The Bad Dream Notebook Page 2

  As she reads, she realizes she has picked up a lot about Nordic ways: their chronic crappy, gray, wet weather with virtually no sunshine for months, all that aquavit, and extreme introversion tied to a general, modern, European sense of there being no way out, the opposite of the can-do-ism of America (still!). A yellow brick road is not in these folks’ lives. So it makes sense that the mourning detective expects to feel depleted for the rest of her life. Probing her own psyche, Erica wonders if she is that badly wounded. Because she can’t imagine feeling like herself again. Take that, newspaper girl. She’d settle for being somewhere in the middle, between the young woman with the dead brother who refuses the reality of grief and the emotionally overwhelmed (though still crime-fighting) Swedish detective.

  Sleep has been Erica’s favorite drug since she gave up booze and mood-changing chemicals in the late seventies. In the last year or so, though, a couple of legal drugs have become part of her repertoire, too. These prescriptions carve out a semblance of normalcy, helping her, in her doctor’s words, “to even out.” But it all catches up with her at night. Erica’s working theory is that the clutching mix of sorrow and terror, squashed now by these pills, finds an outlet in vivid, bad dreams. Her current lack of coherence and creativity during waking hours is counterbalanced by high-octane, visually arresting nightmares. Every night, prepped by a sleeping pill, an antianxiety pill, three pillows, a melancholy Scandinavian crime novel, and two squares of chocolate, Erica approaches sleep with, still, a shred of hope. Tonight could be the charm, the passage from the horrible to . . . well, anything less horrible. She longs for mundane, meandering dreams, the kind she had before John finally, mercifully, died last June, and Mona went off the rails.

  She is often shoved awake by her own voice crying out and a heaving of the brain, the vivid recall of a dream that boiled up from the lava pit of her subconscious. Awake, she scribbles it down on a pad she keeps beside the bed or does a quick sketch, with an obscure, yet urgent, purpose in keeping track of her night mind.

  Tonight she sees there is a fat autumn moon, hung outside the window where she has neglected to draw the curtains. The harvest moon. She rummages in the drawer of her bedside table, where she keeps, among eye drops, earplugs, and hand cream, a clutch of the Shakespeare passages that John had routinely printed out and memorized for years while jogging and then, later, when his knees got bad, walking. She’d found them in his pants’ pockets, jackets, wallet, after he died.

  Yes, here it is. She remembers Mr. Brody in his tweed jacket, reading it aloud to her senior high school English class, all of them torpid after lunch, longing to break free of rooms, desks, Romeo and Juliet.

  O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,

  that monthly changes in her circle orb,

  lest that thy love prove likewise variable.

  GRIEVING FOR DUMMIES

  Erica is sitting across from John in their living room. She knows that music is playing but can’t hear it, which somehow makes her anxious. The dream shifts. Now she’s in the kitchen. She sees something protruding from the broom closet and realizes it is John’s mummified feet.

  It’s not true that no one reads books anymore. Erica is watching a steady stream of people come in and out of her local library. Middle school and high school kids who have to, parents getting picture books for toddlers, those from her own boomer generation and, of course, others who are clearly elderly. All of them reading books. Not counting the army of Kindle readers, of course. She looks up from a book she’s paging through in the how-to section, as a babbling stream of toddlers and parents emerge from a program down the hall.

  Erica has always been a bookworm, plunging into altered realities. She still loves the beating heart of the printed word though these days she forgets what she’s read as soon as she puts the book down, usually something with a Swedish or Norwegian or Finnish corpse in it. Or two or three.

  Erica has always found libraries, museums, and galleries to be sacred spaces, probably because she came from a large, cramped family and craved space and quiet. Libraries, of course, are no longer the hushed chapels of her childhood and youth. Cell phones bling, preschoolers run wild, and the clerks talk loudly to each other; once, they’d broken into song—the theme from Gilligan’s Island—and they weren’t bad either. But there is an expectation among adult patrons that they, at least, will behave. And so it is that, when Erica blurts, “No! You’re shitting me!” upon seeing a particular title in the New Books section, nearby browsers turn and frown pointedly.

  Years before, John had bought her something called Apple for Dummies, trying to be helpful as she wrestled her way into the new technology of the computer age. Then, she’d noticed an epidemic of Dummies and Idiot’s Guides in the SELF-HELP section at bookstores. But Grieving for Dummies is over the top, surely? No, she immediately corrects herself, the endless possibilities of the marketplace must be filled! How about Perversions for Dummies, Tax Evasion for Dummies, Achieving Nirvana for Dummies? As a matter of fact, there has to be one on getting over death. That’s what Americans are supposed to do. There’s no excuse for hanging on to negative emotions in this country. And, certainly, there has to be a good market for Grieving for Dummies, an endless chorus line of the bereaved. She flips through the book, its bullet points, its briskly written pseudo empathy, its checklists for achieving closure. The hidden message: Get over it. We will show you how. The advice is pretty standard; it’s the stuff they tell all the walking wounded, the people suffering from depression, cancer, eating disorders, what have you. Eat lots of fruit and vegetables. Get plenty of exercise and sleep. Drink alcohol sparingly. What about using drugs? (That’s an editorial slipup.) Erica keeps her drugs—all nice and prescribed—for antianxiety, antidepression,

  and antisleeplessness, in her shoes these days, away from Mona’s prying fingers. She never takes more than she should. Those years are long gone. But lots of folks do overindulge. The book goes on: Attend a support group. Befriend your fellow mourners.

  “No,” she says, loudly again, and drops the book to the table, to more frowns from her fellow booklovers. No to all of it, and especially, no, no, no, to any more support groups. Last spring, as John was slowly dying in his ever more potent fentanyl/morphine haze, she and Mona, neither of them happily, had attended the support group at Wings of Hope for teens in the outpatient program, along with their mostly shattered parents or whoever else was still willing to care for them. Mona’s hair at the time was the color of seaweed, and she had regressed physically to her preteen state, Kate Moss-skinny and undeveloped, with bad skin and ricocheting emotions. Erica sat in the circle of the support group with other stunned, hopping-mad, and/or haggard adults, her mermaid-haired, seventeen-year-old child across the room with her compatriots, as far as they could get from the adults. Erica rarely spoke up, although she knew a lot about addiction, didn’t she, from all her AA years. But Mona shared frequently, as articulate as the “facilitator” about the snares and pitfalls addicts must avoid. Oh, A+ performance, Mona! Erica, slumped in her chair, had so wanted to believe Mona, to believe in her again. Recalling this now at the library, to her horror she begins to blubber, and a woman reaching for a book nearby scoots protectively away from this unstable, sniffling woman staring unseeingly at Grieving for Dummies.

  That useless family support group! That counselor who called himself a “facilitator” but who never facilitated squat. For example, she remembers he would never interrupt the small number of long-winded parents who spewed blame at the schools, the community, the police—everyone but themselves or their kids.

  Or the parents who did the opposite, publicly flagellating themselves. These were people who didn’t know anything about addiction except what it left in its wake—anger, fear, blame, and guilt. Which Erica got. The first time she’d gone to an AA meeting and heard someone call himself an alcoholic, she’d felt intense, almost volcanic shame for the poor fellow. Now, of course, the word trips off her tongue. After hundre
ds, possibly thousands, of Twelve-Step meetings, she’s fully inculcated the disease concept (now reinforced by the American medical establishment, unlike years ago, when she “came into the program”). But the family group for addicted teens was made up of civilians, presumably nonaddicted grown-ups with all the baggage of the uninitiated.

  Yet, for all her exposure to the vampire ways of addiction and for all the firsthand evidence she had about the restoration of sanity that happens to people in recovery, she was basically in the same mental boat as these civilians. They were all wrestling with the monster that turned their children into wayward/insolent/ troublemaking/heartbreaking/slothful/criminal/intensely self-involved addicts. And all the parents just wanted it to stop; life was too hard, too painful, too much, too everything. Occasionally, Erica and another parent, a guy she recognizes from the rooms of AA, managed to say something about the nature of addiction, about the hope of recovery, to the circle in agony, mostly Caucasians, but with sprinklings of African Americans, Latinos, Indians, Asians. Once Erica heard herself talking about how shame and blame are not only pointless but actually worsen the situation. But all the while, Erica knew she too was full of shame and blame and was as apt to act it out, despite what she knew and said. Because of Mona, her beloved child, her addict child.

  Now, wiping her eyes and still staring at Grieving for Dummies, Erica feels suddenly insubstantial. As if she is skimming along the edge of the world, trying to stay upright. Kind of like her dim memory of being stoned. This has been happening to her, off and on, over the past year or so, these little breaks from reality. Her trance is broken by a teenage hulk who slumps down loudly in a chair nearby beside an earnest computer geek, probably a tutor, a math book between them on the table.

  “Nope, I don’t see it. Nope. Don’t get precalc, never will, and don’t care.” The kid scrapes his chair back. “Screw it, I’m going outside to have a smoke.”

  “I’m with you there, brother,” Erica mutters.

  Last spring, when those weekly family meetings at The Wings of Hope Recovery Center were over, the parents would shamble off, stunned and weary, to their cars, while a good number of the teenagers took off in other cars. Including Mona. The kids were supposed to go home or stop at a coffee shop for healthy interaction, but were probably on their way to cop or score or whatever the slang verb was now. There was no way to rein her in; Erica had tried everything except jail and inpatient, including taking away the car keys. But Mona just found rides to the next drug high. The next step appeared to be having her put in inpatient at Wings or else waiting for jail again or a hospital. Mona just screamed and covered her ears when Erica brought up the topic of inpatient. And Erica, who had to conserve her strength for John as he lay dying in bits, had let the matter drop.

  The tall library windows today frame a gray November sky, the trees bare but for a few stubborn, flame-colored maples. Erica flips to a chapter called “Give It a Year.” This is interesting to her, as it’s full of cautionary tales about the intemperate acts of the newly grieving. People, wild with grief, who give away large sums of money, sell their houses, get married again (to some psycho) without thinking it through. In short, they act like addicts.

  Erica herself had behaved intemperately, giving away John’s beloved old BMW to the tree-cutting guy a week after he died. True, she wasn’t about to learn to drive stick, but give it away? And she couldn’t wait to do it. And that was just the start of her exorcism of John’s possessions, still ongoing because there was so much; he was a saver, not a hoarder, but close. And it has only been four months since he died. What will she do next? Well, Grieving for Dummies has a lot of suggestions.

  Enough of this, Erica thinks. She needs comfort. She’ll go to the art section, her section. Yet the Dummies book holds her a little longer, impishly falling open to a list of support groups, including . . . really? The Modern Widows Club? Now, there’s a name for a Julia Roberts movie. Or Meryl Streep. Yes, better—she can do crazy like falling off a log. A crazy new widow with a child shooting heroin. Modern Widows, yes! A niche market to be sure.

  The imp gets hold of Erica. On a nearby computer, she finds the Modern Widows Club website and discovers she can get a T-shirt upon payment of modest dues. Why not a kitchen magnet? A cap? A bumper sticker. Caution: Modern Widow on Board. She speed-reads through the mission statement. Nothing eye-catching. A list, inevitably, of tips, including:

  “Don’t be afraid to vent your anger.”

  “Oh, I am not afraid of that!” Erica declares aloud. Again, heads swivel and eyebrows crease. She and her anger have spent many a sweaty hour recently, hacking at bushes and tree limbs and heaving trash bags full of mildewed collections of John’s True Detective magazines. Erica logs off. She’s flunking Grief 101; she has given away a BMW, albeit a rusty BMW. And why? Because it reminded her too much of happy times. One terrible afternoon in October, Wally the tree man drove past in the Beemer as Erica sat in the garden with Casho, who froze and then busted through his invisible fence, bellowing, running after the car. His master’s car.

  She pays no attention to eating right and has taken up smoking cigarillos. She needs a pill to get through the night and another to get through the day. More grief peccadilloes are sure to follow.

  Well, let there be art. She mentally consigns Grieving for Dummies to the hell of poor sales and turns away, noticing as she does that the math-challenged teenager is back, staring at a work-sheet. “I feel for you, buddy,” she murmurs. In the art section, she finds a new biography about the great and seriously fucked-up Modigliani. That and a couple of sun-starved new Norwegian thrillers should hold her for a while.

  Driving home, Erica pays little heed to the treacherously narrow, winding, old cart-roads. They are dark but deeply familiar. The gloomy copses of denuded trees seem to wait impatiently for snow to press upon them; the sun flirts ineptly with the gray sky, and she is stuck behind a crawling car with no head visible in the driver’s seat, the sure sign of an elderly, feeble-sighted driver. But she doesn’t care. She is free to brood and does. At least she hasn’t done something monumentally dumb like fallen in love. The Modern Widows Club website had more or less repeated the Dummies’ advice on that, which boils down to: don’t do it! But anyway, it’s the man who rushes into relationships after the wife dies. Can’t do without a woman looking after him.

  Erica is fairly certain she’ll never have to worry about a man again. She’s not old; she’s not unattractive, but, since John died, she often feels like a tourist in a really foreign country—Yemen, say, or North Korea. She’s tethered to new, as yet nonsensical, rules. This country—grief—has its own arcane strictures of the really foreign type: you must not pat babies on the head or you could steal their souls; don’t photograph people for the same reason; never eat with your left hand. In grief country, you learn the rules and the language from scratch, never mind a guidebook like Grieving for Dummies. In grief country, you find out that tables and chairs aren’t solid but are full of holes, like the physicists claim. That a wizard has been behind a screen all the time, conjuring the illusion you’ve always believed of the sureness of the senses. “Or maybe,” Erica says aloud, suddenly laughing at herself. “I’m just a natural-born paranoid!”

  She doesn’t laugh long. Disaster survivors have a short supply of mirth. I used to believe it when I said there are no guarantees. But I was fooling myself. I thought there was always an ace or two in the hole. I had no idea. And here she has to brake sharply, as the tiny old person driving in front of her suddenly turns off the road without warning. Ah yes, no guarantees. That someone will use their turn signal, for example.

  The sun is feebler still, the sky is a gray sheet, the day pulls in on itself, reminding her of winter around the corner. “Ah, help me,” Erica says in a sigh, hardly hearing herself.

  WALKING THE DOG

  Groggy from anesthesia, Erica realizes she’s lying on a metal table under hard, fluorescent lights. Has she had an operation? Why is she p
anting so hard? Why is her heart jumping? She needs help urgently, but she can’t speak and nobody comes. Have the doctors and nurses forgotten her? Something presses on her arm, then a moist, soft sponge is placed over her mouth. She realizes the dog is licking her face and wakes up.

  Get up already and feed me! Erica pushes Casho’s large head and paws off the bed and squirms in the warm sheets, still in the panic of the dream.

  Grief’s toxicity is familiar now, suffering is her constant companion. She wants to lie in the bed as long as she can. But the powerfully built Labrador, no subservient canine, thrusts his upper body upon her again, making his simple requirements forcefully known. Food when the sun rises and sets, tussles with toys, and eager, sometimes frantic, walks. He is, of course, always grateful for extra scraps of food and praise, when Erica can muster the energy to remember them. But it’s his basic needs that he demands, stalking her from room to room; she is used to the click of his nails, a crescendo of barked and whined rebukes if she lags. He, too, has lived through chronic turmoil, and this has made him peevish, restless to go out or come in, and likely to have accidents in the rooms of the house he doesn’t frequent. Calling cards of distress.

  But Erica loves and needs the dog, his clown nose and clanky brain, his perfect trust in her. He gives her a reason to get up; he forgives her, his new master, always. He accepts that she is not John, who would walk him for hours in forests. But she sticks to the neighborhood, which feels safe because it’s familiar. Every day, or almost, they follow one of several familiar routes. They climb the steep hill past several lovely, old, large houses and the horse barn, stubbornly holding on in their shred of exurbia. Or they go down another hill, lined with more modest vinyl-sided houses, past the one Erica plans to paint someday, so shabby and glowering, its yard festooned with creepy plastic gnomes and a red car up on blocks with the front door open. It has been like that for as long as she can remember. One afternoon, she received an explanation: a young man, walking like Frankenstein, clutching steel braces, waves cheerfully at her from where he’s fiddling with the car engine, and she remembers that he’s the boy who survived the motorcycle accident and lives here. “Hey, big guy!” he calls out to Casho.