J. Gonzalez - They

“Don’t most born-agains think that about their past lives?” Tracy asked.

“Yes, in a way,” Vince said. “The shame comes from the sudden knowledge that you’ve led your life without walking with the Lord, and that you lived the kind of life that He would find displeasing. You have lived a life that has offended Him and because the act of being Born-Again is more or less an act of becoming aware of the order of the universe as spoken through God—that He has created us because He loves us, that He offered His only son Jesus Christ up for sacrifice to redeem us—reinforces a sense of… sorrow I guess is the best way I can put it. You feel sorry to God for having lived in such ignorance and sin. And part of that shame comes from the fact that you are so overwhelmingly happy to be saved that you’re ashamed that you’d ever lived the life of a heretic.”

Tracy’s green eyes seemed to glimmer as she grinned. “I can’t believe you were actually a born-again!”

“You say that as if I were once a leper,” he exclaimed, an embarrassed smile on his face.

“It just doesn’t seem like you ,” she said. She snuggled against him. “You’re just so… not like that.”

They laughed and kissed again. And they didn’t resume their conversation. Instead, they made love again.

After climax and a brief resting period where they lay in bed, basking in the afterglow of their pleasure, Tracy got out of bed and went to the bathroom. Vince sat up, noting for the first time that the hours had breezed by. It was dark outside now. He rested against the headboard and let his mind drift.

His thoughts returned to the discussion he had with Hank Powell after the wake. They’d talked about plans for Vince to return to Lititz to assist him in investigating the mysterious box that Hank assured him he would find. “I didn’t find it last night,” he’d said, “but I’ll find it soon. I’ll find it if I have to dig up that whole backyard.”

Reverend Powell had appeared nervous and fearful the whole time they’d talked after the wake. He’d appeared nervous, twitchy, and he kept glancing around the room, as if he were afraid their conversation was being overheard. Everybody had left the wake three hours before, so Vince didn’t know where the man’s nervousness came from. He thought of asking him but decided not to. Might just make him more nervous.

Something about that nervousness bothered Vince.

He voiced this to Tracy as she came back into the bedroom. “He was probably just shaken up about facing two deaths in the space of only a few days.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Vince nodded. He really hadn’t stopped to consider how the deaths were affecting Reverend Powell’s sanity. Maggie Walters and Lillian Withers had been very close to him. Reverend Powell’s nervousness, his almost stark fear, could be interpreted as a subconscious way of dealing with their deaths.

Tracy grabbed his hand and tugged him gently. “Want to take a shower?” she asked playfully.

He grinned at her, Reverend Powell, the mysteries of his mother’s past, and his own brush with death forgotten for now. “Of course. Lead the way, my fair maiden.”

And as they continued with their lovemaking in the shower, Vince never thought that Tracy would be able to divert his mind from the horrible events of the past week, much less turn his mind away from Laura. But she did.

HE IS IN a large room in a huge mansion.

The room is dark and he’s seated on a table set low to the floor, which appears to be a cold, polished wood. The room is bare save for the impression of paintings on the walls. A large chandelier hangs from the ceiling over the room, the glass beads trailing down like drops of dew from a heavily misted forest. The lights of the chandelier are off, but the room is illuminated by dozens of glowing candles. The candles are black and white. He sits on the table in the center of the room as the air grows warm. It is then that he is aware of the shapes grouped around the walls.

They move forward, surrounding him slowly. They are dressed in black flowing robes and hoods. They step forward slightly but remain in shadow. The air in the room intensifies, grows leaden. And then the chanting starts.

He snapped awake and blinked, the sounds and smells of the dream fading away as consciousness set in. He shook his head to clear his fogged mind, then glanced to his left. Tracy was lying on her side, her back turned to him, her legs drawn up slightly. He glanced at the digital clock on the stand by his side of the bed. It was 3:35 a.m.

He leaned back into the pillows and sighed. The dream had not only come back, it was more intense now, more real . Shortly after Laura’s death, he’d revealed both the dreams to a therapist he saw for grief counseling. The therapist had been very interested in them. After Vince told him the whole dream, Dr. Smith asked him if he felt any blame for Laura’s death. Vince had mulled this over. He’d told Dr. Smith that consciously he didn’t blame himself for her death, but it hurt him just to think about it. Dr. Smith suggested that this particular dream might be his subconscious’s way of heaping the blame on himself. The toddler in the dream represents how he feels now—alone, childlike, fragile in the face of grief. And the people in the room represent his friends and associates. They appear the way they do—a throwback to the hippie era—because he feels different from other people. Laura’s death has made him feel this way, and the unseen man who grabs him and holds the knife to his throat represents self-destruction as a result of guilt. “We need to explore this further,” Dr. Smith said that first day when Vince spilled the beans about the dream. “If we can get past these feelings your subconscious is holding, you should be able to relax more and go on with your life.”

The dreams ceased shortly after this, and he began to go on with his life, even though he still missed Laura. Now he looked down at Tracy’s sleeping form, snuggled naked into the pillow. He snuggled next to her, spooning his body against hers. His pelvis moved against her rump and she made a sighing sound in her sleep. He kissed one bare shoulder, then lay down beside her, waiting for sleep to overtake him again.

The more he thought about the dreams, the more it felt like they were actual events, dredged up by his subconscious mind. He remembered fragments of his life in California. Some of the people in the Hippie Dream appeared to be people that used to drop in on his parents when they were living in California. He tried to remember the events of his past, but the most he could come up with were scattered images; the time they lived somewhere in a suburb (was it LA? Orange County? Wherever it was, it was Southern California) and he went to school, his mother worked as a secretary, and his dad wore a suit and tie when he went to work. His dad was gone on business trips a lot. He had played with some of the kids in the neighborhood. His mom visited with some of the people in the neighborhood—two of them stuck out prominently in his mind. A woman named Gladys and her husband, and their son, a boy who was a few years older than Vince. Was his name Mark? Frank? Alex? He couldn’t remember. Whoever he was, the older boy was rough, but played with him and looked out for him. There was a girl they sometimes played with, her parents being friends of Vince’s. He remembered her name perfectly. Nellie.

And before then? He really didn’t remember.

If the events of his dream were real, if they’d happened to him a long time ago when he was three or four years old as the dream suggested, he would have blocked it out of his memory. An experience like this would have been traumatizing. And if it had happened, then somebody really tried to kill him when he was a toddler. But why? If the people they were with were hippies, could the would-be killer have been on drugs?