Nightmare in Central Park Read online

falls over the canal that streams around the park, it colors the water black. The wrought-iron gate that gives access to the park is wide open. Like the maul of a monster awaiting his next victim. She feels a cold shiver along her spine and has to force herself not to jump back. With an angry blow she opens the window. The stuffy air fights a lost battle while fresh air forces its way into her room.

  ‘Cool, you can enjoy that later,’ says Tim with his thumb uplifted. He steps over the lingering huddle, opens the door and waits for her in the hall.

  She follows him obediently, something she isn´t used to. From the chair she takes a jacket that’s lying around and puts it on. The door of her brother’s room is open and on the desk of Tim she sees a cup of tea with four biscuits. The room is the opposite of hers. Everything is laid out neatly on shelves or put away in crates. A bedspread covers the bed. There´s no dust on it and there´s a smell of detergent. The mirror is shiny and shows an empty room. She feels some tears burning behind her eyelids. With a loud bang she closes the door and walks downstairs behind Tim.

  She sticks her head round the door of the living room. Her father hangs in his shirt slumped on the couch, half hidden behind his newspaper. Long white hair falls on his face and shoulders, but it can´t hide the deep wrinkles in his face. A glass and a half empty bottle stand next to him. In silence her mother is sitting across him with a rigid back. She is staring reproachfully at the paper. On the arm rest of her leather fauteuil there´s some grease.

  ‘I go outside. I will be back in half an hour, ok.’ As usual it´s more a notification than a question. Her father looks up with watery eyes. ‘Do you take care of yourself?’

  Although she sees the concern on his face, she doesn´t care about it, she doesn´t want to feel anything. Afraid to lose the love of her parents, she doesn´t let them in her life anymore. Not anymore since- She remains tight-lipped about what has happened, she only screams for attention about trivial matters. Ann hears how her mother sniffs disdainfully and she runs out before the discussion between her parents starts again. Six years..., how do her parents hang on? How is she keeping up with this nightmare…

  Tim is already outside with his bike.

  She goes into the shed. Secretly she hopes that Tim doesn´t see the chipped paint on the doors and window frames. He is cute. Ann is surprised about her own thoughts, she can´t remember when it was the last time she thought about something positive. Out of habit she puts the little bike with shiny chrome aside to have some room for getting her own bike. The little bike was a very expensive present from her mother for Cedric’s sixth birthday. Not a single day goes by that she doesn´t hear her father blaming her mother for that. At once feeling angry she grabs her bike and pushes it outside. ‘This way.’ Briskly she points Tim out where to go. ‘In the park you can get enough fresh air.’

  Tim smiles unruffled, her mood swings directly and her heart skips a few beats.

  For the first time in years she uses the road that cuts off the distance to the park and meanders right through it, although she doesn´t understand why. Before Tim gets to it, she already crosses the road. On the bridge she brakes to wait for him and she holds on to the leaning which is overgrown with moss. She smells the scent of rotten leaves and mud. Ann can´t control herself. Her eyes can´t look away and she stares in the dark water of the canal. She can almost feel its cold overtaking her and it´s shivering in her bones. A skinny girl with long black hair and a spooky pale face stares scared at her. Here IT happened to me, long ago. Here I saw it. Here- With a scream she puts her hand in front of her mouth and her body shakes when in the streaming water something white comes up from the deep. Her other hand pinches the railing of the bridge so hard that she squeezes moist out of the moss and the green-red colored muck squeezes through her fingers.

  She feels the reassuring hand of Tim on her shoulder. ‘It´s just a plastic bag,’ he points.

  How does he know what startled me? Her thoughts are immediately suspicious, but his presence feels familiar. She gets on her bike again, she doesn´t want to show him the tears burning in her eyes. IT was awful. And afterwards the eternal blaming. Was her father to blame? Or her mother? She knows the answer, but she has never said it aloud. She simply doesn´t have the guts, she doesn´t want to lose her parents. But always those awful discussions between her parents, she can´t stand it anymore. Just a little while and then-

  ‘I wouldn´t do that,’ says Tim who is now bicycling next to her. ‘That shall not solve anything. You can´t erase what has happened and what will happen is also written in stone unless you accept my offer.’

  She glares at him from the corner of her eyes. How does he know what´s replaying again and again in her head? What's he hiding for her with his enigmatic talk? Or is he wise for his age, even wiser than her father who is almost forty?

  Tim turns his head, looks at her and laughs loudly. It almost sounds like a growl from his throat, like Buddy used to sound.

  With her fingertips she carefully wipes the upcoming tears from her eyes to avoid that her mascara runs through. When he laughs again, she furiously clamps her hands around the handlebars of her bike. ‘OK, come on,’ she almost shouts out loudly. ‘Tell me everything. What about your offer on PlazaMarkt? What dream of mine is hidden in the little box? How can you take away my nightmare in a backpack? And what do you know about my dreams and nightmares?’

  Tim looks away from her, it seems he didn´t hear her questions. He looks curious to a kicked away sign in the field next to the bike path and reads out loudly. ‘Keep dogs on a leash.’ He looks around over the field that goes from the oak trees to the dark canal. ‘How ridiculous, let-’ The tires of the bikes make a crunching sound in the gravel and dim his next words.

  He stops in the middle of the park with its ancient trees. One of them stands exactly in the middle. The tree is thicker and bigger than all the others. The trunk is brown and green.

  Ann shivers when she looks at the place on eye level where once a branch was broken off. It looks like an eye staring at me. The Old one, dad had called it when we walked around it in my younger days. He hasn’t been her in the park for years, not since-

  A dog wanders around the tree and then suddenly it runs away, loudly barking, when he is touched by a whipping branch. Strange, there is hardly any wind.

  "He feels his fate," Tim mutters.

  What does he mean now? What fate? She doesn’t ask him.

  Tim suddenly turns around and he jumps on his bike. Is he scared of something?

  He goes left on the next cross road. ‘Come on, that was enough fresh air. We are going back. Then I shall show you what you can find in the little box.’

  Bewildered she looks at him. It seems like he knows where to go here.

  ‘Yes, I walked around here many times.’ Tim is grinning while he turns his head around to look at her. He shakes his brown hair out of his eyes as a Labrador runs along and he shows his white teeth for a moment.

  She is getting used to the fact that it seems like he can read her mind, but it still riddles her what he is saying.

  A little later they´re back at the bridge. The park ranger just fishes a white plastic bag out of the water with a red-white pole. He abruptly turns around when he sees both bicyclers. Inadvertently she has to think back to the snaring remark of Maud, who used to be her best friend, when the park ranger was appointed. ‘Look, that’s closing the stable door when the sheep are already drowned.’ The crackling quarrel that followed was the end of their friendship. Stupid bitch, comparing him with a sheep. She was the one who kept on talking. It was her fault that- She senses that she isn´t honest but her fury is stronger than her righteousness. That uncontrollable temper, I inherited that from my mother. How she hit dad when-

  Tim winks friendly at her. It´s like she already knows him for years, trusts him, even though he doesn´t say much. In front of her house they lock their bikes. Two boys of about 12 years old skate away as fast as they can when they see the boy and
the girl. When Ann enters the house, she hears the clutter of pans. Her mother must be cooking. Another daily ritual that never will be broken. Through the half open door of the living room she sees that her father is still hiding behind his newspaper. The short articles on the page are encircled in black. Morbid, lugubrious, obsessed. Mam already stuck many labels on it and shouted about it at dad. She feels her anger coming up again, as red hot lava that tries to escape from the bottom of the Earth that tries to keep it down. Therapy, medicines; nothing helps me when my memories come up. Day after day. Night after night. The memory of-

  ‘She is about to have a nervous breakdown,’ the shrink had informed her father when he had thought she couldn´t hear him, ‘it just didn´t happen yet, but it will. She is hiding something. A secret of her own.’ After that she had never went back to that creep.

  With a soft hand Tim shoves her up the stairs. In Cedric’s room no one has touched the tea and cookies yet. She sighs and nods her head. Later I will take it downstairs, as usual. She walks behind Tim into her own room and sits down next to him, while he takes up the little box he left there. The box leaves a deep imprint on her bed. Her attention is pulled to a dog barking excitingly in the park. In shock she looks through the