We took a seat near the back and ordered coffee. After we’d ordered, Chloe moved over and slid into my side of the booth.
“Why did you ask me if David Bowie was alive? We just saw him with Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris at the Tacoma Dome.”
“Gram Parsons?”
“K, you’re really freaking me out right now.”
“I’m sorry, it’s nothing.”
I wanted to ask Chloe a whole bunch of questions about Gram Parsons, but I just forced a smile and turned my attention to the shopkeeper’s bell jangling by the front door. Somebody was entering the diner.
It was Swan and the twins.
I felt a wave of anxiety crash through my body, and vertigo hit me like a wave of wet cement. I grabbed Chloe’s hand and tried to stand, but I couldn’t move.
Swan slid into the booth across from Chloe and me, and the twins stood on either side of the table, blocking any potential escape.
“You got my message,” Swan said.
“Why did you kill Fatman Neil?” Chloe asked, glaring at the twin blocking our side of the table.
“We didn’t kill him, sweetheart,” the twin on the right said.
“Bullshit,” Chloe spat.
At that moment I saw something. It was the shadow things again, moving slowly toward us from the back of the diner.
“We have to leave, right now,” Swan said, standing up and reaching for my hand.
“We’re not going anywhere with you,” Chloe said.
I looked back at the shadow things, then at Swan. I could see her yelling, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying.
That’s when the lights went out.
The diner was completely black and the sounds of people talking had suddenly transformed into a garbled hum that filled my head.
And then I was somewhere I didn’t recognize—or rather, I was nowhere.
I had the strange feeling that I was stuck, hovering in between places, straddling some kind of line, and I wasn’t able to tell which side of that line was mine, or exactly how many sides of the line there actually were.
I had no idea where I belonged.
It was horrible, feeling completely alone and untethered, but it wasn’t a new feeling. I’d felt this way before, a long time ago, as a child.
* * *
—
I had nightmares when I was a kid—night terrors, the doctors called them.
In these dreams, I would find myself lying in a thick inky darkness, paralyzed and unable to wake up. I felt like I was stuck in a dark empty limbo.
I called it the in-between place.
In the beginning of the nightmare, the in-between place was always empty, terrifyingly void of anything but the cool darkness, but if I concentrated extremely hard, I was often able to tune in to something—something I could feel alive and swirling all around me. Then suddenly I’d feel like I was floating, like I’d become part of the thick viscous darkness, and it wouldn’t be long before I’d lose my ability to feel where I ended and where the darkness began.
And there was something else there, somewhere deep in the darkness.
There were currents.
Each of these currents led somewhere…else…every one of them a potential avenue of escape from the way I was feeling. But no matter how hard I tried, I was never able to choose a current and use it to escape. So I’d remain stuck in that dark limbo, feeling like my eyes were open but my body was frozen in place, and eventually, finally, I’d wake up screaming.
It was my mother who taught me how to deal with my nightmares.
One night, after a particularly bad dream, she sat up with me while I tried to calm myself enough to fall back asleep.
She asked me to describe how it felt when I was lying there paralyzed.
I told her everything—how helpless and terrified I felt, stuck in the floating darkness, how I was unable to choose any of the currents that I knew would allow me to escape my paralysis.
My mother told me that the best way to deal with the situation was to follow my instincts and make a choice. First, she said, I needed to bring all of the emotion I could to the surface—think about the love I felt for my family, think about being strong and centered—and then she told me to concentrate as hard as I could on the currents and focus on finding the best path, the one that felt right. And once I’d done that, all I had to do was reach down into that specific current, grab her hand, and she’d be there to help me wake up.
I don’t remember ever using that technique my mother taught me, but the night she told me about it, I had the best sleep I’d had in ages. The following week I began seeing a behavioral therapist who put me on some medication and taught me a number of techniques designed to diminish my stress and anxiety.