When the Dream Ends

by D. C. Martin

part 1

Sometimes a picture brings you back. Sometimes it drags you there, even if you don’t want to go. Sometimes you have no choice. Liam Barnes stood there in the attic shivering, hating what he saw, hating that it had been hidden so long, hating himself. He looked at the two boys smiling back at him. Their stories hadn’t been written yet. But they would be written for real and forever, even if someone had hidden them and locked them away.

I had him. I swear I had him. I gripped his hand.

When your life ends, it becomes a box. The people you leave behind pack the box, mostly with the best things from other boxes. When Liam’s father died, he left a great number of boxes. He was an accomplished man, and more accomplishments means more boxes to sort. It was difficult; difficult to sort through each item from each box and discard almost everything.

Liam noticed things that had meant a great deal at some point but were now just ghosts of a past that needed to be released, even as his hand tightened its grip on them, even as he had a good laugh or let a hot tear roll down his cheek. Letting go isn’t ever easy, but it’s the only thing that will make the pain stop.

It happened on a Thursday. Liam remembered it vividly. His dad always had goals, that’s why he had managed to stay alive for so many extra years: his obsession with reaching goals. He finally slipped away, and his last words were all about reassuring Liam that the most important goals had been accomplished. He had been a good father, he had taken good care of his son. It was not his fault that Mom had left. He created a legacy that Liam could look on as an ambitious path for himself.

He was a remarkable man. One of his many accomplishments was accidental. He made Liam completely unable to experience any pride in his own achievements. His father made this possible by protecting him from the pain that might result from making a mistake. He removed mistakes from his son’s memory. But Liam knew they were there, and he knew he had to uncover them. It became his obsession, it became his goal.

Liam began making a box of his own. It took many years, and it speaks to his many adventures. It contains tiny plastic tubes with childproof caps and plenty of warnings on the labels. They kept him dreaming the dream of his perfect childhood. They kept him from seeing the whole truth. He uncorked them and regarded their vintage. He waited for them keenly and signed papers that waived his rights should anything go wrong. He took them, he took them all and anticipated what dreams may come.

* * *

“Why do you keep staring at your hands?” Bobby asked.

Liam looked up at his son and snapped out of it well enough. “Huh?” he said. “Eat your pancakes. Nothing to worry about.” Liam looked at the kitchen clock and thought about how it had been there for over twenty years. So had the table runner. This whole house was stuck in a moment that had passed by long ago.

It was all her doing, of course. And it looked great, too. She was a wonderful woman and a great mom; he just wished she had never got tangled up with him. He was grateful that she finally had the strength and wisdom to pack up and leave, but he wished she had taken the boy with her. There was nothing positive left for him in this house, which had become a prison of poisoned dreams.

Some people think that long-term disability means a free pass or an easy escape from the pressures of a working life. It didn’t mean that for Liam. For him, it just meant living each moment with anger and regret, wishing that he could be more productive, not cursing events from so long ago that he wasn’t even sure that he remembered them accurately. It meant that every failure was amplified and constantly, permanently, playing on repeat.

“It’s almost seven o’clock. Let’s get moving,” he said as he looked out at the sunrise, lighting up the once glorious forty-two acres. It had always been a modest size but, until Liam took over, it was a real operation. He had sold almost everything away. The only thing that was the same was the old birch, and even that would have to go soon. Every time he heard a crack from a dead limb, he would jump and then take increasingly longer to recover.

“Sure, Dad,” was the response. Bobby knew his dad would never pay attention to him. Liam had accepted it just the same as his son.

Liam looked down at his hand again, gripping it. He was conscious of his son’s critical gaze. He was a failure not only as a husband but as a father, too. He felt life slip away because of his hands.

He felt the life go out from his father’s hand, and he eventually had to let it go. They had warned him that it might happen. People are placed in the Intensive Care Unit for a reason. It was all over in an instant, the cruel reality of the past. But, as he reflected on that moment, he saw it over and over under the microscope of his unforgiving, relentlessly critical memories. He was helpless to change them; they were locked away forever in an inescapable cell of guilt.

That’s what this old house had become: everywhere he looked there was a reminder of his father, something he had built, a picture he had taken, a wall he had painted. He built a real family around Liam, an only child, but Liam had failed miserably trying to do the same thing for his own son.

“You’re doing it again, Dad.”

It’s a terrible feeling thinking that your own child hates you. Liam knew how resentful his son was; he knew he blamed Liam for his mother’s disappearance. He just needed time to come to terms with tragedy. Liam resented his son too, for not granting him that: just a little time to get over things and understand the way life would have to reform itself. He burnt the pancakes that should have been fluffy on the inside and golden brown on the outside. It was his fault the breakfast was ruined. Mom would have done them perfectly. Was it Liam’s fault that Grandpa died, too?

“Tell you what,” Liam said, knocking the kitchen table chair down as he abruptly stood up, “you can drive yourself to school.” He threw down the keys to the truck and stormed out of the kitchen. Moments later he watched, that rusted-out Toyota peel out of his laneway, gathering speed on the edge of Highway 20, bluish smoke spewing from the exhaust as the only remaining silver letters on the tailgate: Y and O, glinted rays from the rising sun.

He couldn’t take it any more. He let loose the caps from all of the childproof bottles and watched them cascade into the water and form a gently bobbing mosaic that probably cost thousands of dollars. He had measured out his life with Ativan, LITHOBID, Clozaril, and PAXIL tablets, to name a few. He watched as they all swirled in colourful rhythm away, away from him. They would imprison him no longer.

* * *

The dreams finally started to make sense. He had struggled to understand them all his life, but now he knew, now he finally had clarity. But why would Dad want to protect me from this, he wondered. It just made things worse. He started thinking about the first time he had the dream. He was quite a bit younger.

He woke up covered in sweat, screaming. He was not able to draw breath fast enough, and it was clear that there was something seriously wrong with him. His parents both rushed in and he couldn’t even talk.

The way he remembered it, he just kind of fell over and saw them screaming at him and shaking him. “What’s wrong, Liam? Can you hear me?” They were frantic, but he was slipping away. He was in and out of consciousness, completely unable to communicate. He kept looking at his hands, kept gripping them harder, gripping so hard that his fingernails bit through the palms of his hands, and he passed out.

When he woke up, Dad was there asleep on a grey, purple and yellow patterned hospital chair. He looked very different than usual. His face was stubbly and his hair was messy. There was a pad of paper and a pen on the side table. It said a bunch of stuff he couldn’t understand, but even though he was only five, he could clearly make out the letters PTSD.

“Dad,” he said quietly, and his dad woke up with a start. He seemed to just jump over to his side and kept asking Liam if he was okay, kept asking if he was sure. Then he cried. Liam would never forget that moment.

His father just let it all out and kept saying, “I thought I lost you. I thought I lost you.”

When they got home from the hospital, everyone was there. There was a big banner across the dining room that said, “Welcome Home, Liam!” All of his relatives were there and everyone in the neighbourhood, too. They all wanted to grab him and say things like, “Terrible business that, Liam. Don’t think on it.”

Or, “These things happen, you know. Pity it happened to you.”

More memorably, “Why, son? Why’d ya do it?” Liam remembered just wanting to be left alone, wanting to get away from people. He started breathing hard and ran into the kitchen and sat down against the pantry door. When the phone rang, he scooched over where Mom wouldn’t see.

“Hello,” Mom said and paused. “Yeah, we’re doin’ alright,” she seemed concerned. “Managing, you know. Liam is still struggling. It’s hard to come to terms with it, that’s for sure, but we’re okay now and that’s the most important thing.” There was another pause. “I’ll admit, it’s been scary. Scary for me. His father is not handling it well... ”

That’s when she started crying. She looked up at the birch tree through the kitchen window, grabbed the cord and carried the phone away into the dining room. Liam couldn’t hear her anymore, so he scuttled over towards her but accidentally knocked a bowl off of the counter. It didn’t break, but it skittered around on the floor in increasingly smaller, faster, more audible circles, alerting her to his presence. She looked over at Liam with the amount of distance in her eyes that he had grown to expect.

* * *

Left hand gripped, right foot plants itself, right hand gripped and the left foot makes its mark. Up the birch tree we go. Higher each year.

The tree grew faster than Liam did. It kept reaching to the sun, unrelenting. He went higher, and he went faster. Too fast, maybe.

He was higher than ever and then there he was. Liam saw him: the boy from the picture. He finally understood it. Liam knew it would never go away; it was a moment frozen in time.

* * *

Liam woke up the typical way. He made a routine of coiling up at the end of the bed, taking deep breaths and massaging his temples until he felt relaxed enough to go about his routine. He walked downstairs and his son called to him, only Liam didn’t realize that Bobby was awake yet. He jumped back, startled, as usual. He couldn’t calm himself down; he felt so paralyzed by fear. His feelings were valid, he was making progress. He set about making toast as his breathing settled and his heart rate calmed.

“I am only making toast,” he heard his inner voice confirm.

“Breakfast,” he yelled out and, as he expelled the words, he got so breathless that he fell to the floor. He heard Bobby’s footsteps and made his way to a fully upright stance before the boy entered the dining room. Breakfast was served but he was distant again, thinking back to the dream. I swear I had him for just a second. Just for the blink of an eye.

Liam felt like he needed to make sure he could black out the dream because he just couldn’t take it any more. He drank a 26-oz bottle of Bourbon while his son was at school. Sure enough, he slept deeply that night.

* * *

“I’m at the top of the tree, I can look down. I can see everything.” Liam was lying down, eyes closed, in a dream-like state.

“You can see everything,” Dr. Miller confirmed suspiciously. She took the cap off of her marker. He could hear her. It was a red marker, with a felt tip. Its cap had a silver clip. She turned the page over on her yellow, green-lined notepad, making a distinctive rustling sound. Liam saw her red words bleed through cursive flicks and flails under the blacks of his eyelids.

“Open your eyes, Liam.”

He looked at the flipped-over page from the doctor’s pad and quickly deciphered the faint edges of backwards words. It was all thanks to her marker’s bleeding ink and her own indelicate writing style. She had a very consistent, legible script. He read what he expected about himself, but was much more entranced by her last patient, who must have been quite a piece of work; all of her notes describing his “sexual deviancy.”

Her eyes narrowed behind her rectangular, metallic glasses, perhaps realizing that he could read her notes. She was just about to write down something like, “The patient refuses to convey any truth when prompted to revisit the past.”

Liam had been coming to her for sessions ever since he could remember, and he thought she hated him as much as he hated her.

He almost never said anything, so he took his time nodding and glancing at the floor as he always did. It was carpet squares. The edge of the floor was framed with modern MDF baseboard, and the walls were all a cold grey that you would expect to be the number one choice of nine out of ten correctional institutions.

There was a framed abstract piece above the desk that had a mostly blue background with a really striking bit of red in the foreground. Almost too blunt, almost off-putting, almost scary, but not enough to start a conversation about. Other than that, nothing adorned the walls besides her certificates pronouncing various degrees and memberships for Cassandra Miller, psychiatrist.

“I can’t see anything. I can’t go on today. I thought I would be able to, but I just can’t.”

Dr. Miller leaned in closer and said, “I need you to try, Liam. This could be the breakthrough that we have been waiting for.”

Proceed to part 2...