Writers of the Future: 29

Why’s he tellin’ me it’s gonna be okay? Then I realize I got tears running down my cheeks, and I’m shaking so hard I don’t even feel like me anymore, like I’m just ridin’ in this other girl’s skin and I left the steering up to someone else. I barely even feel it when he puts an arm ’round me and guides me away from the crime scene. Damn, that’s what it is, ain’t it? Funny that I never thought of it as a crime ’til I saw the cops.

  He sits me in the passenger side of one of ’em black cars, and tells me to put my head between my legs and to breathe. I try that, and the world slows down. He’s talkin’ over me, talkin’ to someone else, all the while he’s got his hand on my shoulder.

  “Call the coroner out here. Tell him we’ve got a body.”

  “What about the girl?”

  The man’s hand shakes me a little, like he’s trying to wake me up. “Hey sweetie,” he says gently, “how old are you?”

  I still can’t talk. Closest I can get is a moan.

  When I lift my head, I see Mama bein’ led outta the motel room in cuffs, a sheet wrapped ’round her body. She’s still covered in blood. How’s she gonna cope without her juice, the one that makes her forget, the one that helps her when she’s mad? Right now she’s dull from feeding, her eyes glazed, her steps heavy.

  And then the guy’s coaxing my feet into the car, and closin’ the door. In the silence of the cab, I can hear my ragged breathing, like someone tore into my lungs.

  The man tries to get me to talk on the way to the station. “I’m Detective Carlson.” “What’s your name?” “Was that your mother?” “How long have you known her?” “Do you have any other family?” I just stare out the window and don’t say a word. I wish he’d crash, and I’d die, right now.

  But he don’t.

  Some middle-aged lady with a clipboard meets us at the station and asks all the same questions. I keep hopin’ I’ll wake up with Mama next to me, that none of this day happened at all. The lady tells me she’s takin’ me to a foster home and they’re gonna look for my family. By then, I get strength enough to nod. She reaches out, squeezes my hand, and gives me a smile. I wanna wipe it right off her face. If she’d been there, seen Mama eatin’ that man’s brain, she’d never smile again.

  I don’t think I will.

  My foster parents are nice enough, but I still don’t get the urge to talk to ’em. It’s summer, so they don’t make me go to school. I’m glad for that. I stopped doin’ the workbook pages when I was fifteen.

  I hear ’em talking sometimes, like if I can’t talk, I can’t hear neither.

  “Has she said anything to you?” my foster mom asks.

  “No,” my foster dad says. “She’s traumatized; give her time.”

  “Poor thing. I saw the news. Her mother’s been killing men for years, and all in that awful fashion. Can you imagine?”

  “I’d rather not.”

  I kinda wanna burst in on ’em, tell ’em what a good mother Mama’s been, takin’ care of me herself all these years, but I feel like I’m waiting for something that hasn’t happened yet.

  A week after Mama’s arrested, the social worker comes to see me. She asks if I wanna see Mama in prison. I shake my head no. Still waiting.

  It takes a month before I know what it is, and I don’t know it ’til I hear it. Mama’s juice wears off slowly, ’til she starts remembering things. Remembering everything. The social worker comes again, and tells me what I’ve been waitin’ for.

  Mama’s remembered who my daddy is.

  He lives nearby, and for that I’m lucky. Mama’s driven me all over the continental states, one to the next, never stayin’ in one spot long enough to get our bearings. So I’m surprised when it turns out he’s only a couple hours from the foster home I’m stayin’ at. The social worker’s so pleased she found my daddy that when she drives me out there, she’s hummin’ show tunes the whole way.

  I think I’m gonna be mad when I see him, or maybe just sad and broken. I ain’t never seen his face—how can I go live with him? She pulls into a long driveway, with potholes in it. The house at the end looks nice enough though, and it’s on a lot of land. I don’t look around too much, ’cause my daddy’s standing on the porch.

  I know it as soon as I see him. He’s got long black hair, like Mama, and it’s pulled into a ponytail. He’s got a nose like mine, and the same jaw. When I step outta the car, he walks towards me, his eyes shinin’. He tries to smile and can’t, he’s so choked up.

  “Alexis.”

  There’s so much meanin’ in that one word. I’m not angry, not even sad or broken. Before I know it, I’m huggin’ him and crying, like I’m in a stupid Hallmark movie. He’s crying too. He pulls back and puts his hands on either side of my face.

  “My daughter. You don’t know how long I’ve dreamt of meeting you.”

  Suddenly I wanna talk again, ’cause I’ve got questions, so many questions.

  It’s not like my heart ain’t still broken, but my daddy does his best. He sets me up in his spare bedroom and cooks dinner. I ain’t had a home-cooked meal in practically forever. He lets me serve myself. He don’t urge me to take more or less, or place things on my plate I’m not sure I want. I can feel him watchin’ me out the corner of his eye, like he’s afraid I’m gonna make a run for it.

  “I’ll take you shopping tomorrow,” he tells me, once we start eating. “You’ll need new clothes, shoes.”

  I wiggle my toes. I’m still wearin’ those flip-flops, same ones I ran across the street in. Moving my feet makes me realize how cold they are. I don’t know how to thank him when he ain’t done anything yet, so I just focus on eatin’. He talks ’bout how his week was as we eat, his voice deep and steady. I didn’t think I was tense, but as he talks my muscles relax, one at a time.

  “How’d you meet my mama?” I ask him, once I’ve taken the edge off my appetite.

  “At a laundromat. We lived in the same part of town,” he tells me. His shoulders stiffen up, the way mine do when I’m gettin’ ready to lie. “Your mother was the prettiest thing I ever saw. I won’t say I loved her. I barely got the chance to know her. But I’m glad we had you.”

  And there it is, the lie, at the end. It confuses me. It’s not like he seems unhappy I’m here—he seems to really like me, and I think he’s glad to meet me. But he’s hidin’ something. “Did you know she was crazy when you met her?”

  A shadow passes over his face. “Alexis—there are things I need to explain to you. Things that you won’t want to hear.”

  “Look, you may be my daddy, but you don’t really know me. Mama didn’t tell me nothin’, so I wanna hear what you gotta say.”

  He gives me a long look before he stands up. “Hold on, I’ll be right back.”

  I don’t eat anything else once he leaves. I don’t have an appetite no more. When he comes back, he’s holdin’ something in his hands. He tips it onto the table and it drops with a rattle of beads. It’s a dreamcatcher—one of those kitschy ones that looks like it’s been made in someone’s fifth-grade craft class. “Do you know what this is?”

  I ain’t stupid, so I just glare at him. He laughs. “Yeah, well, I don’t know how much your mother told you about your heritage.” He reaches back and undoes his hair. It’s black as night, shimmering ’neath the chandelier’s light. If I look hard enough, I think I see stars in it.

  “I’m a dreamcatcher,” he says. “I can sort of hypnotize people. I make sure they have good dreams, and no bad ones. It has other benefits. I’m stronger, and no one notices me much until I let my hair loose. Dreamcatchers run in my family. They run in your mother’s to
o.”

  “Mama’s family,” I whisper. “How come Mama’s different?”

  “I don’t know how much you know about genetics,” my daddy says, “but sometimes things go wrong. When they do, you get disorders—illnesses. Those run in the family too. Your mother isn’t a dreamcatcher. Something’s messed up in her genetic code. She takes all dreams, not just bad ones, and eats them. She’s not dangerous to women, just to men. The more she eats their dreams, the more she wants.” He stops, swallows. “It’s why she did the things she did. Once she’s had a taste of a man’s dreams, she wants the whole thing. She’s a dreameater.”

  I’m still puzzlin’ things out, putting things together and seein’ the big picture. “Mama’s juice?”

  “A medicine. My brother’s a doctor. He made it for her. It dampens her urge to eat. It doesn’t always work, and it’s not foolproof. And it’s got bad side effects. It makes her forget things, lots of things. But the first few times my brother brewed it up, it worked like a charm. When it stopped working as well, she left, probably started making it herself.”

  “She ever eat your dreams?”

  “Yes,” he says, and now he’s whisperin’, just like me.

  And then the last pieces click together, and I see why he didn’t wanna explain things to me in the first place, why he lied. “If you’re a dreamcatcher, and Mama’s a dreameater, what’s that make me?”

  He takes a deep breath, like he’s fortifyin’ himself against his next words. “Like I said, it’s genetic. Your mother wrote to me after you were born, the only letter from her I ever got, before she forgot who I was. When I found out I’d fathered a child, I went to my brother and he helped me figure out the chances. There’s a twenty-five percent chance you didn’t get any of this, twenty-five percent chance you’re a dreamcatcher, and a fifty percent chance you’re a dreameater.”

  ILLUSTRATION BY LUCAS DURHAM

  Not only am I not hungry anymore, I think I’m gonna puke. Fifty percent chance I’m gonna be just like Mama.

  The chair I’m sittin’ in ain’t as comfortable as it looks. I flip a quarter, watch it turn in the air, and catch it when it comes back down. Heads. I do it again. Tails. This is how my life’s been decided. I just don’t know yet which one it’s gonna be. Heads or tails.

  “Alexis?”

  The lady at the desk’s callin’ my name. Daddy’s waiting outside, in his car. He didn’t think it a good idea for him to get any closer to Mama, not with her craving his dreams. I gotta leave everything in the waiting room, includin’ the quarter I was tossing around.

  When I see Mama, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, I feel sorta numb. She’s got her hair in a ponytail. She gives me this sheepish little smile when she sees me. Like being in jail’s not as big a deal as I thought it was.

  She picks up her phone on her side of the glass, and I pick up mine. For a while, neither of us says nothin’, and all I hear is her breathing and mine, in-out, in synch.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” she says finally.

  And just like that, the numbness goes outta me. “Sorry for killin’ all those men, eatin’ their brains, or sorry for getting caught? Sorry for draggin’ me around all those years when I got a daddy? Or sorry you had me at all?”

  “Alexis,” she reaches out, touches the glass near my face. I don’t move an inch. Mama looks frail, her fingers delicate, the lines in her face deeper’n I remember.

  She opens her mouth, but I ride on over her, ’cause I’m gonna finish what I gotta say before she soothes away my anger. “Daddy told me what you was. He told me what he is, too. And he told me how much a chance I got of bein’ just like you. Fifty percent, Mama. Fifty!”

  Her fingers trail down the glass, her eyes distant, like she don’t even hear me.

  “Why’d you do it?”

  Her eyes focus again. Mama and I’ve spent so much time together, she knows I’m askin’ ’bout me, and not the men. “Lots of reasons, honey. I thought maybe someone’d come up with a cure by the time you were grown. I wanted a baby—I didn’t think it fair I’d be denied having my own children for somethin’ that ain’t my fault. When I was pregnant, I didn’t think it’d be fair to not give you a chance at life. And when you was born, Alexis, it was like the sun risin’ in the sky after a long, cold night. I weren’t lonely no more, and I’ve been lonely a long time.”

  “But I’m the one who’s gotta live with this. How long I got?”

  “I started feelin’ the urges when I was twenty. Didn’t know what it was ’til I was twenty-two.”

  Four more years before I find out what I am. A few years after that, and I might be just where Mama is right now. “It’s not right, what you done.” I wanna say it with strength, but I hear the wobble in my voice.

  “Honey, you know I love you, right?”

  The funny thing is, even though I’m still angry and feelin’ like I’m gonna cry, I wanna say it back to her. I don’t know if it’s just years of habit, or if it’s ’cause I can’t stop loving her, no matter what. But I bite my tongue, and hang up the phone.

  I can’t sleep that night, hard as I try. My daddy offered to do his dreamcatchin’ thing on me, but I ain’t keen on it after all the things I just found out. Besides, I ain’t never had any dreams. I asked Daddy what it meant, if it meant anything at all. He told me it was nothing, and started talkin’ about putting posters on my walls.

  Maybe it means I’m like Mama. Or maybe Mama’s been eating ’em so many years my brain’s forgotten how.

  I’m tossin’ and turning, so I get out of bed and start walkin’ ’round the house. Turns out Daddy ain’t sleeping neither. He’s in his study, leaning over his desk, polishing something with a little yellow rag.

  “Hey,” I say.

  He whirls in his chair, lifting what he’s got in his hand, only a little bit, but enough for me to see it. It’s a gun—an ol’ fashioned one, like they used in the Wild West. Soon as he sees me, he lets it fall into his lap, coverin’ it a bit with the rag. I think he knows well as I do it’s a silly move. I already seen it.

  I clear my throat, tryin’ to dispel the awkwardness that’s risen up. “You said you was stronger’n most people. How much stronger?” Some of the men Mama took was huge.

  “Much stronger.” He turns and lays the gun on the desk.

  “But you ain’t got nothin’ on Mama, do you?” I take another step into the room and see the shine of sweat on his upper lip. “You’re afraid that prison’s not gonna hold her.”

  “Alexis…” He holds up his hands, warding me off. Huh. So he don’t wanna talk about it. He’s scared. Me? I’ve been scared my whole life, so this ain’t anything new.

  “If she gets out and comes for you, you gonna shoot her?”

  He just sits there, fixing me with his black eyes. I got no idea what he’s thinkin’.

  I point a finger at him. “You remember, that’s my mama you’re thinkin’ of killing. My mama. Someday I might be just like her. You gonna shoot me then too?” I don’t wait for an answer. I go out of the room, my face so hot I’m sure it’s steaming. Part of me wishes I didn’t say those things to my daddy. He’s a good man, and he’s been nice to me. I don’t want Mama to kill him, and he got a right to defend himself. I just don’t know what’s right no more.

  I go outside onto the wooden porch, and lean on the railin’. The night air feels good ’gainst my skin. My eyes adjust to the darkness. ’Cross the yard, in the cottage on Daddy’s property, I see the renter’s still awake too. He’s got the curtains open, the lights on, and he’s hunched over a desk, head cradled in his palm as he reads a
book. Curly brown hair falls over his eyes. Daddy told me he was a graduate student.

  “Alexis.” Daddy’s voice sounds from behind me, but I don’t turn around. His feet shuffle ’gainst the wood, and then he’s next to me, looking out where I’m lookin’. “I don’t want you to worry about your mother, or me either. I want you to think about you.”

  I nod in the direction of the cottage. “I wanna be like that someday—learnin’.”

  “How about in a couple days?”

  I look up at him. “Really?”

  He nods. “I’ll see if I can get you a tutor, get you up to speed before school starts. I should have done it earlier, but I didn’t know if you’d be up for it.”

  I smile for the first time since I seen Mama crouched over that man’s body. “Yeah, thanks.”

  “Come on,” my daddy says. He puts his arm ’round me. “Go get some sleep.”

  I lean into him. “Sorry ’bout what I said earlier.”

  “Sweetheart, out of everyone, you’ve got things the hardest. Don’t you apologize to me.”

  Daddy comes to an agreement with the renter—Josh. Lowers his rent in exchange for him tutoring me. I do my best, but I can’t stop thinking ’bout Mama and Daddy and the gun and the flip of a coin. Josh’s real sweet, and he’s patient even when my mind’s elsewhere.

  I go to see Mama again at the end of July. She looks like hell. She’s got dark circles ’neath her eyes, and she walks like she’s still asleep.

  I pick up the phone before she even sits down. “Mama, you okay?”

  “You still mad at me, honey?”

  I am, but she’s the only mama I got. “No.”

  “I’m not doin’ so well,” she says. She gives me a confused-lookin’ frown.

  “You gotta tell ’em you need your juice.”

  “Don’t matter,” Mama says. “They ain’t never gonna let me have it and it’s too late anyway.”

  Too late? She grips that phone like a lifeline. Her nails dig into the plastic, and they shave off pieces of it that curl and drop to the table. I reach out, but I can’t touch her, can’t tug on her shirt, like I did that time with David. There ain’t nothing to help her ’cept the sound of my voice. “You need to calm down, Mama. No use gettin’ angry.”