"She knows all about me, and then some," I said. "She probably knows what I had for lunch."
"You're in Grace," he said.
"Well, I was embarrassed because I couldn't remember her. She wasn't very helpful. She just stood there waiting for me to rack my brain and come up with her name. She sure knew me right off the bat."
Doc Homer didn't care for expressions like "right off the bat." He switched off the red light before opening the darkroom door, passing us through a moment of absolute darkness. He knew, but refused to accept, that I was afraid of the dark. The click and blackness plunged me into panic and I grabbed his upper arm. Surprisingly, he touched my knuckles lightly with his fingertips.
"You're in Grace," he said again, as if nothing had happened. "There is only one of you for all these people to be watching for. And so many of them for you."
I'd lived all my life with a recurring nightmare. It would come to me in that drowsy twilight where sleep pulls on your mind with tempting music but is still preventable. When I let down my guard the dream would spring again, sending me back into weeks of insomnia. It had to do with losing my eyesight. It wasn't a complicated dream, like a movie, but a single, paralyzing freeze frame: there's a shattering pop, like glass breaking, and then I am blind.
Once, years ago on Crete, Carlo and I were driving on a badly rutted gravel road to get to a beach on the south of the island. A truck loaded with blood oranges kicked up a rock that broke the windshield in front of my face. I wasn't hurt, the rock only pocked the glass and spun out a spiderweb of cracks, but I spent the rest of the day in mute hysteria. Carlo never did know what was wrong. Any explanation I could think of sounded like superstition. My dream was very much more than a dream. It had so much living weight to it, such prescience, it felt like something that was someday bound to happen.
The insomnia, on the other hand, wasn't such a big problem as you might imagine. I worked around it. I read a lot. In med school I did my best studying while my classmates were in the throes of rapid eye movement. I still considered my night-prowling habits to be a kind of secret advantage I had over other people. I had the extra hours in my day that they were always wishing for.
Emelina would not understand this. The night before school started, she brought me warm milk.
"Don't worry about it," I said. She'd also brought out a blue embroidered tablecloth, which she shook out like a little sail and spread efficiently over my table. She felt the place needed more honey touches.
"You've got to have your sleep. They had a special on Nova about it. This man in Italy died from not sleeping for around eight months. Before he died he went crazy. He'd salute the doctors like he was in the army."
"Em, I'll live. That's too pretty, that tablecloth. Don't you need that?"
"Are you kidding? Since Grammy joined Stitch and Bitch she's been embroidering borders on the dish rags. What happens if you just lie in bed and count backward from ninety-nine? That's what I tell the boys to do when they can't settle down."
"Insomnia's different," I said. It was hard to explain this to people. "You know the light that comes on when you open the refrigerator door? Just imagine it stays on all the time, even after you close the door. That's what it's like in my head. The light stays on."
Emelina made herself comfortable in my other living-room chair. "You're like that Thoreau guy that lived at Walden Pond. Remember when we read that in Senior English? He only had two chairs. We need to get you some more stuff in here."
I was surprised that Henry Thoreau entered into Emelina's world view. "If I want company I can always go over to your house," I pointed out.
"That's the God's truth. I'm about ready to move out. Tonight Glen and Grammy got into it, oh boy, she says he's impudent. That's her all-time favorite word. Whenever Mason gets mad at somebody he yells 'You're impotent!' And people laugh, so we'll never get him to stop now."
I drank the milk. I could stand some mothering. I wondered if I'd had this in the back of my mind when I moved in here.
Emelina scrutinized my clean, white walls. "Codi, I hope you'll take this the right way, but I don't see how you can live in a place and have it feel like nobody lives there."
"I have things in here. My clothes, look in the closet. And books. Some of those books are very personal." This was true. Besides my Field Guide to the Invertebrates there were things Hallie had sent me over the years, and an old volume of American poetry-incomprehensibly, a graduation gift from Doc Homer.