The Trust

Chapter 8: The Luxury

I'm surprised to see my father sitting on the edge of the cliff at the bottom of 23rd street.

"What are you doing here?" I sit carefully beside him, dangling my legs over and swinging them back and forth. You're not supposed to go so close, Mom always says. A couple of teenagers were messing around in a car once and went over the edge when she was in high school. They both died, and the town never got over it.

But this is a dream, so I figure it's ok.

"What do you see when you look out there?" He's staring straight ahead, his aviator sunglasses obscuring his eyes. It's 1980s Dad, the hearty young one from my memories, with sideburns and blond hair curling around his ears; not the one who died. That version of Dad was unrecognizable to me in pictures. He looked like a decrepit old man, his face ravaged by drugs and hard living.

"You're out there," I say. "But I can't see you."

He turns to me suddenly, his eyes desperate. "Listen," he says and tells me something important. I try, but I can't hear what he says. There's white noise or static in the air, it starts as a low buzz, like a drone overhead, and intensifies by the second. His face is scared, and he grabs my arms, frantic now. The buzzing stops and I open my eyes.

I want to slip back into sleep and catch the threads of the dream, but there's no time. I glance at the clock and realize the alarm is about to go off.

Uncle Rob texted the night before that he'd be sending a car to pick us up. It's a two-hour trip to the resort on narrow, winding roads. I get car sick easily, and I'm not looking forward to it. Part of me wants to bail; stay home in my pyjamas and have a much-needed day of self-care. But then I remember Clive isn't going and the last thing I want is to have him under my feet. I sigh and sit up, still groggy and unsettled.

I shower quickly, making the water as hot as I can stand. I think about the dream as I lather my hair. There was a comforting feeling to it at first, before it got weird. Was my father trying to send me a message?

That's stupid. I don't believe in the supernatural or anything beyond this life. I think that when we die, we just power down and blink off, like an old computer. No other scenario makes sense to me.

This drives Father Jake nuts. He wants me to believe just a little bit and I don't know why he bothers to keep trying to convince me. He always tells me this passage from the Bible about a mustard seed. Something about, 'if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you can move mountains.' He even gave me a bracelet one time, with a tiny charm — a small, glass heart with a literal mustard seed inside. I was touched by the gift and I wear it all the time, but I'm still not sure I believe.  He says it's OK that I'm doubtful, the mustard seed-sized faith is all I need but I'm not even sure I have that much.

I put the dream out of my head as I dry off, dress in leggings and a comfortable cotton shirt and pack an overnight bag. I think about the wide expanse of ocean and my father, desperate to tell me something I couldn't understand. 

Dreams are just your brain downloading and processing the events of the day, Father Jake says. He should know, he has a doctorate in clinical psychology. 

"They're nothing more than a way for your mind to make sense of things as they happen. The rationality of dreams is associative," he said once. "That's why people see signs in dreams, but they're more random than a system of symbols, because the association can be a word, or even the sound of a word."

I asked him to explain, and he reminded me of the big fight I had with Clive one time, when he accused me of lying. Later that night, I had a dream about a lion.

"Dreams have a logic, but it's not the kind of logic where two things always have to have a connection. Your brain in dreams can make associative leaps simply because one word sounds like another."