ages of five and seven, these night terrors had been fairly common, and Lucy was always afraid that sooner or later the child’s mind would break under the strain. She would continue to breathe, but her eyes would never unlock from whatever world it was that she saw and they couldn’t.
It won’t happen, David had assured her, and John Dalton had doubled down on that. Kids are resilient. If she’s not showing any lingering after-effects—withdrawal, isolation, obsessional behavior, bedwetting—you’re probably okay.
But it wasn’t okay for children to wake themselves, shrieking, from nightmares. It wasn’t okay that sometimes wild piano chords sounded from downstairs in the aftermath, or that the faucets in the bathroom at the end of the hall might turn themselves on, or that the light over Abra’s bed sometimes blew out when she or David flipped the switch.
Then her invisible friend had come, and intervals between nightmares had grown longer. Eventually they stopped. Until tonight. Not that it was night anymore, exactly; Lucy could see the first faint glow on the eastern horizon, and thank God for that.
“Abs? It’s Mommy. Talk to me.”
There was still nothing for five or ten seconds. Then, at last, the statue Lucy had her arm around relaxed and became a little girl again. Abra took a long, shuddering breath.
“I had one of my bad dreams. Like in the old days.”
“I kind of figured that, honey.”
Abra could hardly ever remember more than a little, it seemed. Sometimes it was people yelling at each other or hitting with their fists. He knocked the table over chasing after her, she might say. Another time the dream had been of a one-eyed Raggedy Ann doll lying on a highway. Once, when Abra was only four, she told them she had seen ghostie people riding The Helen Rivington, which was a popular tourist attraction in Frazier. It ran a loop from Teenytown out to Cloud Gap, and then back again. I could see them because of the moonlight, Abra told her parents that time. Lucy and David were sitting on either side of her, their arms around her. Lucy still remembered the dank feel of Abra’s pajama top, which was soaked with sweat. I knew they were ghostie people because they had faces like old apples and the moon shone right through.
By the following afternoon Abra had been running and playing and laughing with her friends again, but Lucy had never forgotten the image: dead people riding that little train through the woods, their faces like transparent apples in the moonlight. She had asked Concetta if she had ever taken Abra on the train during one of their “girl days.” Chetta said no. They had been to Teenytown, but the train had been under repairs that day so they rode the carousel instead.
Now Abra looked up at her mother and said, “When will Daddy be back?”
“Day after tomorrow. He said he’d be in time for lunch.”
“That’s not soon enough,” Abra said. A tear spilled from her eye, rolled down her cheek, and plopped onto her pajama top.
“Soon enough for what? What do you remember, Abba-Doo?”
“They were hurting the boy.”
Lucy didn’t want to pursue this, but felt she had to. There had been too many correlations between Abra’s earlier dreams and things that had actually happened. It was David who had spotted the picture of the one-eyed Raggedy Ann in the North Conway Sun, under the heading THREE KILLED IN OSSIPEE CRASH. It was Lucy who had hunted out police blotter items about domestic violence arrests in the days following two of Abra’s people were yelling and hitting dreams. Even John Dalton agreed that Abra might be picking up transmissions on what he called “the weird radio in her head.”
So now she said, “What boy? Does he live around here? Do you know?”
Abra shook her head. “Far away. I can’t remember.” Then she brightened. The speed at which she came out of these fugues was to Lucy almost as eerie as the fugues themselves. “But I think I told Tony. He might tell his daddy.”
Tony, her invisible friend. She hadn’t mentioned him in a couple of years, and Lucy hoped this wasn’t some sort of regression. Ten was a little old for invisible friends.
“Tony’s daddy might be able to stop it.” Then Abra’s face clouded. “I think it’s too late, though.”
“Tony hasn’t been around in awhile, has he?” Lucy got up and fluffed out the displaced sheet. Abra giggled when it floated against her face. The best sound in