I wake up kicking and sweating. Rowan is standing next to my bed saying my name.
I stare at her. It takes me a second to remember where I am. “Oh,” I say, breathing hard. “Hey.”
“Are you okay?”
I swallow, my throat totally dry, and then nod. “Yeah. Bad dream.”
“Oh,” she says. “Well, you were kind of moaning, or crying or something.” She goes back to her bed and sits on the edge of it, facing me.
“I was?” My brain is a cotton ball.
She nods in the dark. “You kept saying, ‘Listen to me!’”
I unwind my leg from the bedsheet. “Huh.” The nightmare is already starting to fade and the jagged pieces of it aren’t fitting together anymore. “Did I say anything else?”
“Nothing that I could figure out. Are you still sick?”
I continue to untangle myself from my blankets and ponder the question. When I think about going to school, about seeing Sawyer, about the vision everywhere, my stomach churns and I feel like throwing up. “Yeah,” I decide. “I’m still sick.”
• • •
It’s light in the room when I wake again, and I feel refreshed, like I’ve slept a hundred years. Rowan is gone, the house is quiet, and the first doughy smells of the day are wafting up from below. I sit up and check the clock. It’s almost eleven, and I’m starving. My head feels . . . I don’t know. Less heavy or something. I can’t really identify the feeling, but it’s a kind of restlessness. Like my feet are tired of being in this bed. My legs won’t stay still.
I get up and stretch, testing my muscles, and tentatively think about the vision, bracing myself for that overwhelming fear to take over, but it doesn’t. The fear is still there, all right, but it’s . . . I don’t know. More manageable. Softer, maybe. The vision appears on the window, as it has been doing lately, but today it is less in-your-face. It stays in the background, and I can actually think around it. I don’t even know if that makes sense, but that’s how it feels.
I pad softly to the kitchen and toast a bagel in the quiet. It’s so strange to be the only one up here. So nice. I take my breakfast to the chair in the living room and tuck my toes up under my nightgown. I sit there and soak in the sounds of the street below—a garbage truck, an occasional honk of a horn, an exuberant Italian greeting a friend now and then.
I think about the snowplow again and close my eyes to ward off the panic, but the panic doesn’t come, only a controllable fear, one that I can handle. I marvel at myself, wondering where the calm came from. Maybe it was the twelve hours of sleep, or crying it out with Trey last night, or the nightmare working something out for me in my subconscious, like Mr. Polselli talked about once in a section on dreams. But as I sit here, I think maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s coming from the same source that brought me this vision in the first place. Maybe it’s telling me that it’s not quite as futile as it seems, and it’s trying to give me directions now and then if I would only listen.
I think about that for a long time.
• • •
Later, I take a rare long shower. With one bathroom for five people, there’s hardly ever enough time or hot water for something so luxurious. But today I stand here, eyes closed, letting the water beat down and the steam float over my skin and into my lungs. I wash my body, scrub the grease out of my hair, and smooth conditioner through it. At one point, thinking about the conversation yesterday with Trey, about how he and Dad thought I was pregnant, I just shake my head and almost laugh.
But then my mind wanders to Sawyer. To sixth grade, and to my Sawyer pillow, and my dreams of kissing him. The water burrows down on my lips, my neck. My collarbone. I turn my hips slowly side to side, and suddenly I can feel every thread of water moving over my skin, making it come alive.
I don’t really understand why a shower feels so good sometimes, and other times it’s just a shower, but I guess I needed it to feel good today, and it does. I let out a heavy sigh, and my fingers, down at my sides, travel lightly against the current, up my thighs and over my hips, my stomach, to my breasts, and back down. When the water starts to turn cool, urgent heat keeps me warm from the inside. My head bows, streams of water pouring off my hair. I squeeze my knees shut, hands clenched between my thighs, and I just crouch there, feeling so much life and love and risk and terror pulsing around me, inside me, that I don’t know what to do with the overwhelming all-ness of it.
A painful longing takes over my skin and bones, and I move to let the water splash on my face and chest once again. It exhilarates me more and more the colder it grows, until it’s shocking enough to halt and restart my breath a dozen times, and I’m almost too cold to turn it off.
I think it shocked me into reality or something. I stand in the tub for a minute, dripping, not shivering, my cold skin glowing from the adrenaline and utter grief inside. I think about how weird it is that loving someone just makes everything hurt so much more. But I guess it’s that pain that means you’re alive, and love and pain are so . . . so twisty. I wonder if love would feel as good if there wasn’t any pain. I don’t think it could. So I guess that’s kind of what makes life worth living.
It’s so bizarre, but I feel like I grew up in this one moment.
Before my heart rate slows and my skin is dry, everything becomes so clear to me. And despite the grimness of my task, I can’t believe I’ve let so much stand in the way of this thing I have been mysteriously tasked to do.