That Means She’s Dreaming: A Prologue

That Means She’s Dreaming

Near Des Moines, Iowa.

If it wouldn’t have been for the 1993 Iowan Flood, Nick was supposed to be playing in a championship game that night. At least, he would have been playing if his team had the chance to make it to the championship. The parents running the town ball league had cancelled the entire season weeks ago, wiping out the first season of his life where he felt like he was really seeing the ball. He wouldn’t get another chance – next year, he’d be riding the pine for his high school team and putting up with all of the shit the upperclassmen gave him.

After all of the flooding, somehow, the baseball diamond was still where it was supposed to be. The chain link backstop was filled with dead leaves and debris the floodwaters had worked into the gaps between the wires. The same debris was all over the field, mixed in with an impressive variety of trash. It looked as if everything that had been cleaned off of the field over the years had magically reappeared, all at once.

A Range Rover pulled over by the curb nearest the home team bench. Nick figured it must’ve been one of the community college students who played on the field during the weekend. He hoped their games were cancelled, too. It wouldn’t be fair if the drunk college kids got to keep playing when he and his team didn’t.

Nick knew he had to go back home, even though he had no watch to check the time. He had told his Mom, who seemed committed to keeping him away from exploring any of the cool wreckage from the flood and had instituted a new curfew since the flood had really settled in to town. As an excuse, he had told his mom he just needed to get out to walk around the neighborhood. She had only agreed to let him go outside when he promised not to go more than four blocks away, and when she realized it was better than watching him use a whiffle bat to hit a sock down the hallway.

The man from the Range Rover was staring at the baseball diamond as Nick walked away from it. The sun was further down the sky, and it was too dark to make out the man’s features. He was built like an athlete, and he had a dark baseball cap pulled down over his eyes. He had a very large equipment bag beside him in the grass. Nick wondered if the man had actually come expecting to play, and if there might be more people coming. He couldn’t tell if the man was college-aged or not in the dim light – the streetlights here were no longer coming on by the park.

“Nobody’s playing here for a while,” the man told Nick, when Nick was close enough to be noticed. “Someone could get really hurt on that field.”

“I guess,” Nick said, embarrassed he had just thought his team could play on the field if they just picked up a little bit of trash.

“I’d be mad if my team couldn’t play, too,” the man told Nick. He smiled, or at least it seemed like he did.

“I was really seeing the ball, too,” Nick said, saying it exactly like his father (who was also his coach) did when he was bragging.

“Good,” the man said. “I played a little. Got into a few games in the majors.”

“You played pro ball? For who?” Nick asked.

At that moment, the bag next to the stranger moved. It was almost as if the bag had a set of lungs and had sharply taken in one big breath and slowly exhaled, then didn’t breathe again. The outside material still bore a new rise where the fabric had bulged just a bit. Nick kept glancing at this spot in the bag, and then glancing at the man.

“She twitched,” the man said. “That means she’s dreaming.”

It had gotten dark faster than Nick had expected, reminding him again it was August and the days were getting shorter. Few people were driving around this part of town. In fact, Nick could see no other people at all. It was just him, this man, and that bag. The man seemed to notice their isolation as well.

“It’s dark out. I can barely see you. You probably couldn’t even recognize me if I had been a famous ballplayer, huh?” he asked Nick.

“No,” Nick said. “I couldn’t.”

The bag did not move.

“Yeah. That may be a pretty lucky thing, for you,” the man said. He sighed and looked back to the diamond. “I used to play here too, when I was your age. And when I was your age, my mom used to worry about me like I was still a little kid. Bet you got a mother like that, huh?”

“I do,” Nick said. He sensed it would be okay for him to start edging away from the man and into the street. When the stranger didn’t stop him from going away, Nick muttered a goodbye and left the man. He didn’t get away fast enough to avoid seeing the man put the equipment bag back in the Range Rover, but he had decided not to say anything to his parents by the time he returned home.

There was very little in his stomach when he ran to the bathroom to vomit the next morning, after he heard his mother say that a local elementary school teacher had been kidnapped the night before. Her name was Audrey Sheldon. Nick had not been in her class, but he had remembered her for being very nice and awfully pretty. She was a small woman, barely five feet tall and slim. She was in her forties, but could have passed for having just turned thirty without much makeup at all.

Someone had gone into her house and taken her from her living room. The whole town joined in on the search. Nick led them to the spot where had seen the man and told the authorities everything. There were billboards and fliers, but no one found a trace of the woman.

Nick’s family found a good therapist and together they found a way to leave Nick reasonably whole, and mostly able to forget what he had seen, and what had almost happened to him. He wasn’t sure if he would even try out for the high school baseball team after he finished his eight grade year, but in the summer of 1994 he did join the team. More than that, he was still seeing the ball, and he had added a little power to his swing. Each hit helped him get to sleep without wondering if there was a way he could have gotten help that night in the park. If he could have found out what was in the big bag, he would have either saved a life or saved himself from a lifetime battling personal demons.

His anxiety was barely there until the All-Star Game for the Pride of the Working Class Heartland League came to Des Moines. He had gone to the game with other members of his high school team. He had dropped his soda when he looked back to the field after laughing at a joke his friend told him. He stared at the man in the baseball uniform, out there on the field, and he couldn’t stop thinking this was the same man from the park that night. Someone threw half a hot dog at the back of his head, and he picked it off the floor and threw it back, and that was all it took for Nick to pretend he hadn’t seen the man after all.

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