The Dream Came Back

The Dream Came Back

"I didn't move. I stood there with my arms and legs gone heavy and numb, looking straight into the middle of the dining room…

The hallway light put a weak yellow ring on the bottom of the stairs. The runner under my feet had been plowed up and turned over into a long fold.

From the dining room, the sound came again. Nobody was crying. Something heavy, meat and bone, was being dragged across the wood floor.

It dragged for a stretch.

Then it stopped. As if whoever was in there had paused and turned his head toward me.

Then the dragging started again.

Past the doorframe, in and out of the light, was my mother's hand. White, the fingers curled a little, as if she had stopped breathing a second before she could reach me."

I came awake. My chest was working hard in the dark, the way it does when you come up from the bottom of a frozen lake. My shirt was soaked and stuck to my back, and my mouth held the flat metal taste of blood that the dream always left behind.

I lay still with my eyes open on the ceiling. It took a while to place myself. This was the apartment in Brooklyn, where Emily, my wife, and I had lived for 11 years.

Not the wood house in Milton. Not that staircase.

The radiator under the window knocked twice and quit. In the apartment above ours somebody ran a shower, the way somebody did most nights around four, and the pipe inside our wall carried the sound down. I put my hand flat on the sheet and counted what I could hear until the list ran out.

Emily slept in the room across the hall. We had slept apart since April. She didn't argue and she didn't slam any doors. She carried her pillow out to the living room one night and never came back, as if our bedroom had turned into a space she couldn't get enough air in.

Her door stayed shut now, in the daytime too. She got up at 6:15, and I could follow the whole thing through the wall: the closet, the kettle, the front door pulled shut instead of slammed. By 7:00 the apartment was mine again.

Everything cracked after the fertility results in January. The doctor said my count was too low, that natural conception was close to impossible. We spent the months after that doing whatever the clinic told us to do.

Those were the months Emily lived on hormone injections, on the cramps low in her belly, on mornings that smelled like hospital disinfectant. She counted the days of her cycle and took each shot in a thigh that was already swollen, and every time the window on the test came back empty. The tiredness didn't arrive in a day. It wore her down a little at a time, until a woman who used to have energy to spare moved through our apartment like someone sleepwalking.

I did the grocery shopping that spring, since it was the one job left I couldn't do wrong. Spinach, the yogurt she liked, ginger, the prenatal vitamins in the orange bottle. Most of it went in the trash at the end of the week. Behind the milk there was a glass container of something cut small under plastic wrap, masking tape on the lid, a date in handwriting I didn't know.

At one of the appointments I saw her at the end of the hallway, talking to her doctor. Whatever they were saying had frozen the air between them.

I was too far off to hear. I watched her shoulders lift a little and then set. She didn't cry. Disappointment had gone past the place where crying helps. She was closing herself up, building a wall against the pain that I, the husband who couldn't give her a child, was handing her every day without meaning to. After that afternoon she started leaving my life, slowly, and without a sound.

I knew our marriage had begun counting down to its last days.

The clock on the dresser said 4:26. My shirt had gone cold against my back. I lay there another 10 minutes and didn't turn on the lamp.

Back to the dream. I sat up and put my feet on the cold floor. Then I did the thing I had done a thousand times before. I tried to remember it again.

I worked at it, trying to drag something solid out of that night. The sound was still going in my ears, and the taste was still at the back of my tongue, bitter and exact. I wanted one thing past the edge of the dark. An eye. A hand with blood on it. The shape of a man thrown across the hallway wall.

Nothing came.

I pushed until both temples were jumping. It was always the same broken pieces, always out of focus. The dream was an old tape with a deep scratch in it. It ran up to the second I was sitting on the stairs with my knees wet, and then it jumped. Static. Black. Done.

There was never anything after that.

The fall I turned 15, everything warm in my life was torn open in a single night.

A stranger got into the house, turned a dining room that got sun all morning into a killing floor, and murdered both of my parents.

I was an orphan to start with. When I was eight, a couple in Milton, a small town on the Hudson two hours north of the city, went to the children's home and asked to take me.

They said the set of my face, closed off and stubborn, reminded them of the son they had lost young, and that they wanted to give me a home. I believed that kind, sensible reason for years. Much later I understood that the meeting had never been an accident.

My adoptive father taught psychology at a university. My mother was a psychologist with a name in the area and a small practice in the house itself. They were educated people, calm and extremely disciplined.

Our house was a white two-story wood house. The second step of the porch creaked. Out front stood the red maple my mother planted. She always said the year she put it in the ground matched the year I was born, and she called that a piece of luck God had arranged for this family.

My mother saw patients in the front room on Tuesdays and Thursdays, three appointments an afternoon, the last one at five. I was supposed to be upstairs with my door shut by 1:45. I did my homework on the floor and learned the schedule of the house through the boards, who came in, how long they stayed, which ones my father walked out to their cars.

On the night of October 17 that year, all of it ended.

At seven the next morning the police broke the door in. They found me sitting on the seventh step of the staircase, face to the wall, hands on my knees. There wasn't a scratch on me. My clothes were soaked with blood, and the blood wasn't mine.

My parents were downstairs.

I'm not going to describe what the police found in the dining room that morning. I'll say this much. He was in the house a long time. A very long time. He didn't hurry any of it. He worked carefully and patiently, like a man who had the whole night and nothing else to do with it.

The medical examiner put it between 11:00 p.m. and 3:00 a.m. One line in the report never went anywhere. The thermostat in the hallway was set to 81, and my father kept that house at 66 from October to April and argued with anyone who touched it.

They didn't let me identify the bodies. They made that decision for me. For 31 years I still haven't worked out whether to thank them or hate them for it.

The front door hadn't been forced. Neither had the back. Both were locked from the inside. The neighbors heard nothing all night, and nobody saw an unfamiliar car on the street.

So he got into the house without breaking anything. He stayed in it for hours. Then he left, and not one person saw him go.

One person walked out of that house alive. Me.

They took me to the hospital. The doctors went over me and wrote it up: a minor head injury, no sedative in my system, and a large amount of an unfamiliar drug in my blood, a compound that had barely ever reached the market.

They concluded the compound couldn't have put anyone under. Which meant that if I had been in that room while my parents were being killed, I was awake for all of it.

Then they asked me what I saw. That was where it got bad.

Because I didn't remember anything.

Not vaguely. Not out of order. From around eight o'clock that night until an officer carried me out of the house, there was white. Clean white. Absolute.

Like somebody had taken scissors to 11 hours of my life and thrown them away.

The psychiatrists called it dissociative amnesia. In plain terms: when a child sees something past what he can carry, the brain reaches over and hits delete. It pours a concrete wall and seals the whole night in the deepest part of him. It's a defense, so the child doesn't go insane.