It's Only the Rain

"What do I have to lose," she said with a shrug.

Thankfully, her mother was sleeping, and the address was close enough that she thought she could be there and back without taking too much time.

The nearest train station would have left her too far to walk in this weather, so she was forced to pay the cab fare for a ride out. The neighborhood where the driver brought her was much nicer than anywhere she had ever lived. The houses were close together, barely any yard to speak of, but of new construction, all of them two-story and quite large. Mindy tramped through the snow glancing at the address she had written on a slip of paper. When she finally found the right one, she hesitated, suddenly feeling foolish.

"Quit being a wimp! You've come all this way. Don't turn back now..." she grumbled under her breath.

The heavy oak door had an intercom to one side, and Mindy pressed the button, hearing a distinct electric buzzing. She waited, but no one answered, so she tried again, holding the button down longer this time.

"What!" came a loud, angry voice from the speaker, making her jump back.

"Uh...Hi! I'm sorry to bother you. Is this the residence of Professor Jonas Middleton from the University of Chicago?"

There was a long moment of silence then, "I don't do interviews go away!"

"I'm not here for an interview. My name is Mindy Dawson. I'm a nurse at Parker Memorial Hospital."

"Then what are you doing on my damn porch in the middle of the night?"

"I need to ask you some questions about your colleague, Dr. Avery, and about..."

"Son of a bitch! Did Carl send you up here? Is this his way of trying to make up for the mess he created? Tell him I can deal with this. I don't need his help!"

The intercom cut off.

Mindy stood dumbfounded, but couldn't see leaving at this point, and she pressed the button again. When there was no answer after several tries, she held her thumb on the hard metal until the buzzing was driving her crazy.

"Jesus H. Christ! Get off my porch, or I'm calling the cops!"

"Please! I just need a minute of your time!"

"Go away!"

"Please, Professor Middleton! I used the machine. I was inside Trevor's mind, his dreams. I don't know...I need you to talk to me. Explain this to me. Please!" she begged, realizing how crazy this sounded when she said it out loud.

The howling of the winter wind was her only answer, and she slumped dejected against the wall.

"Damn..." she cursed, turning to leave when the door swung ponderously open.

The man in the doorway looked nothing like the photo she had seen. His long hair fell in an unkempt tangle around a narrow, pale face that seemed old beyond its years. His broad shoulders sagged as if beneath a mighty weight, and his eyes looked lifeless and dull.

"You used the machine?"

"Yes," said Mindy, nodding.

He looked off into the distance, shaking his head.

"Then you had better come inside, Miss Dawson, because you're in more danger than you can possibly comprehend."

THE WAKING DREAM -

The interior of the house was dark and smelled musty, almost as ragged as its owner. He led her into a vast family room largely bereft of light with only a single lamp struggling to hold back the darkness. Mindy glimpsed some photos on the closest wall, barely able to make out the smiling couple pictured there, Jonas and Helen Middleton in happier times. He waved absently at a leather couch, and she took a seat while he remained standing, stopping to lean against the long, wood-paneled wall.

"It started like most things, with all the right intentions. We were trying to do something good," mumbled Jonas Middleton, his eyes haunted and far away.

"You and Dr. Avery?"

"And Helen," he added, "We were colleagues at the University. All of us working on research related to various studies on the human brain. Initially, they were independent studies, but that was before Billy."

"Billy?"

"Helen's younger brother. He contracted encephalitis while doing work for some international aid group in the Amazon basin. By the time they flew him back to the States, he was in bad shape, been in a coma for months. Helen took it hard. She had always doted on that brother of hers."

"So, you joined up with Dr. Avery?"

Middleton nodded, "He and I did some of the preliminary work, but it was Helen who made the big break-through that led to us building our prototype of the machine. We really should have given the damn thing a name, but we could never agree on one."

"What happened?"

"In the beginning? Not a whole lot. Our early tests yielded wildly varying results on chimpanzees. There was nothing to indicate what was coming. We were just trying to stimulate brain activity not...not..."

"Journey into another person's mind?" she offered helpfully.

"Exactly..."

"When did you discover that was possible?"

Middleton grew quiet, a tortured look passing across his features, "Helen made that discovery quite by accident. She didn't think we were moving fast enough in our research. I guess she was scared that Billy would slip away before we could reach a point where we could help him, so she started to experiment on her own without our knowledge."

"She used herself as a guinea pig?"

"Yes...She paid off the night nurse at the clinic where Billy was in isolation and started taking the prototype there to test it."

"So she made it inside Billy's head?"

"Well...not at first. She had some success just stimulating his brain exactly as we had always planned too, but it was an incremental improvement at best. She pushed harder, increasing power and focus; it was one night during a high power test that she went beyond just a distant feeling."

"She joined him."

"I didn't believe her at first. It sounded too fantastic, like bad science-fiction. Hell, I was convinced she had imagined the whole thing, consumed by grief or something. Carl and I were both angry when we found out she had been experimenting without us, but he was more ready to accept her story than I. Eventually, he convinced me we should join her at the clinic and try it ourselves."

"Then you've been inside Billy's dreams as well?"

"No, it didn't work on either Carl or me, no matter how we tried it. This further led me to doubt Helen's story...but she was insistent, so we continued to experiment. We tried it with some of our most trusted graduate students, ones sworn to secrecy lest anyone find out we were progressing to human trials without approval. One day, we had another success with a young man named Jack Barton. He was briefly able to link to Billy and reported back information gained that he would have no way of knowing. That convinced Carl we were really on to something and, conversely, made Helen even more determined to use the machine to heal her brother."

"Why did it work on Helen and Jack Barton but not yourselves or the others?"

"Ah! Why indeed. Helen developed a theory on that, one that Carl dismissed as ridiculous. I kind of felt the same at the time, but later events proved how wrong we both were. Helen, you see, thought that the machine wasn't the crux of the matter at all. Her theory was that all we were doing was triggering latent abilities that many human beings have, that by sending specific impulses into the brain, we were reviving these buried abilities in people that were already predisposed to them."

"You mean like triggering E.S.P., telepathy, or telekinesis?"

"I know. It sounds crazy, right? Carl didn't want to believe it. I think, in retrospect, it was more because it invalidated his research than because he couldn't comprehend it being a viable explanation for what we were seeing."

"You're telling me if I keep using the machine, I could learn to read people's minds or something?" asked Mindy, fascinated by the implications.

"Possibly. I honestly don't know for certain, we never pursued that aspect of it, and there was a good reason."

Middleton's tone grew more serious, and he leaned toward Mindy to make his point.

"I saw how obsessed Helen was becoming, and I feared that she might push things too quickly in her continued attempts to save her brother. To avoid her going forward without Carl or me, we locked up the machine and refused to give her the access code to the lab. She couldn't experiment any longer without us in attendance. We had a huge fight over it one night, and she stormed out of the house. It turned out to be the last night I ever spoke to my wife."

"She left you?"

Middleton's eyes clouded with tears, and he shook his head, "Yes and no. Come with me, Miss Dawson, and see the price you might pay if you're not careful."

The older man led her from the room and up a flight of stairs to a locked room right off the main hallway. He pulled a key from his hip pocket and opened the door. Before she even entered, Mindy could hear the familiar sounds of life support equipment humming away, the mechanical pumps churning the breath of life into a prostrate body.

The room was small, with a single bed in the middle, and in that bed, Helen Middleton lay comatose and deathly pale. Her husband went to her side, and using a gesture that emulated Mindy's interactions with Trevor; he brushed her hair back away from her eyes.

"Have you seen the rain?" he asked.

Mindy looked away from the woman in the bed, thinking at first Middleton was talking to his wife but realizing the question had been directed at her.

"When I've connected to Trevor, it always ends with a storm coming out of nowhere."

"Yes. It was the same with Helen and Jack. She theorized it was the subject's brain reacting to the intrusion. It was realizing that you don't belong and that revulsion then manifested into a tempest in the subconscious world the patient had created for themselves. The more time Helen spent in Billy's head, the worse the storms became. She would come back sick to her stomach, weak, shaking in my arms. That was the main reason we locked up the machine, but it turned out to be too late."

"What do you mean?"

"Helen's theory, remember? It occurred to her that she might not need the machine anymore, that she could reach Billy without it."

He drew a shuddering breath, "This was how they found her, unconscious at the foot of her brother's bed. Who knows what happened for sure, but I suspect she pushed too far, went one time too many, and this was the result."

Mindy felt a chill that she suspected was because of more than just the heavily air-conditioned room.

"Was her brother getting better?"

"Marginally, yes, but whether it was because of her, we couldn't say for sure. Helen certainly thought so, but if this loved one of yours...Trevor...if he really cared for you, do you think he would want you to end up like this?"

Mindy didn't know how to answer that, wasn't sure she wanted to know the answer.

"I should go. My mother is home alone. Thank you for your time, Professor."

She almost made it to the door when his voice stopped her one last time.

"Remember what I said. You keep going down this road, Miss Dawson, you may end up somewhere you can never come back from."

Mindy arrived back home emotionally exhausted and fell into a fitful sleep, tossing and turning in her bed. By the following morning, she was more tired than rested but didn't want to be late for her shift. A shower and a hot cup of coffee were first on her agenda, though, and she stumbled into the warm jets of water, letting them buffet her scalp, trying to shake the cobwebs from her brain. To her surprise, she could already smell the pungent aroma of dry roast coming from the kitchen upon exiting her bathroom. She found her mother awake, taking a sip from a mug and leaning against the counter.

"You made coffee?"

Beatrice shrugged and indicated the pot with a nod of her head.

"I used to be known for my coffee."

Mindy went over to the pot, poured herself a cup. She couldn't recall the last time she had seen her mother out of bed this early in the morning.

"I didn't see Greg lounging in his usual spot. What happened? The T.V. go on the fritz, or is the cable out?"

"Greg's gone. I kicked him out," replied Mindy, spooning some sugar into her drink.

Her mother's eyebrows shot up at this revelation.

"Huh...never thought I would see the day. So you still listen to some of your old mother's advice?"

"This had nothing to do with you," said Mindy, her voice taking on a sharper edge.

"Whatever. Just glad to see you grow a pair, finally."

Mindy turned sharply around, fixing her mother with a gaze so intense it made the older woman stand up and take a step back.

"Greg's leaving isn't the only change that I think needs to happen around here. I think you need to call your sponsor and get back into the program. It's time you made a clean break from your problems as well. Greg might have been the millstone around my neck, but the bottle has been yours for too long."

"Just like that? You think it's easy?"

"I know it isn't. I've seen more addicts in my life than you can count, but it's time. I'm done carrying you. You're a big girl. Take some responsibility for yourself for God's sake!"

Beatrice slammed her cup down on the counter hard enough that hot coffee sloshed over the sides onto her hand, but no pain registered on her face, only seething anger.

"You can't talk to me like that. I'm your mother, and this is my home."

"I'm well aware this was your place first, and if it weren't rent-controlled, I wouldn't be here, but I pay that rent now, not you! And as for being a mother...When was the last time you acted like one?"

Beatrice started to fire back, but Mindy cut her off.

"That was a rhetorical question. I don't expect an answer. The truth is I'm done taking the blame for how things turned out for you. We both have taken our share of beatings. It's time to own up to our complicity in what happened to us. It's time to be brave. I'm moving on. What about you?"

Her mother didn't answer straight away, clearly caught off guard by this new version of her usually compliant daughter. Mindy reached up above the phone that hung on the wall, taking down a card from the cork-board that she had installed there to hold messages. She placed it next to her mother's cup.

"Call your sponsor. Start retaking those twelve steps. I know something better will be waiting for you at the end."

There was an awkward silence, Beatrice still trying to digest her daughter's words. Mindy started to walk by her and stopped to place her head on her mother's shoulder.

"I have to go to work," she said, patting her mother twice on the arm.

"Mindy..." said Beatrice as her daughter started to walk away, "I could...I could make pork chops for dinner? You always did like those, right?"

"Sure, Mom. That would be fine. Thanks."

Let alone in the kitchen, Beatrice Dawson picked up the business card in her trembling fingers.

The walk to work was its usual misery, and Mindy leaned into the wind, wondering if she would ever truly feel warm again.

The minute she arrived at the hospital, and the elevator deposited her on her floor; she knew something was wrong. The other nurses were crowded around the main desk, talking in low voices, agitated, and unhappy. Mindy drew closer, seeing Barbara standing back at the edge of the group. The old head nurse had an angry expression on her face and was looking up the hallway toward Trevor's room.

"What's going on? I haven't seen people this wound up since 9/11."

Barbara frowned as she answered, "They're pulling the plug on poor Trevor. His brother got some kind of court order giving him temporary power of attorney. The whole thing stinks if you ask me, and his mother is furious but can't do anything about it."

"WHAT!" cried Mindy, "They can't! He's still in there..."

"Mindy! Wait! You can't go in the room!" yelled Barbara, grabbing for Mindy, but the younger woman was too fast and already up the hallway.

The door flew open, and Mindy took in the scene all at once, one she had viewed many times before in her career but always from an impartial perspective. She was far from impartial today.

Dr. Graves stood at the head of the bed, hand hovering near the panel for Trevor's life support. Trevor's mother, Cecilia, was standing at the foot with Mitchell, who was holding on to her. At the same time, a man in a business suit, certainly a lawyer of some kind, tried to make himself inconspicuous in the corner. The security man she had met before was back of all the others, eying her with suspicion.

"This isn't right, Mitchell! You can't do this to your brother!" wailed Cecilia Harcourt. It was the most emotion Mindy had ever heard from the usually restrained woman, and the anguish evident in her voice made Mindy's heartache.

"Calm down, Mother. This is the right thing to do, and deep down I think you know that. It's been a travesty keeping him alive this long when there has never been any hope of his recovery. I'm just giving him some dignity."

Cecilia sobbed, sagging against her younger son.

"Shall I proceed?" asked Doctor Graves.

"No! You can't!" cried Mindy without thinking.

All eyes in the room were suddenly on her, and she felt a rising panic in her chest.

"What are you doing here? This is a private matter for family, get out!" snapped Mitchell.

"You can't unhook him. He's still in there. He isn't gone," said Mindy.

"What are you babbling about?"

"I used Dr. Avery's machine while you all were out of the room and...I've been...in there with him. I saw him as plain as I see all of you. I spoke to him and walked alongside him. He's in a safe place just waiting for someone to help him get back, to make him realize that he needs to come home."

"What the fuck is she talking about?" yelled Mitchell, not at all sure what was going on.

"Mrs. Harcourt...Cecilia...I saw him. I swear. He's at the house outside Arbor Point. I can reach him. Given some time, I think I can bring him back."

Mindy wasn't at all sure that the last part was true, but she was desperate.

Trevor's mother looked at her with a dazed expression, wanting to believe, to cling to any straw to save her son, but not able to grasp what Mindy was saying.

"It's not too late," said Mindy.

"This is ridiculous! Get her out of here," said Mitchell, calling over the burly security man who promptly took Mindy by both arms and started pulling her toward the door.

"Please! Don't do this! There's still a chance. If I could just get back to him, he's there, Cecilia, at the house with Max! I saw them..."

Mindy vanished out the door, struggling futilely against the stronger man.

"I swear. What are your hiring practices here, Graves? Do you even screen the nut jobs out?"

"Miss Dawson is one of our best nurses," he replied, but the look on his face showed that her behavior had badly thrown him.

"I hate to see what your worst one looks like...Anyway, let's get on with it."

"How did she know?" mumbled Mrs. Harcourt.

Mitchell wrinkled his brow, "How did she know about what, Mother?"

"About Max. How did she know about your dog? Max died when you were kids."

"How should I know? You can find anything on the Internet these days. I'm sure she just intended to milk us for money like that useless Dr. Avery."

"It was so long ago. We never talked publicly to the media about our private lives, let alone about a dog you had as kids."

Cecilia was walking toward the door, moving slowly at first but gaining steam as she went.

"Where are you going? Mother?"

She ignored her younger son opening the door and leaving.

The room was suddenly quiet except for the sounds of the machinery maintaining Trevor's life.

"Should we...Uh...Wait until she comes back?" asked Dr. Graves uncomfortably.

"No. I've waited long enough," whispered Mitchell to himself.