INSOMNIA by Amy Lane
Grace developed a line, that summer. Every body has lines—shoulders, hips, nose, hair, etc., but it takes true sensuality to develop a line. A flowing, a moment of body and function, blending together. An innocent visual suggestion of animal, and tenderness, and that elusive idea of sex that is not pornographic but essential to all complete beings. Most teenagers have aline--it blooms along their skin with hormones, and too much skin oil, and mating urges that rival minks in heat.
But Grace was not a teenager. She had been married for fifteen years, and had two children. She worked hard on her husband’s property in that time, while he drove a truck. She had calluses on her hands and feet, wrinkles in the corners of her eyes, too many freckles, too many stretch marks, and too many pounds to fit on her too tall frame. She was well beyond the age of developing a line, but one appeared anyway. It wrote itself on her body when she stopped sleeping at night.
People noticed. The man at the checkout told her she looked fabulous—she laughed. “I’m not sleeping at night.” She told him, “I feel like death.” But the man was right—she did look fabulous.
As the summer progressed, her answers got longer, more distracted, more full of odd, moony details that were both entrancing and irritating in their completeness.
“I’m not sleeping at night,” she told the lady at the library over a pile of books, “I think it’s the heat.” It was, indeed, hot in Wheatland during the summer—120 in the shade, often enough. There was precious little shade on the burnt blonde acreage that made up the rural town. But she was a hard working woman—instant unconsciousness at the end of the day had never been a problem, until now.
“I’m not sleeping at all” She told the teenager loading hay for her at the feed store, “It’s been hot, and I’ve been reading these fantastic books that I adore… have you ever read the Anita Blake vampire mysteries? They’re wonderful…” And she launched into a monologue that would have convinced the young man to read in a heartbeat, if he hadn’t been too busy gaping at the single line that separated neck from collarbone to cleavage. She prattled on, oblivious, even when he gave her bottom a squeeze. She beamed at him sunnily, laughed that he was being very flattering to an old woman, and then went on her merry way.
“I can’t hardly sleep!” She told the woman who had butchered her hair for nearly ten years. “It’s been so hot, and I’ve been reading these fabulous books, but I just can’t seem to put them down, and when I do they whirl around and around my head, and then I dream of vampires. But it’s more than that…” She trailed off and looked in the mirror, mildly surprised at how good her usual Dorothy Hamill cut looked this month, but then continued on…
…to the man who came out to fix her tractor, “I heard that Mars and Venus are in this really strange alignment, and even though I never really believed in astrology before, it’s like they’re fighting and pulsing, and there’s this terrible war between aggression and love and it’s beating in my brain and pounding through my body…” the man watched her, mesmerized, imagining himself pounding through her stocky, raw-boned body, and nodded happily at her. Grace didn’t notice, but continued prattling on. The tractor man copped a feel, but she thought he stumbled on a patch of horse shit, so he drove away from her spread bemused and in love and hard as a rock.
Her girls were eleven and thirteen, so they were often at friends’ when they weren’t doing chores. What they noticed was the mound of quilts and afghans and sweaters and shirts that issued forth from her sewing machine and busy hands. They would wander into the house on a sleepy afternoon, and she would begin to chatter as though they never left…
“I finished that quilt I started for you last week, remember we picked out the colors together a couple of months ago and I has some extra cotton left over so I made one of those little half-shirts that you’re always wearing, I hope it fits—did you try it on yet? I also finished that sweater—such a quick pattern, I never would have guessed it would only take three days, so what did you think? Your sister has one like it but it’s in a different color, so maybe you can both wear them without being tooembarrassed, and I finished them off professionally, just like the ones in the Vogue magazine—I think they’re selling them at Macy’s this fall, for, like, two-hundred dollars…” And so on. Gretchen, the younger girl, didn’t care for clothes that much, but she loved the blankets, and mom picked such nice colors, so she traded with Marcy, the older one, who would wear her little sister’s clothes to show off her budding breasts. They were both content with the shower of sleep-deprived love that dumped itself on their beds every week or so. Otherwise, besides the sound of the sewing machine and vacuum cleaner buzzing through the house at two a.m., there was little enough for girls that age to notice.
Her husband noticed. She would be awake when he came home, whirring away, and the line of her jaw as she concentrated entranced him. Without speaking he would paw her, kissing her neck and fondling her sensitive parts until she turned to him indulgently and allowed him to do as he would. She was an active participant—they had been married for fifteen years, after all, and were still in love. However, the part that tantalized, and aroused him the most, the part that made the moonlit groans, the slapping flesh and animal noises lovely and erotic was the part of her that was missing, watching from somewhere outside of her and laughing tolerantly at his lack of finesse.
And then, when he had spent himself and was dozing beside her, spread-eagled and vulnerable, she would try to talk to him about why she was up at 2:00 a.m. in the morning.
“It’s just that Mars is aggressive and I feel so aggressive, I’m crafting aggressively, you know—with a vengeance, forcing all this business and this love on everybody so that it sits in their house and collects dust and maybe gets used and maybe gets destroyed but it doesn’t matter because the love is there, and it’s draining from my body, but maybe if I put it out into the Universe, you know, it will come flooding back and live on after me, but no, that’s like vampires, and they’re not real at all, but they’re sensual too, and Venus is out there, and it’s all sort of a muddle…”
Her husband would eventually begin to snore, and she’d be left, staring fitfully into a blank darkness that was peppered with floral valances and painstakingly intricate quilts. She wanted to make love again. She wanted to go walking in the quiet midnight of the parched country. She wanted to go skinny dipping in the nearby lake. She wanted… something. Her head hurt and her eyes burned, and her breath caught, and she knew she would not sleep again this night. With a little sigh, and a kiss on her husband’s cheek, she would dress in shorts and an oversized t-shirt to go sit on the couch and crochet, or knit, or cross-stitch. She watched old movies, and fell asleep right when the first rays of direct sunlight sheared through her curtains and the air-conditioner clicked on once again. When her daughters came out for breakfast, they found her fast asleep on the couch, but it was her pattern these days and they thought very little of it. When her husband left, he would kiss the suddenly enticing line of her neck, or her arm as it stretched above her, or the curiously sexy curve of her ear, and she would smile in her sleep, and murmur good-bye.
On one such night at the beginning of August, instead of returning to her crafting, she actually did venture outside. She wandered restlessly, and finally found herself leaning on the fence railing, staring at the moon with saucer eyes, telling the horses why it was she couldn’t sleep. “It’s just that my children are growing up before my eyes, and they don’t need me so much anymore, and I feel like my lifeblood has been drained from my body and left me dry as a husk and I need something, anything to fill it. It’s just that life is so short, and while I’m looking for the cosmic pitcher to pour and fill the empty places I don’t want to waste my time sleeping because there’s just not life to waste it like that… but that doesn’t work either…” She trailed off there. Stopped speaking, abruptly, felt her eyes grow bright, and a lump form in her throat.
“And the whole time,” she whispered, “Life just goes faster and faster and it pulls away from you and you wonder who it’s feeding… are my girls going to grow up better because I’m spending my life on them? Will my husband wake up feeling drenched in my life and thrilled to be on the planet? It would be so much easier to spend my life if I knew it were going somewhere, and not just pooling around my feet in a red sticky mess that will draw flies and smell bad. And even now, it feels like life has just slipped away, and I’m a bone dry shell, still thirsty for more life, and none is ever coming…” She began to cry in earnest then, and her shoulders shook and she fell to a heap on the sparse grass outside the horse pen. She sobbed for what felt like hours, and finally fell asleep, crumpled like sodden clothing on the ground.
Her husband found her there at ten o’clock in the morning, and had to shake her—hard—in order to wake her up. She blinked at him muzzily, and he stepped back for a moment, looking shaken.
“What’s wrong?” She asked, still trying to focus on his familiar, bleary face.
He shook his head, and stepped forward to help her up. “You’ve really got to get some sleep, hon.” He said after a moment, “Your eyes are well… red.”
She laughed a little tipsily… “Oh, sweetie—my eyes have been red for two months.”
He kissed her cheek, wrapped his arm around her waist, guided her back to the house. “Not like this, Gracie… they looked, well, they looked like a flash picture, or that blue-eyed cat we had whose eyes got red in the light—you know, Stop-light glowing red.”
She giggled then, looked up at him, her smile almost drunken. “Maybe I’m a vampire…”
He laughed then, took her back to her bed, and undressed her. She sat like a child and he put a clean t-shirt over her head, lay her down and pulled up the sheet only, because in spite of the air conditioner, it was still going to be hot. “Good night, Gracie.” He murmured, “Don’t sleep all day.”
She giggled softly to herself, and he left.
After that, her sleep patterns were completely reversed. She would wake around 4p.m., cook, clean, talk, work, take care of the children, care of the horses, care of the dogs, care of the cats, care of the chickens, care of the children again, and then craft and clean and craft some more until eight in the morning, and begin it all over again. Her eyes still glowed redly, and the satin line of her body continued to draw and entice, but her depression was gone.
When her husband came home at 2:00 a.m., she would attack him, rapaciously, pulling at him again and again until he was drained and comatose, and then, while he slept, she would use suddenly slender hands and strong fingers to finish herself off. She was still exhausted, still not sleeping, but she was energized, glowing, practically shimmering with a combination of sex and night. She knew things, people felt when they looked at her. She delved and knew for her own a part of the cycle of sunshine and moon that they could never have. For the tail end of the summer she became one of those people that made you tired, just to be around. She was energetic, and passionate, and she was exhausting. For a month or so, she literally sucked the life out of everyone she came in contact with. In a strange way, they were happy for the favor.
The librarian, after enduring an energetic whirlwind through the library in which Grace dropped off ten and checked out fifteen books, fell instantly asleep as soon as she left. She dreamt erotically of pirates and deserted beaches.
The man in the checkout line rung up her groceries in a daze, left for home early that day, and thoroughly ravished his wife when he got there. He then fell asleep until the next morning.
The boy at the feed store didn’t have as much self control as the checkout man. He was young. After staring, dry-mouthed, at that lovely line of breast to back to hip, while she chattered at him about vampires some more, she touched his arm in a friendly way, and he turned and fled behind the store. His boss found the him asleep on a pile of hay with his pants around his ankles. The boy was fired, but it was only a summer job.
The lady who butchered her hair caught a glimpse at the clean line from jaw to ear to cheekbone, and was inspired to actually cut her hair well. Grace was astounded, and tipped generously. The hair dresser spent the money on lotion, and massage oil, and stumbled to work for the next week, red-eyed and smelling of perfume that penetrated every crevice of her body.
The man who fixed her tractor couldn’t help himself. He stumbled one more time, fell against her, felt the line of flank to buttocks against his groin, and spent himself automatically, falling to his knees as Grace recovered from being off balance. He fell asleep on the road as he drove away from her property, and gracefully sailed his pick-up truck into a tree. He had only cuts and bruises, with a bump on his head, but he slept for the next two days.
Grace noticed none of this. She slept less and less at night, but during the day, she was dead to the world. One day Gretchen started a fire in the kitchen, trying to cook eggs, and Grace didn’t even wake up when the firemen came to the house. Her husband took her to a doctor then, who ran chemical test and brain tumor tests and drug tests, but she tested negative for everything. She endured it all, and the near frantic worry of her husband, with indulgence, and optimism.
“It will end soon.” She said, certain, dreamy. “I’ll sleep well soon enough… I mean we all sleep in the end, don’t we?” Her husband began to panic. He took a week off work, to watch over Grace and the girls. The girls, who had paid little enough attention to their mother all summer, suddenly found something ominous in all of the gifts she had made them while they’d been gone.
“It’s like… she’s saying…” Gretchen began, the night right after the fire, at the beginning of September.
“Don’t say it.” Marcy said fiercely. “I don’t want to hear it. Mom loves us.”
Gretchen was surprised. “Of course she loves us. I didn’t say she doesn’t. But, it’s like cancer or something. Sometimes things take over a person’s life, and they have to leave. It doesn’t mean they don’t love you. It just means they’re…”
“Gone.” Marcy whispered. They had both cried then, and both of them had snuck into the living room where their mother sat crocheting and watching The Lost Boys. They climbed onto the couch with her, and she had, in a rare gesture, put down her crocheting and wrapped her arms around them like she hadn’t done since they were little. They watched movies into the depths of the night, and fell asleep leaning together in a huddle. Her husband woke up and found them like that, felt a little relieved that maybe it was over, and had taken a snap-shot of them, all curled up on the couch like that.
Two days before Grace disappeared he took the pictures in to be developed, and forgot about them until the morning she was gone. He woke up that early September morning with her smell on his skin, and her nightgown and panties in the bed next to him, as though her body had simply passed through them. Not even her clothes were gone. Her knitting, which she never left home without, was in its regular corner by the couch, and her half-finished sewing was on the ironing board in the kitchen. All the things in the house that screamed mother, wife, and lover were still there, but Grace was gone. They couldn’t even find her footprints leading away from the house in the soft gray dust of the driveway.
When her husband got the pictures back, a week after he woke up and found her gone, he noticed to his confusion and hurt, that only the girls showed up in the shot. Grace’s form was blurred, although she was asleep when the shutter snapped, hazy to the point of transparency; a bright spot on the film without a body.
Gretchen and Marcy dreamed of her after that, once or twice a week for the rest of their lives. She was in their dreams for the first day of school, for their first date, for their first sex, and their first love, as well as for every day things, like bad Algebra tests and grumpy teachers. She told them to wear a sweater, eat more vegetables, talk to their father, and clean their rooms. She told them to use birth control, and how to burp their children, and how to sew hems in their pants. She was there for everything, in their dreams. After the first couple of dreams Gretchen got used to the idea that this really was her mother, and she asked Grace why she had to leave.
“I love you honey.” Grace not-answered, her eyes glowing. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” And then she smiled, flashing newly-capped teeth. Gretchen awoke with a fluttery vision of deep black night, and stars of infinite wisdom shining through her window.
But Grace was not a teenager. She had been married for fifteen years, and had two children. She worked hard on her husband’s property in that time, while he drove a truck. She had calluses on her hands and feet, wrinkles in the corners of her eyes, too many freckles, too many stretch marks, and too many pounds to fit on her too tall frame. She was well beyond the age of developing a line, but one appeared anyway. It wrote itself on her body when she stopped sleeping at night.
People noticed. The man at the checkout told her she looked fabulous—she laughed. “I’m not sleeping at night.” She told him, “I feel like death.” But the man was right—she did look fabulous.
As the summer progressed, her answers got longer, more distracted, more full of odd, moony details that were both entrancing and irritating in their completeness.
“I’m not sleeping at night,” she told the lady at the library over a pile of books, “I think it’s the heat.” It was, indeed, hot in Wheatland during the summer—120 in the shade, often enough. There was precious little shade on the burnt blonde acreage that made up the rural town. But she was a hard working woman—instant unconsciousness at the end of the day had never been a problem, until now.
“I’m not sleeping at all” She told the teenager loading hay for her at the feed store, “It’s been hot, and I’ve been reading these fantastic books that I adore… have you ever read the Anita Blake vampire mysteries? They’re wonderful…” And she launched into a monologue that would have convinced the young man to read in a heartbeat, if he hadn’t been too busy gaping at the single line that separated neck from collarbone to cleavage. She prattled on, oblivious, even when he gave her bottom a squeeze. She beamed at him sunnily, laughed that he was being very flattering to an old woman, and then went on her merry way.
“I can’t hardly sleep!” She told the woman who had butchered her hair for nearly ten years. “It’s been so hot, and I’ve been reading these fabulous books, but I just can’t seem to put them down, and when I do they whirl around and around my head, and then I dream of vampires. But it’s more than that…” She trailed off and looked in the mirror, mildly surprised at how good her usual Dorothy Hamill cut looked this month, but then continued on…
…to the man who came out to fix her tractor, “I heard that Mars and Venus are in this really strange alignment, and even though I never really believed in astrology before, it’s like they’re fighting and pulsing, and there’s this terrible war between aggression and love and it’s beating in my brain and pounding through my body…” the man watched her, mesmerized, imagining himself pounding through her stocky, raw-boned body, and nodded happily at her. Grace didn’t notice, but continued prattling on. The tractor man copped a feel, but she thought he stumbled on a patch of horse shit, so he drove away from her spread bemused and in love and hard as a rock.
Her girls were eleven and thirteen, so they were often at friends’ when they weren’t doing chores. What they noticed was the mound of quilts and afghans and sweaters and shirts that issued forth from her sewing machine and busy hands. They would wander into the house on a sleepy afternoon, and she would begin to chatter as though they never left…
“I finished that quilt I started for you last week, remember we picked out the colors together a couple of months ago and I has some extra cotton left over so I made one of those little half-shirts that you’re always wearing, I hope it fits—did you try it on yet? I also finished that sweater—such a quick pattern, I never would have guessed it would only take three days, so what did you think? Your sister has one like it but it’s in a different color, so maybe you can both wear them without being tooembarrassed, and I finished them off professionally, just like the ones in the Vogue magazine—I think they’re selling them at Macy’s this fall, for, like, two-hundred dollars…” And so on. Gretchen, the younger girl, didn’t care for clothes that much, but she loved the blankets, and mom picked such nice colors, so she traded with Marcy, the older one, who would wear her little sister’s clothes to show off her budding breasts. They were both content with the shower of sleep-deprived love that dumped itself on their beds every week or so. Otherwise, besides the sound of the sewing machine and vacuum cleaner buzzing through the house at two a.m., there was little enough for girls that age to notice.
Her husband noticed. She would be awake when he came home, whirring away, and the line of her jaw as she concentrated entranced him. Without speaking he would paw her, kissing her neck and fondling her sensitive parts until she turned to him indulgently and allowed him to do as he would. She was an active participant—they had been married for fifteen years, after all, and were still in love. However, the part that tantalized, and aroused him the most, the part that made the moonlit groans, the slapping flesh and animal noises lovely and erotic was the part of her that was missing, watching from somewhere outside of her and laughing tolerantly at his lack of finesse.
And then, when he had spent himself and was dozing beside her, spread-eagled and vulnerable, she would try to talk to him about why she was up at 2:00 a.m. in the morning.
“It’s just that Mars is aggressive and I feel so aggressive, I’m crafting aggressively, you know—with a vengeance, forcing all this business and this love on everybody so that it sits in their house and collects dust and maybe gets used and maybe gets destroyed but it doesn’t matter because the love is there, and it’s draining from my body, but maybe if I put it out into the Universe, you know, it will come flooding back and live on after me, but no, that’s like vampires, and they’re not real at all, but they’re sensual too, and Venus is out there, and it’s all sort of a muddle…”
Her husband would eventually begin to snore, and she’d be left, staring fitfully into a blank darkness that was peppered with floral valances and painstakingly intricate quilts. She wanted to make love again. She wanted to go walking in the quiet midnight of the parched country. She wanted to go skinny dipping in the nearby lake. She wanted… something. Her head hurt and her eyes burned, and her breath caught, and she knew she would not sleep again this night. With a little sigh, and a kiss on her husband’s cheek, she would dress in shorts and an oversized t-shirt to go sit on the couch and crochet, or knit, or cross-stitch. She watched old movies, and fell asleep right when the first rays of direct sunlight sheared through her curtains and the air-conditioner clicked on once again. When her daughters came out for breakfast, they found her fast asleep on the couch, but it was her pattern these days and they thought very little of it. When her husband left, he would kiss the suddenly enticing line of her neck, or her arm as it stretched above her, or the curiously sexy curve of her ear, and she would smile in her sleep, and murmur good-bye.
On one such night at the beginning of August, instead of returning to her crafting, she actually did venture outside. She wandered restlessly, and finally found herself leaning on the fence railing, staring at the moon with saucer eyes, telling the horses why it was she couldn’t sleep. “It’s just that my children are growing up before my eyes, and they don’t need me so much anymore, and I feel like my lifeblood has been drained from my body and left me dry as a husk and I need something, anything to fill it. It’s just that life is so short, and while I’m looking for the cosmic pitcher to pour and fill the empty places I don’t want to waste my time sleeping because there’s just not life to waste it like that… but that doesn’t work either…” She trailed off there. Stopped speaking, abruptly, felt her eyes grow bright, and a lump form in her throat.
“And the whole time,” she whispered, “Life just goes faster and faster and it pulls away from you and you wonder who it’s feeding… are my girls going to grow up better because I’m spending my life on them? Will my husband wake up feeling drenched in my life and thrilled to be on the planet? It would be so much easier to spend my life if I knew it were going somewhere, and not just pooling around my feet in a red sticky mess that will draw flies and smell bad. And even now, it feels like life has just slipped away, and I’m a bone dry shell, still thirsty for more life, and none is ever coming…” She began to cry in earnest then, and her shoulders shook and she fell to a heap on the sparse grass outside the horse pen. She sobbed for what felt like hours, and finally fell asleep, crumpled like sodden clothing on the ground.
Her husband found her there at ten o’clock in the morning, and had to shake her—hard—in order to wake her up. She blinked at him muzzily, and he stepped back for a moment, looking shaken.
“What’s wrong?” She asked, still trying to focus on his familiar, bleary face.
He shook his head, and stepped forward to help her up. “You’ve really got to get some sleep, hon.” He said after a moment, “Your eyes are well… red.”
She laughed a little tipsily… “Oh, sweetie—my eyes have been red for two months.”
He kissed her cheek, wrapped his arm around her waist, guided her back to the house. “Not like this, Gracie… they looked, well, they looked like a flash picture, or that blue-eyed cat we had whose eyes got red in the light—you know, Stop-light glowing red.”
She giggled then, looked up at him, her smile almost drunken. “Maybe I’m a vampire…”
He laughed then, took her back to her bed, and undressed her. She sat like a child and he put a clean t-shirt over her head, lay her down and pulled up the sheet only, because in spite of the air conditioner, it was still going to be hot. “Good night, Gracie.” He murmured, “Don’t sleep all day.”
She giggled softly to herself, and he left.
After that, her sleep patterns were completely reversed. She would wake around 4p.m., cook, clean, talk, work, take care of the children, care of the horses, care of the dogs, care of the cats, care of the chickens, care of the children again, and then craft and clean and craft some more until eight in the morning, and begin it all over again. Her eyes still glowed redly, and the satin line of her body continued to draw and entice, but her depression was gone.
When her husband came home at 2:00 a.m., she would attack him, rapaciously, pulling at him again and again until he was drained and comatose, and then, while he slept, she would use suddenly slender hands and strong fingers to finish herself off. She was still exhausted, still not sleeping, but she was energized, glowing, practically shimmering with a combination of sex and night. She knew things, people felt when they looked at her. She delved and knew for her own a part of the cycle of sunshine and moon that they could never have. For the tail end of the summer she became one of those people that made you tired, just to be around. She was energetic, and passionate, and she was exhausting. For a month or so, she literally sucked the life out of everyone she came in contact with. In a strange way, they were happy for the favor.
The librarian, after enduring an energetic whirlwind through the library in which Grace dropped off ten and checked out fifteen books, fell instantly asleep as soon as she left. She dreamt erotically of pirates and deserted beaches.
The man in the checkout line rung up her groceries in a daze, left for home early that day, and thoroughly ravished his wife when he got there. He then fell asleep until the next morning.
The boy at the feed store didn’t have as much self control as the checkout man. He was young. After staring, dry-mouthed, at that lovely line of breast to back to hip, while she chattered at him about vampires some more, she touched his arm in a friendly way, and he turned and fled behind the store. His boss found the him asleep on a pile of hay with his pants around his ankles. The boy was fired, but it was only a summer job.
The lady who butchered her hair caught a glimpse at the clean line from jaw to ear to cheekbone, and was inspired to actually cut her hair well. Grace was astounded, and tipped generously. The hair dresser spent the money on lotion, and massage oil, and stumbled to work for the next week, red-eyed and smelling of perfume that penetrated every crevice of her body.
The man who fixed her tractor couldn’t help himself. He stumbled one more time, fell against her, felt the line of flank to buttocks against his groin, and spent himself automatically, falling to his knees as Grace recovered from being off balance. He fell asleep on the road as he drove away from her property, and gracefully sailed his pick-up truck into a tree. He had only cuts and bruises, with a bump on his head, but he slept for the next two days.
Grace noticed none of this. She slept less and less at night, but during the day, she was dead to the world. One day Gretchen started a fire in the kitchen, trying to cook eggs, and Grace didn’t even wake up when the firemen came to the house. Her husband took her to a doctor then, who ran chemical test and brain tumor tests and drug tests, but she tested negative for everything. She endured it all, and the near frantic worry of her husband, with indulgence, and optimism.
“It will end soon.” She said, certain, dreamy. “I’ll sleep well soon enough… I mean we all sleep in the end, don’t we?” Her husband began to panic. He took a week off work, to watch over Grace and the girls. The girls, who had paid little enough attention to their mother all summer, suddenly found something ominous in all of the gifts she had made them while they’d been gone.
“It’s like… she’s saying…” Gretchen began, the night right after the fire, at the beginning of September.
“Don’t say it.” Marcy said fiercely. “I don’t want to hear it. Mom loves us.”
Gretchen was surprised. “Of course she loves us. I didn’t say she doesn’t. But, it’s like cancer or something. Sometimes things take over a person’s life, and they have to leave. It doesn’t mean they don’t love you. It just means they’re…”
“Gone.” Marcy whispered. They had both cried then, and both of them had snuck into the living room where their mother sat crocheting and watching The Lost Boys. They climbed onto the couch with her, and she had, in a rare gesture, put down her crocheting and wrapped her arms around them like she hadn’t done since they were little. They watched movies into the depths of the night, and fell asleep leaning together in a huddle. Her husband woke up and found them like that, felt a little relieved that maybe it was over, and had taken a snap-shot of them, all curled up on the couch like that.
Two days before Grace disappeared he took the pictures in to be developed, and forgot about them until the morning she was gone. He woke up that early September morning with her smell on his skin, and her nightgown and panties in the bed next to him, as though her body had simply passed through them. Not even her clothes were gone. Her knitting, which she never left home without, was in its regular corner by the couch, and her half-finished sewing was on the ironing board in the kitchen. All the things in the house that screamed mother, wife, and lover were still there, but Grace was gone. They couldn’t even find her footprints leading away from the house in the soft gray dust of the driveway.
When her husband got the pictures back, a week after he woke up and found her gone, he noticed to his confusion and hurt, that only the girls showed up in the shot. Grace’s form was blurred, although she was asleep when the shutter snapped, hazy to the point of transparency; a bright spot on the film without a body.
Gretchen and Marcy dreamed of her after that, once or twice a week for the rest of their lives. She was in their dreams for the first day of school, for their first date, for their first sex, and their first love, as well as for every day things, like bad Algebra tests and grumpy teachers. She told them to wear a sweater, eat more vegetables, talk to their father, and clean their rooms. She told them to use birth control, and how to burp their children, and how to sew hems in their pants. She was there for everything, in their dreams. After the first couple of dreams Gretchen got used to the idea that this really was her mother, and she asked Grace why she had to leave.
“I love you honey.” Grace not-answered, her eyes glowing. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” And then she smiled, flashing newly-capped teeth. Gretchen awoke with a fluttery vision of deep black night, and stars of infinite wisdom shining through her window.
