Chapter 4
Even as she looked around the room she was in, Abigail could tell that she was dreaming. There was nothing weird about the walls, or the floor, or even the other people in the room—it was the clocks.
This was a trick she had learned early in her deep dive into lucid dreaming that she had embarked on when she had finally lost her patience with the nightmares keeping her awake at night. Every time she looked at the clock on the wall, she couldn’t quite focus on the time. The same was true of her phone, and she couldn’t quite read the text message she’d just gotten either.
She was at a party, she decided, based on how nice everyone was dressed. She looked down at herself in the dream. She was wearing a slinky black dress with sequined cherries on it. She remembered this dress; she’d worn it to Jacob’s sixteenth birthday and to her own a few months later.
Her phone went off again but she couldn’t read the text message that came through. She shook her head and put the phone back in her pocket. There was a noise in the other room, a banging noise she didn’t like. She couldn’t have told you what it was that she didn’t like about it, but it was the same feeling she had gotten far too accustomed to with twins when there should have been noise but there wasn’t.
Inside the dream, she tried to move through the crowd towards the door to the hallway—they were in Jacob’s house, she realized. This was his sixteenth. She bumped into people and it felt like they were dragging her backwards and away from the door she was heading towards. Knowing that it was a dream didn’t always help. Her phone bleeped again: what if it was the twins!? Her heart raced at the thought, but she always had that thought when a text arrived. She needed to calm down—deep breaths. Slowly, the crowd parted and she made her way towards the door. A huge bird launched from the darkened doorway, shrieking as it swooped past her.
“It’s a dream, it doesn’t exist, it’s not there—it’s a dream,” she said to herself. When she looked again, she didn’t see the bird.
Swallowing hard, she stepped through the door into the dark hallway. It was impossibly long, with closed doors lining the walls for as far as she could see. Freezing water crept around her shoes and seeped into her socks. The banging noise was close, though. She headed towards a door on her left and reached for the handle.
She yanked her hand back with a yelp, the handle was freezing! Her palm blossomed with blisters that she knew hurt but couldn’t really feel. Her phone chimed again, another text.
Glaring at the handle, Abigail muttered to herself that it was a damn dream. She pulled open the door, stood back in horror, and screamed.
Abigail sat bolt upright in bed, the feeling of the scream still in her throat—she must have actually yelled out as she woke up. Her phone alarm was sounding loudly next to her, which explained the constant chiming in her dream. She tried to take comfort in that as she ran through her checklist for after a nightmare.
Her breathing was fast, her pulse racing, and as she held her hands out in front of her, she saw that they were shaking.
Checking the time, she saw that it was nearly three in the afternoon. She hadn’t meant to nap for so long but it did mean that Doctor Lavender’s office would be open.
Leveling herself up from the couch, Abigail made her way to the kitchen and set about making herself a cup of tea as she dialed and waited for the receptionist to pick up.
“Doctor Lavender’s Office, Marianne speaking.”
“Oh, hi Marianne, it’s Abigail Clement here,” she said, grabbing for the phone as the receptionist answered far quicker than she was used to, “sorry, I was just wondering if Doctor Lavender had a free moment to—”
“Of course dear,” Marianne said, “he’s actually just finished up with a patient—can you hold for a few minutes? Then you can tell me all about how London is going—I miss Europe!”
Abigail said that she could and turned her attention to making the tea before her specialist came on the line. It used to upset her that she called her doctor so much that his receptionist knew her well enough to ask about her children, but as she’d gotten to know more people with chronic health conditions, the more she realized how lucky she was to have someone understanding and who cared.
By the time Doctor Lavender was ready for her, she had almost run out of things to tell Marianne about the girls’ latest escapades. She had already covered the whiskey incident, the fact that Sid was now seemingly obsessed with the British Museum, and that Hannah was still convinced that she needed an active social media presence if she was ever going to make it as a cellist. Marianne’s necessary lecture about keeping the girls off socials for as long as possible was cut mercifully short by Doctor Lavender picking up his extension and interrupting.
He ran through the same checklist Abigail had already completed, though this time, she was much calmer as she did it sitting in her armchair by the kitchen window and sipping her tea. He then asked her to recount the dream and explain what was different about this one from the others she had been having recently.
She got as far as the door handle, freezing her skin, and she choked; she hated admitting that she’d let the dream get to her.
“Inside… inside was the inside of a freezer, and Jacob was…” Her voice broke, “his dad was hammering railroad spikes into the wall, Jake was…”
“It’s all right, Abigail,” Doctor Lavender said calmly, “I get the picture. You don’t have to say it. I can see why this has upset you… your nightmares are normally more existential than, well, graphic.”
Privately, she felt that the dreams of her drowning while trapped in a car were pretty graphic, but Doctor Lavender had always referred to those as existential and she’d stopped arguing with him years before.
“Yeah, and there was something about his dad’s face, like it was frostbitten and…” she felt sick as she pictured it, “rotting.”
“Distressing, definitely,” Doctor Lavender said, “now, I see that you have been keeping up with your symptom log? Good. What about extra stress? Anything new happening that might be affecting your sleep?”
She couldn’t tell him she was digging into what happened with Jacob that summer, he wouldn’t understand. She was stressed, yes, but he didn’t need to know the details, right?
“Just dealing with the house, it’s, uh,” she faltered, “stressful being back here in general.”
“Hmm… yes, I’m sure,” he said, “but there’s nothing especially pressing?”
Oh, you know, just finding out my dad had a secret gun and illegal-looking documents, and the best explanation I can come up with is that he was suspicious about local money laundering but then also didn’t care enough to bring it with us or even throw it out when we moved?
Abigail shook her head at her ridiculous thought, “Not really.”
“Hmm…” he said again, “let’s go through some of the breathing techniques we’ve talked about.”
They did help, they really did, but despite knowing that they worked, Abigail always felt ridiculous doing them. By the time they’d finished their ten minute version, she was feeling better about the entire thing.
“I’m just worried about the sleep debt,” she said, “if it gets too much… what if it starts messing with my working memory again?”
He tutted, “No, no, we won’t let it get that far. Did you… did you want me to come out to Rhode Island? I have some family business nearby… it wouldn’t be any trouble…”
Abigail’s stomach twisted. He was too kind.
“No, really, it’s fine,” she said, “I’ll be fine.”
She assured him a few more times that she would let him know if her working memory started to flicker, or if she was having more memories come back to her.
Her tea had gone cold, she realized too late as she took a sip of the bitter liquid.
A knock on the door caught her off guard and she glanced at the phone—she’d been on the call for over an hour! The knock must be Byron, she realized. He was supposed to be coming over today to talk about the mess she’d made of the plaster in the hallway and the office.
She quickly said her goodbyes and went to the door.
“Perfect timing,” she said as she opened the door to Byron, “I needed a cup of tea.”
“Oh, right,” he said, clearly a little perturbed by the lack of greeting, “sure.”
Abigail stepped aside to welcome him in, “as you can see, I’ve not exactly been fastidious with my clean up...”
She gestured to the bucket of crumbled drywall she had cleaned but not as thoroughly as she would have liked.
“Well, yeah, but if you’re worried the rest will fall in on you, I can understand being hesitant to work too hard for no reason.”
He sounded worried, or nervous, she realized, as he smiled at her.
“Ah I’m not that worried,” she said, trying to bridge the gap of strangeness.
“You’re not?” he asked.
“Uh... No?” she replied, “Why... Should I be?”
Byron shook his head, “no no, just, you sounded... Concerned in your text.”
“Oh no, what did I say?” she asked, covering her face with one hand, “I was really tired when I messaged you yesterday.”
He didn’t even reach for his phone, “Your exact words were ‘plaster falling off the walls, no idea what to do to not get buried. Would appreciate your input on fixing this stupid mess’. Then we talked about when I should come over... You did not seem, uh, best pleased. I have to say though, I never had a lot of inside maintenance on my lists and I’d never seen anything that might indicate...”
Then it hit her, he thought she was angry with him and his maintenance of the property!
“Oh!” she exclaimed loudly, “No! No, it’s not a maintenance thing... It was an ‘Abigail found some wires and pulled on them and that destroyed a really bad plaster patch job’ followed up with an ‘Abigail continues to yank on wires until they lead back to a badly installed false wall which she then pulled down by yanking further on the wires’ thing.”
Byron visibly relaxed as she spoke—his shoulders falling from their high and tense position, and stiff expression thawed.
“Oh, right, well, good,” he said, then added quickly, “not, good, exactly. You probably shouldn’t have done that—but I’m glad it wasn’t an issue with my work.”
Abigail laughed and closed the door, “no, trust me, there’s no way I would ever think this was your work.”
She didn’t know anything about assessing dry wall. She had never seen dry wall that Byron had installed, but the quiet pride she saw bloom in his expression made her heart skip a beat. Abigail immediately pushed the warm fuzzy feeling away; she wasn’t allowed to think about Byron like that... At all. It would be bad to get a crush on her contractor.
“See, look,” she said, clearing her throat and making her way down the hall.
Byron’s face took on a serious expression as he inspected the damage, and Abigail let herself watch him… just a little.
“So, uh,” she said, awkwardly, “what do you think?”
“Well you were right about the poor workmanship,” he said, “along this whole section, they just gouged a line in the existing plaster and then put filler over it.”
“Yeah, that’s similar to the office,” she said, hesitant to let him in, in case he recognized the gun safe for what it was.
Byron’s phone chimed and he withdrew it, smiling at his screen briefly, before putting it away before turning to her again. Curiosity sparked in her mind but she ardently looked away, not wanting him to see her and think she was trying to peek at his texts.
“I have to go, I’m running late,” he said, “you’ve got two choices—I can re-fill the damage and paint over it or I can replace the whole panel of drywall.”
“That second option sounds... Pricey,” she said, “and we will have to do something like that for the office anyway.”
“It should only be around two hundred to do it all properly.”
Abigail contemplated for a moment. It would probably be the best thing to fix it properly—especially if she wanted to sell the place anytime soon.
“Sure,” she said, “let’s do the full job.”
“I can get to it end of next week… I’ll probably have a full day free then, is that all right?”
She nodded and they parted ways. He hadn’t even seemed so keen to get away from her, she thought as she closed the front door. Whoever had texted him must have been pretty important, like a date, probably. Abigail shooed the thought away as soon as it popped up, but she knew that she’d need a distraction. Her gaze fell on the bucket of plaster and she knew exactly how the rest of her evening was going to be spent.