Norma
WHEN I WAS YOUNG, MAYBE FOUR OR FIVE YEARS OLD, I used to have these
dreams. One was full of light and the other dark. It wasn’t until I was in my fifties, and Mother was losing her mind, that I realized that they were one and the same. In the first, I was in the back seat of a car as the sunlight burst through the trees that lined the road. The light glinted off the car window and I squinted. I lifted my face to the sun, and it felt warm and good. My hair, normally in a tight braid down my back to keep the ticks out, was tickling my nose. I kept reaching up with my tiny hands, dirt crusted under the nails, to push the hair away. For some reason, one shoe was on my foot and the other lay on the floor in front of me. The car was moving fast and smelled of soap and new leather. There was no air conditioning, so my skinny brown legs stuck to the seat, and the sweat made little oval wet spots where my upper legs met the leather. I lifted my tattered dress and tried to tuck it under. Mother would be annoyed if I sweated on someone else’s car seat. I was blinking away the stars that came from looking at the sun for too long, when she spoke to me from the front seat. I turned to see the face of a woman who wasn’t my mother but had my mother’s face. And then I woke up.
In my dark dream, the sky was black except for the blue halo around the moon. Light refracting, I learned later in life. The moon was bright, and the halo was so blue that my eyes couldn’t fix on any one star. Everything around it was absorbed into the light. There were a few wispy clouds but it wouldn’t rain. I didn’t know how I knew this, but I did. “These are not rain clouds,” a familiar voice told me. I could see a fire burning not too far from where my feet were planted on the ground. The grass was cool and wet with nighttime. The moon brought chills and damp feet. People were gathered
around a fire, and a woman turned toward me, nodded, and turned back to the flames, casting herself in shadow. I had to pee.
I could hear barred owls calling to one another and the faraway howl of a coyote, but they didn’t scare me. They do now, when I’m out at the cottage that Mark and I rented when we were married. When I’m alone and the coyotes start howling, it takes every bit of courage I have not to get in the car and make my way back to Boston. The only thing that keeps me inside sometimes is the thought that a coyote might get me in the mad dash from the cabin to the car. Age brings all sorts of fears. But in that childhood dream, the night creatures didn’t frighten me.
In the dream, I stood, blending into the night. I heard a laugh and I knew it was my brother’s, which is strange since I am an only child. I shivered, and the lady by the fire turned again. She was looking for me, gesturing, waving me toward the circle of people. I wonder why she stayed hidden in the dark. I know how she smelled and the sound of her voice. I can feel her hands, worn from years of mothering, comfort me in a thunderstorm. Her face was a mystery, and it remained so until a few short weeks ago. She was always a silhouette with no colour in her eyes, no pink in her lips and no crow’s feet to mark the passage of time. She only existed in the night. Each time I woke, I grieved for the woman cloaked in darkness and I tried to call out to her. I knew her, but when I tried to say her name, my tongue stuck to the bottom of my mouth and my mind forgot. I could feel the vibration in my throat, but no sound came out. I was so filled with sadness that the tears started before I could even open my eyes.
Sometimes the sadness manifested itself as fright. I don’t remember all of the circumstances, but I remember understanding—not just thinking but truly understanding—that my house was not my house. Nothing was where it was supposed to be. No one was who they were supposed to be.
“We moved, sweetheart. You’re just remembering the old house. That’s all.” She always had a way of making me feel silly for saying these things. Silly when I was young, but guilty the older I got.
And when I wanted to talk about the woman, when I would start to remember her face, her features, the texture of her hair, there was another reasonable explanation.
“I went away to take care of your aunt June for a few weeks, remember? After her surgery.” A surgery that was never actually explained to me and one that, I learned later in life, was a complete fabrication.
“You’re confused. You’re thinking of your father’s cousin who came to stay with you.”
I think I’ve always known that something was out of place. But when I was young, I understood it was me. Then I quickly forgot why. And the dreams persisted.
I tried to talk to Father about my dreams, and although he always had a perfectly reasonable explanation, I could never put the dream away. I couldn’t fold it up and put it in the back of a drawer to be forgotten.
“Norma, sweetheart.” He sighed. “It’s probably one of the visitors who come to our church in the summer. Someone who was kind to you once.” He picked at his fingers when we talked about this, tearing little bits of skin off the corner where the nail met the thumb. Sometimes he put his thumb in his mouth to stop the bleeding. When I talked about my dreams, he’d have bandages on his thumbs for a week afterward.
“Dreams often don’t make sense, Norma. I was once a sea horse in a dream. It doesn’t mean that I am one,” Father told me when I started to describe the woman by the fire.
“But she’s so real,” I told him. In those first few minutes after waking, everything was so clear to me. I could smell the campfire and the potatoes cooking. I grieved with each breath as the smells faded. And then I cried, not just from the corners of my eyes but from the bottom of my torso, from deep in my belly.
When the loud crying started, Mother would rush into my bedroom, stopping to turn on the little Noah’s ark ceramic lamp with elephants and ducks lined up in pairs. The click from the string that lit the little Biblical lamp was my first real memory, aside from the dream. And I could see the lamp cast light across a small bed covered with stuffed animals and a handmade quilt in shades of pink, with lace ruffles all along the bottom. To this day, the light from a lamp, when it’s the only source of light, can take me back to that room, to the smell of sweat and urine soaking through my pink cotton-candy sheets. I still have that lamp somewhere in storage, or maybe it’s at the cottage. The quilt is long gone.
“It’s just a dream, my sweet girl, nothing but a dream. Mother’s got you now. Hush there, Norma, it’s just a dream, only a dream. It’s just a dream. It’s nothing more than a silly dream. Only a dream.” Her voice was softer at night than it was in the daylight. She held on to me tightly as she rocked me back and forth, humming Sunday hymns. The clock in the hall clicked until
the little wooden bird peeked out to tweet three times, and still Mother sat and rocked me. She held on until my tears dried and the shadows crept down the wall and disappeared into the grey of morning. Sometimes, when the crying wouldn’t stop right away, she would make a little bed on the floor using all the extra pillows from the closet at the end of the hall. A few times she steamed milk with a drop of vanilla and let me drink it out of a teacup painted with blue flowers—one I wasn’t allowed to touch in the daytime. The milk still thick in my mouth, I’d fall back asleep, my mother curled up beside me. I loved the feeling of her arm draped across me, her hand holding mine until it became limp with sleep. When I woke in the morning, she would be gone, back to the bed she shared with Father, but her smell lingered on the pillow beside me. My early childhood was defined by scent. Campfire and boiling potatoes at night, and Ivory soap and whiskey she didn’t think I knew about in the morning.
“Maybe we should take her to see someone? A minister maybe?” Mother spoke in hushed tones, her lips barely moving, as if she carried a secret on her tongue and feared that if she spoke too loudly, it would come flying out. This time the dark dream had been intensely vivid. The dark was blacker, the moon was brighter, but the voices were further away. This scared me. And I could see from the dark circles under her eyes and the way she scrubbed the clean pots that it scared my mother, too. She eyed me from behind the counter and watched to see if I was listening.
On the days after my dreams, I wasn’t permitted to be alone. So, I sat on the floor in the living room, bending my head and straining to hear them. I sat where I could best see them, and when Mother spied me, she lowered her voice. I had a stack of junior readers and my baby doll in front of me. I was nine. I was too old for the baby doll, but Mother felt better when I had it with me. When she watched me, I cradled it, dressed it and undressed it, and pretended to feed it. I combed its yellow nylon hair and bended and moulded it into braids. Then I whispered motherly things into its tiny plastic ears. But when Mother wasn’t looking, I set it aside and searched for books, a puzzle or anything more interesting for a girl of nine. When I didn’t have the doll, Mother would always find it, sit it beside me and watch until I picked it up and cradled it.
“She’s a child, Lenore. She has bad dreams. She’ll be fine. We don’t need a minister. She’ll grow out of it. She’ll forget, I promise.” Father sipped his coffee and returned to his newspaper. It was a Saturday morning,
and he was dressed like he was going to court, his greying hair slicked back and his moustache neatly combed. He wore a white dress shirt and a tie, just in case we went out anywhere. He took the tie off in the summer when he mowed the lawn and in the winter when he shovelled the driveway. Mother said that people trusted judges to make the right decisions, as long as they were neat and tidy. Cleanliness was Mother’s answer to most problems.
“It’s more than a dream. And you know what I mean. And don’t pretend you don’t.”
He glanced at me through the doorway that separated the living room and kitchen. I turned away quickly and pretended not to see them talking about me. He returned to his newspaper and Mother stormed off, as much as she could storm in the thick heels she wore, even in the house. She found another room and a random, unnecessary chore.
When I was much older, and the dreams were a dim memory, Mother devised a new theory, one she maintained until the disease started to eat away at her brain. She said that the dreams were nothing more than the result of too much sugar before bed. Which was odd since sugar was heavily rationed in our house out of concern for my teeth. I gave her the same cross look my father had, and she turned away to refold the tea towels sitting on the countertop or refill the already full salt shaker. But eventually I stopped talking about the dreams. I had to. I didn’t stop having them; I just stopped talking about them, to Mother at least. The last time I brought up the car or the mother in my dream, she broke a heavy glass tumbler. She slammed it down on the counter so hard, it broke into three big pieces, cutting the soft part of her palm just below her thumb. Five stitches. That was the last time. I felt the weight of guilt sitting squarely on my shoulders, and each time the feeling began to fade, she sensed it, turned her hand toward me and showed me the scar.
If my mother did anything exceptionally well, it was guilt. Guilt and the cleaning that came with it. I dreamed and she cleaned, and when she cleaned, I felt heavy. While Father was at work and I was at school, she busied herself with chores, the same chores she’d done the day before and the day before that. “Just in case someone stops by unannounced,” she said. But I don’t remember anyone except Mother’s sister, my aunt June, coming to visit. Yet, the dust didn’t even have time to settle before she captured it in dust cloths or the vacuum. And on the rare occasion when the Ladies’ Auxiliary from the church came asking for donations, Mother met them at
the door, as they craned their necks to see inside. She’d have her pocketbook in hand or a tray of cupcakes ready for the bake sale. The women never got beyond the front stoop. They tried, but not one of them succeeded. Years later, I learned of the stories people told about my house
—piles of newspapers stacked taller than my father, and a dead relative mummified in the basement. Although that last one, I believe, I heard in grade school from a freckled boy named Randall, who smelled bad and was liked by no one. Only in the seventh grade did I learn that my mother was small-town famous as the judge’s peculiar wife on Maple Street. And I, by association, the peculiar daughter.
“She’s just vigilant, that’s all,” was Aunt June’s answer. “She likes to know where everything and everyone is. It keeps her mind calm.” Aunt June was the only person who could make sense of Mother, and she tried her best to help me make sense of her, too.
“She wasn’t always this way, Poopkin. When she was a kid, you couldn’t shut her up if you wanted to. I swear you could hear that girl in Timbuktu. And she was happy, happy as a pig in shit,” Aunt June said before her face went all serious. “It wasn’t until after those dead babies that she became all quiet and creepy. It’s hard on a woman. Then she had one, fully formed, but the poor thing had no air in its little lungs. It was a girl, you know.” She stopped to take a breath. “But then you came along, and it helped. She’s just scared she’s going to lose you. That’s all. Nothing more, nothing less. That has to count for something, a love that big.”
I nodded and licked the ice cream Aunt June had bought me before she caught the train back to Boston. Chocolate soft serve with vanilla on the top and strawberry in the middle, smooth and cold on my tongue. Father was waiting in the car and Mother had needed to use the facilities, so it was just Aunt June and me, waiting for the train.
“You remember that, now. Remember she does everything she does out of love. Misguided maybe, but full up to the top with love. You remember that, Poopkin.” She made me shake on it.
I don’t think anyone remembers when they started to make sense of the world. I can’t remember the first time I empathized with anyone, or the first time I noticed an adult and classified them as normal or odd, friendly or dangerous. I don’t remember the first time I cried at a movie because I felt broken-hearted for someone, or the first time I turned red with embarrassment at someone else’s blunder. But I do remember the day I first
understood difference. And I don’t mean the difference between homemade chocolate chip cookies and store-bought. I’m talking about real difference.
I must have been nine, because I was nine when I started talking to Alice, and I remember the two events being close together. Anyway, when I was nine, we went to the beach. The beach was the only place on earth where Mother looked at peace. I swear that her skin loosened, her back muscles let go just a bit, and the corners of her mouth turned up more than they turned down. At the beach I could see a little bit of the person Aunt June knew so well. If there wasn’t a picture, I might think that my memory was tricking me, the sneaky way memory does sometimes. A picture, in black and white, of my mother in a swimsuit, jumping over a wave, her hands reaching for the sun, her hair a mess of light, framing her head like a halo. When Father died, I stole the photo from his bedside table.
That day, we walked along the beach collecting broken seashells. I was disappointed that I couldn’t find the kind that you could hold up to your ear and hear the sea.
Father scolded me when I pouted about it. “Norma, don’t be foolish.
You don’t need a shell when the ocean is just feet away.”
I grumbled as I built a sandcastle with a little blue bucket with a white handle, which Mother had bought for me at the department store. I loved that blue bucket. When I left it in the driveway and Father backed over it, crushing it to pieces, I cried. But that day at the beach, it still had the shine of new plastic on it.
I looked up from my misshapen pile of beach sand and watched the white bodies burned red by the sun file past. Some stopped to admire my castle, although it bore no resemblance to a castle at all. Some people ignored me altogether. Mother sat out in the sun, her chin pointed to the sky, and Father drank a beer and read a book under an umbrella that kept falling over. I looked down at my own hand, made dark by the summer, littered with tiny grains of sand and even darker freckles. The skin was smooth, and the nails formed tiny crescent moons, which Mother had filed to the perfect length and shape just the day before.
“Why am I so brown?” I stood at my mother’s feet, her arm slung over her eyes. “You guys are so white and I’m so brown.”
Mother sat up, casting a wary glance at Father, who placed his book on his knee, split down the middle, where he’d stopped reading. “Your great-
grandfather was Italian,” he said with such authority that it left no room for questioning. “You have his skin tone, and it comes out in the sun.”
I had no reason not to believe him. I turned back to my lump of sand. “Can I see a picture when we go home?”
“No, they were all burned in the fire.”
That fire, which happened when I was too young to remember it, took a lot with it, including every picture of me before the age of five, and now the picture of the only person in my family who might look like me. I cursed the fire and went back to my castle.
A few weeks later, after school started, I was playing in the backyard. The bugs weren’t biting yet, so it must have been afternoon. The sun was hot on the back of my neck. I had on my outdoor clothes—older clothes that I had somehow ruined with stains or the act of growing. The arm cuffs nearly reached my elbows, and the jacket was tight across my chest and belly. I was digging in the yard, the dirt dark and cool, preparing to bury a dead June bug, a large one, the wings hard and shiny in the sun, even in death. I felt sorry that our porch light had caused it to knock its head against the window and die. I was pulling a worm out of the little hole I was digging with a large silver spoon from the kitchen, when the phone rang. Mother set down her book and looked inside, looked at me and back inside again as it rang for the third time. Finally, she got up and went indoors, leaving me alone with the spoon and the dead bug. She hadn’t been gone long when I heard voices out front, children’s voices yelling at one another. I was never permitted to go bike riding like the other kids in the evenings. I could ride my bike up and down the driveway under the careful supervision of my father, but I wasn’t allowed to go play baseball at the overgrown field a couple streets away. “Absolutely not. Ruffians and insects. And parents who don’t seem to care what happens to their children,” was the answer I got when I asked to go. I was confined to my yard, and with the exception of the bike riding, to the backyard. But something about the voices that day drew me out front. I got to the edge of the lawn as a few kids I recognized from school rode by on their bikes. A few waved and called out my name in greeting. I waved back, but just as they were disappearing around a small stand of trees on the corner, I was pulled back with such force I was sure my arm was going to come clean off my body. I stumbled but kept upright while Mother dragged me up the stoop and in through the front door. The
curtains were closed, as they always were, and I had to blink to adjust to the dimness.
“Do not, I repeat, do not ever do that to me again.” She was breathing heavily and sweat was forming on her upper lip. “Someone could have taken you. Do you understand? Do you?” I nodded. “What would we do if someone had just snatched you off the lawn and taken you away? After all we’ve been through, what would I do?” Her fingers were digging into the soft flesh of my upper arm, and I was trying not to squirm, but it hurt. The next day, I found five bruises, each in the shape of a cherry.
“I’m sorry, Mother. I didn’t mean it, I promise,” I whispered, remembering my handshake with Aunt June.
She paused her rebuke to pull the lace drapes open and look out onto the empty road. Satisfied that no one was there, ready to snatch me from the front lawn, she sat beside me, wrapped her arms around my head, and rocked me back and forth like she did when I had my dreams. I met her hug with stiff muscles and looked out the window as she pulled me even closer. She spoke to me in softer tones now, her anger filtered out into the world through clenched teeth.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry, Norma, sweetheart. Mother is sorry.”
That night, as my parents sat at the small table in the kitchen, sharing a bottle of whiskey that they had given up trying to hide from me, their conversation was so strained and their voices so low that I gave up trying to hear from my perch in the hallway and went to bed. It was years before I went out to the front lawn again, and I never did get to bury the poor June bug. For all I know, it was carried away by the neighbours’ mangy cat, Orangie.
A few weeks later, when I was supposed to be in my room memorizing multiplication tables, I heard them talking about me. Mother was sipping a mint julep, a cocktail she’d recently discovered and thought was the epitome of grace and class, but that my aunt June called racist and pretentious. Aunt June drank wine from California. She had faith, she told me, that the winemakers on the West Coast would eventually get it right. She and Mother argued a lot and hugged almost as much. Their relationship was always confusing yet somehow comforting.
Mother was refusing Aunt June’s suggestion that I see a therapist. “Hippie medicine,” she called it, and Father didn’t disagree. Only Aunt
June took up my cause.
Mother said, “But June—”
“No ‘but June’ this time.” Aunt June took a sip of her wine, and Mother turned away from her.
“But June, what if they dig out her life before, dig it out of her memory?” Mother said, hushed and looking toward the doorway that led to the living room. She and Aunt June sat at the dining room table. I was supposed to be watching Romper Room, but I didn’t care who the lady could see through the little mirror. Whenever I knew talk of me was happening somewhere else in the house, I’d sneak behind curtains or hide behind doors and listen.
“Alice says that kids don’t even start to form actual memories until they are five or six. You can just keep telling her that she’s dreaming.” Aunt June took a long drink from her glass, the condensation glazing the crystal, hazy and muted.
“She’s nine, June.”
“She was four, maybe five, when it happened? We’ll never be sure exactly. She told us she was four, but kids can get confused. Memories don’t form yet. Follow along.” Aunt June reached over as Mother filled her glass. I thought they were talking about the fire that took away all the concrete memories of the past. I remember the smell of pot roast that day. It was early September, and we never cooked a roast that early. Pot roast was for the cold days when the wind howled and the snow fell. I remember Mother nodding and children laughing on the television in the background.
“Let Alice talk to her. It might set your mind at ease.”
Mother shook her head and pursed her lips against the mint she accidently let into her mouth. “I don’t think so. My God, June, sometimes I wonder if you have any sense at all. Someone like her? Really, June?”
“Someone like her?”
“You know what I mean.”
Aunt June looked weary but kept going. “Stop being you and think of Norma for once.”
“She’s all I think about.” “Then let Alice talk to her.”
A few weeks later, I talked with Alice for the first time. I had met her before but never at her house, and I’d never talked to her the way I did that day and many days to come. She’d always just been Aunt June’s friend,
who was sweet and nice to me. That day, though, I decided that I loved Alice. She was the first adult who spoke to me like I was a person and not a china doll about to shatter. And she always smelled of peppermint. To this day, when I smell one of those round pink peppermints, I see her face.
“Well, hello, Norma.” She knelt so her face was directly in front of mine. “I’ve heard from your aunt June that you’ve been having bad dreams.” She looked up at Aunt June and smiled. “Do you want to come in and talk with me about them?”
I nodded and she stood, took my hand and led me into a living room unlike any I’d ever seen before. She lived in a brownstone with windows that took up the whole wall, and best of all, the curtains opened to a view of the gardens across the road, all greens and sky-blue peeking through the trees. Mother and Aunt June went into the kitchen to have tea.
Alice offered me a chocolate, but it was bitter and not sweet. I shrivelled up my nose but swallowed it down anyway. Mother would be cross if she found out I wasn’t polite.
“Make yourself comfortable, Norma.” She gestured toward the couch. A baby doll was leaning against the arm. “Your mom tells me that you love baby dolls.”
I picked it up and set it aside. “Not really. I’m too old for that now.” “I see. I guess I’ll just put that away, then.”
“And it’s mother.” “Mother?”
“Yes. She says mom is pedestrian.”
“That’s a big word for . . .” She stopped and sat down opposite the couch in a chair I didn’t think looked very comfortable.
I sat down, too.
“So, you have dreams.” “Yes.”
She waited and I waited.
“Would you like to tell me about them?”
“I tell Ruthie about them, but they’re just dreams. Everyone has them.” “You’re right. Everyone does have them, but your mom—mother
worries that yours are scarier than most. And who is Ruthie?” She leaned forward, her elbows resting on her knees. A small cat, orange, grey and white with a black nose, crawled out from under the chair and slinked
toward me, veering off down the hall before I had the chance to pick it up and pet it.
“Ruthie’s my friend. Mother says she is imaginary. I barely remember the dreams anymore. They’re all faded now. I can’t talk about them anyway. They give Mother headaches.”
“Do you think that they are real, these dreams?”
I turned my head at the sound of a cough coming from the kitchen. “Don’t worry, Norma, they can’t hear us.”
“How do you know my aunt June?”
“Your aunt June and I are very good friends, and we have been for a very long time. Longer than since you were born, I believe.” She leaned back in her chair and folded her legs at the ankles. “Now, back to those dreams.”
“I think my mom—mother is in the dreams, but she’s not. It’s someone else. And I have a brother. But I don’t have a brother. Because of all the dead babies.”
She looked surprised. “All the dead babies?”
“The ones from Mother’s belly. I was the only one not to die.”
Alice sat back in her chair, and I felt like I’d said something I shouldn’t have. I waited for Mother to come down the hall, take me under her arm and lift me off the couch, out the door and back to the train. I could feel the tender skin under my arms turning black under her tight fingers, but she didn’t come down the hall, and I stopped massaging my imaginary bruises.
“That’s a lot of responsibility on you, don’t you think, Norma?”
“I don’t know what you mean. I’m nine. Almost ten, though. I have to make my bed in the morning and take the garbage out on Tuesdays.”
She smiled at me.
“I mean, it’s not your fault those babies died. And it’s not your responsibility to make sure your mother forgets about the dead babies. Your only job right now is to be a little girl.” She scrunched up her nose in a conspiratorial smile. “Maybe one that doesn’t play with baby dolls anymore, but a little girl.”
“Maybe.”
“How about I give you something to do more suited to your age? No baby dolls.” She smiled. “Would you like that?”
“Okay.”
Alice walked over to a small desk in the corner and pulled out a notebook, one with tiny pink and blue flowers on the cover.
“I would like you to keep a journal. All those things that you would like to talk about with your mother but maybe feel nervous about. Or anything at all. When you feel like writing, just write. And if you want to talk about one of the things you write about, we can do that. But this is your journal, just for you.” Alice opened it and wrote her phone number on the inside cover. “If you ever want to talk about any of the things you write down, you can call me. How’s that sound?”
“Good.” I took the notebook from her hand and placed it inside the hand-me-down purse Mother let me use.
“One rule: no talking of babies, the lost ones or the toy ones.” Alice winked at me, and I smiled. A full smile.
I can’t be sure since I’m older now and my memory isn’t as strong as it used to be, but I think that was the first time in my young life that I didn’t feel guilt—in those moments between looking out through the tall windows in Alice’s apartment and when we sat down in our seats on the train back to Maine. Aunt June waved from the platform as we pulled away. Mother put her arm around me, her scarred hand turned toward my face, and whispered, “My precious little baby.” And the guilt washed over me again.
I don’t think I changed much after meeting with Alice, except that one day, while Mother read her book in the lounge chair on the back deck, under a rusted autumn sun, I buried the baby doll under her white and purple rhododendrons. She found it years later, when she dug it up while planting her Japanese maple, and nearly had a stroke.
For a few painful months, we tried to navigate this new Norma. I didn’t talk about the dreams anymore, and when I did have them, I didn’t cry. I wrote about them instead. And I didn’t tell Mother about them—about my dream mother, about my ghost brother. In the margins, I sketched stars and crescent moons and the crude figure of a doll. Father never asked about the dreams, and the skin at the corner of his thumbnail healed nicely. And eventually, the dreams faded too, stored away somewhere in the very back of my mind. By the time I woke one morning to blood on the bedsheets and terror in my heart, because Mother had never told me about this and I was convinced I was dying, I couldn’t even tell Alice about the dreams anymore. The light and dark had faded into an unrecognizable grey. The dreams were a mystery to me until Mother’s mind started to fail her, and
those things stored in the deep dark of her conscience leapt out and started to flail about like fish on the lakeshore. And then those dreams came back to me and started to mean something.
