In Dreams (2 page)

The room was black and steamy, kudzu hanging from trees. A swampy bayou with murky water, a strong oily smell. And I was pushing away vines from my face. My hair was in tangles. The vines stung me, scratching my cheeks and neck. I couldn’t really see. All of a sudden, roots began grabbing my legs, twirling and growing around them, and pulling me into the mud. They had sharp thorns, like pins pricking me. I screamed and tore at the vines until my fingers bled and I could escape. The whole time, I could hear him calling me. “Iris! Iris!” He sounded desperate.

And then I woke up. My dream is always of that corridor, of the doors and the ring of keys, and the world behind each door. But since I was thirteen or so, it has also been about that
voice
. I don’t know who calls me in my dreams. I just know it’s
him
—the same voice every time, even if it changes somehow. I know that doesn’t make sense. But sometimes he sounds as if he’s in pain. Sometimes he’s laughing and asking me to come find him. His voice is gravelly—almost a growl when he is upset. Soft like the wind through the oak tree outside my bedroom window when he is comforting me. I love his voice. Sometimes, I think I hear it in my head. Like the whisper of my heart’s desire. It is the voice of the person I know I am meant to be with. I just wish I knew to whom it belonged.

I glance at my alarm clock. Two
A.M.
Terrific. I have a trig exam tomorrow, and once again, I am the insomniac girl. My best friend, Annie, calls me that—says I am the girl who never sleeps. Lucky for me, she
drinks enough Diet Coke, Starbucks venti Caramel Macchiatos, and Red Bull that she’s also up most nights. We text and video-chat at crazy hours. And half the time she’s sleeping over here or me there. But even if we’re not under the same roof, I know I can call her if I am afraid after a nightmare.

But tonight, instead, I slip out of bed and listen at the door. I don’t hear a sound. Or rather I hear the sounds of a sleeping house, the slight rattle of our heater, the refrigerator motor, a couple of creaks. I open my bedroom door and peer down the hall. Grandpa’s bedroom is shut, no light streaming out from under the door. He’s usually on the computer till all hours, looking for a cure for my mother.

I tiptoe down to her room and open the door. The room is dark and cool, the blinds shut tight, curtains drawn, a small night-light in the corner. We play an iPod of her favorite classical music very, very softly. Claude Debussy’s
Nocturnes
. I hope it helps her dream peacefully. Her room smells of lavender—we keep a plant of it on her windowsill. Grandpa and I read somewhere that it is good for sleep.

My mother has Sleeping Beauty syndrome. Despite the fairy-tale name, it’s a real disorder. She sleeps for months on end, sometimes awake for only a few hours a week. Hers is the most severe case on record.
She sleeps the longest, the deepest, and the last few years has come back to the land of the awake for less and less time. Sometimes, we have to feed her through IVs because she doesn’t even wake to eat and starts wasting away. The doctors have scanned her brain so many times, always searching for something in the pictures that could explain it. But they have no explanation. It’s an orphan disease, meaning a disease so rare there is little funding to find a cure. Three years ago, my mother said she was tired of being poked and prodded. She doesn’t want to see any more doctors about it.

She looks so peaceful.

An antique bentwood rocking chair that belonged to my grandmother and her mother before her is next to the bed. Most nights, Grandpa and I take turns sitting in it, and we talk to my mom. Sometimes Grandpa dozes in it. Tonight I flick on the soft light on her dresser, which is also an antique and has a matching mirror. Then I sit down in the rocker and take her hand. Her fingers are long and elegant like a piano player’s. Tonight her hand is chilly.

“Hi, Mom,” I whisper. “I got an A-plus on my English paper, the one on Shakespeare. Which sort of makes up for the C in trig. Right? I think Annie’s going to sleep over this weekend. We’re going to
rent some movies. She’s going through a major Ryan Gosling phase. Even if we go to her house, Grandpa will be here with you. He said he’d call me if you wake up. . . . I’m thinking of cutting my hair.” I turn to look in the mirror. My hair is long and black and curly. And unruly. If I try to blow it out straight and flat-iron it, the process takes over an hour. So I mostly let it curl. It reaches the middle of my back, and I’ve always been afraid to cut it, worried I’ll look like a poodle. “Maybe not. Maybe I’ll just leave it. I know . . . I always leave it, right? Oh, Annie made the all-county soccer team. And tonight I had a bad dream.”

Her eyelids flutter, at what I guess is a flicker of a dream floating past.

“It’s the same dream, Mom. I wish I knew what it means.” Sometimes I feel as if I’m crazy. Sixteen years old, and I swear I’ve been having these dreams since forever. At least since I can remember dreaming. Who is the man I’m searching for? “I don’t get it. Why can’t I dream of flying or . . . I don’t know . . . Annie dreams her teeth fall out. I mean, why can’t I have normal dreams? Why can’t I sleep?”

She doesn’t answer. She never does. I stand and get her hairbrush, and I brush her hair, then splay it
across her pillow. It’s a rich chestnut color. She really does look like Sleeping Beauty.

“Good night, Mommy,” I whisper. I look at the picture of the two of us on her nightstand taken shortly after I was born. Taped to her dresser mirror is my second-grade school picture—the year I was missing my two front teeth—and another one of the two of us on top of the Empire State Building. I’ve never met my father. My mother said she was artificially inseminated. My grandfather once said it was “complicated.” All my life it’s just been me and her, and Grandpa.

I turn off the light and listen to her breathe. Then I leave and return to my bedroom, positive I will be up until the delicate fingers of pink dawn stretch across the sky.

I pull the sheets back to climb into bed, and push Puck over to one side.

“What the . . . ?”

Little specks of blood are flicked across my sheets like a Jackson Pollock painting—the guy who dripped paint. It’s only then that I look down at my ankles and see it—a raw, red mark on my right leg. In the shape of a vine, wrapped around my ankle. And little pinpricks of blood. Just like in my nightmare.

I sit down on my bed, and my teeth start to chatter. I tell myself this can’t be true. That there is some explanation. Some condition, some way that the impossible is possible. I look at my ankle again in the light. I am not imagining it.

My nightmare is
real
.

2

We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
THE TEMPEST

“
I
have the solution to your problem,” Annie says, flopping onto her bed. I haven’t told her about the blood or the mark on my ankle . . . because really? I’d sound so crazy.

“What? My trig grade? I just don’t understand Mr. Blake. He never
explains
anything. Whenever I ask a question, he just explains it the same exact way as the first time. Which, if I had understood, would mean I didn’t have a question. Or a C.”

“No, not Mr. Blake. Your insomnia. Your bad dreams.”

“Annie . . . come on. You know I’ve tried
everything
. Acupuncture, sleeping pills even—which didn’t work except to make me a zombie the next day. Lavender.
Some concoction from the health food store that Dr. Oz swears by. I’m telling you, nothing works. It’s hopeless.”

“What about hypnosis?”

“A hypnotist?”

“No. A
hypnotherapist
.”

“I don’t know. Sounds weird. Even for you.”

“Look at this article,” she says, shoving a magazine under my nose. “My mom showed it to me.”

Annie’s mom is one of those women who mothers the entire world. The Caseys have six kids of their own, including a set of four-year-old twin boys we call the Tiny Terrors. And there are always, it seems, a dozen kids over all the time—playing in the backyard, or sleeping over, or doing whatever. They have a big old Victorian-style house, and during the winter when the leaves are off the trees, you can even glimpse the Hudson River from Annie’s bedroom window.

I read the article in some women’s magazine—the kind at the supermarket checkout that promises “the secret to wash away belly fat” and “antiaging secrets.” The hypnotherapist quoted in the article is from a town in New Jersey not far from where we live in Nyack, New York.

“What if he hypnotizes me and, I don’t know, tells me to get naked or something?”

“It doesn’t work that way. Read the box there.” She points to the bottom of page 34.

I read it. It doesn’t
sound
as if he can hypnotize me to take off all my clothes. But still. “Maybe. I’ll think about it.”

Annie looks at me. “You’ve got to try something. You can’t go on forever like this. Maybe your subconscious is telling you something. Maybe that’s why you can’t sleep.”

“I don’t know. Like what?”

She shrugs. “My dad says he thinks it’s because you have a lot of responsibility. Way more than most kids our age. Your grandpa is getting way up there, and your mom—”

“Grandpa’s only seventy-seven.”

“I rest my case. Love your grandpa—and love, love,
love
his souvlaki—but he’s beyond ancient.”

“Oh come on, Annie. He beats the crap out of us in Texas hold ’em. His mind is still totally all there. He still lifts weights at the gym. I think he may even have a girlfriend.”

“Get out!”

I smile. “Yeah. I see them at the gym. There’s this
one woman. He always heads to the treadmill next to hers, and they talk the whole time. And she looks, like . . . I don’t know. Fifty. She can still rock leggings and a sports bra.”

“A younger babe. Good for Grandpa. But still, my dad says it’s too much stress for you. When was the last time your mom was even awake?”

“A week ago. She woke up for an hour or so. She drank about four of the chocolate protein shakes that we made her. We talked a little. Then she went back to sleep.”

“All right. Let’s go at this from a different angle.” Annie furrowed her brow. “What do you know about this mystery man in the dream?”

“Not much. I don’t know his name. Or what he looks like. I only know his voice. It’s the sexiest voice I’ve ever heard—and completely unique. And I know I’m meant to meet him. I have dreamed of him hundreds of times. Maybe thousands.”

“Maybe he’s your soul mate.”

“Maybe. I just want to see his face, Annie. I wish I could explain it. In my dreams, I
have
to find him—like it’s a matter of life or death.”

“Or love. Think of what Carl Jung would say!”

Annie and I have stacks of dream interpretation books and encyclopedias. It’s become sort of a
hobby. Like if you dream you’re flying, it’s supposed to mean you are in control of your life or a situation. And Carl Jung, who believed in dream symbols, said there was an archetype of soul mates. He said we each have a male part of us and a female part, and that sometimes there are “divine couples” who fit together perfectly. Some people search their whole lives for their other half. Then again, Carl Jung had an open marriage, so I’m not so sure he knew what he was talking about.