The Rockmore House

5 | First One to Know

The next night, I dreamt that I was lost in a maze of windowless hallways in the bathhouse back at the Elmwood Hotel. When I reached the dead end of another corridor, the dim light from the flickering oil lamps on the walls extinguished and water rushed in and flooded the hallway. The current was too strong to walk or swim against and I panicked as the water rose rapidly and violently. Once the water reached my chin, I woke up gasping for air.

My phone dinged and I swatted at the nightstand to turn my alarm off. But it wasn't time to wake up. It was three o'clock in the morning and my phone was flashing with incoming text notifications. I squinted at the screen. There were three messages from Eric.

     I know you won't answer this

     And I know you hate me

     But I want you to know it's not mutual

I responded while my brain was still foggy from sleep, before I could think clearly.

        I don't hate you

        I'm sorry I come off that way

        You might care too much about what people think of you

         If it's keeping you up at night

He responded right away.

     Eric: What's keeping you up?

      Vanessa: I just woke up actually

I typed out Thanks to your texts and then deleted it.

     Vanessa: Nightmare

    Eric: About what?

     Vanessa: Drowning

    Eric: I'm sorry

    Vanessa: Don't be

                        You woke me up from it

                        So thank you

     Eric: Anytime

                Sweet dreams

I fell back into a dreamless sleep for the rest of the night and woke up with the unsettling feeling that I'd done something wrong. It was a feeling I'd become used to, though, after a summer of time traveling and anticipating delayed consequences. I was afraid one day I'd wake up and a change I'd made to the past would have caught up somehow and I'd live a different life in another town or my brother wouldn't exist or the earth would be plunged into a state of nuclear warfare.

Between this particular worry and the nightmares, I rarely woke in a state of rested calm.

The dream where I nearly drowned in the Elmwood bathhouse wasn't the only one that woke me in a panic. In one nightmare, I was sitting fully clothed in a mineral-stained porcelain bathtub in a dark room and scalding sulfurous water poured down on me from the ceiling.

Another night I was treading water in the middle of the river while the bow of a massive ship cut through the waves heading directly toward me. I awoke with the shriek of the boat's steam whistle still ringing in my ears.

Once I was chopping carrots into little coins in a 1950s era kitchen and an old country song was playing on a crackling radio. As the chugging train rhythm of the song sped up I chopped faster and faster until I sliced into my fingertip. I didn't notice everything was in black and white until I held my hand under the faucet in the kitchen sink and I watched bright red blood swirl down the drain. That one was weird.