Chuck gave her a blank stare.
“So I’m supposed to believe you when you say aliens are headed for Earth because your grandmother used to have funny dreams, too?”
“Not just funny dreams—Seeing Dreams,” Torri emphasized. “She said they came to her often—sometimes about little things, like where she put a piece of jewelry she misplaced. And sometimes about big things. Do you know she stopped my Uncle Timmy from getting into a car accident once by giving him a flat tire?”
“What?” Chuck demanded flatly. “No, I’ve never heard that story.”
Probably because she only told it to me, Torri thought. Because I was the only one she trusted.
But now she had no choice, she had to trust her husband—so she tried to explain.
“Look, Uncle Timmy was visiting her from college when he was younger and he was determined to go back a day early to get ready for some exam or something. Nana had a Seeing Dream about it and she begged him not to go, but he wouldn’t listen.”
Torri spoke rapidly, the words spilling out in a hasty flood as she willed her husband to understand—to believe.
“In desperation, Nana went and stuck a knife in his tire while he was eating breakfast that morning,” she told Chuck. “He never knew what she did, but the delay of getting that tire fixed saved his life. A semi truck jack-knifed on the highway he was going to take to get back to college. There was a seventeen-car pileup and he would have been right in the middle of it if Nana hadn’t knifed his car tire.”
Chuck had remained unconvinced.
“So you think I ought to believe there are aliens on the way because your grandma had a bad feeling one time about your uncle?” he demanded. “Get real, Torri! Just because your Nana was an old gypsy and believed in all that mystical bullshit doesn’t mean you have to, too! You need to snap out of this now and keep your crazy to yourself—I can’t deal with you going nuts on top of all the pressure I have at work.”
Torri had shut up and shut down after that. She’d tried to “keep her crazy to herself” as Chuck had demanded—but it kept spilling over into everyday life. The fugue states during the day got longer. She began blanking out in the middle of conversations with coworkers and even clients at the bank. People began to whisper about her behind her back, asking each other what was wrong with her.
Then the night terrors started getting worse. She woke Chuck up screaming and the neighbors too. Twice the police were called to their house in the middle of the night and had to be sent away, after inspecting everything to make sure there was no domestic violence going on.
Her husband was getting more and more impatient with her and Torri could see the questions in his eyes when he looked at her. She was ruining their perfect life with her sudden and extremely inconvenient mental illness—why couldn’t she control herself? What was wrong with her?
But the worst thing of all—worse than the way she was losing respect at work and waking herself and half the neighborhood up with her screaming at night—was the fact that Torri knew the dreams were real.
She knew it beyond the shadow of a doubt—the same way her Nana had known she had to stick a knife in Uncle Timmy’s tire to keep him home and keep him safe from the impending accident. But now the entire Earth was about to have an accident—the small blue and green planet humankind called home was headed for a collision with a hostile alien race and only Torri knew about it.
Along with that certainty, came a horrible guilt. She ought to be telling people—she ought to be shouting it from the rooftops, going on TV, posting it on the Internet. Torri knew she ought to be getting out the message that the Earth was about to be in big, big trouble.
But the fear of being called crazy had stopped her. The fear that she would lose everything if she started telling people what was going on—what was about to happen—that the sleek black ship called “The Fathership,” which was almost as big as a city—was headed towards Earth with extremely bad intentions.
“And in the end, they called me crazy anyway and slapped me in here,” Torri muttered to her blurred reflection. Now it was too late to tell anyone—she was in the psych ward, for God’s sake. Nobody was going to believe her. Chuck certainly hadn’t. The more she’d tried to describe the AllFather and his alien hordes, the more he had looked at her like she wasn’t playing with a full deck.
“But I know I’m right,” Torri whispered to herself. “I know they’re coming—I just can’t do anything about it!”
Two
“All right, Ms. Morrison, you know that hygiene time is over. Time for breakfast, now.”
The voice of Mazy, one of the “caretakers,” as the orderlies were called at St. Elizabeth’s, broke into Torri’s bleak thoughts.
Torri looked up and tried to smile. She tried her best to continue acting normal—sane—despite the frequent fugues and the night terrors. At least Mazy was one of the nicer caretakers. She didn’t grab you by the arm or push you up against the wall when you didn’t move fast enough. And plenty of them did, despite it being against the rules to “manhandle” the patients.
St. Elizabeth’s was actually a pretty plush establishment, as mental hospitals went. The older buildings, built before the Civil War, (back when it had gone by the name “The Government Hospital for the Insane,”) had all been boarded up or torn down. The new hospital had been built on the East Campus only about ten or twelve years ago, so the facility was still quite new. And the patients it housed were often well-connected so nothing too bad happened there—during the day, anyway.
It was the night shift that Torri had come to dread—and not just because of her night terrors.
But it was better not to think about that now—better to just “get along and go along” as Nana used to say.
“Thank you, Mazy,” she said, nodding at the female orderly. “I wonder what’s on the menu today?”
“I hear it might be pancakes.” Mazy gave her a bright smile—the same kind of smile you might give to a rather slow child. “Won’t that be nice? Let’s go see, shall we?”
“Of course. Thank you.” Torri nodded automatically. Three months ago, if someone had spoken to her in that tone, she would have bristled and demanded to know what the hell they thought they were doing. Now, she simply nodded meekly and followed the orderly in her pale pink scrubs, out of the women’s restroom and down the long halls towards the cafeteria.
The pale pink walls matched the orderlies’ scrubs, making Torri feel like she was inside a giant seashell. She supposed that someone in Administration must have read an article about pink being a soothing color but after a while, it just got monotonous.
At least she didn’t have to wear pink herself, Torri thought. The loose, ill-fitting scrubs that were standard issue for all patients were a boring beige, which looked equally awful on everyone—but still, it wasn’t pink.
There were doors at regular intervals along the corridor, all with various paper signs taped to them. Group Therapy! read one, with a bunch of daisies printed under the words. Patient Lounge, read another. Under that, was a picture of an old-fashioned TV set—the boxy kind with rabbit-ear antenna that Torri could never remember seeing in real life. Art Therapy! had a big smiley face printed under it.