Now the boy is up and out of the pool. Water is streaming down his legs, dripping on the same pavement where her own small feet once dripped, and she is speaking the exact words that her mother used to say to her: “Don’t run,” she says. “Don’t run. You’ll slip.”
But this is only one afternoon in a certain year. One day in a whole life.
The boy keeps moving forward. He gets older. He grows up. He starts college. He drops out. There are arguments, misunderstandings, forgiveness. He moves away the year Rebecca loses her mother. He moves back the same year her father dies. He quits his job. He becomes an artist. He goes back to school. He gets married. He has a baby of his own and then another.
One evening, Rebecca and her son go out for a walk in his neighborhood at dusk. Rebecca is an old woman now and her boy is a man in middle age.
They’ve had a minor fight, but it is passing now, as they walk.
“You have to let me make my own decisions,” he says.
An odd feeling comes to her—it’s the way he says that, the way he turns toward her when he speaks, his words, almost exactly like something she once said to her own parents a long time ago.
56.
Rebecca wakes in an unfamiliar room. White walls. Fluorescent lights. An IV twisting out from one arm.
In her confusion, she recognizes only one thing through the window: the mission-style bell tower of Santa Lora College. She is back, somehow, in Santa Lora.
A soft beeping is coming from a nearby monitor. She has the sensation that she is not alone in this room. She becomes aware of a soreness in her abdomen. Her fingers find a bandage there.
A door opens—someone walks into the room. A nurse, maybe. She is wearing a yellow plastic suit, this nurse. The suit covers her whole body, even her shoes, like in a movie, thinks Rebecca. The nurse behaves as if Rebecca is not in the room. Instead, she leans over something in the far corner. A crib, Rebecca sees now, a clear plastic crib on casters. Inside the crib, swaddled in a cream-colored blanket with pink trim, a newborn baby lies sleeping in a little pink cap. Rebecca’s first thought is this: Who is that baby?
But now the nurse comes to Rebecca. Now she is saying something through her mask. She is shouting to someone else, someone outside the room.
“She’s awake,” the nurse is saying. She is calling to someone else down the hall. She is pointing at Rebecca. “The mother is awake.”
It is hard to understand what it means. But a panic is rising in her chest.
More people rush in—all wearing those yellow suits.
Already a deep sense of absence is welling in her, a loss: Where is her son? she asks.
But they do not seem to understand what she is saying. “My son,” she says again. “Please ask him to come right away.”
It is hard to talk. It is hard to make herself clear.
But no one is answering her, and a dark thought comes into her mind. “Is he okay?” she whispers, her eyes already filling with tears.
“You had the sickness,” says one of the nurses. “You’ve been unconscious for almost a year.”
Rebecca hears the words but cannot understand them.
“It’s normal to feel confused,” says the nurse.
At some point, Rebecca’s mother walks through the door, just like that, her mother, back from the dead, as if she’s been waiting in that hallway all these years. And not just alive but younger, her mother as she was thirty years ago, in middle age, when Rebecca left for college. Her red hair, her white teeth. She rushes to Rebecca’s bed. “My God,” her mother keeps saying. She takes hold of her hand. “My God.”
And it is good to see her face—that joy, that relief. It feels good to see her mother after so many years moving through the world without her. But it’s frightening, too, a visitation from the dead.
“Where’s my son?” Rebecca asks her.
But her mother does not seem to understand the question. “I don’t know what you mean,” says her mother. “You’ve had a baby girl,” she says. “Look.”
“Did something happen to my son?” Rebecca says again, a sob growing in her throat.
There is fear now on her mother’s face. Her eyes flash back at the nurses.
“The doctor,” says her mother. “She says that you might have had some strange dreams.”
57.
For years after Rebecca wakes, acquaintances will comment that she has a sense of wisdom beyond what is common in someone so young. Left unsaid, perhaps, a certain tiredness, too.
It takes her months to believe that she is a girl of nineteen and not a woman many decades into life. How uncanny, it seems to her, that the baby girl on her lap is hers.
And her son: his absence informs every moment of her life. No one can understand it—how she could cling so tightly to a dream. But for her, her son is a truth as certain as anything else: she knew him for forty years. Sometimes, for a moment, she is sure that she sees him on the street. The sound of his voice, the shape of his face—these are as crisp and as dear to her as her daughter’s small fingers, her round cheeks.
There is no grief like the grief for one’s child.
Rebecca’s doctors find the intricacy of her delusion uncanny; whole decades persist in her mind, a whole life. Her symptoms align with several known psychiatric disorders: the delusion that her baby is not her baby, that her body is not her body, a difficulty distinguishing between reality and dream.
A generalized murkiness also remains. A certain slowness of thought, a confusion in her memories.
“Isn’t that to be expected,” says her mother, “after so long unconscious?”
Although her mother caught it, too, and her father, her brothers, none slept as long as Rebecca or recall such realistic dreams. The specialists still cannot explain much about the nature of the sickness, or about what it might have done to her brain.
The main thing, say her parents, is to be grateful. Think of the others. Think of the dead. “Give thanks in all circumstances,” that’s what her father says. “For this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.”
She does not keep in touch with anyone from those days, not even Caleb. How expert we are at looking away from what we would rather not see.
Unmarried with a child—she never would have predicted that it would happen this way or that there would be so little judgment from her parents. If they had any objection, she does not recall it. A gift from God, they say. This girl, your girl, is a gift. No matter how she got here. They leave it at that. They do not ask. And the exact circumstances of her making—so scandalous in her mind that she would have thought it would break the family apart—have drifted away from her thoughts.
But a sensation persists: that pieces are missing. The brain is a mystery, say her doctors, and it takes time to heal. It will get easier—that’s what her mother says. We’ve come through something terrible, she says, but we’ve come through.
Certain thoughts Rebecca keeps to herself, like how can anyone say for sure that the other life was the dream, and not this one? By what instrument can she ascertain that these moments right here—with her girl on her lap, looking up so sweetly, those cheeks, her first tooth—are not part of a strange and pleasant dream she is dreaming in old age?
But some things are simple: She holds her baby girl just like she once, long ago, held her son. She sings her the same songs she sang to him. She loves her with that same madness. Or with more, maybe, her love suffused, this time, with the loss of the other one.