Before I Wake

by Robert J. Wiersema

  Exaggeration aside, she did have a point. I had never really gotten into the music my friends liked when I was younger. My collection resembled that of a forty-year-old—a hip forty-year-old—not the twenty-year-old student I was.

  I slipped a Sinead O’Connor CD into the player, plugging in the headphones before pressing Play. This was one of the first CDs I had ever bought, when I began to make the transition to digital after Karen bought me a player for my thirtieth birthday.

  The sound was immediate and true, insinuating itself directly into the middle of my cranium, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change…”

  Good choice.

  I found myself thinking, for the first time in a very long time, about my guitar. It was a cheap little acoustic, but I had spent hours playing it as an undergrad, building calluses on my fingers, irritating Karen to no end with countless renditions of “Tangled Up in Blue.” I found my fingers unconsciously curling into chords, sliding along imagined strings with a beautiful, steely rasp as I listened to the CD. Why had I stopped playing? When was the last time I had even seen the guitar, which had once stood so proudly in the corner of our tiny, book-lined living room in its battered black case?

  I wished I had it now and could cradle the comforting, familiar weight of its body in my arms. Strange how things slip away.

  The album was almost an hour of betrayal, of loss, and aching strength, but also understanding, great sadness and acceptance. As I listened, I became inescapably, deeply aware of two truths, beyond words, beyond the capacity of rational thought, beyond any possibility of reconciliation.

  I was in love with Mary. This wasn’t the silly, midlife infatuation that everyone seemed to think it was. She pulled me out of my accustomed form in ways that I hadn’t thought possible. With her, I felt a sense of possibility, of potential, that I hadn’t felt in years.

  But that recognition was made almost unbearable by my second, simultaneous realization.

  I loved Karen. Still. After everything I had done, the problems we had and everything I had subjected her to, I loved her.

  I loved her, and I couldn’t stand myself for hurting her. I knew I was too far gone to ever go back, but I couldn’t bear to lose her.

  I couldn’t bear to lose her…

  The trouble was, these words were equally true of both Karen and Mary.

  I sat, in the silence of the headphones after the music ended, until the barest light of dawn began to touch the world outside the window.

  HENRY

  A cold hand fell on my shoulder. “Jesus Christ!” I yelped and jumped out of my chair, dropping my book, spinning to face…

  Tim, who grinned at my distress.

  “You scared the hell out of me,” I mumbled, trying to recover a little dignity.

  “I would have cleared my throat or something, but that seems like such a cliché.”

  I was pleased with myself. A month before I would have had no idea what a “cliché” was.

  He pulled out the chair next to mine and sat down, gesturing for me to do the same. Leaning over, he picked up the book I had dropped and studied the cover. “Tao Te Ching,” he muttered. “However did you end up at that?”

  I had to think for a moment. “Well, I started off with Salinger, which sent me to…”

  He waved my words away, as if he hadn’t really meant for me to answer. “What do you think of it?”

  “I don’t know if I really get it. I mean, I understand the words and everything, but they just don’t seem to pull together.”

  “That’s the thing with the Oriental philosophies,” he explained. “Zen, all the schools of Buddhism, Taoism…it all makes sense when someone else processes it for you, like Salinger. But when you go back to the sources,” he gestured at the book in my hand, “you realize how very foreign, how very different the cultural framework is. And that makes the ideas really difficult for the Western mind to wrap itself around. We don’t have a common vocabulary.”

  I nodded, mostly understanding him.

  “It’s good you’re prepared to tackle it, but you might want to try something a little closer to home. Some Western philosophy. The Bible, perhaps.”

  I felt a small surge of pride at the way he was talking to me.

  “Is it just the books that are keeping you down here?” he asked, his voice dropping a bit. “Or is it something else?”

  “What?” I asked, pretending not to understand.

  “We haven’t seen too much of you,” he said. “You seem to spend most of your time down here.”

  “Well, I’ve been…” I stammered, gesturing at the books piled on the table in front of me.

  How could I explain?

  I killed a little girl. Well, I didn’t kill her exactly: I put her into a coma that she’ll never wake up from. I tried to kill myself, but I can’t seem to die. There’s no way I deserve to be with other people.

  I couldn’t bring myself to say the words.

  “I guess I’m just a slow learner,” I said.

  He nodded. “You’ll find that a lot of us are. That’s why we’re here.”

  “Maybe in a little while.”

  “Whenever you’re ready. No pressure. No rush.” He rose to his feet, started to turn away, then changed his mind.

  “It’s not so bad, you know,” he said.

  “What?”

  “What you’ve done. Whatever you’ve done. Whatever you think is so bad that you shouldn’t be allowed to associate with people. It’s not as bad as you think.” His smile seemed more sad than happy. “It’s probably not nearly as bad as some.”

  Without waiting for me to answer, he disappeared into the shadows of the library, leaving me to puzzle over his words.

  MARY

  Something was going on.

  Simon had been preoccupied and secretive for days, as if there was something on his mind that he didn’t want to tell me about. And he was behaving strangely, changing plans at the last minute. Not visiting with Sherry. Not sleeping. One night, I woke up at about four and he wasn’t in bed. The bedroom door was closed, but I could see a splinter of light under it from the living room.

  I got up and opened the door, just a crack, to look out into the living room. He was sitting naked on the floor next to the stereo, leaning against the wall with his knees up to his chest. The headphones were over his ears, his eyes closed.

  I wanted to go to him, but thought somehow that I shouldn’t. I stood in the doorway for several minutes. Then I went back to bed, hugging his cold pillow against me.

  Just after five I woke up again. He had come into the bedroom, grabbed a pair of shorts and a shirt off the dresser, and ducked back out. A few minutes later, the front door clicked shut.

  What was going on?

  I stared at the white, textured ceiling. How had I ended up living with a man who had a wife and a daughter across town? I got up too and showered, mindlessly soaping, shampooing, rinsing, then got dressed and made myself a cup of coffee.

  If it had been something with Karen, or anything wrong with Sherry, he would have told me. Wouldn’t he? He hadn’t said anything. So what had I done?

  Goddamn this self-pitying crap.

  I just about called Brian. If anyone could cut through the BS and help me figure out what was going on, it was Brian. But I hadn’t spoken to him—to any of my friends—since Simon had moved in. How pathetic. Was I really turning into one of those women, the sort whose lives revolve around their men, their fucked-up relationships?

  A couple of mornings later, Sunday, I was sitting in the living room, coffee cup on the table in front of me, glancing through the New Sentinel, when the doorknob rattled and he came in. He was wet from another solitary run, his shirt plastered to his body, his face red, his breath harsh. I wondered how far he’d gone, how hard he’d pushed himself without me.

  I wondered how much I held him back.

  “Good run?” I asked.

  “What are you doing up?” He glanced
at his watch. “I was just coming to wake you.”

  I shrugged, as casually as I could fake. “I woke up when you left. Couldn’t go back to sleep.”

  “I’m sorry. I tried to be quiet. I wanted to blow out the cobwebs. I’m having problems sleeping.”

  “I noticed. Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

  He looked at a loss for words. It was a state I don’t think I had ever seen him in before. I didn’t like it very much.

  “Everything’s fine,” he finally said.

  “Simon, you can talk to me.”

  “There’s nothing—”

  Then he looked at me and sighed.

  “Yeah, I should have talked to you. I had a big fight with Karen the last time I visited Sherry. It got pretty loud…”

  “And that’s why you haven’t been going over there?” I didn’t dare allow myself to feel relief. It was Karen; it wasn’t me.

  He nodded, but didn’t meet my eyes.

  “Well, why didn’t you say something?”

  He was silent. “It was about me, wasn’t it? That’s why you didn’t say anything.”

  “I told her about our trip next weekend.”

  I waited silently, expecting some revelation. When it didn’t come, I asked, “And?”

  “And she just lost it. Screaming. Cursing me out. It got pretty ugly.” He paused, as if to shape the words before speaking them. “Right over Sherry’s bed.” He shook his head, as if he was having difficulty understanding the situation.

  I was stunned. “That’s it?”

  “What?” He seemed surprised by my response.

  “You kept me in the dark, you made me worry, because you had a fight with your wife?”

  “Well…”

  “Because she’s pissed off that we’re going away for the weekend?”

  He shrugged.

  “Damn it, Simon. I thought you were mad at me for something. Of course Karen’s pissed off we’re going away for the weekend.” I shook my head. “Try to put yourself in her shoes.”

  “Oh, Mary,” he finally said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

  “I thought I had done something wrong.”

  His chin dropped. “That’s exactly what I didn’t want you to think. That’s why I didn’t say anything. It’s just…This is all so hard.”

  “Of course it is. Did you think it would be easy? What you have to remember, though, is to communicate, okay?”

  I made eye contact with him, and waited until he nodded.

  “Good. Now go shower.” I messed his hair. “We’re going for brunch.”

  He leaned in and kissed me gently, then he lingered for a moment, his face almost touching my own. I could feel a crackling of energy in the air between us. “You’re going to be a very wise woman when you grow up,” he said, his eyes dancing.

  I smiled. “Maybe. But by the time that happens I’ll be too busy caring for you in your old age to enjoy it.”

  On the nights that he hunted, the stranger did not wear the collar. There were things best done in the shadows, and times when the objects of the light were best left behind.

  Victoria, he discovered, was a small town masquerading as a city. Within weeks, he was familiar with everyone he would need. He recognized them going to work and coming home, he followed their routines and sought out the secret habits they were convinced no one knew save themselves.

  Secrets. He always knew where to find the people he needed, the people whose vulnerabilities he could turn into his strengths, his power. The power of secrets and lies.

  Everyone had secrets, which, if confronted, they tried to explain away as mistakes, momentary lapses of judgment.

  If confronted.

  But secrets, the stranger knew, had their own power. Those things people hide could be used to reveal the truth, in time. Untold stories could bring other stories to the light.

  The weakness of others would become his strength.

  KAREN

  “You probably just needed to vent.” Jamie said when we met for lunch.

  “Maybe.”

  “I mean, look at the facts: your daughter’s in this horrible accident, she comes home from the hospital requiring extraordinary amounts of care, and within a couple of weeks Simon’s up and gone, moving in with his secretary or whatever she is, who it turns out he’s been sleeping with for months. I think you’re entitled to vent.”

  “But it was so stupid.”

  I had wanted to call him ever since. I don’t know how many times I had dialed his cell phone, hanging up before it could connect.

  “I should apologize.”

  “Why? For calling him on his bullshit?”

  “He was just trying to be polite.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Karen. How much more of this are you going to take?”

  She handed me a business card. I vaguely recognized the name. “She’s one of the best,” Jamie volunteered, taking a bite of her linguine. “I talked to her for a feature I was doing on the state of marriage in the 1990s. Very pro-woman. Very smart. I think you’ll like her.”

  I stared at the name and realized that I had been introduced to her at a party with Simon at some point. For the opera, maybe? A fundraiser? One of the firm functions, whatever it was. She hadn’t seemed very cutthroat, drinking a champagne cocktail.

  “You’re starting to sound like my mother. I’m not looking for a lawyer.”

  “Well, you probably should be. I mean, if Simon’s behavior should prove anything to you, it’s that he’s moved on. You’re not his priority anymore. Don’t think he hasn’t been talking to someone already.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not like that. He comes to visit Sherry every day—”

  “Which is exactly the sort of thing a lawyer would tell him to do. It looks good in court if he seems to be a devoted father.”

  “God, you’re hard, Jamie.”

  “Someone has to be realistic.”

  I tucked the card into my purse, trying to forget that it was there, trying to ignore the sound of Jamie’s voice in my head.

  This wasn’t supposed to happen to us. Not after all the lean years—the studying, the macaroni and cheese, the thin soup, the shitty basement suites and scrounging change for the bus. Everything was supposed to be smooth sailing now. We had our house, our daughter…

  What had happened to my life?

  What could I do? Simon wasn’t coming back—I knew that. So what did that leave me? Fighting? Bitching? I couldn’t just accept things the way they were: Stop thinking of Simon as my husband and reimagine him just as Sherry’s father? Accept that he was gone, that his life was with someone else now? I couldn’t. But what other choice did I have? How much could I give, could I fight, for something that wasn’t going to change?

  “Hello?”

  “Is this Sarah?”

  “Yes…”

  “What did that little girl do to me?”

  “Pam?”

  “I was just at the doctor. He wants me to come in for more tests. He says he’s never seen such a remission.”

  “Pam, slow down.”

  “He says it’s a miracle. He actually used the word. He says that after my appointment on Friday he wasn’t expecting to see me again. He thought that I would probably die over the weekend.”

  “Pam, what—”

  “He thought I was going to die. And now the cancer’s gone. All gone.”

  “Pam, what did you tell the doctor?”

  “About what?”

  “About Sherry. The little girl. What did you tell him about Sherry Barrett?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Thank God. Pam—”

  “But we have to tell someone.”

  “No. I promised Ruth—”

  “Sarah, listen to what you’re saying. This little girl cures cancer. Do you know what that means?”

  “We can’t—”

  “People are suffering. How can we keep this a secret?”

  “We have to.�
�

  “Why?”

  “I promised Ruth.”

  “People are dying, Sarah.”

  “Let me talk to Ruth.”

  “We have to tell people.”

  “Let me talk to Ruth first. She took a big risk letting us…helping us. I can’t go back on my word. Just let me talk to her. Please?”

  “Okay.”

  “Promise me you won’t say anything before I call you back?”

  “All right. I promise. But get back to me soon.”

  “I will.”

  “No, I mean it. People are dying every minute.”

  “City desk. Todd Herbert.”

  “Is this the Sentinel?”

  “Yes ma’am. City desk.”

  “I need to speak to someone.”

  “Is this a delivery question? I can transfer you to circulation. Hold on.”

  “No. I have a story you might be interested in.”

  “What sort of story, ma’am?”

  “It’s about that little girl. The one who was in the accident.”

  From: therbert@ns.ca

  To: jkeller@ns.ca

  Jamie—

  Bit of a situation here. Woman calls me up, says she’s got a story for me about a little girl who was in an accident. I figure it has to be Karen’s daughter, so I let her talk. Long story short, she claims Sherry has miraculous powers, that she cured her of terminal cancer. Normally, I’d just blow this off, but the lady seems to have some pretty solid information, so I figured I’d run it past you, get your read on it before we take it any further. Have you heard anything like that? Could be guesswork, but she gave what sounded to me like a pretty solid description of Casa Barrett—right down to white carnations on the table in the room the daughter’s in.

  Any thoughts,

  th

  From: jkeller@ns.ca

  To: therbert@ns.ca

  Sorry, Todd—talked to Karen. I don’t think there’s any news here. Good human interest, maybe a short feature: followup the accident, etc. As far as miracles go, Simon and Karen wish. Apparently the woman you spoke to is the nurse’s sister. They’re pretty close and she’s been over to visit at the house a few times. Yes, there were carnations in the room with Sherry. Don’t get excited, though: according to the nurse, her sister’s never been sick a day in her life. Approaching senility, apparently. I’ve met her myself and she’s no sicker than I am. Thanks for the reminder though. I think maybe I’ll do a followup for the Life pages next Thursday. What do you think?