River of Dreams

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  For Liz, who made my dreams possible, and Abe and Hazel, who made them real

  ONE

  There was ice and snow everywhere.

  So why did Finn feel so hot?

  She peeled off her sweatshirt. It was her favorite, soft and frayed at the edges, but as hot as she was, carrying it seemed stupid. She dropped it to the ice and looked around.

  How did she get here? And, more important, how was she supposed to get home? A bead of sweat rolled off her lip and into her mouth. Salty. It made her think of pretzels. She was hungry. Why hadn’t she packed a snack?

  And why did her ankles feel wet?

  She looked down and saw that her right foot was in a slushy hole. She pulled it out, but when she set it down again, the ice below her foot melted, and kept melting.

  Before she could do anything, the water rose to her ankles, then her shins, finally splashing against her chest. She barely had time to take a breath before she slipped into the ocean below, the ice now a coffinlike ceiling above her.

  She was drowning. Dying, without ever doing anything. No college, no pyramids, no Cantonese. She didn’t really even know how to drive yet.

  Finn’s lungs burned with the effort of not breathing. She had to get to the surface. There must be some way to get to the surface.

  She looked up and saw—

  A boy, floating in a tangle of kelp, a glowing green cord around his neck. She kicked toward him as he slowly spun around, and she saw his face … Noah!

  Eyes closed. Unconscious. His skin pale and translucent. Drowning, too. Maybe already dead.

  She reached out a hand and—

  His eyes snapped open.

  “Finn! Help me,” he pleaded. “Please.”

  “Noa—”

  Water rushed into her mouth, her throat, filling her lungs. Finn thought of her father. He never said goodbye. And now she was leaving without—

  * * *

  Finn sat up, gasping.

  She was in her room. On the table next to her, an alarm beeped insistently.

  Fahrenheit 451 was on the bed, a pencil marking the spot where she’d given up on it last night. Her jeans were draped on the chair by her desk. The lead singer of Lords of the Playground was pointing from the poster on the door. And the flyer from the Trans-Australia train trip she dreamed of taking was still propped by her computer. Everything was the same as it had been when she’d fallen asleep.

  It was just a dream. She didn’t have to be afraid of ice, drowning, failing Noah. She could just be afraid of what she was usually afraid of …

  Everything else.

  * * *

  Finn walked barefoot down the hall. There were no lights on in the house. Nana must not be up yet.

  She got to the small room off the kitchen and pushed open the door. Her younger brother, Noah, lay on the bed, a blanket pulled up to just below his chin. Eddie—their brown-and-black shepherd-Lab mix—looked up at her from the foot of the bed, where he’d been sleeping. Keeping watch. Not that Noah was going anywhere.

  People used to say they looked alike, but Finn never saw it. Where Noah’s hair was blacker than a moonless night, hers couldn’t decide if it wanted to be dark brown or auburn. They were both thin, but Noah made his slightness seem powerful. And, while Finn had the Driscoll green eyes, Noah’s were piercingly blue. If he would just wake up and get out of bed, every girl in his freshman class would fall in love with him.

  Noah had gone into a coma nine months ago, right after his fourteenth birthday. There was no warning—no bad reaction to food or drugs, no blow to the head, no loss of oxygen. One morning he just didn’t wake up.

  Finn and her mother, Julia, had ridden to the hospital in the ambulance. The EMT kept asking them questions: “Did he hit his head … Was he anaphylactic … a drug user?” No, no, and no. Nothing. He just didn’t wake up. Her mother cried and tried to hold his hand, but the EMT kept taking it back to insert a needle or check his blood pressure. The sounds—the ripping of sterile packages and beeping equipment—it was all so loud. Finn started humming, trying to drown it out.

  At the hospital, they took him away. Scans, blood tests, more scans. More questions about what he might have done, what might have caused it? Specialists came and ordered more tests, sometimes the same test, but none of it mattered.

  It all came back “normal.” Noah was healthy, they said … except for being unconscious.

  Nana came to help, and the three of them—Finn, her mother, and Nana—took turns staying at the hospital. When Finn was home, she’d go to her room, put on headphones, and play music as loudly as she could until the pounding in her ears drowned out the silence.

  After a month with no change, they brought him home. They put him in the room off the kitchen because it fit the hospital bed better. Mom decorated with stuff from his bedroom: drawings and vintage video game posters, a shelf full of graphic novels. It was like a replica of Noah’s real bedroom, just like how the unresponsive boy on the bed seemed like a replica of her real brother. Finn hated it.

  The floor was cold on her feet as she crossed to her brother’s bed. “Good morning, shrimp.” She leaned down and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “You were in my dream last night. I was hot and melted through ice, and you were floating in the ocean.”

  She brushed the hair from his eyes and waited to see if he’d respond … a twitch, a smile, a sigh. There was nothing.

  A nurse came to check on him every day. The physical therapist came three times a week. Her mom, who was an expert in underwater construction, had taken a job with a Norwegian oil company to get better benefits, so much of the work of caring for Noah fell to Finn and her grandmother. They fed, bathed, and turned him so he wouldn’t get sores. Finn did her homework in his room, working through math problems (she could have used his help) or discussing the novels from English class (if he were conscious, he would have left the room). She even told him things she would never say if he were awake. Like about Marcus Hahn, who sat next to her in biology.

  She watched him quietly breathing in and out. Finn didn’t let herself think about Noah before the coma. But seeing him in her dream …

  Tears welled up in her eyes. She wiped them away with her sleeve. Even though she knew he couldn’t see her, at the hospital she’d always left his room and cried someplace else. After a few weeks, she willed herself to stop crying and hadn’t since. Must be the dream, she thought. She stood up. “I’ll get you some breakfast.”

  In the kitchen, she grabbed an IV bag of liquid food to hook up to Noah’s gastric tube.

  “Good morning, Fionnuala.”

  Her grandmother, Margaret, was the only person in the world who dared to call her by her real name. “Good morning, Nana.”

  “How is Noah this morning?”

  “He wants bacon for breakfast.”

  Nana smiled.

  “And, I think I forgot to tell you, I’ll be late getting home from school. My g
roup’s meeting to work on our science project.”

  “It’s Monday.”

  Monday was the day they called her mother, Julia. Finn didn’t really care if she missed the call. Her mother had decided to leave. It wasn’t Finn’s job to bend her schedule so Julia felt like she was doing her parental duty.

  “I’ll try to get home,” she lied.

  “Are you okay, sweetheart?” Nana covered the few feet between them and raised her hand to touch Finn’s forehead. Finn’s health and emotional well-being was a subject of constant discussion. She couldn’t sneeze without someone asking how she was. Finn was adept at faking a smile and telling people she was fine.

  “I’m fine, Nana.”

  “You look tired.”

  Even if last night’s dream was unsettling—seeing Noah with his eyes open, his plea for help—Finn couldn’t think of any reason to tell Nana about it. Nana had lost her son; her grandson was in a coma. What good would extra worry do her? “Just homework. I’ve been busy.”

  Nana didn’t look convinced, so Finn opened her eyes a little wider, a tip she’d learned on the Internet for convincing people you were telling the truth. It worked. After a moment, Nana reached out and patted Finn’s arm. “Make sure Noah eats a good breakfast.”

  * * *

  Winter seemed intent on pushing fall out early, and Finn wished she’d put on a coat for the walk to school. With no mountains or forests to block its path, the wind could change the weather from balmy to freezing in an instant.

  She stopped outside a two-story wood house with a beautiful wraparound porch. The front yard was covered in brown leaves. Someone had pushed a wheelbarrow full of wood chips to the maple tree that towered over the property. A shovel was sticking out of the pile, evidence of a chore abandoned.

  Finn pulled out her phone and typed: Outside. Cold. Bring me coat. Plz.

  Normally, Jed appeared a millisecond after she texted, but she knew a request for a coat would throw him. Jed had been wearing the same navy-blue hoodie since second grade. Well, not the same one, but the same style. “It makes getting dressed easy,” he always said. “Everything goes with blue, especially when you only wear jeans.”

  She and Jed had been friends since her family had moved here when she was six. Finn vaguely remembered life before, a big city with lots of stuff to do. Her mom worked in a tall office building, and Finn would go to work with her sometimes. She’d stand at the window and wonder how far away the horizon was. But her dad wanted to live someplace smaller, simpler, so they’d moved here.

  She’d met Jed that first day. He was riding his bike to get gum at the local convenience store. He stopped to give her a piece on his way home. They’d started walking to school together the next day and hadn’t stopped since.

  When Noah fell into the coma, everyone at school asked how he was doing. Most of the time, Finn pretended she didn’t hear them until they stopped asking. Eventually they all left her alone. Not Jed. He refused to be pushed away.

  When she stopped texting him to say she was on the way to school, she’d find him waiting outside for her. When she stopped talking about how Noah was doing, Jed came to her house and sat with Noah himself. When she decided smoking was the answer, he told her she was an idiot and lent her his hoodie so Nana wouldn’t smell smoke on her coat and ground her forever. Two weeks later when she realized he was right, she was an idiot for smoking, he didn’t say a word. Sometimes Finn felt like Jed was the only thing that kept her from disappearing completely.

  The front door opened. Jed held up two coats: one plaid and extra large; the other one a perfectly sized, unattractive teal.

  “Which one?” he called out.

  “Not to be ungrateful, but are those my only choices?”

  “These were the ones I found.”

  “Did you ask if it was okay if I took them?”

  Jed yelled back into the house. “Mom, Finn needs a coat.”

  Finn heard Jed’s mom’s voice but not what she was saying. It was like a short melody being played in a far-off room.

  “She says you can take whatever you want. I say these are your choices.”

  “Teal.”

  Jed tossed the plaid coat inside and picked up his backpack. “Bye!” he shouted back into the house, and closed the door. As he jogged down the sidewalk toward her, Finn noticed that Jed was taller and broader than he’d been this summer. He looked less like the freckled boy from second grade and more like his father, a handsome man with a kind face.

  “I couldn’t do any of the math problems,” he announced when he reached her.

  “Did you try?”

  Jed was easily distracted, always drawn to the cool thing he hadn’t tried yet. As if to drive the point home, he said, “I sat with a pencil, looking at the problems, if that’s what you mean. But I was listening to this online radio station from Detroit.” He pulled out his phone and slid a finger across the screen. “I heard this song. It’d be your life story if you’d grown up in a project somewhere on the East Coast.”

  “Which I didn’t.”

  “No, but your dad’s dead and your mom took a job half a planet away for the pay and benefits. As a result, you’re alienated and cynical.” He hit the screen. “I just sent it to you.”

  “I’m not alienated.”

  “So you’re admitting to cynical?”

  “I look back at cynical from where I’m standing,” she said. Jed laughed.

  * * *

  They separated in the front hallway of school, with a promise to meet up at lunch.

  Finn walked down the hall, staring at the floor. If you aren’t exceptional in some way—or if you made people uncomfortable because your brother was in a coma—the best way to go through high school, Finn had decided, was head down. The steady banging of lockers made her think it was almost time for the first-period bell.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Deborah Marks—according to Jed the “most beautiful girl at the school under five foot four”—talking to Marcus Hahn, the quarterback of the football team.

  Finn and Deborah had been friends in eighth grade. A momentary overlap of interest in romance literature sparked a year’s worth of lunches comparing novels from Jane Eyre to Twilight. Finn had existed in the halo of Deborah’s popularity until high school. It was a fork in the road. Finn went left, toward fewer friends, more classes, and a personal identity dominated by tragedy. Deborah, well, she went right, toward complete school domination. She got respectable grades, participated in a thousand activities, and was decent to everyone. You wanted to dislike her on principle; it just wasn’t easy to do.

  Finn glanced over, took in Deborah’s outfit: a short skirt with a geometric pattern and a sweater that had an equally busy but competing design. The two things should not go together, but, somehow, they did. Perfectly. Marcus was standing so close they might have been superglued together. Maybe what Jed said the other day was true, that Deborah had broken up with her crosstown boyfriend. That would clear the way for her and Marcus to be together, which they totally should be because they were perfect for each—

  Finn’s foot caught the leg of a classmate who had kneeled to tie his shoe. She barely kept herself from doing a total face-plant.

  “You okay, Finn?” Deborah called over. Finn turned and looked at her. Deborah’s face showed only kindness and concern.

  Finn sprang up. “I’m fine.” She hurried toward her locker.

  Screw Deborah Marks.

  * * *

  Finn’s first class was New World History, which also happened to be her least favorite. Mr. Newsome would give the most boring teacher who’d ever lived a run for his money. And, since he saw the world entirely through a white-male lens, she was learning a lot about “forefathers,” but not much about the people they were forefathering over.

  Today he was droning on about the House of Stuarts, the first family to rule over the whole of the United Kingdom. Potentially interesting stuff. The Stuarts, already the rulers of Scot
land, take over the British throne, failing to realize the autocratic style they’d practiced in Scotland wouldn’t be well received by their new subjects. They almost destroyed the kingdom. It was standard dinner-table talk when Finn was growing up; her father took a lot of pride in their heritage. They were Anglo-Celtic on both sides for a million and one years, or so he used to say.

  Mr. Newsome, on the other hand, never talked about any of the good parts of this history, and today was no exception. He was just laying out an array of facts: who lived when; who died where. Thank God she sat in the back so he couldn’t see that she hadn’t used her pencil for anything other than to write a note to take home her smelly gym clothes.

  She glanced across the aisle at “Moby” Dawson, who hadn’t once looked up from a drawing in his notebook. It was an intricate cityscape, a spread of buildings that looked more like jails than places people would go voluntarily. Finn wondered how long he’d been working on it.

  She didn’t know much about Moby. He’d moved to town last summer right before school started. He’d gotten his nickname after building a raft that fell apart as soon as it hit the middle of the river. All the pieces of the raft, and then Moby himself, floated by an “end of summer” barbecue some kids were having. They fished him out, but maybe he wished they hadn’t. Because now he was known by the name of a giant white whale. Jed said Moby was a computer genius and could hack into the school’s system and change anyone’s grades. Finn had never spoken more than five words to him.

  In the front of the classroom, Mr. Newsome picked up a pointer and turned to the European map that hung behind him. “Alan fitz Flaad is the oldest known member of the Stuart clan. He was from Breton.” Mr. Newsome pointed at France.

  Finn stopped listening.

  She couldn’t get last night’s dream out of her head. She’d always envied people who remembered their dreams. This one just reminded her of how much she missed her brother and how utterly helpless she was to save him.