“No, sweetie, sorry I don’t know what the twins have been telling you,” he finally said. “Probably pulling your leg. You know how they are. Always trying to scare you.”
“Ah,” I said and sank deeper into my seat. I looked over at Ada. She looked like hell, but I could see she didn’t believe my parents either. The twins weren’t lying. My parents were. But why lie about something as random as that?
I must have dozed off somewhere during my thoughts because the lurch of the car woke me up. We were home, our large, quiet house looming above us, the trees waving wildly in the wind.
I got out of the car, the cold gusts catching in my throat and messing up my hair. We’d only been gone a little over a day and yet the sunshine and optimism felt so long ago.
***
I was back at the lighthouse, standing outside of it just underneath the tower. Its insides were lit up like a spaceship with piercing light coming through the porthole windows. A movement at the very top of the lighthouse caught my eye. A man came to the edge and looked over me and the ocean before him. He was fuzzy and devoid of shape or feature. It was as if my eyes couldn’t, or wouldn’t, focus on him.
He lifted his arm and pointed to the sea. With the light splashing out behind him it made his movements look like grandiose gestures.
I followed his gaze and saw floating pieces of wreckage bobbing up and down among the waves. They glinted in the dark. I looked up again at the man. He was gone.
I faced the ocean and the incoming wreckage. The man was now standing between the sea and me, continuing to search the waves.
I took a step toward him. He wasn’t tall or large but there was a feeling of immensity about him. His black coat looked dense like a black hole, and the more closely I looked at it, the more it opened into a deep chasm. It was intensely magnetic.
I reached out for him, to see if my hands would disappear into his back.
He turned around, slowly. I paused, my hands outstretched. I expected to see his profile as it came into my view, but instead it seemed to fade into the night sky. Or the black sky was bleeding into his face. By the time he was facing me straight on, his face was gone and I was looking straight into the sea behind him.
“Everything isn’t lost yet, kiddo.”
A deep, smooth voice. A Cheshire smirk faded into view and out again.
And then I woke up.
***
Work on Monday was an utter disaster. I couldn’t concentrate on anything. If I wasn’t thinking about the dream from the night before, I was thinking about the real experience in the lighthouse. The last thing I was thinking about was answering the phones properly. I probably hung up on ten different people.
It was enough, anyway, that Frida, my boss, pulled me aside.
“Are you OK?” she asked, stopping me in the hallway as I was scurrying back from the bathroom.
Frida was just as petite as I was, which always made me feel I could relate to her on some level. She was only about thirty and was known to trade drunken late-night stories with me (or should I say I just listened to them as I didn’t really go out like she did). But there were days like today when her skinny face became one of authority.
“I’m fine.” I smiled, obviously not wanting to get into it.
“Come with me,” she said brusquely, and beckoned me to follow her into an empty office.
With my heart pounding irregularly, I did as she asked and she closed the door behind her. She had this concerned look on her face that made me feel on edge. I had a flashback to a doctor-patient scenario.
“What’s up?” I asked as casually as I could. In the back of my head I knew the phones were ringing. Normally my bathroom breaks weren’t this long.
“You’re not a very good liar, Perry,” she stated. That was kind of insulting. I totally thought I was.
I gave a half-hearted chuckle. “I don’t know what you—”
“I think you need to go home,” she said simply.
“Go home?”
She sighed. It wasn’t exasperated or annoyed but more along the lines that she didn’t want to get into explaining herself. She was going to have to, though, especially with the quizzical look I was giving her.
“Remember a few weeks ago?” she asked, her voice taking on a warning tone. “You had that little attack of yours?”
Ah, right. No wonder she was handling me with such care.
“I’m fine,” I said again, trying to smile brighter.
“Look, it’s all right. I know I’m your boss and you can’t talk to me about stuff, but if you need to, I’m here for you. The last few weeks, I’ve noticed you’ve been a lot different.”
“Last few weeks?” I repeated.
She folded her arms and leaned against the door. “Yes. You’ve been sloppier, more curt with clients. You’re looking more tired, like you haven’t been sleeping at all. I don’t know what’s wrong, and I don’t expect you to tell me, but I just want you to know that you can if you want to. I’m not going to judge. I’d rather just know.”
I felt pretty embarrassed.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I mean, no offense, but I hadn’t noticed I was acting any different then.”
“But you notice now?”
“I did have a rough weekend,” I said honestly.
She stared at me for a few beats. During that time my mind went on a paranoid rampage. OK, so yes, a few weeks ago I had a panic attack. I screwed up a call between some old bag on the phone and the person she wanted to speak to. She raised such a fuss about me (no seriously, that bitch was cruel) that I ended up having a panic attack that a lot of people in the office, unfortunately, bared witness to. I just blamed it on PMS or something. I guess that hadn’t really fooled Frida.
But other than that, and a few other instances before, I was fine.
“How about you go home and get some rest. Come back tomorrow if you feel better,” she suggested gently.
It would have been a dream come true. My boss was finally giving me a day off and for no real reason, to boot. Except the way it was actually going down was completely humiliating. I felt my pride bristle along my back like porcupine spines.
“I’ll be fine,” I countered.
She gave me a sympathetic smile and said something rather chilling, “You won’t. And that’s all right. Really, Perry, life gets hard sometimes. We all know it. And we all know you can’t deal with it while you’re here at work. So, coming from a friend, really, just go home and sort yourself out. Come back full of pep and beans. Just...deal with whatever you need to deal with.”
There was more to it than that, I knew that much.
“And if you weren’t my friend?”
“You’re projecting a bad image for the company right now,” she answered bluntly. “Since that incident a few weeks ago, people have been a bit, um, concerned about you. I think it would be best for you, and everyone else, if you could do your job properly. You are, after all, the face of the company. So go home; again, it’s no big deal, but just go deal with whatever it is you need to deal with. And if you need assistance from the company, you know, in medical terms…if you need to talk to someone and that sort of thing, please don’t hesitate to ask. We have some really lovely benefits in that area.”
My face was red and I felt sick. All this talk about panic attacks and I was about to have one in this empty office. Frida was watching me closely. The hint of trepidation across her forehead told me that she was a bit afraid of what I might do or say.
Ridiculous. I have one bad morning of answering phones and I get sent home.
Well, I had no choice but to take the professional route. I told Frida that if that’s what they thought was best, I would do what was best for the company. I’ve never cared about the company a day in my life, but suddenly I wanted nothing more than to prove them wrong. I’d go home, graciously and with understanding, and come back tomorrow full of pep and beans, or whatever the hell she was talking about.
Back at my desk, I quickly gathered my stuff as Frida was gathering Alana to take over my duties for the rest of the afternoon. Because of that, she was going to be an even greater bitch tomorrow.
I suppose I should have been happy to have such a concerned workplace, but it just didn’t bode well for me. Call me paranoid, but I felt like this was the start of my job heading in the absolute wrong direction.
With no choice and under my boss’s watchful eye, I quickly grabbed my purse and headed to the elevator before Alana showed up and undid me with her ice queen glare.
I got in the elevator. The doors shut just as I saw Alana coming around the corner, the metallic closure eradicating her sneer in progress. Good timing.
The elevator started to make its way down. I thought about what I would tell my mother when she caught me coming home early.
The elevator lurched to a stop.
The motion caught me off guard and I fell over slightly, catching myself on the rail. I had fears of malfunctioning elevators but always brushed them off as irrational. Luckily, it seemed to have stopped with that one lurch.
But I still wasn’t moving and the elevator doors didn’t open.
The floor buttons on the console were lit up in the shape of an X. It flashed “X” – three times.
What the—
The doors opened, faster than normal, like they had been oiled with speed.
A man dressed head-to-toe in raingear stood on the floor staring at me. His coat and pants were wet and he was standing in a puddle, the carpet soaked through and spreading out in a radius around him.
Before I could even comprehend any of it, the doors shut. The man didn’t even make a move for them. The elevator lurched again, seeming to drop a floor.
I let out a scream, feeling like I was in the Tower of Terror but with no safety belts.
The elevator stopped abruptly and once more the doors opened.
I expected to see the fisherman again but the doors revealed the lobby, lit with daylight from the building’s front entrance. Two straight-laced businessmen were waiting impatiently on the tiles. They gave me a suspicious look. I must have looked scared out of my wits.
I quickly walked out of the elevator, stopped in the middle of the lobby and looked back at the two men. The doors closed on their amused faces and off they went.
“What. The. Hell?” I said aloud, my hand at my chest. I almost (almost) wished that the Creepy Clown Lady from last week was down in the lobby again, just so I could have someone to talk to. But alas, I was alone. I rubbed my fingers along my temple, trying to bring a sense of peace and clarity to my head, which now felt dangerously overloaded.
I walked out of the building, gasping for the damp air outside and avoiding the eyes of the business people passing me by on the busy street. What just happened?
I looked back at the ugly building, its sleek, tinted exterior that hid a wealth of weirdness behind it. Maybe Frida was right after all. Maybe I really did need to go home and sort myself out. If it wasn’t the nightmares, or terrifying situations in a lighthouse, it was the imaginary fishermen I saw in my office building.
I suddenly had no problems with writing it off as a sick day.
***