on the safe side, part 4

January 15, 2084 - Summer Phoenix is 19, Sophie is 61.

Soundtrack: "Because of You," by Kelly Clarkson.

Summer doesn't dream most of the time. Between school and work and family, there isn't time to dream. Or when she does, they're those short, nonsensical dreams...

Like the one where she's being chased by police dogs for the dimebag of weed she stuffed in her bra. They have her backed up against a chain-link fence with barbed wire across the top, and on the other side of it, there is a wide open field. Freedom (except, upon waking, she would realize once the police caught up to her, they could clearly just shoot her through the fence). But she can't climb it...

Because she also happens to be wearing roller blades. So instead the toothy and snarling animals just creep up to her, as she tries to hold steady her trembling, rolling legs.

Summer wakes most mornings to the busy voices of students getting ready for their morning classes, snapping towels at each other in the hallways, slamming doors, microwaving their packaged breakfasts - beeeep. Her roommate is still asleep, running her fan for white noise to drown out the noise. The girl sleeps like a rock. And has the luxury of late classes.

Summer takes early classes so she can get out to Bluewater by 11:00 to open the shop.

She's hired as much help as she can manage. Money isn't the problem. With the business grant she won, she can afford a stock girl, an extra cashier, and Elijah making the toys. Her grandma even comes in to help manage things some days. She's lucky, Grandma Sophie tells her. Without that grant, who knows how they'd ever cover all the bases.

Summer never saw herself selling toys when she was a girl. Her mother was young and healthy, and Summer would guess her mom didn't even know what would happen to the shop when she was gone, seeing that day must have been so far off still. Summer's done the best she could to lighten the load on all of them - she hired a bookkeeper to keep their taxes straight, but she pays the bills herself. She runs the hiring and the firing, placing the orders, and even covers the hour gap left when their morning cashier leaves and the night cashier arrives. She's given up trying to make the toys herself now - she just delegates that work to Elijah and washes her hands of it.

If her mother was watching from wherever she is, would she be saddened that Summer hadn't learned to make the toys herself? That she just parcels out the job, piece by piece, and still can't even manage to give enough of it away?

They talk softly in between customers, and sometimes when they have a lull, Summer will wait at the cash register with an accounting textbook, or her stats homework. She hates most of her classes. She actually hates being a business major in general. It just hadn't made much sense to study music or art or physical therapy, or any of the thousands of things she's actually interested when it's already set in stone what she's going to be when she's done with it.

Sometimes she wonders if her grandmother knows just how much she doesn't want to be here. Her grandmother knows more than she lets on - with this family full of secrets like it is, she carries them all. From this angle, looking out the big picture windows, they can both see the lake where her mother drowned.

"He hasn't been back here yet, has he?" Summer says. "Not once."

"Now's not the time," Sophie says.

It's never the right time. Summer mumbles, "When is?"

"Your Aunt Nessa," Sophie says. One phrase that carries the weight to explain anything - meaning, "not now", or "not as important". After all, what could be as important as that? "You know your sister will be old enough to help you here soon," Sophie offers.

"I won't do that to her," Summer says. "She's just a little girl. She should get to be a little girl."

"It's your mother's store. Your father thought it would help you girls remember her."

Summer blurts out a laugh. "No, that's not what he thought."

Summer doesn't know if anyone else remembers. She remembers clearly the reason he'd given her this place - not for her own good, but so he could wash his hands of it. I can't go there, he'd said. I don't want anything to do with it.

"Don't you know what this means to him? That you're taking care of it for her?"

"Sure," Summer says with a sigh. As long as he's happy. Everyone runs circles around him, holds him in delicate hands, walks on eggshells. Is he really that fragile anymore?

Her grandmother lets off an irritated huff. "I don't know what you expected us to do. Didn't we do all we could? Didn't we try? Nobody knew what to do."

"I wasn't blaming you," Summer says. Though she isn't sure if that's the truth - or who should be to blame, if anyone at all. Summer knows all about blame, how it never fixes anything. It won't change wrongs or repair mistakes. It doesn't bring people back, or keep them safe, or promise their return. It doesn't change the fact that she drove Tyler away, and now she can't take it back.

***

The nights she stops by her dad's house to see Ryanne, she has just enough time to finish her homework and get in bed for a few hours of sleep. The nights are full of voices - college kids, laughing and goofing off in the hallways, stumbling home drunk from house parties they're not even old enough to be attending. The sound of people being young, starting their own lives, shaping their futures, even if it is in between drunken parties. They make her angry, jealous, and annoyed all at once. She's thankful her roommate runs that fan all night for the white noise.

She never used to dream, but they've been coming more often lately. The dreams never make sense - those weird nonsensical dreams that say one thing and mean another.

She's on base. Or it's what she imagines must be the base from what Tyler told her of it. She doesn't remember how she got there, but she's vaguely aware that it doesn't matter because she's only dreaming. This is a dream, yet the room feels so visceral, with its cold gray tile and its blinding white walls. Her eyes hurt. There are no windows here and the air is cold. He told her that on the phone once - they keep the air cold because of all the soldiers in their thick radiation jackets.

When she finds him, she's only half aware that she'd been looking for him at all. He stands in an empty hallway. They're alone.

He's been gone eight months, and she still remembers sending him off like it was yesterday. Here he looks older, stronger, thicker at the shoulders and even taller than the last time she saw him. He's been through training. And besides that, he's just a young man still, growing the way young men do. He was only nineteen the last time she saw him, just a boy - a little boy going off to do a man's work.

He's twenty now. She wasn't even able to call him for his birthday.

She touches him, his body solid under her fingers. She leans her face to his shoulder, but she can't smell him, and then she realizes she can't actually smell anything here. She puts her lips to his jacket, the thick and heavy material, and she can't feel any heat from it. She moves around to face him and looks up into his eyes to see if he's real.

"Are you alive?"

He blinks, he exhales, he smiles gently and then the smile fades.

"Yes," he says. "But you don't need me anymore."

His voice is sad, but he doesn't accuse or berate. He isn't even asking her a question.

"No, it's not true, why are you saying that?" He's too calm. He's so resigned when he should be angry - he should be furious. She doesn't understand. "Why are you giving up so easy?"

"I'm not the one who gave up."

"I'm sorry," she pleads. "I didn't give up, that wasn't it. It wasn't you, I was just..."

It isn't that he stops her from talking, but the words stop anyway. He leans his face to her cheek. He whispers, "Didn't we always kind of know?"

"What did we know?"

He doesn't answer. She rests her face on his shoulder, feeling the pulse of his heartbeat in his skin that gives no heat.

Then he moves to step past her.

When she turns, he's already gone. Not like he left, or even that he'd run away, but like he'd just vanished from her hands. Like he'd vanished from the whole world.

She takes off running along the white corridors, shouting his name, "Tyler!" The halls seem to stretch out forever, and she can't see him - can't see his shadow shifting around the corners. There is only the sound of footsteps running and she chases after it, though they might actually be her own footsteps echoing against the narrow walls.

She reaches the end of the corridor and shoves open the doors.

Outside the hallways, there is open sky and fresh air. She winces hard at the sun, even brighter than the blinding white walls and fluorescent lights.

She isn't on the moon, or even in space. She's on Earth. Some part of Earth, somewhere she doesn't know.

She turns back for the room, the long white corridors, the blank walls, but they're gone too. Vanished. Like they were never there at all.

All she can do is pick a direction and run.

She runs faster, but finds nothing but fields and fog and trees.

She runs, sprinting, panting and pumping her legs, faster and faster. Until she can't run any harder, until she can't run any more.

She collapses to the ground, planting her fingers in the dirt, lying her face on her hands.

She breathes, the air warm and thick with fog. Tyler isn't here.

When she finally raises her body from the ground, afraid to stand on her legs, she finds that she's come to the edge of the land. An open expanse of water crashes around her and she can't see where he could have gone. Where was there for him to go?

Or was she the one who was lost?

When she opens her eyes, she's in her bed, in her dark room in Frosh Hall with her roommate's fan whirring its white noise through the night. She knows where she is, and she knows that where she was wasn't real, but it lingers in that visceral way that dreams sometimes do. She can still feel the cold pulse from his neck against her lips.

Summer never used to dream, but now that she does, they're only nights full of twisted and mysterious nightmares.

*******

(footnotes: what Tyler said // what Vicky said // other lives she could have had)