Helena wakes ecstatic, with the blind, instinctive joy a child feels just before recalling that it’s Christmas morning. She’s going home today. She’s getting out of this place in a few hours. Joachim will be here to take her.
She had an awful dream the night before. It must be the painkillers. She and Joachim fought and he left her in the middle of some dark, eerie forest where she could feel slimy hands with long fingers groping at her ankles. She wandered, exhausted, for hours, and then abruptly found herself in the apartment with Joachim, who was on the sofa reading a newspaper. He kept telling her everything was fine and she’d only dreamt the part about the forest, and she began to believe him. But just as she sat down next to him, she heard a baby crying in another room and leapt to her feet. Yet how no matter how many doors she opened—and there were so many doors in their apartment now, one after the other, dozens, hundreds, millions—she could neither find the crying infant, nor return to Joachim. The last door opened onto perfect, impossible, unbroken darkness, and she was in the forest again, and she was in the hospital again, and she was hoarse as if she’d been screaming, but she must not have, or someone would’ve come.
Medication can have side effects like that. Magdalena’s sister Sara told her that, when she used to take sleeping pills, she could feel a dark, shadowy form standing over her bed every night, bending down to her, but never quite touching her. So there are all kinds of things like that. The dream doesn’t bother her anymore; only, it’s strange that she can remember all that about the shadow over Sara’s bed. Why something so trivial, a stray conversation, and so little of the past few years?
Her pulse speeds up and she feels slightly nauseous. She has to stay calm and take deep breaths. She still has a lot of recovering to do and panicking won’t help. Joachim said the doctor said she’d be better soon. That the blanks in her mind would fill in again. So none of it matters, now that she’s getting out of here. Soon she won’t even need the painkillers, and that will be the end of nightmares like this. She’ll tell Joachim about it later, and he’ll tell her some crazy dream he had and they’ll laugh together. She knows seeing him will reassure her. As much as the medicine, that’s probably what was messing up her sleep—being alone here, spending so much time away from her husband.
When he comes in later that morning with a tired smile and bags under his eyes, she knows she was right. It’s hard on him, too, being away from her.