I FALL SICK. THE YOUNG doctor who orders me to the hospital says it’s the latest strain of Asian bird flu, but I know better. I have fallen sick of mind, of spirit, of the enigma of what I do and who I am. I drift in and out of consciousness. I wake and dream, dream again. My dreams are stories—the stories I want, the stories I have made myself believe, the stories of my life. Of innocence, of abuse, of neglect. Never stories of guilt; no, never guilt. The people in my dreams are deprived perhaps, confused maybe, but never guilty. I will prove it. I lie back on my pillow. So many stories. The past mingles nonsensically with the present—Edith, Vincent, Raquella, Laura alive, Damon reprieved. Now both are dead.
They come to see me, those few who, against all good sense, have loved me—shapes drifting in and out of my dreams. Martha and Brock, tall forms with masks over their mouths; my brothers, too; and Richard for a few minutes. Each evening—it is always evening in my dreams—an old friend named Diane reads me poems as she did when we were young and too fresh to fall asleep. She reads a poem of a tree that changes colors with the seasons, from green to yellow to deep red.
“Where did you find it?” I murmur.
“In the New Yorker,” she replies.
“It’s about death,” I say, and see her eyes grow wide with fear. “It’s all right. It’s lovely.” I fall back into my dreams.
Michael St. John does not come.
On what they later tell me is the eighth day, I wake and sense a presence in the room.
“Ms. Truitt,” a voice says. A voice I know. Used to know.
I look up. Not a real voice, a dream.
A figure is standing in the doorway. The light glints on a thick shock of yellow hair. I struggle for words, hear them, thin, far away. “You’re dead, dead in a Dumpster.”
The figure moves slowly toward the end of the bed, and the dream becomes reality. Damon’s face. I hear my cry. I’m alive, awake. “Damon? You—here? You’re—”
“Jeff said you were sick.”
“But you—you’re dead. The body in the Dumpster.”
“Somebody else.”
My drugged and addled mind races. “Kellen.”
“Jilly. It’s over.”
“How do you know?”
The muscle in his throat quivers. “I don’t want to lie to you, Jilly. Don’t make me.” He moves to my side, finds the chair by the bed.
“What are you going to do now?”
“Get my life back.”
“What?” My hands feel for the bed, find the railing. I look around the room. How long have I been here?
He looks down. “I’ll understand if you don’t want me at the office.”
“Damon,” I say. “You disappeared. The undertow, the street, it’s pulling you back, pulling you under.”
His jaw clenches. “It’s over, Jilly.”
“It’s never over.” I feel weak. My arm slips from the sheet and falls.
I feel his hand on my forehead, feel him lift my hand and slip it back under the sheet.