Scratch, page 15
* * * * *
Scratch gasped as Adam’s hands reached up from the bed and grasped his face. It was like a tap had been turned on within him and he felt all of the ache he had absorbed over the years begin to run out. It was painful, but relieving as well.
He saw me! Scratch leapt back in surprise, breaking the connection. The tap closed and Scratch felt bloated with the agony. Adam’s eyes snapped open and he jerked awake. He looked around the dark room, unable to see Scratch by the side of the bed. He looked at the clock and saw it was still the middlw of the night. He rolled over on his side and laid his arm protectively across Michaela. His hand rested on Holly’s arm, and Scratch saw the blue aura that lingered around it.
In the morning, Scratch thought, he’ll think it was a dream, if he remembers it at all. But he saw me in his dream, like the shaman of old. Like the man who imprisoned us.
And his hands felt like my sister’s.
CHAPTER SIX
They spent the morning organizing the house. Holly, clad in sweat pants and a half shirt with a Pitt Panthers logo, focused on the sunroom, her new studio. Canvases were hung, and easels were placed near the windows to maximize the natural light. Brushes and paints were unpacked and placed in a cabinet; high enough that Michaela couldn’t reach them.
She sat cross-legged on the floor, sketchbooks stacked next to her. Her tongue was pushed against the back of her teeth as she used an Allen-wrench to tighten the bolts of her drawing table. She was rapidly growing impatient with the tediousness of unpacking and putting things away. She had never been the most organized housekeeper. Cleaning and taking care of the details were often put aside to another day in favor of a new creative effort. Life was too short to dust when you could be reading. It was in direct opposition to her mother’s “Clean now, live later,” philosophy and had been the source of many arguments between them over the years. Carol couldn’t see that Holly needed to clear the clutter in her head before she could do anything else.
“Shit!” she muttered as the wrench slipped out of the pentagon shaped hole in the screw again. She blew a stray hair away from her face and wiped her arm across her forehead. She dropped the wrench and reached for her glass of Coke. The ice had long since melted, and she frowned at the flat, warm, watered-down taste. She put the glass back down and reached for the wrench. It wasn’t there. She ran her hands across the floor, but it simply wasn’t where she thought she had dropped it. This was not a new phenomenon to Holly. She did the same thing with her brushes and tubes of paint all the time. She would sit them down, and mere seconds later not remember where she put them, and then waste minutes searching. She had always had this problem, and could hear her mother’s voice, “If you were more organized this wouldn’t happen,” in the back of her mind.
She sighed and stood up to look more closely. The small wrench dropped out of a fold in her sweats and bounced off the floor with a tinny chiming sound, then disappeared somewhere between the boxes. Holly rolled her eyes and got down on her knees to look. She stuck her arm between her sketchbooks and the tackle box that held some of her old paints and supplies. She jerked back with a yelp as she touched something soft and furry.
She laughed and chided herself for her reaction when she saw Buggly belly-up on the floor. She picked the bear up by its red shoestring collar and thought she might be able to wash the thing before Michaela knew it was missing. She looked into the black beads that were its eyes and was struck by inspiration. An idea that had been pestering her for days started to form more fully. She sat down on the floor, Allen-wrench forgotten, and put Buggly on top of one of her boxes. She grabbed a sketchbook from the pile and opened it on her lap. She dug through the junk in the bottom of the tackle box until she found two pencils, then stuck one lengthwise between her teeth. She held the other one loosely as she looked at the battered toy.
Then, with quick, looping lines, she began to draw.
* * * * *
Adam had decided to turn one of the front upstairs rooms into his study – though, given the dreams he had been having, den might be a more appropriate term. The empty boxes that had held his books and music were scattered around the room. He wished he had known he wanted this stuff up here before he arrived; then Joe or Elmer would have had to lug them up the stairs.
He assembled the stereo first, with Michaela’s help. The rest of the work would go more smoothly if there were music in the air. After connecting all the components and hooking up the speakers he went on what he believed would be a futile quest for a good radio station. His belief was rewarded. FM was a total bust. There was a lot of static on most of the AM frequencies, though he thought he could hear the strains of Nashville Country trying to break through in a couple of places. One station, with a preacher shouting about Jesus, Halleluiah! came through really well. He switched to auxiliary mode and plugged his Ipod into the dock. He put on an old Soft Cell album, then went back to work.
After unpacking the computer and assembling it on his desk, he took a break to help Michaela build a castle out of the empty boxes. While he piled them in a Habi-trail configuration, Mike ran to her room and brought a large stash of toys back with her. She crawled into the opening of a large box on the floor, plopped out of the other end, stumbled and then caught herself on her hands. She grabbed an unwieldy armload of small, plastic plates and a miniature teapot. She shuffled back inside the box, her tush in the air, dropping as many of the items as she managed to hold onto. She poked her head back out of the opening and brushed stray hair out her eyes in a motion so like her mother’s it made Adam’s heart sing.
“I’m playin’ House,” she announced.
“Since it’s made entirely of old cardboard boxes,” Adam said, the corners of his mouth turned up slightly, “it looks more like you’re playing Homeless.” Mike furrowed her brow in her “you’re crazy,” look, and then backed into the box. Adam smiled, only a little ashamed at his politically incorrect humor, and swung around in his leather swivel chair. Holly’s ergonomic stool had been consigned to the barn.
He pushed the power button of his Mac and was pleased to see it boot up. The computer was apparently undamaged. Once Holly’s angel appeared on his desktop he tried a number of his most frequently used programs to satisfy himself that they were working properly. He hadn’t bothered trying to hook up the modem. The closest service provider to Canaan was miles away. He could get service, but it was a long distance number. The dialup fees would be astronomical, so he had resigned himself to no Internet for the time being. There would also be no TV until they called to get a satellite dish installed. There wasn't a cell phone signal for miles either.
The album ended. Mike began to sing in the background while she played, Jonathan Richman’s “Ice Cream Man,” Adam noted, as he opened a new text file. His fingers danced over the keys in what he called his “Advanced Hunt-N-Peck Method,” typing the words “Dream Journal” in bold, twenty-four point Helvetica. He lowered the point size and entered a couple of spaces, then saved it to a folder called “Writing.” The folder had a lot of files in it. Many of them were work related, including his notes on many of his clients. Those notes needed to be purged now that he believed he would never have clients again. There was his copy of his resignation letter and grievance as well. Other files included his many aborted attempts at short stories and poetry. One long file was the novel he had started in college, and hadn’t worked on in years.
He leaned back and tried to remember what day it was when the first of his bear dreams had occurred. Last night’s dream had seemed so absolutely real; it was time to figure out what his unconscious was trying to tell him. All of them were extremely vivid dreams, and the fact that there were not only recurring motifs, but also a recognizable sequence, made him believe they were important in some way.
He had studied a certain amount of dream analysis in college, of course. He had been a Psychology major, after all. But he was by no means an expert. He didn’t believe in the idea of a Freudian dream dictionary where every symbol meant the same thing to everyone, though one of his professors had still been enamored of the idea. He had won that teachers undying enmity one afternoon when he had announced in class, with a poker face that anyone in Vegas would have been proud of, that he had dreamed he was being chased by thousands of disembodied penises. The Prof had raised a bushy eyebrow, his interest obviously piqued.
“Indeed,” the Professor had said, unaware of the laughter that hid behind every face in class. “And what do you think this dream of penises means, Mr. Mansfield?”
“I think,” Adam had said, and then paused for maximum effect. “I think it’s symbolic of my fear of snakes.” The room had exploded, and for a moment Adam thought that perhaps the professors brain had as well. He turned red, and Adam knew now that he was struggling to cram his anger back inside, but it was too late. Years of being taunted by smartass students, of having his papers rejected by the journals, of thinking his life had been wasted, erupted that day, with Adam as the target. He was thrown out of class, and sent before the Dean. Not only did he have to make a public apology, he was forced to drop the class and take it again the following year with a different teacher, even though they were well past midterms.
He shook his head at the memory, and for the first time took note of the similarity of this incident to the event that cost him his job. It was a joke instead of a punch, but the same kind of anger had fueled it. The public apology in both cases, made because he was forced to, not because he meant it, galled him. He wondered what had become of his old professor.
Adam didn’t believe that dreams necessarily meant anything, that they were for the most part just a sorting out of the detritus of the day, the mind’s way of taking out the trash. He did, however, think that you could find meaning in them if you looked with an open mind and tried to apply their symbolism to your life. While in grad school he had read a lot of Jung, and many of his followers. He thought that very little of Jungian psychology was practical in any sort of day-to-day therapy; certainly not in the types of jobs he had had anyway. But he was fascinated by the ideas. This reading led him to mythology, and an interest in the similarities in symbols to be found from one culture to another.
He thought his current dreams, filled as they were with world trees and animal spirits, were rife for this sort of examination. It didn’t take a genius to see the most obvious connection. He had spent the winter in the throes of depression, and was just starting to really come out of it. If that didn’t have “rebirth motif” written all over it he didn’t know what did.
He started to type again, trying to remember as much of his first dream as he could. It was surprisingly easy. Most dreams were gone from his head almost as soon as he woke up, but these had lingered. A part of him, way in the back of his mind, tried to tell him that this was silly. They were just dreams, nothing more. That might be so, he reasoned, but he could still learn something from the process. Most importantly, and this he recognized consciously, he felt motivated to work on something again, for the first time in months.
“Where’s Buggly?” Michaela cried from inside one of the boxes. Adam turned and saw the top of the cardboard bulge upward as Mike tried to stand. A second later she scurried out of the box and began to scan the room with a worried look.
“Where did you put him?” Adam knew it was a dumb question to ask a four-year-old, and chided himself for sounding like a typical adult. He stood and went to the boxes and lifted them one by one to see if Buggly had gotten trapped under one of them.
“Not here,” Adam said.
“I want Buggly.” Mike’s voice rose into a worried whine.
“Maybe you left him in your room,” Adam suggested. “Why don’t we go look, okay?” Mike nodded, then reached out and grabbed Adam’s hand, pulling him along down the hallway to her room. Mike plowed into the room and began to toss things around, looking for the misplaced bear. Adam scanned the piles of toys scattered around the floor. They had been here less than a day and Michaela’s room looked like a battlefield after The Great Toy War. Her sense of organization was much like her mothers, who also tended to forget where she left things. Adam checked under the covers of the small bed, even though Mike hadn’t slept there last night. He glanced at the painting of the guardian angel and paused as a snatch of last nights dream flew through his mind.
“I can’t find him!” Mike whined, more loudly than before. She threw a bucket of puzzle pieces down, spraying them across the floor. Adam rolled his eyes. Next time Mike wanted to put it together they would be hunting for missing pieces.
“Maybe downstairs?” Adam asked. Mike’s eyes grew wide for a second, then lit up like she had forgotten there was a downstairs in the house.
“Come on!” she said in a voice that implied she was impatient with how slow Adam was being. She grabbed his hand again and began to pull. He went along, accepting that he had been drafted until the search was complete.
She hesitated at the top of the steps, which were more numerous and steeper than the ones in the apartment had been. She looked up at Adam, and he picked her up and started down the stairs.
“Hurry!” she said. Adam slipped into a thumping gallop that bounced her hair. He began to hum the Lone Ranger theme, and was pleased to hear Mike giggle in his ear. As soon as they reached the bottom she wriggled to be let down. She was running before her feet hit the floor. Adam followed through the foyer and dining room and into the studio.
“Buggly!” Mike cried triumphantly as she snatched him from the top of the box he was sitting on. Holly jerked up in surprise at the commotion, snapped out of the near-trance state she achieved when she was working.
“I lost him,” Mike said, pronouncing the “L” like a “W.” She clutched Buggly to her chest, and then stood with a befuddled look on her face, not sure what to do now that the crisis was over.
“He was safe with me,” Holly said. She stood straight up from her cross-legged position. “He was watching over me while I was drawing.”
“I see you got a lot of work done on the studio,” Adam said, nodding toward the drawing table that still lay on its side with the legs unattached.
“I got distracted,” Holly said, and a smile lifted her few freckles. “That happens, y’know.” It happened to her a lot, and she knew Adam knew it.
“So I’ve been told,” he said. “So… give. Whatcha working on?”
“Something new.” Her hands played nervously with the sketchbook.
“If you’re not ready to share, that’s okay,” Adam said. Holly usually went through a private period with her new ideas, allowing herself to become intimate with them before she allowed anyone else to see. He was content to be left in the dark until she was ready.
“No, it’s not that,” Holly said. “This involves you, if you want.”
“Okay,” Adam said.
“No pressure,” Holly said, then launched into her speech, determined to get it out before Adam could say anything. “But I know you’ve been looking for something to do, and I’ve been thinking about the stories you tell Mike... you know, the ones about her and Buggly, and how much she loves them, and I thought that maybe other kids might like them too, ‘cause they’re really good and they’re educational and, with your Psychology background and everything, you could do some really good work that could help kids with some big issues, and maybe you could write them as a series of children’s books and I could draw them.” She shoved the sketchbook toward him.
“Whoa,” Adam said, almost out of breath himself. “That comes out of nowhere.”
“Not really,” Holly said. “I guess I’ve been sort of thinking about it, but the move and… and everything, just got in the way. Whattya think?” she asked and pointed to her drawings.
Adam opened the sketchbook and saw the large, friendly cartoon face of Buggly. Holly had quickly sketched a number of face shots and body types. A couple of them were scratched out, rejected, but she had quickly settled on a look she liked and proceeded to create a basic model sheet for the figure. Following that was a series of rough drafts of Buggly in various scenes. On another page was a simple line drawing of a little girl. Holly had penciled in the name Mike above it. The last drawing, the one she was working on when they came in, was of Buggly and Mike holding hands on a forest path.
“These are really good,” Adam said. “They’re not like most of the work I’ve seen you do.”
“I’ve always liked cartooning,” Holly said. “I just got caught up in the painting thing ‘cause that’s where I received the most success. Painters are taken seriously, you know. Cartoonists tend to be viewed as idiot cousins in the world of fine art. What do think of my idea?”
“I don’t know,” Adam said. “I’ve never in my wildest dreams thought of myself as an author of children’s books…”
“But you’re really, really good at it,” Holly said. “You make that stuff up right off the top of your head, and it’s great. And I know you write well.”
“What about your painting?”
“I can still do it,” Holly said. “I think maybe I could do paintings for the book covers, and maybe watercolors or pastel drawings for the interior.”
“What will Sheila say?”
“She’s my agent,” Holly said. “I think she could actually help us get the book published. I’m starting to create some buzz. Some New Age stores would probably carry the books just because I did them. Sheila isn’t going to say no to something that will broaden my audience.
