The Rockmore House

21 | Through the Storm

A loud thunk tore me from another restless sleep. I was in the river in a storm again, bobbing in the waves, with the same boy's terrified face inches from mine. But this time the current swept him away from me and he disappeared into the wild gray-green waves. I woke up on the floor drenched in sweat, with the bedsheet tangled around my legs.

I sat up quickly and was still gulping panicked breaths when I heard a light knocking on the door.

My dad's muffled voice asked, "You alright?"

"Yeah. Can you come in for a second?" My voice sounded so small and scared.

I sipped some water from the glass on my nightstand and straightened the bedsheet. It was glowing in the light of the full moon that shone through the window. My dad's tee shirt was the same eerie bluish white.

I sat on the edge of the bed. "Sorry to wake you up. Bad dream. I can't believe I fell out of bed."

"It was the scream that woke me up. Scared the shit out of me. Must have been some nightmare."

"Yeah, it was. Dad, did I ever fall off Grandpa's boat? In a storm?"

He silently dragged the chair from the desk closer to the bed and sat down before he spoke.

"You did. I didn't think you remembered that. I'm so sorry, Skater."

My eyes watered when he called me by my old nickname. It had been a long time since he'd called me Skater, and since he'd repeated all those familiar stories about how I was the "biggest littlest Avril Lavigne fan" when I was four years old. Supposedly I loved Avril so much that I wore my dad's one and only necktie around the house and asked for a skateboard for my fifth birthday. I got a scooter instead, but my dad still called me "Skater Girl."

When I was thirteen, and Avril started calling her fans "Little Black Stars", my dad had a tattoo of a black star added next to the Black Flag four bars on his arm. By then, I wasn't obsessed with Avril anymore, and the tattoo bothered me for some reason and that's when I asked him to "get over it" and stop calling me Skater.

"Is that what your dream was about?" he asked.

"Yeah. I have the same nightmare a lot. I still don't know how much of it matches what really happened."

"Well, how about you tell me what you remember and I'll fill in the gaps as best I can?"

"Okay, so I was playing with Barbies in the cabin and then the sky got really dark."

"Your punk Barbies," he said quietly.

"My what?"

"You gave them haircuts and used markers to color their hair black and green and blue and give them makeup. I called them your 'punk Barbies'. Sorry. Go on."

"The waves were so big and the boat was tipping back and forth and I thought I was going to puke, so I leaned over and fell in the water." I hesitated to ask the question I really wanted answered. "Was there a boy there?"

"Jason was with us. It was you, me, your grandpa and Jason on the boat that day."

"I mean in the water with me. In the dream, there's a boy. I'm wearing a life jacket and he's not."

He scratched at his facial hair and thought for a moment. "No, you were alone. We didn't see you for a couple of minutes, and when we found you, you were passed out. Just bobbing there in the water with your head resting on the shoulder of your life jacket. But when you woke up, you acted like nothing ever happened. That storm came and went so quickly, it didn't seem real to any of us. It, um, kind of got swept under the rug."