Keeper of Dreams

by Orson Scott Card

  And when the twins were inside the house, Hazel was a help. She had infinite patience as a performer, apparently, telling stories to the twins whenever they wanted, which was often. And always with different voices for all the characters and a lot of silliness and wit so the boys were laughing all the time. They actually preferred Hazel to the television. But after a few stories, Rachel could tell that Hazel was exhausted and so she’d bundle the twins into their jackets and herd them outside. In the meantime, Sarah would lie miserably on the couch in the family room and call out, “I can take them in here! Please don’t wear yourselves out!” They cheerfully ignored her, except when Hazel went in and plumped up her pillow and gave her hot chocolate or lemonade or milk or whatever Sarah could finally be bullied into expressing a preference for that day. “You are the most undemanding, unparticular pregnant woman I’ve ever known,” Hazel told the girl. “I swear if the baby said, ‘Well, Mom, shall I come on my due date?’ you’d answer, ‘Oh, you just come when you want. This month. Next month. Whatever.’ ”

  “I just don’t have that much in the way of a preference,” said Sarah.

  Whereupon Hazel would turn to Rachel. “I swear if Sarah’s head was on fire, she’d just say, ‘Now, if you’re going into the kitchen anyway, and it’s not too much trouble, would you mind bringing me back a glass of water to put this pesky fire out? But only if you’re already going to the kitchen, don’t make a special trip on my account!’ ” Rachel noticed that Sarah laughed at these jokes, but at the same time she could see that the girl had some kind of pain behind her eyes.

  Sarah’s due date came and went. December 8th. December 9th. December 10th. “I’m going to start jumping off the bottom step,” Sarah told them miserably. “If that doesn’t work, I’ll try the second step.”

  “No such thing,” said Hazel. “If that baby needs a few extra days to get ripe, don’t worry. Besides, the doctors never really know when the true due date is. For all you know, this little girl was conceived late in the cycle.”

  On the 11th, there was a little false alarm—a sharp pain that Sarah was sure wasn’t a contraction but she still had to go check. Hazel bravely stayed with the boys while Rachel took Sarah to the doctor’s office for an unscheduled checkup. All the way there, Rachel kept assuring Sarah that the doctor would probably make them go right to the hospital and call Will from there. Sarah said little, and her tacit disagreement turned out to be correct. The doctor was as frustrated, it seemed, as Sarah was. “You’re not dilated at all,” he said. “I really don’t want to induce until there’s some sign that your body is in birth mode.”

  “That’s all right,” Sarah said miserably.

  On the ride home, Rachel finally let her curiosity get the better of her manners. “Can I ask you something personal, Sarah?”

  “I would hope so,” said Sarah. “And I’d also hope that if I don’t want to answer, I won’t have to.”

  “Of course,” said Rachel. “And it’s rude of me even to ask, but the curiosity is killing me. How did Will come to start calling you ‘Streak’?”

  Sarah laughed sharply and looked out the window for a long time. Just as Rachel was about to say never mind, she spoke. “I’m very shy about my body,” she explained. “The first time we went swimming, he dived under the water and snapped my swimsuit. I was mortified, but he assured me that I’d run from the poolhouse into the water so fast that he wasn’t sure I was wearing a suit. Actually, it was when he did that and I found that I could forgive him for touching me like that, well, that was when I realized that maybe I could marry somebody.” Sarah laughed nervously. She had said more than she planned to, but less, it seemed, than she wanted to.

  Immediately Rachel remembered how, at Thanksgiving, Sarah had been so adamant about her children never having memories of the house she grew up in. “You were molested as a child, weren’t you?” Rachel asked.

  Sarah nodded. “I knew you guessed when I reacted like I did to living in my parents’ house. It wasn’t my father, though, I don’t want you ever to think that. My father’s youngest brother lived with them for a while because of some trouble he was in out in Star Valley, Wyoming. He stayed for a year. I turned eleven that year. He made me do things.”

  “You don’t have to tell me more than that, Sarah, if you don’t want to,” said Rachel.

  “I have some pretty bad memories of that time. Because I felt for the longest time that I was partly at fault. I mean, at first it was almost exciting. I was curious.”

  “You were a child.”

  “I know that as a Primary president you have all sorts of training in dealing with this.”

  “Less than I should,” said Rachel. “And more than I was ever required to have.”

  “Well, they say that the child is never at fault. But I was over eight years old and I wasn’t stupid. I know that it was mostly him, even though he really was a child himself, only fifteen. But it was partly me, and I couldn’t feel right about anything until I was seventeen and I decided that maybe other people could do what the therapist said, but I had to repent. Like Enos, you know? I prayed for two days. In the summer. My mother understood a little and she refused to let anyone go searching for me. Out in the far corner of the orchard. It works, you know. I was forgiven.”

  Rachel had tears in her eyes, but when she glanced over at Sarah she could see that the girl was dry-eyed.

  “I don’t get emotional about it now,” said Sarah. “It’s at the very center of my life. Not the molesting, but the forgiveness. That was when I first had a, you know, dream. I don’t have a lot of them, if that’s what worries you. It’s more like going to a movie with a friend who’s seen it before, and right before the scary parts she says, ‘Don’t worry about this, it turns out all right.’ ”

  “But you still can’t go home.”

  “Bad memories.”

  Rachel had a sudden insight and had to blurt it out. “Did your parents know what kind of trouble this uncle of yours had been in back in Wyoming?”

  “They knew it was trouble with a girl. Father told me that it never crossed his mind that it was somebody as young as me, that his brother was messing with children. Afterward, Father wanted to get his brother put in jail for what he did to me, but I refused to let him. I knew that Ammaw and Old Man—my grandparents—I knew they’d blame me the way they blamed that evil girl back in Star Valley. She was twelve. So the way they saw things, I must be even more wicked. It was really ugly. I love my parents, but they come visit us, I don’t go visit them. If I was a better Saint I’d forgive them, and I have, in my head. It’s just my heart that doesn’t know it, when I go home.”

  “You poor thing,” said Rachel.

  “Oh, I’m fine. I just wanted you to understand that it’s not because my parents wouldn’t help me. And I’m not really insane or hateful. I’m still going to be a good mother to your grandchildren.”

  “Well of course you are,” said Rachel. “I never for a moment thought otherwise.”

  “But you were worried when I reacted like I did about going home.”

  “I was just afraid that there was some kind of rift in your family. I was worried about you. I know you’re a great mother.”

  “Not lately,” said Sarah. “I’m just a mountain of flesh piled up on beds and couches made of stone.”

  “Is that furniture uncomfortable?”

  “Air pressure is uncomfortable when you’re this far along. I have no navel. But where it used to be, I have this patch of incredibly sensitive skin. And lately it feels like it’s spreading. Pretty soon my whole body will be nothing but one huge extruded navel. Touch me and I’ll scream.”

  “I’ll remember not to slap you around so much.”

  They laughed.

  As they pulled into the garage, Rachel said, “Don’t you worry about what you told me. I won’t tell anybody.”

  “Well, I hope you will tell your husband. I was hoping you would. So I won’t have to explain it.”

  “
But no one else.”

  “That’s very kind of you.”

  “Hey, I was going to the kitchen anyway.”

  That night, when Jared got home from a late night of grading finals with his grad students, Rachel told him about the conversation. She cried in telling it, all the more because Sarah hadn’t shed a tear. “Well, it explains one thing that I’d wondered about,” said Jared.

  “What?” asked Rachel.

  “Why Will was drawn to her in the first place.”

  “Oh, Jared, he couldn’t possibly have known about . . .”

  “I know that he fell in love with her because she’s a great person and all that. But there’s a kind of frailty about her. She needs protecting. And Will needs to be a protector.”

  That was true. They both knew that about Will. Unusual in a youngest child. He should have been the spoiled one. Instead he was always looking out for other people. All through Primary, he was the one who would never let anybody tease or pick on anybody else. What Sarah needed, Will was; what Will needed, Sarah was.

  “But it’s more than that now,” Rachel said.

  “I know that,” said Jared. “I mean, Will can’t be too protective if he calls her Streak.”

  So they figured they knew everything, understood everything. Except Rachel still had a nagging doubt. There was still something wrong. Something in Sarah that made Rachel worry. Was it her spirituality? Hardly that. Rachel was always more, not less, comfortable around spiritual people. No, there was just an awkwardness. Sarah had told Rachel about the most terrible, intimate secret of her life, surely—and yet Sarah still seemed reticent and shy. Something was wrong, still.

  On the 16th of December they had their traditional Christmas party for friends in the ward and stake, mostly people who had worked with Rachel in the Primary over the years plus some special neighbors. Everyone made much of Sarah and Will and their kids, and Hazel of course, but then it was time to put the twins to bed and Sarah insisted on doing that herself. “You go help her, Mother Hazel,” said Rachel after she was gone. “You know how tired she gets, and she wouldn’t ask for help if . . .”

  “If her head was on fire, I know,” said Hazel with a smile. “Consider it done.”

  About fifteen minutes later, Rachel realized that she hadn’t brought the candy up from the cold room in the basement. She tiptoed down the stairs in case the boys weren’t soundly asleep yet. Nobody could possibly have heard her come down. Which was why Hazel didn’t stop talking to Sarah when Rachel came within earshot. Surely she would have stopped if she had thought that anyone could overhear her.

  “Of course you know that Will’s a special boy. They’re all special. All of Jared’s and Rachel’s children. Absolutely brilliant, every one of them. I’m in awe myself. But there’s a special burden to being the wife of a man like Will. He’s going to be a great man, like his father. The best of a good lot, really. And a woman in your situation really has to keep on her toes just to avoid getting in the way.”

  Rachel could hardly believe what she was hearing. Surely Hazel wasn’t trying to tell Will’s wife that she wasn’t up to snuff, was she? If she listened just a moment longer, Hazel would say something that would clarify everything and Rachel would see she had been silly to jump to such an awful conclusion.

  Suddenly there were hands on her shoulders, sliding down her arms, wrapping around her body from behind. Rachel jumped—but such were her eavesdropping skills that she didn’t make a sound. She just turned around and faced Jared and touched her fingers to his lips. “Listen,” she whispered.

  He seemed to notice his mother’s voice for the first time.

  “It’s a special burden to take this family’s name on you,” Hazel was saying. “I know it—I wasn’t born with it, either. Rachel is a natural, she really was born to be married to a man like Jared, but I wasn’t that sort and neither are you. It’s just a fact of life.”

  Sarah murmured something.

  “Oh, don’t even think that you can ever measure up. No matter what you do, Sarah, people are going to look at you with Will and they’re going to say, ‘What does he see in her?’ The thing you have to worry about—the only thing—is making sure that Will never wonders that. I hope you’re using this time that you’re in Rachel’s house to study everything she does and learn from her. She is the perfect wife for a prominent man. But then, she has a real education herself, and she’s a professor’s daughter.”

  “I’m going to stop this,” whispered Jared. But still he didn’t move. This was his mother, after all. One doesn’t just interrupt one’s mother. Or rather, Jared didn’t. Actually, nobody did. Not Hazel. Hazel wasn’t good at taking anything that seemed like criticism.

  “You just have to cling to your children,” said Hazel. “They will never know that you aren’t really part of this family. For them, you’re the heart, even as Will is the head. So you mustn’t worry about a thing. When you have one of those awful times when you think everybody must think you’re a complete idiot, you just hold these little ones close to you because they won’t judge you and find you unworthy the way everyone else does.”

  That was just too much for Jared. He strode into the bedroom where they were talking, and in a fierce whisper he said, “Let’s come out of this room right now.”

  Hazel and Sarah followed him out and he closed the door behind him. “I didn’t want to wake the twins,” he said.

  There were tears in Sarah’s eyes. Tears on her cheeks. She didn’t cry when she told Rachel about her awful childhood experiences, but she cried listening to Hazel tell her she would never be worthy of her husband. Rachel wanted to slap her mother-in-law. She had never slapped anyone since she grew past that phase in her quarrels with her brother, but apparently she still could conjure up a real lashing-out rage even after all these years as a Primary leader with a permanent smile plastered on her face.

  “What’s the emergency?” asked Hazel.

  “You, Mother,” said Jared softly. “You’re the emergency. I overheard what you were saying in there, and—”

  “You were eavesdropping?”

  “Yes, Mother, I was. I’ll be made a son of perdition for it, I know. Me, Cain, and the devil. But yes, I heard what you were saying to Sarah and I couldn’t believe those words were coming out of your mouth.”

  “I was only reassuring her that—”

  “Reassuring her! ‘Oh, don’t even think that you can measure up.’ That must have been a real comfort.”

  “Sarah understood what I meant,” said Hazel.

  “Is that why she’s crying?”

  “Watch the way you talk to me, young man,” said Hazel. “I may only be an old woman who’s good for nothing at all anymore, but I’m still your mother.”

  “Yes, you are my mother. The very same woman who used to weep for days before her mother-in-law came to visit and then weep again for days afterward. And why? Because dear old Mattie was always judging you and you never measured up. That brought you so much joy, of course you had to plunge Sarah into—”

  “Please,” said Sarah. “She didn’t make me cry. I was already crying when—”

  “No, there’s something you have to understand,” Jared answered. “You have to know that when I was seven I came in and found my mother sobbing her heart out and I said, ‘Why are you crying, Mother?’ and she said, ‘Because Mattie’s right, I should never have married your father, I’ve ruined his life.’ And I knew then and there that this was wrong, it was evil, no woman should ever make another woman feel unworthy of her place in her own home.”

  “Are you suggesting that I am anything like my mother-in-law!” Hazel was furious now.

  “I’m suggesting that what you were doing in that bedroom was exactly what Mattie Maw did to you when you first married Dad. Remember the story you told me? How Mattie called you in and sat you down and explained to you that there was a special burden placed on women who married into that family? Mattie’s father, after all, was an apostle, and her
husband’s father was a great colonizer and his mother was famous in the Church as the general president of the Relief Society—”

  “The YWMIA,” said Hazel coldly.

  “And,” said Jared pointedly, “she had always thought that her sons would marry within their social class. Daughters of general authorities, presumably, or people with enough money to move in those lofty circles. Of course that was the 1930s, I’m sure things are different now, but she was full of stories about how her marriage to Grandpa was the event of the season in Salt Lake City, and her oldest boy had married the daughter of another apostle but it was beyond her how Dad—she said Alma, of course—could have lost his senses to such a degree as to pick up with a girl whose father was—well, no one even knew where he was, and there was certainly no money and less breeding and I think the exact phrase she used was, ‘Try as you may, Hazel, you will never be one of us. All you can do is just stay out of Alma’s way.’ That was a terrible thing for Mattie Maw to say and it caused you more pain than anything else in your marriage and now here you are saying it to Sarah and it—”

  “Yes, it caused me pain,” said Hazel. “But as you condemn me you’re forgetting one tiny little fact.” Suddenly she burst into tears. “Every word she said was true!”

  “No it wasn’t,” said Jared.

  “Oh, even you know it’s true. Look at you, Mr. Professor with all the brains, pointing out to the poor daughter of a scrubwoman that once again she’s . . . blown it!”

  “It was never true, Mother. I can’t believe you still believe it!”