“What did he say?”
“He didn’t say anything. I was…oh, what the hell…I was snooping through my mom’s computer. I was reading some of her e-mails. And I found a pretty recent one about a study he wanted her to read. It was about male chromosomal abnormalities. He said her miscarriages all those years ago might have been his fault because his little dudes were DNA-challenged.”
“What did your mom say?”
“She said to let it go. My dad was just bouncing around an idea. But it made me sad that he was still thinking about that. Still feeling guilty. Based on the e-mail, it was something he had considered—something I guess both my parents had considered—as the reason for all those miscarriages between Paige and me.”
“Your dad’s sweet.”
“He is. I’m worried about him.”
“And I’m worried about you. There’s something else going on inside you, I get it. You’re not ready to come back to school now. I understand. But you will be ready in three or four months, I’m telling you that. And you need to plan for that eventuality now.”
I nodded. “That makes sense.”
“Thank you. So, you’ll talk to the college?”
“I guess.”
“You guess,” she said. She sounded a little disappointed in me. “So, what are your exciting plans this week? Anything special?”
I almost confided that I was seeing a detective with ash-blond hair and hazel eyes twelve years my senior for lunch that day. But I stopped myself. Instead I said, “I’m going to vacuum. I’ll go to the supermarket. You know, push a shopping cart with a crappy wheel that makes it slide into the shelves of potato chips. I’ll buy lots of food with high-fructose corn syrup. I’ll be a homemaker.”
“This will pass, Lianna Ahlberg. I mean that: this nightmare will pass.”
When I said good-bye, I thought of the word nightmare. An expression came to me: it was like a dream, but it was real. I couldn’t recall who had said that and wondered if it was also something I had read in one of my father’s poems. It was, I decided, an eerily apt summation for my life.
IT’S SO OBVIOUS a distinction, it’s often overlooked: your eyes are open. But when you’re dreaming—at least in the traditional sense, deep in a REM world without natural laws—your eyes are closed. And yet the wide-eyed sleepwalker is sometimes acting out a desire. Bringing to life something a bit like a dream. Instead of thrashing about in your bed, you’re moving about in the world. And there is the problem. The big problem. You are bringing those desires or dreams to bear on a world that has laws—natural and otherwise.
And so sleepwalkers worry and fret, because we know what we dream. We know what we desire. And there always are consequences. The depth of our amnesia varies—some of us, in truth, know almost nothing—but we still know just enough to be scared.
Yes, our eyes are open. But only we know what we see.
CHAPTER SIX
THE NEWSPAPERS WITH their stories of my mother from those first days were still strewn on the far side of the living room. We couldn’t throw them away, but we couldn’t recycle them either. They sat like swatches of carpets for a makeover we had chosen to abort. When I finally picked them up, squaring their edges and piling them together, most of the ink that remained on my fingers was from photographs of my beautiful mother. I carried them up to the attic and placed them on top of the carton that held my kid sister’s old Barbie dolls. Neither my father nor Paige ever remarked upon the fact they were gone.
Tattered gray clouds blanketed the mountains to the east, and it was deep enough into September that the sun was too weak to burn them off. The autumnal equinox was later that week. If I weren’t going to Burlington, I thought I might have started the first fire of the season in the woodstove in the den. I wondered if it would rain. We needed rain so badly.