Chapter Eight
What great sleep there is for a childhood.
—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie
Maryellen woke up when her breathing stopped. She fought the smother of wet earth that plugged her nostrils and choked off her breath. She felt like she was buried alive, or thrashing upward from under pondwater toward her mother’s grieving face.
She gasped a breath.
“Come on, honey. Wake up, now.”
She gasped another breath, pushed off the wet washcloth that her mother held to her face. She had not been drowned in a pond after all, and she caught her breath.
“You had a bad dream.”
Her mother’s voice sounded funny, a long way off.
A dream, she reminded herself.
“I was drowning,” she said. “Something held me underwater.”
“You’re here, now,” her mother said. “Your father had a bad dream, too. Like a zoo in here.” She toweled Maryellen’s face dry and laughed. “The two of you chattering away. The army hospital said they fixed that for him.”
Maryellen’s head hurt, and the light hurt her eyes.
Her head throbbed, and her mother’s voice hurt her ears.
“You’re supposed to let people sleep when they talk or walk,” her mother said, “but that godawful yelling was going too far.…”
Maryellen wrapped up in a blanket and sat in a chair because her head hurt too bad when she lay down. Her mother brought her a cup of tea with some toast. She warmed her hands on the hot cup, then pressed her palms to her eyelids. Blue shimmers flared against the dark. Maryellen reminded herself that she was home. She had a headache, the first headache she ever remembered. Her father and the dead rat seemed like dreams themselves, but she knew they were true. The sweat that matted her hair to her forehead was real.
“You just wore yourself out sleeping, poor thing,” her mother said. “You must have been one tired little girl. Your daddy, all the excitement …?”
A questioning tone edged her mother’s voice. This time she wiped Maryellen’s face with a hot, wet washrag.
“No,” Maryellen told her mom. “I was playing.”
“Playing?” she laughed again, that quick laugh. “Well, it sure looked like you were sleeping. Then thrashing. Who did you play with?”
“Afriqua,” she said. “Afriqua Lee. She’s got green eyes and curly, curly hair like that lady in your magazine. Do I have to go to church? I don’t feel good.”
Mom’s lips pressed her forehead.
“You’re not hot,” her mother said. “You can go to church. Maybe you can catch a little nap there, if you want. Nobody’ll notice. Say ‘Good morning’ to your dad and finish getting dressed.”
Maryellen mumbled “Good morning” to her father without looking up, and allowed him a hug on her way to the bathroom. She wore her new robe, the pink material all shiny and much brighter in the daylight.
She washed her face in hot water, but the vivid dreams of the pond refused to go away. She was afraid she was going to throw up. She hoped she didn’t, even if it would keep her home from church. Maryellen shut the water off and heard her mother talking to her father.
“I don’t know, Mel. She looked so pale, and you didn’t see her eyes, they were so wild. She didn’t even see me.”
“You’re the kid expert,” he said. “This is all new to me. All kids have bad dreams. She’s probably fine, but I’ll stay home and take care of her.…”
“No, you don’t. You’ve been gone so long that people here think that I made you up. Today I want to show you off for the whole town.”
Maryellen straightened her robe and left the bathroom. Her mother swept her close for a hug.
“You look better now, babe. Do you feel better?”
Maryellen nodded. She didn’t really feel better, but she didn’t feel bad, exactly, except for the headache. She tingled, and just felt … different. Her body didn’t feel like she was all the way in it.
“Good,” her mom said. “I want to show us all off, starting today.”
They rode the mile to church in her grandfather’s black car with the running boards. Her parents borrowed it for the day, and if the weather stayed good they would all have a picnic at Kapowsin. Her grandparents lived just behind them through the bushes. They always walked to church, and usually they walked with Maryellen and her mother. Church was old people and crying babies and the few men already back from the war.
She loved riding in grandpa’s car but today she barely endured the ride to church because the bouncing aggravated her headache. Fragments of her dreams whirled about her like candy wrappers in a dust devil.
Her new dreams were special dreams, much different from other dreams, more like being awake than dreams. The foreign world of Afriqua Lee began to feel as familiar as this one.
Afriqua Lee and her people lived in large, linkable vans, some of them like railroad cars. Four or five of her grandfather’s cars would fit inside the Romni Bari’s personal van. Buses and vans of the Roam lit up all over, or took on the colors of the landscape, or created a landscape that had never been there. They left no track, and no sound escaped them, and they didn’t stop for gasoline like her grandfather’s car. When they came to the great wall of a city, the sides of the vans advertised their wares. Members of the Roam sold expertise and information, delivered goods and messages. City people couldn’t travel to other cities, she didn’t know why. The Roam could travel to any city it chose, but it couldn’t have a city of its own.
Some of the vans put on shows for children, to entertain them while their parents bought what they needed from the Roam. Maryellen saw one of these shows in her dream: jaguars chasing monkeys through an overgrown courtyard of stone. These picture-stories were different from the ones in her books.
The city in her dream—seen from the top of a huge pile of stones—walled itself in against the world. The wonderful vehicles of the Roam moved in a great procession when they entered and when they left the gates.
“Come on, babe,” her mother said, and shook her again. “We’re here.”
Here, Maryellen thought, Where is “here”?
She glanced over her mother’s shoulder, out the car window, and remembered. Sometimes she sure fell asleep fast. The pipe-tobacco smell of the upholstery brought her back, and the tolling of the church bell across the street battered her headache. The day, too, was too bright for her head. She squinted her way up the aisle and squeezed into the pew between her mom and dad.
Each time they rang the bells at the front of the church a funny red sign lit up in her mind. It flashed on and off just like
the water faucet drip in the plumbing store sign. The number “8” on its side had been in her dreams before, branded onto the backs of some peoples’ hands
Her father woke her this time as the pew emptied for communion.
“C’mon, Muffin,” he said. “I’m taking you out to the car.”
He laid her down on the back seat and fixed his coat for a pillow. Then he sat behind the wheel but turned so that he could put his feet up on the seat and watch her, too. He rolled his window down and smoked, talking with her quietly. She watched, fascinated, at the slow swirl of smoke around his head.
“I could go to school on the army money,” he was saying. “I got a couple of job offers already, but I don’t want to work for somebody else all my life. That’s too much like the army. I want to be my own boss.”
He quit talking and Maryellen didn’t say anything.
“Haven’t you ever seen anybody smoke before?”
“What?”
“The way you’re staring. It’s like you never saw anybody smoke before.”
“Oh,” she said. “No. I’ve seen it.”
The passenger door in the front opened up and her mother leaned her head inside.
“Dr. Trapp is coming,” she said. “He was just a couple of rows in front of us so I asked him to take a look at her.”
Her mother reached over the seat and brushed back Maryellen’s hair.
“How’re you doing, babe?”
“Okay.”
“Do you still have your headache?”
Maryellen nodded.
Dr. Trapp opened the back door and sat on the seat next to her. He felt her head and throat with his pale, skinny fingers. He made her stick out her tongue and asked her the same things that he always asked her in the office. When he looked into her eyes he hesitated, then looked again.
“That’s curious,” he said. His angular face wore a puzzled expression as he sat back in the seat beside her.
“What’s curious?”
A hurried tightness squinched her mother’s voice, like she spoke while holding her breath.
Dr. Trapp was staring into Maryellen’s eyes again, going from one eye to another. His eyes were blue, with flecks of gold. He didn’t blink much, but when he did she saw the fresh scar where he’d had a mole removed.
“Her pupils … open and close at random.”
“Like in a skull fracture?” Her father’s voice startled her, right above her head. He went on. “I … saw some of that, you know, in the war.…”
“Well, Mel, her scalp’s not tender, no signs of an injury. She’d remember anything that hit her that hard. I assume that you know of no such injury …?”
“No,” her mother said. “Nothing that other kids don’t get—scraped hands and knees. Lately she babbles in her sleep, but so does Mel. Today she’s been impossible to get to wake up.…”
Her mother’s worried face appeared over the seat, then disappeared to talk with the doctor outside the car.
“Has she had any shaking, or tremors, or fits of any kind?”
“No,” her mother said, “not that I’ve ever noticed.”
“Does she fall asleep at strange times, or does this just happen as a result of her normal sleep?”
“No, no,” her mother insisted. “She was just hard to wake up today, that’s all. We were up late last night, but a few times lately she would sleep round the clock if I’d let her. She’s not like that. You can see how hard it is to keep her awake today. And she’s so quiet.…”
He opened the door again and wiggled her foot.
“Is your neck stiff, honey?”
She shook her head. She had her eyes closed because the light made her headache worse.
“Just the headache?”
“Yes.”
He closed the car door and sent streaks of red shooting through her head.
“She has no fever, although she’s clearly been sweating,” he told her mother. “My greatest concern would be for meningitis, but this doesn’t look like that.”
“What could it be, then?” Again, her mother’s worried voice.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I want to see her tomorrow in the office. Call me tonight if she changes in any way for the worse, but bring her in tomorrow even if she’s all better.”
Maryellen slept most of the day away while relatives came to welcome her father home. The men laughed over their beers and her father brought them into the kitchen one by one to show them the nicks in the linoleum and to tell the story of the rat. Each time, he pushed the curtain aside and looked in to see how she was doing.
All of the coats were piled on her parents’ bed, and Maryellen’s mom kissed her forehead each time somebody came or left. When everybody was gone and her parents sat in the kitchen alone, swirling the ice in their glasses, Maryellen felt a sudden, intense hunger. She padded out to the kitchen and wolfed down a huge plate of spaghetti while her parents joked with each other and ruffled her hair.
“Better, huh?” her dad said.
“Yes.”
“Probably just some kid thing,” he said. “She got over it pretty fast.”
“We can borrow my parents’ car again tomorrow to take her in.”
“She’s better,” her dad said, “she said so herself. We can’t afford to pay him to tell us what we already know. Kids get these things, they get over them.…” He waved his hand to dismiss the whole thing.
“But, he said …”
“Right. He said to bring her in. He didn’t say it would be free. It’s going to take everything we’ve got to get out of this dump, and the sooner the better. If she gets sick again tonight, we’ll take her. How’s that?”
Her father’s voice snapped the words out and his tone bordered on a growl.
Her mother rubbed her eyes the way she did when she was tired or when she just wanted everything to go away.
“All right,” she said. “I’m tired and don’t want to think about it right now. She’s been like this off and on since the earthquake, maybe it’s just … nerves or something.”
“Yeah,” her dad said. “Nerves. So we’ll see how she is in the morning. You ate a good dinner and got plenty of sleep, Muffin. That’s all you needed, right?”
“I guess so,” she said.
It made her feel like she was taking a side against her mother, and she didn’t like that feeling.