I went back home, feeling discouraged. I hadn’t gotten anything out of the conversation with Gail, unless you counted the chocolate chip cookies. They were good cookies, at least, but I would have liked answers a lot more.
Mom’s car was still gone. My headache wasn’t going away. I went upstairs and got the aspirin. A ladybug strolled across the bathroom mirror. I swallowed the aspirin with a palmful of water from the tap, then caught the ladybug and took it out to the garden and put it on a rose. It wandered around, presumably confused by its sudden alien-abduction experience.
I lay down on the couch and put my arm over my eyes. Maybe a nap would help. Lord knows I hadn’t slept well night before last. Maybe I still had some sleep debt to work off. And if nothing else, it might help ward off the headache.
I don’t know how long I was asleep. Not long, I think. I had a brief, muddled dream about the roses, about plunging my hands into the rosebushes and drawing them back covered in blood. The bushes leaned in closer, expectantly, as if they were waiting for me to speak. When I snapped awake, I wasn’t groggy at all. I wish I had been.
It was touching me again.
I tried to move but my arms were frozen in place. I couldn’t even turn my head. A shadow bent over me as the claws moved in my hair. They combed through the curls, my scalp stinging at the tug. I wanted to grab for it. I wanted to scream.
Sleep paralysis, I told myself frantically. Sleep paralysis. That’s all it is. It’s your brain playing tricks.
My conscious mind might know that, but the rest of me was not getting the memo. The claws moved and it felt real, as real as the realest thing I’d ever experienced, as real as my heart hammering in my chest.
The shadow bent lower. I couldn’t see anything but a dark blur at the very edge of my vision. Wake up wake up wake up this isn’t real wake up!
“The roses say … say your prayers…” whispered the voice.
My ear stung suddenly and I jerked free of the paralysis. I sat bolt upright, slapping at my ear with a yelp, and then collapsed backward, shaky with adrenaline and relief. For a long minute, all I could do was drag air into my lungs and wait for the shaking to pass. I rubbed my stinging ear. It still hurt.
Sleep paralysis, as my old advisor would have said, was a helluva thing. I could see why my old roommate had hated it so much. I’d always thought it sounded interesting, but I could have done without this much interest.
I swung my feet over the side of the couch and rose petals fell off my shirt to the floor.
… what the hell?
I reached down to pick one up. Pink rose petals. For a moment I thought they had red stripes, and then I realized that my fingertips were bloody.
No, really, what the hell?!
I staggered into the downstairs bathroom, baffled and annoyed. There were two more rose petals stuck to my shirt and when I touched my ear, it was bleeding.
“Son of a bitch,” I growled, turning my head. (It’s very hard to get a good look at the back of your ear in a mirror, have you ever noticed that?) Near as I could tell, I had stabbed it somehow. Maybe a shard of glass from the coffee pot had somehow gotten into the couch cushions? “Okay,” I muttered. I washed it as best I could. Had the dream been my sleeping mind’s attempt to make sense of the pain? Dreams happen fast and rewrite themselves. Maybe what I thought I’d been experiencing had all happened in a heartbeat, like a dream of falling that jerks you awake.
I tried to put a Band-Aid on my ear. It could have gone better. Ears are not ideal surfaces for that. This did nothing to improve my mood. I stalked back out to the couch.
And stopped.
And stared.
There were at least a dozen rose petals on the ground, leading in a trail to the sliding glass door. How did they get there? The roses had been in the kitchen. I stared at the glass door for entirely too long, wondering if they had somehow blown into the house … through … a closed door…?
Wait, had someone come into the house and dropped rose petals on me while I slept?
What the hell was going on?
Why would you drop a handful of rose petals on someone, anyway?
My brain, always a font of useless knowledge, skipped to the Roman emperor Heliogabalus, who once (apocryphally) dropped tons of rose petals on guests at a feast, smothering them. I could probably rule out either Roman emperors or murder attempts.
Had this been intended as some kind of romantic gesture?
I heard the thump of a ladder against the side of the house and saw red.
“Phil! Did you do this?”
“Hold the ladder, will you?” said Phil.
I didn’t want to hold the ladder, I wanted to yell. But when people ask you to hold a ladder, you do it. It’s reflexive. I grabbed the ladder and glared up at him as he descended.
“Sorry,” he said, “the ground’s a bit soft there. What’s up?”
I waved a rose petal in his face. “Is this your idea of a joke?”
He took the petal, turned it over, then looked at me with the air of a man who is being polite in the face of adversity. “Is what my idea of a joke?”
“I…” What had felt like righteous wrath when I stormed out of the house suddenly felt a lot more like jumping to conclusions. “There were rose petals on me,” I said. “When I woke up.”
“There’s one on you now,” he said. “Also you’ve got a Band-Aid in your hair.”
I picked the rose petal off the front of my shirt. So there was.
Phil’s look of polite tolerance didn’t change. It was not the look of a man who had dumped rose petals on me in my sleep in the name of flirtation. It was the look of a man who had a strange woman yelling and waving floral bits at him.
“Were you working with roses earlier?” he asked. “They get everywhere, I swear.”
I had been. I’d had a whole bouquet. But surely if I’d tracked all the petals in myself, I’d have noticed when … when … When you immediately went looking for a Band-Aid for your scratches, then went to work on The Project, then looked up rose picker’s disease, then traumatized your mother and went rushing to clean up broken glass. Which involved bending over more roses, so that the petals could also have gotten stuck to you. And you took the trash out by the back door, so you could have scattered even more then.
And while I’d like to say that I would have noticed if there were petals stuck to me, I had once gone to work with a sock clinging to my sweater and hadn’t noticed until lunch. (The front of the sweater, no less.)
I am an asshole. Yup.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I seemed to be apologizing to Phil a lot. Possibly because I kept acting like a dick to Phil. “I … uh … yeah. I was. I don’t know why I thought…” I rubbed my face. “I’m sorry. I’ve been worried about Mom, and I’m obviously not acting rationally. Sorry.” I didn’t feel like explaining about the sleep paralysis and the feeling of an intruder. Phil must already think I was a few eggs short of an omelet.
“It’s fine,” said Phil. We stood awkwardly for a minute, and then he added, “I caulked up a hole by your windowsill. I don’t know if that’s where the ladybugs got in, but it can’t hurt.”
“Thanks.” I mumbled something about letting him know if any others got in, then beat a hasty retreat back into the house with what shreds remained of my dignity. One thing was sure, I wasn’t sleeping on the damn couch anymore. If that meant sharing the bed with a few stray ladybugs then so be it. Better that than making a fool of myself thinking the handyman was dropping rose petals on me in my sleep.
It was too early to have wine, but I milked the box for the last half glass anyway. Squeezing the wine udder my roommate called it, when you open the box and pull out the little bag and squish it to try to squirt out the last bit. Then I went back online to look up sleep paralysis. (I swear, I am not usually a person who looks up medical conditions online. I lived without health insurance long enough that I am far more likely to try to sleep off anything short of decapitation. This was just an extraordinary few days.)
Yup, it was sleep paralysis. I found out that what I’d had was called a “hypnopompic hallucination,” the kind that accompanies waking, as opposed to “hypnagogic,” which is what you get when you’re falling asleep, except that all sleep hallucinations are lumped together under hypnagogia, because why should sleep research be any more logical than any other science?
Rarely linked to underlying psychological conditions. Well, at least I’ve got that going for me. No, they didn’t know what causes it, except maybe stress. Not that I have any sources of stress in my life at the moment. Ha. May also be linked to sleep apnea, and narcolepsy. Oh, joy. Often accompanied by an illusion of an intruder or difficulty breathing. Check and check. The exact nature of the hallucination is strongly influenced by cultural context. In the old days, it was referred to as being hag-ridden, but now often manifests as an alien-abduction experience. Oh, now that’s interesting …
I spent two hours down this particular rabbit hole, reading a paper about sleep paralysis in Brazilian folklore, and only surfaced when Mom came home.
“You’re sitting here in the dark,” she said. “You’re gonna ruin your eyes.”
It was such a normal Mom thing to say that I started laughing, partly from relief. Some things didn’t change. I flipped on the lamp. “I got distracted and didn’t realize how late it got.”
“So you haven’t eaten?”
“No worries. I’ll nuke something.” I microwaved a frozen potpie and munched it while Mom consulted her planner, muttering to herself about schedules.
I was halfway through the pie when she looked up sharply. “Did you say grace?”
“Uh…” I looked down at the remains of Swanson’s finest. “No, sorry.”
Her gaze was less stern than alarmed. I could have held out against disappointment, but she seemed actually worried that something would happen. I folded my hands, feeling ridiculous, and mumbled, “Thank you, Father, for the food we … um … have already received … from your bounty.” I couldn’t remember the rest, but apparently that was enough.
Mom nodded to me. “It’s important.”
“Okay.” I found I wasn’t particularly interested in the rest of it. I put it in the fridge for later and had a chocolate chip cookie instead. “Oh—Gail sent these for you.”
“She came over here?”
“No, I went to go”—see if she’d noticed you acting strangely—“meet her pet vulture.” I swallowed a mouthful of cookie. “She’s an interesting person.”
“She is,” said Mom. “She’s so funny. Always makes me laugh.”
“Very nice garden too.”
Mom stiffened. “Yes,” she said slowly. “Though Gran Mae’s was much nicer when she was alive.” She went in search of wine herself and came out with a fresh box.
I did not think this was true, given the extraordinary insect life in Gail’s and the ecological dead zone that was Gran Mae’s rose garden, but I remembered my talk with Brad. If Mom was still mourning Gran Mae, I should talk to her about it. I tried to think of something positive to say, and came out with, “Gran Mae’s was certainly much … tidier.”
“She was a very tidy person,” Mom agreed.
I flashed back to Gran Mae telling me to pick up my room. You live like a little piggy, Samantha! Nobody wants to marry a little piggy!
I’d said, “Pigs are one of the smartest animals on earth. Oink, oink.” I was that kind of ten-year-old.
Gran Mae had pressed her lips together. “Always have an answer, don’t you? No one can tell you anything.” Then I think she’d threatened me with the underground children, but whether for sass or having a messy room, I don’t know.
“She was always after Brad and I to clean our rooms,” I said, trying not to sound aggrieved. “I know she was only trying to get us in the habit.”
“Ye-e-e-s…” said Mom, drawing the word out and staring into her wine. “We used to butt heads about that when I was a kid too.”
I felt stuck. Did I offer sympathy for young Mom or keep trying to say nice things about Gran Mae? “Um. Yes, she was definitely very into cleaning.”
“Well, she was a hospice nurse, you know,” said Mom. “Lots of nurses get like that, I think. And very brisk and efficient and rather exasperated with healthy people. They have to save their compassion for all the ones who are dying.”
“I suppose that’s true,” I said, even though I had my doubts about Gran Mae being compassionate with anyone. She’d probably have fixed them with her gimlet eye and said, “Are you dead yet? Then make your bed and quit whining.” “You’ve still got one lung, you know, some people would be grateful for any organs at all.” “Life support? Nobody wants to marry someone on life support!”
I gulped wine to stifle this train of thought. “Remember how she loved all those old TV shows? Leave It to Beaver and My Three Sons and The Patty Duke Show.”
Mom chuckled. “I watched so many of those growing up. She always had them on. I thought they were still shooting them and kept wondering why they were black and white instead of in color.”
That had gone pretty well. I tried to think of another good memory. “She always baked me a cake for my birthday with homemade frosting.”
“She did. She loved you and Brad so much.”
I had my doubts, remembering all those mornings with the power struggle over the eggs, and the arguments with Brad. Slammed doors, and her standing outside his room muttering, “Useless. Completely useless. I don’t understand why men are so obsessed with sons.” It didn’t feel like love.
No. I was being positive, dammit. Something nice. Say something. Nice and normal. “She was always talking about me having a coming out.”
“Oh, it was such a big thing for her generation. She hadn’t had one and I think it really galled her.” Mom shook her head. “She made sure I had one.”
“That must have been a bit awkward.”
“Well…” Mom stared into her wine. “She did an amazing job under the circumstances. It wasn’t like there were dozens of debutantes when I had mine. But all her friends from work came, and I had an extremely fancy dress. And roses everywhere, of course.”
“I’m sorry about the roses this morning,” I said. I was starting to feel like a bull in a china shop, the way I kept having to apologize to everyone. Possibly the best thing I could do for Mom was to pack up and leave, preferably without threatening to murder anyone else or startling her out of her wits.
“It’s all right, honey.” She patted my arm. “I was just surprised, that’s all. It was a nice thought.”
“I could have planned better.” I lifted my hand, raked by rose thorns. “I think I left a blood offering on every plant in the garden. I don’t know how Gran Mae did it. Pact with the rose gods, maybe.”
Mom didn’t laugh at this. She picked up the remote and began to flip through until she found a mystery at random. “Have we seen this one?”
“I can’t remember now.”
“Good enough for me.”