Читать книгу Don't Go Crazy Without Me - Deborah A. Lott - Страница 12

Coming out of a dream, I feel my father’s hand press down on my wrist, implore me not to leave him. I shift in bed, come to fully, and the phantom hand becomes my husband’s, the bed our bed, the house our own. I recite the facts of the present that blur in the middle of the night. The house on Teasley Street where I grew up has been lost to foreclosure, and my brother Paul forced to move into a cheap apartment. He will never forgive me and Ben for not buying the house for him. Ben and his wife live in the San Fernando Valley. Their adult daughter, my niece, lives near them.

My parents are both dead. Gone. In my waking life, that is the way they stay. At night they come back. My father roams the halls of Teasley Street in my dreams, faded like a photocopy when the ink is running low, perpetually stuck in the process of being erased. He’s confused, disoriented; he wants something from me he cannot articulate.

My mother, perhaps no vaguer in death than she was in life, is the one I want something from. In my dreams, she prepares elaborate meals for my brothers that I am not allowed to eat. Sometimes I approach her, hemorrhaging from an open wound. She’s embarrassed by the spectacle of the blood. “Put a Band-Aid on it,” she says. “Don’t make a fuss.”

She said nearly the same words to me at my father’s funeral: “Please don’t make a scene and embarrass me.” Any scene, beyond the obvious one my father was making by being laid out dead in a coffin, would be my fault.

In my middle-of-the-night cosmology there is no afterlife, no god. Not Rebecca’s fickle, His-name-never-to-be-spoken-aloud patriarch, not the neighbors’ boyishly handsome savior. Although I’m not sure I like my parents being quite as present as they become in the middle of the night, I cannot bear to think of them as forever gone either.

Tonight I have dreamed again that my father, beside me on his bed, has pinned my wrist with one hand as he whisper-shouts about the conspiracy between my mother and Uncle Nathan and a slew of doctors. I have felt once more that vertiginous swirling and sinking as I fluctuate between longing to trust him and not wanting to believe that what he’s saying could be true.

After years of being with one crazy man after another, telling myself they weren’t really crazy crazy, or knowing that they were crazy and trying but failing to save them, I have married a man more like my mother: stable, rational, dependable. This is my husband’s body in the bed next to me, not my father’s. This is a body I associate with safety, with pleasure, with love. Like my mother, my husband is not prone to the excessive displays of affection that, like my father, I crave. Still, in the middle of the night, as I mold my body against his, even in his sleep, he reaches out to hold me.