The Sheltering: A Novel

PART NINE�������������������������������������������

PART NINE 267 LUCY’S DREAMS FELT MORE LIKE POSSIBILITIES than lives she had lived. It swallowed the funeral and everything that followed: the realness of her inner life outstripping reality, as if sleep—and she slept so well now, God, how deeply she could sink—had woken some long dormant section of her brain. She thought her father responsible. His kitchen table presence. What might he have told her if only she had sat still? That believing in God doesn’t mean God will believe in you? That maybe the entire concept of belief was beside the point? She could no longer recall what it was that she needed so desperately to read to him. She could barely recall her mother and sister barreling through the house, throwing open the cabinets and closets. The dreams swallowed everything. The morning of the funeral she dreamed of Katie’s birth, which she could not possibly remember, but somehow did. To some extent it had always been this way: Lucy dreaming memories that did not exist yet feeling them—swearing them—real. Or at least she had at one point. But what was indulged smilingly at five and six was dismissed at eight and nine and never raised again beyond a single slip when Lucy was thirteen. Madness. Pure fabrications, her mother called them then, as if their very existence threatened her physical self. Utter lies. Why do you want to sit there and lie, honey? So could she call them dreams? It didn’t matter. She learned to keep her mouth shut, and with her silence went the fabrications, the utter lies evaporated from the shallow pool of her imagination, atrophied into dust. But now she was dreaming again. The morning Katie was born, Lucy was alone with her Grandpa, her mother’s father having bought Lucy a microscope as compensation for no longer being the only child. Her parents were at the hospital—Katie had come screaming into the world some hours earlier—and she supposed her Grandma was there too. Lucy and her Grandpa sat on the carpeted floor of the dining room they never used with its heavy-legged table and chairs and bay windows that overlooked the dead lawn and blistered street. Her Grandpa pricked his finger so that Lucy could examine the smear of blood left on a glass slide. This was a lesson. There was a way to touch the microscope, a way to see. There were parts: the stage with stage clips, 268 the coarse and fine focus, the rack stop and arm and turret. Later, her Grandma came in and sat cross-legged in her mauve pants and baggy knit sweater—the sweater was the same tan as beach sand: if this wasn’t real how on earth would I come up with such a detail, mother?—the jangly necklace that looped twice, twinned strands of amber glass, tinkling when she bent forward to touch the eyepiece . Red and white blood cells, platelets, plasma. Should she have been writing this down? Could she even write then?—no, of course, not, you were barely two, Lucy. Later, her Papa, her father’s father, came in from smoking Winstons on the concrete carport and she let him pull her up into his hard arms and onto his back where he horsied her around the house. But of course he didn’t. Her Papa—how was it that he even had a name?—had died before her own birth. Nevertheless: she remembered moments with him, moments which were impossible but she felt certain had happened nonetheless. So it was a construction, she told herself, a backwards projection. All the stories she’d heard, the details of his Vitalis-rich hair and nicotine fingers. The winter chimney of his lungs. The slash pines rowcropped along the highway that led to his house. He took an interest in her dead pets. A.J., the blind husky that wandered into traffic. The kittens lost before they were weaned. That day they read the Frog and Toad stories she loved, and then walked through the cypress and black gum behind his house: it was early evening and the sun looked caught in the trees, orange and netted and slowly being drawn to earth. She even remembered his funeral, the somber days leading up to it, inclined in his bed, the sun washed gray in the clouds. The sharp...