Elixir, Page 5

  “That’s about it.” Ben shrugged, then looked down again at his list as if he’d just noticed something. “Oh, wait—there’s one more thing … any desire to go to Carnival in Rio?”

  He tried to keep a straight face, but he couldn’t pull it off.

  My jaw dropped. “Are you kidding me? YES!!!”

  There were about a million reasons I wanted to go to Carnival. Not only was it a massive four-day celebration unlike anything else in the world, but it was also a photojournalist’s dream: ornate costumes, wild revelry, and throngs of people from every walk of life, surging into the streets to rejoice together.

  Of course, I also had a personal reason to go to Brazil. For a year now, I’d wanted to visit the place where my father had disappeared. I wanted to talk to the people who’d been with him in his last days. Mom thought the idea was pointless and morbid. She had already been in touch with everyone at the GloboReach camp outside of Rio, where Dad had last been seen. She spoke to them on the phone the day he was declared missing and went there in person almost immediately there-after. Everyone told her the same story: that Dad’s time at the camp was just like all his other visits. He saw patients, he counseled other doctors, he surveyed the operations to see how the outpost could work even better. Had there been drama or violence? Sure, that was a way of life in the favelas, the poorest parts of Rio; but the drama and violence had been nothing out of the ordinary, and nothing that had to do with Dad himself.

  Dad had gone off alone on a few occasions, and he hadn’t let anyone know where he was going. But this wasn’t unusual. He always became personally invested in his patients’ lives, and it was common for him to visit former patients whenever he returned to a GloboReach camp. He’d also get so engrossed in individuals’ stories that he’d embark on one-man missions, striving to accomplish that little bit more to help a certain family or village. Given all that, no one thought twice about Dad being away and out of touch until several days had gone by. At that point the trail had already run cold, and no amount of Weston family money or powerful government emissaries could change that.

  Four months went by between Dad’s disappearance and the official declaration of his death. In that time my mom’s mind-set decayed from fierce certitude that her money and connections would find my father, to a determined hope that they could at least bring her answers, to abject despair about everything in the universe. She survived only by closing the door on the whole thing. She was afraid that if I opened it back up, I’d be leaping back into the same world of pain.

  Mom didn’t realize I’d never left that world. The only thing I thought might help me escape was to get some answers of my own, even if those answers were the same things I’d already heard through Mom, and even if they killed the last tiny fire of hope I held that my dad could maybe, possi-bly, somehow still be alive.

  “Think she’ll sign the paper?” Ben asked as I pulled out my cell phone and dialed. Since my eighteenth birthday was still a couple of months away, I needed a notarized permission letter from my mother each time I traveled outside the country. Not every airport asked for it, but many did, and it was technically a requirement. If they asked when I got to customs in Brazil and I didn’t have it, they wouldn’t let me out of the airport. I’d have to take the next flight home.

  Mom wasn’t answering. I left her a message with all the pertinent information, and asked her to call me.

  “You know she won’t want you to go,” Ben said.

  “I know. But it’s for work. I think she’ll give in.” I nodded toward the playing cards. “You want to deal, or would you rather postpone your agony?”

  “Big talk from somebody about to be double-skunked.”

  “Ooooh. Cocky much?”

  Ben just grinned and dealt. We left Dalt’s several hours later, with our cribbage game tally dead even.

  My phone rang on the drive back home.

  “Shalom,” I chirped to my mom. “Isn’t it the middle of the night in Israel?”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea, Clea.”

  I could hear the roar of laughter and loud conversation behind her and knew she’d stepped away from a dinner party; the kind that seemed casual and friendly, but at which many of her greatest political accomplishments were hatched. She wanted to cut to the chase; she wouldn’t be able to stay on the phone very long.

  “It’s a legitimate assignment,” I said.

  “The one you were hired for, or the one you’ll actually do?”

  “I will absolutely do the job I was hired to do.”

  An explosion of laughter erupted from the crowd. Mom joined in.

  “We’ll talk later,” she said. “Love you.”

  She clicked off, and I smiled. She hadn’t said no. I turned up my radio and continued home, stopping by Rayna’s house to munch popcorn and catch up on the TiVo’d shows we’d missed. It was late by the time I hung the cribbage board back on my wall and climbed into bed, and I imagined for once I’d easily fall asleep.

  I was right. I did fall asleep. But then the dreams came.

  The room was in shades of red, which matched the robe I wore. I sat in front of a mirror, slathering cold cream onto my face to loosen the thick stage makeup.

  There was a knock at the door. Three raps fast, then two slow. Our signal. I eagerly rose to unlock the door, taking care not to make a sound. I didn’t want him to enter before I was ready. I sat back down and quickly blotted the extra cream off my face. I turned down the wick on my table lamp, then called, “Come in.”

  I didn’t turn to look at him, but our eyes met through the mirror. We’d been together for a year now, but seeing him still made me nervous. He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. Not that he looked perfect. His nose bulged slightly near the top, like it had been broken ages ago and hadn’t quite healed properly. And though he was young, ever-so-thin lines snaked out from the corners of his eyes. They gave him character; he looked like a man who’d wrestled with life and won.

  “What took you so long?” he asked as he removed his top hat and ducked his muscular frame through the door. “I was worried.”

  I wheeled in my seat, primed to snap, but he was smiling. I relaxed and laughed. He was teasing me. I always said he worried about me far too much and it would be the death of me, so now he was playing it up on purpose. “You are so bad,” I said.

  “And you,” he said, holding out a huge bouquet of red irises, “were so, so good.”

  “Did you really like it?”

  “Hamlet has never had a better Ophelia.”

  “In over two hundred years?” I asked. “I’m not sure you’re qualified to make that statement.”

  His mouth curled in a wry half smile. “Oh, I’m pretty sure I am.”

  I rolled my eyes and gave him the closed-lip smile I almost always used when I wasn’t onstage.

  He didn’t let me get away with it. “You know I think your smile is beautiful, Anneline.”

  I blushed. He knew I hated the little gap between my front teeth. I could forget about it when I was in character, but in real life it felt like a sinkhole in the middle of my face.

  “You’re so convinced you’ll disappoint people if you show them that you’re not perfect,” he said gently.

  I blinked back the tears that suddenly welled behind my eyes. He always knew the deeper truth behind what I did, even when it was something so scary and personal that I’d never say it out loud to anyone, even myself.

  “You don’t realize you are perfect,” he went on. “Your imperfections are what make you perfect. They make you you. That’s what people love. It’s what I love too.”

  I had to blink harder now to stop the tears, but they were tears of gratitude. It had been that way from the day we met—like he could see every place my heart was cracked and would pull open the wounds, inspect them, dig out every bit of infection, then fill them with his love until they healed.

  It felt so good I almost couldn’t take it. I smiled—a real smile�
��and quickly changed the subject. I nodded to the bouquet of irises in his hand, then to the vase of long-stemmed roses on my dressing room table, “Roses and irises? You’re feeling extravagant today.”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t send you those.”

  “No? The note says ‘From Your Biggest Fan.’ They were delivered before the show started. They aren’t from you?”

  “I know you prefer irises.” He held up the bouquet. “May I?”

  “Of course.”

  He pulled the roses from the vase so he could replace them with his own bouquet, but he winced and immediately dropped all the flowers.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Thorns,” he said, grimacing. Several blooms of blood pearled on his hand, quickly growing in size. He clenched his fist against the sting.

  “I’ll get you a cloth.”

  “Don’t. I’m fine.”

  “Martyr.” I pulled a cloth from a drawer, then took his clenched hand in mine. “Open up.”

  “Anneline, I’m fine.”

  “Open.”

  He did … and his hand was unscathed.

  “How … what happened?” I asked.

  “The bleeding stopped.”

  “No,” I said, running my thumb over his open palm and fingers. “There’s nothing here. Not even a scratch.”

  “I was barely even cut.”

  “You were bleeding all over your hand,” I insisted. I pushed down on his palm. No red blossoms pooled into view. Nothing.

  “Ow!” He laughed. “Are you trying to make me bleed?” He closed his hand over mine, and with his other hand tipped my face up until my eyes met his. “I’m fine,” he assured me. “I’m better than fine. At least, I could be …”

  Still holding my hand, he sank to one knee and pulled a small box from his pocket.

  No. It couldn’t be.

  He opened the box to reveal a single perfect diamond on a delicate ring. He looked up at me, and I saw an eternity of love in his eyes. “Will you marry me, Anneline?”

  I saw it all in that second; our entire lives sprawling out ahead of us, a whirlwind of images whizzing so fast I couldn’t grab a single one, but the feeling of them broke over me in a wave of happiness so pure it made me cry.

  “Anneline?” His eyes widened in concern.

  “Yes! Yes, I’ll marry you!”

  He didn’t say anything, but his smile glowed as he got to his feet and scooped me into his arms. I screamed and laughed and cried, and my whole world became an ecstatic blur.…

  I sat up in bed, breathless and dizzy. I spun my head toward my computer, irrationally positive the man would be there, stepping out of the darkened screen.

  He wasn’t, of course, but I had to see him. I rolled out of bed, but I was still too hazy from the dream to get my footing, and thumped onto the floor. Instantly there was a bang on my door.

  “What happened in there?” Piri asked.

  “I’m fine!” I called. “Just a bad dream.”

  The door flung open.

  “A bad dream?” Piri tsked with alarm. “Someone walking over your grave. Wear your clothes inside out today; turn your luck around.”

  She stared at me, waiting for me to give the absurd superstition its due respect.

  “Sure, I’ll do that, Piri. Thanks.”

  Piri nodded, then shut the door. Before it closed all the way, I saw her gaze at Dad’s office door and cross herself. I rolled my eyes.

  I got up and contemplated my computer. Only a moment ago I’d been desperate to turn it on and see the man from my dreams, but suddenly I wasn’t sure. I tried to tell myself the same thing I had the night before, that vivid fantasies about the man were my brain’s way of making him less scary and easier to deal with. I even thought about what Rayna would say: The man was mysterious and beautiful—it would be stranger if I didn’t fantasize about him. She’d tell me it was harmless, and I should just thank my imagination for a good night’s fun.

  The problem was that these dreams didn’t feel fun. They felt thick and real, and they clung to me like moss, leaving me disoriented and weirdly out of control. I didn’t like it, and I had a feeling that the more time I spent looking at the pictures, the more vivid the dreams would become. I’d be better off avoiding them, maybe until after Rio. By then I imagined enough time would have passed that they might not have such a grip on me.

  It seemed like a good plan … but the dreams kept coming. Every time I closed my eyes, I dove into another chapter of the love story between myself and this man. Only I was never really me. I was Delia, or Anneline, or Catherine, or Olivia—always one of those four women, each of whom lived in a different era. And the visions felt less like dreams and more like being flung backward through time.

  At first I hated it. No matter how happy I was within the dreams themselves, I woke up feeling like my brain had been hijacked by the guy in the pictures. I tried to fight against the dreams. I’d purposely fall asleep in front of the scariest or most dramatic movies, hoping they’d suck me into their stories while I slept. I’d download visualization exercises specifically made to help you shape your own dreams. I’d run on the treadmill for miles at night until I was sure I’d hit the pillow too exhausted to dream at all.

  Nothing worked. Every night I was back in time again. I was Olivia in Renaissance Italy, trying to perfect my watercolor technique by painting the man I loved and his best friend Giovanni. They were terrible models; they couldn’t stay still for more than two minutes without cracking each other up. Other nights I lived a hundred years later, as Catherine in rural England, racing bareback through the countryside, the man from the pictures pushing his horse to keep up with me. Other nights Anneline swept me onto France’s finest nineteenth-century stages, or Delia whisked me to Prohibition-era Chicago.

  I got so frustrated, I almost called my therapist to tell her about it, but something wouldn’t let me do it. I hated how helpless I was to fight the dreams, but I also felt weirdly protective of them. They were mine. The man was mine. I didn’t want to share them with anyone. I couldn’t explain why I felt that way, but I did.

  After a full week, something even stranger happened: I stopped feeling irritated that I couldn’t control the dreams, and started looking forward to them. It didn’t happen all at once, but the more time I spent with the man, the more I started falling for him, and the less it mattered that I wasn’t in control.

  He had a way about him. No matter how much I tried to protect myself and hide, he always saw through to the core of what I was truly feeling. And while he was technically performing this magic with four other women, as long as I was asleep those women were me. They looked like me (with the exception of the small gap between my teeth when I was Anneline), they sounded like me, and they had the same deep-seated, unspoken fears that we were all desperately afraid to show.

  Those fears didn’t faze the man at all. In fact, he loved me for them, and for the quirks I developed to try and cover them up. It was like he was made for me. He made me feel safe and loved in a way no man ever had in real life. He was even marked as mine. At least, I liked to think of it that way. His chest was stamped with a small tattoo … a tattoo in the shape of an iris.

  In the end, I didn’t care if the dreams were fantasies; they were impossible to resist. I started making excuses to go to bed earlier and earlier, and even took midday naps to satisfy the part of me that couldn’t wait to be with him. Waking up was heartbreaking. Each time I sat up in bed and realized I was alone, I felt as if part of me had been ripped away. I clung to the wisps of the dreams as long as I could, but they always faded too soon, leaving me sad and empty and wanting more. Daydreams about him didn’t have the same tactile feel of reality, but since they were all I had to try to fill the void between sleeps, they had to be enough.

  “That’s it,” Rayna said, pushing my laptop closed. It was about a week before the Rio trip, and she and I were at the kitchen island working on term papers.

  “Rayn
a!” I complained. “I could’ve lost my work!”

  “Please. You hadn’t typed anything in the last hour. Consider this a one-person intervention: Who is he and why haven’t you told me about him?”

  I felt the blush rise into my face. “Who is who?”

  “Seriously? You’re going to play that with me? Clea, it’s obvious. You’re practically delirious; you’ve been a million miles away since we got back from—” She gasped and smacked my arm. “Oh! My! God! It’s Ben, isn’t it? I did interrupt something the night we got back from Paris. It’s Ben, and you haven’t told me because you didn’t want me to say I told you so, when I so told you so! You loser!” She hurled the epithet with a grin of such complete delight that I almost hated to tell her the truth.

  “No! Rayna, it’s not Ben. It’s not anyone.”

  “Liar.”

  “Okay, it’s not anyone real,” I said, grimacing.

  She was still glaring at me skeptically. There was no way I’d get out of the conversation without telling her something. And the truth was that as much as I wanted to keep the man to myself, I was also bubbling over about him inside, and part of me was dying to dish about him with my best girlfriend. Still, I wasn’t exactly sure about the best way to start dishing about someone who existed only in my dreams.

  I took a deep breath and just dove in. I told her all about the dreams, but I didn’t mention how I first saw him. I just said he was some guy I’d seen in a picture somewhere.

  It actually felt great to talk about him. I felt like I gushed for ages. When I was done, Rayna just stared at me.

  “You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?” she asked.

  “I need a boyfriend.”