Restive Sleep

Rhun awoke to find that someone had opened the curtains to bedroom window while he slept. As he sat up, he realized that the same person had also been nice enough to put all of his missed coursework on his bedside table. It felt strange to wake up in his own bed after spending three nights in hospital, after dreaming about her. He dreamed about her every night since they took his appendix out. At first, he thought the dreams were the result of anesthetic from the appendectomy. Then after the second night, he thought it was the result of the pain medication. After the third night, he was sure it had to be the cleaning products they used to keep everything so sterile.

Now that that proved not to be the case either.

He leaned back on his headboard and closed his eyes. Images from his dream danced behind his eyelids. The dreams always took place in a house. He wasn’t sure why there, it wasn’t his house, or any other house he’s ever been in before. It always started with him doing something mundane in that house, like reading a book or washing the dishes. Then, when it seemed like it would be a dream full of day to day things, she would run through the front door. She seemed to always be running away from something. What she was running from, she never said. He just assumed she was just afraid of the dark. It was always night time in the dream, and whenever he saw the sun rise, he knew it was time to wake up.

“Oh, you’re awake.” Rhun opened his eyes to find his mother standing in doorway. He hadn’t even heard her open the door.

He shook his head, dismissing the girl from his dreams. “Just barely.”

Mum smiled and moved to sit on the edge of his bed. “How are you feeling?”

Nothing felt off balance. “Fine, I guess.”

“Good,” she paused, and bit her lip for a second. Rhun knew that she was stopping herself from suggesting that he could use his new wellness to get his missed work done. “Dan called to say that he was going to drop off your assignments from today after school.” Even when she tried not to talk about school, she still always found herself on the topic. He glanced at the small stack of papers on his bedside table and sighed. He knew most of the coursework he had missed was from English. The woman who taught that class believed that it was her duty to reteach him how to write in the English language. He knew all of the differences between British and American English, Mum had made sure of that. He usually just forgot to use American spelling and grammar.

“Don’t you have a class today?”

“Not until later.” Her American accent was starting to come back. Even when they were living in Wales, she never quite lost hers like his Dad lost his. It was the way she said the letter r in all of her words. She always pronounced it. Dad’s excuse for losing his accent was that there was just too much Welsh in his blood. Both of his parents had been born and raised in The States, but had moved to Wales shortly after he was born to conduct research so she could write a book about whatever it was. Rhun had never talked to her about it much, and only knew that it took fifteen years of his life for her to complete it.

Rhun found it strange that he was actually American, even though everything else about him was Welsh. They had moved back to The States last year, but he still felt that he was in the transition stage. He was popular at school due to his accent, which everyone confused with a run of the mill British accent. The only reason anyone seemed to like him was because he was foreign. Knowing this made everything seem less concrete, less real.

“Sometimes I wonder if you’re real.”

“If I’m real?”

“Yeah. Sometimes it feels like you’re part of my imagination. There are things about us that I can’t explain.”

“Like what?”

“How we met.”

Parts of last night’s conversation were starting to creep into his mind. “Will you be okay by yourself?” He was going to say something just like that before he woke up. “Rhun?”

He looked at Mum with a dazed expression on his face. “Pardon?”

“I swear you’ve been spacey ever since they put you under. Are you going to be okay by yourself until your Dad comes home?”

“Yeah. I’ll be fine.”

She patted his leg before standing up. “I’ll get started on your breakfast. What would you like?”

“Eggs,” he responded without thinking.

“Just eggs or do you want something else with them?”

For some reason, he found making a decision on what to eat seemed harder than it should be. “I don’t know.”

“I’ll surprise you then.”

“Okay.”

With that she left the room, closing the door behind her. He glanced at his pile of work again, and groaned. He didn’t feel like doing it yet. His mind was still in a haze, fog lingering around the edges. He felt like he couldn’t keep his eyes open, yet knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep. He closed them anyway and tried.

“The shadows. It’s like they’re alive or something, and they’re following me.”

“That sounds like something that would be in a Stephen King book.”

“Oh. Oh, God, don’t say that. I don’t want to live in one of those books.”

“I know what you mean by that. Actually, now that I think of it, it kind of reminds me of that one video game. What was it called…Dan sent it to me for Christmas that one year. It followed a guy who had to fight off shadows to find his wife.”

“Rhunws, I think there’s a couple games like that..”

“Alan Wake! That’s it.”

“Ah, I remember that game.”

“You’ve played it?”

“Yeah. Though I don’t particularly want to be living in it either. Stephen King gets name dropped like fifteen times.”

“I know what you mean.” His words didn’t sound right in his memory. It was his tone of voice, but the pronunciation was all wrong. Rhun couldn’t figure out what was wrong at first, then the answer hit him like a bullet train. The words sounded too, American. His eyes shot open. He didn’t have his accent in his dream. He shook his head, dismissing the idea that he was losing his accent. It was a ridiculous thought. He hadn’t been in the States long enough to lose his accent, and yet, only after a year and a half, Mum’s American accent was coming back. He turned to the coursework on the bedside table. If that couldn’t distract him from the possibility of losing his accent, nothing would.

Half way through his math assignment, Mum came in carrying Rhun’s breakfast on a tray. He moved his work back to the table to make way for the tray. Mum sat on the edge of the bed. “You’re Dad’s going to come home early, so you won’t be alone while I’m at my lecture.”

“You got him to skip his sixth period class?” Dad was wasn’t the type to miss school. There was only one time when he caught the flu that he missed work. He was the high school maths teacher version of a perfect attendance student.

“He was the one who suggested it,” she told him. “He said he couldn’t leave you here to fend for yourself when you can barely walk to the bathroom by yourself, and that he’ll be home a little after noon.”

“Okay.” There was a long pause between them. Mum had never had to wait for him to get better. Even when Rhun got sick as a child, he never got sick enough to not go to school, or be bed ridden. He never had surgery prior to this, either. Neither of them knew what to do.

Mum stood up. “You eat and call when you’re done with your plate.”

“Okay.”

The day passed slowly, and by the time Dan arrived, the small pile of missed coursework was finished, with the exception of his English assignment. He had been putting off for the past hour or so. He wasn’t in the mood to deal with it. English used to be one of his favorite topics. It was depressing how something he used to enjoy could become something he detested. He mindlessly sketched in the margins of his notebook to pass time.

He hadn’t even noticed Dan had entered his room until he threw the next pile of coursework onto Rhun’s bed. “You didn’t really miss anything today. Actually, I kind of wished I had gotten appendicitis and didn’t have to go to school.”

“Trust me, you don’t want it. It’s not fun.”

Dan shrugged and dropped his backpack on the floor. “Eh. You’re day was probably better than mine.” He pulled Rhun’s desk chair over to the side of the bed and sat down. Dan was his only friend, and it was because they were related. Being first cousins and being born only days apart from each other were the main foundations of their relationship. The two could relate to each other well, and had a couple of things in common, but people could always tell that they weren’t the best of friends. There was always a sense of distance between them, like neither of them really wanted to be in the same room with the other.

“What happened?”

“The whole day was spent talking about the girl who was in the car accident last fall. The one who went in a coma. The school is under the impression that everyone needs therapy to deal with her possible death.”

“Possible death?”

Dan nodded. “She’s been in a coma for like three months, and may or may not wake up. Her parents aren’t sure if they want to wait for something that probably won’t happen.” He glanced at Rhun’s notebook, and look of shock contorted his features. “How..”

“What?” Rhun looked down at his drawing, wondering what was wrong with it. On the page was a drawing of a girl. Her face was oval shaped, soft without looking pudgy. Her eyes were almost too large for her face, giving her a childish wide-eyed look. Her dark hair was long a curly. As far as he knew, it was a regular drawing of a girl. He looked at Dan, then back at his drawing, and it hit him.

The girl on the page was the girl in his dream.

“That’s the girl,” Dan finally managed to say after looking at Rhun’s drawing, then at the photograph, and back again.

“There was an article about her in the school paper as well.” Dan reached for his backpack at the foot of the bed, unzipped it, and pulled out a small newspaper. He handed Rhun the paper. On the front page of the paper was the picture of her that was taken at the beginning of the school year, before her accident. He remembered hearing about her accident, but never knew who she was. He scanned the article and found out her name. Delilah Thompson. She was in a deep coma due to a head injury she obtained in the car crash that she and her brother had been in three months before.

“Do you know her?”

Rhun shook his head. “No, or at least I don’t think I do..” He paused, debating whether or not to tell his cousin about his dreams.

Dan raised an eyebrow. “Something tells me that you do.”

“She’s been invading my dreams ever since I went to hospital.”