This is my entry into the NYC Midnight Short Story Challenge 2009.
The basic rules: 2,500 word maximum; one week to write; assigned genre and subject. My genre: horror. My subject: A metal detector.
As per the contest rules, I have interpreted the genre rather liberally! But here it is, my first blog.
Emma in my Dreams
I dreamed of her last night and woke up crying. Again.
Not just choked up, with that lump in my throat that’s always there, but a full-on deluge that would drown you if you let it, if you succumbed one day and said fine, you wouldn’t fight anymore, you’d just let the tears fall and fall and fall until they submerged your bed and your room and your whole house and then the street and pretty soon all of Vancouver was underwater and even the mountains slipped quietly into the salty depths.
But you don’t let the tears drown you. You roll over and you grab the corner of the pink Cinderella pillowcase and you rub it against your face hard. So hard it chafes your skin. So hard it hurts. You tell yourself to breathe. Inhale-exhale-inhale-exhale until your lungs work again. Until you can almost believe you aren’t on the verge of drowning.
The dreams are never sad. I’m always smiling. I’m dancing with her in the front yard. Watching her blonde ponytail fly and her gold heart pendant catch the sunlight as she pirouettes on thin awkward legs, not knowing she’s ungraceful. Not caring. Laughing with a clear silver sound that grabs at my heart.
Sometime between her laughter and the moment when I wake alone, that’s when the tears start.
•
Get away, they keep saying. As if I wouldn’t wake up seeing her, hearing her, feeling her, no matter where I was.
Maya and Allie and Jen come to me in the cafeteria at lunch, wearing hopeful smiles and carrying an envelope whose contents inform me I’m catching a flight to Honolulu on Saturday.
“I have to work,” I protest.
Maya waves a dismissive hand.
“For heaven’s sake, Karen, the hospital can live without you for a week. Besides, I already cleared it with Carmen. She says you should go. You haven’t taken any time off since the funeral.”
Jen frowns, and I can see Allie doing her best not to cringe. But I can’t help smiling at Maya.
She’s the only person I know who dares to mention Emma, even if her approach isn’t subtle enough to satisfy my mother’s etiquette book on how to deal with the bereaved.
Maya was the only one who didn’t offer useless words of consolation. Who didn’t come to the church and look at Emma lying there in the oak box – arrayed in her pink ruffled dress, gold heart pendant nestled at her neck, Cinderella Barbie clasped in her small white hands – and try to find meaning. To say that somehow God in His malign omnipotence had deemed it fitting for a four-year-old girl to twirl her way into the path of a car being driven too fast by a sixteen-year-old trying to impress his friends.
“God wanted her home,” my mother said, patting my hand softly.
“Then God sucks,” Maya replied, enunciating each syllable with devastating clarity. And with enough volume that several people – including Granny and Father Conlon and Kevin, who’d returned for the funeral despite my telling him there was no need to develop a conscience about Emma after all this time – turned to stare.
I’d have laughed at the expressions on their faces if I hadn’t been expending all my energy just to breathe and remain upright.
I grabbed Maya’s hand and squeezed it hard.
I owe Maya everything for that moment.
So since she’s apparently bullied the others and made them pool their money to send me away, I can’t very well say no.
I don’t say anything at all. I just shrug, a palms-up gesture of surrender that wins a smile from Jen, a gleeful clap from Allie and a brief, fierce hug from Maya.
•
The too-perky Air Canada girl checks me in and waves me towards security gate C, where I join a lineup of bored-looking travelers and speculate whether any of them are headed to Honolulu and whether any of them are dreading it as much as me. A week of unscheduled hours without the distraction of work doesn’t bear thinking about.
I empty the change from my pockets and dump my keys in the tray to pass through the X-ray, then follow a pink-shirted, straw-hatted man through the metal detector.
It beeps so piercingly that I feel myself jump.
I shrug at the security guy, who gestures for me to step to one side.
“Got anything in your pockets?” he asks in that bored tone they must practice in security school. “Change? Keys?”
I shake my head, and he waves his wand along my body. It beeps as it passes the chest pocket of my white button-down shirt.
He points a finger at the offending pocket. Although I know it contains only the wad of American bills the girls gave me, I obediently reach in.
I stare as my fingers emerge from the pocket with a gold chain wrapped around them. But it isn’t the chain that freezes me to the floor, rooting me in place despite the security guy’s instructions to claim my things and move along.
It’s the gold heart pendant dangling from it.
•
Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.
I give myself instructions as I walk, one word for each step, trying to still the erratic beating of my heart. I rub my hands together as I make my way slowly towards my departure gate, working to restore some warmth to fingers that have become strangely cold.
There’s a logical explanation, I tell myself. Jewelry doesn’t go around jumping into the pockets of clothes. Particularly not fresh-from-the-dryer clothes that were ironed a mere half-hour before I left, thereby eliminating the chance that I had shoved the pendant into the pocket weeks ago and forgotten about it while the shirt hung unworn in my closet.
It has to be something I did in that last half-hour, just before leaving. What had I picked up? My passport. Kleenex. My glasses.
That’s it, I tell myself. When I grabbed the glasses off the dresser I must have knocked the pendant into my pocket.
Somewhere in my mind, a small voice insists the explanation doesn’t make sense. That if the pendant had been sitting on my dresser, I’d have seen it.
I refuse to acknowledge the voice. When it tries to tell me that I know the pendant was not on my dresser, that I have not in fact laid eyes on it since that day in the church, I simply won’t listen.
Clearly, the pendant was on my dresser, or it wouldn’t be in my pocket, where I’d dazedly shoved it again after the security guy waved me onwards.
The thought makes me stop and reach tentatively into my pocket again. My fingers hit cold metal, and I draw out the pendant. I stare at it for a long moment, then bend and zipper it into the outside pocket of my carry-on bag.
I won’t think about it again.
•
It’s a surprisingly painless flight.
My seatmates, the pink-shirted man and his matching pink-shirted wife, seem disinclined to talk after the initial hellos, leaving me to my crossword book and the in-flight movie. In the darkness, while Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson strut the catwalk on the overhead screen, I fall into a sound and dreamless sleep.
I’m refreshed when the pilot lands us smoothly in Honolulu. I even find myself smiling as I claim my pink suitcase – Emma’s choice – and make my way to the taxi rank, feeling the heaviness of the warm air on my skin.
Already it feels different, I think as I hand my case over to the driver and clamber into the back of the cab. Perhaps the girls weren’t wrong. Perhaps a change of scene will help.
I give the driver the name of my hotel and settle back to watch the scenery go by.
My feet brush against something on the floor, and I glance down.
I recognize her instantly, the blonde hair and tiara and sparkling ball gown. Cinderella Barbie. I pick her up and finger the hair, feeling a prickling in my throat as I think of Emma, tearing open the pink polka-dot wrapping paper and then refusing to set Cinderella down for the rest of the day. She took Cinderella everywhere after that and slept with her every night.
I hand the doll over the seat to the driver.
“Looks like someone forgot this,” I manage to say in an almost-casual tone.
The driver drops her onto the seat beside him.
“Huh. Haven’t had a kid in here in ages. Wonder where that came from.”
Then he glances back at me.
“Do you have kids? Would they like Princess Whoever-She-Is?”
Cinderella, I nearly say. But I’m too busy trying not to let the prickling in my throat turn into a lump, and I just shake my head.
We ride in silence to the hotel, a small stone building on a side street a few minutes’ walk from Waikiki Beach.
I get out and reach into my breast pocket for my cash.
My fingers grow cold again as they emerge with a twenty.
And a gold heart pendant.
•
The pendant shines at me from the bedside table as I climb into bed and pull up the duvet. The gold heart seems so small. So innocent.
I’ve done nothing today. After checking into my room, I just walked ceaselessly up and down Waikiki Beach, analyzing the ways in which it is possible for the pendant to have ended up in my pocket again.
I can almost convince myself that I had left it in my pocket. That I had just thought about putting it into my carry-on. But I have a vivid memory of pausing. Bending. Zipping the pendant into the bag. I can even hear the sound of the zipper.
Despite my best efforts to banish the memory, I can’t stop thinking about the last time I saw the pendant, nestled in the hollow of Emma’s white throat as I leaned over to kiss her blonde head.
There is no possible way it has come with me to Hawaii.
Yet there it is, gleaming benignly in the light from the bedside lamp.
I pick it up and hold it against my cheek, feeling its smooth coolness against the heat of the sunburn that’s already turning my face pink.
“Emma.”
Her name escapes me involuntarily, my voice unnaturally loud in the silence of the room.
I feel the familiar lump in my throat as I stroke my cheek gently with the gold heart. Then I return it to the table and turn out the light.
I wake up with my pillow soaked in tears.
I roll over and pick up the pillow to wipe my face with the crisp white linen pillowcase, noticing that it feels rougher against my face than the pink cotton Cinderella one from Emma’s bed.
As I move, a flash of gold on the sheet catches my eye.
The heart pendant. Under my pillow.
I look from the bedside table to the heart and back to the bedside table again, wondering whether I had half-awoken in the night and reached out for it. Or whether I had thought about it so much that even in my dreams I had to bring it closer to me.
The tears start again.
This time, I don’t wipe them away.
•
I have grown to like this silent place on the North Shore in my week here. The water in this rocky cove, surrounded by dark cliffs, isn’t for the beach crowd. Signs warn about the sudden drop-off and undertows that will suck in even the strongest swimmer.
I don’t care. I’m not a swimmer. I don’t even venture into the deep end of the community centre pool.
I have space to think here. Space to wonder what it means that each night I’ve fallen asleep with the gold heart on the bedside table and each morning I’ve woken up with it under my pillow.
Part of me wants to believe it’s Emma. Reaching out to me. Part of me says that’s foolish. That it could not be so.
Each morning, I return the pendant to the bedside table when I leave the hotel. I tell myself that I won’t think about it during the day. That I will have mai tais and go shopping and maybe even take a surfing lesson.
I don’t do any of that. I just drive my rental car to the North Shore and come here. I sit with crosswords I never get around to doing and smile at the occasional passerby – a local out walking a dog or, today, a small white-haired man equipped with a hand-held metal detector, slowly making his way up and down the beach.
I watch as he bends each time he hears a beep, only to straighten up, disappointed, when it turns out to be an old nail or a pop can.
He is only a few feet away when he gets another beep, pulls something out of the sand and turns to me with an outstretched hand.
“Excuse me, miss, is this yours?”
The gold heart catches the sunlight.
My hand, acting without my instruction, reaches towards it, and my fingers make a fist around the cold pendant.
I say nothing. I have no voice.
The man half-smiles and walks away, his head bent to watch the sand again.
I sit immobile for what feels like an eternity. I look out over the waves and the rocks and feel the warm salt air and think of Emma. Not still white Emma with Cinderella Barbie clasped in her hands and gold heart nestled at her neck, but twirling laughing Emma with flying ponytail and gleaming pendant catching the sun as she spins.
Then I hear it.
Laughter.
A clear silver sound that grabs at my heart.
I see a flash of pink on a rock out in the water.
I get up and walk slowly to the water’s edge, staring at the spot. It comes into focus slowly, like a film dissolving into a new scene.
Blonde hair. Pink ruffled dress. Cinderella Barbie in hand.
She waves, and I feel a smile that melts the lump in my throat.
I take a step into the water, feeling its warmth lap against my legs. I take another step. And another. And another.
I will go. I will dance with her. Watch her blonde ponytail fly and her gold heart pendant catch the sunlight as she pirouettes on thin awkward legs, not knowing she’s ungraceful. Not caring.
“Wait for me, Emma!” I yell, and I laugh as my voice echoes back at me from the cliff walls. “I’m coming!”
I plunge.
But you don’t let the tears drown you. You roll over and you grab the corner of the pink Cinderella pillowcase and you rub it against your face hard. So hard it chafes your skin. So hard it hurts. You tell yourself to breathe. Inhale-exhale-inhale-exhale until your lungs work again. Until you can almost believe you aren’t on the verge of drowning.
The dreams are never sad. I’m always smiling. I’m dancing with her in the front yard. Watching her blonde ponytail fly and her gold heart pendant catch the sunlight as she pirouettes on thin awkward legs, not knowing she’s ungraceful. Not caring. Laughing with a clear silver sound that grabs at my heart.
Sometime between her laughter and the moment when I wake alone, that’s when the tears start.
•
Get away, they keep saying. As if I wouldn’t wake up seeing her, hearing her, feeling her, no matter where I was.
Maya and Allie and Jen come to me in the cafeteria at lunch, wearing hopeful smiles and carrying an envelope whose contents inform me I’m catching a flight to Honolulu on Saturday.
“I have to work,” I protest.
Maya waves a dismissive hand.
“For heaven’s sake, Karen, the hospital can live without you for a week. Besides, I already cleared it with Carmen. She says you should go. You haven’t taken any time off since the funeral.”
Jen frowns, and I can see Allie doing her best not to cringe. But I can’t help smiling at Maya.
She’s the only person I know who dares to mention Emma, even if her approach isn’t subtle enough to satisfy my mother’s etiquette book on how to deal with the bereaved.
Maya was the only one who didn’t offer useless words of consolation. Who didn’t come to the church and look at Emma lying there in the oak box – arrayed in her pink ruffled dress, gold heart pendant nestled at her neck, Cinderella Barbie clasped in her small white hands – and try to find meaning. To say that somehow God in His malign omnipotence had deemed it fitting for a four-year-old girl to twirl her way into the path of a car being driven too fast by a sixteen-year-old trying to impress his friends.
“God wanted her home,” my mother said, patting my hand softly.
“Then God sucks,” Maya replied, enunciating each syllable with devastating clarity. And with enough volume that several people – including Granny and Father Conlon and Kevin, who’d returned for the funeral despite my telling him there was no need to develop a conscience about Emma after all this time – turned to stare.
I’d have laughed at the expressions on their faces if I hadn’t been expending all my energy just to breathe and remain upright.
I grabbed Maya’s hand and squeezed it hard.
I owe Maya everything for that moment.
So since she’s apparently bullied the others and made them pool their money to send me away, I can’t very well say no.
I don’t say anything at all. I just shrug, a palms-up gesture of surrender that wins a smile from Jen, a gleeful clap from Allie and a brief, fierce hug from Maya.
•
The too-perky Air Canada girl checks me in and waves me towards security gate C, where I join a lineup of bored-looking travelers and speculate whether any of them are headed to Honolulu and whether any of them are dreading it as much as me. A week of unscheduled hours without the distraction of work doesn’t bear thinking about.
I empty the change from my pockets and dump my keys in the tray to pass through the X-ray, then follow a pink-shirted, straw-hatted man through the metal detector.
It beeps so piercingly that I feel myself jump.
I shrug at the security guy, who gestures for me to step to one side.
“Got anything in your pockets?” he asks in that bored tone they must practice in security school. “Change? Keys?”
I shake my head, and he waves his wand along my body. It beeps as it passes the chest pocket of my white button-down shirt.
He points a finger at the offending pocket. Although I know it contains only the wad of American bills the girls gave me, I obediently reach in.
I stare as my fingers emerge from the pocket with a gold chain wrapped around them. But it isn’t the chain that freezes me to the floor, rooting me in place despite the security guy’s instructions to claim my things and move along.
It’s the gold heart pendant dangling from it.
•
Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.
I give myself instructions as I walk, one word for each step, trying to still the erratic beating of my heart. I rub my hands together as I make my way slowly towards my departure gate, working to restore some warmth to fingers that have become strangely cold.
There’s a logical explanation, I tell myself. Jewelry doesn’t go around jumping into the pockets of clothes. Particularly not fresh-from-the-dryer clothes that were ironed a mere half-hour before I left, thereby eliminating the chance that I had shoved the pendant into the pocket weeks ago and forgotten about it while the shirt hung unworn in my closet.
It has to be something I did in that last half-hour, just before leaving. What had I picked up? My passport. Kleenex. My glasses.
That’s it, I tell myself. When I grabbed the glasses off the dresser I must have knocked the pendant into my pocket.
Somewhere in my mind, a small voice insists the explanation doesn’t make sense. That if the pendant had been sitting on my dresser, I’d have seen it.
I refuse to acknowledge the voice. When it tries to tell me that I know the pendant was not on my dresser, that I have not in fact laid eyes on it since that day in the church, I simply won’t listen.
Clearly, the pendant was on my dresser, or it wouldn’t be in my pocket, where I’d dazedly shoved it again after the security guy waved me onwards.
The thought makes me stop and reach tentatively into my pocket again. My fingers hit cold metal, and I draw out the pendant. I stare at it for a long moment, then bend and zipper it into the outside pocket of my carry-on bag.
I won’t think about it again.
•
It’s a surprisingly painless flight.
My seatmates, the pink-shirted man and his matching pink-shirted wife, seem disinclined to talk after the initial hellos, leaving me to my crossword book and the in-flight movie. In the darkness, while Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson strut the catwalk on the overhead screen, I fall into a sound and dreamless sleep.
I’m refreshed when the pilot lands us smoothly in Honolulu. I even find myself smiling as I claim my pink suitcase – Emma’s choice – and make my way to the taxi rank, feeling the heaviness of the warm air on my skin.
Already it feels different, I think as I hand my case over to the driver and clamber into the back of the cab. Perhaps the girls weren’t wrong. Perhaps a change of scene will help.
I give the driver the name of my hotel and settle back to watch the scenery go by.
My feet brush against something on the floor, and I glance down.
I recognize her instantly, the blonde hair and tiara and sparkling ball gown. Cinderella Barbie. I pick her up and finger the hair, feeling a prickling in my throat as I think of Emma, tearing open the pink polka-dot wrapping paper and then refusing to set Cinderella down for the rest of the day. She took Cinderella everywhere after that and slept with her every night.
I hand the doll over the seat to the driver.
“Looks like someone forgot this,” I manage to say in an almost-casual tone.
The driver drops her onto the seat beside him.
“Huh. Haven’t had a kid in here in ages. Wonder where that came from.”
Then he glances back at me.
“Do you have kids? Would they like Princess Whoever-She-Is?”
Cinderella, I nearly say. But I’m too busy trying not to let the prickling in my throat turn into a lump, and I just shake my head.
We ride in silence to the hotel, a small stone building on a side street a few minutes’ walk from Waikiki Beach.
I get out and reach into my breast pocket for my cash.
My fingers grow cold again as they emerge with a twenty.
And a gold heart pendant.
•
The pendant shines at me from the bedside table as I climb into bed and pull up the duvet. The gold heart seems so small. So innocent.
I’ve done nothing today. After checking into my room, I just walked ceaselessly up and down Waikiki Beach, analyzing the ways in which it is possible for the pendant to have ended up in my pocket again.
I can almost convince myself that I had left it in my pocket. That I had just thought about putting it into my carry-on. But I have a vivid memory of pausing. Bending. Zipping the pendant into the bag. I can even hear the sound of the zipper.
Despite my best efforts to banish the memory, I can’t stop thinking about the last time I saw the pendant, nestled in the hollow of Emma’s white throat as I leaned over to kiss her blonde head.
There is no possible way it has come with me to Hawaii.
Yet there it is, gleaming benignly in the light from the bedside lamp.
I pick it up and hold it against my cheek, feeling its smooth coolness against the heat of the sunburn that’s already turning my face pink.
“Emma.”
Her name escapes me involuntarily, my voice unnaturally loud in the silence of the room.
I feel the familiar lump in my throat as I stroke my cheek gently with the gold heart. Then I return it to the table and turn out the light.
I wake up with my pillow soaked in tears.
I roll over and pick up the pillow to wipe my face with the crisp white linen pillowcase, noticing that it feels rougher against my face than the pink cotton Cinderella one from Emma’s bed.
As I move, a flash of gold on the sheet catches my eye.
The heart pendant. Under my pillow.
I look from the bedside table to the heart and back to the bedside table again, wondering whether I had half-awoken in the night and reached out for it. Or whether I had thought about it so much that even in my dreams I had to bring it closer to me.
The tears start again.
This time, I don’t wipe them away.
•
I have grown to like this silent place on the North Shore in my week here. The water in this rocky cove, surrounded by dark cliffs, isn’t for the beach crowd. Signs warn about the sudden drop-off and undertows that will suck in even the strongest swimmer.
I don’t care. I’m not a swimmer. I don’t even venture into the deep end of the community centre pool.
I have space to think here. Space to wonder what it means that each night I’ve fallen asleep with the gold heart on the bedside table and each morning I’ve woken up with it under my pillow.
Part of me wants to believe it’s Emma. Reaching out to me. Part of me says that’s foolish. That it could not be so.
Each morning, I return the pendant to the bedside table when I leave the hotel. I tell myself that I won’t think about it during the day. That I will have mai tais and go shopping and maybe even take a surfing lesson.
I don’t do any of that. I just drive my rental car to the North Shore and come here. I sit with crosswords I never get around to doing and smile at the occasional passerby – a local out walking a dog or, today, a small white-haired man equipped with a hand-held metal detector, slowly making his way up and down the beach.
I watch as he bends each time he hears a beep, only to straighten up, disappointed, when it turns out to be an old nail or a pop can.
He is only a few feet away when he gets another beep, pulls something out of the sand and turns to me with an outstretched hand.
“Excuse me, miss, is this yours?”
The gold heart catches the sunlight.
My hand, acting without my instruction, reaches towards it, and my fingers make a fist around the cold pendant.
I say nothing. I have no voice.
The man half-smiles and walks away, his head bent to watch the sand again.
I sit immobile for what feels like an eternity. I look out over the waves and the rocks and feel the warm salt air and think of Emma. Not still white Emma with Cinderella Barbie clasped in her hands and gold heart nestled at her neck, but twirling laughing Emma with flying ponytail and gleaming pendant catching the sun as she spins.
Then I hear it.
Laughter.
A clear silver sound that grabs at my heart.
I see a flash of pink on a rock out in the water.
I get up and walk slowly to the water’s edge, staring at the spot. It comes into focus slowly, like a film dissolving into a new scene.
Blonde hair. Pink ruffled dress. Cinderella Barbie in hand.
She waves, and I feel a smile that melts the lump in my throat.
I take a step into the water, feeling its warmth lap against my legs. I take another step. And another. And another.
I will go. I will dance with her. Watch her blonde ponytail fly and her gold heart pendant catch the sunlight as she pirouettes on thin awkward legs, not knowing she’s ungraceful. Not caring.
“Wait for me, Emma!” I yell, and I laugh as my voice echoes back at me from the cliff walls. “I’m coming!”
I plunge.
