In Her Dream
Alice is dying to live.
Alice can’t grow if she won’t let go.
The sun is up not long after Alice and Scott had settled into their dreams. In his, Scott was back at the ball field in a championship Little League game. He had just driven in the go-ahead run during the first half of the ninth inning. His team was about to close the game out. Scott’s in center field, and the ball is hit his way. He makes an incredible play, leaping up above the chain link fence in straightaway centerfield. He catches the ball, and the game is over. He’s a hero. In Alice’s dream, she’s ten years old back at Lake Tahoe, where her parents used to rent a cabin for two weeks in July, right around the Fourth. She’s down by the water with her older sister, Grace, and they’re walking along the lake shore, talking about boys and Grace’s experience in middle school.
“I can’t believe you like Ricky Weadon,” Alice proclaims while tossing a few pebbles into the water.
“Whatever. Don’t be jealous.” Grace shakes off Alice’s comment with untouchable older sibling swagger. Of that, Alice was most definitely jealous.
Alice laughs at the thought of being jealous over such a scrub. “He’s gross,” she looks at her Grace and smiles, “but Ryan Nelson is cute!”
Both girls start laughing. They approach a small jetty of tall rocks.
Grace makes a fatal suggestion “Let’s climb to the end of it, so we can sit and look at the lake.”
“Ok,” a simple response Alice would spend the rest of her life regretting she made.
Time starts to slow down for Alice as she watches Grace climb the jetty. She follows her up, but then something catches her attention. She sees Grace waving to her at the end of the jetty, teetering back on her heels with a big smile on her face. There’s something else caught in the moment with them. It’s something coming from inside Alice, an unclear but noticeable voice. She looks around. No answers from the woods that edged up against the shore. No answers in the sky above. Alice looks back at her sister, and Grace is still smiling at her.
“What’s wrong, Alice?” Grace wonders.
“You don’t hear that?”
“Hear what?”
Again, the ethereal voice speaks more audibly, but Alice still can’t understand what its saying.
“That! You can’t hear that?”
Grace shakes her head.
“C’mon to the top with me. It’s beautiful.”
Grace extends her hand. Alice is compelled to join her, so she starts climbing the jetty again. She’s almost near the top when she stops and turns her head around to face the pine trees and light shrubbery along the shore. A breeze stirs the sleepy tree branches awake, moving them, making them call out to Alice. The voice is recognizable this time. It’s Grace, but she’s behind Alice, and the voice is coming from the trees, haunting in both its tone and in its message.
Let go.
It sounds like Grace, but it can’t be her.
Let go.
She turns around to call Grace, but her sister is gone, without a word, without making a sound. There’s just empty space where she stood. A chill explodes up and down Alice’s spine that she can feel beyond the haze of her dream.
She opens her eyes, confused by her predicament. She’s lying in Scott’s bed facing the wall, but she was just at the lake. She felt the air and heard the wind.
Let go.
The situation begins to take shape and become clear as she recognizes the décor in Scott’s bedroom, and pieces from the night before begin to form in her mind: dancing, drinking, snorting, fucking, and sleeping.
Grace.
Grace was there in Alice’s dream. Alice remembers and quickly closes her eyes to try and bring back that dream, that day at the lake. She reaches for the specter of her sister in the white sun dress and the single braid of hair running between her shoulders, but Grace is gone. She’s been gone for twelve years now.
That’s longer than I ever even knew her.
Alice opens her eyes and tears leak out. It’s eight forty-five in the morning. Songbirds are hidden in trees outside of Scott’s window.
“Fuck.” Alice mumbles to herself. She rolls over to wake Scott up, and the entire world rolls over with her. Her head feels like a clothes dryer. Her mouth feels like sandpaper rubbing against concrete. A night of fun like she had comes at a price; only having three hours of sleep turns the dial up on her misery to max.
“Scott. Scott,” she gives him a nudge. “Scott wake up.”
It looks like nothing short of a ground-shattering earthquake is going to wake up the silver fox. Alice pushes herself up and hovers over Scott. She takes a deep breath before she exercises some demons, grabs Scott by his upper arms, Alice shakes him violently.
“Scott your fucking house is on fire!”
This does the trick. Scott wakes up and shoots out of the bed, screaming “What? What?” as he tries to jump into his sweatpants unsuccessfully. He face plants on his bedroom carpet. A few moments pass, and things become clear to Scott. Alice is laughing at him. There is no emergency.
“My house isn’t on fire, is it?”
“Nope,” she says while laughing.
“That’s really cool of you, Alice. Thanks.”
“Well, you wouldn’t wake up, and I want to go home, so what was I supposed to do?”
Scott gets up from the floor and gives her a perplexed look. He grabs an empty glass from his dresser and walks into the bathroom where he gets some water from the faucet. Alice gets out of his bed and begins to put her clothes on. Scott walks back into the bedroom and watches her get dressed. He looks over at the alarm clock on his nightstand and sees that it’s just about nine o’clock. A little reluctant to bring it up, he divulges his plan to Alice.
“So, I’m gonna hit up Remy and see if he’ll give you a ride back to your place on his way to work.”
Alice stops zipping on her dress.
“Are you kidding me? Why can’t you drive me home?”
“Because I have a lot of stuff that I have to do later today, and I need to get some more sleep.”
“Really?” She had nothing more to offer, but she goes after him anyway. “You fucking suck.”
“Geez, Alice. It’s a long drive to Pasadena and back.” Scott picks his phone up off of his dresser and walks out of the room to call Remy.
“It’s twenty miles, asshole,” is all Alice says as he leaves the room.
