Being Henry David - By Cal Armistead Page 0,57

night, Thoreau visits me in the blue bedroom at Thomas’s house. He’s wearing his dark gray jacket and sitting in the same chair where Thomas was when I woke up that first morning here. Keeping vigil.

“So, now you know,” he says.

“Yeah,” I whisper into the half-dark. “Guess you knew all along.”

He nods and tugs thoughtfully on his beard, which is longer than the last time I saw him and streaked with gray. Henry is older every time I see him. It’s like he’s slipping away from me, getting ready to leave me for good.

The thought of Henry leaving me now, just as I’m forced into the disaster that is my real life, makes me furious. God. I don’t want pseudo-ghosts or dream visitations or whatever you’d call this. All I want is oblivion. Numbness. I’m not Thoreau reincarnated. Not even close. I’m just some screwed-up kid from Illinois who did something terrible and ran away. And he’s just another crazy dream.

“Go away, Henry.” I whisper.

He turns to look out the window into the sky, like he’s trying to decide which star to inhabit in his next life. “You know where to find me,” he says at last.

I turn my face toward the pillow, closing my eyes to the figure in the bedroom, denying him. When I open my eyes again, he’s gone.

14

Somebody is hammering on the door. I roll over in bed and bury my face in the pillow, ignoring the sound. Why doesn’t Thomas answer his friggin’ door? The doorbell rings next, and I open one bleary eye to see the sun glaring into the window from somewhere high in the sky, above the house. It’s not morning anymore. What the hell time is it?

I have a vague memory of Thomas trying to wake me up earlier to take me with him to the library, but I told him to leave me alone so I could go back to sleep. It’s all I want to do. Just stay in this bed with the covers over my head and sleep and sleep…and let the dreams come.

Mostly, they’re memories in dream form, seeping back into my consciousness. Some of them are good—like remembering Christmases and birthdays. There was the year I got a new mountain bike and the time I got my first computer. And there were all those big holiday meals when my mom cooked a turkey, with grandparents and cousins crowded around the table. I dreamed about being in Boy Scouts and camping trips with my dad, mostly going up to Wisconsin into the north country, miles and miles from anybody and anything. Those were the best times of all.

The bad memory dreams are the ones where I see myself going through the motions of being a “good kid,” when in truth I’m holding so much inside that I want to break furniture and throw things at the wall and scream until I burst a few blood vessels in my head. I’m the phoniest person around, putting hundreds of miles on my running shoes to escape, playing guitar till my calluses bleed because that’s an escape too. On the outside, I’m the perfect kid—like a statue of perfect marble, serene and unreal. Inside, it’s all snakes and maggots and broken glass.

And something else came to me in my dreams, something my whole family pretends to have amnesia about. I dreamed about Cole.

Closing my eyes against the sun, I try to go back to sleep.

The doorbell rings again, over and over, really insistently this time, and then I hear someone calling my name. A girl’s voice. Uh-oh.

I get up and pull on a pair of jeans and pad barefoot to the front door, raking fingers through my wild bed hair. Open the door, and there she is.

“We have practice this afternoon. Did you forget?” It’s Hailey, hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, car keys in her hand. One of her earrings is a dangly gold starfish, the other a seahorse. Her eyes snap with anger and I don’t blame her. But then, when she gets a good look at me, her eyebrows crunch together in concern. “Hank, are you sick or something?”

Of course I forgot the band practice. With my memory banks under siege, I only have room for so much in my brain right now. But there’s no way I can explain that to her without telling her everything.

“Hailey, I’m so sorry. I, uh, didn’t sleep well last night and was just trying to catch up. What time