The Bad Daughter(16)
That dream melted seamlessly into dream number three.
She was trying on bridesmaid dresses in the middle of a huge warehouse. “I like this one,” Tara said, pulling a bright yellow gown off a nearby rack and handing it to Robin.
“What do you think?” Robin asked a couple of minutes later, emerging from behind the curtain of a makeshift dressing room.
Tara doubled over with laughter. When she stood up, she’d morphed into Melanie. “You look like a giant banana.”
“I have another dress to show you,” said a salesgirl with bright red hair and huge green eyes.
“Dr. Simpson?” Robin asked.
“Call me Arla.”
“I didn’t know you worked here.”
“I thought therapists knew everything.”
“I’m not a very good therapist.”
“So I hear. Anyway, I have to go. Your father is waiting.”
“What’s he waiting for?”
“He’s waiting to die,” Arla said before fading into nothingness.
The warehouse disappeared and a hospital corridor rose to take its place. Robin raced down the sterile hall, peeking into room after room, finding each one empty. And then, in the last room, she saw Cassidy.
The child sat up as Robin entered the room, the front of her pajamas dripping fresh blood. “They broke in and shot me,” she said, pointing to a second bed only a few feet away.
Robin approached the bed and pulled down the sheet, revealing Blake and his pretty new assistant naked and tangled up in each other’s arms. “What are you doing here?” Robin demanded of her fiancé.
“Same thing I’ve been doing for years,” Blake said. “No surprises here.”
Robin heard a strangled cry escape her lips.
“Robin,” Melanie said from somewhere above her head.
She felt a hand on her shoulder.
“Robin,” Melanie said again, shaking her, her voice piercing Robin’s dream. “Wake up.”
“What?”
“You’re having a nightmare,” Melanie told her.
Robin opened her eyes, saw Melanie looming above her, a gun in her hand. “What are you doing?”
“Sorry about this,” Melanie said, pressing the gun against Robin’s forehead. “It has to be done.”
She pulled the trigger.
Robin screamed and bolted up in bed. “Holy crap,” she whispered, wiping a swath of perspiration from her forehead and coming fully awake. “What the hell was that?”
It was then that she saw him. She caught no more than a fleeting glimpse—a tall young man, wide-shouldered and slim-hipped, long hair falling across his forehead into his eyes. “Landon?” How long had he been standing there?
In the next second, he was gone.
“Landon?” Robin called again, getting to her feet and crossing to the bedroom door. She peered down the hall but saw no one. The door to Landon’s bedroom was closed. Had he been there at all? Had she dreamt him, too?
Robin returned to her room and sank down on the bed. She checked her watch and saw that it was almost five o’clock, which meant she’d been asleep for more than an hour. Had he been watching her the whole time? Had he been watching her at all?
She reached for her purse on the floor beside the double bed, her fingers searching blindly for the small notepad and pencil she kept inside it. She wanted to jot down her dreams before she forgot them, something she often advised her clients to do. Not that she was any good at deciphering their meaning, despite the various books she’d read on the subject and the extra courses she’d taken. Sure, she could recognize the difference between a dream of wish fulfillment and one of anxiety, but the individual symbols contained in these dreams always eluded her. “No surprises here,” she muttered, borrowing Blake’s phrase and scribbling it down, although the rest of her dreams were already evaporating, bursting like bubbles in the air. By the time she’d finished recording that simple sentence, the only image that remained from any of the dreams was that of Blake and his pretty assistant lying naked in each other’s arms.
“Tara is dead,” she said out loud. “Your father’s in a coma. Cassidy is still in critical condition. And you’re worried that your fiancé is cheating on you. Way to put things in perspective!” She fell back against the pillow, dropping the notepad and pencil to the floor and staring at the ceiling fan whirling gently above her head.
Gradually she gave in to curiosity and looked around the room, noting the changes that had been made. Her bed, once covered with plain white sheets and a blue blanket, now sported flowered sheets and a frilly pink bedspread; rose-colored broadloom lay atop the hardwood floor she’d grown up with; the formerly beige walls were now a soft shade of ivory. Large posters of the Eagles and the Grateful Dead had been replaced by even larger posters of Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. The only thing that was the same was her old desk. It stood in front of the window, a small TV occupying its center, the space around it littered with a motley collection of snow globes that Cassidy had clearly outgrown and abandoned in the move to the larger, grander house next door.
“Some house,” Robin said, walking to the window and leaning against the desk, staring across the expanse of mottled grass at the imposing structure. “More like a hotel.” She picked up one of the snow globes and turned it upside down, watching as hundreds of tiny white flakes swirled around the assortment of miniature animals trapped inside its underwater zoo. “I should have stayed in a hotel,” she whispered to the tiny giraffe standing next to a blue plastic whale. She wondered idly if the Hotel Tremont was still considered Red Bluff’s finest.