Craig Lancaster - Edward Adrift

We wish you the best in your endeavors.

If there is such a thing as being flummoxed to the power of ten, that’s what I am. Mr. Withers told me on December 9 that I could not have my job back. He stated this with clarity. I had come to accept this state of affairs, even though it hurt me badly to see my job gone forever.

So what is the point of this letter? To tell me five days after Mr. Withers’s direct phone call telling me I could not work at the Herald-Gleaner that, in fact, I cannot work at the Herald-Gleaner . That seems redundant and cruel.

I realize I was involuntarily separated. Must I also be involuntarily mocked?

This letter has real potential to derail what has been an outstanding day so far.

I open the other letter.

December 18, 2011

Dear Edward,

I’m sorry we haven’t checked in on you. As you can probably imagine, it’s been a difficult time around here since we brought Kyle home.

I want to thank you for whatever you did to get him to talk. I never in a million years would have wished to hear what he told us, but I also cannot imagine the horror his life might have been if we’d never found out the truth. He is going to get all the help he needs to get past this, and we’re going to get all the help we need as a family. And you, as a member of our family, helped us reach this point. We love you. You will always be one of us.

I can tell you that Kyle is doing well. We just started seeing a counselor—together as a family, and also Kyle alone—and have begun the work of repairing what has been done. I have spoken with the administration at Kyle’s school, and to their credit, they are taking this issue seriously. I would destroy them if they didn’t.

We’re eager to talk to you again very, very soon and to have you come out here and have the vacation we never managed to give you (I’m so sorry about that!). One of the keys to moving beyond this is finding a way to live normally again. We look forward to that.

I was wrong about the letter from the Herald-Gleaner . It can’t ruin my day. Kyle is getting the help he needs. Nothing can ruin my day now.

I’ve returned from a post-dinner walk around my neighborhood when my phone rings. I pick up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Edward.”

It’s my mother.

It’s funny—not ha-ha funny, but just funny—how a few hours and some good news can change things. I’m still angry that my mother intruded on my sovereignty and spoke poorly of my father, but I’m no longer angry at her. One tiny preposition is removed, and everything changes. I still intend to make sure she understands that she cannot do that to me again. I simply have no intention of being mean about it, and I was a bit mean earlier today.

“Hi, Mother.”

“I know you’re angry at me, but I’m hoping that you’ll come for dinner tomorrow. I didn’t expect to be in Billings for the holidays, but since I am, let’s try to make the best of it, OK?”

“Yes. I understand.”

“I want us to get back to where we were. I don’t want to be feuding.”

“I don’t want that, either, Mother. We can talk about that when we see each other tomorrow.”

“That sounds good. Good night.”

“Good night, Mother.”

I’ve made another important decision. My effort to renew routine in my life is going so well that I realize I’ve been missing my most important routine for far too long. It’s time for me to get back to watching Dragnet every night. Adam-12 was fine, a perfectly worthy show, but it’s not the gold standard. If it were, I wouldn’t have gotten off-track with it. That’s clear now.

As today is the 355th day of the year and there were ninety-eight color episodes of Dragnet , if I had been on my old routine all year, where I start with the very first episode on the very first day of the year and watch the episodes in order, one a day, I would be watching the sixty-first episode of the series, “Narcotics: DR 21.” This is the sixteenth episode of the third season and it originally aired on January 30, 1969. It is one of my favorites.

I queue this episode up on my bitchin’ iPhone and settle into the couch to watch it.

In this episode, Sergeant Joe Friday and Officer Bill Gannon are flummoxed because drug cartels are moving large amounts of contraband through the airport and the police are having trouble stopping it because they cannot develop probable cause. It’s an offhand comment from Officer Bill Gannon about not being a dog who’s able to sniff out the drugs that gives Sergeant Joe Friday an idea—the police department should train a dog to identify packages containing marijuana.

This seems like a no-brainer, and I remember when I watched it for the first time wondering whether Sergeant Joe Friday and Officer Bill Gannon were idiots for not thinking of it earlier, but it turns out that training a dog to sniff out drugs is not easy. In fact, I get stressed out watching the episode for fear that the dog, Ginger, won’t be up to the task. This is silly, of course; I know how the episode goes. Ginger ends up joining the police force, and she’s so good at what she does that the drug cartels put a price on her head. Drug cartels are assweeds, and it’s a testament to Jack Webb’s filmmaking ability that I stress out every time I see this episode.

But regardless of the stress, today has made this much clear: I’m on the right track. I’m on the right track. I’m on the right track.

It’s 3:06 a.m.

I am not on the right track.

I did not give Sheila Renfro permission to be in my dreams. I guess she didn’t need permission, because there she was, in the nightgown she wore the night she slept in my bed, following me in the night through a wooded area. She would let me see her, but she would not look at me and would not respond when I called for her. For hours, we walked through the woods, a place I did not recognize. It could not have been Cheyenne Wells, Colorado, as there are no woods there. Sheila Renfro has no context in my life here in Montana. It was a confusing dream, and when I finally decided to run for her—in the dream—she vanished.

That’s when I woke up, scared and screaming “Sheila!” Not “Sheila Renfro,” which always bemused (I love the word “bemused”) Sheila Renfro, but just “Sheila.” What does it mean?

That’s a rhetorical question, of course. For as long as I’ve had vivid dreams, I’ve been reading what I can about the science of dreaming, and I’m afraid the oneirologists are not much help when it comes to definitively diagnosing what we see when we sleep. Some believe that deeper meaning underlies our dreams and that interpreting them can lead us to greater understanding of our conscious selves. Others think that dreams are nothing more than images we’ve stashed away in consciousness that are then unfurled and combined in nonsensical and psychedelic ways by our deep brain as we sleep.

In my reading, I’ve learned about authentic dreaming and illusory dreaming. I’ve experienced both. The dream I had about being on the barstool with my father in Cheyenne Wells, Colorado, was an authentic dream. It really happened. This one tonight, with Sheila in her nightgown and following me through the woods, that was illusory. The nightgown stemmed from something real; everything else did not.

It’s all very baffling, the mixture of the known and the unknown, and it’s a burden on this fact-loving brain of mine, so I find that I must be practical about this.

It will be very hard to get a decent night’s sleep if I’m going to be regularly dreaming about Sheila Renfro.