The Girl on the Glider Read Online Free PDF Page A

night. I kick and twitch and talk in my sleep. Not mumbling. Not whispering. No, I have loud, boisterous and elaborate dream conversations. Sadly, I never remember them. It’s rare that I remember any of my dreams. But I remembered this one. It happened in March. Here we are, months later, and I still remember every detail.
        In the dream, I was sitting out on our deck after dark, smoking a cigar and looking up at the stars twinkling down through the tree limbs. I do this quite a bit in the waking world, so the dream was pleasant enough. Max was sprawled in my lap, and I was petting him with one hand and holding my cigar in the other. My dog, Sam (who was the inspiration for Big Steve in my novel Dark Hollow , as well as many other things), was sprawled at my feet. There was a glass of bourbon on the table in front of me. Crickets and spring peepers were chirping over in the swamp, and in the distance, I could hear the soft, muted roar of the trout stream. Eventually, I became aware that Max and I weren’t alone. I heard the glider rails squeak, as if someone was slowly rocking back and forth. I turned around and there was a girl sitting on the glider. As soon as I saw her, Max jumped down off my lap and ran away, hissing.
        The girl was young, maybe eighteen or nineteen years old. She had long, shoulder length blond hair, combed straight. She was thin but not skinny. Pretty. She wore denim jeans, sneakers and a white t-shirt. She clutched a black cell phone in one hand, and held it at her side, as if waiting for it to ring. When she raised her head and looked at me, her expression was one of profound sadness.
        She said something, but I couldn’t hear her. Her lips moved silently.
        And then I woke up. I lay there for a while, thinking about the dream and wondering what it meant. Did I know the girl? She seemed vaguely familiar, but I didn’t know why. I was left with a sense-a certainty-that I should know her, and yet I didn’t. Who was she? Could she have been a fan I’d met at a book signing, perhaps? Or maybe someone I’d encountered briefly at some point in my life, but had since forgotten-an old coworker or one-night stand?
        I didn’t know, and the harder I thought about it, the more important it seemed.
        Unable to sleep, I slipped out of bed, pissed, and then put on my robe. I went out to my office, made a pot of coffee and worked until five o’clock in the morning, at which point I came in and waited for the baby to wake up. When he did, I got him out of the crib, changed his diaper and made him breakfast. When Cassi finally woke up, she was grateful for the opportunity to sleep in. She asked me what time I’d gotten up, and I told her. Then I told her about the dream. She agreed that it was odd.
        A new day began, but unlike the leaf cyclone or the accident itself, I didn’t forget about the dream. I jotted it down in my commonplace book (a notebook that many authors use to write down story ideas, scraps of dialogue, plot devices, sketches, or anything else that occurs to them when they are away from their writing instruments) with the intent of cannibalizing it for a story at some point in the future. There was something about the dream. Something unsettling. I wanted to capture every detail. I needed to make sure that I would remember her face.
        What I didn’t know at the time was that remembering her face wouldn’t be a problem for me, because I would see her again.
        

ENTRY 10
        
        About two weeks after that, I was sitting out on the deck with Sam and Max. It was early April, and quite a warm evening for the season. Much like in the dream, I was smoking a cigar, drinking bourbon and watching the stars. I even remember what brands the cigar and bourbon were-Partagas 1845 Black Label and Knob Creek with just a little bit of ice. Max was sprawled in my lap, all twenty pounds of him, purring and stretching and acting not at