wear this towel over my shoulders for a horse blanket.

“In the attic I’d also ‘built’ myself a horse by attaching a cardboard head and a yarn tail to the stepladder. I’d straddle the top of the ladder and pretend I was Dale Evans’s very best friend, and she and I would ride out to meet Roy on the range or we’d round up wild horses and shoot bad guys.