IN SAM’S DREAM, her mother is swinging an aluminum baseball bat through their house. She smashes the bay windows in the den and then the tall windows in the living room. She shatters the antique chandelier she’d bought on a trip to Houston soon after she married Sam’s dad, one that still hangs in their house. She explodes the sconce lights and the stained glass in the hallway. In life, in the throes of her aneurysm, she’d only broken out the three bay windows in the den. In the dream, she spares nothing. Her mother is deliberate, thoughtful as she goes along, a quality Sam thinks admirable and lacking in herself. Sam is vaguely aware of the chaos raging in her mother’s brain, which in the dream sounded like a crazed Geiger counter. Her mother moves through the house but reads to her in the voice of Sam’s third-grade teacher, Mrs. Swatzel. Little House in the Big Woods. Pa and the bear. Her mother, who is also Mrs. Swatzel, goes on smashing with the bat, pausing only to readjust the crossing-guard sash Mrs. Swatzel used to wear after school. In life, everyone wondered: Had her mother shattered the windows out of anger? Frustration? The random heat lightning in her brain? No one knew. They found her sprawled on the kitchen floor one morning after a jogger passing the house had heard the ruckus, seen the jagged openings. Someone had called her dad at the station. At first they’d thought there had been a break-in, an intruder. Wasn’t that what the baseball bat in the hallway closet was for?
In the dream, her mother pauses between one window and the next, and despite the Geiger counter noise turns to Sam and says, See? I’m calling to you. I can’t speak anymore, can’t dial a phone, can’t even think straight. But I’m calling to you. Her mother seems elated at the news. You will hear me. These are the shouts of my body. This is how I love you.
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