The Dream Jumper's Promise

Chapter 21

Was it rape if the aggressor was someone you’d once lead on to the point of almost having sex? And you were drunk? Someone you trusted and briefly considered to be the father of your unborn baby? Noble was one of her most trusted friends. It was possible that she’d led him on. He’d never do anything to her she didn’t want. If they’d had sex, she must’ve encouraged him.

            The one thing Tina was sure about was that she felt like shit. Her head was pounding like a sidewalk under a jack hammer. If she’d been as drunk as her hangover indicated, the likelihood of letting anyone have their way was pretty good.

            Earlier that morning her father had recounted what a fool she’d made of herself at the birthday party. “Acting like a God-dammed bar girl,” he’d said. “Dancing around and hugging everyone.” He’d never appreciated her choice in friends or understood Kristina’s closeness to any of them. No one was good enough if they lived in Hawaii. Her parents hadn’t warmed to Hank when they met him at the wedding then avoided Maui, choosing phone calls instead.

            Her mother had grown up the daughter of the crazy father who killed himself when he lost his job at the mill and she lived her life in fear of losing everything she’d struggled to attain. Over the years Tina had pieced together her mother’s secret story, how she turned eighteen, abandoned her mother to her bottle of vodka and went in search of a better life for herself. Finding a young lawyer from money had both saved and transformed her.

            Hearing the pounding of a hammer behind the building, Tina went outside the shop, and followed the noise. A man in dress shorts and a pressed Hawaiian shirt hung a sold sign at Mr. Takeshimi’s place. Tina’s heart squeezed into a tight, hard ball. Mr. T was leaving. Seeing her neighbor at the front window, she smiled but his gaze was on the sign that told the world he’d be leaving Lahaina.

            Tina waved at him sympathetically, wanting to call out her own proverb to console him, but he turned and walked away without waving back. Her hopes sank. If he couldn’t stick it out, how could she hope to? He’d been fighting for freedom in America, then for acceptance in Hawaii and then for the right to keep his home. She’d only just begun her fight against the elements of her life.

            Tina and her father sat in the waiting room at the Kaiser clinic until Doc Chan was available. The emergency appointment about her ‘current state of mind’ would hopefully get her parents off her back and allow them to get on that plane to Seattle. According to her father, he had enough evidence against her stability to gain a power of attorney over her. “I should know. I’m the attorney,” he’d said on the drive over. Tina was tired of fighting with her parents. And tired of feeling hung-over. She’d taken a pain reliever, had a big glass of orange juice, but the symptoms wouldn’t go away. Slumped in the waiting room’s leatherette chair, she thought how easily the little girl whose judgment was always questioned by her father had risen to the surface.

            Her cell phone rang. Seeing that it was Jamey, she let it go to message. After Doc Chan reassured her father about her progress, she’d return the call. He was probably still disappointed she’d gotten drunk on the night he needed to dream jump. If he found the remains of a sedative in her glass, she’d add that to the growing list of unknowns. Maybe she’d drunkenly added a Xanax to the water to insure sleep. She’d been woozy, that much she remembered. The memory of everyone yelling ‘surprise!’ was her last clear memory. Her father handed her a glass of wine at some point or was that Noble?

            When she called Pepper that morning she was told she’d been ‘wasted’ and everyone agreed it was perfectly fine to get drunk at your own birthday party especially after all she’d been through in the last months.