Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books) Read Online Free PDF Page B

thought was to bring it into being, shook through her with the sensation of a silent explosion. She was conscious of being without form in the sense that this man at the window had form, although she felt physically housed in some minimal way. Her senses functioned well enough. She heard voices, shouting, and clattering footsteps.
    She was at the window herself now, right beside him, not daring to turn her head for fear of seeing his face.
    Down below the crowd moved along Sixth Avenue. She saw rapid shifts and the bob of colorful bits of clothing. It wasn’t exactly Sixth Avenue because the buildings were of stone and not very large, and there was a hollow sound of wooden shoes on cobbles. In the middle of this thoroughfare, which seemed to have no sidewalks, some sort of clumsy cart was stuck while traffic honked around it.
    Behind her a voice — a young voice, the voice of her daughter Claire — said scornfully, “You have already fallen.”
    The one beside her, whose confusion of anger and hurt she sensed as if it were her own, stirred, about to turn. His dark sleeve brushed her somewhere as if on the bare skin of her elbow.
    Tearing herself free in a panic, she fled into the sky, struggling to fly higher, faster, to soar free, but feeling the her strength fade.
    She woke drenched and panting. Her nightgown clung coldly to her back as she sat up and groped shakily for the bedside lamp-switch.
    Safe in light, she sat hugging her knees and trying to calm her heart. She went over and over the dream in her mind, tasting each time a more faded echo of the terror, a more tolerable fear. She was too old to start upright in a sweat of horror in her bed at three in the morning!
    What, after all, was she so afraid of in the dream? An ugly face? Something scarred, modeled on news photos glimpsed before she could get the page safely turned?
    And what in the world was Claire doing in her dream? After today’s conversation she could have understood an appearance by George, come to badger her even in her sleep, but Claire? Hadn’t spoken to her in weeks.
    Never mind, it’s only a dream, remember? Claire is firmly embedded in her own life, her own dreams, and here you sit safe in your own home, your dogs snoozing in the kitchen, your old friend asleep in the guest room.
    On the other hand, best, maybe, not to try to go back to sleep at once. She got up, threw on her robe, and wrote down the details she could remember from the dream.
    Only that morning Ricky had asked her, oh so diffidently, whether she would consider letting him look over some of her dream-notes on the off chance that he might be able to help. An outsider with a fresh viewpoint might be able to shed light on what was happening to her.
    She was touched that he had offered her his time this way, his most precious possession: to throw it away on her nightmares seemed an act of generosity bordering on profligate madness. Why in the world should she allow him to involve himself in this?
    Well, because he had asked, of course, and because without asking he had in a way already involved himself. Now and again, since that first night when he had been summoned to her bedroom by her outcries in French, he would keep a vigil by her bed at night. Nothing formal, nothing acknowledged openly by either of them; but she had wakened several times now to find him sitting on the big blanket-chest by the window, just sitting in the dark, breathing softly, sometimes rubbing nervously at the nape of his neck, with a faint dry sound of skin on skin.
    To avoid embarrassing him or herself she had said nothing and given no sign of having noticed. But she was moved by his watchfulness, and his silent companionship made it easier for her to get back to sleep.
    Now, casting over the accumulation of her night-time scribbles, she felt embarrassed and foolish to have agreed to let him read her notes. And a little bit afraid.
    One thing was clear. It was always, in its essentials at any rate, the