A WALL OF WATER APPROACHED him, a vertical ocean that threatened to engulf and crush him beneath waves and waves of moving weight. He was in such a panic that when he woke up, he knocked his bedside lamp to the floor. Becky bolted up and started barking.
“Shh,” he said.
Becky quieted down, but she remained alert, standing at the foot of his bed. He listened to her pant. Or was that him? Yes, he was panting like a dog and quivering like a child. Her bark had oriented him, at least.
I’m in my bedroom.
It’s nighttime.
I just had that fucking ocean dream again.
He glanced at his alarm clock. It was two in the morning. He thought again of that moving wall of water. The dream had felt apocalyptic and inevitable. Those feelings lingered with him now, even as he calmed down and steadied his breathing. He listened for his parents. He heard nothing.
A little moonlight came in through his window. The lamp, a sturdy plastic thing, was unbroken. He placed it back on the table and turned it on. Becky blinked at him. He’d had some kind of night terror, he realized, because his sheets and blanket were half across the room. How had Becky stayed on the bed? He reached over to pet her. She stretched and yawned beneath his hands. Then she jumped up and started wagging her tail.
“Two in the morning, Becks, not time for a walk.”
Becky whined.
Andrew sighed and got out of bed. His back ached from digging at Avella for three hours after school. All twenty men on the maintenance crew, the regulars and the summer hires like him, had been tasked with shoveling dirt for the pond. They couldn’t use the excavator because the suits complained that the noise disrupted their meetings. He groaned as he bent over to put on his sneakers.
He opened his bedroom door. There was only silence and darkness in the hallway. Apparently his parents had not been awoken by the lamp falling to the floor or his thrashing around in bed. Or more likely, he had woken them up, his mother at least, but she’d probably just turned over and gone back to sleep.
He and Becky slipped out the back door and walked up the street. It was colder than he’d expected. Late May in Vermont could still be frigid at night.
He wondered if he shouted during these nightmares, which had been with him since he was a kid. He was almost eighteen, and he still had dreams that were bad enough to wake him up. It made him feel foolish. When he sheepishly admitted his problem to his friends, Marcia had suggested he keep a dream journal, and Sara had told him to jerk off before going to sleep. That, or get a girlfriend.
The first two were easy, but the last was impossible. There was only one girl Andrew really wanted.
Laura lived in his neighborhood, which was a source of both pleasure and pain for him, as he frequently walked his dog past her house. It was nice to be near her, however remote the possibility of an actual connection.
He gazed at her house as he stamped his feet and rubbed his arms to ward off the chill.
Laura.
Andrew’s proposed dream journal had quickly become a Laura journal. It was filled with pictures of her, poems about her, but mostly unsent letters to her.
Laura,
I feel like I can smell your hair around the school, around our neighborhood. It’s like I’m always just missing you. I never know where you are, but I know where you’ve been. I love you, but you haunt me like a nightmare. When I’m an old man, I know that I’ll still dream about you.
He knew the memory of her would haunt him, because he didn’t really believe he’d ever get to have her in the first place. But the knowledge of his inevitable doom didn’t stop him from obsessing over her. He entertained himself daily with dozens of scorching, crazy, lurid fantasies, imagining a Laura who most certainly did not exist. Other times he daydreamed about some idyllic future together. He knew she was going to college somewhere out West. They’d get together this summer, fall in love, he’d transfer to whatever school she was attending, maybe even study the same stuff, take the same classes. They’d live in each other’s dorm rooms, or get an apartment together. They’d probably have to get married first because of her religion. That was all right; he’d marry her tomorrow if he could. Their life together would be wonderful. Would he have to convert to whatever sect of Christianity she belonged to? That was the only question mark in his fleeting fantasies.
Sometimes he wondered why he loved her so much. After all, he barely knew her. But she was kind, that much he knew, because she did volunteer work and was nice to everyone, even the most decrepit and socially outcast misfits at their school. And she had some self-contained confidence, some inner glow unrelated to her beauty that made her mysterious and compelling. Was it her faith?
Laura.
She was asleep inside that little house. Andrew felt attuned to her every toss and turn. He thought that he might wake her with the force of his will or summon her to him with the strength of his love. He stared hard at her house and at the window that he imagined to be hers.
“What the hell am I doing?” he asked himself out loud.
A light came on. Andrew felt a painful rush in his heart.
There was a slight movement. A shadow flickered across the window frame, and the curtains fluttered. He did not blink.
The coherent part of him knew that in a moment the light would go out. The other him, the one whispering to himself in the dark, held out for better things. She’ll come to the door. She’ll open the door. Our eyes will meet, and it will be like the movies where neither of us has to say anything, but whole histories and lifetimes will pass between us. It’ll be like that but better. . . .
The light went out.
With fury, he wiped at the tears that ran down his cheeks. He felt romantic despair, but also he just felt fucking cold. He was dying of cold. He was ashamed of not being a stronger person who could somehow withstand cold and disappointment. He turned around and walked home, jogging and then sprinting the last few blocks to his house. Becky followed, fast on his heels.
When he got inside, he sank to the kitchen floor. He buried his hands deep inside Becky’s fur while she licked his face. They stayed that way for a while. Becky was a big dog, a black Lab mixed with some other large breed. She stood strong and solid and still as Andrew leaned against her.
“Where were you?”
Andrew looked up at his mother. She wore her old purple robe and a pair of tiny slippers, small and pink like those of a ballerina. Under her slippers she had on a pair of gray wool socks. The seams of the slippers were permanently overstretched from this arrangement. She was thin and tall like him, her younger son. They shared the same coloring too, a sort of peachy paleness and hazel gray eyes.
“Going for a walk. Becky had to pee,” Andrew said.
“It’s two thirty in the morning.”
“I know, I know,” he said. He looked away from her.
“You’re not . . . You’re not on drugs or something, right?”
“What? No.”
“Well, then, where were you?”
“I just told you,” he said. “What, were you actually worried?” he added.
She crossed her arms over her chest and glared at the floor. He regretted his words, but just barely. His mom had chosen sides a long time ago. He stood up and headed for the stairs.
“Your brother’s home in two weeks,” she said.
He stopped. “So?” he asked, without turning around.
“He’s coming home, that’s all,” she said. Her voice was vague and soft, as though she had spoken through a pillow.
“Whatever,” Andrew said.
When he reached his room, Becky leaped around, grabbed one of his socks in her mouth, and curled into a tight ball. Andrew felt himself deflate. Two weeks. Two weeks before Brian came home and took over. Andrew and Brian barely spoke at this point, but Brian’s presence was like a poisonous fog: suffocating and unavoidable.
Andrew got into bed and pulled the covers around him tightly. As he warmed up, his body hurt all over with tingly, prickly sensations. Were these his nerves coming back to life? Had they been frozen? Marcia will know, he thought. Marcia knows everything.