I looked out the front window and saw all my neighborhood friends, children as they were decades earlier, playing. Some were running through the front yards, others were riding their bikes in lazy circles on the street. I glanced back at the new carpet and sofa, and out again to the kids outside. The year was somewhere in the late 1970s.
Two little girls were standing on the bridge that spanned the creek. I watched as they dropped sticks over the side and ran across the street to the bridge on the other side, peering down at the water. Pooh Sticks, we used to call it. Whoever’s stick drifted under the bridge the fastest won.
The girls on the bridge looked over at me, seeing me peering at them from our front window, and waved. And that’s when I saw it. One of them was my best friend, Jane, who lived across the street. She had a pixie cut, and she looked like one, too—blonde, blue-eyed, beautiful.
The other girl was me. I actually remembered the pants my little dream self was wearing. White denim jeans with colorful flowers embroidered on them. I had a pair like those when I was in the fourth grade. Look at that, I said to myself. I haven’t thought of those pants in decades.
The girls ran off the bridge and down the riverbank toward the water—an act strictly forbidden by our parents—and I knew they were going to make a game of walking across the creek under the bridge on a beam that ran the length of the creek bed, maybe seeing some crayfish or bullheads along the way. The idea was to get all the way across without slipping and falling into the water. I hurried to the door and poked my head out.
“Watch out for the turtle!” I called to them.
When I was a kid, the entire neighborhood of children took a collective breath when the enormous ancient snapping turtle who lived somewhere under that bridge decided to walk across the road from one side to the other. It was a living, breathing reminder that danger lurked in that dark water, danger of all kinds.
I glanced across the street at the house kitty-corner from ours, and saw that the garage door was open and several parents from the neighborhood, young couples who were about my age now but had seemed so old to me when I was a child, were gathered there. Everyone had a drink in hand. Many were smoking.
One of the men was flipping burgers on a grill in the driveway while the others supervised earnestly. There was my dad, holding court as he always did, telling stories that had the other men in stitches. He looked so young and handsome, dapper in his short-sleeved, red-and-white-striped shirt. I watched as he turned his gaze to the group of women who were standing near the makeshift bar, and he caught my mother’s eye and smiled. She lifted the drink she was holding, beaming back at him. He lifted his. A private toast amid a crowded party. So like them.
My mother. She was wearing a brightly colored sleeveless sundress printed with big psychedelic flowers. She was wearing flats—uncharacteristically, since she wore heels every day—her dark hair in curls around her face. She held a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other, and she was laughing.
I often thought she had a Jackie Kennedy air about her—sophisticated, always dressed to the nines. She bought her first pair of jeans when she was in her eighties, and then went hog wild and got a jean jacket, too, embroidered with flowers like the ones on my white pants. But on this day, and for most of my childhood, she was Jackie O.
She looked across the street and saw me watching her. She smiled. “Mom,” I whispered.
“You want to go back, but you can’t.”
I snapped my head around. There, sitting on the couch in front of the window, was my grandma. She had lived with us while I was growing up. She rarely went along when my parents socialized with the neighbors, preferring to stay home with my brothers and me instead.
She had died when she was ninety-one, after suffering a series of ministrokes. I went with her to the hospital when she had the first one, a TIA they called it. She had been sitting on the couch in our living room, in the same place she was sitting now in my dream, telling me a story, but then her words stopped in midair. Her amused expression dissolved into one of confusion and even fear. She held my gaze for a terrible moment in which time seemed to stop. It was like she was paralyzed.
“Gram?” I had said. “Are you okay?”
She just stared at me, unblinking, but I knew her eyes were pleading with me to do something.
“We need an ambulance,” I called out to my brother, my mom, anyone who was within earshot. “Now.”
She had come back to herself by the time we got to the hospital and was joking and laughing with the nurses. One of the nurses, clipboard in hand, asked her about the medications she was currently taking.
“I don’t take any medications,” my grandma had said.
The nurse had turned to me and, in a stage whisper, asked, “What meds is she on?”
My grandma winked at me, and I smiled back. “None,” I said. “She hasn’t been to the doctor since my mom was born. Sixty-five years ago.”
The nurse looked at me, openmouthed, and then left the room. I could hear her talking to the other nurses. “I’ve got an eighty-eight-year-old woman who isn’t on any medications!”
That was my grandma. A feisty, funny Finlander, a daughter of immigrants. She never took any sort of medication with the exceptions of a white chalky mint when she had an upset stomach and a hot drink of brandy and honey when she had a cold.
Many people in my culture don’t get the experience of living with their grandparents, and that makes me feel sorry for them. She added so much laughter to my life. When my parents imposed rules on my headstrong teenager self, Gram was my confidante and sounding board and, oftentimes, my partner in crime. When I would come home as a broke college student, she was always the one who would slip a folded twenty-dollar bill into my palm, giving me a wink. “Have fun with it,” she’d say.
And here she was, in my dream. I hadn’t seen her in so long.
“Gram,” I whispered. But when I got to the couch where she was sitting, she was gone.
And then the house crumbled around me. The scene across the street, the playtime at the creek, the parents and their laughter, all of it disappeared. I was standing in a pile of ash.
My eyes shot open, and I sat up in bed, my heart racing. My face was wet with tears. I hadn’t even known I’d been crying.
I blew my nose and took a sip from the glass of water on my nightstand, glancing at the clock. Just fuzzy red symbols. I squinted. Two o’clock? Three? My glasses were on the nightstand, but whatever time it was, it didn’t matter. It was dark, and I wanted to disappear into my dreams again, back into my past, a world that had long since disappeared, and yet had seemed so tangible and real when I was dreaming about it. I lay back down and drew the covers up to my neck, curling into a ball. I was cold deep inside.
CHAPTER FIVE
I must’ve fallen back asleep because I woke to a new day, the sun streaming in. I stretched, and then it came back to me. The voice in the hallway. The dream about my childhood. I shook my head, trying to rattle the thoughts out of it.
I looked around the room, but saw nothing unusual. There was the dresser, my minifridge, the television. The bathroom door was slightly ajar, just as I had left it. My glasses were on the nightstand. I slipped out of bed. It was the second day of my new life.
I swallowed my morning pills with a big gulp of water. The doctors said they would help. I wasn’t so sure. But I was taking them dutifully anyway, just so nobody could say I was part of the problem. Or all of the problem.