Chapter Thirty

Tracy Kingston awoke from the endless dream and sat up in bed. She shook her head clear of any thoughts.

Tears of joy and sorrow ran down her cheeks at the memory of what she, Rick, Dave, and Connor went through – together.

“I’ll always love you,” she whispered.

She got up and walked to the bathroom. Tracy looked at her wet face in the mirror and then sighed.

And suddenly, Tracy felt a pressure on her right shoulder.

She turned around and then Tracy Kingston screamed.

“Tracy!” It shouted with laughter.

That was when she awoke from this nightmare which had made its hundred-something occurrence this past week. She could take no more – the pain of the memory had been burned into her brain. “Connor!” Tracy screamed when she sat up. Instantly, she realized she had just screamed and shut her mouth with the hopes of not waking her husband.

To her concern, the body lying under the comforter next to her sweaty body did jump. “What?” he shouted in horror as his heart pounded harder and faster and turned to face his wife.

Tracy had momentarily forgotten that it was just a dream. She had also forgotten all sense of time – and periods of her life which made no sense to her. Tracy had also forgotten in that brief period of deep slumber that she is an Andrews and not a Kingston.

Tracy put her left hand onto her chest, feeling her heart slowing down, and sighed. She could not risk another attack like the one several years ago that sent her to the hospital. “I’m sorry, Jack. It was just a bad dream,” she assured him when she was completely satisfied that her heart was not going to explode.

“The same one?” Jack asked and sat up, propping a pillow behind his lower back. She nodded which brought her husband to his next question. “And who’s this Connor?” This one he paid closer attention once his brain was awake and alert.

Tracy hesitated and then finally sighed. “No one,” came the answer that caused Jack even more questions to roam around in his head.

This was by far the worst answer he had wished for. He instantly envisioned his wife leaving him, taking Alexandria, and never talking to him again – all because of an old high school boyfriend who didn’t make it big in life and wanted her back. “Who is he, Tracy?” he repeated.

She gnashed her teeth together as her jaw twitched. “No one – I can’t remember,” she began and saw that he still was not happy with her explanation. “I think he might be,” he could feel that she had been shaking. “Dead,” she concluded and a tear rolled down her cheek.

Shit, he thought, you had to go on pushing, didn’t you? Feeling very apologetic, Jack placed his hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to,” he tried. He brushed her sandy-blonde hair from her forehead as their eyes met.

Dampness enveloped her eyes, yet she formed a grim smile. “I love you,” she said and wrapped her arms around his neck.

Smiling, he rubbed her hair. “I love you, too,” he said and felt her pull away. “Where you going?” he asked as she slid out of his arms and out of the bed.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“I’m going to the bathroom and then to check on Alex,” she replied and headed toward the door.

“Hurry back – you don’t want me to get cold, do you?” he smiled and she placed her hand on her stomach.

“We will.” She smiled and patted her large belly.

As he watched her leave the darkness of the bedroom to the dim light of the hallway, he let his mind run over Tracy’s dream – was his name Connor? – and then further back when he and she met.

They were both majoring in creative writing and shared a night class together in their junior year. During the semester, he had discovered her love of writing horror novels; as she was currently writing one, she tells him about a dream killer. He had shown her his poems and expressed his wish to have them published and make his money just by writing poems.

They began dating during the end of the semester and they had followed one another in their choices of classes in the years to come. Falling in love seemed natural to Jack; he had no problem proposing to Tracy three years later; they had both graduated and received their degrees in creative writing.

One year later they wed and Tracy took a teaching job at the local school teaching a creative writing class. Jack was a success in that he received decent words from critics and had been on several talk shows when his poetry book made its debut.

But all that was two years later and nothing has happened since. He was still producing poem after poem, but being the compulsive perfectionist, it took him a while to get anything good enough for publication.

In fact, Jack looked over at his night stand and saw several pages with scrawling on them; lines he would later edit and rewrite to please his mind.

He let his mind roam back to their wedding day when Tracy’s step-father cornered him in the back room of the church several minutes before show time. “If you marry my daughter,” he remembered Herb say and cut him off.

“Step-daughter,” he corrected with a grin.

“Step-daughter, then. You’ll live through hell – believe me. I’m warning you through the kindness of my heart: don’t do it. She’s crazy – doctors have proven it.” Herb explained and Jack shook his head in disbelief.

To this day, he had never told his wife about that conversation.

Tracy walked several feet down the hall and stopped at the closed door. She put her ear up to the door and when she heard nothing, she slowly opened it. It creaked slowly open and she stepped aside to allow light to enter the room. She stood at the doorway, smiling at her sleeping daughter.

Tracy spied a white stuffed bear on the floor near the head of the bed and she walked over to it and cautiously picked it up; she didn’t want to make any more noise than she had to. She placed it next to her daughter and as if by instinct, Alexandria snatched the bear and tucked it under her arm.

Tracy fought back her tears as she remembered taking Alexandria to the hospital for respiratory failure when her daughter was only one and a half years of age. The doctors had discovered that something in her lungs was causing them to be close to the size of no more than the tip of an ink pen. They were stumped as to the cause, though; all they did at the time was to laser off a millimeter or two of skin and tissue and hoped for the best.

At first it seemed to have worked, although everyone knew that it would only be a temporary cure – until they had the final answer, she would have to keep coming in and having her flesh inched off. And it didn’t take doctors to have to tell Tracy that a human child can only take so much before they run out of tissue to remove.

Alexandria was given a life expectancy of about twelve unless a permanent cure was found – and she is now six. You’ve already lived half your beautiful life, Tracy thought. There were many nights when she cursed herself at being the reason for her daughter’s sickness. She had, after all, been diagnosed with a rare heart disease shortly after Alexandria was born – although her doctors did trace the disease back through her lineage; and she would lay awake sobbing her eyes out as she sat by the window in her bedroom.

When she had turned to head back toward the door, she saw her husband standing there watching her. She walked up to him and almost fell into his arms and he caught her. “Why?” she whispered with her face pressed against his chest. “Why does it have to happen?”

Jack had tried to be the strong one – the one she could rely on to be there when she needed this sort of collapse. But here lately, it was beginning to take its toll on him and he felt as if he would break any day now, either in tears or in anger – he didn’t know which. “I don’t know. There’s a reason – His reason,” he replied while rubbing her back.