The Dreamers

56.

Rebecca wakes in an unfamiliar room. White walls. Fluorescent lights. An IV twisting out from one arm.

In her confusion, she recognizes only one thing through the window: the mission-style bell tower of Santa Lora College. She is back, somehow, in Santa Lora.

A soft beeping is coming from a nearby monitor. She has the sensation that she is not alone in this room. She becomes aware of a soreness in her abdomen. Her fingers find a bandage there.

A door opens—someone walks into the room. A nurse, maybe. She is wearing a yellow plastic suit, this nurse. The suit covers her whole body, even her shoes, like in a movie, thinks Rebecca. The nurse behaves as if Rebecca is not in the room. Instead, she leans over something in the far corner. A crib, Rebecca sees now, a clear plastic crib on casters. Inside the crib, swaddled in a cream-colored blanket with pink trim, a newborn baby lies sleeping in a little pink cap. Rebecca’s first thought is this: Who is that baby?

But now the nurse comes to Rebecca. Now she is saying something through her mask. She is shouting to someone else, someone outside the room.

“She’s awake,” the nurse is saying. She is calling to someone else down the hall. She is pointing at Rebecca. “The mother is awake.”

It is hard to understand what it means. But a panic is rising in her chest.

More people rush in—all wearing those yellow suits.

Already a deep sense of absence is welling in her, a loss: Where is her son? she asks.

But they do not seem to understand what she is saying. “My son,” she says again. “Please ask him to come right away.”

It is hard to talk. It is hard to make herself clear.

But no one is answering her, and a dark thought comes into her mind. “Is he okay?” she whispers, her eyes already filling with tears.

“You had the sickness,” says one of the nurses. “You’ve been unconscious for almost a year.”

Rebecca hears the words but cannot understand them.

“It’s normal to feel confused,” says the nurse.

At some point, Rebecca’s mother walks through the door, just like that, her mother, back from the dead, as if she’s been waiting in that hallway all these years. And not just alive but younger, her mother as she was thirty years ago, in middle age, when Rebecca left for college. Her red hair, her white teeth. She rushes to Rebecca’s bed. “My God,” her mother keeps saying. She takes hold of her hand. “My God.”

And it is good to see her face—that joy, that relief. It feels good to see her mother after so many years moving through the world without her. But it’s frightening, too, a visitation from the dead.

“Where’s my son?” Rebecca asks her.

But her mother does not seem to understand the question. “I don’t know what you mean,” says her mother. “You’ve had a baby girl,” she says. “Look.”

“Did something happen to my son?” Rebecca says again, a sob growing in her throat.

There is fear now on her mother’s face. Her eyes flash back at the nurses.

“The doctor,” says her mother. “She says that you might have had some strange dreams.”