Page 78 of A Theory of Dreaming
Dr. Quinbern’s stare was unconvinced. “Are you certain?”
Preston nodded. His vision was starting to grow cloudy, though he felt no instinct to cry. “Can I see her?”
Quinbern tilted his head in a very sympathetic way. “Yes, son. Of course. But I expect you’d like to let her parents know. You shouldn’t be left to manage this alone. There’s a phone at the nurse’s station.”
Effy lay against a bastion of pillows in a half-upright position that was too awkward and stiff to appear at all peaceful. It did not help that there were wires crisscrossing her unmoving body, one to the IV in her wrist, and the other to the oxygen plugs in her nose. Preston recognized both—recognized everything, almost—from when he had visited his father in the hospital after the accident. There was the noxious smell of cleaning solution, the low but insistentbeeping of machines, the rumpled hospital gown, and most of all the complete and utter stillness, as if the room were cast in a layer of unmelting ice.
Preston approached her, his heart thrumming like the beat of blood behind a bruise. He sat in the chair that had been pulled to her bedside, close enough that he could reach out and touch her easily—if he dared. The tips of her fingers, minus that missing fourth one on her left hand, were blue, as if frostbitten. Her lips were chapped and white.
He tried to remember the last time he had kissed her there; he even lifted a finger to his own mouth, as if he could recall it through touch alone. But all the memories that came were distant, fuzzy, and vaguely unreal, just as the memories of his father had been. When was the last time he had been checkmated in chess? When was the last time he had seen his father smoke a pipe over the morning newspaper? When had he last pointed out one of the rabbits on their lawn?
Preston lowered his head into his hands. The beeping of the machines reasserted itself, to the point that he could hear nothing else. Not even the bells.
He couldn’t have begun trying to estimate how much time he spent there, hunched over in the chair. His watch was filled with water and its hands had not turned in weeks. There was no clock on the wall. Even when he closed his eyes, the white lights burned through his lids, and every breath that came up his throat felt like a scraping rasp. It was all too much and too close and the naked reality was too painful to bear.
Effy breathed, but only barely. Her chest hardly rose and fell. This state she existed in was deeper than sleep and too far gone for dreams.
Hours must have passed in this manner, because the next time Preston raised his head, it was to a knock on the door. Blearily, he tried to peer through the window, but the shape on the other side was muddled in the frosted glass. The door opened anyway.
And then there she stood in the threshold, slim and silver-haired. She wore an unshowy overcoat of gray and had her face half-hidden beneath a beret, though it could not truly disguise her, at least not to his eyes. She pulled off the hat and held it in her hands.
“I’m sorry,” Preston managed, in scarcely more than a whisper. “I didn’t know who else to call.”
“Don’t be sorry for anything,” Angharad said.
She approached him, and Preston grew suddenly still, tense in his chair. As seemed to happen so often lately, words failed him. He just let Angharad wrap her arms around his shoulders and stroke back his hair as if he were a little boy again.
Twenty-Seven
There is only so much any mind can endure before it must reject reality. Before it must reject wisdom and reason. I have always found my fragments of freedom in fantasy. It has served me better than any shield or sword, and certainly better than any of the laws of men. I have lived and died by quill and ink. And how could I ever begrudge myself this? Even moths and cormorants are thought by the naturalists to dream.
—from the diaries of Angharad Myrddin, 207 AD
“You don’t have to tell me everything,” Angharad said. “If it helps, we don’t even have to speak.”
She had pulled over a second chair to the other side of Effy’s bed and was leaning forward, hands resting just on the edge of the mattress. Still nearer to Effy than Preston dared. She had taken off her wool coat and draped it over the back of the chair, and her white silk blouse shimmered under the relentlessly bright lights.
At first Preston let the silence go on, not because it helped but because he could think of nothing that was not too painful to say. Several moments passed before he lifted his head and said hoarsely, “It was my fault. I left—I shouldn’t have left her alone.”
“Don’t say that,” Angharad replied in a sharp voice. “Don’t think that. I’m sure you did all that you could.”
But wasn’t that worse, Preston thought to himself, to have done everything and have it still not be enough? He recalled her mother’s words with a sickly feeling in his stomach.
Just because you love her doesn’t mean you can help her. It doesn’t mean you can save her.
He looked over the bed at Angharad, letting his gaze run over her scrutinously. Even in her trendy blouse, tucked into pleated slacks, even with her cropped hair, ending in a glossy bob just below her chin, there was something irrepressibly ethereal about her.
It was not her beauty alone—those wide-set green eyes that shone out of her almost agelessly pale face, her pearl-like complexion, which was hardly wrinkled at even more than sixty—but something intangible, something Preston could not name or describe. It was as if she had not traveled here by train or by car but rather had stepped out straight from the realm of the Fair Folk, materializing within a mushroom circle or a dew-brightened field. As if she did not belong in the real world nearly as much as she belonged in that proverbial castle in the air.
I had not known that the seam of the world was not between the living and the dead, but rather between the real and the unknown.
He could ask her, he realized. About that entry in her diary. About the bells. About the dreams. She was probably better equipped than anyone else to answer his burning questions. But Preston could not make himself speak. Not when Effy lay between them, trapped precisely in that murky seam between the living and the dead.
“You must be exhausted,” Angharad said at last, when it was clear Preston was not going to answer. Her tone was low and gentle now. “I’ll stay with her, if you’d like to get some sleep.”
Exhaustion lay upon him like a heavy cloak. His eyelids felt as if they were weighted with lead. Hewastired, but he was afraid of sleeping. Afraid of losing his already tenuous grip on the real world completely. He looked back at Effy again, her skin washed as pale as ice under the blinding hospital lights. He waited, as if he could wake her just by staring. Just by wanting.
Each moment that passed in which she did not wake was more agonizing than the last. He couldn’t bear it. In halting, painful motions, Preston rose from his seat.
