Queen of Dreams (14 page)

The phone rings.

I sit up, rigid with expectation. Could it be—? Why not? If he could be in the rain-filled grove, if he could come to the show and buy my painting of him (that shape made of emptiness that only he recognized), why couldn’t he be calling me now? My hand trembles a bit—my voice, too—as I say hello.

“Riks,” says a not-Emmett voice that I know too well, “we need to talk.”

I’m disappointed, and angry at my foolishness.

“There’s nothing to talk about, Sonny,” I snap. “Not anymore. Please don’t call me again.”

But of course he does. The phone rings and rings, the answering machine comes on, I hear him say, “Riks, listen to me, it’s important,” I disconnect the phone. Then I go to bed, where I draw my knees up to my chest and shiver in spite of having turned the heat to high. Emmett has vanished (perhaps I’m too needy for his liking), and until I fall into uneasy sleep, I listen to my little voice.
Now that you’ve turned off the phone, what if Jona has an emergency?

14

FROM THE
DREAM JOURNALS

Recently, they’ve been arriving when I don’t expect them.

This morning, for example.

She drives up in a car like a silver whisper and sits there for a long moment, comparing the address on her notepad with that on my door. Or maybe she’s gathering the scattered petals of her courage.

When she does ring the bell and I open the door, she is beautiful and sad, like a princess from one of our old Bengali tales.

Maybe that’s why, when she tells me her dream, I recognize it at once, though I haven’t dreamed it myself.

In the dream—she’s had it several times now—she is in a walled garden. There are golden plants all around her, flowers made of diamonds. A brook flows through the garden, with honey for water, and invisible birds sing so sweetly she thinks her heart will burst.

She pulls at the strap of her Gucci purse, looking down at her lap. She smooths out the silky fabric of her dress as she speaks. She has chosen pearls for her ears, her throat. This does not surprise me, for they are the gems of weeping.

As long as she is in the garden, she knows she will be safe. No one can get to her. Get at her. She hears them calling her name, outside. The voices are angry, angrier. But she doesn’t care. She lifts her hand. A dragonfly swoops down to kiss it.

I read her story in her listless eyes. A husband who is so busy dreaming his king-of-the-mountain dreams that he doesn’t know his home has turned into a desert. That the only solace his wife has comes from sitting in an unreal garden, listening to birds that aren’t there.

You need to talk to him, I tell her. Make him talk to you.

She shakes her head. I tried. I don’t care to anymore.

When did he stop sleeping with you?

She turns hunted deer eyes to me. How did you know?

I don’t tell her that I know it through my own life, which is like hers turned inside out. We dream tellers do not speak of ourselves.

I forget, she says finally. It doesn’t matter.

You need to find something—or someone—else to love. Or you’ll go mad.

She looks at me.

Maybe I’m mad already, her eyes say. Maybe that’s the best way to carry this emptiness.

Why did you come to me? Do you want me to explain what you saw?

No! Don’t! I don’t want it explained away. I just want to dream it again and again. Every night. I could bear the rest of my life then. If I knew for certain that when I lay down, I could go there. But it doesn’t happen, not often enough. And recently, less and less. That’s why I’ve come to you.

I sigh. It’s a dangerous path she follows. But she will not accept any other help from me. And I can’t turn down the entreaty in those eyes, the shimmer in them that could be mascara or desperation.

I bring her a bottle from my closet of shadows. One drop each night, I say, just before bed, in each eye.

She twists open the stopper. Smells the clear liquid dubiously.

You’re sure? It looks just like water.

I nod. I don’t tell her that I’ll be sending my dreaming thoughts to her, too, to guide her across the threshold.

But it’s such a small bottle—it’ll be empty in no time. Can’t you give me more?

I shake my head. It’ll last longer than you think, as long as you use it right. When it’s over, come and talk to me. Maybe you’ll want something different by then.

She smiles her disbelief. Rises on unsteady stiletto heels. Without looking at them, she puts handfuls of dollar bills on the table between us.

I tuck most of them back into her purse.

Everything in moderation, I say sternly. But inside I’m telling her, Don’t give up. The dream is not a drug but a way. Listen to where it can take you.

So many kinds of sorrow in the world. Sometimes I think I might break from it.

You’ll be here for sure when I come back? There’s fear in her voice, in the clutch of her perfect nails on the strap of her purse.

I say to her what I say to all my people, though this time I speak with a tinge of guilt.

My dear one. (She looks up at that, startled again. She’ll never know how deeply I mean those three words, how deeply I am tied to her, now that she has come to me.) My dear one, as long as I’m alive, I’ll be here for you.

15

Someone is pounding on the door of the apartment, calling her name. Someone rings the doorbell over and over until the maddeningly cheery chimes dig into her skull and hiding her head under the pillow can’t save her. She drags herself out of bed, swearing, her head dull and throbbing as with a hangover. Unfair, this world where you can suffer a hangover without having touched a drink. (Half a glass of champagne, she figures, doesn’t count.) She blinks hazily, wondering if it’s Sonny, would he dare this final assault, but the voice doesn’t fit. She considers not answering, pretending she doesn’t exist. Maybe it wouldn’t even be pretense. She feels a strange weightlessness as she makes her way to the bathroom, a sense of not belonging to the hands that splash water on the face that is bent over the sink. It is dark all around, or maybe her eyes have floated away. When she comes out of the bathroom, the voice shouting her name hasn’t left, so she opens the door.

“God, Rikki, what’s wrong with you?” Belle is sobbing as she pushes her way into the apartment. “Why didn’t you open the door earlier? I thought something had happened to you, too.”

She registers that
too,
a cold corkscrew of a sound that bores into her, leaving a narrow black tunnel in its wake. She mumbles something about being asleep. It isn’t an unreasonable excuse. When she looks past Belle at the landing outside her apartment, with its small window, she sees the sun hasn’t risen yet. Belle is wearing a short red dress. Surely that wasn’t what she was wearing when she saw her last at the—where? With an effort she recollects the gallery, and then everything comes tumbling down on her: her parents, Jona, the paintings gallant and forlorn on the wall before the crowds came, the man in white, Sonny’s disastrous entry and more disastrous exit. Belle’s makeup is smeared, her eyes are swollen. Rakhi wants to tell her that she shouldn’t have been driving when she was upset like that, she could have had an accident. Perhaps she does say it, but Belle doesn’t hear, she’s too busy talking and crying at the same time.

“I came home and there were these messages on the answering machine, like six of them, I almost didn’t turn it on, I was so tired, but thank God I did, it was Sonny, he was calling from the hospital, he’d been trying you but you didn’t pick up—”

Hospital.
The word sinks into her with finality, a stone of a word.

“Jona?” Her body starts to shake. Belle is holding her.

“No, not Jona, thank God. But just as bad. Your parents. They got in an accident, going back. Your father’s hurt bad. But your mother’s—” Belle sobs so hard she can’t complete the sentence.

But Rakhi doesn’t need to hear the word, that sound like a fist striking flesh, to know what has happened.

At the hospital, where Belle has driven her, everything appears blurred, as though she’s looking through glasses that are meant for someone else. Faces in uniforms and surgical scrubs float up to her, float away. They say things she can’t quite comprehend. (What’s there to say? Everything’s been encompassed already in that one unsaid word. Its single syllable swings at her from time to time, making her flinch.) She follows a uniform down a passage to a room, a bed, someone lying in it, covered with a white sheet. Under the sheet, she can see the outlines of disconnected tubes, like the freeways of an abandoned city. Sonny is there, his eyes red-rimmed. She wants to pound her fists against his chest, shout that he has no right, that she has no tears left because he’s cried them away. She knows he would grab her hands, hold her, murmuring like one does to a child or an animal. But finally she doesn’t. It wouldn’t change the thing she needs to change.

She doesn’t look at the bed.

After a long time someone takes her to another room, another figure lying in another bed. There are bandages, a broken arm in a cast. This time the tubes are hooked up to a machine. He isn’t conscious, so she doesn’t have to talk to him. She’s thankful for that. This surprises her. She hadn’t thought she could feel thankful about anything again.

At some point, she finds that she is back home—she’s not sure how—and in her own bed. There are two quilts covering her, but they can’t stop her from shivering. She wants to ask about Jona, where she is, but all her words have wandered away and she’s too tired to go searching. Belle gives her a couple of bright pink pills and thankfully she swallows them.

And then. The dreams that her mother had protected her from all these years, positioning herself between her and them like a fortress wall, crash over her.

16

Rakhi

I am in the kitchen that is no longer my mother’s, boiling banana squash.

I’ve never cooked banana squash before, although it was a dish my mother was fond of making. She made it well and with deceptive ease. In her hands, it never turned into the disconcerting orange glob that stares at me from the pan. I add several spoons of mustard oil in an attempt to redeem it, and mix in salt and pepper. It looks just as unappetizing as before, only greasier. I sigh and place it, along with overcooked rice, on a tray.

I’m making the banana squash at the request of my father. He has also requested that I boil the rice until it turns mushy. He says his insides are too bruised to handle anything more demanding.

I’m quite sure there’s nothing wrong with my father’s insides. All his test results have turned out fine, and the doctors have told me there’s nothing to worry about. But I don’t point this out to him. Since the accident, I speak to my father as little as possible. I touch him as little as possible, too, but this is more difficult, since he needs my help with so many daily necessities until the cast comes off.

Sometimes I speak to my mother. I ask what she was thinking of when the accident occurred, how she could have been so disgracefully careless. I ask how exactly it came about.

I am angry with her, too, but it’s a more complicated anger. I don’t have words to articulate it. It is easier to allow myself to feel baffled.

No one is sure of what happened that night. But this much the reports agree on: she went off of Highway 580 where the road lifts itself up and curls lazily against the San Leandro hillside. She plowed through the guardrail and over the purple ice plant that covers the hillside, the car’s nose pointed directly at the long, low flatness of the San Mateo Bridge, its floating fairy lights. Then the car flipped over. By the time the ambulances got there, she was unconscious. She died soon after reaching the hospital.

The reports say there were no skid marks, no sudden braking. Nothing to indicate that she’d lost control of the car—or that she’d tried to stop it from going over.

My father says he was asleep when the accident occurred.

I don’t believe him. Somehow, he was responsible. I know it by the prickly coldness along my spine, the way my teeth hurt as though I’ve been sucking on something too sour.

“Talk to me,” Belle said after she took me home from the hospital. “For God’s sake, Rikki, talk to me. Cry, scream, do something.” But every response I considered seemed clichéd. Meaningless. I knew I should save my energy for something more useful, even though I didn’t know yet what it was.