Not when Harrison is methodically flossing each tooth.
In bed, Harrison presses his lips to my temple and says: “Forgot to tell you, I went to the fertility specialist today.” And instead of the elation I should feel, guilt cuts deeper into my stomach. My sweet Harrison. Unaware of the secret lying between us. I want to tell him—but I just can’t. Because the strangest thing just happened, and really, who on earth would believe it?
Besides Oliver.
Chapter 10
When I wake up Sunday morning, Harrison’s side of the bed is empty, and by the silence in the house, I know he must be out running—even though it bucks his regular schedule. Maybe my husband is becoming unpredictable. I roll over, glancing at the digital clock on his nightstand: 9:36. And I sit straight up, every nerve in my body awake and alert.
I dream about you, too.
I throw off the covers and, still wearing the white tank I slept in, yank on a pair of Harrison’s old boxer shorts. I go into the kitchen to make some coffee, chugging the first cup that I brew like it’s vodka, the hot liquid scalding my throat. The second one I take into the living room.
I prop myself on the couch in the living room, my hands wrapped around the mug, and as I sit there in silence, the world comes sharply into focus. I notice the thin film of dust on our flat-screen, the twittering of birds fluttering right outside the window.
I dream about you, too.
Is that really what he said? It all happened so fast. Maybe I misheard him. Perhaps I had too much wine. Or the acoustics were bad. Or I had a ministroke that caused a hallucination, something I read about in one of Harrison’s medical journals once.
Maybe he said: I think about you, too. Or maybe he didn’t say anything at all.
Maybe I am completely losing my mind.
“Mia?”
I startle and jerk my head to see Harrison standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the den, sweaty and red-faced. “Sorry,” he says. “I thought you heard me come in.”
“No, lost in thought, I guess.”
He tugs the hem of his shirt up to absorb the sweat from his chin, revealing his tan belly, a few dark curls framing his navel. “Hey—you wanna go paddleboarding today? Foster was telling me about this little outfit up the Delaware. It’s only about thirty miles from here.”
All I can do is stare at him. My husband. Who wants to go paddleboarding with me. And is standing in front of me, solid and real. And I think of Oliver and the dreams and the near out-of-body way I felt at times around him. And I don’t know what’s happening to me, but suddenly I’m cold, my limbs nearly convulsing with chill. I tug a blanket off the back of the couch and wrap it tightly around my shoulders.
“I don’t think I’m up for that today. I have some errands to run.”
Harrison shrugs. “OK. I might go into the office then, after I shower. I’ve got an abdominoperineal resection tomorrow, and I want to study up on the technique.”
I nod. It’s something I saw him do a hundred times as a resident before a big procedure—he’ll spend hours poring over at least four different medical textbooks, refamiliarizing himself with all the anatomy, the techniques, going down every rabbit hole in his brain of what could go wrong and how to prevent it.
When I hear the squeak of the pipes and the rushing of water toward the shower in our bathroom, I pick up my coffee and take another swig. But it’s lukewarm now, and bitter.
While I sit there, drinking it anyway, a million questions tumble through my brain. And I realize there’s only one person who can answer them.
* * *
The instant I rap on the wooden door with my knuckles, Willy’s deep bellows answer from inside and it feels like a replay from the evening before, except this time Harrison isn’t by my side. The street is quiet, the sun already burning the pavement.
A few minutes tick by and I’m about to knock again when the door opens to reveal Caroline shooing Willy, but he gallops onto the porch anyway. Smudges of mascara raccoon her eyes; loose wisps of hair frame her face. She squints at the daylight. “Mia,” she says, surprised. “Hi.”
“Hi.” Willy’s cold nose mixes with his hot breath on my hand. I rub his head without bending over. “Sorry to pop in unannounced, but I don’t have . . . I didn’t know—” I glance past her into the dimly lit house. “Is Oliver here?”
She stifles a yawn. “Uh, yeah—I think so.” She eyes me, curious. I know I should say something—an excuse as to why I’m there; but since I don’t have one to offer, I remain silent. “Do you want to come in?”
“No, thanks, I don’t want to intrude.”
“OK. Well, I’ll go get him.”
She steps back inside, leaving me on the porch with Willy. Heart racing, I crouch down until I’m face-to-face with the dog, so I can scratch him properly behind the ears. But as soon as I’m within range, his huge, sandpapery tongue laps the side of my cheek. “Willy!” I shout, wiping the gooey saliva off my face with the back of my hand and then on my shorts.
“I should have warned you. He’s a kisser.”
Oliver. I look up into his eyes, and as soon as I see him peering back at me, I know. I did not mishear him. The intense way he’s looking at me—the way I’ve felt him looking at me on and off since the very first time I saw him—suddenly makes perfect sense. Because it’s the same way I’ve been looking at him. As if he’s not real. Or I can’t believe that he is. As if he could disappear at any second. I rise slowly, my legs unsteady.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi.” He’s in plaid pajama pants and a rumpled T-shirt advertising a liquor brand. He reaches down for Willy’s collar, gently guiding him inside. He shuts the door, and we’re alone.
“Do you want to sit?” He gestures to the porch swing.
“Sure.” Though the few words we’ve said are conventional—social customs—the words we’re not saying thicken the air between us and everything feels tense, high stakes. When we’re both on either end of the slatted bench, looking out at the street instead of each other, I take a deep breath.
“What did you—” I start, at the exact moment that he says: “So about last night—”
We both pause. I chuckle nervously.
“You first,” he says.
I swallow. “What did you mean last night when you asked, you know, if I had dreamt about you before we met?”
“I meant”—he speaks slowly, as if English isn’t my first language—“did you dream about me before we met?”
I flush. “No, I know—but why would you ask that? Unless you . . .”
He studies my face. And then nods slowly. Once.
Even though it’s what I expected, I’m struck dumb. I open my mouth to speak and then close it, because I have no idea what to say.
A pickup truck ambles down the road in front of us, bringing my attention back to earth. To Oliver.
“Do you hear that?”
“What?” I ask, pushing my head forward. The car’s gone and the air is once again quiet.
“The Twilight Zone music.”
I stare at him blankly.
“Sorry,” he says. “I make bad jokes when I’m uncomfortable.”
I lift an eyebrow. “Tiny character flaw?”
“Something like that.”
The swing creaks beneath us, swaying slightly.
“So, what do you dream about?” I ask. “You know, when I’m . . . there.”
Oliver pauses. “Different things.”
“Like what?” I press.
He shifts his weight in the seat, jostling the chains on the swing, but won’t meet my gaze. And I know. It’s as if every sexual encounter we’ve had in my dreams is playing like a movie reel between us, and my cheeks flame red, the tension mounting. Why did I even ask?
“I don’t know,” he says finally. He clears his thr
oat. “One of them, we were on a boat—”
“A ferry?”
“No, a rowboat. It was raining . . .” He trails off, and I understand. That’s the trouble with dreams, isn’t it? It’s impossible to explain them to someone else. They sound so ridiculous, nonsensical in the light of day. “What about you? What do you dream?”
I shrug, while frantically searching my mind for a tame one. “Once you gave me a brown paper bag full of teeth.”
“What?” His head jerks up. “Whose teeth were they?”
“How should I know?”
“Let’s see,” he says. “We were in an elevator, but when we got to the top of the building, it kept going, and we were suspended in the sky and I was completely freaking out but you didn’t care. Like you hung out in gravity-less elevators all the time.”
I start giggling. “You tried to kill me in a biplane once.”
“You pushed me down a waterslide even though I had all my clothes on and was holding a turkey sandwich. The bread was soaked.”
This sends me spiraling further and we’re both laughing now, more a side effect of the anxiety than it actually being funny, but once we start, the release feels good and it’s difficult to stop.
When we finally do, the silence stretches between us, growing unwieldy in its awkwardness.
“What do you think it means?” I ask Oliver quietly.
His head lolls slowly from one side to the other, as if he’s stretching out his neck. “I don’t know.” He pauses. “I just keep thinking of Occam’s razor.”
I wrack my brain, trying to recall the meaning of the familiar phrase, and it comes to me: “The best explanation is usually the simplest.” And then: “So what’s the simplest explanation?”
He shrugs, and though I’m desperate for answers, it helps somehow to know he’s as mystified by the entire thing as I am. “That we know each other somehow? That we’ve met before?”
“Yes! I’ve thought so, too.” I lean forward a bit. “We must know each other, right? I mean, I feel like I know you. Is that weird?”
He shakes his head. “No. I know what you mean.”
I try to ignore the chill that runs up my spine. “OK. Well, then maybe as kids? Where did you grow up?”
“New Jersey,” he says. “Freehold. Moved here when I was fourteen. You?”
“Silver Spring, Maryland. Philly for college.”
“Right,” he says. “Philly.”
“You said you’re in Center City, right? I used to be in that area a lot.” I decide to float my lame theory. “Maybe we’ve seen each other—a bar? A coffee shop?”
“Maybe,” he says, thoughtfully. He’s silent for a beat and then: “Or what about traveling? You know, like what if your family was on vacation in New Jersey and we happened to be at the same McDonald’s or hotel lobby or something?”
“Wait—who vacations in New Jersey?”
He cocks an eyebrow.
“OK, say we have met at some point—it clearly wasn’t something that either of us remember. And I can’t help but feel like it would have to be meaningful in some way—some kind of connection that would explain the dreaming.”
He nods. The swing creaks again.
“I Googled it—right after I saw you in the waiting room.”
He cracks a grin. “I did, too, actually. And then again last night—stayed up way too late.”
“You did?”
“Yeah.”
“What’d you find?”
“Not much, except if you believe the Internet, we’re not alone. A lot of people say this has happened to them before—dreaming about someone and then meeting them.”
“Yeah, they just don’t say what it means.”
“Right.”
We sit in silence for a few more minutes. “I don’t know—maybe there is no answer, no explanation.”
“Maybe,” he says, and then after a beat, he mutters: “I just feel like there has to be.” Even though it’s more to himself than to me, I’m buoyed. In those words, I hear it—the hint of desperation, the bewilderment that has plagued me on different levels since first laying eyes on him. And it’s validation—that I’m not crazy. Or if I am crazy, at least I’m not alone in my craziness.
Oliver opens his mouth to say something and then stops. Hesitates.
“What?”
“I did find one thing. There’s this professor. At Columbia University.” He digs his cell out of his pocket and taps the screen a few times, then hands it to me. It’s a headshot of a stern-looking woman, her arms folded across her suit-jacketed chest. I skim the words beside it.
Carolyn Saltz, PhD, a professor of clinical psychology and director of the sleep lab at Columbia University, has coauthored more than twelve studies on sleep and dreams. She resides in New York with her wife, four birds and a shih tzu named Freud.
I look back up at Oliver.
“I read through some of her research,” he says. “And it was a lot of basic dream stuff, theories on why we dream, what they mean, but there was this one study where she delved into the idea of something called mutual dreaming, where two people share the same dream world.”
I cock my head. “Like Inception?”
“Yeah. Kind of. Minus the technology and stealing-corporate-secrets thing. Says it usually happens between people who know each other really well—siblings, best friends, husband and wife . . .” He clears his throat.
“And it’s the same dream—it sounds like our dreams are different, right?”
“Yeah,” he admits. He tugs his hair again, and that’s when I notice something I’ve never seen before—in my dreams or real life. A scar, a thin jagged line a few inches above his left ear, right at his hairline. “God, I just wish I could sit someone down and say, ‘This is what happened to us—what does it mean?’”
I glance back at the screen. “Well, why don’t we?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why don’t we contact her?”
He cocks his head, considering. And I press on, a dog with a bone. “What do we have to lose?”
I scroll down the page and click on the contact link.
Due to the volume of inquiries, Dr. Saltz is unable to respond to individual emails. For interviews and media requests, please email: [email protected].
I turn the screen to Oliver. “Never mind. She probably gets a hundred emails a month, kooks asking her what their dreams mean. I guess it was a stupid idea.” I sigh and hand his phone back over.
“What if—” Oliver stops.
“What?”
“Well—what if we ask for an interview?”
“But we’re not media.”
“We could be,” he says, slowly. “I used to be a journalist—”
“You did?”
“Yeah. I still have some contacts at a few magazines. I could pitch an idea about dreams, see if someone bites.”
I stare at him, considering not just his plan but also this new crumb of information about who he is. Journalist. It’s not that it’s surprising, given his current career, but I find that each time I learn something about him it makes me want to know more. But instead of probing, I go with: “It’s not the worst idea.”
He shrugs. “What do we have to lose?”
Chapter 11
“Pop’s probably going to need knee surgery sometime in the next couple months,” Harrison tells me on Monday morning, when we’re sitting side by side in identical wooden armchairs waiting for Dr. Hobbes to grace us with his presence. It’s the first time I’ve seen him since yesterday morning, and I haven’t had a chance to tell him about going to see Oliver.
Well, I suppose I could have texted. Met up with him at his office for dinner. I could have not pretended to be asleep when he got home last night. The truth is, I don’t know how to explain what’s happening t
o myself, much less anyone else.
“Wait—what happened to physical therapy being enough?” Harrison’s dad tripped going up their front steps a few months earlier. A brick had come loose, causing him to come down the wrong way on his knee. He didn’t go see a doctor for five days, not until Harrison’s mom called, describing the swelling as grapefruit sized, and Harrison talked him into going in.
“Turns out, you actually have to do what the therapist says. Pop’s . . . struggling with that.”
“Ah.” Mr. Graydon is not known for his ability to take direction from others.
“If he does, I think I’ll go out there to help Mom. Just for a few days. She’s not strong enough to lift him.”
“Yeah, of course,” I say, staring at the files on Hobbes’s desk, as if I can glean the information in them telepathically. I don’t even know if they’re our results or somebody else’s. I glance down at my lucky yellow dress and pick imaginary lint off the shoulder. “Want me to come with you?”
Harrison’s head snaps toward me. “Do you want to?” He cocks an eyebrow. “Sleep on that ancient mattress and listen to Mom and Pop argue about whether the television is too loud over and over again?”
I consider this. Those parts are pretty awful. “We also get to eat your mom’s cooking, so—it’s not all bad.”
His mom’s picadillo has been known to cause tears of happiness. And tears of frustration the one time she tried to teach me how to make it and—after I added twice the amount of cumin (or cinnamon or some c spice) as needed—kicked me out of the kitchen with a string of Cuban swear words.
I glance at the clock on the wall and Harrison notices. “I’m sure he’ll be here soon,” he says. I rub my sweaty palms over the hard edges of the chair’s wooden arms and try to relax.
“So, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”
Harrison eyes me, no doubt noticing the gravity of my voice. “OK,” he says.
I open my mouth—even though I still have no idea where to begin—but then the door opens and Dr. Keenan Hobbes breezes into the room, greeting us without so much as an apology for the wait. Deep lines carve his face, making him look more grave than necessary. Or maybe it’s that I hope he looks more grave than necessary.
You Were There Too Page 11