Someone in the house is shouting.
It’s Dad who’s shouting. An intruder has broken into our house. An intruder is trying to kill Dad.
I sit up in bed. My body runs alongside my heart, trying to jump on.
I feel for my bike frame and grab the tire pump. It’s light but would deliver a solid blow.
The lights are on in Mom and Dad’s room. Dad’s eyes are shut. Every time he shouts, his head rises off the pillow. Mom kneels on the floor beside him, shaking his arm.
“Wake up, Bill! Wake up! Bill! Stop it!”
“What’s wrong with him?”
Linda runs in from the hall, wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt.
Dad shouts again.
Linda shouts back, sounding just like Dad. They’re not shouting words. It’s a preword and I don’t know where they learned it.
“Linda! Stop it!” Mom says.
“Mom! Why is he doing this?”
“I don’t know, Billy. He just is. He just started shouting like this.”
“Why don’t you make him stop it?”
“I can’t!”
Linda looks into the hall, hopping up and down. “Where’s Dad? He’ll know what to do! I’m going to go get Dad!”
Mom grabs her by the shoulders. “Linda! Linda! What are you talking about? This is Dad. He’s already here. He’s the one who’s yelling.”
“Oh! He’s already here. I forgot.” She starts to cry and leans on Mom.
“Linda, you have to calm down. You have to help me.”
“But I’m afraid!”
“I can’t wake him up. Somebody try something!”
“Come on, Dad,” I urge. My voice leaves my throat in shreds like splinters. “You can do it. You can wake up.”
I really don’t know if he can. What if he can’t?
I drop the pump and climb across the bed to shake him. How long has it been since I’ve crawled into my parents’ bed—ten years? Back then it was a tract, a room to itself.
“Come on, wake up. It’s not real. If you wake up, you won’t be scared anymore.”
“In another minute,” Mom says, “I’m calling an ambulance.”
“Dad, stop,” Linda says. “Please stop, okay? Please wake up. You’re scaring me. Okay. Okay.” She breathes deep the way the doctor told us to, but each breath has a rattle in it like she’s swallowed cellophane. “I know. Let’s pry his eyes open.”
Bending over him with one fingertip, she slides up his eyelids. He’s still shouting without looking at us, in a separate world that we can’t get to.
Then Dad’s irises contract.
“He’s awake,” Linda says.
I press Dad’s arm. His pajama shirt is soaked. “Dad, it was just a nightmare. Come on. Sit up. Sit up.”
“He’s awake, Mom. Dad, it’s okay,” Linda says. “You’re home in bed.”
“All right.”
“You’re home. You were having a nightmare.”
“Was I? My God.” Dad’s voice is rough, like that night in the kitchen.
Linda and I surround Dad, but Mom stays back. Dad’s nightmare must have scared her. She looks like someone who walks along the edge of a pool not knowing what they’ll find. A koi, a piranha, a dead body, their own reflection.
“Are you going to be all right, Bill? I was just about to call an ambulance.”
“Maybe he should keep sitting up, Mom. Keep sitting up. You’d better stay awake for a while, until you’re sure it’s gone away.”
“I’m awake. I’m awake.”
Linda tugs the corner of his pillow. “I’m the one who woke you up, Dad.”
“Thank you, honey.” He feels for her hand, squeezes it.
“When you saw me, you were all right.”
“What was this nightmare?” I ask. “It must have been a whopper.”
“What was it, Dad?” Linda echoes. “Was it pretty scary?”
“I was alone….”
Crawling back to Mom’s side of the bed, I settle against the headboard. “So, you were alone?”
“That’s right. I was sealed up in a metal box…with a window in it.”
“Mom,” Linda asks, “can I turn on all the lights so we feel less nervous?”
“If it will make you feel better.”
“Don’t say anything important till I get back.”
Lights come on in rooms, shaping our box of life beside the highway. The drivers on 128 may notice a lit-up house, but they know nothing about Dad’s nightmare. Probably no other family is awake in this section of Hawthorne.
“What do you think the metal box was?” The obvious thought is a coffin, but I hope he’ll say “phone booth” and break this mood.
“It was like a submarine, because I was dropped into the ocean. But nobody knew that I was inside. First it was bobbing on the surface. Then it started to sink. I could see the water through the window.”
Dad links his phrases slowly, but we listen without interrupting, as the doctor said we should. I try to picture the dream, picture myself in it. I feel that if I get it right, just the way Dad dreamed it, the spell will break and it won’t bother him again.
“I wanted to get out, and I knew it had a door in it when I first went inside, but when the box began to sink the door had disappeared.”
“Why were you inside it in the first place?” Linda asks.
“Does that really make any difference, Linda?” Mom asks.
“I’m trying to figure out what it means.”
“It doesn’t mean anything. Don’t you see what the problem is? It’s those pills they’ve got him on.”
“That’s what it must be,” Dad says. “Those pills.”
Of course. “Well, that’s good then, isn’t it?” I comment.
“How is it good?”
It’s good because Dad is not really in a metal box that’s sinking.
Mom finds a clean pajama top in a pile of folded laundry on the dresser. She holds it out to Dad while he takes off the soaked one. “I could kick myself. How could I let you take anything without looking into it more closely?”
“Dad,” Linda asks, “do you think that if you had stayed asleep, you eventually would have found a way out of the box?”
“I don’t think we need to know any more about this,” Mom answers without looking at Linda. “It doesn’t matter what the nightmare means, it’s just bad enough that it happened. Try to get it out of your mind, Bill. Do you want to read something?”
“Maybe we should have made the decision together,” Dad says, buttoning the new shirt.
“Together? Bill—” It seems like Mom wants to say that Dad hasn’t been able to decide anything for at least a month now. But how can she tell him this? No one ever actually says to him that he’s anything less than normal. “Well, do you mean you didn’t want the pills? If we had decided together, would you have not gone ahead with it? Do you want to go off them?”
“I didn’t want them. I knew they wouldn’t help.” Dad suddenly seems more wise instead of less, like his dream packed him something to carry back to the rest of us. His calmness spooks me, and I wish there were more lights for Linda to turn on.
“Why didn’t you say something at the time?” Mom asks. “Why didn’t you refuse to take them?”
“Because you seemed so happy.”
“You were making me happy?” Mom is still holding the sweaty pajama top. “You took them to make me happy? But I did think it was going to help. Something had to.”
“Are you all right, then, Dad?” I ask. “Can we go back to bed now?” I was thinking of getting up extra early. I have an oral report to give tomorrow, and I haven’t even started it yet. I feel like my blood has slowed down finally. A section of my face, right between my eyebrows, had actually been jumping.
“I don’t feel like sleeping,” Linda says. “Dad, do you want to sit up for the rest of the night with the lights on and watch TV? There might be an old movie on. Then when the movie’s over, I’ll make pancakes.”
“That’s all right, honey. Your mother and I will sit up for a few minutes and talk. Oh, God.”
“I’m going to bed. Maybe you should move into a different room,” I suggest. “To just, you know, forget things. Remove the reminders or whatever. Maybe you should sleep on the couch tonight.”
“He’ll be all right,” Mom says. “But I vote with Linda. Anyone who wants to can leave their lights on.”