I hesitated, then drew a deep breath and let myself be led away. My mother’s nurse led me to my room, taking me all the way to my bed and helping me to sit down. From the pitcher at my bedside, she poured me a glass of water and watched me drink it down. The water tasted strange, metallic and salty on my tongue, but I realized my throat was indeed parched as I lay down on my pillows. Every bone in my body ached with exhaustion.
“I’ll be back in a moment,” she said. “I’ll bring a tray for you to eat a little something.”
As she departed, she left me alone in my room. It was the first time since everything had fallen apart that I had been completely alone.
When the door latched shut, I sat there, stunned, almost frozen. In the stillness and quiet, all the emotions that I had kept at bay seized me. Grief and terror, and heartbreak seized me, pulling me in every direction.
My heart ached and burned, as if Petre’s knife had stabbed me there. If only it had been me that had taken that blade; if only I had been able to protect my dad. If only everything had been different. But it wasn’t. And so, burying my face in my pillows, I finally let my emotions spill out in wracking, painful sobs.* * *I didn’t want him in my dreams, but I couldn’t escape him. Everywhere I turned, Vasile was there. His voice, his eyes, his caresses. But I was always losing him, always. I slid over a rocky mountain cliff, my hand slipping from his. I fell overboard from a skiff in a storm, reaching helplessly out for him as I drowned.
I felt myself sobbing even as I slept, but I was powerless to wake up. Inconsolable in that desolate dusk-dawn dream place, where nothing was right and everything kept going wrong.
Even as I slept, I knew I wasn’t well.
Morning light broke through my dreams long enough for me to see the new doctor standing over me. His name was lost to me, his face melting like wax. I tried to blink myself into awareness, but it was useless, and I kept slipping back down into sleep. His words sounded heavy; they felt like blocks of granite. Nothing made sense and yet it all made sense.
I worried about Natasha, about what had happened to her. She’d been so different the last time I saw her. Was she sick as well? Where is she now? I wondered, the thought slipping through my head barely noticed as it flitted by the baseboards, like a field mouse or garter snake.
The word poison floated in the air, and I could see it there, hovering in my half-consciousness, the calligraphic letters floating over me in bed. As if someone had painted a portrait of me, laying there, and written the word above me.
Poison and danger and worry, such worry. My aunt was there, I was sure of it. I smelled her smell, lavender and rose. But the rose was sickly sweet. Like funerals, like death. “Will she survive?” someone said, someone with my mother’s voice, but very far away.
Poison. Poison. Poison. The word kept dancing around me, taking real shape. First made of lead. Then made of glass. Then drawn in molten gold on the ceiling. In the place of the dancing fever, I was in a room filled with feathers, wallpapered with lizard scales. Filled with terrors.
I felt myself thrashing against my sheets. Trying to escape. Trying to flee. Something. Anything. Everything.
“I’m here,” a voice said. A deep voice. A musky scent. It smelled like passion, like screams of pleasure. The pain of ecstasy. Vasile. It was Vasile again; Vasile was back in my dreams. His words were softer than the doctor’s. Warmer. Steadier. A voice asked him to leave. He said, “Never. Never fucking ever.” His rough hand on my forehead and cheek. The sound of him sobbing, a long kiss made wet with his tears.
Then the feeling that he had fallen asleep. His head was resting beside me on the mattress, the close-cropped hair at the base of his neck tickling the soft flesh of my inner forearm. Wake up, wake up, I whispered, but the delirium ate my words before I could move my mouth to say them right.
Then, a moment later—or was it a year?—he was holding my hand, actually holding it; I was not slipping from his grasp. But now I was getting wiser—I had seen this dream before. I knew what was about to happen.
The loss. The death. The absence. The plunge over the cliff.
The dream place would wrench me away, as always. I couldn’t bear for my heart to die like that, once more. And so from deep down in the quicksilver depths of my soul, I found the strength to let go first.