“I thought you guys were friends.”
“He was one of my professors. He’s a genius, but I hate his guts. He’s old, cranky, and impossible to impress. But you should see the size of his—”
“Oh my God, please don’t.”
“I was going to say memory palace,” Alice says.
“And that is . . . ?”
“It’s a trick for remembering things. You build a house inside your mind. Whenever you want to store information, you focus on where you’re putting it. You keep things utterly organized, so you know where to find them.” She pretends to gag. “It’s not how I’ve ever worked. It’s led to some . . . disagreements while we’ve been interviewing you under hypnosis.”
“Such as?
“He wants to follow the hallways of your little memory hut,” she says. “He wants to sort carefully through every room, every drawer, every cabinet, every shelf, in order. I prefer to follow the trails.”
“Trails?”
“Of light,” she says. “I’ve seen them since I was a child. They’re connections that my intuition shows me. Think of it like this: You mention something about your recurring nightmares. You describe them to me, and one detail sort of . . . illuminates. So say it’s the orb of darkness that swallows you. That jumps out at me, like it’s all lit up, and I start to follow that to everything it’s connected to: the nighttime, a growing sense of dread, your Opening, feelings of powerlessness. It can be specific or vague. Either way, I wait until something else jumps out at me before I keep moving.”
“And if nothing jumps out at you?”
Alice scrunches up her mouth. “Then I keep waiting until it does. That’s why this takes so long. But still, it’s easier than starting from the very beginning, wasting hours in a room full of memories about birthday parties and balloons and beets. And it worked, didn’t it? I mean, minimally, but it worked.”
Beau appears in the doorway. “Come in, come in,” Alice says, waving him forward.
He takes a step and leans against the doorway.
“We’ve had a revelation,” Alice says, clapping her hands. “Three days after Natalie completed the EMDR process, she quit dancing. Prior to that time, she encountered Grandmother several times a year, and she’d been dancing since shortly before her first visitation, her Opening. There could be a link between your decreased level of physical activity and your losing track of Grandmother.”
“Doesn’t that seem like a coincidence?” I say.
Her head wobbles. “No,” she says firmly.
“And that’s because a light string told you so?” I ask.
“Light strand, but yes. This is important. I feel it. Besides, think about it: It’s a physical activity, a ritual of sorts, but there’s also a sort of meditative or artistic quality to it. That’s the point of ritual: When you’re comfortable enough with an action, your mind is able to disengage from the actual, physical motions and focus elsewhere. When we dream or hallucinate, multiple separate parts of the brain are active. It’s possible that dance, which marries physical and mental actions, enables you to access Grandmother’s world better than simple stress or emotional fatigue would on its own.”
Beau looks at me. “Like with the piano,” he says.
“What’s that?” Alice says.
Beau shifts his weight to his other leg. “I can move between the worlds when I play.”
Alice taps her fingertips together. “Perfect. An accompanist.”
“But I’ve never seen Grandmother while I’ve been dancing,” I pipe up.
“Maybe not,” Alice says. “But there are so many reasons this could have an effect. For one, it’s possible that dancing regularly affected your sleep. After all, this phenomenon starts as a dream state. Completing the EMDR might’ve cleared out some of your stored, unprocessed trauma, making those heightened dream states unnecessary. But you’re still having a recurring nightmare. You’re still able to move between your world and a world that exists as a dream state for most of us. I still think pinpointing your trauma is the key here, but deepening your sleep might help too. We don’t want to use any drugs that could augment your dream patterns or keep you from waking up when Grandmother appears, but we can naturally exhaust you as much as possible. We’ll send you to the studio late at night, and when you get home you can take some melatonin to help you sleep.”
“Studio?” Beau says.
“The NKU dance studio,” Alice replies. She rifles feverishly through the papers on her desk. “Where the hell did I put my phone? The dance studios have pianos in them already. It’s perfect, strangely so even. Two people from two different versions of the same town, with the same gift, accessed by complementary activities. It means something.”
“Light strand,” I say, and she points one finger at me vehemently.