How, how, how? How can he possibly know I’m here?
I don’t reply. Flustered, I turn off my phone and make my way out of the airport to the taxi stand, where I ask my driver to take me to Dollis Hill, a northwestern suburb of London. He asks for an address, and instinctually I begin to give him the address of my childhood home but stop myself.
“Are there hotels there?” I ask.
“There are hotels everywhere, miss. You have one in mind?”
“Something near Gladstone Park.”
He reaches two fingers beneath his wool cap and scratches his head.
“Don’t know that area all too well,” he says. “Give me a minute.” He consults his iPhone, then says, “There’s a Travelodge nearby. And a Holiday Inn. Both of them too far to walk to the park, I’d say, if the park is where you want to be.”
God, is the park really where I want to be? The way he says it makes it sound like Disney World.
“Anything closer?”
He looks again. “There’s an inn. Quincey House Hotel. Three and a half stars on TripAdvisor. Right on the south side of the park. That’s the closest.”
I have a vague memory of that hotel from my youth but can’t picture it.
“Can I bother you to phone them and see if they have rooms?”
“My pleasure.” He dials, has a brief conversation, then turns back to me. “He’s wanting to know how many nights.”
I have no idea. “Three,” I say, figuring that would be on the long side.
He relays the information, chirps “Very good, then,” and hangs up.
“Quincey House Hotel it is, then.”
“Thank you.”
At least I have some place to stay, though I still have no plan or even much of an idea of what I’m doing here. I have some vague notion of a direction and a strong hope that an invisible current will carry me along until a path becomes clear. Or perhaps it will just dump me out into the ocean, setting me adrift forever. I suppose that’s a reasonable end as well.
The driver tells me it will be at least a forty-minute drive. I nod in agreement, and as he pulls from the curb, I close my eyes less out of fatigue and more to prevent conversation, but within minutes, I’m asleep. It’s a bumpy, fitful half sleep, but qualifies as sleep because I have dreams.
I dream of the sea.
I’m a little girl, and our family is at Littlehampton Beach, where we would go for a few days every summer. In my dream, I’m running along the small sand dunes, and though I have no concept of how old I am, I see Thomas, and he’s just a tiny boy, so I can’t be more than about seven. The air is heavy with salt, and the sound of small waves licking the shore is louder than it should be. Crackling, like heavy static on a radio.
I chase Thomas through and over the dunes; he squeals with delight. He scurries behind a dune, and I scale it to reach the other side, only to find he’s not there. I look to my right, and somehow he’s now a hundred yards away, past the chalky-white sand and out in the water, where my mother holds him fast with both hands. My father is on the shore, building a sand castle, lost in his own world of creation. My father was often lost in creation.
I watch as my mother lowers Thomas into the water, belly first, positioning her arms beneath him. She’s teaching him to swim. She’s thin here, and quite lovely. Nothing like how she looks now. Thomas kicks and flails his arms, spastic attempts to keep himself afloat, but he starts to sink as my mother pulls her arms away. He panics, and she lifts him up again, reassuring him that she has him.
I can hear her so clearly.
I have you, silly boy. I’ll never let you go.
Then she repeats the process. Thomas kicks and flails, then slowly sinks until she lifts him from the water once again. This goes on and on, and I just stand on my dune and watch. In the distance, the sad, lonely warble of gulls echoes.
I look to my father, whose creation is suddenly massive and striking, but not a castle at all. He has rendered Mister Tender from a billion grains of wet sand. The bartender is life-size, rising from the ground like some kind of sea creature come ashore to feast. The creation looks at me, just me, smiling as my father fortifies its legs, making it stronger, protecting it against a swirling, rising tide.
Then, in the imagination of the dream version of me, I picture one of those legs moving. Breaking free of the beach, lifting of its own accord. Coming to life. But it’s real. I see it. My father steps back, nervous and proud, admiring what he has brought into this world.
Mister Tender turns to me and smiles.
His other leg lifts.
A small step, then a larger one.
He grows larger as he heads directly toward me, consuming the beach with every pounding step, adding height, weight. Depth. In seconds, he’s a tower. My father is gone.
The sand monster is coming to kill me.
Then, a scream. But it’s not mine. It’s Thomas’s. I look past the sand creature closing in and see my mother near Thomas, but this time, she didn’t pick him up after he began to sink in the water. She just left him, and the scream I heard was the last he made before he slipped beneath the surface. For a flash of a second, I see his little white hand poking above the top of the shimmering waters, but once it disappears, I see him no more.
My mother calmly walks back to shore, wiping her hands on her hips, back and forth, back and forth. For a moment, she is smiling, and then she wears no expression at all.
Shadows on my face. Then my view is blocked entirely.
The sandman is here.
I jolt awake when the taxi stops at a light, and I’m so disoriented and rattled from the dream that I grab the top of my knees to steady myself. A few deep breaths, then I turn to the window.
The neighborhood isn’t familiar to me, but the look of things is, as is the smell. Britain has such a distinct scent, I think. There’s such an age to it. The smell of centuries-old books.
Ten minutes later, things start to spark memories. The rows of houses, the grocers that haven’t changed in all this time, and then, finally, Gladstone Park. It’s out my window, and as we travel past, I decide to close my eyes again. It will be there if I want to look, especially since I’m staying nearby, but right now, I don’t care to.
The driver pulls up in front of the Quincey House Hotel, a three-story brick building that looks as if it could have been a small school a hundred years ago. I realize I’ll need to use my credit card to pay the driver. It makes me nervous, as it will be another part of a trail I’m leaving, but I have little other choice. I could take money from a nearby ATM, and will likely do that, but that’s a fingerprint as well. There is no easy way to hide.
As he hands me a receipt, the driver says, “Suppose this park is special to you. Not a lot to it. Most tourists prefer Hyde Park or St. James’s.”
I don’t want to tell him the park is special to me, because that’s not the word I would use. But I also don’t want to explain why I would use the word haunts.
So I simply reply, “I’m not a tourist.”
Inside, I tell the front-desk clerk I’m the person who just inquired about a room for three nights. He nods and smiles but thankfully engages in little small talk. I hand him my credit card, and he asks for my passport, which I lightly protest against, but he informs me hotel policy insists upon it. When I hand it over, he proceeds to make a photocopy. Any chance of anonymity is officially gone.
Upstairs, my room is decent if not a little antiseptic, as if whatever charm this building once had was efficiently sanitized away by uninspired hotel architects. But it’ll do. Before I bother to do anything else, I collapse on the bed, wriggle my feet under the covers, and sleep.
This time, there are no dreams. My ghosts have decided to get a little sleep of their own.