Authors: Connie Willis
I knelt down in front of her and took hold of her hands. “Annie, the dream’s not important. What’s important is that you’ve got a dangerous drug in your system. I don’t know what symptoms it can cause, but we’ve got to find out. There might be
withdrawal symptoms of some kind. We’ve got to get you to a hospital. They’ll know what to do.”
“No,” she said, still quietly. “They’ll give me something to stop the dreams.”
“No, they won’t. They’ll try to get the Thorazine out of your system, and they’ll run tests so we’ll know exactly how much Richard’s been giving you and for how long. What if he’s been giving you drugs for weeks? What if Thorazine isn’t the only thing he’s been giving you?”
“You don’t understand. They’ll put me on medication.”
“They can’t give you anything without your consent.”
“Richard did. I can’t go to a hospital. The dreams are important. They’re the most important thing.”
“Annie …”
“No, you have to listen, Jeff. I figured out he was giving me something when you called me. When I got up to answer the phone I was so dizzy, and then when you asked me if Richard was giving me anything, I knew that must be it. But I didn’t tell you.”
“Why not?” I asked gently.
“Because it stopped the dreams.” Her hands were ice cold. I chafed them gently between my hands. “When you’d called I’d been asleep all afternoon, and I hadn’t had any dreams at all. Then you called and told me about Special Order 191 and I didn’t even want to listen. I just wanted to go back to sleep. I wanted to sleep forever.”
“That was the Thorazine,” I said.
“I wanted to sleep forever, but I couldn’t. Even under the Thorazine, even when I was asleep, I knew the dreams mattered, and that I had to have them. That’s why I came here. Because I knew you could help me. I knew you could tell me what the dreams meant.”
“Annie, listen.” I looked anxiously into her blue-gray eyes, trying to see if they were dilated. They weren’t. They looked clear and alert. Maybe she
had
only been on the Thorazine for a couple of days. “Will you at least let me call Broun’s doctor? He’s not a psychiatrist or anything. He’s just a G.P.”
“He’ll call Richard.”
“No, he won’t,” I said, and wished I could be sure of that. If I told him that Richard had given Thorazine to one of his patients without her knowledge, he would immediately think she was a mental patient. He would call Richard, and Richard would tell him that she was highly unstable, that she suffered from delusions of persecution. He would use his Good Shrink voice and Broun’s doctor would believe him. And then what? Would he take Annie back to the Sleep Institute, or would he have Richard come and get her?
“At least let me make you some coffee,” I said, patting her hands. “We need to get that junk out of your system.”
She wrapped her fingers around mine. “Tell me about the horse. Please.”
“It was D. H. Hill’s horse. It was shot out from under him.” I held on to her hands as if I expected her to pull away from me. “Its front legs were shot off.”
“Did Lee see it happen?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I didn’t want to believe it when you told me about Tom Tita and Hill’s red shirt and the lost order,” she said, and her voice was still calm, but her grip tightened. “But I knew it was true, even under the Thorazine. I knew what the dreams were that night at the reception as soon as you told me about the house at Arlington, but I didn’t want to believe it.”
She bent her head so that it almost touched our hands. “That poor man!” she said. “The Thorazine made me sleep all the time, and even when I was awake it was as if I were asleep. It was wonderful. I hadn’t been able to sleep before because I was so afraid I’d dream about the soldier in the orchard, and now I slept and slept and didn’t dream anything.
It was wonderful. I was so glad Richard had given it to me.”
She looked up at me. “But even when I was asleep I kept thinking how terrible it was that they didn’t have Thorazine in those days, that there wasn’t anything to stop those awful dreams. He had to keep dreaming them over and over again till he was afraid to go to sleep, too.” She was holding my hands so tightly they hurt. “That’s why I have to have the dreams, that’s why I came to you. You have to help me have the dreams. So he can get some sleep.”
“Who?” I said, but I already knew the answer.
“Robert E. Lee. They’re his dreams, aren’t they?” she said, and it wasn’t even a question. “I’m having Robert E. Lee’s dreams.”
I could almost smell the corn, hear it rustling in the still, hot steam of the morning, and I knew the guns were about to open up and the slaughter begin.
“Yes,” I said.
I got Annie something to eat and made her drink some coffee. I wondered if I should walk her around to try to keep her from falling asleep the way you did for a drug overdose, but she had been asleep for days. I wished Broun had a medical book from later than 1865 so I could look up Thorazine’s side effects.
The phone rang, “It’s Richard, you know,” she said, and took hold of my hands again, “He’ll come and get me.”
The answering machine clicked on. “He won’t know where we are,” I said. “The message on the answering machine says Broun’s in California. He’ll think I went with him.”
“What if he comes over?”
“We won’t be here,” I said. “I have to go to Fredericksburg to do some research for Broun. You can come with me. He won’t have any idea where we’ve gone.”
Annie was asleep before I’d finished talking, still holding on to my hands, her head turned slightly against the back of the club chair, her cheeks as pink
as a child’s. I eased my hands out of hers and went and got a blanket from my room to put over her, and then, wide awake finally, I packed a bag and put it and Annie’s things into the car and then came back to the study and read galleys.
Richard called every ten minutes for the next three hours and then stopped, and I turned off all the lights in the study and went downstairs and made sure all the doors were locked. I went into the dark solarium and stood at the window, watching Richard pull up and park across the street and thinking about how the Civil War started.
Lincoln had offered Lee the command of the Union army, but he couldn’t take it, even though he was opposed to secession and hated the idea of war. “I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home,” he wrote his sister. “I know you will blame me; but you must think as kindly of me as you can, and believe that I have endeavored to do what I thought right.”
“I could have taken no other course without dishonor,” he wrote after the war, after he had killed two hundred and fifty thousand of his own men; and Lincoln, that other good man entrusted with mass murder, had said, “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us do our duty as we understand it.”
Our duty as we understand it. “I had to do it,” Richard had said, and had slept with a patient, had given her a dangerous drug without her knowledge, and I had promised I’d take care of her, so I couldn’t let him get away with it, even though he was my old roommate. “He just one day signed up,” Broun’s character Ben had said, “and I knew I had to, too.” And there we were, enemies.
At seven o’clock I went back upstairs and woke Annie up. I called the woman next door and told her I’d changed my mind about going to California with Broun and would she watch the cat, I’d put its
food by the door and she could come and get it and the cat anytime she wanted.
Then I said, “And would you tell the police we’re gone? Broun doesn’t usually bother with that kind of thing, but there’s been a car parked across the street with a man sitting in it ever since I got back from taking Broun to the airport last night. I can’t tell if he’s watching the house or not, and I’m probably crazy to think it means anything. But Broun’s got a lot of first editions.”
When the police car pulled up next to Richard’s, I took Annie out through the back door to the garage, and we fled south, into the land of dreams.
T
raveller was a perfect horse for Lee. He could stand the bad weather and the parched corn, and he had incredible stamina. When Lee reviewed the troops, Traveller would start out at a long lope and never once change his stride. The men would be lined up for sometimes as much as ten miles, and Traveller would gallop the whole distance while the other officers’ horses dropped out, one by one.
Fredericksburg was only fifty miles south of D.C., but it was an entirely different world. The redbud and forsythia were in bloom, and the martyred blossoms of the dogwood were everywhere.
I checked us in at the Fredericksburg Inn, a big old building with a wide porch. I asked for two adjoining rooms and then told the clerk I wanted to see them before we signed in. The clerk gave me a key and we went upstairs. The two rooms were really a suite on the second floor at one end of the building. I could see the parking lot from the window of one of the bedrooms and the Rappahannock from the other. There was a fire escape at the other end of the hall that went down to another, smaller parking lot that couldn’t be seen from the front of the building.
I left Annie in the room and went down and signed us in as Mr. and Mrs. Jeff Davis. The clerk grinned when he read it. I debated telling him that an angry husband might show up and giving him twenty dollars to tell the husband we weren’t there. Instead, I grinned back and said, “No, no relation. Everybody asks that,” and went out to move the car around to the little parking lot by the stairs and get the bags.
When I got back up to the suite, I put my bag in the bedroom with the view of the big parking lot and Annie’s in the other.
“You can relax,” I told her. “Richard will have ho way of knowing we’re here. The only person who knew I was going to Fredericksburg is Broun, and he’s in California. You can go ahead and unpack and then we’ll go get some breakfast.”
I went into the other bedroom, shut the door, and called Broun’s answering machine to make sure Broun hadn’t left the name of his hotel or the number on the machine. “I’m in sunny California doing research on my new book,” Broun’s voice said. “If you’ll leave your name and number and any messages, I’ll be picking my messages up remotely, and I’ll try to return your call as soon as possible.”
Good. He hadn’t left a number, and he hadn’t said anything about his research assistant picking up his calls. He had meant it when he said he wanted me to take some time off. I tried to think of anybody
else he might have given his California number to. His agent probably, but she wouldn’t give out information to a stranger, even if he claimed to be an old roommate of Jeff’s. McLaws and Herndon maybe, though I doubted if he’d told them he was running off to California when he was supposed to be working on the galleys.
I punched in the remote code that would play me any messages left on the machine. There was a click and then a short whirring sound while the machine rewound, another click, and Broun said, “Jeff, I’m in California, and I must have brought the damned fog with me. I’m going to see the prophetic dreams man tomorrow. Call me if you run into any trouble with the galleys. And get some rest. I’m worried about you.”
I unpacked the bag I’d thrown together the night before and opened the box I had brought the galleys in. There were books lying on top. I didn’t remember packing any books. I picked the top one up. It was volume two of Freeman. I sat down on the bed and pulled out the other three hefty volumes, one after the other.
A soldier running from battle would sometimes find miles later that he was still clutching his rifle, or his hat, or a half-eaten square of hardtack, and had no more memory of doing it than he did of running away. And here we were fifty miles from the battle with a suite at the Fredericksburg Inn and Freeman’s
R. E. Lee
and who knows what in Annie’s duffel bag, two Johnny Rebs on the run. But sooner or later that soldier would stop running and decide what to do next, and I had no idea. I hadn’t thought any farther than getting Annie safely away from Richard.
I had done that, and we could stay here for at least a week and maybe longer if Broun stayed in California, but sooner or later we were going to have to go back to D.C., and sooner or later we were going to have to talk about the dreams.
But not yet. There was no telling how much
Thorazine Annie still had in her system or how long it would take to work its way out. Dr. Stone had said taking somebody off a sedative abruptly might cause a “storm of dreams.” I wasn’t going to insist on figuring out what was causing Robert E. Lee’s dreams if she was having nightmares of her own. What she needed right now was breakfast and some rest and a vacation from the whole crazy mess.
There was a slick colored brochure lying on the oak chiffonier by the bed. I picked it up. Maybe we could take a walk around historic Fredericksburg, see some of the sights. “America’s Battlefield,” the brochure said. “Visit the Historic Civil War Battlefields. Where 100,000 fell! Stand in the shoes of the generals. Self-guided tour.”
I thought of Annie standing halfway up the hill at Arlington, looking down at the snowy grass. Fredericksburg’s battlefield had been made into a national cemetery, too, with twelve thousand unknown soldiers buried in it.
Maybe I shouldn’t have brought her here, I thought. She hadn’t dreamed about Fredericksburg yet, and I didn’t want her to. The battle had been a complete slaughter, with the Union soldiers trying to cross a flat plain to the defended ridge called Marye’s Heights. But Lee won, I thought. Maybe he doesn’t dream about the battles he won.
The other attractions were minor, to say the least: James Monroe’s law office, Mary Washington’s cottage, and Kenmore, a southern plantation where George Washington’s sister Betty Fielding Lewis lived, but when I checked the map, they weren’t anywhere near the battlefield, which meant we could go sightseeing and read galleys and do what Broun had sent me to do, which was interview a doctor about his acromegaly.
I dug the number Broun had given me out of my wallet and called Dr. Barton. The number had been disconnected. I opened the drawers in the oak chiffonier till I found the phone book and looked
him up under “Physicians” in the Yellow Pages. There wasn’t any listing. There was a Barton listed in the white pages, but no “doctor” after his name. Broun had said he was old enough that his acromegaly hadn’t been treated. Maybe he’d retired. I called the number.