They say it gets easier over time. It had been six months without relief. Sometimes, a week or two went by and Eve didn't have the dream. She learned that this was a source of false hope. When it returned, it was worse than ever. Lately, the new thing was the way she could sense the dream coming on while she was almost still awake. It happened that night.
She lay in the bed she used to share with John and felt herself sinking. She could still hear the ticking of her grandfather's folding travel clock in the bathroom and the wind harassing the leaves on the porch, but at the same time she was paralyzed while staring at the ceiling. She couldn't have even moved a pinky if she'd wanted to.
Please, she thought to herself. No.
Despite all the begging, sleep came to her. In the dream, it was a summer evening. Eve stepped onto the three season porch and the boards groaned under her feet. The floor had deteriorated enough that it actually felt soft. Two adult sized bikes gathered dust on one side of the porch and right in front of her stood an old dresser stuffed with doorknobs and bits of shingle and other stuff like that. Eve didn't know where it all had come from; they rented the place. Hard bits of dog shit sat in the corners where the dresser was shoved against the screen windows.
Eve smiled. This wasn't a palace, but it was better than the flat they'd been renting. At least this was a house standing on its own. It was a crumbling storage unit for her land lady's forgotten trash where the neighbors set off fireworks on fucking Christmas day, but it was a house and she was glad to take it. Besides, certain things make all the difference.
She skipped down the three concrete steps in her bare feet and felt the ragged grass and the mushy crab apples. John stood under the tree with his plaid flannel back turned to her. He cradled an object swaddled in a blanket. And that's when Eve remembered that this wasn't real.
Please. No.
Eve begged John not to turn around. In her head, she was screaming. But he could no more hear her than she could wake herself or shake off the paralysis that kept her trapped in her bed. He started to turn. He saw her in the corner of his eye and grinned, the stubble on his chin changing color from light brown to blond as his face angled into the sunlight.
"Hi, Eve." he said. "Look who I have."
Please.
A sound awoke her. Eve shot up in her bed. Nothing. She went to the bathroom. There her grandfather's clock. It had a hard leather case hinged like a clam shell so that the brass clock face could slide out and prop the thing open. It ticked away and reminded her of that interval of her childhood when she'd lived with the old man. Her grandfather had been an itinerant preacher and they often stayed in motels. The two constant features were that clock and a photo of grandma he kept next to it.
In the picture, she was no more than thirty but leaned on a cane because childhood polio had shortened one of her legs. In another hand she held her ever present cigarette. Grandma had died of lung cancer years before that. As for Mom and Dad, Eve had no memory besides the time she found herself alone in the house. For the longest time it had been just her and her grandfather and whatever church they were going to that month. Eve wondered what had ever happened to that picture.
The sound came again. It was a sort of crashing sound. She ran out into the kitchen. Nothing. Then she checked the living room and even the three season porch and its dresser. All was quiet. But there was one room she'd avoided. Of course, there was no way she wouldn't have to go there. Eve held her breath and stepped over the threshold of her daughter's room. It was just as it had been for nearly a year now, a pristine collection of stuffed animals. Curtains with balloons. A changing table with one of those goddam Diaper Genies. And an empty crib.
Eve walked around the crib, trying to pretend it wasn't even there. She pulled aside one of the balloon filled curtains and peered into the darkness outside.
A figure stood in the yard beneath the crab apple tree. It was tall and thin and its face was white beneath the glow of streetlamps. He wasn't white like the pink skin people call white. He was white as soap. And his face was thin like the rest of his body, as though someone had pulled up on his head and stretched it into a long oval. The entire bottom half was a smile. It wasn't a grin. It wasn't sinister. Whatever the thing was, it was genuinely happy. Then the mouth opened.
"Eve."
She jumped. She'd heard the voice as though it had come form within the room, rather than out in the yard.
Then another crashing sound. She ran to the basement door and opened it and flung on the lights. What she saw was a very normal man standing over some boxes and slowly turning his face up to her with a cow like expression. The stubble on his chin looked almost gray in this light.
"John?" she said. "What the hell?"
"Sorry." he said. "I didn't want to wake you."
"Again - what the hell? It's the middle of the night."
"I guess I was hoping I could come in and get my stuff and leave without you noticing."
She knew that what he'd meant to say was that he'd hoped to avoid even acknowledging that she still existed. Eve wasn't mad at him. She would've let him come and get what he wanted. Hell, she wasn't sure if she needed anything right now besides a place to sleep and her grandfather's travel clock. That had been enough for her from the age of two until thirteen, so why not now? The answer, of course, was that grandpa was gone. A lot of people were gone.
"Come up here." she said. "I want to show you something."
He climbed up the stairs and she took him by the hand for the first time in six months, for the first time since that awful day in the hospital when everything had gone upside down. When he realized where she was going, he pulled away.
"What are you doing?" he said.
"Please, just look."
He came with her into the nursery and she pulled the curtain away. There was the tall skinny man with the oval face and that ridiculous, delirious smile.
"What?" said John.
She turned to him and shook her head.
"You don't see that?"
Eve turned back. It was gone. Then, back to John.
She screamed. The tall man was standing in the door to the nursery. Now she could see just how tall he really was. He would've touched the ceiling, if he hadn't been bending his head down to stare at her. She could feel that paralysis gripping her again. Nothing moved. She could even feel her toes or her fingertips.
John leaped to, but only because of Eve. The look on his face made it clear he hand't seen that. Oddly, he didn't get mad. He didn't call her crazy. He didn't ask her what the fuck was wrong with her. Instead, John grasped his stumble with his hand and rubbed his mouth and then ran shaky fingers through his hair. He knew all too well what the fuck was wrong with her and he wasn't going to beat any dead horses.
Still, the tall man was there. Still sporting that child like smile, it walked backwards and crouched down as it left the room. Eve ran to escape, but then fire jumped up through the doorway. It quickly branched out along the wall. John shouted. He definitely saw that. John rushed to the window and tried to work it but it wouldn't budge. He grabbed the Diaper Genie and threw it but it bounced.
As the room filled with smoke, John sent furious knuckles into the window. The glass began to smash and he kept going. He went at it like a boxer training with a sandbag. It wasn't just the panes he had to break apart, but the wooden grid that framed them. His fists grew bloodied and raw and he began coughing. At last, after a few seconds that felt like minutes, he broke apart the whole bottom half of the window.
"Go through!" he shouted at Eve.
"What?"
"Don't think about it!"
John grabbed her by the waist and pulled her towards the window. She could hear him hacking right next to her ears as he put her head out the window. Then he lifted her up and it went black. Somehow, she somersaulted through the hole and and landed in the yard on the unkempt grass. Eve brushed rotten crab apples and glass from her hair. She looked back. There was the window of her dead baby's room, full of smoke.
"John!" she shouted.
No response. Then a shadow appeared along the side of the house. A long, thin shadow. The tall man came creeping into the yard. Sirens cried in the distance.
Eve ran to the driveway. She climbed into the car and realized that of course she didn't have the keys. She fiddled around and found the spare keys and shoved them in the ignition and turned the damn thing and the engine came to life. She glanced one more time at the house as flames flew up all around it. And standing there in front of the inferno was the tall man. Eve guessed she'd rather have those neighbors with the fireworks about now.
She tore down the street as flashing lights came up behind her. One of them was a cop car. It must've noticed her peeling away because it gave chase with the sirens blaring. Eve pushed her bare foot against the pedal. This was insane. Really, out of all the insane things she'd lived through, this was the worst. And yet, she couldn't stop.
Why would she expect it to be different? She couldn't stop the dreams from happening. And she couldn't stop herself from going faster and faster down a suburban street as a cop car sped after her. Eve passed through the denser part of town and plunged into darkness. Summer fog enveloped her and that only made her feel more insane. Somewhere in the middle of those feelings, she felt kind of elated.
Maybe it was this. Maybe it was the feeling of escape. Maybe it was the sense that if she really drove fast enough, she'd go right off the edge of the earth and launch herself into space. She'd go far away, out into the vacuum where there were no sagging floorboards and no corners full of dogshit and no dreams of happy husbands holding happy babies.
Then that is just what happened. The car came free of the ground. For the briefest fraction of a second, she was weightless. And in that second, she looked in the mirror. Of course, there were the lights of the cop car, falling further and further behind. But also, there was that smiling face. There was, after all, no escape.
The car plunged into the water. It was cold for summertime.
What Eve remembered next was standing on the bank. She was soaking and shivering and it was daytime. She remarked to herself how the sunlight had that same quality she'd remembered when John had been holding the baby. She half expected to see him come out from the trees that stood a few feet downstream. Instead, what she saw was a tow truck hauling her car out of the water.
It should've shocked her to see her own body in the driver's seat, but it didn't. Maybe there was nothing much that could shock her now. Eve turned away from the scene and walked down the road, feeling hot pavement on her feet. It felt good. What did anything matter? So she was dead now. No more dreams. No more pain.
Then thought occurred to her that perhaps this is what she'd wanted all along. Perhaps somewhere out there, a confused child was looking for her mother. Eve remembered how confused she'd been when she'd woken up alone without her parents. At least her grandfather had come to rescue her. She wasn't going to let her child be alone. Eve lifted her shoulders, determined to find that little girl and feeling happier than she'd felt in longer than she could remember.
What she didn't see was the river behind her, where a tall man emerged from the water and followed in the same direction.
image courtesy of pixabay
