She estimated she was on the third or fourth floor: across the way, she could see four- and five-story apartment buildings, wedged together, and lights in several windows. Christmas music was piping from somewhere, a tinny sound, like the music that gets played in Hallmark card stores. Chicago. She knew it right away. She could feel it, could feel it in the cold air that made the glass chatter ever so slightly and see it in the wind, which spiraled a plastic bag down the block and made the street signs sway.

Below her, a Lotto sign was blinking in a deli window. Colored Christmas lights dangled limply from its blue awning. It was dusk—there was a faint red smear on the horizon, like a small cut in the fleshy clouds knitted across the sky—and the light had a strange charcoal quality, like a drawing that had gotten smudged. Then she realized it was snowing. But the flakes were dirty, gray looking, almost like ash.

She wondered where Connor was. She assumed he would appear soon on the street, blowing into his hands, maybe, or trying to catch a snowflake on his tongue when he thought no one was looking, and was surprised when instead he appeared in the window of the apartment directly across from her. She ducked quickly. She counted to thirty before she risked peeking over the windowsill again. He was gone. Instead, she could see a brown-haired woman—his mom? Not his stepmom, definitely—hanging ornaments on a Christmas tree. The room was warm looking, practically glowing, and Dea had a momentary suspicion that she was supposed to be serving as witness to this: to the perfection of it, the completeness. That Connor knew she was there, somehow, and wanted her to see. But she dismissed the idea just as quickly.

Before she could second-guess what she had come to do, and decide it was a really fucking stupid idea to break the rules, she found the stairs leading down to the street level. Her footsteps were very loud, as they often were in dreams: Connor’s mind was too focused. He was zeroing in on the room, on his mom, on the ornaments. There weren’t neighbors to shout or cars to honk or babies to cry.

Outside, it was a dream kind of cold: it didn’t hurt, didn’t knock Dea’s breath from her chest or make her hands swell and stiffen. This, too, was because of Connor’s focus. He wasn’t putting enough energy into the world outside of his apartment. Her feet crunched on the accumulating snow as she jogged across the empty street. She kept glancing up at his window, paranoid that he might look outside and see her again.

That would be very bad. That was majorly against the rules. And even though she was technically, technically, about to break the rules, she didn’t see how this would hurt. He wouldn’t know she was responsible.

She stopped in front of the deli, stretched onto her tiptoes and curled her fingers around one end of the Christmas lights. One sharp pull, and they were down, blinking in her hand. She would have to hurry. She had no idea how long this dream would last. Any second, it might morph into something else, and she might find herself on a battlefield or in the middle of an ocean.

She knelt. Moisture seeped into her jeans. It gave her a small thrill. She loved the way Connor’s unconscious mind expanded, reacted to her presence, pushed back and made things difficult.

It took her a while to get the Christmas lights just right. The wires were stiffer than she’d expected, and in the end she had just enough material to work with. She straightened up, her knees now aching and her shoulders sore. She imagined Connor moving to the window again and seeing the words she’d written out in blinking letters, nestled in all that gray snow.

I’m sorry.

SIX

She woke up to simulated church bells, one of her mom’s favorite clocks sounding dolorously through the house. Sunday. The down part of the wave. The shore was hurtling toward her—Monday, seven thirty a.m., first bell—and she couldn’t do anything to stop it.

Overnight, the seasons had shifted. Summer was gone. Rain was pounding the window, as if it were trying to get in, pasting blackened leaves against the glass like flattened palms. Dea could hear the wind, like the distant whistle of a teakettle, and the air was cold. The shimmer of gold was washed out of the fields, replaced by a dull, flat monochrome, a wet mulch-y color. When she went to the window, she could see Connor’s dad make a quick dash from the front door to the car, sloshing through puddles, holding a paper over his head as a makeshift umbrella.

She pulled on jeans and her favorite sweatshirt, which she’d had since Chicago—even though there were now two fat holes at the elbows and a coffee stain by the hem—hoping it might serve as good luck. She finger-combed her hair. When she checked her reflection, she saw she looked good, rested and relaxed, and felt a brief moment of guilt. Sometimes she felt like a giant leech: she fed on other people’s dreams.

She wasn’t speaking to Miriam. She’d decided that, definitively, this morning. Since her mom was the primary person Dea talked to, it seemed like a drastic measure. But deserved. She didn’t even want to see Miriam, but she was starving and she could already hear Miriam banging around in the kitchen, like she was trying to startle Dea into forgetting she was mad.

Dea’s mom looked good, too—she looked as if she’d gained weight overnight. Her skin was smooth and her eyes were clear. Dressed in a big cashmere sweater and leggings and big socks, she looked like a model from a magazine about Healthy Mountain Living. She was almost through a plate of eggs. Dea knew that meant that Miriam had walked a dream the night before—her mom never ate in the mornings unless she had—and felt even more resentful. After their fight, after Dea had called her out on being a fraud, it was a direct reminder of how screwed up everything was.

Of how screwed up she, Dea, fatherless dream-walker, was.

“Dea?”

Dea didn’t answer. She banged the cabinets loudly when she got her cereal, which she ate plain, shoveling it into her mouth with a serving spoon.

“Don’t you want some milk with that?” Silence. “I can make you some eggs. Why don’t I make you some eggs?” Her mom sighed and rubbed her forehead. “Listen, Deedle”—an old nickname—“I know you’re angry at me. But you have to know that everything I do—everything I’ve always done—is for your own protection. You have to believe that. I love you very much. You’re all I have.”

Dea clattered her bowl in the sink.

“Come on, Dea.”

It was awful to ignore her mom but also gave her some sick pleasure—like when she flossed too hard and her gums bled a little. In the hall, she shrugged on a Windbreaker and stuffed her feet in an old pair of rain boots.

“You can’t ignore me forever!” her mom called.

Dea stepped out onto the porch and slammed the door behind her. Her breath steamed in the air. Rain poured off the overhang, a solid sheet of water that distorted the view, and turned the world into a wash of browns and grays.

Strange how quickly the weather turned here, in this vast bowl in the middle of the country where nothing ever happened—like the sole reminder that the world was actually unpredictable and wild.

Seasons turn. Patterns get broken. People change.

She had successfully made it out of the house without saying a single word to her mother.

As soon as Connor opened the door, Dea saw that he’d forgiven her, and felt a small thrill. She wondered if in some dark corner of his unconscious, her message to him was still blinking: I’m sorry.

“Jesus,” he said, as soon as he saw her. “Come in, before you drown.”

He shut the door and the noise of the rain was suctioned out. His house was cool and half-dark. Most of the lamps weren’t set up yet, although several of them stood, encased in thin plastic, like alien birds. She stood awkwardly just inside the door, overly conscious of the fact that she was dripping onto the wood floor.