Chapter 6

He was again in a house, but a different one from the last dream. This time he started in the basement, which also functioned as the laundry room. A rusting washer and dryer and a rack of cleaning supplies sat next to him while a water heater took up the opposite corner. The smoke blew down the rickety wooden staircase leading to the first floor.

Max climbed the steps and threw open the door to find a ribbon of smoke running through the kitchen. Decaying pizza boxes, Chinese food cartons, and empty pints of ice cream covered in sticky residue populated the kitchen.

A door led to a dining room that contained no furniture except for a lawn chair folded against the wall. Paint had chipped from the walls of the dining room and plastic covered the cracked windows. The trail of smoke led down a narrow hallway, growing thicker the farther Max went.

Halfway down the corridor he met a wall of flames. The heat washed around him, but his shadowy presence felt nothing. He ran down the hallway in search of Sarah. The bathroom was engulfed in fire, but he didn’t see her in the old-fashioned bathtub or hiding in the linen closet. He continued down the hall to an empty room, its ceiling peeled away by the heat, but he didn’t see her in there either.

The doorway at the end of the hallway was already crumbling. This must be the source of the fire, he thought. Through the smoke and flames he made out the ruined frame of a bed and a nightstand next to it. The bedroom continued to burn while Max could only watch in horror.

He stood in the doorway as a twelve-year-old boy again, watching the fire consume his parents while he did nothing. He couldn’t let the same happen to Sarah. He searched the bedroom for her, but found nothing even close to a human body. Then he went back through the hallway to search the rest of the house for her. While he had stood in the bedroom, dithering as he thought of his parents, the flames had spread through the dining room and into the living room.

There, on the couch, he found Sarah. But the woman lying on the couch, a bottle of vodka dangling from her hand, was not the Sarah from the beach or any of her younger incarnations from her childhood home. This Sarah was older, with crow’s feet around her eyes and lines around the corners of her mouth. Her hair was pulled back into a greasy ponytail turning gray at the temples. A bare roll of fat bulged from above her sweatpants; a pink T-shirt reading, “Sassy Bitch” clung to her saggy breasts.

This woman lying on the couch could not be the Sarah he had rescued on the beach. How could that beautiful, vibrant young woman have become this aging, alcoholic wreck? Of course it couldn’t be her, not the real Sarah anyway. This was an illusion, like Sheila’s dream.

When the fire reached the living room, it ignited a stream of spilled liquor on the carpet. The liquor served like a fuse, leading right to the couch where Sarah remained in an alcoholic stupor. If Max did nothing, the fire would consume the couch with her on it.

The fire had already destroyed so much of the house that he may as well start over again. With that, he transplanted the couch onto a blank green plain. He set her down amongst the grass and then made the couch disappear to leave nothing but the two of them.

He leaned Sarah’s body against his so that her head rested on his shoulder. He freed her hair from its ponytail and as he stroked it, the strands became silky and blonde once again. “What happened to you?” he asked. How had she come to live in that messy house, surrounded by her own filth? “It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have left you.”

As with Sheila, he drained away the fat from her stomach to leave it firm once again. The lines disappeared from her face, transforming her back into the woman from the beach. She whimpered once, but her eyes didn’t open. He continued to stroke her hair as he contemplated what to do.

All three times he’d left her, he’d come back to find her mired in an even worse nightmare. There had to be some way to keep the bad dreams from resurfacing. As he looked around the tranquil green plain, the answer came to him.

He could fashion a new life for her here, on this verdant little island, far away from killer ocean waves, storms, or fires. Here, nothing would threaten her. This would be a paradise for her, a Garden of Eden where she could live at peace for as long as it took for her to emerge from the coma.

First, he decided he needed to build her a new house. One not similar to the fiery wreck he’d rescued her from or her childhood home. The more he thought about it, though, the more he realized the difficulty of this project. What did he know about designing a house? He had lived with his parents in the same house until being taken to Washington Juvenile.

He sighed and imagined a simple, square cottage. He put a bed in one corner, and then added a bathroom and kitchen. The more he added, the more he realized he needed. She would need a table and chair for eating and another chair to sit on when she wanted to relax. What about books, television, and radio? He thought about his room at Midway House and added a record player to one corner along with all his classical records. At least it was a start. He would have to come back and add more later.

With the cottage built, he worked on creating more of a landscape for outside her window. He raised the land on the western horizon to construct snow-capped mountains. He planted rows of trees to the east. Along the edges of the cottage, he installed rose bushes and a bed of daisies. As he stood by the front door of the house, he surveyed his new world and smiled. Here was a place where she could be content.

He took her inside and laid her on the bed. She looked so beautiful lying there, but something was wrong. Of course, she was still dressed in that awful T-shirt and sweatpants. He changed those into a flannel nightgown, and then added a nightstand and alarm clock next to her bed. Outside, he lowered the sun on the eastern horizon.

Now that he’d completed all the preparations, he went inside the cottage to wait for her to wake up and see her new home. When she didn’t open her eyes after twenty minutes, he rang the alarm clock, watching with anticipation as she sat up.

She ran a hand through her hair and then patted her stomach. “Oh man, what a dream,” she said. She rolled out of bed and then froze. Max held his breath, waiting for her reaction. After a moment, she rubbed her eyes and then went into the bathroom. She looked into the mirror and smiled. “What a nightmare.”

He went outside as she used the toilet and showered. Through the cottage wall, he heard Sarah humming a tune. After a minute of thinking, he remembered the song. “The Long and Winding Road” by the Beatles. Mom liked to play Beatles albums while she painted. “Their lyrics are so creative,” she said. “And Paul’s voice, it’s like an angel’s.”

He remembered those days after he lost his sight when he sat in her studio, listening to the music and the sound of the brush and smelling the oil-based paint she used. Throughout the process she described the painting to him. “This is a flock of Canada geese flying over the cove in autumn,” she said and he tried to imagine the birds and the water reflecting the colors of the setting sun.

“I’ll never be able to paint, will I, Mom?” he asked one day as she painted.

“Of course you can, honey.” She put a brush in his hand and led him over to a canvas. “If you see what you want in your mind, your hands will know what to do.”

He tried to paint the harbor from McAlbee Point, where he and his friend Rodney Jackson used to ride bikes after school. But he couldn’t see the image in his mind and after a moment of scribbling on the canvas, he threw down the brush in disgust. He stormed back to his bedroom and never visited her studio after that day.

He looked over the landscape and a smile came to his face. Sarah’s mind was his canvas now. He could paint a whole new world for her. A perfect world. Mom would be proud.

When Sarah finished showering, he went back inside and replaced some of his father’s classical records with his mother’s Beatles albums. He didn’t know what became of them after his parents died; they probably went to some neighbor in the estate sale. What had happened to his mother’s paintings? Funny that he’d never thought about them until now. Before Sarah emerged from the bedroom, he put up Mom’s painting of Gull Island Harbor at sunrise in the living room.

Sarah came out of the bedroom and spent the rest of the day cooking, cleaning, gardening, and listening to records as if she’d lived in the cottage for years. Maybe this will work, he thought. From experience he knew the unconscious mind embraced whatever it saw as reality, which had doomed his parents and Alberto Conte, but might save Sarah.

When she went to bed that evening, he stayed in the bedroom long enough to make sure she fell asleep. After he heard her breathing softly, he drifted out of the world he’d created and back to the dark, empty canvas of the real world.

“Are you all right?” the nurse asked.

“I’m fine.”

“You look tired.”

“How long was I in there?”

“Three hours. Did she respond at all?”

“No.”

“Maybe next time. I’d better go in there and get her cleaned up and turned over. I would have done it earlier but I didn’t want to disturb you two.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem. My name is Henrietta by the way.”

“It’s nice to meet you.”

“Are you going to be around here much longer? I get off in an hour. Maybe we could get some coffee or something.”

“Oh, that’s nice of you, but I have to get home.”

“Sure, I’ll take a rain check. See you around.” Max waved in her general direction and then left the hospital. On the bus back to Midway House, he thought about Henrietta’s offer, the lie he’d told Dr. Perry about Sarah, and his vision of Sarah in the morning. How long could he wait for her to wake up? And when she did, would she even want to see him?

He sighed as he stood up to get off the bus. He and Sarah might just have an imaginary world right now, but it was enough.