Dreaming Anastasia (2 page)

Sunday, 1:50 pm

Ethan

I know I'm too close. That I need to be careful. That I should look away.

But I don't.

She brushes some of her auburn hair out of her eyes, then leans over and whispers to the tall blond girl next to her. And then, as though she feels my gaze, she turns.

She's the one, I realize as we look at each other. After all these years, after all the times I've been wrong. This sixteen-year-old girl with the laughing brown eyes and the posture of a prima ballerina—she's the one.

Of course, there is only one way for me to know for sure. Until then, I can only go on instinct. And here, two weeks after I've first begun to follow her, that instinct is telling me I'm right.

Her instincts are telling her something too. Even in the darkness once the lights have dimmed, I know she is still looking at me, still wondering why I'm looking at her.

And for a few seconds, Brother Viktor's words echo in my mind.

“There will be a girl,” he had told me. I was not called Ethan then, but Etanovich. “The books say she will bear our bloodline. She will be young, and she will be fiery. She will not know her destiny. But when you look into her eyes, when you touch her, the signs will be clear. You will know she is the one.”

Just before intermission, I slip away. To stay now that Anne—that is her name, Anne, which surprised me at the same time as it seemed fitting—had seen me would be too dangerous.

So I will just keep watching. Soon it will be time to find her again. Time to know for sure if what the documents say is true. Time to know if my long, long wait is finally about to end.

Sunday, 7:30 pm

Anne

Thanks for the pizza,” Tess says to my mother. She's flopped next to me on the family-room floor, her empty plate in front of her.

“Sure thing, sweetie.” From her seat on the couch, my mom gives Tess a smile, then goes back to watching whatever it is she's watching on the Travel Channel—something about the top-ten romantic getaways, which is a bit of a stretch these days since my parents aren't exactly on a romance kick. My father is currently out on his post-dinner jog while my mother is curled up on the couch with the show.

The two of us—Tess and I, that is, since both my parents are avoiding wheat, and pizza is far off their list—just chowed our way through most of a medium Lou Malnati's cheese and tomato. This means we'll be sluggish and heavy when we tie on those pointe shoes tomorrow afternoon at Miss Amy's, where we're both in advanced ballet—but Lou's pizzas are worth it.

At least that's the story I'm telling myself.

But I've got some kind of crazy nervous energy zipping through me, and I think my metabolism is going to take care of most of the excess calories anyway. I've felt this way ever since
Swan Lake
that afternoon. The feeling stayed with me on the drive home from the city and didn't even go away when Tess and I worked on our world history homework while we waited for my dad to come back with the pizza. Which surprised me, because normally, world history is not exactly a subject that makes me do handsprings. Not that I don't like knowing about the stuff. I actually do. But Coach Wicker—who pretends to teach the class when he's not too busy figuring out football plays on the computer—is the most singularly boring individual I've ever met. He can take something that I find interesting—like, say, Henry VIII and all those wives—and turn it into something so ridiculously dull that suddenly, I can't remember which wife he divorced and which one he had beheaded, and I really don't care in any case.

“She looks good,” Tess says after we've carried our plates into the kitchen and I'm wiping up the stray strands of cheese that dripped to the counter when I plated up the pizza from its Lou to-go box.

“Who?”

Tess frowns. “Who do you think?”

“Oh.” I realize she means my mother. “Really?”

“Yeah,” Tess says. “Not so thin, maybe. Not so—I don't know, fragile.”

I shrug. “Maybe,” I tell her.

It's something I try not to dwell on. Not that I'm successful at it or anything. But I do try, just like I've been trying for almost two years, and sometimes, it
is
getting better. Except for the part where my older brother, David, is no longer my older brother, because he's dead from cancer, and the rest of us—my mother, my father, and me—are still trying to pick up the pieces.

Which is why it helps to have a friend like Tess who can shift from where she's been—talking about how my mother barely eats anything these days—to where she heads now, so quickly, actually, that it takes a few seconds before I catch up with her.

“Well, anyway,” Tess says. It's one of her favorite ways to jump topics. “He really was hot, wasn't he?”

“
He
who?”

“Ballet guy,” she says. “Thick hair. Blue eyes. Serious studly goodness going on there.”

I shrug again. “I guess,” I tell her. “But that whole staring thing—what was up with that?”

“Doesn't matter. Doesn't diminish him on the hotness scale. Note, by the way, how I did not just say
wicked hot?
”

“Progress. That's good. Maybe you do have a learning curve.”

“Funny. You are oh so funny, Annie. But I mean it. There was just something about him.”

“Something annoying, maybe.”

“You mean it? You didn't find him, like, way attractive?”

“I didn't find him
not
attractive. But it's not like he's going to keep me up nights. Like I said—all that staring. And his posture. He was so—I don't know, straight. So formal or something.”

“Huh,” Tess says. “Hadn't thought about that. But you're right. He was standing up pretty straight. Geez, Michaelson, give me a break. No wonder you ended things with Adam Green three months ago and haven't replaced him with anyone. You are seriously too picky.”

“First, it's not like I'm ever going to see this guy again. And second, I ended things with Adam because all he was interested in doing was feeling me up and hoping I'd let him do more. Which, let me say, is not what I consider even slightly romantic.”

“Someone's standards are awfully high.”

“Ha, ha.” I reach into the pocket of the jeans I'd changed into once we got back from downtown and pull out my cell phone. “Should I get Neal on the phone? Tell him you've changed your level of expectation?”

Neal Patterson is Tess's ex. If she had her way, he'd be ex to the entire world as well. Their breakup was, in a word, legendary.

“Whatever,” she says. “But the guy at the theater was cute. And he's got that whole mystery man thing going for him. That's gotta count for something.”

“Only if he drops back out of the sky and starts stalking
you
next time.”

“It could happen.”

“Oh, yeah,” I tell her. “I'm sure. You want to study some more before my dad gets back and drives you home?”

“If we have to,” Tess says.

“Thought you bombed that last quiz. That one on all the royal families?”

“Who can remember all that crap? Plus it's sort of sick that they were all, like, intermarried to each other. That was one small royal family tree they had going there in Europe.”

“Nothing like keeping it in the family,” I tell her. And then we get back to work.

Chicago,
The Present

Tuesday, 5:55 am

Anne

Anne.” My father bends over my bed, gently shaking my shoulder until I open my eyes. He's turned on the lamp on my nightstand, and I can see that he hasn't combed his hair yet, so it's standing up all spiky. He's still in a T-shirt and the plaid Old Navy sleep pants my mother bought him so he wouldn't wander around in his boxers and make us both uncomfortable, even though with all the jogging and avoiding wheat, he's in decent shape.

“You were screaming,” he says. “You must have been dreaming.”

“Don't know,” I tell him. “I don't remember.”

My father studies me, but he doesn't push the issue. “I'm going to shower,” he says eventually. He gives my arm a rub, lets his hand rest there for a bit. “And your alarm is about to ring, so you might as well get up. You sure you're okay?”

“Absolutely,” I tell him. I sit up and give him my best smile. And then I keep smiling until he walks out of my room and back down the hall. Until I hear him turn on the shower in the master bath and hear the TV click on in my parents' bedroom, which means my mother is watching the news or whatever while she gets dressed.

And then I stop smiling and concentrate on getting my heart to stop racing in my chest and my pulse to stop doing the cha-cha in my veins.

But I know that's not going to happen anytime soon. It never does. Not when I have the dream—the same dream I had Sunday night after Tess went home. The same one I've had too many nights to count in the past three years since I first had it, right after we found out David was sick—which doesn't even make much sense, since it's not a dream about him.

Truth is, I've always had strange dreams. Particularly because sometimes—a lot of the time, actually—when I dream, I'm not me. It's like watching a movie through someone else's eyes or something. While I'm saying stuff and doing stuff, I'm pretty clear that in the dream, I'm this other person, not myself.

Once, I even dreamed as a guy—not that I woke up with any stunning insights about the male psyche or anything, which certainly doesn't surprise me. Tess says with guys, it all comes down to three things—sports, sex, and food. Not necessarily in that order. For example in junior high, I was trying to write a short story, and I asked my brother David what he and his friends said when they thought a girl was hot. His response was, “I'd do her.” Then he grabbed the bag of Cheetos, snagged the remote, and flipped between ESPN and ESPN 2 for the next thirty minutes.

But these past few nights, I've just been her. The girl who haunts my dreams but whose face I never see. The one who refuses to leave me alone.

As always, I was trapped in this little cabin. That's the way it goes in these dreams. A pattern I've grown used to—like how I know Adam Green can never carry on a conversation with a girl without his eyes straying to her chest, or how my father simply cannot make it through dinner without checking his Treo, as though his law firm will simply curl up and die during the time it takes him to eat a plate of meat loaf.

And as always, I felt like I'd been there a while—days, maybe longer. I knew every inch of the room: tiny little windows, wooden floor, huge stone fireplace with a massive rocking chair next to it, and, tucked into the far corner, a bed with a quilt, a pillow, and a little wooden doll with red painted lips. Same stuff I always saw. The same feeling of watching it through a stranger's eyes.

She's so damn lonely. That's what I felt when I was her—this emptiness inside me, like someone's fist had burrowed its way into me and left a gaping hole. Like I'd done something—or had something done to me—that was so brutal and so awful I couldn't even think about it. I just felt sad. And sometimes, when I dreamed I was her, I woke up with my face wet with tears.

Normally, that's pretty much it. Which is probably why I've never told anyone about it. I mean, what would I say? That I keep dreaming I'm some girl I can't really see and I'm trapped somewhere and I feel sad? Yeah, right.

But this time, the dream changed. This time,
she
was doing the dreaming. And it was a dream she was struggling
not
to have. But let me say, she was spectacularly unsuccessful at stopping it. And so was I.

I was in a bigger room then, packed with people—adults and children. All talking a mile a minute in a language I couldn't understand. All clearly frightened out of their minds. And there was this one girl in particular, with long, brown hair and a white dress. She was my age, I think, sixteen or seventeen, or something close. I couldn't take my eyes off her. Or rather, the girl I am when I have this dream—she couldn't. Because she knew she was looking at herself. That whatever was about to happen to the brown-haired girl and all these other frightened people actually happened to
her
, and now she was dreaming about it, even though she'd clearly rather not. And honestly, neither would I. But I did.

My pulse quickened, and my heart started to beat so fast that I thought it was going to hammer up my throat and out my mouth. And then the shooting began. Men—some in uniforms, some in regular clothes—were shooting and shooting, and the people—they were screaming and falling. And there was blood everywhere—rivers of it running slick over the floor.

I kept watching the girl in the white dress, knowing it was me I was watching, even as a part of me knew I was dreaming as someone else. She screamed, then tried to run, only she saw she had nowhere to go. Nowhere, that is, but into—and this is the part that still has me feeling like I was sucked into a Stephen King novel or something—a giant pair of hands that swooped down out of a black cloud and scooped her up and out of the room.

Normally, this would be where I'd wake up. Or where the dream would finally change, and I'd be eating Thai food with Adam and he'd refuse to let us order extra spring rolls. Or I'd be making out with Johnny Depp in the frozen-foods aisle while my mother asked him to pass her the Lean Cuisine sesame chicken, because the sign said they're five for ten dollars.

But this time, I just kept on dreaming.

And things shifted back to the tiny little cabin.

There was an old woman sitting by that huge stone fireplace. She was rocking and sipping something from a mug. Her skin was brown and wrinkled, and she was wearing a long, brown dress that brushed the wooden floor as she rocked. She had some kind of red kerchief thing tied around her head and a black cat curled up in her lap. And compared to the room where everyone was getting shot, this seemed rather tame. The girl whose head I just couldn't exit seemed to know the woman. She wasn't exactly happy to see her, but she didn't seem frightened anymore either.

And that's when it happened. When the old woman in the rocker looked up. And suddenly, dream girl and I separated. I wasn't dreaming as her anymore. I was me, and she was standing next to me. But I didn't have time to look at her, because I was too busy looking at the woman in the rocker, who was now staring straight at me, her dark eyes burning, each pupil a tiny skull.

She smiled. Her teeth were metal—iron maybe, or silver. And then her mouth sort of dropped down and unhinged. Opened wider and wider, those metal teeth gleaming, until, just as I was sure she was going to swallow me whole, I finally woke up.

Which is why I'm sitting here in my bed, my heart still flopping around in my chest like a hooked fish and my T-shirt plastered to my back with sweat.

I'd like to blame it on the sushi we ate last night at that new place on Central Avenue.

But I can't.

So I do what I've done before. I get out of bed, pick out some clothes, and start getting ready for school.

And then I head into my bathroom, close the door, strip off my sweat-dampened T-shirt and underwear, climb into my shower, and hope that eventually the hot water will take the chill off my skin.