Chapter 17

The girl known as Melissa Hooper got home from work that Thursday afternoon and relived her afternoon with one Ryan Atwood. She had never been so captivated or felt so comfortable with anyone involved in one of her cases, and very few people in her private life. There were moments during their interview where she truly felt like she knew him and he seemed to be talking to her like he had known her for a very long time.

Now, she had jeopardized her job by agreeing to meet him over dinner…at his house!! She justified it as part of her job, and what did it matter at what time of day she went there? After all, she was supposed to visit unannounced to capture the true atmosphere of the home without any staging or false pretenses. Melissa loved her job, and now she loved it just that little bit more if she would get to look at Ryan Atwood's piercing blue eyes again.

Aside from any personal opinions or feelings she was having toward Ryan, her professional side was also very impressed. This young, upwardly mobile man, was willing to sacrifice his bachelorhood and take on the enormous responsibility of a teenager.

During their meeting, Ryan had spoken about his own troubled childhood and how he had ended up at the Cohens. He had confessed to her that he would probably be in jail with his older brother, Trey were it not for Sandy Cohen's faith in him and Kirsten's ultimate decision to accept him as part of the family. Melissa had been so touched by the tenderness and sincerity of heart with which Ryan had spoken about his adopted family and how they had supported him through so many life changing moments. She had hardly believed how candid he had been about the moment when he thought he had made his childhood friend and sometime girlfriend pregnant, and had chosen to leave his girlfriend of the moment to face his responsibility as a father.

Melissa thought back to that particular point in the conversation for a moment and remembered how Ryan had really emphasized his feeling of responsibility as a father, but more than that was the true pain in his eyes when he talked about leaving the girl he loved to be a father. She had felt that he was trying to say something to her without saying it, but felt he couldn't find the words.

That same feeling had come over her when Ryan had spoken about the most traumatic event of his life. This was a question that she always felt uncomfortable asking prospective foster parents as she felt it pried too deeply. It was supposed to indicate the person's ability to deal with traumatic and stressful events, but she felt that it often led the meeting down a melancholy path that it should not go, and usually took the subject of the question some time to formulate what they considered to be the most traumatic event.

When she had posed the question to Ryan, he had not hesitated, and confessed that undoubtedly the most traumatic event of his life was having the girl he was in love with die in his arms and not be able to do anything to save her. He had added that it was the same girl he left for the pregnant friend, and once again he had this look come over him as he had stared into her eyes. His eyes seemed to say 'there's so much more I want to tell you' , but then he would pull back and become non-chalant and laid back with his legs crossed again.

As she recapped the interview for about the twentieth time in her head, she thought of what a lucky girl that had been for Ryan to have been so in love with her, and then shook herself for considering a girl who had died in a tragic car accident as lucky.

It brought her back into her own reality where she realized she was lucky, and not for the adoring love of a high-school sweetheart, or any sweetheart for that matter, but for the fact that she was alive. Ryan's story had brought some of her own painful memories back to the forefront. The car accident she had been in on her graduation day in Riverside. The car accident she remembered nothing about.

It had taken her months of talking with her mom and her Aunt Julie to piece her memory and her life before the accident back together, but she still remembered nothing about the accident itself or the circumstance of it. For almost two years after the accident she had a recurring dream about being upside down, then feeling heat from a fire, and then feeling safe and being held. She couldn't see the car in her dream or who was holding her, but she knew she felt safe. Then the dreams had stopped.

In the beginning, she had often asked her Aunt Julie to help her by getting the police report or even pictures of the wreck to help jog her memory, but Julie had always told her it was best she didn't remember the accident and that she focused on remembering her life rather than her almost-death. Then she'd lost touch with Julie and she'd even drifted from her mom. She never really got back the feeling of bonding with her mother after the accident, and her mom seemed to want to distance herself. It was really when she lost all contact with her aunt and her mom that the dreams had stopped.

That night after finishing the notes in the Atwood/Davies case file, Melissa Hooper went to bed and dreamed.

She was a passenger in a large vehicle like an SUV, there was a boy driving with no face. Lights were flashing behind them. They were being chased. The car was bumped and bumped again , and again. She was scared, terrified screaming at the faceless person beside her, and then. "Ryan, look out!!"

Then she was upside down, she smelled gasoline, she felt herself being pulled and lifted. There was heat from a fire. She was down again and felt safe. She heard a voice again

"I'm gonna get help"

She heard herself speaking "No, stay, don't leave"

Then nothing, then the voice again. "Marissa, Marissa, MARISSA, no, no,"

Melissa sat up in bed with a start, she was sweating and crying. She remembered her dream vividly. The boy had no face, but she had cried out to Ryan and the voice she heard in her dream was HIS voice. The name she heard in her dream was not her own. Marissa? It sounded like her name.

Melissa wasn't sure what was going on. Had this man she'd met today made such an impression on her that he could implant himself in her dreams? Could he make her dream a dream she had not had in years? Dream a dream in more detail than she had ever done before? Was she superimposing him in her dream because of his story?

Melissa got up and went to her kitchen to get a glass of water. She looked on her kitchen table and saw the Atwood/Davies file. Sitting down at the table, she opened the file and began reading her notes all over again and again. When she was finished, the sun was rising, and all she knew was that she had to talk to Ryan Atwood again.