Although I am exhausted and weary to the bone, I know I will need their assistance in turning my brain off and falling asleep tonight. I swallow two of the lavender pills and go to bed, leaving Israel in the kitchen in silence.
Despite the pills, which usually knock me into a dreamless, comatose kind of slumber, I am fitful and restless all night. I feel stuck in that not quite asleep, not quite awake state like you feel at the very ending of a nightmare. Too groggy and disoriented to wake up fully, but never reaching that refreshing, rejuvenating energy you get after a good night’s sleep. I feel as though my insides are shutting down, everything is heavy and I am being pulled under by a suffocating fog and strange dreams. My room is so dark and my dreams are dark too. At first, I am young again, eating bread in our stone home in the seventeen hundreds. I can see my mother sewing something by the fire. I am lying on a pallet next to her; I can see her bare feet. The fire burns hot, I can feel it on my face and on my legs and arms. I hear my dad humming but I can’t see him. I hear a little scuttling sound and then Rose, little three-year- old Rose, lies down beside me. I can see her light blue eyes, mirror images of my own. She wears a white gown and holds a small wooden toy in the shape of a bear. As I watch her, she begins to grow. Her features grow up, her baby fat melts away. I look down at my own legs and they are growing too. Rose reaches out and strokes my cheek, then my hair. I still feel the fire burning brightly beside us. I still hear my dad’s hums, see my mother’s feet. Rose stops touching my face and her hand reaches down to hold mine. She holds it softly for a moment, then tighter, then tighter still until I want to say stop, that hurts! Her hand squeezes and it feels larger now, not like that of a small three year-old. It squeezes violently then and pulls out of my grasp with such force that the nails scratch me. I cry out, both in my dream and in reality, and wake, gasping. I throw off the blankets and fumble for the light on the stand by my bed. I turn it on, half sobbing. The place on the bed next to me is warm as though a body had been there only seconds before and I cradle my bleeding hand, feeling frightened and very small.
Chapter Four
I bring my blanket from my bed and wrap myself in the recliner. I spend the rest of the night next to the couch where Dad sleeps, snoring blissfully away the way he always does. I am freezing cold, shivering and trembling, chilled almost to the bone, teeth chattering, my fingers and toes alternating between a state of numbness and bone-chilling pain. It’s not the temperature of the room, it’s the way my body reacts to fear. It was the same when I was a little girl scared by a dream or a thunder storm. I’d cocoon myself in quilts and shake like a leaf until the fear subsided.
To be frank, I am not one of those girls you read about in mystery novels. If something goes bump in the night, you can be sure I won’t be the type to head down into a dark basement to investigate. I’m not going to traipse off into the spooky attic, looking for mysterious answers. I’m not going to calmly take a shower if I hear a serial killer is on the loose in my neighborhood. I’m more the “yell for help and hide under the covers” type. I’m not particularly brave, and what happened in my bedroom frightened me. I want nothing more than to reach out to someone, anyone, but knowing Prue would probably beat me with the bat she keeps by her bed just for such purposes, I curl my legs up in the chair and try to fall back asleep. Whatever happened had to have been a strange nightmare; a nightmare that caused such anxiety that I scratched my own palm and wrist. The dried scrapes looked like the leftovers of a cat fight. Dark red and jagged, they run from the first line of my palm – where a