Getting warmer.
Right? And on the park map, it’s right next to the carousel, just like in your painting.
Where is it?
Elysburg, PA. Couple hours away. Think I might go check it out tomorrow. Want to come?
Another sideways glance at Harrison.
Can’t. Headed out of town for the weekend.
Cool. Where to?
Jersey. Grounds for Sculpture.
I realize, a beat after I hit send, what I’ve just admitted to. And I have no doubt what his response will be.
WHAT? WHO VACATIONS IN NEW JERSEY??!
I grin.
“Mia.” Harrison’s voice grabs my attention.
“Huh?” I look up at him.
“I’m talking to you.” His voice is loud, competing with the wind.
“Oh. Sorry.” I tug at the button on my door panel and watch the window automatically close. My hair stills. “What’s up?”
“I said I’ve got something for you.”
“What?”
“Reach into my bag.” He gestures to the backpack at my feet.
I look at him curiously and reach down to unzip the bag’s front pouch.
“No, the big one.”
I grip the other zipper and pull, revealing a manila folder stuffed with papers. Assuming it’s Harrison’s work stuff, I push it forward to look behind it, without any idea what I’m looking for.
“That’s it. Pull it out.”
“This folder?”
He nods.
“What is it?” I ask suspiciously, as I tug it onto my lap. It’s thick, half my palm wide.
“Research.”
I turn the flap, my eyes landing on the headline of the first page: Why Do We Dream? I stare at it and then slowly turn to him.
“I thought we could go through it together.”
“What?” I ask, even though realization is dawning. I flip through the thick stack of papers and see bright-colored Post-it Notes sticking out the sides, Harrison’s illegible scrawl ending in question marks. It’s not just some web search results thrown together. It’s been curated, annotated—it took effort. “When did you even have time to do all this?”
“Last night, when I was on call. It was a slow night.”
I can’t help but gape at him. And I think of the way he gaped at me Wednesday night. His long sigh. “But . . . I thought you didn’t really believe me. That I was being crazy.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy,” he says quietly. “Not completely, anyway.” He grins. I swat at his thigh with the back of my hand. “Look, I do think this is . . . unusual. And I did hope that it was just some phase—like those two months you were determined to make your own paint using eggs and there was dried yolk on every single surface of our apartment. But when you were telling me about the amusement park dream on Wednesday, I realized this is not going away. And I thought about when I have a patient who comes in presenting unusual symptoms that don’t match up with anything I’ve seen before. I don’t dismiss what they’re saying out of hand; I research to fill in the gaps of what I know and hopefully come up with a diagnosis.”
“And if you can’t, then you dismiss the patient as a hypochondriac.”
He laughs. “OK, so the metaphor isn’t without its flaws.”
My hand finds his, our fingers lacing together. I squeeze gently. “Thank you.”
He shrugs, as if it’s nothing.
But it’s not. In that moment, it feels a little bit like everything.
* * *
In Hamilton, we stop at a drive-through and buy a sack of chicken soft tacos for dinner. We eat them in our room at the Howard Johnson, reveling in the air-conditioning that we cranked to full blast and drinking cold bottles of gas station beer.
And we go through the articles Harrison printed out, one by one. The first few are from Psychology Today: examinations and explanations of various dream studies; researchers trying to understand exactly why we dream. Some believe dreams are our brain’s way of forming and processing memories, while others think it’s how we sort through all the information our brains have collected throughout the day—random snaps of passing cars, snippets of conversations we overhear but aren’t paying attention to. Another theory suggests dreaming is psychological—how we work through difficult emotions like fear and anxiety in our lives. And some scientists believe dreams serve no function at all—that they’re just random and meaningless firings of the brain.
Harrison had highlighted that line, and I shoot him an amused look as soon as I notice it. “Let me guess, you’re in the meaningless camp?”
He holds up his beer from the corner chair he’s sitting in. His legs are propped on the bed, crossed at the ankles. “I think it’s important to consider all possibilities,” he says diplomatically. He bites into his taco, and a few errant shreds of cheese fall to his lap. “The next few pages delve into Jung versus Freud dream analysis—it’s interesting, but nothing that really pertains, so you can skip through those.” I flip through until I get to the next Post-it.
“OK, so here we get into some of the more . . . er . . . out-there stuff you and Oliver found, particularly the psychic dreaming. There are apparently three kinds. Precognitive means it predicts the future, so seeing someone you’re going to meet, or those people who thought they dreamt of the World Trade towers falling.” I follow along on the pages in front of me. “Then there are clairvoyant dreams, which supposedly give real-time information, so I think that lady who found the—what was it you said—candlesticks? That’s clairvoyant. And then telepathic is people who communicate to each other mentally.”
“Dream telepathy. Yeah, Oliver said something about that.” But I’m no longer looking at the papers in front of me. I’m staring at my husband, who not only listened to everything I’ve offhandedly told him these past few weeks, he paid attention. Even though I know he thinks it’s a bunch of nonsense.
And for some reason, I think of my childhood television. Growing up, we only owned one, which was embarrassing enough in the nineties, when all of my friends had at least two or three, but even more so because it wasn’t even a new one. It was one of those old huge wood console boxes from the seventies that we inherited from my grandmother. Worse still, sometimes the picture would get fuzzy or go out altogether, or the sound would just vanish and you had to bang on the top and side of it with your fist to rattle whatever was loose just enough to get it to work again.
As I stare at my husband, it occurs to me that marriage is a lot like that TV. The connection gets loose sometimes—even to the point where you think it might not work anymore—but then something jars it and the wires slip back into place, exactly where they belong, lighting up the screen and bringing back the sound; everything working as it should.