To the Coast

My daughter Penny woke up in the middle of the night, complaining that she was having other people’s dreams. “How do you know?” I asked her silhouette in the doorway. She came through the dark to the bedside, slipped against the heat of my thighs. “I just know,” she said, yawning, and then added, “And the people talk funny in them.” “Funny how?” “Like you and Oma on the phone.” Strange dream, I thought, pressing the parenthesis of her body into mine, quieting her, letting our tired bodies tug us back to sleep. Dozing off, I wondered briefly what these people had said in Dutch. “What was the dream about?” I whispered, not expecting an answer. She’s fallen asleep, I thought, the dream has already washed away. But Penny let out a sigh and told me this stranger’s dream. “There was a road,” she said, “red dirt. And bicycles. A girl and her mom were riding them.” Startled, I listened as she described a dream I once had as a child. “It was windy, and the bicycles went backwards instead of forwards.” Her body shifted, already closing back into slumber. “Whose dream do you think it was?” she asked in half-sleep, her lungs ballooning in her chest. Mine, I knew, a terrible dream from long ago, when Ma and I made that trip across Holland on our bicycles. Every day we rode toward the coast; every night I rewound our progress in my dream and watched us go backward. In this dream the wind pushed us hard, and we couldn’t resist traveling kilometers in reverse. When morning came, I awoke disoriented with the sun in my lap. And Ma and I began again, pedaling in the right direction, out of the path of war. I hadn’t thought of this nightmare, the German occupation or our bicycle trip, in more than thirty years. Now Penny was dreaming of red dirt, and I remembered how Ma and I rode on county roads, across the shadows of clouds. I could hear the clink of gears, the shuffle of wild grasses, the way we exhaled. Our calf muscles went taut and our lips cracked. We took breaks to eat tangerines that Ma broke in with her thumb. I could see Ma on her bicycle in front of me, the shape of her, the hem of her dress floating on the wind and making cursive letters. At night, we stopped exhausted, crawling into each other. Ma held me beside our bicycles, as I held Penny now, and I fell asleep to the smell of her sweat and the black soil below us. Sometimes, when I dreamt of us going backward, Ma shook me awake and spoke to me about the wind, whispering that she could taste the sea salt on her tongue, that soon we would make it to the coast.