Cam’s fingers involuntarily release her pencil. It rolls off the desk onto the floor. Ignoring it, she rolls her chair back slightly, just enough to rest her elbows on her lap and lower her face into her hands to stop the spinning sensation.
She can hear her heart beating, hear her own rhythmic respiration…then someone else’s.
Inhale…
Exhale…
Inhale…
Cam’s head is filled with the sound of erratic, shallow breathing, in some kind of bizarre syncopation with her own.
“Please, you have to let me go.”
The thin, uneven pitch of the voice is typical of male adolescence, but she can’t see the speaker yet. Can’t see anything at all; her eyes are tightly closed against her palms and her mental screen remains dark.
“Why are you doing this? Who are you?” she hears the boy ask brokenly.
He’s so afraid, she senses, so terribly afraid, it’s all he can do to just stay conscious, keep breathing…
Inhale…
Exhale…
Cam’s own lungs seem to constrict with the effort.
But that’s crazy. You can breathe. You know he’s only in your head, like the others.
All of them—all the characters she alone can see and hear—are figments of an exceptionally vivid imagination Cam’s English teachers liked to call “a gift,” back when she was in school.
Ha. A gift?
Hardly.
But then, her teachers didn’t know about the strange visions she’s endured for as long as she can remember. If they knew, they might have understood that a vivid imagination can be—more than anything else—a curse.
They’d have suggested a shrink for her, instead of creative writing courses. Because that’s what you do when you hallucinate on a regular basis, right? You see a psychiatrist.
That’s what her sister Ava did at college.
But no one in Cam’s world ever realized that she had stumbled across the truth about beautiful, brunette Ava. About her mental illness. For all she knows, Pop never even knew about Ava’s troubles in the first place.
In any case, no one in her life has ever suspected that Cam is aware she might have more in common with her older sister than an uncanny physical resemblance. She might also have the genetic potential to go stark, raving mad, just as Ava so obviously did twenty years ago.
Why else would a person—perched twelve stories in the air—take a headfirst dive to the ground?
You don’t kill yourself just because your mother abandoned you when you were a teenager, or because your college course load is overwhelming…do you?
Okay, some people might. But Cam found her sister’s diary years ago. She’s suspected, ever since, what was going on with her. She’s come to believe the voices in Ava’s head told her to jump.
The voices in Cam’s aren’t anything like that.
For one thing, they’re invariably laced with fear. Terror, even. They never speak directly to Cam; they’re always addressing someone else, some shadowy person who intends to hurt them.
And most of the time, those voices belong to children.
Cam knows that because she can usually conjure their faces if she focuses hard enough.
Funny…even though she’s the one who dreams up these tortured characters in the first place, she can never quite anticipate what they’re going to look like, or whether she’ll even get to see them at all.
For instance, this boy today, the frightened boy with the cracking voice, sounds like he’s small, and pale.
But when he begins to take shape in Cam’s mind’s eye, he’s older than she expected. Dark-skinned, too—Hispanic, maybe, or Native American. He has a mop of curly dark hair and big brown eyes.
He’s huddled in a confined space—she can see carpet, and metal, and a small recessed light, as if…
Yes, it’s a car trunk. It’s open. Broad daylight. Dappled, fluid shade spills in, as if trees are gently stirring overhead.
Then a human shadow looms over the boy; someone is standing there, looking down at him.
Cam’s heart races, her throat gags on the boy’s panic.
Calm down, she tells herself—and him. Even though he’s not real. Even though he exists only in her head.
Is he wearing some sort of uniform? Boy Scouts, maybe? Khaki shirt, badges, and pins. A kerchief is tied around his neck. On his sleeve, a couple of sewn-on numbers, but Cam can’t make them out.
Which doesn’t make sense because she’s the one who made him up—so she should know which numbers he’s wearing, shouldn’t she? She should know his name, and his age, and, dammit, she should be able to make him stop sounding so helpless.
But no. He’s crying now. Crying and cowering in the car trunk, his elbows bent on either side of his face, his hands clutching the back of his head.
Cam can’t bear to see him like that, can’t bear to listen to the unnatural, keening sound.
Stop, she commands her overimaginative, gifted brain, lifting her head and shaking it back and forth. Stop doing this to me.
Mercifully, the boy’s voice gradually grows fainter. The image begins to fade.
Cam breathes deeply to calm herself.
There. That’s better.
She sits up in her chair.
Sips some tepid tea from the mug on her desk.
Slowly, her breathing returns to normal.
That was a bad one.
They usually are. Bad like a nightmare that grips you when you’re having it…
And ends when you wake up.
But lately, the hallucinations stay with her. She doesn’t forget them the way you would a nightmare. They seem more real than ever before. Why?
Who knows? It’s hard enough for Cam to believe she’s capable of creating such emotional drama out of thin air—let alone comprehend how and why she does it.
Lord knows she’s got enough to worry about without her mind being cluttered by imaginary people in trouble.
Her promotion from Assistant to Associate Editor is on hold until the next fiscal year begins. Mike’s been laid off for almost a month. They’re running out of money.
That’s real stress.
That’s what she should be worrying about.
Not daydreaming, or hallucinating, or whatever one would call the unsettling visions that pop up in her head.
Maybe I should go see someone about them, she thinks—same as always, whenever she comes out of one of these episodes.
Then—no. No way, she tells herself—same, too, as always.
She can’t go see a shrink. They can’t afford it, and anyway, what would Mike do if he realized he was married to a crazy person?
Probably the same thing Pop did, all those years ago:
Make himself scarce.
I can’t lose Mike. I need him. I love him.
She can barely remember her parents’ married era. Not that Ike and Brenda Neary had ever divorced, though they often spoke the word.
Spoke? Ha. Screamed it.
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