These Dreams of You

by Steve Erickson

  “Not a matter of making amends, mind,” he continues, “there are no amends to be made, are there? With you or Alexander.” She watches him; he sips his tea, won’t look back at her. “Did you find the girl’s mother?”

  “Complete dead-end,” she answers after a moment. She takes her purse from the table and opens it. “No one will tell me how she died, and in all likelihood she isn’t Sheba’s mother anyway.” She says, “I never should have gone.”

  “But you had to go,” says James.

  “Zan didn’t want me to.”

  “But he understood. Ronnie Joe Somebody.”

  “Not the same thing.” She finds the photo in her purse and gazes at it as she did on the train last night.

  “A moral compulsion, though, wasn’t it? To take responsibility, even for the thing you’re not really responsible for. Another endearing Viv quality.”

  “My moral compulsion got me a photograph”—she hands it to him—“of the wrong, dead woman.”

  James does a double-take. Viv’s not sure she’s ever seen James do a double-take. “But this woman,” he says, “is very much alive,” which isn’t as true as he thinks.

  Less than an hour later, in the back of another taxi on the way to Zan’s hotel, Viv says for the fourth or fifth time, “Are you sure?” and James answers, “Well, I suppose I can’t be absolutely positive, but let’s say I’m more sure about it than about most things.”

  Viv says, “I always thought you were sure about everything.”

  “Exactly.” He says, “What no one knows is who she is. All manner of confusion there. Alexander thought I arranged it, I thought he arranged it, and when he asked her, she said you arranged it.”

  When they reach the hotel, the woman behind the front desk looks at Viv and asks to speak to James in private. “James,” Viv says a moment later, “what’s going on?”

  Brow furrowed, James answers, “Alexander and your son checked out of the hotel four days ago.”

  “Zan and Parker? What about Sheba?”

  “Apparently,” James gestures toward the front desk and seems to choose his words as carefully as possible, “the girl went missing.”

  Viv staggers a bit. “My daughter, James,” she says, flashing anger, “you keep saying ‘the girl.’ My daughter.”

  “Sorry.”

  She hardly can get out the words. “What do you mean missing?”

  “With the nanny. Alexander was quite distraught, of course—she, uh,” indicating the front desk again, “this lady knows his books . . . well, anyway, he left instructions before he and the boy . . . your son . . . ”

  Viv sinks into a chair. Looking back and forth from Viv to James, the woman behind the front desk says, “Your husband and son left their bags here, with a number. Then when the woman and little girl came back, I tried calling but no one answered.”

  There’s a pause and Viv and James turn to her. “Came back?” says James.

  “The little girl and nanny.”

  “Sheba came back?” says Viv, rising.

  “Oh yes,” answers the woman. “They’re upstairs right now.”

  The woman calls to Viv, halfway up the flight of steps, “Third floor. I couldn’t put them in the same room, it was taken, so they’re down the hall—thirty-seven, nicer, actually . . . ” and Viv already hears her daughter’s music. “I called for a doctor an hour ago,” the woman turns to James. “Since they checked in, she hasn’t seemed at all well. The African lady.”

  Upstairs beyond the door marked thirty-seven, in the morning shadows slowly bleached of night by the sun through the window, the little girl with the thumb in her mouth who never has understood western time retreats to the middle of the room, watching Molly unconscious on a bed in a small alcove in the room’s far wall. Sheba thinks to herself, She sleeps, or she’s sick—did I make her sick? and in her heart the girl finds herself back in Ethiopia, two years old again and on the precipice of abandonment again like when her mother—her other mother, with the blue-green hair—first came to get her. Since they have been here in this room—bewildered by western time, Sheba has no idea how long—the girl has stood at the woman’s side stroking her wet brow, wondering where her father and brother are, having almost come to believe they wouldn’t abandon her. Back in Ethiopia, at a moment when she nearly had a family, she remembers that her name was something else though she can’t quite remember: Zan? no that’s her father’s name, if he’s still her father. She returns to the bed and is stroking the arm of the young woman, who at this moment is a color more volcanic than brown, when the door of the room opens behind her.

  Sheba looks at Viv and wordlessly crosses the room to her, puts a small arm around her for a moment as Viv pulls her closer whispering her name. Then the child pulls Viv by the hand over to the bedside. Staring at the woman who clearly is delirious, Viv can’t know that once this woman transmitted music of her own, because it’s gone completely quiet: “My God,” she hears James behind her, “how long do you suppose she’s been like this?”

  “She needs a doctor right away,” says Viv.

  “The woman downstairs said she called for one this morning.”

  “It’s her,” says Viv, “isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t it? Doesn’t she look like . . . the woman in the photo?” by which Viv means almost dead.

  “Yes.”

  Viv turns to him. “Do you have it?”

  “Sorry?”

  “The photo?”

  Reaching inside his coat, then to the other inside pocket, James murmurs, “It’s here somewhere,” checking the outer pockets, then patting his pants pockets. Then he checks the coat again. “After all, it didn’t just disappear.”

  The doctor says, “Forgive me for being blunt,” but he doesn’t seem to Viv the sort of doctor who needs forgiveness in order to be blunt. “I can relocate her to a hospice,” he says, “but don’t know that there’s much point, is there?”

  “I don’t know,” Viv says, you tell me. Sheba hasn’t moved from her place by the woman’s bed, she hasn’t stopped stroking the woman’s arm. The girl is the calmest Viv has seen her; it’s terrifying. Viv looks at Molly visibly bobbing on her sea of delirium and says, “What’s wrong with her?”

  “She’s slipping away,” the doctor snaps, then, looking at the little girl, softens. “She’s slipping away,” he says again.

  “But what’s she dying of?”

  “She’s dying of dying. It may have been coming on a long time, but there’s no way to know that,” and he adds, “Have you made arrangements for her daughter?”

  Viv says, “I’m her mother.”

  “How’s that?” says the doctor.

  Viv starts to repeat herself but stops.

  James says, “Shall I stay, then?”

  “No,” says Viv. “Can I call if I need anything?”

  “Of course.”

  “Thank you.” He’s half closed the door behind him when she says, “James.”

  He turns and peers at her through the doorway.

  “We never . . . ” she says. “We didn’t really talk about you.”

  “Another conversation,” he says, sounding falsely chipper because James never is truly chipper, one of the things that he and Zan always have had in common. “For another time.”

  “Let’s make sure to have it.”

  “Right,” he says, but both know they won’t, before it’s too late.

  Afternoon passes and night falls. From outside, rising from the crescent circle of Cartwright Gardens are the sounds of people returning from work, students from school, diners in nearby restaurants. From the pub halfway down the block comes a roar of approval; someone has scored a goal or try. In the park across the street a couple argue, more and more audibly; the guy is losing. If time is a child’s game of telephone, now at the end of the line a simple melody hummed in someone’s ear long ago is a din beyond human pitch, the ashen silence that blots out every song, when light isn’
t the norm of things but an aberration in the black. Trying to pull Sheba to her, Viv feels this calamitous silence pass over, the room enveloped by that momentous passage to which every life bears witness at some time and stands vigil, before it finally is itself borne witness to, and the subject of the vigil of others.

  Zan, where did you go? Viv asks, staring out from a window several windows down from where Zan asked something like the same question of her. Where did you take my son? How did the determination to uncover and understand the bonds of this family lead to such a smashing of it? Is life a plate on which we’ve spooned so much that all it could do is crack?

  Gently she tries to pull Sheba from the woman in the bed but the girl won’t have it. Sheba clutches Molly’s arm the way she used to clutch Viv’s in her sleep, runs her fingers along the profile of the dying woman’s face as she did Viv’s those first nights that Viv came to get her more than two years ago in Addis Ababa, “Tezeta” curling through the window. When the girl falls asleep on her feet and crumples to her knees, still she won’t be dislodged from her place.

  Am I a ghost, wonders Molly in her delirium? She tosses and turns on the bed in a blur of reverie. If so, how long have I been one? Is it since Ethiopia? Is it since Berlin and my mother? When did the music turn so low? The stroke of a small girl’s hand is the only thing that tethers her to another world and keeps her from slipping away for good into this one.

  In Hyde Park, Molly holds the girl’s hand as they watch Zan and Parker cross Kensington Road and make their way to the Ethiopian embassy. Ninety seconds after the father and son have disappeared around the farthest corner of Prince’s Gate, Molly leads the girl from the knolls of the park between Carriage Row and the Serpentine, in the direction of Earl’s Court where Molly has been staying, exactly the opposite way from where Zan and Parker will go looking for them an hour after visiting the Ethiopian ambassador.

  At Earl’s Court the woman and girl catch the Circle Line to Westminster, where they transfer to the Jubilee Line that takes them to Waterloo. Ascending from the underground onto the main level of Waterloo Station, they board the train for Hampton Court, the same train they rode before.

  By the time the woman and girl disembark at Hampton Court, the warm morning has become an unseasonably warm afternoon, unlike the last time they came to the palace when black billowing clouds rolled across the sky.

  It’s an hour and a half since Molly told Zan that they would meet. The woman and girl follow the same red brick bridge to the palace and beyond.

  Am I a ghost? wonders the woman on the edge of the three-hundred-year-old maze. It seems like the two stand there all afternoon before she pushes Sheba toward the maze’s entrance. “Remember?” she says to the girl, who turns to her. Did I become a ghost, Molly thinks, when I stole the motherhood I never was worthy of? “I’ll come find you,” and Sheba walks toward the entrance with no discernible trepidation, and disappears.

  Molly remembers when she was a girl living in Berlin a few years before the Wall fell and her mother took her to the southern part of the divide not far from Checkpoint Charlie, near what used to be a recording studio and, before that, an old movie studio. There, as though a prophecy of what was to come, the Wall unraveled into a stone labyrinth between east and west, and within the maze Molly hid from her mother, running down concrete blue passages canopied by sky and the dark tunnels sheltered by the debris of surrounding construction. Winding her way to the center of the maze, she waited and her mother always found her, the mother’s ear for the music of her daughter as unfailing as Molly assumes a true mother’s always will be.

  If I’m a ghost, can I pass through the maze’s shrubbed walls to the center? Already be there waiting when Sheba gets there? So the girl will know she’s never lost and that Molly will never lose her? The woman knows her own music has faded. She can hear her decrease in volume, she hears herself turned down. When she hears music from the maze, when she hears the girl’s music wind its way back to her, she knows there’s no mistaking it for the echoes of her own.

  She follows the music in. She goes right to the girl at the center; Sheba looks up at her. Since Molly came, she hasn’t sucked her thumb until now. “I’ll never lose you again,” Molly says.

  They hide in the hedges when the palace closes. Has anyone ever hidden overnight in the maze? She swallows the child in her arms so as to keep her music quiet—Jasmine, I saw you peeping—and then when night falls she unfolds herself to let the child out, and a tune smokes skyward. They lie in the center, the girl in the crook of the woman’s arms, and watch it drift to a star.

  Unable to dislodge Sheba from her place next to Molly, Viv falls asleep with her on the floor, the outside noises of the neighborhood flickering like embers beyond the window. It’s early in the morning—Viv isn’t sure of the time—when she lurches awake to the sound of the door, and there against the light of the outer hall are two silhouettes that need no light other than the one in her heart.

  Staring at each other, Viv and Zan have so many of the same questions—where were you? why did you go? are you all right?—and share so few answers except one—never mind; never leave again—that all the questions cancel each other out. Her son puts his arms around her in a way that he hasn’t since he was Sheba’s age and says, “We thought you were in Berlin.”

  “Berlin?” she says.

  Zan shrugs helplessly, “I . . . ” and she touches the marks on his face where he was beaten and throws her arms around him. They hold each other, one or the other reaching over to turn off the light in the hallway outside the door, one or the other quietly kicking the door closed until they’re back in the dark. On the floor by Molly, Sheba sleeps.

  She is two again, as when her other mother with the blue-green hair first came to get her in Ethiopia, and now as then the child is too shackled by loneliness to speak, the child who never has felt loved first and foremost, loved beyond and before anyone else, the child who must compete with other children for love and be always convinced she has lost, who somehow can imagine a blind parental love unconditioned even as she doesn’t yet believe she has known it. Like someone once said of God, if you can imagine such a love then it must exist.

  At the center of the maze, when the little girl feels a single tear leak from her eye, she turns in the woman’s arms so no one can see it and so it soaks nothing but the ground beneath them. The girl is too little to know how profound it is to feel nowhere to belong; maybe no one at any age understands feeling grief for what can’t be remembered. But though she barely remembers anymore the world she came from, half of her brief lifetime ago, she knows she never wanted to leave it, that she left part of herself there, so her grief is a secret from herself and until she learns the word for this secret then it’s not a grieving that heals anything.

  Then who are you? Molly says to the girl in her arms, and are we really here? Are you who I think you might be, or just who I always hoped you to be but never were? Is my own mother here with us now? Do I hear her wandering the green passages just the turn of a corner away, or does she hear you, mistaking your music for mine? I never called you by a name except once—but is it yours? and do you need one? Or is it just I who need for you to have one?

  Does one need to travel a birth passage, womb to uterus, to be a daughter, if already you’re the descendant of an unforgiving century? Tell me now, if you know, because now I must leave by the other passage at the other end, that emerges to a place that it’s not yet time for you to go.

  A few minutes later Viv must pull Sheba away from the bed, however adamant the girl is otherwise. “Come on,” she says quietly, “come,” but Sheba slips from Viv’s grip; Zan gently takes the girl’s other hand and tries to draw her away as well. The girl resists and when she begins to cry—always the loudest little person Zan has known, more volume per capita than any single body he’s ever heard, like a boombox in a confessional—no sound comes from her, Radio Ethiopia gone silent, just the twisting of her little face. If Viv and
Zan are to have with Sheba at least one more act of parenthood, this must be it: “She’s not there anymore,” Viv whispers to the girl, trying to think of a way to say it, “she’s here, she’s around us,” looking around them in the dark, “but not there,” indicating the body; and Sheba, supernaturally cognizant beyond what the span of such a short life allows, wonders how many mothers she has to lose, into how many mothers’ bodies she has to press her own, into how many families she has to storm her way in order to make a home. “She’s not there but she’s here,” says Viv, “let her go,” and—though she doesn’t say it out loud—be my daughter again.

  She’s nobody’s daughter for a while. She doesn’t talk to any of the family. She doesn’t defy Viv and Zan or argue with Parker; the nights after the coroner comes and takes Molly away, the girl lies on the floor by Molly’s bed with her back to everyone. All her demands to be part of the family have gone silent; she makes no music. She can’t quite precisely be called inconsolable because she’s so deep in herself that she gives no evidence of anything to be consoled. Neither Viv nor Zan can get her to come to bed with them; crumpled half asleep on the floor next to where Molly died, she is not moved by any coaxing. I’m a professional, she murmurs. She sleeps there until the father picks her up and carries her to the other bed, but when they wake in the morning she’s back in her place on the floor and doesn’t give it up until the night before they’re to fly back to Los Angeles, when Parker calls to her softly, “Hey, buttmunch, come here,” and only then she picks herself up and scrambles under the blankets beside her brother.