Excerpt: The Book of Sighs

The Book of Sighs
By Tamara Christie

Part One
Night Swimming

Chapter One
Catherine

“It was only a dream. It was only a dream.” Heather was whispering. She heard the voice at first as if she were still lost in sleep, as if it were part of her dream soundtrack, but slowly she realized that it was her, that it was real, that she was awake now. She had no idea how long she had been sitting there, upright in her bed, murmuring these words over and over again to herself. But now she started to shiver, and she stopped the mantra and clawed at her drenched nightgown.

“Ugh, fucking dream,” she said, louder now than the earlier chanting, trying to break through her reverie and the cold, sweaty fear that still gripped her. It helped. When she heard her thick, groggy voice bouncing off the close walls of her bedroom and back to her, the dark room seemed smaller, less threatening. She looked over at the digital alarm clock, and its familiar green glow also helped a little. It was an anchor to reality. It also told her that she had gotten approximately three hours of sleep. 4:07. “No one should be up at this hour,” she muttered, tossing aside the clammy sheets and putting her feet on the floor. She rubbed her eyes, cranky and still mildly agitated. There was nothing to be afraid of, she knew that. The woman in her dream couldn’t hurt her. Her mother was dead.

Heather rubbed her knee, as if to alleviate an ache, but when she caught herself in this action she stopped, noted, and realized the injury – and the resulting pain – had also been a figment of her imagination. She had fallen in her dream, she recalled, and skinned her knee on the pavement. It seemed her brain had not forgotten that old familiar sting from childhood.

Her mother’s arms had reached toward Heather, beckoning her. Catherine was sitting on the front porch of an old house with a tidy lawn and tiny four square windows. Heather had never seen the house before that she could recall. Her mother was younger in the dream than Heather should logically be able to remember; perhaps seventeen or eighteen. Heather would have been just an infant when Catherine was that age. But her face was so vivid; it was as if she had looked that way the last time Heather had laid eyes on her. A flash of images shuffled through her mind, this time of genuine recollection, and reassured her that was not the case. In death, Catherine was gray, lined, somehow simultaneously swollen and sunken. She was gone, and only the empty body remained.

Perhaps Heather had seen the youthful Catherine, her long, black hair and sweet, naive face in a photograph she had discovered in her grandmother’s belongings. She’d spent many a rainy weekend rummaging through the dusty boxes in the basement of her uncle’s house, where her grandmother lived when Heather was a small child.

But the rest. She had no idea what on earth could have made her subconscious conjure the rest.

Catherine was smiling. She didn’t speak, but still Heather felt comforted by her presence. She limped forward toward her mother’s embrace, feeling all the boundless energy and the countervailing awkward angles of her seventh or eighth year. She held the plastic handles of a jump rope in her left hand, and her right was warm and sticky. It was loosely covering her right knee, which stung anew. She lurched, hunched and cautious, toward the porch and the sweet comfort there.

She could smell lilac bushes and cut grass, sweet and pungent. They tickled her nose. She sniffled and licked her upper lip, which tasted of sweat and the hotter salt of tears. She realized she was crying a mantra in her dream as well, “Mama, Mama, Mama,” and she sounded like a baby. She reached up to scrub the tears from her cheek with the back of her left hand. The jump rope slapped against her left leg and she dropped it and began to run. It hurt more, but it was over more quickly, and she was in her mother’s arms at last, forgetting her shame at crying, letting a flood of tears soak the shoulder of Catherine’s cotton dress.

And then she couldn’t breathe. Catherine was squeezing her, at first snugly, soothingly, but then, before she knew what was happening, the hug was just a bit too snug, and then moreso, and then Heather felt crushed against her mother’s chest.

“Mama,” she tried to say, but it was muffled and impossible to understand against the wall of flesh and bone. She tried to inhale but there was nothing to take into her lungs. The cotton dress and her mother beneath it might as well have been a concrete mask. She flailed her arms, but somehow Catherine had them pinned as well. It felt as if her mother had more than two arms with which to restrain her. She tried to slide off Catherine’s lap, but her legs were immobilized as well.

There was no escape. There was no air. There was nothing except her mother’s cooing comforts, mocking Heather now as she suffocated in the shrinking black space of her mind. She was so sleepy. Her knee stung but it felt like someone else’s pain, like someone else’s knee. She tried to reach down to poke the scraped skin, to wake up the tender spot, to wake herself, but she couldn’t move a muscle. She tried to open her eyes, but they were pressed against Catherine. She tried to scream, and somehow, despite her failure, it woke her. Somehow. She shivered and told herself, over and over, “it was only a dream.”

Heather was a realist. She didn’t believe the old wive’s tale, popularized in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, that if a person died in their dream they would die for real. She didn’t believe in ghosts or Freddy or anything of the kind. But as she sat on the side of her bed, her heart finally beginning to slow its pounding racing rhythm, she felt inexplicably relieved that she had managed to wake up when she did. She didn’t necessarily think she would have died in her bed, never to wake up again, but she was nevertheless sure that she didn’t want to know what dying felt like, even if it was all in her head.

The clock now said 4:14, and she was able to see all the shapes of her bedroom. She got up to pee, turning every light on as she traipsed to the bathroom, squinting at first but hoping to burn the last vestiges of the nightmare – because that’s what it was, when she was really honest with herself – from her head. Her face in the bathroom mirror was typical of middle-of-the-night bathroom trips: puffy, pale, eyes encircled with dark blue-black. There was no sudden streak of white hair at her temple. She didn’t realize how long it had been since she’d had a real, honest to goodness nightmare until she found herself relieved at how easily the remnants of her fear were being dispelled. It was a rough one. She wondered what her therapist would make of it, but she hadn’t been to see Dr. Hillman in almost three years, and she didn’t think one bad dream was enough to drive her back to see him. After all, she’d be almost embarrassed to describe it to him: my mother smothered me to death with her love. How much more clichéd could she get?

After she had peed, she washed her hands, looking more closely at her reflection now that her eyes had adjusted to the bright light. She wondered how much she looked like Catherine. People used to remark about it, back when she was a girl and they went everywhere together. But compared to the girl in her dream, Heather thought her own countenance was entirely different.

Yes, she was more than a decade older than the Catherine who had appeared in her dream. But age discrepancy notwithstanding, she was also taller, she was paler, and her hair had a significant tinge of red, thanks to her father’s contribution to the messy pot. She was, she thought, a little bit prettier than her mother had been. Her eyes were green and people complimented her on them. But she was, she already knew from experience, woefully less appealing. The mysteries of attraction and chemistry still eluded her, after all these years, and she felt a sudden, black surge of envy toward the woman who had done what Heather had to assume was the best she could to raise her.

She pulled her hands out of the stream of water suddenly; steam rose around her as she cursed and turned the hot faucet handle off. She had turned it on by itself to speed the water, but now she had bright red, tingling hands thanks to her reverie.

“Sleep,” she told herself in the mirror. And she trudged back to bed, switching off lights as she went, shaking her head in irritation at her absentmindedness and the host of other issues she knew she was trying in vain to ignore. Maybe she’d have to consider returning to Dr. Hillman’s dingy, depressing office soon, after all.