Dreaming in Words

by Hillary G. Anderson

 She does not know I am here.

 Draped in mourning clothes, Kate wanders the graveyard. She pauses to lay a gloved hand on a child’s tombstone and tilts her head back to stare up at an angel monument, its sightless stone eyes ever watchful. The heartless, cold form leans slightly over the grave, arms stretched wide but curving inward in an attitude of protection. Strange how people set lifeless rock as guardians over lifeless bodies—remnants no longer in need of guardianship.

 Kate sighs, her breath stirring the black lace of her veil. She moves on, her steps delicate and careful across the grass. Here and there she stops to read an epitaph or rest her sheathed fingertips on a headstone, and stoops to rearrange flowers tossed by the careless wind. A dark and lovely sight she is; a shadow with substance in a landscape full of shades without form.

 Bodiless, they are here. Sightless, they are watching.

 The child whose grave she first visited trips happily along behind her, treading on her skirt. Yet his feet cause no damage to the silk, and Kate doesn’t hear his laughter on the breeze. An old woman bows to her as Kate crouches down to pull away a patch of moss on a tombstone. A man tips his hat as she passes by. She doesn’t know they’re here.

 Her steps slow as she approaches the cliff where the grave she means to visit lies. The child stops following her and scurries back to his stone angel, disappearing into its arms. The others dissipate with a shimmer, like the air on hot days long past. Kate is alone, and the closer she comes to me, the more ferocious the wind grows, carrying the salty chill of the ocean up from below. It whips her dress tightly around a body I once knew so well, and rips at the veil covering a face I can never forget.

 A gentle rain begins to fall and she stumbles to her knees as drops patter against the tombstone. She is not careful to avoid treading on this grave, like she was with the others. With a longing familiarity, Kate lies atop it and clutches at the grass as one would clutch at a lover’s shirt to hold him close, to keep him from leaving. She strips off her gloves and reaches out with bare fingers to caress the words carved in stone, stroking the name with tender desperation. She whispers fiercely through her tears, “Do not leave me.”  

 I cannot leave.

 Without eyes, I see her face. Without ears, I hear her cries. Her love holds me here, and I am a prisoner sentenced to witness her die slowly, day by day, as she comes to this place to be with me, though I no longer exist in her world.

Saturday, August 23, 2014. I wasn’t feeling well that night. I was up until just past 1:00 am when I finally gave in and took prescription pain medication. At 3:20 am on Sunday, August 24, deep in drug-induced sleep, I was stirred into half consciousness by a rumbling I thought must be thunder.

But there’s never thunder in Napa.

The thought hadn’t even fully formed before my bed pitched forward, snapping me upright. I couldn’t figure out what was happening with the bed; it was bucking like a horse, at times completely airborne and hovering above the carpet. It didn’t occur to me until a good three seconds later that it was an earthquake.

I have to crawl under my desk, I thought, recalling years of earthquake education and drills Californians are subjected to. But it was immediately obvious that I wasn’t going to be moving anywhere but where the earth wanted to take me. I could barely stay seated in bed much less try to get across the room to my desk. Besides, it sounded like my desk was about to fall over on me. I stayed where I was, clutching the blankets on either side of me. I was too shocked to scream. All I could do was hold on and wait for it stop.

I heard my neighbor screaming, car alarms wailing all up and down the street. In the dark, things were crashing around the room. The power flickered and died; the fan I had running to stave off the heat of the summer night cut off, and the streetlights went out, plunging me into total blackness.

The shaking stopped. My neighbor was still screaming, but not as urgently. My heart beat in my throat. I couldn’t see anything. Not a sliver of light streamed through the part in my bedroom curtains. Before I could even move I heard my dad at the bottom of the stairs calling up to me, asking if I was all right. My breath shaking, I managed to answer, “Yes. I’m scared, but I’m okay.”

I didn’t hear him on the stairs. He’d probably already rushed away to turn off the gas line and start checking on our neighbors and the house. I slowly climbed out of bed on shaky legs, trying to make sure I didn’t step on or trip over anything. It was so incredibly dark. I couldn’t find my glasses or my flashlight. Both had been on the nightstand by my bed. They must have gone flying somewhere across the room. The only coherent thought I had was “find a flashlight.”

In my stupor, I stumbled across the room, through the hallway, down the stairs and into the kitchen, where I knew a flashlight was stuck to the fridge with a magnetic strip. I was incredibly lucky I didn’t get hurt during my idiotic journey. In the dark, I could’ve easily tripped over something and broken my neck. As it was, I stepped into the kitchen and onto broken glass. Again, I was lucky. Though barefoot, I wasn’t wounded. I thank my tough ugly feet for that.

I clicked on the flashlight and pointed it at the floor. Water glasses had been launched out of one of the kitchen cupboards and shattered all over. Mom came in the kitchen and said Dad had, indeed, run outside to turn off the gas and check on the neighbors. We were both uninjured but terrified. I suddenly realized I hadn’t seen or heard the cats. Flashlight in hand, I ventured back upstairs to search for them and my glasses. Though my vision was blurry, I saw that, miraculously, none of the pictures lining the stairway walls had fallen and the big bookcase in the hallway was upright. Books and a framed photo of my niece and nephew had flown off the shelves. The glass in the frame was broken but not littering the carpet.

In my bedroom, once again I was in awe that more things hadn’t fallen. The quake was so violent, how did the window not shatter and the air conditioning unit fall on the roof? How was the TV still on the table, my dresser and desk still in position? Later we realized it was the direction of the shaking that had kept more things from falling. Files and boxes lining my closet shelves had crashed to the floor, but other than my bedside lamp, that was about it in my room.

I rummaged around and found my glasses and flashlight on the floor. I started calling for the cats and looking under the bed. Downstairs, Mom called that she’d found Piggy under the couch and Eve was under her bed. But we couldn’t find Kuma. We walked around the house calling for him. Later I found him hiding under my bed, so tightly squished into one corner I hadn’t seen him before. He was uninjured, but refused to move. I had to pull him out and put him and the others in their carriers and set the carriers near the front door in case we had to leave the house.

Dad returned and said the neighbors were okay, just scared, and as far as he could tell the house didn’t seem to have any major damage visible from the outside. Mom swept up the glass in the kitchen. The TV in the playroom/den had flown off the shelf, yanking the cable out of its socket. We righted the TV, which somehow was not broken, and scouted the house for significant damage. We found nothing besides a few fallen and broken items. Since it didn’t appear we were going to have to evacuate, Mom and Dad went back to bed but I was too shaken—literally and figuratively—to sleep.

I kept the cats in their carriers to keep them calm and contained and put them in the upstairs bathroom. But there was no way I was going back into my room to try to rest. Shaking on upper floors is always more violent than ground floors, and I didn’t want to feel any aftershocks up there. I settled on the couch in the living room and tried to close my eyes. I did feel one aftershock: a quick, violent jolt that only lasted a second. As soon as there was light outside, I went out to look at the house and around the neighborhood. I couldn’t see any visible damage anywhere. Everything looked normal.

The power came back on later, but it ran at lower voltage than normal all day and flickered off and on occasionally. At first we couldn’t get any channels on the TV, but eventually a few local stations came in. The earthquake was all over the news. We were hoping it wasn’t too bad, given that our house was relatively unscathed. We were wrong. Much of west Napa and downtown had been heavily damaged. There were no fatalities but lots of injuries, although most were minor. Everyone kept saying how lucky we were that the quake hit in the middle of the night when people weren’t roaming the streets. If the quake had hit at any other time, rubble falling from buildings would have killed people. Flying broken glass would have acted as shrapnel.

The next day I ventured downtown with my camera. I was shocked. Businesses and houses were destroyed. Churches were damaged. Historic buildings like the downtown post office were in shambles. It was insane. Everywhere people were working to clean and stabilize and repair, and many were wandering the streets like me, eyes wide and teary. I didn’t expect to have such an emotional response, but this was my hometown. Seeing the center of it so damaged hurt my heart. I knew we would recover, but the wounds were deep. It would take time.

Tulips in the snow. White petals on white powder, the shadow of clouds softening and dimming everything. A gravestone looming.

You would have been 39 years old today. So close to 40, I might’ve teased you about being over the hill, but immediately withdrawn the remark and commented on how smooth your skin was and how jealous I was of your hair, its dark locks completely free of gray. And I am two years younger. You’d have laughed and teased me right back, saying I wasn’t far behind being over the hill myself, then said you couldn’t even see the gray strands in my hair without a magnifying glass and my skin was better.

“You always made me laugh,” I murmur, my breath clouding the clear December air.

“So did you.” I almost hear her voice, the underlying humor a gentle cadence, and picture her standing next to the headstone, trailing her fingers over the granite.

“I miss you, Angela,” I say to the tulips.

“I miss you, Maggie,” the blooms seem to answer back in her voice.

I shiver and blink, willing tears away. They’d freeze in seconds, leaving salty diamond trails on my cheeks. I’ll cry later.

“Don’t cry for me,” she says, her humorous tone stiffening. “I don’t want you to.”

“I know,” I answer, laughing softly. “If you were here you’d punch me in the arm and tell me to remember you and smile, and go on with my life.”

“I wouldn’t punch you….Well, not too hard.” I hear her smile and it brightens the air. Sun peeks out from the clouds and the snow sparkles.

I laugh louder this time, and the moisture in my eyes spills over, but in mirth. “You still make me laugh,” I say.

“Excuse me?”

The man’s voice startles me and I jump to my feet, not even aware that I’d kneeled down. Melted snow has seeped through my trench coat into my knees of my jeans.

The man raises his hands for a moment and steps back. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. I heard someone laughing, and…well, that’s not something you usually hear in a cemetery.”

He’s average in appearance, though rather tall. Dressed in a gray suit and black trench coat. Brown hair shot through with just a little silver. Dark, gentle, sad eyes. But we’re in a graveyard. Of course he’s sad. I should be, too. “I’m…I’m sorry if I disturbed you,” I say.

“No, no, don’t worry, you didn’t,” he reassures me with a little smile. It makes the skin around his eyes crinkle like crepe paper. I like it. “It was surprising and refreshing to hear laughter in a place like this.” He looks around. “They don’t want us to be sad, you know.”

I nod and smile back. “I know.”

He looks at Angela’s headstone and his smile fades. It hurts to lose that brightness. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he says. “A family member? Sister, maybe?”

I start to shake my head but stop. “She was like family. Like a sister. She was my best friend for 15 years. She…she died in a car accident.” I clear my throat. “Can I ask who you’re visiting?”

He points to a spot a few rows behind us. “My brother. He died of cancer two years ago today.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugs and bows his head. I understand. Sometimes there’s just nothing you can say.

“She was young.” He nods at Angela’s stone. “It’s harder when someone dies young, I think. It doesn’t seem fair, to take life away from someone who hasn’t had many years to live it.”

I have to bite my lip to keep a sob from escaping. “Yeah. She didn’t have much time, but she did a lot with the time she had. Angela,” I pause when my voice breaks on her name. “Angela was the most optimistic person I’ve ever known. She was always there for me. Cheering me on, comforting me when I needed it, and gently but firmly prodding me on when I needed a good kick in the butt.” I laugh in spite of our surroundings because it’s so true, so accurate, I can see Angela standing by her headstone, lips firm but eyes kind as she shakes her finger at me.

His smile returns and my heart lifts. “It sounds like she was a very special person.”

“She was. She is.”

“And she obviously saw something very special in you.”

I turn my face away and blush. I can’t even quite say why.

“Why tulips?” he asks, and I turn back.

“What?”

He crouches down and picks up one of the flowers. “Usually you see roses or carnations out here. So why tulips?” As he stands back up he hands the flower to me. Our gloved fingertips barely brush during the exchange, but my heart skips.

“They were her favorite,” I say, focusing on the flower instead of him. If I looked at him right now I don’t think I could form a coherent sentence. My face feels too warm in the chilly air, and what I’m about to say makes it worse. “She loved them, not just because they’re pretty, but because of their name. It…it sounds like ‘two lips.’” I point to my mouth. “And she said two lips have the power to change your world, with words, with song…with a kiss.”

I clear my throat and place the tulip back in the snow with the others. Take a breath and look at him. The breath stills in my throat. He’s smiling again, but not like before. More pure, less tinged with sorrow.

“Can I show you something?” He points towards his brother’s grave. I nod and we walk together, side-by-side, through the snow. When we reach the headstone I take in the name—Mark Johnson—and the dates and epitaph. Then I look at the ground and gasp.

Tulips. Yellow and white and red tulips, gathered neatly and resting softly against the stone.

“They were his favorite, too.” He holds out his hand to me. “I’m Michael.”

I take his hand. It’s not a handshake. We simply hold onto each other. “Maggie.”

Michael smiles and it’s his brightest yet. “Maggie, would you like to get some coffee?”

My smile is an automatic response to his. “I would like that.”