In Between Dreams

by Iman Verjee

  ‘Really?’ I can’t believe that they want me back.

  ‘Of course,’ Nova says. ‘You were a big help yesterday.’ She exchanges a quick look with Joseph.

  ‘Great.’ Joseph sits down beside Alex, dragging him onto his lap. The action makes my heart race uncomfortably and I have an urge to pull Alex away from him. I sit back down and shake my head clear. ‘Are you alright?’ he asks and I try to nod. ‘Great. It’s decided then.’

  He doesn’t take me back to the Academy until well after lunch, when the sky is beginning to darken and the road stretches ahead of us dotted in spotlights of yellow. Before we turn out of his driveway, I twist my neck back and see Nova and Alex standing at the doorway. I keep looking until they become two barely discernible dots and all I can make out is the back-and-forth movements of their wrists, waving goodbye, their voices ringing in my ears, shouting that they’ll see me soon.

  ‌29

  ‌St Albert. May 1980

  Summer was approaching; almost overnight, the trees had leaves again and people spilled from their houses, lying in their backyards and shouting at each other over their fences. At night, he would take her out onto the porch and sit on the swing, the unrelenting night pressing down upon them like a child’s favorite blanket. The distant spattering of dogs barking and the hard vibrations of parties going on around the block were soft sounds in the background. He could smell hotdogs burning and hear the playful chirp of crickets in freshly mowed lawns; the croak of a frog serenading distant fireflies.

  ‘There goes Mrs. Crawley,’ he would say as a car flashed past. ‘Probably off to her bridge game,’ pushing his toes into the ground and then releasing his feet so that the swing rocked them gently. ‘And there are the Pressley twins—God, they look different, don’t they?’ Still boys when winter had started, now they were sixteen and looked like young men. Limbs having shot up, forming muscle where before there was only fat, bringing a confidence with them, an excitement for the future. He had been that way once. He cradled his daughter to him. ‘Promise me you won’t grow up that fast?’ he said, and then felt a terrible sadness and anger at the way the world kept moving relentlessly forward.

  He was happy, despite everything that had happened. Life was simpler with Gina gone and Frances was a quiet and easy baby, never giving him any of the problems his friends had warned him about long ago. Very few instances of colds and fevers and maybe one or two diaper rashes, but other than that it had been smooth sailing and he didn’t mind not having anyone else to help him. After six months alone together, they had found their rhythm which consisted of him waking up at six to feed her breakfast, dropping her off to a daycare a couple of blocks down from his work, and then hurrying back as soon as five thirty struck, standing by the glass door and always spending a few minutes watching her; the way she stumbled and straightened and crashed into the soft bean bags. The little gleeful laughs and the toys always gripped in her fists as a worker picked her up and spun her around. Then she would spot him and point and he would be called forward by that invisible bond between them and she would be back in his arms and soon after, back in bed, her cheeks red and sleepy.

  He had moved her into one of the spare rooms, converting it into a nursery. He painted the walls himself, a swirling beige, and hung a mobile over her head that sang a soft tune for her before she went to sleep. And he would sit in the darkening room, staring and promising and loving her and wishing that he could have a little more time to grasp just how wonderful this time they had together was.

  One night, during his soft commentary, he heard approaching footsteps. At first he thought they would go right by him; he had been so busy this past year that he hadn’t had a visitor in a long time and he was surprised to hear someone coming up his porch steps. He had to blink twice before he remembered who the man was.

  ‘Ben.’ Thankfully the name came to him just in time. A man he had sometimes played poker with; quiet and sensible and had played that way, never winning or losing too much.

  ‘Ridiculous heat, isn’t it?’ He came forward, looking down at Frances and James instinctively drew her closer.

  ‘I don’t mind it,’ he said.

  ‘Right.’ Ben pulled at the fabric of his shirt, fanned it twice against his skin. ‘I find it a bloody pain. Thank God for Jen—she bought two inflatable pools last week. Spends all day in them with the kids,’ and then remembering the two women who had left this house, a sympathetic look crossed his face that James had fast got used to after Gina left. Ben looked around the garden, neatly trimmed and bursting with new flowers. ‘I see you don’t have one.’

  ‘I don’t really need it.’

  ‘Well you’re always welcome to come and use ours. Roxy is always looking for someone to play with.’ He bent toward Frances. ‘Hello, there.’

  As if she knew she was being talked to, Frances squealed happily and held out her arms to this stranger. Her hair was caught up in the evening light and her pretty mouth opened in a gurgled laugh. Ben reached out for her but James held her tightly back.

  ‘Is there something that you wanted?’ he asked. He was protective over his daughter, so unused to having other people interfere with their nightly routine, that he was disconcerted and a little annoyed.

  ‘Well,’ Ben inserted two fingers into the collar of his shirt and tugged at it. ‘It’s Roxy’s first birthday tomorrow and we’re throwing a party.’ He leaned back against the railing, his face shining with heat.

  ‘So?’

  Ben cleared his throat. ‘The whole neighborhood is going to be there and I thought it would be nice if the two of you could come.’

  ‘We’re busy tomorrow,’ James said, bouncing Frances on his knee, trying to get her to keep quiet. ‘Thanks for the invitation.’

  Ben insisted. ‘I’m sure everyone would love to see you.’

  ‘I said we can’t.’ The thought of all those people feeling sorry for him, wanting to hold his daughter, pet her and smother her, made him shake his head more forcefully. All those questions he would have to answer, those sympathetic glances he would have to face that would also tell him he deserved this loneliness, that he had brought it all upon himself.

  ‘Okay.’ Ben relented. ‘If you change your mind, it starts at twelve and we’ll be going all day. You remember how these things are,’ he grinned, ‘so you’re more than welcome to drop by whenever you want.’

  ‘Okay, thanks.’ James turned back to his daughter, the man already far from his mind.

  ‘It was good to see you,’ Ben said. ‘She really is gorgeous.’ He reached out to touch Frances but before he could, James had sprung up from the swing, baby in one hand, forearm of the other pressed tightly against Ben’s throat, shoving him down the stairs.

  ‘Don’t touch her,’ he growled. ‘Don’t you fucking touch her.’

  Ben’s eyes grew wide as he stumbled down onto the pavement. He held his hands up to block any further contact. ‘Hey, just calm down. I’m sorry.’ He made a move to come back up, to apologize, but James forced him back down.

  ‘Is that what you came here for?’ his voice rising, a hazy anger clouding his vision. ‘To look at my daughter?’

  ‘What?’ Fearful confusion creased Ben’s previously friendly face. ‘Look, I didn’t mean anything by it—I was trying to pay you a compliment. What kind of fucking pervert do you think I am?’

  Pervert. The word sent a rush of anger through him and a sickening feeling of shame pulled a growl from his throat. He released his hold on Ben’s throat.

  ‘Get lost,’ he said. ‘Don’t come back. I don’t want to see you near my house ever again.’

  Ben turned and almost ran down the street, back to the twinkling lights of his house. He went inside and James heard him shout something to his family before the door closed behind him. James blinked a couple of times as the anger subsided and he held his daughter tightly to him.

  Everyone kept their distance after that.

  It was the middle of summer when
his father passed away. A heart attack aggravated by a heatwave that left people in the town sitting by their fans or carrying cups of ice to rub along their necks. It was his new favorite thing to do with Frances; shivering as the ice fell down his neck and hearing her laugh at his expression, asking for a cube of her own. He gave it to her and loved the way it dribbled a pretty river down her chin.

  His mother called him up early that morning, unexpectedly calm so that at first he thought he was dreaming. He drove to his parents’ house that same day with Frances; it was the first time he had been back since he had got married and it felt strange to take her to the place where he had been as a boy. They held the funeral two days later, the entire procession shifting and sticky in their black clothes. He was sitting on a chair beside his mother, holding her hand tightly in his own with Frances gripped in the other. As he watched the coffin being lowered into the ground, felt it shake with the weight of his father, the hairs on his arms stood up. To be stuck in that box, under the smelly earth forever while everyone else got on with their lives seemed too cruel to him and he had a sudden urge to jump down and save his father from that fate. He jiggled his knee and tried not to move.

  To distract himself, he scanned the crowd, picking up familiar faces from his childhood, all different but somehow exactly the same. His eyes came to rest on a small, perfectly still figure at the back. Her head was down and covered in a wide-brimmed hat but he was sure it was her; he would know her anywhere. She hadn’t changed in the past two years—still as girlishly pretty as ever in a lace dress with her hands folded in prayer before her. Marienne. He said her name silently and as if she had heard, she looked up and saw him staring. She stepped back further into the throng of people. He wanted to go to her but the priest was speaking slowly, unbothered by the growing impatience of the crowd around him. We therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of Resurrection to eternal life.

  The priest had barely finished his last words when everyone began to move; rushing to give their condolences, eager to climb back into the air-conditioned relief of their cars and hurry back to their own lives. James held Frances close to him and every time someone leaned down to tweak her nose or exclaim how pretty she was, he panicked and wished he could have left her at home.

  He kept his eye out for Marienne but she never came forward; he saw her though, standing a little way away, watching them, before a group of people huddled around him and blocked his view. When everyone had left, with only two or three people standing over his father’s fresh grave, praying for him or themselves, James couldn’t tell, he stood up and went to look for Marienne. His chest beat erratically, and adding to the uneasy effect of the heat, made him lightheaded. It seemed like a lifetime since he had last seen her, so much had happened. But when he got to the tree she had been standing at, it was empty and he saw her walking slowly down the grassy slope to the street. She turned briefly before getting into her car and he lifted his hand in greeting, hoping she would see him and come back. She nodded and returned the wave. Then she slipped into her car and he sagged against the tree, Frances dozing in his arms, and watched as she drove once again out of his life.

  Thoughts of her were distracting him, so he didn’t hear his mother when she asked him, ‘What am I going to do now, in this big house, without your father?’

  ‘Did you see Marienne?’ he asked, absently folding his father’s belongings and placing them in an old suitcase.

  ‘Where?’ His mother pressed a shirt to her face. Her shoulders shuddered before she sucked in a deep breath and let it fall into the bag. He picked it up and re-folded it neatly.

  ‘At the funeral, Mom.’

  ‘Are you sure she was there?’

  ‘Yes, I saw her. She waved at me.’

  His mother frowned. ‘I didn’t see her. Maybe you imagined it—this heat is probably getting to you.’ Like it did to him.

  ‘No, she was definitely there.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t she come up and say hello?’

  He looked over at Frances, sleeping peacefully in his parents’ bed. Her cheeks were red with heat and her hair stood up. He wanted to lie down next to her. ‘Why do you think?’ he asked. His mother followed his gaze and sighed.

  ‘She would have made a wonderful mother.’

  ‘Yes, she would have,’ he said, almost wistfully, letting go of his father’s clothes and leaning against the bed frame. He opened his two top buttons and blew down his shirt. The heat was unbearable. He had received a letter from Gina just the other day, letting him know that she had landed a bigger role than expected in the movie. I’m sorry, she had written hurriedly, eager to get them out of her life, but my place is here now. Take care of our daughter. He had torn it up and thrown it in the trash and forgotten about it within the next hour. He hadn’t expected anything else.

  ‘You’ve done such a good job,’ his mother was saying. ‘Look at how happy she is.’ They stared at Frances together and his mother reached up to curl a lock around her finger. He resisted the urge to slap her hand away.

  ‘I wonder if she’s living here,’ he mused. ‘How else would she have heard about the funeral?’

  ‘I haven’t seen her around,’ his mother replied. ‘Maybe she’s living close by. I could try and find out for you, if you want to go and see her.’

  ‘How would you do that?’ A pulse of hope lit up in his gut. His mother smiled, lovingly running her hand over his father’s favorite navy jacket.

  ‘Why don’t you keep this,’ she said, handing it to him. He took it gratefully. Then she patted his hand and turned back to folding. ‘Have you forgotten what a small town this is, sweetheart? If Marienne is here, there’s nowhere to hide.’

  He didn’t have to go looking for her. She found him, which only made him miss her more.

  He had taken Frances on a walk earlier that morning, wanting to show her the hill he had climbed every day to go to school; the unmoving pond behind his house that the occasional burst of wind picked up and set back down again in sharp ripples. She was too young to understand any of it; he was doing it for himself. He wanted to remember something.

  Brushing away fallen red needles of bottlebrush that dropped into the pram, he caught the scent of a particular tree he had never been able to identify it but had the peculiar, unforgettable stink of fish. He had always hated the smell but now it teased him, sparking off tiny bursts of nostalgia in his brain. He sat in the shade with Frances, listening to the murmur of water insects, surrounded by boyhood memories he thought he had lost.

  ‘Sometimes it gets a little lonely, just the two of us, doesn’t it?’ He rocked her slowly in the stroller, putting his chin close to her face. She banged her fists against her legs and gurgled in reply. He touched her cheek and smiled tiredly from the sun that was already burning at his back. ‘She would love you, you know. She would look after you much better than I ever could.’ He stretched out his finger and she clasped it, biting down hard and then shouting out in what he had come to identify as her laugh. As always, he was astounded that she recognized him, that she understood what was between them, young as she was. He closed his eyes, pressed his forehead against the bar of the stroller and said, ‘I would do anything for you,’ before lapsing into a long silence.

  He didn’t hear the footsteps coming up from behind his house; they padded softly along the overgrown grass, so he jumped when she spoke.

  ‘This always was my favorite part of the house.’

  His head came up fast. ‘Annie?’ He squinted until she stepped out of the sunlight and into the shade of the tree.

  ‘I’m sorry about your father,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you for coming to the funeral,’ he replied.

  ‘I wouldn’t have missed it.’ She came closer to him but didn’t sit down, even though he shifted to make space for her. ‘He was like family to me, you know that.’ She bent toward Frances, stretching out her finger to tickle her belly.
For the first time, nothing in him resisted letting someone else touch his daughter. He trusted Marienne, he always had. ‘Hello there…’ she was waiting for a name.

  ‘Frances.’

  ‘Frances,’ she repeated, straightening up. ‘That’s unusual.’

  ‘It seemed to suit her.’

  Marienne cleared her throat. ‘Where’s Gina? I didn’t see her at the funeral.’ She said it casually but there was a trace of residual anger, worn away and blunt now but still there in her voice and tensed-up features.

  ‘She moved back to Montreal to live with her brother six months ago and I haven’t seen her since,’ he said.

  ‘She went without Frances?’

  ‘I don’t think she ever really wanted her.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Her hand fell to his shoulder and he closed his eyes when she squeezed it with fingers as well known to him as his own. He put his hand on top of hers.

  ‘Have you been living here all this time?’ he asked.

  ‘I just moved back a few weeks ago.’ She played nervously with her earring, tilting her head and rolling it between her fingers. Her hair hung perfectly straight over her shoulders and looked dark blue where it caught the light.

  ‘Oh.’ He wanted to know more; where she had been before, what she had been doing ever since she had left him, but he didn’t have a right to know anything anymore. ‘I’ve missed you. Nothing’s been the same since you left.’

  She pulled her hand away from his shoulder. ‘That’s not why I came here.’

  ‘Whatever the reason was, I’m glad.’ He grabbed her wrist. ‘I want you to come back home with me, Marienne.’

  After a long pause, she spoke. ‘I waited for four years for you in this house, when you went away to college.’ She smiled, picking up a leaf from the lowest branch of the tree. ‘I remember coming out here in the evenings, wondering what you were doing at that exact moment—if you could tell I was thinking about you.’ She started to rip the leaf to pieces, dropped down and sat beside him. ‘You came to visit that one summer—a year before you were done. Remember you took me out on a boat on this pond, with dinner hidden in a picnic basket, and how beautiful it was that night?’ He nodded, enjoying the feeling of being transported back, the swell of pleasure it evoked. The sense of infinite possibility that he had had back then, like all young people do. ‘I thought you were going to propose that day.’ She gave a sad little laugh. ‘But you didn’t, and the next day, you just left, like you did every year, and I told myself that that was it. I was done waiting—I was just wasting my time. She stared down at her wringing fingers. ‘But I couldn’t leave. I loved you too much. I trusted that you would do the right thing.’