(Winter 2010)

When I was a doctoral candidate in the second year of my PhD program, I worked for a semester on a project called Writers in the Schools. Once a week, I drove from Denver to Boulder to teach poetry to little children at a Montessori school. It was sweet work, and the commute was stunning: blue skies and jagged white peaks. Along the way, I stopped to pick up a colleague who was teaching at the same school. We drank coffee, played music, and gossiped as the sunshine played off the mountains.

One morning, my friend was late coming out of her building. I fiddled with the radio until she appeared on the threshold, visibly flustered, her hair in disarray.

She swept into the car like a bluster. “I’m sorry I’m late,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep last night, and when I did, I had terrible dreams.” And she went on to recount a series of dreams about strangers in her living room, a shared bathroom, and a woman handling her toiletries.

She said, “It was like my worst nightmare.”

This didn’t sound that bad to me.

“In my worst nightmare,” I said, “I am in the woods with a friend. We are running from something we can’t see. Someone or something is chasing us, and we are running together, but then my friend falls to the ground. When I turn around, she is no longer there. She has fallen into a crevice in the earth or stumbled into the water.”

The woman beside me was silent and looked down at her hands. I continued, recklessly filling the silence with my words. 

“It’s a recurring dream, always the same. I know she has died, and her body is underwater. Then her mother comes looking for her. I see her searching through the trees, calling for her daughter. I know I should tell her what happened, but it feels like my mouth is sewn shut. I can’t speak. I can’t make a sound.”

Light spilled quietly into the car. My colleague wouldn’t meet my eye. 

“Then I wake up,” I said dumbly. 

A heavy silence settled between us as I shifted into first gear and put the car into drive. I sensed I had said something wrong.

We drove the residential streets in silence. When we got to the highway, I turned on the music, and we drove the rest of the way to Boulder as if nothing had happened.

(July 2012)

“Something is coming.” The connection was unstable, and there was an edge in Cher’s voice, an urgency I had not heard before. “Something big is coming, and you need protection.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You must bring me three things: $2200 cash, $400 in quarters, and a clean white sheet.”

“What’s coming?”

“Gather these things. Bring them tomorrow.”

“I have a white sheet, but—”

“No, a CLEAN white sheet,” Cher was impatient. “New. Untouched. A clean, flat white sheet.”

“But—”

“Do you understand?”

“Yes, I think so, but—”

“Good,” she said. “I will see you tomorrow. Come in the afternoon. At 4:00.”

“What’s coming?” I asked again, but she had already hung up the phone.

The safety deposit box was in the basement of an old marble bank in Brooklyn Heights. The banker led me to a small, private room where I opened the safe deposit box—there was the cash, no longer banded together but instead lying in flat, white envelopes. I took two of the envelopes, put them my tote bag, and closed the rest of the money back in the box. Then I rang for the banker, who returned the box to the empty hole in the wall.

I then walked five blocks to another bank where I bought forty rolls of quarters. They were heavy. Twenty pounds of dead weight that pulled on my thin shoulders.

Then I walked to the Fulton Street mall, where I stood in the linen aisles of a TJMaxx store that was sunken below street level. I shivered in the fluorescent light, surveying the sheets for what felt like an eternity. There were dozens of packages to choose from, and time had slowed to a dull lull. Twin, Full, Queen. 100% cotton, blends, and thread counts. I stared at the wall of bedsheets, some with tiny floral patterns, others bright pink. All mashed together. I didn’t know which package to buy. I pulled a few off the shelves to compare the prices. I had a queen-sized bed, so I was shopping for a queen-size set, but I didn’t know what the sheet was for. I didn’t know if it would be destroyed. I kept looking at the prices, but the numbers seemed to be spinning in circles. Nothing was fixed. The lights above hummed and buzzed. The walls seemed to be breathing darkly. Tears seeped from the corners of my eyes—like pools of rainwater that can’t permeate the saturated earth. My vision was muddy, confused.

The phone rang in my bag.

“You’re late,” Cher said when I answered. 

“I don’t know which sheet to buy.”

“Hurry,” she said, “We don’t have much time.”

Cher’s ofisa was a tiny and efficient storefront. The front room, where she conducted readings, was just big enough for two king chairs and a little side table that displayed her cards and crystal ball. The walls were sponge-painted gold. There were floating shelves for her crystals and candles and spiritual baths, and an astrological wheel of the year—made out of plaster and spray-painted silver and gold—hung from a metal cord. The room was always cold as an icebox and spotlessly clean.

“Do you have everything?” Cher asked. I nodded as she opened an interior door and led me into a living room so small that the furniture seemed to be in miniature: a tiny leather couch, a narrow glass table, and six diminutive chairs. It was quiet and solemn.

I reached into the tote bag and pulled out the sheets.

Cher moved quickly. My eyes darted around the room as she opened the package, removed the flat white sheet, and spread it neatly on the floor. In the back of the room was a kitchenette with a mini-fridge, a sink, and a hot plate. Makeshift steps led up to a loft space. It was silent. Alfie and the kids were nowhere to be seen. Cher and I were alone with the ritual.

“Give me the quarters,” she said.

My hands clawed in the bag. Cher took the quarters and began breaking open the paper rolls. The coins rang against each other as they fell in silver piles on the white sheet on the floor.

“And the money?”

I reached into the bag and pulled out an envelope full of hundred-dollar bills.

“Sit,” Cher gestured to the floor.

I sat cross-legged on the white sheet, holding the money.

“Now,” she said, “Something is coming. Something big is coming. We must protect you.”

“What is it?” I was afraid. “What’s coming?” 

“Don’t worry about what it is. The important thing is that I am going to build a barrier around you that no harm can get through.” Cher was speaking quickly and with grave authority. “We must build a silver shield of protection around you,” she said mysteriously. “Now, the money you hold in your hands—you are to say a prayer, make a wish, and then blow on it three times.”

I closed my eyes and shivered. “I’m cold,” I said.

“Concentrate, Sweetie. Focus.”

I held the money in my hands. I wasn’t entirely sure how to pray, but I wished for freedom, for protection—whatever that was.  When I opened my eyes, I saw Cher’s open palm extended towards me.

I handed the money to her, and she swiftly tucked the envelopes away.

“Now lie down,” Cher instructed, gesturing to the sheet on the floor.

“Do I have to be naked?” I was afraid.

Cher laughed, “Of course not, Sweetie.”

I lay on the floor, trembling, with my arms open like wings. “Can you turn off the air conditioning, please?”

Cher thought for a minute, then reached for the remote. The rumble of cold air stopped blowing. I lay on the floor and closed my eyes.

Cher was moving around me, above me. I could hear the quarters clinking and clattering against each other. She worked quickly, praying over me first in English—“In Jesus’ name, protect this woman”—and then in a language I did not understand. I lay perfectly still and breathed deeply into my prayer. What happened next is clouded as if I was sinking through the floor, back through space and time, forward into an unknown future. I passed through the door that opens in deep meditation into a place beyond thought, beyond dreams —a place of stillness, where everything is a unified field of light. When I close my eyes, I can still vaguely access that place, see the white light within me, and feel my back pressing into the plush carpeting. 

When I opened my eyes, Cher’s face hovered over me, her eyes placid and serene, her dark hair hung like a veil, crowned in a halo of light. She looked so peaceful, so gentle, so pure.

“You look like an angel,” I said.

She took my hand, helped me to my feet, and gestured to the floor, where a halo of quarters radiated outward around the shape of my body. Cher had arranged the quarters around me in gleaming, concentric rings like a silver snow angel. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

“You also have the angel inside you,” she said.

I was overwhelmed. How could I have any recourse with the angels? Just below the surface of my pleasant personality was the abiding knowledge that I was bad, broken, evil. As Cher swept the quarters up, bundled them into the sheet, I began to cry.

“You too can be an angel,” Cher said again. “But there’s a lot of work you need to do. This week, you need to go back to the Philadelphia house.”

“I don’t want to go back there,” I said.

“I understand that,” she said. “But you don’t need to be afraid. You are protected. Now listen to me. This is important: spirit tells me there is something else in the house that you need to find. Now, let me ask you this: Is your mother home there now?”

“No,” I said. “She is still at the lake.”

“Good,” Cher said. “Then it’s time. You need to go back to Philadelphia. Spirit tells me there is something important that you need to retrieve from that house, something from your childhood.” 

“What is it?” I asked.

“You’ll know it when you see,” Cher said cryptically. 

Then she opened the door and turned me out onto the street. It was midsummer. The streets were alive with young people, lovers, and mothers, pushing young children in carriages.

I stepped into the throng of the world and felt I was protected as I was swept up and carried home on the golden tide of humanity.

***

Three days later, I was preparing to make the trip. At Cher’s instruction, I was to return to my mother’s house, to the house I grew up in, to search for clues hidden in the attic, the basement, between the walls. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but Cher insisted that something was there, and it was my job to find it.

I packed only the necessities. I needed a key and a headlamp. I needed a change of clothes and I needed a plan. Where would I look first? In the attic, certainly. The attic wasn’t really an attic—but a secret room hidden behind a mirror over a dressing table in the master bedroom. I would look in the old trunk in the basement—and in the eaves. I would look in the coffee cans in the garage. I made a mental map. I knew where I was going and what I was going to do when I got there. I was high on revelations and expectations, and I was exhausted. It was early evening when I lay down to rest for a moment, and the sun was still in the sky.

At midnight, I was wrenched from a dream to the sound of an alarm. It was dark and, for a moment, I didn’t know where I was—but I had been there before, lived there for years in the space between asleep and awake, in the shadow of a recurring dream that had haunted me since adolescence.

This, my worst nightmare.

In the dream, I was running from something. I was with a friend, and I did’t know from whom or what we were running from, but we are very afraid. We were running through the woods, an ugly place, alive only with danger.  And then something bad happened. My friend tripped and fell down, mauled by the dark force that pursued us as I run ahead. Her body is swallowed by dark, lapping waters. Always I tried to swim down to save her, but she is no longer herself. In the dream, her death is an accident, and it is always my fault—and her mother is searching, calling through the darkness for her daughter— like an alarm.

I know where she is buried, but I can’t speak, and her mother keeps searching, calling her daughter’s name into the void.

The alarm split through my dark apartment and pulled me out of the dream. I tried to turn off the alarm, but it wasn’t coming from my phone. It wasn’t the smoke detector or the car alarm or a passing siren. It was a low, incessant tone that cut through the whole neighborhood, permeating everything.

I closed my eyes and clamped my hands over my ears, but the alarm wouldn’t stop, and, for the first time, I knew. My nightmare wasn’t a dream; it was a memory.

Shaking, I put on my clothes and went down to the street. The sky was red dark, and the streetlights were on, and the alarm droned through the whole neighborhood: a low, moaning siren. Was there a bomb? A flood? I ran back inside and closed all the windows. The glass dampened but did not block out the sound of alarm.

In my experience, the recovery of a repressed memory is not total revelation but more the acquisition of language. I suddenly had words for a feeling I had never spoken before. I pieced together images that had been haunting me for years, and they crystallized into a narrative. All at once, I found words for the secret I had been keeping—from myself.

I called Cher. I knew what I wanted to say, but when she answered the phone I couldn’t get the words out. I was crying too hard.

“Are you there, Sweetie?”
But I was choking, sobbing, and gasping for air.

Now Cher was alarmed. “What is it?”

Finally I managed to say it. “He killed her,” I gasped. “My father killed her.”

“Killed who?” Cher’s voice was high and tense. “What are you talking about?”

But I couldn’t get out the words.

Cher was pragmatic and had a maternal solution for everything. She told me, “Take a deep breath. Meditate. Drink a glass of water. Fix myself something to eat, even if it’s just dry white toast. Take a hot shower. Get some rest and come see me tomorrow.”

I don’t know how I got through that night or through that week or how I had lived my whole life to that point, but suddenly all the pieces fit together, and everything made terrible sense.

***

I was sitting in Cher’s ofisa when I found words, pieced together the flashes of dreams and nightmares and memories, and assembled them into a story:

“Something happened the summer I was eleven years old,” I said. “My father and I went for a drive. I can still remember the roads he used drove me on as a child as if part of me was always tracking a way back. But that day, he took my somewhere I’d never been before. Maybe there was a playground or a park. Maybe we played together. Then he asked if we wanted ice cream, and she got in the car. I don’t know exactly what happened next—but later when we were back home, he was hiding something in the back bedroom of the cabin next-door. I remember him locking the door. And then I remember maybe burying something in the woods or carrying something. I don’t know, but he said, “Look what you did, Neine. Look what you made me do.”

“He killed her,” My eyes were fixed on the crystal ball. I was rocking back and forth, inconsolable. “He killed her. I think he killed her.”

“You don’t know that for sure,” Cher advised calmly. I glared at her. “I know what happened.”

“Sweetie, you don’t for sure know what happened, and you have to stop blaming yourself,” she advised. “Whatever happened, it wasn’t your fault. You was a child.”

“We didn’t have a phone in the house,” I gasped. “There was a pay phone in the park, and I lay in bed for a week, imagining how I would get up in the middle of the night, sneak out the front door, run to the park, and call the police. But I was afraid of what would happen if he caught me. I just imagined it over and over, but I never made the call. All these years, I never said anything, never did anything.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong. You was a child and you did as you was told.”

“But I knew,” I said. “I knew it was wrong.”

“No one ever taught you right from wrong,” Cher said firmly and with compassion.

“But I’m grown now,” I sobbed. “I know now.”

“You’re still learning,” she corrected me. “That’s my job: to teach you your rights from your wrongs.”

“I have to call to the police,” I said. “I have to call the police now.”

“No,” Cher shook her head slowly.

I took my phone out of my pocket. “I have to call the police now.”

“You’re not making sense,” Cher said.

I started to dial, and Cher gently took the phone out of my hands.

“You can’t do that,” she said.

“I have to tell what happened. Her mother—” my voice cracked. “Her mother is looking for her. I have to tell what happened. Her mother needs to know.”

“Her mother already knows,” Cher said softly, releasing my hand. She placed my phone face down on the table and covered it with her palm. “Her mother already knows in her heart. A mother always knows.”

“I have to tell what happened,” I said.

“You can’t do that,” Cher said. “If you do, who do you think they’ll blame?” Cher raised an eyebrow and looked at me hard.

“It doesn’t matter. I have to do the right thing. I have to tell.”

“Telling now won’t solve nothing,” Cher’s voice was cold and firm. “If you call the police, best case, they won’t believe you. Worst case, they come after you. They’ll blame you. Who else is there to blame? You won’t help nobody by coming forward now. You won’t help her family, won’t give them peace. You’ll just make problems for yourself.”

I buried my head in my hands.

“Trust me,” she said. “You are protected, remember? Do as I say, and everything will be fine.”

I was no longer a child, but I’d been following orders my whole life, and I am ashamed to admit I obeyed.

When I told Marream the story, she didn’t exactly believe me. She didn’t not believe me—but she did have questions. She wanted me to slow down. She wanted details and dates. So I slowed down, tried to give her what she wanted. It was 1993. It would have been late July or early August. Upstate New York. The summer I was eleven years old. Something bad happened. How I could explain it? My father took me somewhere. I made a friend. He took us out for ice cream. He took her for a ride, and she went home.

Marream had a lot of questions, “Where were you?”

“At the lake,” I said, “But he took me somewhere I’d never been. We went for a drive.”

To blow the stink off—that’s what he called it when he went out for a drive. Sometimes, only sometimes, he took me with him to the bank, to the bookstore, to a boat show, for a long, long ride down a tree-lined highway.

“Where did you go?”

“It was a place I’d never been before,” I said. “Maybe it was a park? Maybe I made a friend on the playground, and he took us out for ice cream. And then,” I said. “And then.” My heart was in my throat. I couldn’t breathe. The images came in flashes. “Then he locked her in the bedroom next door.”

“Of the lake house?”

“Yes,” I said. Then I said, “No. It was the old camp next door. There were five little cabins in a row, and my grandparents owned them all. And the fifth cottage was unfinished. Under renovations. No one was living there.”

I knew the answers to her questions—but I couldn’t bear to say the words out loud. My body was clenched in a scream.

“How old was she?” Marream asked.

“I was eleven,” I said.

“But how old was she?” she pressed.

“I don’t remember. About the same age? A little younger or a little older. I don’t know. She was a child.”

Marream opened her laptop and began googling dates and places and missing children.

“I already did that,” I said rocking back and forth, between convulsions. “I couldn’t find anything.”

Marream wanted to try again.
“If a child went missing,” she said, “It would be in the news.”

“It was a long time ago,” I said. “Before the internet. I don’t know how far back the records go.”

“If a little white girl went missing, it would be in the newspaper.”

“What if she wasn’t white?” I asked. “What if she were native? Or her parents didn’t have papers?” I asked. “Would they have called the police? And if they did, would the police have taken it seriously? Would it have been reported in the papers?”

“I don’t know,” Marream admitted. “But when a child goes missing, there’s a record.

“I need to lie down,” I said but couldn’t move from my chair.

Marream frowned and turned back to the computer.

“He killed her,” I said, clutching my knees.

“What if it happened a different way?” Marream asked solemnly. “It may be that he killed you. It may be that he did something so bad to you that he killed something inside you. I’ve read about things like that happening. Something so bad happens that a part of your mind splinters or separates or disassociates, and it becomes a separate being. Maybe he didn’t kill another child —maybe what you’re remembering is that he killed a part of you.”

Marream touched my back as a rocked back and forth.

“He killed her,” I whispered between convulsions. “He killed her.”

“For something like this,” she said, “we need to find some kind of proof.” Marream was looking for facts and alternate explanations, which I could understand. I too wanted it not to be true. I too wanted corroboration, but more than that, I wanted to be heard. I had just found words for something I’d been repressing for so long, and now I was confessing my truth.

Eventually, I lay down on the bed and stared blankly at the wall until Marream turned out the lights.

When I awoke, it was light, and Marream was perched at the foot of the bed. She regarded me with gravity, and her face was drawn into a frown.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“You were crying out in your sleep,” she said. “What was I saying?”

“I don’t know,” she hesitated. A lot of things. It sounded like you were running, like you were trying to get away from something. I think,” she said sadly and shaking her head, “that there must be some truth in your dream.”

Marream didn’t necessarily believe the words that were coming out of my mouth, but she could tell I was wrestling with a very dark force.

“I don’t know what exactly happened,” she said. “But there’s something happened. Something very bad must have happened. The body cannot lie.”