If Only in My Dreams Page 11

  But he’ll have to become more patient if he’s going to take over where I leave off next spring, Jed tells himself—not for the first time.

  He can’t help but worry about how Gilbert is going to manage the household in his absence.

  He’ll have to grow up quickly… just like I did.

  Jed pauses beside the car, remembering how proud Pop was when he scraped together enough to buy it—how lovingly he cared for it, polishing it every week until the chrome shone like mirrors.

  I really should fix that tire, Jed thinks guiltily.

  It just hasn’t been a priority. Not with everything he needs within a few blocks’ walking distance of the house.

  Well…

  Not everything.

  Clara lives in New York.

  But that’s all he knows about her.…

  So far.

  He hasn’t opened her pocketbook or her suitcase—not yet. It seemed far too brazen a thing to do in the store, especially with Alice underfoot.

  But when it came time to close up the five-and-dime for the evening, there was no question about his leaving Clara’s belongings there. He opted to bring them home with him for safekeeping—and, all right, possibly for further investigation.

  If she hadn’t left her bags behind, it would have been much easier to forget her.

  Who are you kidding, fella?

  All right, Jed probably wouldn’t find it easy to forget her under any circumstances. It isn’t every day a beautiful doll like her walks into his life… then out again, without any plausible explanation.

  If she hadn’t left behind the suitcase and pocketbook, he’d be helpless when it comes to finding her again.

  If that’s what he decides to do.

  Forget about her. That’s what you should decide to do.

  Even if…

  Say he finds her, in New York. What then? Does he just hand over her bags and wish her well?

  Somehow he knows that seeing her again, one last time, won’t be enough.

  But what else is there?

  Falling in love, getting married, settling down…

  That wasn’t part of his future plan. Not for a coupl’a years, anyway. After he’s enlisted, and done his part for his country, and seen something of the world beyond Glenhaven Park.

  Then again… he’s seen it. Some of it. He’s seen New York and Boston, and the Catskill Mountains where they spent a week every summer before the Depression, and once, right after he got the DeSoto, Pop drove the whole family to the Jersey shore for the day.

  Maybe that’s all the world travel Jed really needs.

  Maybe if he found the right girl tomorrow—

  Or, more specifically, today—

  Maybe he’d be content to just stay put here in Glenhaven Park forever.

  Maybe.

  Jed can see his mother’s silhouette against the filmy white curtains in the window as he passes the back corner of the house. He pictures her there in the kitchen, bustling from stove to sink to icebox, preparing supper with help—and a lot of bickering—from his sisters.

  They eat later than usual on Monday nights, because it’s laundry day and Mother doesn’t finish until after five o’clock.

  It must be nearly six now.

  Mother will be sending Doris out to summon him for supper any minute.

  First, however, he wants to examine Clara’s bags. His curiosity has been building all day, as has his anticipation of actually finding her address.

  He steps into the garage, which was formerly a carriage house, and is far too small to house the monstrous DeSoto. Anyway, it’s filled to its shadowy, cobwebby depths with unused remnants from his grandparents’ household, plus the Landrys’ yard equipment, outgrown bicycles, and lawn furniture nobody’s bothered to bring out for two summers now.

  Jed hauls the suitcase up the steep, rickety flight of stairs leading to what was once a loft overhead. Now it’s a one-room apartment with indoor plumbing Pop installed back in ’38. He’d planned to use the space as a workshop; he always did like to tinker with things.

  But those days were over for him soon after he finished whitewashing the walls and sanding the wide-planked floors.

  Pop’s tool bench still sits in one corner of the large room. Jed likes to look at it, remembering how he was once Pop’s proud helper. Hunched over some splintered furniture or broken appliance, cigarette burning between his lips, Pop would tell him what he needed; Jed loved to reach in, rummage around until he found the right tool, and bask in Pop’s approval.

  Jed hasn’t opened the tool chest since his father passed away. When something needs fixing around the house, it’s Granddad who usually does the repairs, using his own set of tools, before Jed can get to it.

  He should probably move Pop’s tool chest back down to the garage; the apartment is cramped enough as it is. But he doesn’t have the heart to do that just yet.

  The remainder of his meager floor space is occupied by furniture odds and ends, including the twin bed, bureau, and desk Jed moved up here from the house. His grandparents brought their own bedroom suite when they took over his old room. The heavy mahogany four-poster and massive wardrobe still seem out of place up in Jed’s dormered boyhood room, against a backdrop of decades-old pastel wallpaper picturing baby farm animals: lambs and chicks and calves.

  No less out of its element is the wobbly wooden dinette table that once stood in the Landrys’ breakfast nook and is now tucked into a dormered nook of Jed’s garage loft. He has countless memories of hearty meals eaten at that table with his parents and Gilbert when they were a well-fed family of four, back before the Depression—and the girls—came along.

  Now the nicked wooden surface, its faded yellow paint worn away completely in some spots, is covered with household bills, books, magazines, and a basket of folded clothing Mother must have brought up earlier.

  Jed drops the suitcase by the table and pushes the tabletop clutter aside to make room for the pocketbook.

  He stares at it as he removes his coat, hat, and gloves, tossing them all on one of the rickety painted chairs.

  Then he lowers himself into the sturdiest of the four, the only one he uses for sitting, and takes a deep breath.

  Does he dare?

  If you don’t open that pocketbook, you’ll never see her again.

  But he can’t know that for certain.

  He can’t know that she won’t show up tomorrow to reclaim her things… and his heart.

  Face it. That’s not going to happen, Jed.

  And you can either forget her… or try to find her.

  He hesitates.

  Then, with a trembling hand, he unfastens the clasp on Clara’s pocketbook.

  Karen Vinton, a beautiful African American woman dressed in a gauzy purple print skirt and a brown shawl she crocheted herself, looks up from the phone in her hand when Clara steps into her reception area.

  “There you are! I was just about to call you. You’re fifteen minutes late.”

  “Sorry. Subway trouble.” Living in Manhattan, you can blame anything on that.

  In reality, the subway got her here in a flash, but Clara spent the next half hour wandering aimlessly around the neighborhood, trying to work up the courage to break bad news to someone who cares about her.

  She reluctantly follows Karen into the adjacent office, a rectangular space as nondescript as the waiting room. In it was a tidy desk in one corner, a cluster of blond wood chairs covered in nubby gold fabric, a characterless framed still life on the wall, and a tall window covered in metal blinds.

  “So how was your week?” Karen Vinton’s stack of silver bracelets jangles as she closes the door and turns to face Clara with a smile.

  “It was… okay.”

  Jed Landry flits into her mind, then stubbornly refuses to budge.

  That’s been happening all day. The dream hasn’t faded in the hours since she awakened, as dreams usually have a way of doing.

  She can still recall every unse
ttling detail.

  She finds herself wishing she could tell Karen about it, but how would she even bring it up?

  “What’s on your mind, Clara?”

  “Do you mean… right this second?”

  Karen nods.

  “Can I tell you about a dream I had?” she hears herself blurting, much to her own surprise—and dismay.

  “Sure.”

  Clara hesitates. Why did she have to go and say something about the dream?

  Because you don’t know what to make of it… and you’re starting to think you might be losing your mind. Who better to decide whether that’s the case than a shrink who knows you inside and out?

  She takes a deep breath, and finds herself spilling the whole story—prefacing today’s events with the cancer diagnosis.

  Karen takes that in stride—unsurprising, really, considering that it’s her job to remain calm and listen.

  She starts asking questions about treatment, but Clara holds her off with a terse, “I just want to tell you about the dream, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Clara reveals the entire dream, and how she met Jed—even that she was attracted to him. And how she awakened on the Metro-North train with no memory of how she might have gotten there—not in real life, anyway.

  She winds down by admitting that her feet were raw and bleeding by the time she made it downtown, and how Mr. Kobayashi had to let her into her apartment.

  She also mentions that when she called Bobby, the unit production manager, he was remarkably understanding about the whole thing and promised to pass along the information to Denton. The director promptly sent an enormous bouquet of flowers, closely followed by a messenger service delivering her call sheet for tomorrow as well as her bag containing keys, wallet, and cell phone, which she’d left in her trailer up in Westchester.

  “And that’s it,” she says, looking at Karen at last. “What do you think?”

  “About…?”

  “All of it. The whole dream. It was a dream… wasn’t it?”

  “Do you think it was?”

  “Of course!” She stares at Karen, who is watching her intently. “I mean, what else could it have been?”

  Karen remains silent. Waiting, apparently. She’s good at that.

  Clara knows from experience that she’ll just sit there for as long as it takes for Clara to answer her own question.

  “What I don’t get,” she admits, shifting her weight uncomfortably, “is how I lost a few hours of my morning. I mean, I didn’t feel like I was losing it when I was dreaming… but I figured I’d wake up and find myself in the same place where I was when I started dreaming. Instead, I guess I blanked out… and I woke up in the same place where I was in the dream when it ended… on the train to the city. How could that happen?”

  “Temporary dissociative amnesia can be triggered by both psychological and physical trauma.”

  “Is that what I have?”

  “I’m not saying that, but given your cancer diagnosis—and the head injury—your experience isn’t all that unprecedented… except…”

  Utterly unnerved by the final word and the way Karen trails off wearing an intent frown, Clara prods her. “Except… what?”

  “If we assume that your experience this morning should be attributed to the bump on your head, we would have to rule out retrograde amnesia, because you seem to clearly remember the details leading up to the accident… correct?”

  “Right. I remember specifically how the train slowed down all of a sudden, and I flew backward through the air, and hit my—”

  “Backward?” Karen cuts in. “Don’t you mean forward?”

  “No, backward,” Clara repeats slowly, though how that might have happened is momentarily puzzling to her. Usually, a lurch on a moving train would cause you to fall forward… wouldn’t it?

  Again, she regrets not paying better attention in high school physics class.

  Karen is silent for a few seconds, as if trying to ascertain whether what Clara described is physically possible.

  Then she continues with a shrug. “You say you didn’t immediately lose consciousness after you hit your head.”

  “I don’t think I—wait a minute, of course I didn’t. If I had, everyone there would have seen me. They’d have known what happened. But according to them, I just… vanished.”

  “You wandered out of the car you were in, and then off the train.”

  “I guess so. Nobody saw me go, and I don’t remember it. Except that I do very clearly remember the train pulling into the Glenhaven Park station, and finding the empty platform, and everything that happened after that.”

  Karen hesitates. Then she asks, “Have you ever heard of dissociative fugue?”

  “No. What’s that?”

  “It’s a psychological disorder—”

  “Oh, God, here we go.” Clara rakes a hand through her hair. I’m losing it. I knew it.

  “Why do you say that?”

  Ignoring the question, Clara asks impatiently, “What kind of disorder?”

  “Do you want the textbook definition, or layman’s terms?”

  “Textbook.” She’s familiar with layman’s terms: crazy.

  “It’s a disorder in which the patient experiences a spontaneous episode of sudden travel away from home, marked by amnesia about some or all of his or her past life. And she may, during this episode, experience the reemergence of some event or person representing an earlier trauma.”

  Clara is shaking her head before Karen is finished speaking.

  “That’s not what happened,” she says resolutely. “I never for a moment forgot my past life. I knew exactly who I was the whole time.”

  “But you did experience what you say were memory blanks?”

  “Only about what happened to me, physically, while I was dreaming or hallucinating or whatever I was doing. I don’t remember getting on the train back to the city,” she says impatiently, sick of going over this aloud after having dwelled on it ever since it happened. “I mean, not in the present day. I remember getting on the train in 1941, in the dream. But it was a different train.”

  “How?”

  “You know… old-fashioned—like a train would be in 1941.”

  Karen is silent, mulling that over.

  “What are you thinking?” Clara asks at last.

  “That I’m not entirely sure what’s going on with you, but that it’s acceptable to have escapist fantasies when you’ve just been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness.”

  “So that’s what you think happened to me this morning?” Clara asks doubtfully. “Just a fantasy?”

  “I don’t know, Clara. We have a lot more work to do before I can make any kind of diagnosis.”

  “But what are you thinking this might mean?” she presses, unable to let it go. “Why did this happen to me?”

  “You mean this particular episode? I would say the fact that it involved traveling back to the past might indicate that the forties represent nostalgia for simpler times, and that this man—”

  “Jed Landry?” Clara asks, her heart beating a little faster.

  “Right, that he might represent your repressed longing for a man who knows nothing about your life or your illness, a man who has no preconceived notions about you. A hero to come along and save you from all this.”

  Clara rolls her eyes, ignoring the little voice that tells her there might be a hint of truth to it. “I don’t want to be rescued,” she says firmly. “You and I both know that I can take care of myself—and of my mother, for that matter.”

  “Have you told her yet?”

  “No. And I’m not going to.”

  “Don’t rule it out. You might need her. Or someone.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Are you sure? A cancer diagnosis is traumatic under any circumstances, and you wouldn’t be human if you weren’t just a little bit insecure about your ability to face the challenges ahead.”

  A lump rises in her throat, maki
ng it impossible to speak.

  “Then there’s that bump.” Karen leans forward and peers at Clara’s forehead. “You need to have that looked at. You might have a concussion.”

  “Do you think it might have caused the whole… amnesia thing?”

  “I’m concerned about it. Do you have a headache? Blurred vision? Are you nauseous? Sleepy?”

  “Not really… not any more than I normally would be after getting up in the dark to go to work.”

  “Does your head hurt?”

  “Just if I touch the bump itself, but it’s just sore. I’m sure I’m okay.”

  “If I were you, I’d go to the doctor just to be sure.”

  “I will… tomorrow.” Glancing at her watch, she sees that their forty-five-minute session—which today was reduced to a half hour—is almost up.

  “I don’t want you to go home alone tonight. Is there anyone who can come by for a while tonight, just in case your head starts bothering you? I’d do it myself, except I’ve got tickets to a concert.”

  “I’m fine, Karen. It’s no big deal.”

  “But I don’t like it that you live alone. You must have a neighbor you can count on… someone who would be willing to check in and make sure you’re all right.”

  A neighbor you can count on.

  Drew Becker pops into her head.

  Why, she doesn’t know, because he’s a total stranger. Not someone she can count on.

  She imagines herself knocking on his door and asking him to keep an eye on her in case she develops brain damage.

  Sure. As if.

  “I’ll be fine,” she assures Karen. “And I have an early location call tomorrow morning, so—”

  “So I’m calling you on your cell first thing, to make sure you’re all right.”

  Clara sighs. “Must you?”

  “I must.” Karen flashes a brief smile. “And listen, let’s make another appointment, sooner than next weekend.” She briskly takes out a desk calendar and flips the page. “How’s Monday?”

  “Monday? Karen, I’m way too busy to squeeze in—”

  “I’d like to see you again on Monday,” Karen says firmly, pencil poised over the page. “Six o’clock.”