Keeper of Dreams

by Orson Scott Card

And yet he went on living, tricking himself into seeing evidence that they still lived with him. Selena and Baby Di, the Queen Dee, the little D-beast, depending on what mood the two-year-old was in. They’d just stepped out of the room. They were upstairs, they were in the back yard, if he took just a few steps he’d see them.

  When he thought about it, of course, he knew it wasn’t true, they were dead, gone, their life together was over before it was half begun. But for that moment when he first walked into the room and saw the evidence with his own eyes, he had that deep contentment of knowing that he had missed them by only a moment.

  Now the madness had finally lurched outside of the house, outside of his lost and broken family, and shown him a newspaper from before he was born, delivered by a boy from another time, on the driveway of a stranger’s house. It wasn’t just grief anymore. He was bonkers.

  He went home and stood outside the front door for maybe five minutes, afraid to go in. What was he going to see? Now that he could conjure newspapers and paperboys out of nothing, what would his grief-broken mind show him when he opened the door?

  And a worse question was: What if it showed him what he most wanted to see? Selena standing in the kitchen, talking on the phone, smiling to him over the mouthpiece as she cut the crusts off the bread so that Queen Dee would eat her sandwiches. Diana coming to him, reaching up, grabbing his fingers, saying, “Hand, hand!” and dragging him to play with her in the family room.

  If madness was so perfect and beautiful as that, could he ever bear to leave it behind and return to the endless ache of sanity? If he opened the door, would he leave the world of the living behind, and dwell forever in the land of the beloved dead?

  When at last he went inside there was no one in the house and nothing had moved. He was still a little bit sane and he was still alone, trapped in the world he and Selena had so carefully designed: Insurance enough to pay off the mortgage. Insurance enough that if either parent died, the other could afford to stay home with Diana until she was old enough for school, so she didn’t have to be raised by strangers in daycare. Insurance that provided for every possibility except one: that Diana would die right along with one of her parents, leaving the other parent with a mortgage-free house, money enough to live for years and years without a job. Without a life.

  Twice he had gone through the house, picking up all of Diana’s toys and boxing them, taking Selena’s clothes out of the closet to give away to Goodwill. Twice the boxes had sat there, the piles of clothes, for days and days. As one by one the toys reappeared in their places in the family room or Diana’s bedroom. As Selena’s dresser drawers filled up again, her hangers once again held dresses, blouses, pants, and the closet floor again was covered with a jumble of shoes. He didn’t remember putting them back, though he knew he must have done it. He didn’t even remember deciding not to take the boxes and piles out of the house. He just never got around to it.

  He stood in the entryway of his empty house and wanted to die.

  And then he remembered what the old woman had said.

  “That’s OK. I never get it into the house anymore these days.”

  He had never said the word “newspaper,” had he? So if he hallucinated it and she saw nothing there in the driveway, what was it that she never got into the house?

  He was back out the door in a moment, car keys in hand. It was barely dawn as he pulled back into that gravel driveway and walked to the front door and knocked.

  She came to the door at once, as if she had been waiting for him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s so early.”

  “I was up,” she said. “I thought you might come back.”

  “You just have to tell me one thing.”

  She laughed faintly. “Yes. I saw it, too. I always see it. I used to pick it up from the driveway, carry it into the house, lay it out on the table for him. Only it’s fading now. After all these years. I never quite get to touch it anymore. That’s all right.” She laughed again. “I’m fading, too.”

  She stepped back, beckoned him inside.

  “I’m Tim Bushey,” he said.

  “Orange juice?” she said. “V8? I don’t keep coffee in the house, because I love it but it takes away what little sleep I have left. Being old is a pain in the neck, I’ll tell you that, Mr. Bushey.”

  “Tim.”

  “Oh my manners. If you’re Tim, then I’m Wanda. Wanda Silva.”

  “Orange juice sounds fine, Wanda.”

  They sat at her kitchen table. Whatever time warp the newspaper came from, it didn’t affect Wanda’s house. The kitchen was new, or at least newer than the 1940s. The little Hitachi TV on the counter and the microwave on a rolling cart were proof enough of that.

  She noticed what he was looking at. “My boys take care of me,” she said. “Good jobs, all three of them, and even though not a one still lives in North Carolina, they all visit, they call, they write. I get along great with their wives. The grandkids are brilliant and cute and healthy. I couldn’t be happier, really.” She laughed. “So why does Tonio Silva haunt my house?”

  He made a guess. “Your late husband?”

  “It’s more complicated than that. Tonio was my first husband. Met him in a war materials factory in Huntsville and married him and after the war we came home to Greensboro because I didn’t want to leave my roots and he didn’t have any back in Philly, or so he said. But Tonio and I didn’t have any children. He couldn’t. Died of testicular cancer in June of ’49. I married again about three years later. Barry Lear. A sweet, dull man. Father of my three boys. Account executive who traveled all the time and even when he was home he was barely here.”

  She sighed. “Oh, why am I telling you this?”

  “Because I saw the newspaper.”

  “Because when you saw the newspaper, you were embarrassed but you were not surprised, not shocked when it disappeared. You’ve been seeing things yourself lately, haven’t you?”

  So he told her what he’d told no other person, about Selena and Baby Di, about how he kept just missing them. By the end she was nodding.

  “Oh, I knew it,” she said. “That’s why you could see the paper. Because the wall between worlds is as thin for you as it is for me.”

  “I’m not crazy?” he asked, laughing nervously.

  “How should I know?” she said. “But we both saw that paper. And it’s not just us. My kids, too. See, the—what do we call it? haunting? evidences?—it didn’t start till they were grown up and gone. Barry Lear was busy having his stroke and getting downright eager to shed his old body, and I was taking care of him best I could, and all of a sudden I start hearing the radio playing music that my first husband and I used to dance to, big band sounds. And those newspapers, that paperboy, just like it was 1948, the year we were happiest, the summer when I got pregnant, before the baby miscarried and our hearts broke and just before Christmas he found out about the cancer. As if he could feel Barry getting set to leave my life, and Tonio was coming back.”

  “And your kids know?”

  “You have to understand, Barry provided for us, he never hit anybody or yelled. But he was a completely absent father, even when he was home. The kids were so hungry for a dad, even grown up and moved away they still wanted one, so when they came home for their father’s funeral, all three of them saw the same things I was seeing. And when I told them it was happening before Barry died, that it was Tonio, the man who wasn’t their father but wanted so badly to be, the man who would have been there for them no matter what, if God hadn’t taken him so young—well, they adopted him. They call him their ghost.”

  She smiled but tears ran down her cheeks. “That’s what he came home for, Tonio, I mean. For my boys. He couldn’t do it while Barry was here, but as Barry faded, he could come. And now the boys return, they see his coffee cup in the dish drain, they smell his hair oil in the bathroom, they see the newspapers, hear the radio. And they sit there in the living room and they talk. To me, yes, of course, but a
lso to him, telling him about their lives, believing—knowing—that he’s listening to them. That he really cares, he loves them, and the only reason they can’t see him is because he just stepped out, they only just missed him, he’s bound to be in the next room, he can hear every word they say.”

  Tim nodded. Yes, that’s how it was. Just how it was.

  “But he’s fading now.” She nodded. “They don’t need him so much. The hole in their lives is filled now.” She nodded again. “And in mine. The love of my life. We had unfinished business, you see. Things not done.”

  “So why did I see it? The paperboy, the newspaper—I never knew Tonio, I’m not one of your sons.”

  “Because you live like I do, on the edge of the other side, seeing in. Because you have unfinished business, too.”

  “But I can never finish it now,” he said.

  “Can’t you?” she answered. “I married Barry. I had my boys. Then Tonio came back and gave them the last thing they needed. You, now. You could marry, you know. Have more children. Fill that house with life and love again. Your wife and baby, they’ll step back, like Tonio did. But they won’t be gone. Someday maybe you’ll be alone again. Big empty house. And they’ll come back. Don’t you think? Selena—such a lovely name—and your baby Diana. Just in the next room. Around you all the time. Reminding you when you were young. Only by then Diana might not need to be a baby anymore. It won’t be toys she leaves around, it’ll be school-books. Hairbrushes. And the long hairs you find on your pillow won’t be Selena’s color anymore. It’ll be grey. Or white.”

  He hadn’t told her about still finding Selena’s hair. She simply knew.

  “You can go on with your life without letting go,” said Wanda. “Because you don’t really lose them. They’re just out of reach. I look around Greensboro and I wonder, how many other houses are like mine? Haunted by love, by unfinished love. And sometimes I think, Tonio isn’t haunting us, we’re the ones who are haunting him. Calling him back. And because he loves us, he comes. Until we don’t really need him anymore.”

  They talked a little more, and Tim went home, and everything was different, and everything was gloriously the same. It wasn’t madness anymore. They really were just out of reach, he really had just missed them. They were still in the house with him, still in his life.

  And, knowing that, believing it now, he could go on. He visited Wanda a couple of times a week. Got to know each of her sons on their visits. Became friends with them. When Wanda passed away, he sat with the family at the funeral.

  Tim went back to work, not at the company where he and Selena had met, but in a new place, with new people. Eventually he married, they had children, and just as Wanda had said, Selena and Diana faded, but never completely. There would be a book left open somewhere, one that nobody in the house was reading. There would be a whiff of a strange perfume, the sound of someone humming a tune that hadn’t been current for years.

  Right along with his new family, he knew that Diana was growing up, in a house full of siblings who knew about her, loved the stories of her childhood that he told, and who came to him, one by one, as the years passed, to tell him privately that once or twice in their childhood, they had seen her, the older sister who came to them during a nightmare and comforted them, who whispered love to them when friends at school had broken their hearts, whose gentle hand on their shoulder had calmed them and given them courage.

  And the smiling mother who wasn’t their mother but there she was in the doorway, just once, just a fleeting glimpse. Selena, looking at the children she had never given birth to but who were still hers, partly hers, because they were his, and he would always be a part of her even though he loved another woman now and shared his life with her.

  Sometime, somewhere down the road, his life would draw to a close and he would see them again, face to face, his family, his first family, waiting for him as Tonio had waited for Wanda all those years. He could wait. There was no hurry. They were only moments out of reach.

  NOTES ON “MISSED”

  I can’t remember now if the local paper asked me for a Halloween story—I think they did, but it might be that I’m conflating this story with a multi-author serial that the same newspaper put together a few years later. It might be that I came up with the idea, called them, and asked if they would consider running a piece of scary fiction and, if so, how long it ought to be.

  Whether they initiated it or I did, the result was this story, set in a specific neighborhood. In fact, the house where Tim finds the newspaper is the home of our friends the Jensens. If you can’t tip your hat to friends or family now and then, what’s the fun of being a fiction writer?

  I began this story frivolously enough. It was a lark; write a newspaper horror story for Halloween.

  But it turned serious almost at once. I had only just started running. After our last child, Erin Louisa, died on the day she was born, I had suddenly come face to face with mortality. People I loved could die. I could die—and at the weight I was carrying at the time, I probably would, sooner rather than later. I got serious about getting my body under control and started exercising. I never became the kind of runner Tim was—but I knew something about what it felt like, to run.

  And so I suppose it wasn’t just coincidence that I made this a story about the worst thing in the world—to have a family and lose it. It was what I was going through at the time, in a very small way. And things like that, things from real life, are going to show up even in the “frivolous” fictions of a writer who’s just doing something for the fun of it.

  III

  LITERARY

  50 WPM

  “You know a lot of these guys?”

  “No. We didn’t fight the same war.”

  “I thought you went to Vietnam.”

  “Oh, sure, yeah. But I never fired a rifle at anybody, and nobody ever fired one at me. I never even left Saigon.”

  “But I always thought . . .”

  “What?”

  “You know.”

  “What?”

  “Your hand. Your fingers. The missing ones. I thought that happened in Vietnam.”

  “It did . . . . There he is.”

  “Who?”

  “My guardian angel.”

  “Man, if I got a guardian angel I hope mine ain’t dead.”

  “Yeah, well, he was joking, too, I think. Got in country, he saw I was kind of green. You know. I was young, I’d never been out of Hickory, I didn’t know a thing, so he says to me, I’m your guardian angel, I’ll not only keep you alive in this hellhole, I’ll even keep you sane.”

  “Well, one out of two ain’t bad.”

  “I know you don’t mean anything by it, son, and there’s nothing wrong with joking, but I got my fingers resting on the name of a friend who died saving my life.”

  “Sorry, Dad. You know I didn’t mean . . .”

  “Funny thing is, your grandpa had it all figured out so my life wouldn’t need saving. See these hands? All seven fingers? Would you believe I used to be a typist?”

  “That before or after you were front man for the Beatles? No, sorry, I want to hear. Dad, I do. Really.”

  Your grandpa was a grunt in World War II. Volunteered the day after Pearl Harbor, and when they saw how that country boy could shoot, he was infantry all the way. He wasn’t stupid, he didn’t volunteer for anything, didn’t get himself into Airborne or the Marines, turned down sergeant’s stripes three times. He just knew how to shoot, so they had him on the front lines in North Africa, Sicily, and in slow motion all the way up the boot of Italy.

  He told me it got so he didn’t even bother learning the name of a new guy till he’d been there for a week, so many guys got blown away just cause they were new and didn’t know enough to keep their heads down. Dad and the other guys’d tell ’em, but they just didn’t have survivor instinct, that’s what Dad called it. The sense to know just how far you had to bend over to keep from giving them a target.

  Helmets don
’t stop bullets, son. You got a helmet so you don’t get killed when a bullet knocks a chip out of a stone wall and the chip comes and hits you in the head. But somebody aims right at you, that helmet just adds a little more metal to get slammed into your skull.

  Anyway, Pop comes to me when I’m thirteen years old, summer before eighth grade, and he says, “No, I’m not going to teach you how to shoot. Knowin’ how to shoot got me three and a half years on the front lines killin’ guys and having guys get killed all around me. What you’re going to do this summer, boy, you’re going to learn how to type.”

  Now, I didn’t even hardly know what typing was. Something girls took in high school, something you saw secretaries doing when my mom took me with her to pay, like, the water bill or something. Pop had to drag me there, I ain’t kidding, kid, had to drag me up to the high school and sign me up for summer school typing. Bought me a typewriter, too, and he didn’t have a lot of money, that was a big deal, we had to be the only people we knew had a typewriter on their kitchen table, it sat there during meals and everything. At least an hour a day, he set the kitchen timer on me and it was worth half the skin on my butt to fiddle with it and cheat. So I sat there and typed, and a lot of the time he was watching me. Stuff like “Don’t look at the keys!” and “Spell it like it’s written, you moron!”

  No, he actually called me shit-for-brains, but your mother doesn’t like me talking to you the way my pop talked to me. And yes, this is about how Daniel I. Keizer saved my life. Look, forget it, let’s go find your mother and your sisters.

  It’s not like I tell this story a lot, son. So I don’t know which parts to take out so it’s entertaining.

  It’s about my father trying to save my life. That’s why he made me take typing class. He says to me, “Bobby, there’s gonna be a war. There’s always gonna be a war. First thing they do, they find out what you can do. Me, I could shoot the shit off a squirrel’s ass so clean he’d think he wiped himself, so they put me in the dust and the mud and had people tryin’ to kill me, and all I got in exchange was the GI Bill, but I never got me a single one of my buddies back, they stayed just as dead as they were when I left ’em behind in Italy. Well, that ain’t gonna happen to you, Bobby. You go into that recruiting office and where they say skills, you put down, ‘typing, fifty words per minute.’ That’s the magic number, boy. You type fifty words a minute—and that’s fifty words without a single mistake, every minute, page after page—and they never put you near a rifle. After Basic, you just sit at a desk and type and type and type, and when the war’s over you go home and you ain’t dead and nobody you knew in the army is dead because they were all typing, too, or giving orders from some nice safe place ten or twenty miles back or five thousand miles even. That’s where I want you in the war.”