In Your Dreams

CHAPTER 12



Maybe it’s because I have dreams on the brain lately, but the morning of my birthday, I remember a dream for the first time in a long time. Funny thing is, I’m not even sure the dream is mine to begin with, because what I view in my mind’s eye are the forest-covered hills of North Carolina, just as Kieran described and drew them in his journals. Only instead of words and drawings on a notebook page, I visualize trees covered with summer green leaves and distant mountains beyond shrouded in the fog of an early morning. And I see Kieran, standing in front of me in a clearing—or in front of somebody, I guess—smiling as he takes in the scenery.

I wake up, and I’m as calm as the slight breeze that rustled the trees on the mountain in my mind. Because I feel so refreshed and relaxed, I want to make sure I remember as many details as possible so I can relive the dream whenever I want. Before I forget anything, I jump out of bed and go to my desk, logging into my laptop so I can type out everything as fast as I can.

After I record the dream, I practically float down the hall to the bathroom and get ready for the day. Seventeen starts off with Mom serving me pancakes for breakfast—slightly burned, of course—and when I show up at school, I find my locker tricked out with streamers and balloons in Titan navy blue and gold, courtesy of Cassie, Lauren, and Ashley. Kieran gives me a funny card during English, and assures me more surprises are waiting tonight, when we’ve planned to go to Sumner with Kayla and Brad Wallace—who finally worked up the nerve to ask Kayla to Prom—to catch a late Friday night movie. And even though today is April Fools’ Day, my friends and family honor the Prank-Free Zone I’ve declared around myself and don’t do anything stupid. By the time I finish dinner at my grandparents’ and duck back over to my house to grab Kieran’s present—a sketch pad with a set of colored pencils—I’m convinced nothing could ruin my night. But my good mood evaporates as I approach the Laniers’ house, where Kayla’s sitting alone on the front porch steps, hugging herself and rocking back and forth.

“Kayla?” I yell, racing across the driveway behind her Jeep. She turns her head slightly and even from this distance, I can tell she’s been crying. I sit down next to her when I reach the porch, dropping Kieran’s gift bag at my feet. “Oh, my God. What’s wrong?”

“Kieran’s never going to talk to me again, for starters,” she whispers, staring in front of her as if I’m not there.

“What happened?”

Kayla gazes at me, red-rimmed eyes blinking back tears. “We need to go inside,” she rasps, standing up. I grab Kieran’s gift and follow her into the house. Without a word, we walk to the kitchen where Jim and Carlie both stand against the sink, Jim with his hands behind him on the countertop and Carlie hugging herself as Kayla had been on the front porch.

“Where’s Kieran?” I ask, fighting to keep my voice level because something obviously isn’t right here.

“Upstairs asleep,” Carlie whispers. “He’s…he’s a little upset.”

Jim exhales. “Zip, I think you’d better sit down.”

Too afraid to argue or question, I place the gift bag next to the wall and slide down into a chair at the end of their kitchen table. Kayla sits down opposite me, wiping underneath her eyes with the back of her wrist.

“Where to start?” Jim mutters, shaking his head. Carlie places a hand on his arm, and he launches in with “We’d always planned to tell him the truth. So tonight, we did. He’s eighteen now and everything’s been changing so much lately—there was just no sense in waiting anymore.”

“How about not ruining his birthday?” Kayla suggests, her bitterness aimed at the wall as she’s evidently too angry to look at her parents. “How about not ruining the first thing I’ve had resembling a date in, like, forever?”

“Kayla, enough,” Carlie scolds, but she sounds more exhausted than anything. “Zip needs to hear this.”

I’m so confused I want to scream at them. Where’s Kieran? What’s going on? Why aren’t you crazy people making any sense? But I keep my cool as Jim drags himself to the table and sits in the chair closest to me.

“In another lifetime,” he begins after a deep breath, “I served as a consultant to the New York City Police Department and the Manhattan District Attorney. You’ve probably seen people like me on TV shows—the ones who profile suspects and do interviews to determine if defendants are fit to stand trial.”

Mom and I have blown enough lazy Saturdays on Law and Order marathons for me to know what he’s talking about. “Yeah,” I whisper.

“The last case I worked on involved an armed robbery committed by two young men, Morgan Levert and Frank Dozier,” Jim continues. “They’d been in and out of trouble as juveniles, but nothing too serious. When I met them, they were alleged to have held up a liquor store in the northern part of Manhattan. Frank, along with Morgan’s girlfriend, Jenna Bradley, were supposed to do the job, while Morgan manned the getaway car around the corner. Fortunately, the store owner triggered a panic alarm under the cash register, and police started showing up almost immediately. Jenna fired from inside the store, and she was killed in the shootout. Morgan left before the police spotted him, and at first, they had no idea Jenna and Frank had an accomplice. Frank eventually gave Morgan up and cooperated on possible hiding places, and they found Morgan on an abandoned farm outside the city about two days later. I got involved because Frank claimed he was on drugs when he committed the robbery and that Morgan had been controlling him.”

“Controlling him?” I ask, not bothering to mask my doubt.

“Yes. Your reaction is fairly similar to everyone else’s, from his lawyers on down to me. Obviously, people lose their inhibitions and can be easily influenced when on drugs, but Frank seemed lucid at the time of the arrest, so he wasn’t tested, and investigators found no drug paraphernalia at his or Morgan’s apartments. Frank’s lawyers arranged for tests later on at his insistence, but enough time had passed that the results came back clear. Frank kept claiming he’d used something for months that he couldn’t name or describe beyond it being a liquid, and that Morgan and Jenna had cooked it in their apartment. Morgan talked Frank and Jenna into robbing the liquor store while they were under the influence, and they carried out the robbery while high.”

“So this Frank guy was crazy?”

“Not exactly. Morgan claimed he had never manufactured drugs, and no evidence existed to suggest he had. Despite his repeated insistence that he’d been drugged, I found Frank perfectly competent to stand trial. He didn’t exhibit true signs of delusion, and I assumed he was trying to talk his lawyers into mounting an ‘under the influence’ defense to explain why he supposedly couldn’t remember details of the crime. He was sentenced to twenty-five years for attempted armed robbery, and Morgan was convicted of conspiracy.”

Jim pauses, and I’m about to ask what any of this has to do with Kieran or anything else when Carlie drops a bomb: “Morgan Levert and Jenna Bradley are…were…Kieran’s parents.”

I open my mouth to say something, but my mind goes blank. “Okay” is the brilliant response I finally squeak out.

“Kieran was almost sixteen months old when his mother died, and as he had no other relatives on either side, the state took custody when Morgan was arrested,” Jim explains. “We volunteered to be his foster parents, and once Morgan went to prison, we began the process to adopt him.”

“I had a difficult pregnancy with Kayla, and I couldn’t have any more children,” Carlie says, looking over at Kayla, who’s sniffling as she listens to this story for what I’m assuming is the second time tonight. “I wanted Kayla to have a sibling, and when Jim started working on this case and we found out about Kieran…”

“By the time his father went to prison,” Jim continues after Carlie’s voice fades away, “Kieran was nearly three. I had family and professional ties in North Carolina, and so we moved there for a fresh start. Not too long after, we started noticing Kieran’s behavior.”

“The sleeping, you mean?”

He nods. “Obviously, we thought he had narcolepsy, although people usually don’t exhibit symptoms until they’re older. We took him to countless specialists and tried every approved treatment, but nothing helped to keep it under control. Medications, other treatments that help most people wouldn’t work on Kieran. No one could tell us why. We’ve put him through so many tests…” Jim shakes his head, and Carlie sits down in the empty chair next to him. She rubs his back, her action seeming to give him the strength to continue. “We encouraged him to start keeping the dream journals to find out if he noticed anything especially strange or unusual about his dreams, anything that might give us clues as to how his illness works. Kieran was about eleven when he told us of the pattern he noticed with Kayla’s races.”

“The medals,” I say. Jim and Carlie exchange glances, and I wonder if they’re relieved or concerned that Kieran had shared this information about his dreams with me.

“Of course, the pattern in and of itself didn’t offer any scientific, medical explanation for his condition, but we were so desperate to make sense of things,” Carlie explains. “Obviously, we were curious when he told us about his dreams. So we…” She steals a glance at Jim, who tilts his head toward her as if he’s giving her permission to speak. “God—I’m not proud of this. We started looking through his journals. He’d shared some things with us willingly over the years, but after he told us about Kayla, we wanted to read everything.”

I look over at Kayla, who’s gritting her teeth, and when I turn my attention back to Carlie, her hands are over her mouth and nose as if she’s trying to hold something in. “He’d described flashes of me wearing clothing I hadn’t bought yet,” she eventually says. “He’d drawn Jim and me sitting on a beach three months before we announced a family vacation to Martha’s Vineyard. And the spider ring—”

Carlie’s voice rises as she glances over at Kayla, but Kayla folds her arms more tightly around her ribcage and continues staring ahead at the kitchen cabinets. Realizing she won’t get any help from her daughter in telling this particular story, she says “Kayla had a spider ring she’d gotten at school.”

“I drew it out of one of those plastic jack-o’-lantern buckets during the class Halloween party,” Kayla adds, still gazing in front of her. No one speaks as we wait for her to continue, and when she doesn’t, Carlie resumes the story: “She didn’t have it on when I picked the kids up from school. Later on, I was making dinner before Jim came home, and Kieran was sleeping in his room. Kayla put the ring on and called me away from the stove, and I just reacted—I’m afraid of spiders.”

“It all happened so fast. She rolled up the morning newspaper and started whacking at my hand,” Kayla interjects, allowing herself a tiny smile, but still unwilling to meet anyone’s eyes. “I’m yelling at her to stop hitting me because the spider’s not real. Kieran wakes up and comes in screaming and freaking out until both he and mom realized it was just a plastic spider ring. It was pretty funny at the time.” At last, she turns into the table so she can look at all of us. “I hadn’t shown Kieran the ring when I got it because I wanted to scare him later. He didn’t know about it until we woke him up.”

“When we read Kieran’s journals, we found a drawing of a hand with a spider. The entry was dated in August,” Carlie whispers.

“We didn’t know what to think,” Jim takes up the story. “We might have just dismissed all of this as selective memory—he remembered times he was right about something happening in the future, but forgot instances of dreaming about something that didn’t happen.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” I tell him, my eyes narrowing as I concentrate.

“Well, for example, have you ever been thinking of someone and they show up at your door or maybe call or text you a few minutes later?”

I search my memory, but nothing immediately comes to mind. “Maybe.”

“Selective memory is your brain choosing to remember the few instances in which something like that happens and you’re correct. At the same time, your brain dismisses the millions of times you aren’t thinking of someone before they call, or those times you’re thinking of someone but another person shows up at the door. You recall when you’re right, and forget about the times you’re wrong.

“Which makes you think you’re always right,” I say, and he nods.

“Kieran described and drew these things so far in advance…” Jim continues, shaking his head and searching the wall near the ceiling as if looking for the right way to continue. “You have to understand, Zip—Carlie and I have trained as scientists. Even though in our respective practices we’ve had to deal with the emotional side of people, science is ultimately how we make sense of the world. But even scientists struggle with why things happen sometimes, especially when dealing with the human brain. We didn’t have an explanation for Kieran’s condition, and I couldn’t trust my colleagues to help me come up with one—as you can imagine, claiming my son has glimpses of the future wouldn’t have helped my credibility.”

“And we didn’t want to turn him into some human guinea pig,” Carlie adds. “On the one hand, as Jim said, we’re scientists. We want to understand why certain things happen. At the same time, Kieran’s my son, blood or no blood. We’d already put him through so much—the scans, the tests, the x-rays…there’s only so much you can do to someone in the name of science before you start wondering what you’re accomplishing.”

“So I made a decision,” Jim says. “I went back to New York to talk to Morgan Levert about Kieran. In retrospect, I made the biggest mistake of our lives.”

“How could Kieran’s father have helped?” I wonder aloud.

“Morgan is Kieran’s only living blood relative. I thought if I talked to him he could tell me something about his medical history, or his family’s, that might explain the dreams, or at the very least, the sleeping disorder.”

“And?” I ask, eager for the end of the story.

“I told him about Kieran’s condition, and he informed me Frank Dozier hadn’t been lying.”

“So Frank and Jenna had been on something after all?”

“Yes. Morgan had been…a bit of an amateur pharmacologist, let’s say.”

“Sort of like the amateur pharmacologists out on the north end of Titusville?” I smirk.

Jim gets my meaning and bobs his head. “Exactly. As you know, some of these people have only a vague idea of what they’re doing. They work off a recipe handed down to them from someone and hope the lab doesn’t explode before they mix up something they can sell. Morgan and Jenna apparently stumbled upon a formula that produced a powerful narcotic. Under the influence, users would descend into a sort of sleepwalking state, doing things without realizing and remembering little once they sober up—much like a walking blackout after someone’s had too much to drink. And just as with most other drugs, users can be heavily influenced by the suggestions of others when they’re under.”

I’ve never been drunk before, partially because I try to avoid alcohol as a student-athlete, and partially because I’m afraid I’ll get caught—by my mom, by the cops, or by the school. My future’s too important to me to do something stupid, so I don’t bother, but plenty of other people do. Lauren and Cassie went to visit Cassie’s older sister at Northern last year before Lauren started dating Bill, and they snuck into a frat party where some guy put something in Lauren’s drink. Luckily, Cass stayed glued to Lauren the whole time, and so Mr. I’m-So-Awesome-I-Have-to-Drug-Girls-to-Get-Some didn’t get the chance to pull anything. When she was telling me about the weekend when they got back, Cassie said Lauren was walking around and talking, trying to get Cassie to leave her alone so she could go off with this guy, but Lauren claims she doesn’t remember a second of it. She said one minute she was standing against the wall, waiting for the guy to bring her another drink, and the next minute, she was outside leaning over the bushes with Cass holding her hair back as she started to puke. She remembered nothing in between, like watching a DVD and skipping from the first chapter straight to the end without seeing the rest of the movie, even though in reality, an hour had passed between the time the guy left her alone and when she ended up heaving her guts out. So I wonder if the sensation Morgan described to Jim is similar to what Lauren experienced.

But then I think of something even more relevant than Lauren’s blackout, remembering times Kieran and I have been walking to class or talking on the phone, and later I’ll mention something about our conversation and he has no memory of anything. “So was what Morgan Levert described sort of like when Kieran blacks out?” I ask.

“It sounded similar. And once he realized what the drug could do, Levert overreached—rather than trying to sell his new creation on the street, he decided he and his friends would take their criminal activities to the next level.”

“Armed robbery,” I fill in.

“He told me he had some pretty grand plans,” Jim says, sighing. “The liquor store job was mostly a training exercise for them. He’d hoped to move up to banks, armored cars…and in every situation, he’d be the driver, while Jenna and Frank did the dirty work they wouldn’t remember the details of later. Obviously, they didn’t plan on the first store having a panic button.”

“So why did Morgan risk telling you this after the fact?” I ask. “Wasn’t he afraid you’d go to the police?”

“All I had was his word, and he knew it. As I said before, no evidence of drug activity had ever been uncovered. Morgan cleaned out his apartment and destroyed any traces of the drug before he left the city to hide out. He also said Jenna ingested the substance well into her pregnancy with Kieran. We can only assume Jenna’s use is what caused his condition—we don’t have a better explanation.”

“So what’s in this…stuff?” I say, not quite sure how to refer to a substance with no apparent name. “Morphine, maybe? I mean, if you’ve got some idea what’s in it then you can break it down and figure out how to help Kieran, right?” Even as I ask the question, I fear the answer must be ‘no.’ Jim went to visit Morgan years ago, and Kieran’s condition apparently hasn’t changed.

Jim’s mouth spreads into a bitter smile as he tells me what I’ve already guessed to some extent. “Morgan screwed me,” he begins, and my back rises a little bit with the shock of someone as formal as Jim Lanier dropping the word “screwed” in the middle of a sentence. “He claimed he and Jenna had never written the formula down, and he didn’t remember how to make it. I should’ve been smart enough to see that coming, but I wanted so much to help Kieran…” Jim shakes his head and looks away. “I sat in front of this man, a criminal, and told him everything about Kieran. I thought I could appeal to him as a father—a father who wanted to help his son. I showed him pictures, shared information with him about Kieran’s life…” Jim draws in a breath and fixes his eyes on me again, as if he wants to make sure this dramatic pause forces me pay attention to everything he says next. “So there’s no telling what’s going to happen now that he’s out.”

Panic grips me to the point I can barely open my mouth. “He’s out?”

“One of my contacts back in New York told me he was released last week. He’s done his time and he’s free, and I can’t exactly ask the friends I still have in the police department to keep tabs on a free man who hasn’t yet committed any further crimes. We’ve thought about hiring a private detective, but if Morgan has something up his sleeve and he’s smart, he probably went off the grid as soon as he could. I wouldn’t even know where to tell a private detective to start looking for him—with Jenna dead, he doesn’t have any reason to stay in New York that I know of.”

“So you think he’s going to try to find Kieran?” I wheeze.

“I have no idea what he’s thinking,” Jim says. “As I said, he had some big plans he didn’t fulfill. Maybe he thinks he can connect with Kieran and get him involved in a life of crime somehow. Maybe he thinks he can use Kieran’s dreaming abilities to his advantage. Maybe he hopes to find Kieran and give him more of this substance…I don’t know...”

“What about Frank Dozier?”

“As far as we can tell from the dream journals, he has no interest in Kieran—unlike Morgan.”

“Morgan’s why we moved here from Asheville,” Carlie says. “Kieran started recording dreams about him almost two years ago, although at first we had no idea he was dreaming about Morgan based on the vague descriptions.”

My memory trips back to Kieran’s notebooks and Carlie’s reaction to seeing them on the floor, Kieran’s doppelganger with the goatee staring up at her. “So Morgan’s the Boogey Man.” I say.

Carlie closes her eyes briefly and opens them again. “We’ve always been careful not to let Kieran’s dreams dictate our behavior, but when we found journal entries that clearly seemed to be about Morgan, we started looking into leaving North Carolina.”

A little laugh escapes from me in spite of myself. “So you moved to the middle of nowhere.”

“The Sumner job was perfect,” Jim adds. “It’s within driving distance, and Titusville’s at least forty-five minutes from…well, anything.”

Kayla sniffles again, and I remember she’s still in the room for the first time in a while. “So, how much of this did you know before tonight?” I ask her.

She rests her elbows on the table, hands cupping her chin. “A lot, but not everything. I mean, I didn’t want to know too many specifics on the dreams. But I’ve known about the Morgan Levert stuff since I was eleven so I could help protect Kieran.”

I try to wrap my head around hearing this story as an eleven year-old, considering I can barely grasp it at seventeen. No wonder Kayla’s outer shell is so tough, thanks to the tremendous sense of responsibility she’s had to bear all these years. Turning away from her to glance back and forth from Jim to Carlie, I notice they’re both avoiding my eyes, and a thought occurs to me. “You saw me in his journals, didn’t you?” I ask, trying to keep my voice level.

“We had no idea what to think when we first found those sketches,” Carlie admits, her face stained with a sheepish smile. “Then after we moved here and he started talking about you all the time…”

“Well, you can imagine how shocked we were when you brought him home that night.” Jim finishes Carlie’s thought. “And that’s when we were certain…despite all the micromanaging we’ve done of his life, finding out you were real told us we didn’t have control over the situation anymore. We knew everything had to come out at some point. We couldn’t forbid him from seeing you without a good reason, and there’s just no good reason—you’re a wonderful young woman, Zip, and you come from a wonderful family.”

“Thanks,” I say, accepting what are, in this context, the weirdest set of compliments I’ve ever received.

“After Carlie told me he’d shown you his journals, I knew we couldn’t avoid telling Kieran—and you—everything, especially with Morgan out there somewhere. You’re a part of this.”

Sinking down in my chair, I whisper, “Am I in some kind of danger?”

Jim lets out a long, measured breath. “I wish we knew. The best we can tell from Kieran’s dreams, Morgan’s likely going to try to make contact with him, and we need to assume anyone in Kieran’s inner circle could be collateral damage in whatever Morgan’s planning. As much as I’d like to believe he’ll come out of prison rehabilitated, I know what I saw all those years ago. We’re counting on Morgan going to North Carolina to look for Kieran, because as far as he knows, we’re still living there. Only my sister in Asheville has any idea we moved here, and she’s keeping an eye out to see if he shows up.”

Assuming the popular position of the evening, I wrap my arms around myself, gripping my sides so tightly I feel my ribs through my sweater. “Can I see Kieran?” I squeak. “Please?” And although I’m asking politely, I don’t care what their answer is. I need to be with Kieran right now, need to put his face and his voice to everything I’ve just learned. For the last hour, we’ve been talking about him. Now I want to talk to him, because talking to him is the only way any of this will sink in for me.

Carlie reaches out past Jim, putting her hand on my cheek, her actions and the tears glistening in her eyes speaking the apology for everything I’ve heard tonight she can’t seem to say. “Of course you can see him,” she whispers. “He’s been upstairs for a while now. He’s probably awake.”

I stand up but before I can leave the kitchen, Kayla’s voice stops me. “I want to come with you,” she announces. I’d hoped to talk to Kieran about everything alone, but Kayla’s so upset, and I imagine she’s thinking Kieran might go easy on her if she’s with me.

“Sure,” I tell her, and she crosses the room to join me.

Once we’re out of the kitchen and halfway up the stairs, she says, “All I ever wanted to do was protect him. Mom and Dad, too.”

“I know.” My forgiveness extends beyond the present moment back to January now that I understand what Kayla’s been dealing with for so long. “Kieran knows it, too.”

“I’m not so sure,” Kayla insists, walking ahead of me. “You didn’t see how angry he got. He was screaming at us after Mom and Dad told him everything, saying he wouldn’t trust any of us ever again and once he’s done with school for the year, he’s leaving and not coming back. He’s never been pissed off like that before.”

We don’t get the chance to find out if Kieran’s calmed down, because when we reach his bedroom he’s not there, the comforter pulled back and the sheets twisted up as if someone had been in bed recently. Kayla surprises me by crossing the room and knocking on the closet door. “He probably heard us coming,” she says to my confused look. “He used to love hiding from me when we were little.” No one responds to her knock, and she opens the door just as I come up next to her to find the closet contains Kieran’s clothes and Kieran’s shoes, but no Kieran.

“The bathroom,” Kayla suggests, marching out into the hall to find the bathroom door wide open. We perform cursory searches of her room, her parents’ room, and the guest bedroom—Kieran isn’t hiding anywhere.

“I guess he slipped out while we were in the kitchen,” Kayla says, so far from freaking out right now I’m amazed. She’s been dealing with this kind of weirdness full on for years, though, so on some level, tonight’s probably just another night in the Lanier household.

I follow Kayla back to Kieran’s room, where she walks over to the window and yanks up the blinds. “My car’s still here,” she reports. “Not like he can drive it, anyway.” She sinks to the window seat, the darkness I first noticed on the front porch overtaking her face once again. “So he’s run away, and we’re out in the boonies, miles from town. He’s probably asleep in a ditch, or in the middle of the road.”

Sitting down on his bed, I try to think like Kieran would, wondering where I’d go if I wanted to collect myself and feel better, but had no transportation and probably couldn’t get far before passing out. I’m guessing he wouldn’t go to my grandparents’ house or over to talk to my mom, because how would he explain?

I can only think of one other place nearby where Kieran could go to be alone. Raising my eyes to meet Kayla’s, I tell her “Get your coat. I think I know where he is.”