Double Vision

Chapter Seven

                  When I came to the next morning, it felt like somebody was trying to drill their way out of my skull.

                  For a few seconds, I just lay there, staring up at the ceiling as my thoughts began to slowly trickle back in. Last night was returning to me in erratic drips: setting off for the warehouse, trying to locate Hannah, the blur in the middle that had somehow resulted in me leaving with Mitchell. And yet against all this, it still felt like there was something missing – a giant piece of the puzzle that was yet to click into place…

                  All of a sudden, it hit me.

                  I shot up in bed, wincing as my head objected to the new upright position. My eyes flickered across the room, landing upon Reese’s bed as my heart rate hit a new high. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting; would I have been more shocked to see her sitting there, or to be faced with the untouched sheets pulled tight over the mattress? Last night’s memory had been tainted with a strange tinge; while too vivid to be a dream, it was way beyond the realm of bizarre reality.

                  It had to be a dream. There could be no other explanation; I wasn’t even going to try to argue with myself that it had existed outside my head. As much as it hurt to think of cold hard facts, Reese was dead, buried six feet under and robbed of her ability to speak or think six weeks ago. She certainly couldn’t appear at the foot of her own bed, talking to me like nothing had happened. It must’ve been a strange side effect of the excessive alcohol and sleep deprivation.

                  There was no other explanation.

                  So why was my heart still pounding a million times too fast?

                  I fought against it, but my head kept wandering back, reinstating how real it had felt at the time. There had been no dreamlike quality about it: no fuzzy haze, or bits of conversation lost to a restless sleep. Everything had been cleanly cut, the words as well-defined as the edges of my sister’s red lipstick.

                  Trembling slightly, I climbed out of bed. My actions were slow and controlled; one wrong move was sure to send my head into an excruciating protest, and my stomach didn’t feel too trustworthy, either. I shuffled across the room, broaching the floor space between the two beds, moving one step at a time as if any sudden jerks could cause Reese to appear out of nowhere.

                  Her bed looked as it had for weeks: too neat to have ever belonged to my sister. In the time she’d actually been sleeping in it, the covers had more often than not been screwed up into a tangled mess. She’d been a firm believer in the ‘I’m only going to mess it up by sleeping in it, so why bother making it?’ worldview, regardless of Mum’s nagging.

                  I stepped closer to the foot of the bed. My eyes scanned the covers, searching for any kind of disturbance, the slightest wrinkle in the sheets that may have provided proof of my own sanity. But there was nothing; everything looked how Mum had left it weeks ago, uncomfortably neat, and certainly never having been disrupted by its previous owner in the middle of the night.

                  I’d been dreaming. The words came with their own relief. I’d been sure, but now I felt like I might be able to start truly believing it. Of course it never happened. I had stumbled across my dark room in an intoxicated state, crashed onto the duvet and fallen asleep right away. That was all.

                  It didn’t happen, and that was the bottom line.

                  I was just going to have to repeat it over and over until the belief became a little more solid. After that, I would be fine.