She keeps rubbing his arm. “What were you dreaming about?”
He is quiet for a moment. “The same dream I’ve been having all week. I’m in the tree house and a strange bird lands on a branch and talks to me.”
“It talks to you? What does it say?”
“Nothing, really. Nonsense.”
“You’ve been having the same dream every night?”
“More or less.”
“Anxiety, I guess,” Madeleine says.
“Probably.”
She turns the light off, and David is silent for the rest of the night. But she stays awake, watching the vibrations of stars through the skylight until they vanish into dawn. It is impractical to have a skylight in the bedroom, of course. Uncovered like this, it allows the morning light into the room—but Madeleine has not yet found an elegant shade for it.
When the alarm rings, David unfolds himself from bed and lurches into the bathroom, pale and dazed as if hungover. Still, he emerges showered and shaven, and in a white button-down shirt and pressed chinos he is an advertising executive again. He kisses Madeleine and goes out to catch the 7:09 to the city.
That afternoon, Madeleine shops for baby clothes and returns to find David lying on the couch with an arm over his face. She feels a primal rush of alarm, as if she has walked in on an intruder. She rests the shopping bag on the mirrored console table.
“What’s wrong?”
“Terrible headache,” he says drily. “It’s been happening a lot lately, but today I just couldn’t get through it.”
Madeleine sits on the edge of a cushion, puts a hand to his forehead.
“You never said anything about headaches. Why didn’t you say something?”
“It was just a headache before. Now it’s worse.”
“You’re warm. Did you take something?”
He blinks at her. “Of course. Nothing helps. It’s like an ache in my whole body. Even my scalp hurts.”
“You need to see a doctor.”
He closes his eyes again. “We don’t have a doctor here.”
“We’ll find one.”
“Just let me rest right now.”
She kisses his forehead and retreats. While she is upstairs arranging the baby clothes in dresser drawers, she hears the sound of the sliding glass door. Outside the nursery window, she sees David go over the grass toward the woods.
*
“I can’t help myself,” he says, when he comes to bed after midnight again. “It’s like the woods are calling me. The only time I feel all right is when I’m up in that ash tree. At work, I can’t sit near the computer. There’s no air in the building.”
“Honey, what’s going on? You never had this problem before,” Madeleine says.
He looks at her for a long moment, then asks quietly, “Do you remember the bird in my dreams?”
She nods.
“My mother used to talk about things like that. Dream visitors. I remember she used to have recurring dreams of a mountain lion. It was her guardian animal, she said. She used to ask me if I ever had animal friends in my dreams. I told her I didn’t know what she was talking about.” David smiles weakly. “I used to think she was crazy, or pretending to be eccentric. Once, she made a big papier-maché sculpture in the yard, a big yellow mountain lion. It was supposed to be a totem to her animal.”
Madeleine does not respond. The sky is clouded tonight, and there is no moon through the skylight, no stars. David’s face is just a shifting patchwork of shadows.
“Anyway, I’ve been thinking about that,” David continues. “I took some books out from the library, just for the heck of it. New Age stuff, about animal dreams and their meanings. There’s a lot out there.”
“I’m sure,” Madeleine says.
He props himself up on an elbow.
“Can I read you something?”
He turns on the bedside lamp, and Madeleine squeezes her eyes shut. She hears him slide out of bed. When he returns, he is holding a book with a cover illustration of a neon figure shooting laser beams from its fingers and toes. “This one has a whole section about physical symptoms like the ones I’ve been having.” David glances at her with flashing eyes. “Listen to this.”