At ten o’clock on the dot, Oliver comes rushing at me. “C’mon,” he says. “We’re gonna be late.” I follow him through the glass door and we squeeze into the elevator behind two girls, one wearing black lipstick, the other in plaid pajama pants. When they get off at the third floor, Oliver and I ride in an awkward silence.
The doors slide open and I follow him to room 427. As he raps on the door, I finally think of something to say: “I can’t believe the magazine liked your story idea.”
“Um,” he says. We hear a “Come in” from the other side. “They didn’t.”
“What?” I whisper. But he’s turning the handle and then we’re in the office, face-to-face with the woman from the photo, except she’s in full color—wearing a light pink tunic and a smile that stretches her thin lips until they’re nonexistent.
“Oliver, I presume?” she says, sticking out her hand over her desk.
“Yes.” He fits his hand into hers. “Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me.”
“It’s a pleasure,” she says, turning to me.
“This is Mia.”
“Hi,” Dr. Saltz says, staring from me to Oliver as if she’s waiting for an explanation as to why I’m there. Oliver doesn’t offer one. I wiggle my fingers at her as she lowers herself into her desk chair. She sweeps a hand magnanimously at us to follow suit. “Well, like I told you,” she says when we’re seated across from her, “I’ve got this twenty-five-minute window before my next class, so fire away.”
“Right,” Oliver says. He rubs his palms on his jean-clad thighs.
“What magazine did you say you were from again?”
“Um . . . we’re not. From one.”
My head snaps toward him, eyes wide, and then up at Dr. Saltz.
She cocks her head like a questioning bird, eyes narrowed, then looks up toward the ceiling, as if searching for help. More to herself than us, she mutters: “I told Janine to vet these interview requests, but does she listen? No. No, she doesn’t.” She drops her eyes back in our direction. “Let me guess,” she says, her voice steady, laced with a not-small hint of anger. “You’re having strange dreams and want to know what they mean.”
“Er . . . yes.”
She rolls her eyes and starts shuffling papers on her desk. “Thank you so much for wasting my time—and yours. But there are therapy offices all over the city of New York and I’m sure one of them can help you decipher what being chased by a Tyrannosaurus rex or showing up naked to your family reunion means.”
She stands up with such force, the leather chair rolls back, slamming into the cinder block wall behind her.
Oliver half stands, too, holding a palm up. We come in peace. “No, wait. Please,” he says. “We don’t know each other—” He gestures to me. “We just met a few weeks ago. But we’ve been dreaming about each other. For months.”
“Years,” I say.
“Years,” he repeats, and then his head swivels. “Years?”
I nod, holding his gaze. His have only been for the past few months?
“Congratulations,” she says under her breath, but she doesn’t move to leave. “So you guys are obviously soul mates destined to be together. There. Is that what you wanted to hear? I have things to do now.”
“What? No—no! I’m married!”
She fixes a look at me. A cocked eyebrow; and I feel all the shame she’s directing toward me. The judgment and guilt dealt in one swift blow—You’re married, yet you’re here? With another man? I drop my head. “C’mon,” I say to Oliver. “We should go.”
“SHE KEEPS DYING,” he says, the fervor in his voice jerking my head up. “She dies. In my dreams—nightmares. And I can’t go on like this—I have to know what it means. Or how to make it stop.”
I blink slowly. And then blink again. The air-conditioning unit squeaks and rattles to life beneath the window, before growing into a steady hum. And then I flash back to the conversation on my porch—how I asked him what he dreamt and he got so uncomfortable. But then, what about the elevator one? Surely I don’t die in all of them?
“Most of them,” he says quietly to me, and I wonder if I asked the question out loud, or just with my expression. Harrison says I’m transparent. That it doesn’t matter what I say, because what I think is always written right on my face. “The elevator, the waterslide. They end the same.”
And suddenly I feel so foolish. Here I am harboring a borderline teenage-girl crush on this man I’ve been dreaming about, while I’m actually—literally—his worst nightmare. Harrison will be so relieved to know the reason Oliver looks at me so intently is because he’s waiting for me to choke on a noodle, a spring pea, to drop dead of a sudden heart attack.
I become aware once again of Dr. Saltz still hovering behind her desk. Her eyes dart from me to Oliver and back to me again. Realizing we have no intention of leaving—I’m not sure I could stand up if I wanted to—she takes a deep breath, exhaling slowly. She pinches the bridge of her nose, directly between her eyes. She licks her lips. She mutters something that sounds like, “Jesus, be a fence.” Then she sits down.
“You’ve got five minutes,” she says. “What do you want to start with?”
“Um . . .” I say, slowly. “I think the dying bit would be good?”
“Great.” She places her hands together in front of her. “Dreaming of death often doesn’t literally mean that someone is going to die.”
“Often? So sometimes it does.”
She shrugs. “There are not really any statistics I can point to here. But the general consensus is that it’s symbolic of the ending of something—whether it’s a job, a relationship . . .” She pauses, looks pointedly at me. “A marriage.”
“Hey,” I say, but before I can defend myself further, Oliver speaks.
“I did just break up with my girlfriend. Around the time the dreams started.”
In my peripheral, I see Dr. Saltz lift her hands, palms to the sky, as if to say, See? I rest my case, but I keep my eyes trained on Oliver. Girlfriend. After learning he wasn’t actually married to Caroline, I didn’t even think about him being in a relationship with anyone else—not that it’s any of my business.
“OK, so what about this whole dreaming of each other before we met? That’s not normal, right? I mean, is there any research where that’s happened before?”
She turns to me, expression bored, her voice monotone. “In dream science we refer to that as psychic dreaming, the idea that some dreams have a predictive quality to them, or can tell the future.”