5
* * *
“So,” Dr. Shapiro said. “Now you’ve taken to fainting, have you?”
“Mmmm,” Jennie said. It was hard to say much else, because he was holding her left eyelid open between his thumb and forefinger while he peered into her pupil with his little penlight.
“Okay.” He released her eyelid, and she blinked.
He went back around his desk and wrote something in his little leather-bound spiral notebook. She wondered what he was writing but was afraid to ask, afraid it might be something she didn’t want to hear. Brain tumors, she had heard, sometimes began behind the eyes; a brain tumor, something happening to her mind, might explain those dreams, or hallucinations—those frightening experiences she was afraid even to mention to him. She waited for his verdict, but he was still writing in the notebook. With his head bent that way, she could see his bald crown gleaming under thin strands of white hair. Michael didn’t like him—no doctor that old could be any good, he said—but she stuck with him because he was so nice, even now when she had to come all the way in from the country.
He finished writing and looked up from his notebook. “What about the headaches? Still getting them?”
“Twice since we moved to the country. I thought they were gone, they went away right after we decided to move, but I’ve had two again in the last two weeks.”
“When you fainted?”
“Yes, I had one then. Just before. It only lasted a second, and then I fainted.”
“And the other one?”
“Pardon?”
“The other headache. You didn’t faint then?”
“I had a dream.”
“You had a dream?”
She realized how strange that sounded. “I went to sleep after I had the headache, and I had this very strange dream.”
She had an impulse to tell him about it, about everything: the woman in the dream, and the horse and buggy on the road yesterday, and the way both times she seemed to have gone back into another time. About how real it felt, and the coincidence of the name Pamela both times, which she couldn’t explain, and which frightened her. She had to tell somebody. She hadn’t even told Michael about yesterday. He was already upset enough, insisting she come in for a complete checkup.
“The headaches and fainting I know about,” Dr. Shapiro said, pumping up a blood-pressure cuff on her arm, “but for dreams you’ll have to see somebody else. That’s another branch of medicine.” After he had taken her blood pressure, he stowed the cuff away on a shelf. “How are you getting along with that handsome husband of yours?”
She wondered how much he suspected. She had seen him several times in the year before they moved, when she had been so nervous and the headaches had been bothering her, but they hadn’t discussed Michael. “We’re doing very well since we moved, I think.”
He wrote something on a card and came around to sit on the edge of his desk. “Now, Jennie, I’m going to give you some advice. I said a while ago I could handle the headaches and the fainting. To a certain extent I can, but only to a certain extent. Now what I’m going to say you might find a little upsetting, but I assure you, there’s no reason to. I’ve told you before the headaches are caused by tension, by emotional pressure. I have a strong suspicion the fainting is, too. I was meaning to suggest this even before you moved to the country, so it’s nothing precipitate, though I must say I don’t like this fainting. But there’s nothing more I can do to alleviate those headaches, and if they continue I want you to promise me you’ll see a psychiatrist.” He raised his hands. “I know, I know. Nobody likes to be told to see a psychiatrist. But a psychiatrist is just another specialist. If you had a skin problem, I’d send you to a dermatologist. What you have is a problem caused by emotional tension, and in that case the specialist happens to be called a psychiatrist.”
“You think a psychiatrist would make the headaches go away?”
“Practically guaranteed. I’m not saying you’re a neurotic. You’re just going through a difficult period, and you need a little help adjusting to it. You just find out what’s causing that tension, and how to deal with it, and in a little while it’ll probably disappear.” He smiled his gentle smile. “Promise?”
“Okay.”
“That’s a good girl. Now I’ve written the name of a good analyst on this card, and if those headaches continue you set up an appointment to see him. Tell him I sent you.”
“All right, Dr. Shapiro. I promise.”
He helped her on with her jacket and held the door open for her while she picked up her purse. “And you tell that husband of yours if he doesn’t take good care of you, I’ll see he gets a sound thrashing. Even if I have to do it myself.”
He was smiling, but she could tell he was serious. She had another sudden urge to confide in him—but how could she tell this sweet old man about a bedroom changing around her, about a man in a buggy chasing her on a road, shouting after her another woman’s name? About that, there was no one she could confide in.
“Thank you, Dr. Shapiro. I’ll tell him.”
• • •
The next day, after Michael left for work, she went for a walk along the road. It was a very hot day; down at the bottom of the hill the lake reflected the almost milky blue of the sky. She walked slowly along in front of the house, carefully studying the angle of the road, the slope of the roadside ditches, the view ahead of her. She could barely admit to herself why she was out here, examining this innocent stretch of asphalt. Still frighteningly clear in her memory was that oncoming horse, the man in the buggy, that cool dirt road she had somehow been transported to only two days before. She was afraid to acknowledge what it might mean: her suspicion that in some way this was the same road.
She wasn’t sure why she thought that. It didn’t really look the same. There were no trees or brushy hedgerows along the roadsides as there had been with the other, and this road was paved. She walked on toward the cutoff to Summer House Road. In the vision there had been no cutoff there, nothing but a solid bank of trees all around the curve.
But that was it—the similarity. Because of the brush, there had been no way of telling where it went or if there had been a lake below, but in the vision, too, about the same distance ahead, the road had curved to plunge down the hill. And the shape of the curve had been the same. She had felt it even then—that it was the same road, the way it might have been a hundred years ago.
She heard the approach of a car ahead of her and stepped to the side of the road. It was an old red pickup, faded almost pink, emerging out of Summer House Road. The driver, a round-faced old man with fishing flies stuck in his hat, looked at her curiously as he rattled past. She felt conspicuous and strange, out here comparing the road to a dream. She turned and went back to the house.
Another day passed, and still she couldn’t get the dreams, or visions, or whatever they were out of her mind. How could she believe that there was some force, some supernatural power, with the ability to thrust her back into another time? But the alternative was just as frightening—the possibility that that nervous sickness she had had in the city was getting worse instead of better, and was taking a particularly scary turn: people who began to see things, to hear voices . . . She tried not to think of that.
She was glad Michael hadn’t taken Dr. Shapiro’s suggestion seriously. “If he can’t find out what causes headaches and fainting,” he said, “I certainly wouldn’t take his word about any psychiatrist. I think you should see some other doctor.”
“I doubt if that would help,” she said. “I guess there’s just nothing a doctor can do about headaches.” But for once she was grateful that he had so little faith in Dr. Shapiro. The idea of seeing a psychiatrist frightened her.
She suffered through a week of anxiety, trying unsuccessfully to lose herself in work on the attic studio, stripping paint from the woodwork. But she couldn’t concentrate, and the anxiety stayed with her, making her so nervous she ended up scraping more skin fro
m her hands than paint from the wood, and finally she gave it up, stopped work one day in the middle of the afternoon, determined to pull herself together. She took a bath and did her nails, resolving to take the afternoon off and go for a walk along the lake. It was an old remedy: giving herself a present when she was feeling bad.
In the second-floor bedroom, her hair piled up atop her head, she slipped into the new long dress and looked at herself in the mirror, slim and white and beautiful. It made her feel better already. She scooped up the jeans and shirt she had been working in and started for the clothes hamper in the bathroom down the hall.
But just outside the doorway she felt a sudden and familiar ache begin just at the point where her right shoulder joined the back of her neck. It was abruptly there and just as abruptly very intense, throbbing up her neck into her temple. With it came a roil of nausea, a wave of dizziness, a sudden rush of weakness through her legs. She leaned helplessly against the wall, closing her eyes tight against the pain.
And then, just as suddenly, the pain was gone.
She opened her eyes.
She saw with a shock that the hallway was different. The long runner carpet was gone; the floor stretched bare and gleaming toward the stairs. The walls were covered with unfamiliar wallpaper, gray with a filigree of flowers; the buffet table was gone from the head of the stairs. She touched a hand to her face, almost as if to see if she was real. Her hand was trembling violently. Panicky, she thought: This is not a dream. I haven’t fainted. I didn’t fall asleep, I didn’t even lie down. This is real.
Slowly, the jeans and shirt still clutched in one hand, she turned. The window at the other end of the hallway was different, with little ruffled curtains of something like unbleached cotton tied back on each side. Cautiously, as if any second the floor might shift beneath her feet, she moved to that window.
The view outside had changed. The slope of the back field was the same, but there was no thicket of trees at its other edge, no house half hidden behind those trees. There were no electric wires along Summer House Road; in fact, there was no Summer House Road. A split-rail fence bordered the edge of the field on the left, and beyond the fence was only a dense thicket of trees running along the ridge.
There was still a tree in the yard, but where her flower garden should have been she saw a grape arbor, several rows of tall twisted vines. Beyond that was a vegetable garden, and beyond the garden another split-rail fence separating the yard and garden from the field. On the right she could see the edge of a barn, and behind it the fencing of some kind of animal pen.
A movement in the grape arbor caught her eye. She saw it again: something moving through an opening in the leaves. It moved, rose upward, and with a start she saw that it was a man, his back to her, spading around the roots of one of the vines. Frightened, awe-struck, she watched the long flat muscles of his back flex under the shirt, the tightening of his dark trousers against the backs of his legs. Fear made her go weak again, and she wrenched her eyes closed, trying to summon back reality, but when she opened them he was still there, still spading in the dark earth.
Now he stopped and thrust the spade into the ground. He turned and came back along the row toward the yard, and with a strange thrill she recognized the man who had pursued her in the buggy that day on the road. The same black hair, the same dark moustache. From some inner center for which she could find no source came that same strange stirring she had felt that day on the road—a kind of tender yearning ache, something akin to love.
He crossed the yard to the tree, sat down against its trunk, and fumbled a pipe out of his shirt pocket. A long-eared dog ambled out of the row behind him and flopped down at his side. Jennie watched, her mind suspended, as he lit the pipe and reached over to scratch the dog’s ears. Again, through her fear, she felt that strange lovely ache in the pit of her stomach, that gentle yearning; she felt he was almost close enough to reach out and touch. He leaned his head back against the tree trunk and closed his eyes, sucking on his pipe.
When he opened his eyes he was looking directly up at her window. She recoiled in fear, her heart suddenly pounding again. When she peered out again through the crack between curtain and windowsill, he was staring up toward the window, one hand braced against the tree trunk, ready to propel him up. Though she knew he could not see her through the crack, his eyes seemed to be looking directly into her own, with a burning force that made her knees go weak.
“Pamela?” he called.
For a second he remained poised against the base of the tree; then he propelled himself into a dead run toward the corner of the house. Jennie let go of the windowsill and turned, stunned, her hand to her throat. She heard the kitchen door open downstairs, footsteps racing through the house, starting up the stairwell. Panicked, she stumbled away from the window, dizziness rushing to her head, blindly reaching to the wall for support.
The sound of footsteps ceased.
In the hushed pause that followed, the only sound was that of her own pulse thumping in her ears.
The dizziness passed, and she could see again. The runner rug was back on the floor. The buffet table stood where it always had near the head of the stairs. She turned quickly to the window. The ruffled curtains had disappeared. Beyond her flower garden, she saw telephone poles lining Summer House Road, electric wires slicing through the treetops. Beyond the thicket of trees at the far end of the field was the peak of that familiar house, just where it should be.
The barn, the garden, and the grape arbor were gone.
6
* * *
IT OCCURRED TO HER that she might be going insane. She was afraid to think about what was happening to her, and there was no one she could talk to. Beverly called a day or two later, but she couldn’t talk to her. And Beverly was in any case enmeshed in her own problems: she and Don had had a fight and had broken up. There was Michael, but she was afraid even to tell him about this new dream, if that was what it was, afraid of what he might say. As it was, he remarked on how depressed she seemed and suggested she needed a rest.
“You’ve been working too hard getting this house in shape,” he said. “Why don’t you go out to Fire Island for a weekend with Beverly?”
“I’ll be all right,” she said. “Half the reason for leaving the city was because I wasn’t feeling well. I hate to run away from here for the same reason.” She knew that was what he really feared—not overwork, but a renewed siege of the nervous anxiety she had weathered that last year in the city. But it was better he think that than learn the real reason she was upset. She was afraid he would share her own worst suspicion—that she might be going mad.
Now she spent hours every day walking along the lake, trying to regain there the peace of mind the move to the country had originally given her. But every time she returned up the flagstone steps to the yard she would see that tree at the rear corner of the house, and her mind would veer back to those dreams or visions or whatever they were, and her anxiety would begin all over again.
Late one afternoon, after climbing up the steps from the road, she crossed the yard to the tree and, standing in its dappled shade, hesitantly laid her hand against the bark, looking out to where that spectral grape arbor had been. She wondered how long a tree like this lived. If somehow what she saw in those visions was a real scene with a real person from an earlier time, could this be the same tree? She leaned pensively against it, remembering that mysterious man, the flexing of the muscles under his shirt, his strong hands lighting the pipe, his eyes burning up at her—eyes capable of great depth, of strong emotion.
Usually she was plagued by fear, but there were times like this when she was full of yearning, wanting to feel again that swell of emotion that came each time she saw him, that openness to tenderness and trust she hadn’t felt so strongly since she was a girl. No one she knew would admit to such emotions; everyone had become too cynical, or too afraid of being thought naive. Was she naive to be romantic, to think that it was good to feel deep emotions? S
he turned to look off toward the woods rising up from the lake. Sunlight struck a line of fire along the electric wires above the road; she heard the steady drone of a tractor working in a distant field. She forced herself to remember that this was reality, that what she longed for was an unreal dream. What she was doing was silly, she thought, falling in love with a dream man. She must be regressing to girlhood. She felt a start of fear again. Regression. Was this the first step toward madness?
She went back into the house and climbed the stairs to the bedroom on the second floor. Sunlight spilled in through the window in the far wall; the curtains swelled in a faint breeze, then subsided again. She crossed the room to the wardrobe closet, paused for a moment with her hand on the closet door. Then she turned the small key and swung the door open.
The dress hung dazzlingly white and beautiful inside. The sight of it brought a thickening to her throat. With a kind of awe, she reached in and lifted it in the cradle of her arm, letting it flow like water across her hand. It seemed almost to glow in the dimness of the closet. She hadn’t worn it since that afternoon at the upstairs window, but at least once a day she had opened the closet to look at it and feel its delicate fabric, half afraid to admit what she knew to be true: this dress was the cause of whatever was happening to her. She had been wearing it each time she had had a vision—and each vision had taken her to the same place, or the same time, something to do with a woman named Pamela. There was some power in the dress, either to distort her mind or actually to transport her back to an earlier time, together with whatever she wore with it or carried in her hand.
Second Sight Page 4