“You want a DQ?” he said.
“No, thanks.”
“A nice big one?”
“No, thanks.”
“A Buster Bar, then?”
“No, thanks. I don’t want to look like Dr. Goldberg’s wife,” she said.
And then she started crying.
He had never heard her sob this way. She sobbed all the way back home. Once, he put his hand on her, hoping to stop her. But she pushed it gently away. Another time, he started saying “honey” there in the roaring highway darkness sweet with the smell of com and grass and alfalfa, but that did no good, either.
She spoke only once. She said, “She was my little sister.”
Dreams of Darkness
For Robert Gleason
Nothing to say about this, really. I woke up in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, and went downstairs to my office and started putzing around and all of a sudden the main character came to mind, and off I went.
1
The two men were about what you’d expect. Crew cuts. Freckles. Dark suits. Very white button-down shirts. Club neckties. Shoes so shiny they revealed that the men had spent at least some time in the armed forces. Intelligent but curiously empty blue eyes.
Five hours ago, the two men had been in Langley, Virginia. It had been raining, festive Indian summer suddenly giving way to the harsh gray tones of winter.
Missouri was a bit more fortunate. As the men walked from the small airport to the green Ford sedan that had been arranged for them, the temperature was 84 and the sunlight was so brilliant they quickly put on their sunglasses.
“Hot,” said the first man as they strode — each gripping an identical brown leather attaché case in his right hand — across concrete and then across gravel and then across grass to where the Ford sat.
You could smell asphalt melt. You could smell smoke in the surrounding hills. You could smell burning sunlight and dog shit on the green lawn and exhaust from passing cars. You could smell the sweat on their faces commingle with the sharp scent of Old Spice.
“Very hot,” said the second man, as he opened up the rear door of the sedan and set his attaché case on the back seat.
In a few minutes, they had the front windows rolled down and they were pulling away from the airport. They drove slowly.
There was no hurry. They could do what they’d come to do and there would still be plenty of time to be on the last flight out tonight at 10:08 p.m.
2
Name: Jessica Anne Reardon
Present Address: 145 Farber Avenue, Baxter, Missouri
Occupation: student, Wilson Junior High
Parents: William and Helen Reardon
Occupation (father): factory worker
Occupation (mother): housewife
The first time Jessica exhibited her special talents was in first grade when she woke up one morning and came down to breakfast and told her mother that she’d had a terrible dream. Her older brother David would be hit by a car today.
Later, of course, her mother would feel guilty about the way she reacted. She told Jessica that many people, herself included, often had terrible dreams about people they loved but that didn’t mean anything, and they never came true.
At 3:04 that same afternoon, David Reardon was struck from behind on his bicycle. Both his arms were broken, and it was feared at first that the paralysis in his legs might be permanent.
Approximately a year later, Jessica had a dream about the house next door catching fire. She did not tell anybody about the dream because by now she was afraid that her dream about David had not only predicted his bicycle accident, but had somehow caused it to come true.
That night, the elderly widow Mrs. Pinehurst was burned to death while sleeping in her bed.
Over the next six years, eight more dreams of Jessica’s proved true. There was the school bus accident with the football team aboard; the explosion in the boiler room of Rafferty’s department store; the tornado that ripped apart an entire mobile home court, leaving ten dead, including an infant. And so on.
During this time, Mr. and Mrs. Reardon had consulted with a city council member (a shirt-tail cousin of the mister’s); a young and wry and somewhat snotty priest; a psychologist who showed a most appreciative eye for Mrs. Reardon’s worn but gentle beauty; and a minister who kept glancing at himself in the mirror behind Mr. Reardon’s head. (Mr. Reardon had worn a necktie for this particular meeting and the minister had looked suitably impressed, until Mr. Reardon told him that he worked in the local Choate factory on the loading dock. It was then that the minister had frowned and started looking at himself in the mirror.)
All these people said the same thing.
The dreams are just coincidence.
There’s nothing wrong — or special — about your daughter.
Just go back home and lead a nice, normal family life and don’t pay any attention to these dreams.
Lots of people have them and they don’t mean a darn thing. All right? Well, thanks for stopping in Mr. and Mrs. Reardon, and good luck on everything.
3
Dr. Fran Lederer had never been exactly sure why she’d come to the blue hills of Missouri, and taken the job as psychologist for the school district.
She supposed it might have been because of a broken heart (rather badly broken, in fact) and because, having grown up in New York City, she had a sentimental notion of rural life. Life here would be clean and simple and she’d meet at last the “right” man and they would live out a clean and simple life together.
Instead, she’d found Baxter to be a small city of rigid class and religious lines.
The first man she dated that first autumn could never get over the fact that she was Jewish. It was all he talked about, her being Jewish, and she soon tired of it, and spent the winter alone in her three-room apartment writing letters to her sarcastic friend Sharon and getting to know her cat, Sara.
In the spring, she took a driver’s ed course, bought a car and started driving around the countryside. She found a huge pottery kiln that fascinated her, and among the local artists who worked there she met a man named Steve Robisher, whom she liked a lot.
The following September, a rain-lashed, late afternoon, she was sitting in her tiny office watching the rain slant silver and cold from the dark sky, when a new blue Chevrolet sedan pulled up and three people emerged, running immediately for her office building.
This was her first sight of the Reardon family. Her first impression was that they were working class in a sound, dignified way; that the mother and father looked very young to have a daughter this age; and that their problem, whatever it was, was serious. In this part of the country, folks were skeptical about psychologists. Getting fathers to come to a session was a tug-of-war. Yet this father had shown up willingly. Hence: these people had a serious problem.
At that first meeting, they told Fran of Jessica’s history of predictive dreams and while Fran had listened as politely as possible, she was not convinced that anything remarkable was going on here. Applying scientific method to what the Reardons were describing would soon discredit it.
What Fran was interested in was fourteen-year-old Jessica herself. She had the same shy beauty as her mother except for her eyes. They told of some great and overburdening sorrow. Fran could never recall seeing such grief in the dark eyes of a teenage girl. She wanted to learn about the events that had put such sorrow in Jessica’s eyes, and then she wanted to help Jessica take that grief away forever.