"Get out of town? Just leave? Leave my friends, my work…everything? My life is here." Tanya stood, frozen, listening to the words, the terrible words… Leave. Pack your things and go away.
"You may not have a life, otherwise. Go away…just for a little while. We'll keep on looking in the meantime."
"I'll think about it," Tanya said and hung up the telephone. "Goodbye," she said as she left the room, dazed. Her hands clenched and unclenched at her sides, frustration grasping at her. Leave…Pack and leave…
* * *
From the depths of sleep, Tanya heard a woman's terrified scream. She opened her eyes. "Go away! Away…" The words echoed in her ears, screamed in her own voice. Another nightmare. She sat up in the bed and turned on the bedside lamp.
Her nightdress clung to her, cold and wet, soaked with perspiration. Her heart fluttered in her chest, a small trapped bird, and sent her pulse pounding in her temples. She gasped for breath as if she were running a marathon. A headache raged.
Pack and leave. She thought about those words as she slid from bed and fetched a clean nightdress, slipped the damp one off, and felt the soft, dry folds of the clean garment cover her nude body. Pack and leave. Those damn words, told to her, to pack her things and leave one foster home for another. She left the old farm behind for a new one, her old friends behind for the unknown. Pack. A small amount of clothes, old and new drawings, her paints. Her life in a suitcase, so small and simple.
In her nightmare, she stood at the side of an empty, dusty road. In each direction, she could see nothing but dust and dirt, dead trees and naked bushes. She waited for an unknown car which would take her to another nowhere, a place without a name and people without faces. There was more to the dream, but she could never remember. The nebulous, wispy images refused to be grasped.
But the dreams, of late, always ended in the same way. Kathy. Kathy, staggering down the dusty road toward her, her disfigured body blown to gigantic proportions. She stomped with the pulverized parts of her leg, then thrust her other leg forward. Her arms flailed, one sending showers of blood and flesh into the road, the other reaching for Tanya. One eye, blown out of the socket, hung by a thread of nerves and fiber, the other stared at Tanya as the monstrous Kathy howled her pain.