The Dreamers

55.

Rebecca, five years older, is holding her little boy’s hand as they walk one day in the woods. His fingers pull dandelions in a field. He blows the seeds through the air. She sees wisdom in the sight of him, his growing body announcing it every day: life goes on.

Soon he is a boy at six years old, standing on a diving board in aqua blue swim trunks, calling: “Mama, Mama, watch this.” She is sitting on the weedy grass beside the pool. They are at her parents’ house on a Sunday afternoon. She is holding her boy’s flip-flops in her lap. His church clothes lie in a heap beside her. From inside the house comes the soft clinking of plates, the sounds of her mother making lunch in the kitchen.

Her boy jumps into the pool. A cannonball. That look on his face as he leaps: his eyes pressed shut, as if by the force of his smile.

Rebecca calls to him from the grass as he bobs afterward in the water. “Amazing,” she says.

He looks like her brother did at that age. Goggles, a gap between his teeth, lanky legs and long feet. The smell of the neighbors’ orange trees is wafting over the fence. The sounds of her mother in the kitchen, the low heels of her church shoes clicking on the linoleum.

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.