Open Mind: Chapter 20

That night, I dreamt that Annie and I were at one of the old rickety traveling carnivals that our town used to host every summer. Every year, my parents and I would pack up half a dozen of our cousins from the neighboring towns, pile us all in the back of the truck, and we’d head to the fairgrounds. This time, Annie was among the crowd of cousins in the trunk -- I don’t know what it says that the girl that just kissed me last night was now taking the place of a cousin, but I am not about to let some Freudian questioning ruin one of the only pleasant dreams I’d had in months.

I laid on my back beside her, gazing up at the seemingly never-ending line of telephone poles that whizzed past us. I turned to face Annie, but I couldn’t quite make out the features of her face. It was as if I were looking at her from behind a foggy bathroom mirror -- I looked around me to confirm that all of my cousins were similarly difficult to distinguish. I could hear the buzzing murmur of their voices, but I couldn’t make out a single word. This was, of course, nothing unusual -- all my dreams feel this way, I thought. I felt the rumbling of the tires underneath my spine, and I knew without looking that we’d reached the mole-filled field that served as the parking lot for the fair.

The rest of the dream came to me as snapshots of moments in time-- exchanging crumpled dollar bills for a ring of tickets, sharing a ridiculously tall, fake cherry-flavored drink with bendy straws, trying to avoid vomiting on the spinning octopus ride -- all of it obscure but real in the moment.

Annie pulled me to a lonely park bench across from a funnel cake stand. “This is a wonderful memory,” she said, wistfully. For the first time in the dream, I could hear her clearly. Her voice was soft and distant, like a whisper carried across the gentle wind towards my ears. “I wish I could stay here with you like this, forever.”

“These things stay open all night, you know. Or…at least till midnight, I think.”

“I’ve thought about all the places I would have liked to have gone with you if we’d known each other sooner. All the places I’d still like to go, if things were different.”

“We can go wherever you want, Annie. I think I saw a line for the bumper cars if you wanted to --”

“That’s not what happens,” Annie said cryptically. “In about two minutes, your cousin Janey is going to barge in and say that --”

Right on cue, the unmistakable whinny of my older cousin Janey rang out across the field. “Skyyyyyyyyler!”

“Okay, so it happens faster than I thought,” Annie interjected.

“What do you mean?” I said, my eyes shifting from Annie to the unmistakable figure of Janie approaching. Her bulbous face was much clearer than the other cousins had been. Her cheeks were flushed from the heat and the effort of tracking me down.

“Damn, Skyler. There you are! And you drug Max out here too.”

I turned back to Annie, but she’d been replaced with the short, dumpy frame of my cousin Max -- who couldn’t have been more than three years old.

This… this can’t be right…

I could feel the mush of my brain matter straining to make sense of what it was processing. It was like the static of the rabbit ear television between stations -- nothing made sense and yet there were pieces of familiarity that increased the frustration. The harder I tried to see Annie again, all I could see was more white streaks in my vision.

Then, like a lightening bolt through the night sky, a voice snapped through the static. “Get up, Skyler!”

I jolted upright and found myself back in the living room with Doctor Lau looming over me. I could feel the weight of Annie’s arms still wrapped around my shoulders, and I wriggled out from under her. Her arms slumped onto the mattress with a dull thud. The doctor drug me across the mattress and threw me down on the hardwood floor. She rushed over to Annie, and I struggled to orient myself to the scene unfolding before me.

“Come on, Annie, come on!” Dr. Lau gently slapped at Annie’s face, trying to stir any reaction out of her. Her icy stare shot back to me with deadly intent. “What did you two do last night?”

“What is wrong with her?” I cried out. “Why isn’t she waking up?”

“Don’t play stupid with me, Skyler! If you all did something, I need to know. Did you and Annie have drugs? Alcohol?”

“God, what?” I reeled in disbelief. “I can’t believe you’d accuse me of doing some shit like that!”

“I am not accusing you! I know there’s no way you could have gotten something like that, but if Annie had it, I need to know!”

“No! God, no!” I rushed over to Annie, but the doctor shoved me hard into the coffee table.

“Stay away from her! At least until I figure out what the hell is going on.”

I was so overwhelmed. All I could do was sob. I walked from the living room to the kitchen, giving the doctor space to figure out what was happening. My eyes wondered across the picture frames scattered along the walls -- all pictures of Annie staring back at me. I averted my eyes from hers in shame. What had I done? Did I do something and I didn’t know it?

The dryness of my throat overwhelmed my other senses, and I searched the pea-green plywood kitchen cabinets for a glass. I grabbed the first plastic cup I could find and rushed to the kitchen sink to fill it. Next to the sink I saw it -- my opened bottle of pills.

“D…doctor Lau…” I mumbled. I couldn’t find the air in my lungs to say what I needed to say.

“What is it, Skyler?” The doctor snapped at me, clearly still preoccupied with Annie’s condition.

“My medication… she took my medication…”

I saw the doctor’s head pop up over the living room sofa. “How much?”

“Well..” I couldn’t find the words, so I held the orange bottle up and tipped it over, with only a handful of pills cascading from the bottle and dropping to the floor.

“No no no no no no no,” the doctor muttered, each “no” getting louder and more frantic as she turned her attention back to Annie. Panic overtook her, and she started to shake Annie’s body uncontrollably.

Everything felt numb. I could no longer sense the plastic cup in my hand, and it slipped to the floor and crashed against the linoleum, spilling water across the cold surface. I shambled back into the living room, watching in horror as the doctor slumped over Annie’s still body.

“Is she…” I said, too afraid to finish the question.

“No,” the doctor said bluntly. “she is alive. But in this state, she will not wake up. I can purge the medication from her system, but she has triggered Open Mind.”

“So then you just… purge her and then we wait, yeah? Wait until she reconnects.”

Doctor Lau took a ragged breath, hesitated, then brought Annie’s head close to her breast. She squeezed her tight. She rested her head against Annie’s and sighed deeply. “I don’t feel her connection, Skyler.”

“What is that supposed to mean? Maybe it’s you!”

“No, what it means,” the doctor snapped, “is that her connection was already tenuous as it was. This may have been the final snap.”

“That can’t be right… It can’t be!” I paced from the living room to the kitchen, my heart racing. The edges of my vision blurred as I struggled to keep conscious. The thought of losing the one person in my life that I … well, in the moment I couldn’t even discern what my feelings towards Annie were, but I knew that I couldn’t afford to lose her.

I looked to the doctor, whose eyes were darting around the room. I could see the motors of her brain turning as she frantically tried to formulate a plan for dealing with the crisis. Her eyes fixed on me and narrowed.

“Here is what we need to do…” The doctor’s voice trailed off as she played through the plan in her mind over again. I could make out each step as her expressions shifted, transitioning from uncertainty to fear and back around to panic.

“What is it,” I asked.

“I don’t know for sure that it will work, but it might.”

“What might?”

“I-I’m getting to it,” the doctor snarled. “But it is all just theoretical, mind you. There is a likely chance that I am wrong, so you have to be willing to take a chance on that.”

“Whatever it takes.”

In that moment, Wilcox popped into the room. He landed on the back of the couch between the doctor and I, and I watched as his eyes shifted from me to Annie. He started to speak at the same time as the doctor, and I had to wave him away.

“What are you doing?” Doctor Lau said, her voice layered with concern and frustration. She paused for a moment, and then scoffed. “It’s the possum again, isn’t it?”

“Of course,” I laughed.

“Well his timing is impeccable, because he can help with my plan.”

“What plan,” Wilcox interjected.

“I don’t know the plan because you kinda interrupted it,” I snapped back.

“Ask him if he’s seen Annie,” the doctor said. “Maybe he knows.”

“Tell her I could hear Annie, but her voice was… scrambled. I couldn’t track it.”

“He says she’s scrambled.” I looked at Wilcox and shrugged. He slapped his tiny paw against his forehead.

“That’s what I was afraid of,” the doctor muttered, completely serious in the face of my attempt to relay Wilcox’s absurd assessment of the situation. “Some piece of her is still here, since she is breathing. That means that remaining parts of her could be there, or someplace in-between the two.”

I looked to Wilcox, who was absorbing everything that Doctor Lau said without hesitation. I wished in the moment that I understood what he understood, because I felt incredibly lost.

“I have no idea what that means,” Wilcox said. “Ask her to explain it again.”

“Doctor Lau, I completely understood what you meant, but Wilcox over here didn’t. Can you please explain it again in a way that a possum would understand?”

Wilcox hissed.

“Okay,” the doctor began in a hurried tone, “so our soul -- or whatever you want to call it -- exists in both the ‘real world’ and in the ‘spirit world.’ We simply shift our consciousness between the two when we engage in Open Mind.”

“The rubber band,” I whispered to Wilcox.

“Right, like a rubber band. I didn’t quite believe it when Annie said that her ‘rubber band’ was weakening, but it appears she may have been right. On top of that, the amount of medication she took all at once had some impact I am sure. But that means that her consciousness could either be in some random place in the ‘spirit world,’ or some random place in the transition between the two.”

“There’s nothing in the ‘transition’ space,” Wilcox interrupted. “I don’t know how to explain it, but nothing stays there. I don’t think anything can exist there.”

“Wilcox says the transition space is not an option.”

“Wonderful! That limits the spaces to be searched then.”

“But the other side is huge, right? How are we supposed to know where to find Annie?”

“That’s where my theory comes in. Wilcox can hopefully confirm it or not, but I think that the ‘spirit world’ is actually very limited. We can generally move through spaces on the other side that are familiar to us -- places we have been or seen on this side. The more familiar the space, the stronger our connection to it, and therefore the easier it is for us to travel through that space through Open Mind.”

I looked to Wilcox, who nodded in agreement. I nodded in a similar fashion, and the doctor continued.

“If Annie is going to be anywhere, it is going to likely be a place that she has a connection to. The issue is that it may not be a place that you both share a connection to.”

“When I found Adrianna during her restraint, she was drowning in a river. That must have been the river that both of our families went to on our camping trips. She may have had a similar experience of being unable to breathe that connected her to a place like that…”

“That would make sense.”

“So what? I just have to search every place that she and I would have in common? I can’t imagine there are many, other than Dogwood.” I shuddered to think of what the Dogwood of the other side would look like.

“I think you should search her room. Try to find any clues that you can as to where she might have gone. Even that small connection may be enough to get you to that place if she is there.”

“Great, Wilcox and I will see what we can find.”

“Hurry, Skylar. There’s no way to know how much time we have to find her.”

I could feel my heart pounding in my chest, and the adrenaline threatened to overwhelm my senses. I followed Wilcox as he scurried towards Annie’s room.

“This could take awhile,” I warned him. “Annie said her room was a mess. She wouldn’t even let me in there last night.”

The door to Annie’s room was left ajar, and Wilcox pushed it open with his crooked snout. Once inside, I was surprised to see -- although in hindsight I should not have been -- a room that was nearly spotless. Wilcox shot me a sideways glance, and I could do nothing but shrug.

“So you’ve known her longer than I have,” I admitted. I rushed over to her standing desk by the door and started rustling through the stacks of papers on top. “Do you have any clue where she might have gone?”

“That depends,” Wilcox said, sniffing the ground like a hound dog in search of a squirrel. “we don’t know where she might have landed, or if she had any control over it. Did you get a sense she was looking for something or someone?”

“She doesn’t like to talk about herself much,” I said softly. It hurt a bit to admit it, but it was true; she knew much more about me than I did about her. I felt like a narcissist, always worried about my issues and never questioning hers. But would she have even told me if I asked? A stinging thought pierced my brain, buzzing with the question of whether I’d ever be able to ask her again. I buried my mind back into the assorted school papers I had strewn across her bed, eager to push unhelpful thoughts like those away.

“Wait!” All I could see was Wilcox’s pink tail from under the bed. I walked over to him, but he hissed. “Don’t move!”

“Why?”

“I can feel something here. I don’t know if it’s her.”

“Go check! Can’t you go to the other side?”

“I don’t want to disrupt. Let’s just see what--”

From the other side of the room, a song began blaring.

CAN I GET GET GET TO KNOW KNOW KNOW YOU BETTER BABY?

I stumbled backwards, overwhelmed by the volume of the song. I dashed over to Annie’s corner side drawer where her phone had been left charging. The music was playing through the speakers of her phone -- but not as an alarm as I had suspected. In fact, the phone was not powered on at all. The music was coming from some other source, but being amplified through the speakers.

“What the hell is that?” Wilcox hissed as he scurried from under the bed.

“It’s… it’s a song,” I stammered. “It’s a song that Annie and I danced to during one of our tutoring sessions.”

“She must be here then!”

“You’re right,” I said, “but that also must mean that she is trapped there.”

“Let me pop over there, and if she’s there, I’ll help bring you over.”

“Go for it, buddy,” I said with a smile. Finally, a sign of hope.

A few minutes passed without any sign from Wilcox. I continued to search the room. It felt perverse to go through Annie’s things while she was in the other room, but I figured she would understand. My gaze landed on an old, golden picture frame beside her bed. It had been knocked over on its glass front. I turned it over in my hands to find a picture of Annie and her aunt. Annie was so small; likely no older than two or three. I could just barely make out a brick wall with many different faces -- all of children with Asian features like Annie’s. In the corner of the picture, someone had scribbled letters in Chinese.

As I moved to set the frame back down, I noticed the corner of another photo just barely peaking out of the back of the frame. Curiosity got the better of me, and I unhooked the back of the frame. Both pictures fell out onto the floor. I scooped both back up and set the original picture back on the side table.

I did not recognize anyone in the second picture. There was a young man and woman, seemingly only a few years older than me. The woman had some kind of ribbon tied around over her eyes, but she held a small baby in her hands. Neither the woman nor the man were smiling, but their faces were completely neutral. They seemed to be standing at the foot of some huge statue -- only the toes of the statue were visible in the frame of the photo. I turned the photo over in my hand. On the back, there were two inscriptions, which had both been transcribed from Chinese to English. One seemed to be the name of the statue -- The Grand Buddha of Leshan. The other said, “how I wish you could see her, our darling Annalise.”

As I spoke those words aloud, I heard the rustling of papers on the desk behind me. One single sheet fell to the floor. I put the pictures back where I had found them and stepped over to the paper. I looked it over and immediately the pieces clicked.

“You are cordially invited to this year’s prom,” I murmured to myself. It had a date circled at the bottom, which was April 24th,

“I couldn’t find her,” Wilcox said. His voice startled me, which caused me to jump and let out a tiny squeal.

“Don’t do that!” I snapped.

“Sorry… but did you hear what I said?”

“Obviously,” I said pointedly. “Heard you loud and clear. But I have another lead.” I tossed the paper onto the bed. Wilcox looked down at the paper, and then back to me.

“You know I can’t read, right?”

“Oh,” I responded. The thought had honestly never occurred to me until that point. “Well, she knocked that page on the ground and it says that her prom was today.”

“She did mention off-hand before that she wasn’t going to go,” Wilcox said. “She said she didn’t have anyone to go with so she didn’t want to go. She didn’t seem too upset about it, but it must have meant something to her.”

I opened the bedroom door and called to Doctor Lau. She was hunched over the kitchen sink, her head in her hands. She lifted her head to me, and without a word, she regained her composure and approached us.

“I apologize. I just needed a moment.”

“That’s fine,” I said dismissively. “We need to go to her prom.”

“Annie’s prom,” Doctor Lau said with a weak laugh. “How did you come to that conclusion?”

“I have my ways,” I said. “Just trust me on this. I need to get to her high school.”