Some Dreams

For a while, after her son died, she could still distinguish between dreams and reality. Dreams varied. Some included a central task, like the dream where she misplaced him at a party. She searched room after room, some familiar and some not, parting the cigarette smoke with her hands and asking revelers if they’d seen him. He’s got big auburn curls and a limp. He’s only two, she said. Some dreams sucked her back in time, like the one where she and a long-lost friend from middle school resolved an elusive conflict. She didn’t know why they had drifted apart. She didn’t know why this one friendship kept haunting her, why the electrical signals created more than twenty years ago fired again and again while she slept. Some dreams revealed an unmet need, an aching desire to find a place to pleasure herself or a person to find pleasure with. The point is, dreams varied. But since he died, her reality was always the same. Reality always included a deep well of pain, a tether to the physical, a reminder of his absence.

Then the pain morphed. It liquified and flowed into every part of her, becoming the song of blood flowing through her veins. She inhaled and exhaled the pain. It prevented sleep from finding her. She’d lie in bed, squirming, itching, sighing, aching for the release of unconsciousness, but the pain wouldn’t allow it. It called to her, harassed her with images of him, warped her memories, whispered that it was her fault he got sick and died. As sleep became unreachable, as her life became one endless day, she could no longer distinguish between dreams and reality.

Sometimes, she missed her dream world more than her son. She yearned for adventure, a mystery, a task, a monster she could run from or fly from or succumb to or fight. Mostly, she longed for a moment of peace, a moment when the pain ceased its endless tormenting.

Without sleep, she began to lose time. She’d forget appointments. She’d forget to feed her daughters lunch. On what she could have sworn was her 34th birthday, her husband brought out a cake with 35 candles. When she realized her error, she refused to blow them out. How did she not remember turning 34? Being 34? She sobbed and slammed her fists on the kitchen table. Her daughters jumped, their faces filled with terror.

Her memories of him were slipping away, too, drowned in the ubiquitous pain of his loss. Until the day Grandma got sick.

Marlys wasn’t a typical grandma. Most grandmas she knew hardened with age; Marlys softened. Before her son was born, Grandma was the love of her life, the only person whose love didn’t depend on performance. One of her earliest memories was Grandma picking her up from daycare for a special adventure. They drove to a castle filled with holiday decorations and lustrous, fragile knickknacks. While walking hand-in-hand admiring the twinkling palace, an older gentleman stopped them and complimented her brown eyes. She let go of Grandma's hand and corrected the man, telling him her eyes were, in fact, hazel, not brown. He seemed surprised and laughed uncomfortably. He called her precocious. She looked up to Grandma, expecting a face filled with disappointment or directives to apologize but found Grandma gazing down at her with unending pride and love. The gaze felt like a hug.

One of her most recent memories was borrowing Grandma’s slate grey Camry. After adjusting the driver’s seat, she couldn’t resist snooping through Grandma’s things. She read a few post-it notes with little reminders scrawled in Grandma’s graceful, tiny cursive. She pushed eject on the CD player and found a disc titled Treasury of Catholic Devotions. She found a silver tube of lipstick in the cupholder, and, though she never wore lipstick, she angled the rearview mirror, applied it, and then slipped it into her pocket. She opened the glove compartment and found a picture of herself at her college graduation. The shot was candid, her smile genuine. Though Grandma didn’t take the picture, she knew it was Grandma’s gaze, Grandma’s perspective the photographer captured.

The news came in a text message: Grandma’s in the ER. They can’t get her heart rate under control. She grabbed her down jacket, quickly kissed her daughters and husband, and drove the thirty icy miles to the hospital, grateful it was a hospital that had never treated her son. Everyone was there: her siblings, her parents, her aunts, her uncles, her cousins. She marched to the center of the group, tearless and resolute, assuming a posture she’d perfected in the years her son had been sick. She felt alive again. She had a role to assume, a task. The family fed her information, but she sensed it was incomplete and filtered through fear. She needed to speak with Grandma’s doctors.

A few hours later, a shock from a defibrillator corrected Grandma’s irregular heartbeat, and a nurse announced she could see two visitors at a time. When it was her turn, she sat down next to Grandma, wearing her tearless, resolute face. She held her hand. She made her giggle a little. Then the doctor came in carrying a clipboard, Grandma’s chart. She had become adept at reading the subtle cues of hospital communication: the tone and pace the news is delivered in, the nurses’ emotional energy, the doctors’ facial expressions. Grandma’s doctor was young, probably a resident, and lean with a boyish face and a side part in his thick dark hair. He read Grandma’s test results and couldn’t hide the surprise in his voice. The numbers on his chart didn’t match the state of his patient. She knew this wasn’t good news.

When she returned to the waiting room, the fear she’d sensed amongst her family members had dissipated. They seemed relieved. She did not feel relief. She felt the tug of the dark presence that followed her since her son got sick. She felt like a protagonist with a central task. She knew this wasn’t a good feeling.

She tried to tell the family about the doctor’s tone, his facial expression, the way the nurses avoided Grandma’s eyes when they took her blood pressure. Her uncle got angry and accused her of giving up on Grandma. Her mom assumed her son’s death had warped her sense of reality, making it so that she thought everyone was dying. Her aunt began to cry. Her grandpa abruptly left the hospital, citing exhaustion.

Grandma was admitted to the hospital a few hours later and moved upstairs. She walked alongside the gurney as the orderly wheeled Grandma to her new room, telling stories about her daughters, knowing that hearing about her great-granddaughters latest antics would elicit that look of unending pride and love. She watched her Grandma’s eyes crinkle at the edges and felt accomplished. She was doing the right thing, the thing she couldn’t do when her son was dying.

When they reached the upstairs room, Grandma greeted the nurse waiting there by name and made polite introductions. “Oh, you’re Sam’s mom,” the nurse said and, for the first time that day, she let a tear loose. The nurse who knew her son, who knew her, helped Grandma transition from the gurney to the hospital bed. She took her vitals and, though the nurse was better at concealing her reactions than the lanky resident, her expression reconfirmed Grandma’s fragile state. She decided to tell Grandma about the lipstick. After her confession, Grandma’s smile was genuine, and she told her to keep it.

On her drive home that night, the familiar ubiquitous pain returned. She found the house quiet, her daughters and husband already asleep. She peeked into her bedroom, and her husband sat up, yawning and rubbing his eyes but eager for the news. She told him about the lanky resident and his clipboard and the nurse who Grandma knew and how Grandpa left and her uncle had yelled. She asked him if she was jaded, had lost touch with reality, saw death everywhere. He said he trusted her judgment and held her tightly, but the pain kept his touch, his words at bay. She kissed his cheek and claimed she wasn’t tired, that she’d be back later.

The frigid air embraced her as she walked outside with the lipstick and a Parliament Light, numbing the pain enough for her to take an achy breath. A dense blanket of snow covered the trees that lined the backyard creating a deep cold silence. She pulled the silver tube out of her pocket and carefully applied the lipstick before lighting her cigarette. The plum-colored lip prints on the hard filter looked like art to her, as did the cloud of smoke she exhaled into the moonlit air. She followed the plume as it drifted up and away, towards the frosted pine trees, her eyes snagging on a color that didn’t belong. She squinted as if it would help her focus on the abnormality when, suddenly, it rotated, and two dark reflective lenses met her eyes. The barn owl lept from its perch, leaving a shower of snow in its wake. She watched, enraptured, as the owl circled the yard and landed on the railing directly in front of her.

She froze, too afraid to move, too stunned to breathe. Their eyes remained locked, and, for several minutes, the barn owl sat motionless, looking at her. For those moments, she did not think about the lanky resident or Grandma’s test results or her family’s reactions. She did not think about her son. She let the frigid night air and the owl’s gaze envelop her and, after a minute, an unfamiliar emotion bubbled up from her belly into her heart. The muscles of her jaw relaxed, her toes unclenched in her boots, the crease between her brows disappeared. Peace. It was peace she felt in the owl’s contemplative stare. The owl’s gaze felt like a hug.

That night she slept deeply. She had the dream where she misplaced Sam at a party. When she parted the cigarette smoke, she saw Grandma holding him. Grandma looked at her with unending pride and love. Sam waved, his auburn curls bouncing. Then, Grandma turned around and carried Sam back into the crowd, and she watched as they disappeared into the smoke.