Mary

I know now that I have always dreaded that name. Mary, an embalmed name, like a brooding English queen or a dour old maid who corrals the schoolchildren in the courtyard. Or Mary, disgusting white trash: Appalachian royalty, Camel Crush and baby bump. It is an evil name, a darkly silent sprawl for thousands of acres. Mary, so tall in her class portrait, posed in her overalls so neat and clean and unfairly infringed by the seam of the page. Mother to none, sister of my own, forever young in these mismatched shoeboxes.

In my own twilight, I work silently now, whenever the occasion arises, fumbling through the sparse surviving prints that I’ve spirited away over the years only when I’ve convinced myself of the need to revisit her, but I could never shake my reputation in its entirety. Even after all this time, my phone will ring with an anecdote, a neat story from way-back-when or, more often than not, a long, unwinding excuse for somebody else to reminisce importantly for hours on the horn. I stopped placing calls a long time ago; I will settle for flirtation, the dreamy scent of excitement. I am too weak to shut it down completely, too cautious to bloody my hands further. This obsession is a nagging burden. It is a small shed in the garden, adrift with birdsong and cherubic guidestones. I am walking in this garden and I am a stranger, and I am afraid in an ugly pit of my stomach. These dazed memories are yellowed with the same tar on the photographs in the Frank Sibbica shoebox, and in walks they are brightly unnatural.

“Mary was a tomboy,” passengers would always say. Some I never felt as though I had to chase for an answer. They’d smell like coffee when we sat facing each other late at night; others abandoned their reservations at the lull of chardonnay. “Mary loved our dog”. “Mary always wore a crown when we played on the street.” I look back on these talks and for a moment I am filled with shame, then sadness. No friendly visits. And once I have passed it onto you, visits turn to extended stays and pretenses fade completely, and a silent part of myself is tied down in meek complicity. I am always surprised by the ease with which we close our eyes and tell a lie. But our talks did not begin like this, and at first, I am left only with a muted impression of a girl, her dolls, and her crown, and a house that cries out for blood, red and warm.

As long as I have engrossed myself into this tale over these winding years, I must look back to its origin. There was a dream -- a weighted, sweaty nightmare -- and a garden. Quaint and clean, with an air of summertime. I look down and I see a path of stony steps throughout the grass. But to my side, at once far and near in the haze of my dream, there is an awful stump. A wicked, vulgar tree stump that reeks of marvelous malignance. Would that I awoke here, that this could be cast aside like all other dreams, that this shapeless droning should cease. Unnaturally, my legs lead me closer and I am pushed onto my knees; there is a violent tug on my hair and my hands feebly grab the harsh bark for respite. It is when I look down and see not rings but an inky black well, an endless cauldron into the stillborn heart of midnight, that I feel a great pressure on my chest bleeding onto my mind’s self from the waking world and a deadening chill breathes onto my tender neck. Mary. I am awake, and my bare back has pruned with sweat. I did not so much hear her name as I did know it, and in knowing it, I came to know that I had known it all along.

I see the demarcation so clearly, a distinct then and now. Mary the name, Mary the specter. Mary, Mother’s sister. Why had I dreamed her name? I survive a quiet solitaire, and this old man does not dream. But when I first heard it, when I first opened my eyes into a world beyond ours, here in the nadir of my own life, when I first violently thrashed ashore this new world, far from my responsibilities, I did not cry as newborns do. I dressed myself maturely into a deep denim blue and settled behind the wheel and onto my mother’s patio on the turn of a weekend in May. I’d last seen her long auburn hair behind the glow of fireworks; she’d cut it to her shoulders now. My mother was clutching her school’s mug between chipped fingertips when she opened the screen door.

The stale air is cloudy inside, and she is positively neutral at my sight. I fixate on her sleepless eyes and she ushers me outside past the sound of a frightening movie at mid-day. She has done little in between the weeks between my phone call and the knock at the door.

She is pleasant, always, but passively: she has long since abandoned my dreams for which she’d once cast aside her own. “You look well,” she remarks intermittently with the tapping of a cigarette into her cup. I ask whether she remembers Mary. Did we talk about anything else? I would not think I’d recall. I remember asking evasively, avoiding her eyes, looking anywhere else and feeling embarrassed. My radiator dripped onto her curb.

From lips wrinkled not with laughter she laughed weakly, and I couldn’t tell why. “I’d just been thinking about old Mary, too.”

I blinked. “How old had I been?”

“You couldn’t even read yet,” My mother liked to point when she talked. “It was your first funeral.”

Aunt Mary, babysitter Mary. Mary, with her red house, green grass . . . and her garden. All her colors burned brightly. “She used to watch me,” I said sheepishly.

“Only when I had to work. But I always had to work back then,” she reminded me, crossing her legs and sinking down into the cushion. She takes a long drag, thinking, proceeding cautiously. Her words bounced off the wood paneling and swirled between my ears. Now she has ashed and is starting to speak of work. I must be visibly disappointed that she cannot look into my head and see my nightmares as she could do so many, many years ago, when she would pluck them from my recesses to dangle them overhead. I feel as much, anyway. It is only when I hear her say crown that I catch myself awake.

“There’s a crown on her head,” I say to myself.

“Yes, there was. I don’t remember when she stopped wearing it. Now, we’d probably call her better than different, but back then, that’s all we knew. Maybe stick her into a home, or something.”

“No, no, I remember it differently. She wore a crown. I remember that much. I couldn’t remember it then, but now that I’m hearing you say it, I can see it, plain as day.”

“Well, go figure.”

I continue. “Yes, she wore a crown, some misshapen, wooden thing. I suppose then I took it for what it was, being so young and everything.”

“Oh, well, if you suppose, then.” She unfurls her legs and stretches the remote toward the television set.

I remember my real question -- my question about Mary, and her hands -- only when I am safely behind the wheel again. These are just her little games that I will soon come to expect.

---

Where we have been is generally where we are going. We are hikers on an arching trail, and the movement of the sun is fragmented by the rustling of the forest canopy. One journey is just the road back into the previous, and soon, we find ourselves right where we started, exactly where the stepping stones have led all along. There we’ll end at some long-lost beginning. On those dark roads into the underbrush, we are at the mercy of those much older hands we hold.

My own journey had not resolved itself neatly. The Mary dream did not stop; it was not smothered on its mattress as I was waved a false goodbye from my mother’s porch. No, the dream reproduced into itself, then multiplied. The cycle continued for many more nights. I would sink lowly into the rhythms of a deep slumber, and I would awaken in the garden again -- “your first nightmare, George, I remember” -- and I would suffer in the sand forever. But Mary’s house is outward facing inside, and the walls are not solid so that I am at the stump again. There is a horrible faceless effigy deep inside the tree, the house. At Mary’s house, there is an orangeness to that heavy floating air. Her name, eager for attention, my hair damp with fear at first watch.

The notebook by the phone became its own little encyclopedia. Phone numbers and maiden names, crude little arrows and the pointed horns of a crown. One’s first phone call is the most intimidating, when you waltz the dance of family secrets over the wire. It is cheaper to pay for long distance than to risk another drive or something worse still. I could turn off the lights and pretend to be oblivious in my own one-bed.

Mom’s little sister, as it would turn out, loved to play pretend. Strangely, I couldn’t help but smile when I pictured that skinny little girl with huge teeth and black bangs pleading with her older siblings to play princess with her. “Mary loved princess-in-the-castle,” the phone said one night. I was shuffling photographs in my hands like playing cards. Then the next night, another voice offered an explanation: “Hide and seek, darker, with some childish crown of hers, and we had to share a flashlight. Me and your Ely, scaring ourselves sick when we couldn’t find her. And there she was, under the bed like always, just in time for your grandma to start shouting again, as though she’d never been gone” As though she’d never been gone. He wheezed with laughter on the other end, then coughed thoughtfully. “Mary used to ride that dog like a horse.”

As a small child, I’d so often toe the line between the waking world and those of my dreams that my older self could never quite divorce the two. My earliest childhood memories could just as precisely be called dreams -- and those on the farthest end of the spectrum, nightmares. Had I truly walked the fenceline of my grandfather’s farm to ask to drive a tractor? I thought not -- rather, not until I heard the story told back to me many birthdays later. After that moment, I’d come to think a little more carefully about things. My comfortable ordering of the world became less reliable somewhere around the birth of time.

Mary’s house -- those scant features I can safely pluck away from the thistles of disbelief -- was rusty, tarred with a faint tobacco. You’d walk right into the living room when you’d creak open through the front. In houses back then, everything was a dark brown: carpet, paneling, paint. She lived alone, though I used to think all the cousins were hers. I was foggy on that point for a while. I remember the doll room, shelves and shelves of heads and bodies without faces, all slumped around the dusty piano in the middle. I hated that room most of all. The dolls themselves I’d now wager as Amish or Mennonite in origin; then, they’d simply been dolls to my young mind. Dolls with plain flour heads, try as I may to capture the abject fear of an endless room. The featureless dolls loomed over me. I am disgusted with myself because my cousins were disgusted with me. We peeked around the corner, I felt startled by a push, and they blacked out the lights and slammed the door behind me. I remember the push, indeed I feel it now strong and centered on my back, and I remember the darkness, and I remember the most horrible faces and music. Damn it, I hate that I still hear that piano. I am a grown man, and I am grabbing this dinner table firmly enough to make my knuckles pop out real rough and white. Rough and white, so that I can remember the pain of banging and barreling down that door with hot tears in my eyes. You stuck me in a nightmare.

They shut me up for hours, I screamed at my mother’s feet when I’d met her on the lawn.

You baby! I heard from behind. That wasn’t even a minute, and you bumped your big head into Auntie’s piano and made a bunch of noise.

I’ve thought for a good deal of time about that day. I don’t know how old I was, and my mother doesn’t remember it either. I trust she’d be more keen to remember it had it been a lone nightmare, some made-up thing of mine to revisit in crayon until I’d lost the fear response. Someone ought to stop me here and say, now, George, don’t you think it’s possible that you remember the dolls most of all because of what happened after, the first time you’d learned the rod? To which it’d please me to reply, naturally. I remember that I stayed so far away from the older kids for the rest of my youth, perhaps further still. But a lie I do not remember. I was telling the truth about that matter, and I am now, too. I’d been in there for hours. You mess with a boy’s instinct at that age -- well, you see what happens. You know it, all right.

---

In the impossible blackness of the night, I hear a silent scream to turn back now, and I am afraid. Rain spatters harshly atop my windshield, and the ink has began to run in dark smears across a wet yellow legal pad. My mother is up there, sending this rain one last time to spite me. Through evening fog, one might think my headlights are simmering through the dark. I’ve already turned off the engine; I am not afraid, far from it, but if I blur my eyes in this silence I can almost picture rushing water.

Someone much smarter than me ought to be doing this. I think back to her hospital bed. I have not wept in many months. My heart has broken, I suppose. I am going to feel a swelling numbness in perpetuity until this whole thing is behind me. Is that the fear of accountability? I sink down in my seat. She’d died screaming; still no tears.

A knock on the window startles me. A flashlight -- already? I think to myself. The beam catches my face when I crank down the window.

“What are you doing?” asks a stern voice, but I know this is no officer at all.

I shove everything just below a line of sight. “Cop, no, sorry, officer, spoke on the phone. So sorry, I mean that we spoke on the phone.”

He is silent for a beat. “I don’t have a phone, and I ain’t no cop. Who are you?”

“No, yes, of course. A neighbor, then. I looked you up, but everything is wrong. I am so sorry for the scare.” I remember to smile and point upward for eye contact, but he is headless in the dark. “My name is George Price. I used to live in this neighborhood. Years ago?”

Why was that a question? He doesn’t notice, maybe he has been drinking too. There is little else to do. He lowers the flashlight. “Talk inside, it’s hell out here.”

He kicks his way up the steps, and I see he is still in his leather motorcycle boots. He is a big man, with bigger arms and weathered ink across his dark shoulders. “I would offer you a beer, but I don’t have any in the fridge.”

“That works just fine. Thank you.”

He slinks into the front, a dim foyer that swallows him whole. I crane my head to look into the hallway and bump into a distended gutter. I look up -- that’s new. Was this screen here as well?

He returns with a softness in his gait. I gulp from my open bottle, greedy. He’s working on his own, his giant shoulders blocking the door. “So?”

“Oh, yes, thank you. I used to live here with my mother a very long time ago. I am sorry to surprise you like this.”

“It don’t matter to me. Just not used to spotting cars out front, is all. I’ve been living out here since I left the Army. Got a Street Glide out back; you ride?”

“Oh, no, the jacket was a relative’s. But thank you.” Another swallow. My eyes dart around at all the moths, and I think back to when I was young.

He’s just going to keep talking, I can see it in that vacant look. “They had me up in Liberty all them years ago, but I got out just in time. I don’t got a TV out here but I can tell you a thing or two about what’s going on, you know what I mean? And you know it was a long summer this year, I don’t know what to do about all these bugs. They swarm all up and down out here but inside it’s always clean, I don’t know if y’all did any work for that or anything.”

He rambles on as though I’d lived here only weeks ago, but on the inside, where the anticipation and trepidation have lock stepped into a beautiful amber haze, I am warm and happy, a child. I am going to have to remember you, I think to myself. In these fifteen minutes, you have done more for me than anyone else. Had the Army taught you to ignore the fear response, or had eight years in Mary’s house beaten it out of you? Perhaps I should thank the brew, maybe the moonlight for your hospitality. You are a lonely man, and a lonely man will give me anything and more. Certainly one who lives in a house where nothing survives so much as lives in the first place.

---

“Everyone always says this was me, but if you look at the bangs, that’s the giveaway. This was her at the fair, because they’d come through every year. And back then -- of course! -- that was always the best part of the year. Much cheaper than Christmas! She was always ugly.”

I do not like her laugh, I realize. I hear it only in response to poisoned tales of myself or Mary. My mother has piled up hundreds of these old photographs all around her living room; I feel as though I’m swimming in a glass fishbowl. The blue of my jean jacket looks almost brand new in this apartment. My mother’s apartment smells like Folger’s and sounds a lot like daytime television.

“Of course she was never married,” she snarled. “Do you think your Aunt Mary got along very well with other people? She was different, and marched to the beat of her own drum, we kids would always say,” she said matter-of-factly. She took a deep breath and admired a photo in the palm of her hand. “I think she’d be very happy to know you have so many questions about her. I think she was afraid of being forgotten . . . I think she wanted babies of her own. Can you imagine that? Dying alone. Oh, the cold feet. Who would pull your blanket up?”

I choose to ignore that. She holds my eyes in her gaze for half a smile. I am afraid that she has always known that something has marked me out from a very small age. In her irises there are whispers of green, same as mine, yet I see no further than here. I stare down at my feet, and in my mother’s home, surrounded by these photographs, I feel no closer to knowing anything.

“That was your first funeral,” she says suddenly. I look up; her eyes have started to glisten. “I never wanted to take you there. Not to a graveyard. It is no place for a child!”, her voice cracks. She fumbles a deck of photos onto the couch and buries her face in her palms.

I reach out and touch her arm, feeling embarrassed. “I don’t understand, and I’ve heard you say this before,” I say softly. My heart quickens. “What happened at the funeral?”

My mother has lived alone for many, many years. In that time, she and I have held something in common between ourselves. She has not cried in front of another person; she knows not the sounds, the impressions that jump out onto the other party like a sickness. From behind her long painted nails I hear only a disgusting, beast-like infliction; she is weeping, no, weeping and talking simultaneously. My lip curls upward in disgust. “Tell me what happened now.”

“I feel sick,” she gasps. She panics, and she lurches off the sofa and storms out the room. I hear a slam, than the rushing of a faucet.

I sit alone, immobilized. The weight of a wicked realization has begun to settle. My jaw clenches as I stew in a reddening silence. My mother is a liar, I think to myself. Only an animal would lie to her only son. I blink and feel the hot tears begin to sear under my eyes. She’s raised me to be a lonely creature, so I think she ought to suffer that same way.

“You knew I was different,” I hear my sharp, breathless whisper below the force of the water. “You knew, somehow you knew, somehow you knew I’d dreamed of her, and she made me different, and you let her, and you let me be different. You never even took me to that stupid funeral! I saw it, I had a terrible dream, and I saw her funeral because she took me there, because you wouldn’t, and you never thought to listen.”

I swerved home, forgetting to turn on the radio until the sun had long dipped beneath the mile markers. I shot a mean look at the shoeboxes in the seat over.

“We don’t have to talk about her!” she’d cried out from her stoop as I’d swung open the front door. “She’s not worth your time, not now, not ever!”

I grimaced upon remembering. I felt stupid for involving her in the first place, and I felt even worse to think of my poor mother, having lost her sister all over again. The thought dissipates; my mother does not grieve. I took a harsh breath, gripped the steering wheel, and felt everything drift away. I must’ve looked maniacal.

---

“Hello, my name is George Price. I think you might remember me back from Brooksville, graduating class of -- Hello?”

I scratch off another name and another number. I have to squint by lantern light because they shut the power off days ago. Most of these leads have gone nowhere; I am sure I do not sound friendly when they answer. And when I look down at these photographs, what else stares back at me than a once happy family? I see children playing in the water, forever young, forever summer. Each smile fixed in place by an artist and her loving hands. Outside these photos I hear only the cacophony of a night terror.

I’ve cared more about genealogy now than at any point in my life prior. Bloodlines had once exhausted me; now I scour over every possible branch. I am searching for the meaning that makes this beast growl.

What do I know of Mary? I know that she deals in whispers. I know to close my eyes to the visible light spectrum and to step closer to the gothic fence between our worlds. At the center of this mystery is a girl and her crown, and she holds it loosely as she would a stuffed rabbit by its foot. Mary does not blink; her eyes watch all in total apprehension. Whose? She is at once eternal child and looming authority, and the unknowable chasm between all the knowledge presents me with despair. I know that she is evil, as all black-eyed children are.

I know, too, that no one else cares. Her family, mine, has locked this corpse in a sealed mausoleum and buried with her the collective knowledge of her personhood. All those faces shuffled meekly into the pews, crossed their hearts, and left as disdainfully as they’d arrived. No one brought flowers; her mother, having lost her mind in the years prior, knew no one to mourn, not even herself as her candle faded. I know that Mary died a meaningless death, lived a meaningless life, and I cannot reach through these cards to touch her as she so touches me. I too quiver with fear at the thought of a meaningless death. Mary, Mary, queen of everything. Let’s raise our cups to Mary, with whom I never drink alone. I laugh because in my dreams when I pry open her closed casket I see the pointed veneer of an unholy crown behind the black light. Of course she’s faceless; her black eyes await her in Hell.

I crawl joylessly into bed. I doze off to the creaking movement of neighbors; I melt into paralysis, warm and tender, bloody beating heart like a canary. Here I am, alone again in Mary’s dewy garden. Let the awfulness of it all wash me anew.

When I answer her phone call many, many months later, I sit behind the steering wheel in silence. My fingernails are long and dirty, my face thorny with hair. I must look dreadful; I don’t care at all. I’d wanted to say something cruel, but the wind was knocked out of me cold. I’d fallen to my knees instead, helpless.

White coats took me down those white halls to another white room. I should’ve brought balloons, I thought cutely. But here she is, and so am I.

“Mother,” a child calls out.

She turns her head, and it hurts her. “George?”

“It’s me, it’s George. Why didn’t you . . . ?” I kneel next to her.

My mother’s smile is the most beautiful thing on Earth. “You’re not supposed to see your mom like this. I never wanted this, George. I’m so sorry. I thought there would be more time.”

“Well, forget all that. It’s me. I’m here now.”

“I have felt so terrible all this time. I wanted to talk to you about it, but, oh, where to start? Oh, and this food. She was my little sister, and I just wanted to protect her from it all.” She holds me in her eyes where arms fail. “I guess I failed you, too.”

“Is she wicked, Mom? Is she truly a nightmare?” Tell me now that she is love personified, I hear from my heartbeat. Make it all better now, hold me, that she might be an angel up above.

The sick woman turns her head away, then back. She is shaking her head. “Oh, George. She was disturbed. I won’t let you run her through the mud. I don’t care if she hurt you, back then. You have to get over it.”

My face tightens. “Then you are no mother of mine.”

“Georgie? What, what do you mean?”

I stand up and straighten my coat. I am grown, after all. “We’re done in here!” I call out. “And no, don’t give me that stupid look. Are you listening? I’ve been trying to tell you this entire time, but you don’t listen. Oh, how you people never listen! Don’t you get it? That I saw Mary and her crown? That she would walk up and down the hallway in her crown when she thought we were all asleep? She dragged me to her own funeral.”

“Oh, George,” she wails. “You’re hurting me.”

“I’ve had it with you. You don’t ever tell me nothing, and you don’t listen neither. Go on, then, die already,” and I’ve already kicked open the door and stepped out into a the bleary eyes of a cold new world.

They’d call me back, days later. I knew what it was as soon as I answered the phone. My mother, gone -- she died screaming. And when the light left and her soul disappeared from this world, I was told her body lay there frozen, her mouth open in submissive terror. I can wish only that she’d died completely, utterly alone, but I know better. A violent cascade of thoughts stir from within as I process everything and understand nothing. Mary did this, that’s right. Mary did this, and she too must die. I will kill the vampire.

---

Her house is dark and matted, like fur, and I watch him struggle with the overhead light as though the spirits of the air fester in fungal overgrowth. His boots splosh wetly on the carpet so that I have felt no need to remove my own shoes. He sets the flashlight on a propped up side table that kind of holds up a loveseat as much as it is held up by it. “What’s your poison?” he asks, and I tell him something sour and watch his shadow waddle off into the kitchenette.

“Mind the mess,” he’d told me when we came through. I felt a big hand on my shoulder to keep him steady. “I’ve kept meaning to straighten up anyway.”

I walk around like a phantom. In the mental glow I cannot tell what has changed, what the stranger has seen fit to adjust. There are framed photos that sit politely atop the cabinet space, and they glow an elegant satisfaction amidst mess and ash. I see children, smiling absently from ironed eyes, the adults in the frames a varying mix of generational features. I see several sets of keys; there must be cars in the yard. The thought does not sit right with me. This is not your yard.

When the stranger returns I see his wobble in the fullness of light. I see his features, dark but not cunning, evasive without fearfulness. He seems empty, devoid of any sort of interior narration. He lacks the hate response, I realize. He hands me a glass. He is never waiting for a response. “I don’t got ice,” but I hadn’t been thinking about that anyway.

He sees in my hands a golden photo frame. I set it back down on the dusty white shelf. Their blurry black eyes are watching me. “Do you ever feel threatened here with all these faces?”

“The family didn’t want them, they told me. I kept them up in case they ever came back. I got a Street Glide out back.”

What? I looked again. Was that my face? None of the children looked familiar.

“That’s the best thing about an estate sale, you see,” he explains. “They can be all or nothing. Looks like I got all.”

“It looks like you did,” I say.

“I keep them up because I don’t got family of my own. I wish they’d taken more photos of me when I was their age. And that photo you got right there, look. Isn’t she unique? Looks like a groundskeeper. I’ve got this car I’m working on right now out back.”

“Stop talking so much. Cars? Are they all out back?”

“I’d show you, not for the rain. Been meaning to fix them good, but I keep finding more. Did you see the wheelbarrows out front? Today I was supposed to be getting it paved.”

I take a long, bitter swallow from my glass. I can feel my heartbeat in my index finger, and inside my head, I’ve already collapsed onto the bed.

I close my eyes and panic. “The garden,” I say. “The stony steps, out there?”

He puts his hands in his pockets and leans onto his heels, back and forth. “You’ve been here before, huh?” He looks down, raises up his eyebrows. “Guess that makes sense. And the pictures?”

I straighten with importance. “I have sold you complete lies, no half-truths. I may as well be a complete stranger to you and this house.” He is pretending to understand. The truth is that I was afraid you wouldn’t let me in. I have no money, no wealth to my name, just that car out on your street.” He is nodding, I realize. “My name really is George, but I never lived here or even around here. My aunt did, and no one will tell me the truth about here. I’ve seen her almost every night in my dreams, I’ve dreamed her awful face and her wild voice, and every night, I see us in the garden. She beckons for me, yes, beckons for me, because I wandered too close to the piano and glimpsed beyond an unholy veil, and my mother did nothing to fix it!”

I am shocked by the truth in my own words; my head is pounding with rye, and my eyes are a blurry visage. In the totality of my honesty I have seen everything. I see Mary at the heart of midnight, hands that clap and two more that appear from the air. I see a crown fit for the eight kingdoms of Hell, and a woman who wears it. I see the golems in the piano room, their lifeless hands wretchedly puppeteered with pagan violence. I see my mother on her hospital bed in a sea of faces, a sailor thrashing on the starboard and looking up at North to see only darkness. It is when I catch my breath and pause between tight, gritted sobs that I feel the warmth of human touch from a stranger and realize I’d never left that piano room all along, that the queen of hell is my own blood, that forgiveness is ours, sayeth the Lord, all of it. The glass rolls onto the carpet and not one of us stops to catch it, and when I brace for the awful shattering sound I hear only the chuckle of the carpet below.

The green air is charming, and I hear birds, hummingbirds and songbirds. They are chirping with the sunny glow of the dewey grass. I am in the garden, together with the stranger. My clothes are wrinkled from slumber, and I smell like Aunt Mary’s house.

“This is the backyard,” he says. “I’ve got the import under that tarp over there.”

“They are lovely,” I say back. “I would love to help you work on them. Please teach me everything you can about cars.”

“You said last night your aunt was some sort of witch? That’s pretty interesting. I’ve got a new alternator we could put in today.”

“That would be beautiful,” I say. There is a smile on my face, and the warm beautiful air makes my heart feel like summertime. “Yes, she used to live here. She loved playing pretend, and her crown.”

“Oh, a crown, huh?” He crumples up a tarp and pops open a squeaky hood. “Yeah, I think you said something like that. What’s the crown for?”

I reach down and eyeball the Craftsman box for an eight millimeter. Struggling with the latch, I remove my sheathed blade and pry open the faded red toolbox. I hand him the socket wrench. Am I good with my hands? No one is around to tell me otherwise. “Oh, yes, she was keen on that crown. Ah, but she loved her family. In her very own, special way, that’s right.”

“That’s nice. Is there an eight millimeter in there too?”

“Right,” I hand it over. He thanks me, and slides on his back out of sight, his shins poking out from under the car. He asks if I want to watch Matlock later. I take a second to look around. Thought this is the same landscape, the same unique dot on our blue globe, the world is so much more beautiful here than in the nightmares. I walk around, touching everything with my real-world hands. A bird fountain. A folding chair. A beer can. Everything is so beautiful this morning that when the sun catches my eyes and in that brief second where I am overwhelmed by its rays I am in complete peace at the knowledge that my mother is looking down in total forgiving, pacifying love and that she is speaking in her own heavenly dialect and, indeed, she has stopped the rain, just for me. I look around and see Mary at the clearing, her crown a beautiful halo, her eyes wet with morning dew and joyful tears, and I remember so kindly and vividly that Mary, too, speaks with the words written uniquely on her heart.