Sean grips my shoulders tight enough to make me stop speaking. “You’ve got to calm down. I want to hear this, but you’re starting to fly. Can’t you feel it? You’re going too fast. You told me to tell you when you sound like your thoughts are racing. Well, I’m telling you.”
He’s right. My thoughts
“I know what you’re thinking,” says Sean. “I can see it in your eyes. You’re thinking riding the high is worth the low that’ll follow the crash.”
He knows me well. Thank God there’s enough of my baseline identity left for me to hear him. In my present circumstances, the next crash could kill me.
“Tell me about Natchez,” he says. “What happened there?”
“I think I may have seen my father murdered, Sean.”
“Why do you think that?”
“The night he was killed, I stopped speaking.”
“That sounds normal enough.”
“For a year?”
His cheek twitches as though from the effort of trying to look calm. “Okay, maybe not so normal.”
“And after talking to Malik today, I’m thinking maybe I was so traumatized by what I saw that night that I became dissociated. That the truth about his death is locked inside my head somewhere, but I can’t reach it.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I want to talk to Malik again.”
Sean blinks in disbelief. “Jesus, Cat. The guy’s going to be in jail soon.”
“I don’t care. I think he knows something about me.”
“What could he know about you?”
“The reason my father died.”
“You told me your dad was killed by a prowler. And your nightmares are consistent with that. Faceless men breaking in and hunting you through your house?”
“What if they’re also consistent with something else?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe his death had something to do with Vietnam. Our maid thinks one of my dad’s friends came looking for drugs, and they argued. But what if it was about something else dating back to the war?”
“Like what? The Vietnam War ended thirty years ago.”
“Yes, but it hadn’t even been over for ten years when my dad was killed. And I really don’t know what he did there.”
Sean clearly wants to help me, but he has no idea what to do. We’ve been in similar situations before.
“Listen,” I tell him, not at all sure I should confess this. “I didn’t tell Kaiser this, but I have the feeling I’ve met Malik before.”
Sean looks confused. “You
“No, somewhere else. Or some other way.”
“Shit. What way?”
“That’s what I want to ask Malik.”
“You’re freaking me out, Cat. The guy did act like he knew things about you. Is Kaiser right? Could you have had more contact with Malik than you think, but blocked it out somehow?”
I turn up my palms in frustration.
“Cat?”
“I want to go to bed. Right now.”
“To make love, you mean?”
“No. To sleep.”
Sean closes his eyes, then opens them and gives me a long-suffering smile. “Okay. Let’s get you tucked in.”
After managing a smile of gratitude, I walk past him and down the stairs to my bedroom. I want to fall into bed, but my hygiene ritual is one of the things that holds me together. I manage to finish most of it, but my skin lotion will have to wait until tomorrow. As I climb under the covers, Sean comes in and sits on the edge of the bed in the least threatening position possible.
“Feel better?” he asks.
“No. What are we going to do?”
“About what we were just talking about?”
I shake my head. “About us.”
He gives me what he must think is a brave smile. “I don’t know, Cat. Now that Kaiser knows about us… there’s no telling what kind of stories will spread.”
“Can you leave them, Sean? Just tell me the truth. Can you leave your wife and children to be with me?”
He takes a deep breath and slowly blows it out. “I can. I can give up everything to be with you.”
I see in his eyes that it’s true. “But do you
“Best for who? For me? Yes. For the kids? I can’t say that. It might be the worst thing that ever happens to them. It might ruin their lives.”
I close my eyes. I don’t want to ruin anyone’s life. But I don’t want to lose mine, either. “You’ve got three days to decide. After that, you’re either all the way in my life, or all the way out.”
Sean has witnessed terrible things in his life, but those quiet words seem to have put him into shock.
“I’m pregnant, Sean. I can’t wait anymore. I have to live a real life.”
He nods slowly. He gets it. “Can you sleep?”
“I’d sleep better if you were here.”
“I can stay.”
“How long?”
“It’s still afternoon. Five or six hours, maybe. Unless the killer hits again. Then I’ll have to go.”
“If that happens, I want you to go. But I don’t think it will.”
Sean pats me on the shoulder, which I hate. “Go to sleep. I’ll be out there watching TV.”
“Wake me up if you have to leave. I don’t want to wake up alone.”
“I will.”
He kisses my hair above the ear, which I like. As he leaves the bedroom, I prop one pillow so that it blocks the light from the window, then turn to the wall and let my eyes lose their focus. Malik’s words are ricocheting through my head like bats in a cave. How did he get to me like this? What does he know about me that I don’t? And how does he know it?
Ever since I was a child, I’ve had the feeling that the world makes sense, but according to a logic indecipherable to me. That the region of my mind that can decode life’s symbols is inaccessible due to the chemical imbalances in my brain. Only in sleep do I travel to that place, and even then the faces I see are obscured, the words garbled as though spoken through water. As a teenager, I experimented with techniques that supposedly allow people to guide their dreams, but I had no luck. To this day, my subconscious remains off-limits to my conscious mind, like two hostile nations along a fiercely guarded border. When I do dream, terror and confusion are the primary emotions I experience. I’m a stranger in a strange land, trying to read signs printed in a foreign language, praying only to find my way back to the safety of the waking world. Nothing I’ve seen seems related to my father’s death, though, at least not to the story I was always told. As sleep draws its curtain over my fevered mind, I ask myself again if the adults in my life long ago decided to protect me from a reality they deemed too devastating for me to endure.
Nathan Malik seems to think so.
Where wakefulness becomes sleep, I never know, because my dreams are as vivid as anything I experience while awake. This time I’m back on the island, in the ancient pickup truck, riding through the pasture with my
