“Mia,” he says. A warning.
I ignore it. “By the sixth attempt it increases to sixty-five percent. Of course the odds are a little better for us, because I’m under thirty-five and we’d be using my own eggs, but still it’s lengthy, an involved process. And I thought that if we at least get started, make an appointment for more information or an evaluation so that—”
“Mia,” he repeats. Sharper this time.
The ding of letters lighting up on the Wheel of Fortune board fills the room. “Three l’s,” says Pat.
And then Harrison: “I just . . .” He lifts his hand to his face, and I know he’s rubbing his eyes beneath his glasses. Something he does when he’s tired or thinking or both. “I need—”
“Time.” I finish for him, my voice flat. “Yeah, I know.”
I turn away from him, back toward the television, and after a beat, he follows, the mattress wobbling beneath us once again. He drapes a long arm around me, casually cupping my breast, a position so common and comfortable, the intimacy of it doesn’t even register.
“When did you say they’re coming to fix the air again?”
“Monday,” I say.
He grunts. And then: “We should get out of here. This weekend. Go to the Poconos or Cape May—or what about that place in Jersey with the huge artwork garden you’ve been wanting to see?”
“Grounds for Sculpture.”
“Grounds for Sculpture,” he repeats. “We could stay in a third-rate hotel, swim in the overchlorinated pool, eat those rubbery just-add-water powdered eggs at the free breakfast in the morning.”
“I love those rubbery just-add-water powdered eggs.”
“I know.” He nuzzles my ear. “What do you think?”
What do I think. I let his words roll around in my head: We should get out of here. I think about the last time he said that, when we were living in Philadelphia, just after our second miscarriage, and the weekend trip ended up with us moving here. I think about how spontaneous it was, so unlike Harrison, and how he’s doing it again. I think my husband is changing right in front of my eyes. His beard, his spontaneity, how he needs time. I think about how time feels like the one thing I don’t have to give him.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
The Game Show Network moves on to its nightly lineup of five Family Feuds in a row. At some point, Harrison removes his glasses, unbuttons his shirt. And then his arm grows heavy over mine, his breathing deepens. I nudge him gently and he rolls off of me, to his side of the air mattress. I turn off the television and lie beside him, waiting for sleep to come. But it doesn’t. I listen to the rattle of the air-conditioning unit in the window, and then the overwhelming silence it leaves behind when it suddenly clicks off. I stare up at the crisscross shadows of the exposed wood rafters holding up the roof.
Restless, I pick up my phone from where it lies on the ground beside the air mattress and click on my text messages. I reread the last few from Oliver, and without hesitating this time, I hit send on the picture I took of the carnival painting.
Then I navigate to the message board again. As I’m searching for an update from MissyK874—she hadn’t been on all afternoon—my phone comes alive in my hand, startling me.
It’s loud, the buzzing, in this tiny room, and I slide my thumb on the screen to answer it quickly, simultaneously registering that the name on the screen is Oliver.
“Hello?” I whisper, heart racing. I glance at Harrison’s sleeping form. It doesn’t stir.
“Do you know that place?” Oliver’s voice demands in my ear. There’s an edge of panic to it that sends my heart galloping even faster.
“Wait—hold on.” I roll off the air mattress as smoothly as I can. I tiptoe to the door, easing it open and then pulling it closed behind me, as I step out onto the gravel. The rocks dig into the bare soles of my feet.
“What are you asking?” I say, gingerly hopping over to the grass for relief.
“Your painting. The amusement park. Where is that? Have you been there?”
“No.” I cross an arm over my stomach, to ward off a sudden chill, even though the night air is still thick with summer heat. “It was a dream. A dream I had. One about you. We’re there, in that carnival at night. Alone at first, and then all these people are there, too . . .” I trail off. “Why?”
He doesn’t say anything for what feels like hours and I grip the phone, waiting. Wondering. Is it a place he recognizes? Somewhere he’s been before?
“Oliver? What is it?”
“It’s just . . . I’ve had that dream, too.”
Chapter 16
After two days of sleeping on the air mattress in the studio and taking showers in a house so hot, I feel like I need another one the second I step out of it, I’m near salivating at the idea of a hotel room.
That’s how I find myself sitting in the passenger seat of Harrison’s Infiniti Friday night, heading south on Route 29 toward Hamilton, New Jersey, home to the Grounds for Sculpture, a forty-two-acre art park and arboretum known for its oversize three-dimensional sculptures of famous paintings. Though it’s a short trip—only forty-five minutes—my mood buoyed the second we hit the highway, remembering the many miles Harrison and I traversed during our first few years together; road trips home for holidays, to weekend weddings, short beach excursions. I often loved the ride more than the destination, even though Harrison’s Jeep rattled like the frame was going to come completely off the wheels at any speed above forty-five. It just added to the exhilaration of having Harrison completely to myself for the stretch of time and highway in front of us.
The Infiniti is smooth, quiet as it barrels down Route 29. Too quiet. I roll down the window and hot air whooshes into the car. I stick my hand into it, let the wind dance through my fingers.
My cell vibrates in my pocket and I dig it out, peering at the screen through the hair that’s whipping around my face. It’s Oliver.
I think this might be it.
I cast a sideways glance at Harrison. The day after my phone conversation with Oliver, I drifted around in a kind of stunned fog. So we did have the same dream, at least once. But what did that mean? It was so maddening, getting these little puzzle pieces that didn’t seem like they would ever add up to one big picture. I told Harrison that night, but he didn’t say anything. Just stared at me like I had sprouted a third arm, and sighed—a long, controlled exhale of breath—making me feel even crazier than I already felt.
Meanwhile, Oliver has gone into a deep dive of amusement parks in the United States. He’s convinced the one in our dream must actually exist and keeps sending me images he’s found online. At first I thought he might be on to something. The problem, I’ve found, is that they’re all so similar—carousel, wooden roller coaster, Ferris wheel, funnel cakes. And I’ve started to wonder if the details I’m painting are from my dreams—was the carousel horse really ivory with a gold and red saddle?—or from some collective memory of what a carousel is supposed to look like.
I enlarge the current image Oliver sent with his text. It’s an ornate carousel, with intricate gold curlicues decorating the rafters of the ride. I squint at it. There is something vaguely familiar about it—but then, there was something familiar about the last eight.
Maybe, I type back.
He sends another picture: a Tilt-A-Whirl with royal blue domed seats on a mechanical track. I sit up.
Getting warmer.
Right? And on the park map, it’s right next to the carousel, just like in your painting.
Where is it?
Elysburg, PA. Couple hours away. Think I might go check it out tomorrow. Want to come?
Another sideways glance at Harrison.
Can’t. Headed out of town for the weekend.
Cool. Where to?
Jersey. Grounds for Sculpture.
I realize, a beat after I hit send,
what I’ve just admitted to. And I have no doubt what his response will be.
WHAT? WHO VACATIONS IN NEW JERSEY??!
I grin.
“Mia.” Harrison’s voice grabs my attention.
“Huh?” I look up at him.
“I’m talking to you.” His voice is loud, competing with the wind.
“Oh. Sorry.” I tug at the button on my door panel and watch the window automatically close. My hair stills. “What’s up?”
“I said I’ve got something for you.”
“What?”
“Reach into my bag.” He gestures to the backpack at my feet.
I look at him curiously and reach down to unzip the bag’s front pouch.
“No, the big one.”
I grip the other zipper and pull, revealing a manila folder stuffed with papers. Assuming it’s Harrison’s work stuff, I push it forward to look behind it, without any idea what I’m looking for.
“That’s it. Pull it out.”
“This folder?”
He nods.
“What is it?” I ask suspiciously, as I tug it onto my lap. It’s thick, half my palm wide.
“Research.”
I turn the flap, my eyes landing on the headline of the first page: Why Do We Dream? I stare at it and then slowly turn to him.
“I thought we could go through it together.”
“What?” I ask, even though realization is dawning. I flip through the thick stack of papers and see bright-colored Post-it Notes sticking out the sides, Harrison’s illegible scrawl ending in question marks. It’s not just some web search results thrown together. It’s been curated, annotated—it took effort. “When did you even have time to do all this?”
“Last night, when I was on call. It was a slow night.”
I can’t help but gape at him. And I think of the way he gaped at me Wednesday night. His long sigh. “But . . . I thought you didn’t really believe me. That I was being crazy.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy,” he says quietly. “Not completely, anyway.” He grins. I swat at his thigh with the back of my hand. “Look, I do think this is . . . unusual. And I did hope that it was just some phase—like those two months you were determined to make your own paint using eggs and there was dried yolk on every single surface of our apartment. But when you were telling me about the amusement park dream on Wednesday, I realized this is not going away. And I thought about when I have a patient who comes in presenting unusual symptoms that don’t match up with anything I’ve seen before. I don’t dismiss what they’re saying out of hand; I research to fill in the gaps of what I know and hopefully come up with a diagnosis.”
“And if you can’t, then you dismiss the patient as a hypochondriac.”
He laughs. “OK, so the metaphor isn’t without its flaws.”
My hand finds his, our fingers lacing together. I squeeze gently. “Thank you.”
He shrugs, as if it’s nothing.
But it’s not. In that moment, it feels a little bit like everything.
* * *
In Hamilton, we stop at a drive-through and buy a sack of chicken soft tacos for dinner. We eat them in our room at the Howard Johnson, reveling in the air-conditioning that we cranked to full blast and drinking cold bottles of gas station beer.
And we go through the articles Harrison printed out, one by one. The first few are from Psychology Today: examinations and explanations of various dream studies; researchers trying to understand exactly why we dream. Some believe dreams are our brain’s way of forming and processing memories, while others think it’s how we sort through all the information our brains have collected throughout the day—random snaps of passing cars, snippets of conversations we overhear but aren’t paying attention to. Another theory suggests dreaming is psychological—how we work through difficult emotions like fear and anxiety in our lives. And some scientists believe dreams serve no function at all—that they’re just random and meaningless firings of the brain.
Harrison had highlighted that line, and I shoot him an amused look as soon as I notice it. “Let me guess, you’re in the meaningless camp?”
He holds up his beer from the corner chair he’s sitting in. His legs are propped on the bed, crossed at the ankles. “I think it’s important to consider all possibilities,” he says diplomatically. He bites into his taco, and a few errant shreds of cheese fall to his lap. “The next few pages delve into Jung versus Freud dream analysis—it’s interesting, but nothing that really pertains, so you can skip through those.” I flip through until I get to the next Post-it.
“OK, so here we get into some of the more . . . er . . . out-there stuff you and Oliver found, particularly the psychic dreaming. There are apparently three kinds. Precognitive means it predicts the future, so seeing someone you’re going to meet, or those people who thought they dreamt of the World Trade towers falling.” I follow along on the pages in front of me. “Then there are clairvoyant dreams, which supposedly give real-time information, so I think that lady who found the—what was it you said—candlesticks? That’s clairvoyant. And then telepathic is people who communicate to each other mentally.”
“Dream telepathy. Yeah, Oliver said something about that.” But I’m no longer looking at the papers in front of me. I’m staring at my husband, who not only listened to everything I’ve offhandedly told him these past few weeks, he paid attention. Even though I know he thinks it’s a bunch of nonsense.
And for some reason, I think of my childhood television. Growing up, we only owned one, which was embarrassing enough in the nineties, when all of my friends had at least two or three, but even more so because it wasn’t even a new one. It was one of those old huge wood console boxes from the seventies that we inherited from my grandmother. Worse still, sometimes the picture would get fuzzy or go out altogether, or the sound would just vanish and you had to bang on the top and side of it with your fist to rattle whatever was loose just enough to get it to work again.
As I stare at my husband, it occurs to me that marriage is a lot like that TV. The connection gets loose sometimes—even to the point where you think it might not work anymore—but then something jars it and the wires slip back into place, exactly where they belong, lighting up the screen and bringing back the sound; everything working as it should.
“Come here,” I say. And he does. And that’s how the papers end up a scattered mess on the floor.
* * *
At breakfast, we eat reconstituted eggs with toast off a conveyor belt and drink the burnt, watered-down coffee, dumping in extra plastic cups of creamer to try to cover the taste. We spend the morning sweating through the landscaped acres of Grounds for Sculpture; the afternoon, swimming in the motel pool, the cool water a balm to the hot day. And then, the chemical scent of chlorine still clinging to our skin and hair, we go to dinner. A local pizza joint.
“Oh my god.” I’m savoring my first bite—the perfect blend of tomato sauce, chewy crust and warm, melty cheese. “I wish this place delivered to Hope Springs.”
“Really? But we’ve got that amazing gas station pizza,” he says solemnly, until he can’t hold it anymore, and his face cracks. “God, I miss Philly.”
My head snaps up. “You do?”
“Of course. The food, at least. Especially Paesano’s. I would literally kill for one of their sandwiches right now.”
I study him. “Do you think . . . would you ever want to move back?”
His face clouds over. “No. I couldn’t.”
I’m about to counter, ask why, when my cell buzzes. It’s Oliver. “Sorry,” I say lamely to Harrison, before checking the message.
I AM THAT GUY.
What do you mean?
Grown man. In amusement park. Alone. Might as well be driving a white van and offering candy to children.
I grin.
Also, not sure what I
was expecting to find, but feeling a little stupid about my theory now.
Not the same park, then?
Not the same park.
“Is that Oliver?” Harrison asks and I look up at him.
“Yeah.” I put my cell back down next to my plate, and he clears his throat.
“So, don’t you want to hear my theory about your dreams?”
“You have one?”
“It’s toward the end of that stack of research. We just didn’t quite get to it last night.”
I hold his gaze for a beat, a half grin on my lips. “Hit me with it.”
He sets his pizza down on the plate, wipes his hands with a napkin. “So one of the things I kept finding and coming back to over and over is this fact that our brains don’t make up faces. Experts seem pretty unified in believing that people who appear in our dreams are only those we’ve seen before—even if it’s just someone you’ve passed on the street or subway that you didn’t even necessarily take note of, but your brain did.”
“Right.” I’d come across that fact as well. “And we’ve discussed that. I mean it’s not out of the question that I’ve seen him somewhere before—we did both live in Philly.”
“Right.”
“But then, why—”
“Hold on, I’m not done yet. A lot of psychotherapists also agree that it’s the emotions in your dream that are important—not who’s in them or what’s happening, but the way you feel. So, simply put, if you’re scared or anxious in a dream, then there’s something in your life that’s making you feel scared or anxious. So I think that maybe you’ve seen Oliver in passing and your brain just locked onto his face for whatever reason. And instead of focusing on him, you should focus on how you feel in your dreams and what insights you might gain from that in your life.”
He sits back, and I take it as the cue that he’s finished. It’s so very logical, so banal, so Harrison, that I almost laugh. “So . . . basically you don’t think it means anything.”
You Were There Too Page 16