Day: Mara and the Dreamers’ Club
Red Rose (Scenes 1-4)
They've promised that dreams can come true, but forget to mention that nightmares are dreams, too.
—Oscar Wilde (attributed)
1
The first thing Mara saw when she awoke was an image of Nico Cairns fading before her eyes, while feeling an almost intangible link with her sister disappearing forever. In the static of her thoughts, she tried to contemplate that word, 'forever,' mankind's attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible in a word. Forever was the void filling the space between being and doing, existence and action, selfhood and free will. Forever was the loneliness of Mara's own plight, adrift in a limbo of dreamless sleep, just one step away from the sleep of death.
Just one more step into that void to reach a memory that was and shall never be again.
Mara took that step and fell . . .
Asleep.
2
Colbie Amame, Celia Hearn, and Kendra Tellerman fidgeted in their seats at the school nurse's office, still dressed in winter clothes over their school uniforms, because winter break was just days from now after they had completed their final exams, and with it came the chill of the frosty morning air. And right now, they were looking from Connie Davis to the school nurse assistant and back to Connie Davis hiding something in a desk drawer, while the assistant had her back turned.
"I'll be back in thirty minutes," the school nurse assistant said and left the three girls alone with Connie, then paused at the door: "Oh, and before I forget: Connie, can you fill in for the one o'clock shift?"
Connie spun in her office chair and said, "All right, how long do you need?"
"An hour, tops. Hopefully, no more than that!” her colleague said. “But if not, then cover me for two hours, and I'll buy us some dinner when my shift's over."
"Gotta deal then," she said, leaning back in her seat with a mischievous smile on her face. "Is it your ex, or someone new?"
Connie Davis's colleague grimaced, saying, "Not in front of the students!" Then she turned to the three seated at Connie's desk and added, "Pretend you didn't hear that, girls!"
And all three girls raised their right hands, palms forward, saying, "Scout's honor!"
"Connie, you and your girls are life-savers! See ya when I get back," and she rushed from the office.
"See you later," Connie said, while the three girls added a devious variation of it.
“Enjoy your date, Ms. Haining,” they said.
As Ms. Haining laughed at their suggestive remark, her footsteps echoed down the corridor and receded in the hallway leading to the side exit, and then the door opened and closed with a woosh and a thud.
Once the coast was clear, the remaining school nurse sprang from her chair, making it spin as she sped towards the door (left ajar by her coworker on her way to a lunch break and maybe even a date), and pushed the door completely shut and locked it. By doing so, she was breaking every rule in Shad-Row Academy's code of conduct for nurse- and faculty- and student-relations, so she wanted answers from her girls.
Connie then trudged back to her desk and collapsed into the cushion of her chair, folding her arms over her desk and resting her head in her arms, relieved that her part in the intrigue was over. At least, for now.
The trio of girls traded nervous glances, then leaned forward in their seats, as Colbie whispered, "How did it go?"
Connie raised her head, her bobbed hair slightly unkempt and her forehead soaked in sweat, and said, "Don't worry, girls. I think she fell for it."
All three girls breathed deep sighs of collective relief, leaning back in their chairs.
Connie leaned back against her chair, extending her arms and arching her back in a much-needed stretch to relieve all the tension of an impromptu escapade in the back room of the nurse's office, where she had accessed restricted medical documents on her laptop and had them printed out and hidden inside a manila folder, while her three visitors kept her colleague busy with small talk. While they had her colleague distracted, Connie had crept to her desk and opened the desk drawer as quietly as she could, then slipped the folder inside and closed it just as her colleague got up to leave for her date.
Once she steadied her nerves, Connie reopened the desk drawer and pulled out the envelope and said, “Before I give you this, I need to know what's going on."
“I know what you’re thinking,” Colbie said, “but it's better that you don't know, Ms. Davis."
"Don't go all formal on me!” she said. “I need you three to be straight with me, okay? My hands are tied now, because I'm giving this information to you."
Celia said, "But—"
"No ‘buts,’” Connie said.
"But we don't want you to get in trouble!" Kendra said.
"That's exactly what I mean," Connie said. "You've heard of the reports on TV. The investigation is still on-going, and nobody knows what’s happened to the family or the twins or where they are right now. And," she stressed when the girls were about to protest, "you girls are still minors. If you get in trouble or get hurt because of this, I'll have to notify your parents and explain everything to them and to the authorities. And then," she continued, deflating with another sigh, "the school's gonna fire my ass, and then I'll really be screwed."
Colbie and Celia and Kendra became silent, lowering their gazes to the floor in defeat.
Connie said, "But I can't answer them in good conscience if you don't tell me exactly what's going on. I need to know." She sighed, then said in a gentler tone, "Please, you don't have to be afraid. Tell me everything you know, and I'll try to understand."
So for the next half hour, all three girls told her everything that happened in their dreams that night, including why Colbie was screaming in her dorm, and why Celia and Kendra were clinging to her and crying, and how they encountered Mara and Nico Cairns in last night’s dream dive.
3
How Mara ended up back in this place, she couldn't imagine. All she knew upon waking was that nothing will ever be the same without Nico by her side. She found herself lying on the same mattress where she slept with her sister every night in their parents' house. During late hours when sleep was impossible, Mara remembered filling the time between waking and sleeping by playing with each others' bodies.
Nico would wrap her arms around Mara's shoulders, holding her close to her body beneath a thick cotton blanket and a layer of linen over their heads, while Mara would wrap her arms around her sister's waist, and her head would rest over her sister's breasts under the cloth of her shirt, listening to her heart beating. Sometimes Nico would hold a chunk of Mara's hair and tickle her nose or cheeks or the base of her throat, eliciting girlish giggles and sniggers and sudden movements on the bed, and they'd hold their breath and listen to see if their parents overheard.
At other times, Nico would sometimes tickle Mara's sides through her shirt. On more daring occasions, she would dig her hands up her shirt and tickle the flesh between her breasts, or dig under her pants to tickle her butt beneath her panties. Through it all, Mara would bite on her lower lip in the agony and pleasure of repressing her bodily urges, her heart and mind racing at the thought of her parents hearing her outburst of ecstasy, as her sister's insistent caresses pushed her closer and closer to moaning, the closest Mara knew to living on the edge.
And on later occasions, as the marriage between their parents got worse, Mara remembered when Nico would wrap her arm around her shoulders in a firm embrace, pillowing Mara's head on her chest and running her free hand through her hair smelling of shampoo, and staring vacantly up at the ceiling in thought. All the while, Mara would slip one of her arms under her sister's shirt to play with her bellybutton or fondle her breasts, her tears falling across her face and dropping into her sister's skin.
All the while, the storm of yet another fight brewed downstairs between mother and father, both fighting over big things and small things and money and work and the welfare of their children. Yells and curses echoed up the stairs like the screams of hell, threatening to invade their world of sisterly love.
And during one of those times in the silence that always followed the fighting, Nico rubbed circles between Mara's shoulder blades, whispering pretty reassurances that everything would be okay, but things weren't okay. Not then, and certainly not now.
Nico said, keeping her gaze to the ceiling, "You scared?"
"Yeah."
"Don't be."
Mara, who had been listening to her sister's heart, looked up and saw her gazing at the ceiling, or maybe gazing at something else. In her mind.
"Sis?"
"Yeah."
"When you look up at the ceiling, what do you see?"
Only then did Nico drop her gaze, now looking down at Mara's eyes, full of wonderment clouded in fear. She said, smiling, "That's for me to know, and for you to find out."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"We all have our dreams, Mara," she said, looking back up at the ceiling. "You'll need to find one for yourself."
Nico was always the philosopher, more concerned with being something rather than doing something, but Mara was more the romantic type, more concerned with feeling things and doing things. As such, they were twins, but they were opposites. They were born of the same loins, but they were two sides of the same coin. While Nico would answer with words, Mara would answer with actions, for actions speak louder than words.
So Mara raised herself up and met Nico's gaze, and planted a kiss on her lips.
They made love for the first time that night.
4
Connie Davis paused for a while after all three girls told her their dreams, which amounted to ten minutes of them rambling and five minutes of Connie redirecting them back to the topic at hand. It was not much different from police work, she observed, in that cops conducted interviews with witnesses.
In addition to being a school nurse, she studied and researched dreams on her time off from her nursing duties at Shad-Row Academy, and sometimes substituted as a special guest speaker at Shad-Row University, the university-level counterpart to Shad-Row Academy in a different part of the campus complex. To most people, it was odd to leave an academic career in dream research at the famous Dream Research Center at Shad-Row University in favor of a menial position as school nurse at Shad-Row Academy on the other side of the campus, but she preferred it this way.
She had her reasons, though, one of which left her enough time to participate in another area of interest as a part-time private investigator specializing in dreams. She had cultivated this interest ever since she met Kendra’s stepfather, often for consultations to get a second opinion on a certain aspect of a cold case and sometimes for the application of her specialty on the circumstances of a confusing crime scene.
She had other reasons, of course, three of which included Colbie Amame, Celia Hearn, and Kendra Tellerman. Out of all the people who volunteered for her dream research experiments, these three had become her main research guinea pigs.
Hence, they were her 'girls,’ though Connie still debated whether or not she should tell them that two more candidates had volunteered for her program last week, whose medical records were contained in the very mania folder she was about to give them. Instead, she hedged her facts and said, "You do know that my research is crowd-funded, right?"
"Of course we do," Colbie said. "You even have us collect the donations at the Post Office."
"So you know," she continued, "that all my volunteers for my research are students, right?"
"Well, yeah," Celia said. "We send out flyers asking for volunteers every week. Did we receive more volunteers?”
“I did, but . . .” Connie said.
“But what?” Kendra said.
“Well,” Connie said, thinking of a way to hedge her facts again in light of the missing details in her own memory of last week over the weekend. “Look at it this way. Since the police have started their investigation of the Cairns family disappearance, did you notice that all of my volunteers have dwindled to just you three this week?”
"Yeah, we did," Colbie said.
"Do you think they're connected?" Celia added.
"Yes, I do," she said and pointed to the manila folder. "This folder contains the medical records of Nico Cairns and Mara Cairns, the twins you were talking about. If you look at these records, you'll see a connection, but I can only give you the general details to start you off.”
“Why’s that?” Kendra said.
“Because I don’t have all the details myself,” Connie said, “and I don’t want to influence your thoughts. I want you three to be as objective as you can, so you'll have to study these records in detail on your own. Got that?"
All three girls nodded.
"Good,” she said and took a deep breath before making her decision. “Here's where it gets suspicious. After we finished your sleep experiments last week, I received two students who came in after you left. Guess who they are.”
All three girls guessed, and Colbie said, “You’re kidding.”
“I’m not,” she said.
“Really, Mara and Nico Cairns?” Celia said.
Connie nodded and said, “And they wanted to volunteer for this week's experiment, which was originally scheduled for today."
"Wait, seriously?" Kendra said.
"Yeah, I know. Coincidence, right? Well, get this," Connie said and leaned forward in her chair, lowering her voice. "I had them give a waiver for their parents to sign in order to participate in my experiment, because they're minors like you. They were supposed to be here with us for today’s experiment, but something must have happened to them. I've been trying to find out more from the Metro Police Station, but they're not telling me anything more than what's been reported on the news, and it’s got me worried."
Connie's smartphone vibrated on her desk next to her computer, so she picked it up and saw Roy Dolan's number and answered, "Connie Davis here. What's going on? . . . Where? . . . I see. Did they find the twins yet? . . . Wait, what? You're kidding! I thought it was still— . . . I see. What's got them so spooked all of the sudden? . . . So it's like that, huh? . . . Right. Well, keep me updated when you can. Oh, and one more thing," she added, looking at Kendra Tellerman. “Kendra’s at my office. . . . No, she's not in trouble, and she’s not hurt. She's just taking another one of my dream experiments with her friends. . . . Sure, you can." She gave her smartphone to Kendra, saying, "It's Roy.”
Kendra's face turned bright red, so when she answered, she said, "Yes? . . . No, no, it's not like that. Just the usual stuff. . . . Oh, I'm fine. . . . I might drop by the Police Station later when I have time. . . . All right. Will do. . . . Right, bye."
The connection clicked off, and she gave the phone back to Connie, saying, "You could be a little more tactful, you know!"
"What?" Connie said, smiling. "It's always nice seeing your face light up every now and then."
Colbie and Celia giggled and sniggered beside her.
Kendra threw them a death-glare and said, "Ugh, shut it!"
"All right, all right," Connie said, raising her hands to calm the situation. "Let's get back to business."
Colbie and Celia stopped giggling, and Kendra began to cool off.
Kendra said, "What did he say?"
Connie said, "They just found their parents' bodies."
"Where?" said Celia.
"They're not telling yet," she said, then leaned forward over her desk and eyed the girls in deadly earnest, "but I suspect it's somewhere in the old Rancaster district. It's the perfect place to hide bodies, since that's the only jurisdiction in town where the law doesn't apply."
"What about the twins?" Colbie said.
"They say they haven't found the twins, because they just got spooked out of it."
"What makes you say that?" Kendra said.
"When I talked with Roy, he said the case is still open, but now it's pending review for termination. He wouldn't say why, but I could tell that somebody or something has got the whole police department spooked. So I need you three to find out what happened to them, and if what you're saying is true, I need you to find Nico Cairns' body, too. After that, I want you three to report your findings to the police and let them handle the rest of it. Once that's done, drop this detective charade. And," she stressed, glaring at the girls and making them flinch and fidget in their seats, "don't you ever—EVER—ask me to break school policy again. Is that clear?"
All three girls gulped and nodded frantically in their seats that her meaning was as clear as her glare.
