Chapter 30 #2
“No, thank you. We can work in her room,” I assure her quickly before I pause. “I should have called ahead. I’m sorry.”
“You have never once needed to call ahead. You know that.”
“I know.”
“Then stop apologizing for it.”
We go upstairs together, and at the top of the landing, the door to Tessa’s room opens, and a nurse comes out in scrubs, pulling the door softly closed behind her. She’s short and blonde, smiling at me, blue eyes catching the hallway light.
I smile back on autopilot.
She murmurs to Nora about the morning routine and vitals. I hear it all and register none of it because the blue of her eyes is the wrong blue entirely. Not even close.
Nora thanks her, and the nurse heads downstairs. Then she opens Tessa’s door, and I follow her in, noticing Tessa sitting in one of the reading chairs in front of the window, like last time.
Nora straightens the curtain, then picks up a water glass from the nightstand to take back down. At the door, she pauses, one hand on the frame. “I’ll leave you to it,” she says, before she pulls it closed behind her.
The room settles. The door click is small but final, and outside, Nora’s footsteps fade down the hallway. The curtain she straightened shifts slightly in the draft from the door closing, then stills.
I take the few steps to the window and sit in the chair next to Tessa, before I put my bag down in front of me. The morning light comes through the curtains and bathes her face in soft light.
“Good morning.” I settle back in the chair. “I’m sorry for visiting this early. I needed some company today.”
The curtain moves in the draft from the heating vent as I open my notebook and look at the blank page.
Five years ago, I tried to go to her. Not calling her back, not working from the outside in, but going to where she was, entering her frame rather than asking her to enter mine.
It was the most promising thing I’d tried, the thread that felt, for the first time, like it might actually lead somewhere.
And then This Man noticed me, and I had to stop the inside approach because I couldn’t separate it from the consequences of attempting it.
Couldn’t know whether the nightmares were punishment or coincidence, warning or noise.
And after long enough, the question stopped mattering, because I couldn’t do it anymore.
My nights were already spoken for. There was nothing left to risk in a method that may have drawn his attention in the first place.
Then I found Lennon and had a couple of nights of sleep back.
Ordinary mornings, waking up with my heart at a normal rate and the room exactly as I’d left it.
I did think about it, about whether the window had reopened, whether the outside approach had simply run its course, and the inside one was available again, or whether I could try once more now that my nights were finally my own again.
If I could try to reach Tessa in dreams again.
If the outside approach hasn’t worked in five years—if calling her back, waiting, observing, documenting has produced nothing but incremental and inconclusive results—then it may be that it isn’t the method.
Maybe the method that might work is the one he doesn’t want me to use. Which means it would have worked.
Which means it might still.
“I think,” I say quietly. “That someone has been working very hard to keep me from finding you. I don’t intend to let that continue.”
Tessa’s breathing changes. Not dramatically.
It’s a subtle shift in the rhythm of it, a slight irregularity, as if something interrupted the pattern from the inside.
Her chest rises and then doesn’t fall quite on schedule, holds for a beat too long, and then the next breath comes shallow, labored, as if the air is thicker than it should be.
Then another. And another, each one a little more effortful than the last.
I’m already standing.
“Nora.” I go to the door, my voice carrying without being loud, because loud causes panic, and panic doesn’t help anyone. “Nora, I need you in here, please.”
I go back to the chair, two fingers to her wrist, and I count, waiting for her breathing to slow again.
“I’m here, Tessa,” I say quietly, while I wait for the door. “You’re doing good. Breathe.”
Nora is already in the doorway when I turn to look again, and she reads the room quickly, without fuss, coming to stand on the other side of the chair.
“Her breathing, it—”
“I know,” she cuts me off, eyes not leaving her daughter’s face. We watch her breathing for a moment. It steadies, gradually, the rhythm finding its way back closer to normal, and I feel the tension in my shoulders ease by a fraction.
“This is the third time this week. The breathing.” Nora still keeps her eyes on Tessa. “Dr. Hargreaves mentioned it at the last review. She said if it continues…” She stops, smoothing the blanket over Tessa’s lap with one hand. “She wants to talk about next steps.”
“What kind of next steps?”
“Can we…” She looks at the door.
“Of course.”
I grab my notebook and bag and follow her out into the hallway, before she pulls the door to Tessa’s room almost closed behind us.
“They want to put her on oxygen support.” Her voice is lower out here.
“If her breathing keeps deteriorating, they want to put her under. A clinical coma in a hospital setting.” She looks at the closed door rather than at me.
“They say they can’t provide what she’d need here, even with all the medical staff. ”
“And your concerns about that?”
She looks at me then, and it’s the first time in over six years I’ve seen Nora Vaughn look uncertain.
“If I move her.” Her voice drops further. “If I put her in a hospital, and they manage her breathing and put her under, keep her under…” She stops. Presses her lips together. “They don’t know what that does. To wherever she is. They don’t know if she’d—”
“If she’d come back,” I say quietly.
“If she’d survive it. They don’t know. And I can’t—” Her voice breaks a little. “I can’t lose her completely. Not yet. Not when she’s still…” She glances back at the door. “She is still here. I know she is.”
I don’t reach for the clinical framing. I stand there and let it be true, because it is true, and sometimes that’s the only thing that helps.
Nora’s green eyes are glassy when she finally looks back at me.
“Excuse me.” She straightens, and her heels are steady on the hardwood as she moves down the hallway. “I’ll call Dr. Hargreaves. Let her know about this morning so she can come and check.”
“I’ll see myself out,” I say to her retreating figure, but I don’t think she hears me.
I go downstairs, one hand trailing the banister, the house quiet around me, but when I reach for the front door handle, I hear a familiar voice on the outside.
“… Try this first, and if it doesn’t work, I’ll teach you lucid dreaming.”
Her voice.
Slightly breathless in the way she gets when she’s moving and talking at the same time, and what she just said.
Lucid dreaming.
Like she knows what the words mean, and I stand there with my hand on the door handle, trying to process the fact that Lennon Maes is on the other side of this door, apparently knowing about Lucid dreaming.
I check my watch.
8:04 a.m.
I check it again.
Waking life.
The handle turns from the outside, and the door swings inward, almost hitting me in the face before I manage to step back. Lennon is pulling someone behind her, her hand wrapped around a shirt sleeve, and the someone is Derek Wells.
What in the world?
She sees me and stops so abruptly that Derek walks into her shoulder from behind and has to catch himself on the doorframe.
She looks at me, and all I can do is take her in.
I register the shadows under her eyes that weren’t there two days ago, the set of her jaw, and the fact that she is here, at the Vaughn house, at eight in the morning, having apparently spent the intervening two days making plans that involve lucid dreaming and Derek Wells.
Her hand is still in his sleeve.
“Paul? What are you doing here?”
What am I doing here?
“Working.” I keep my voice level. “I had a session this morning.”
“With…” A pause, the pieces assembling behind her eyes. “Tessa?”