Jodie woke crying. She remembered the dream vividly. It was night time and she was on the seashore. The beach was dark up and down and behind. The ocean was dark also except for the white crests of the waves and the sound they made, like a vast creature breathing, sighing in the night. It was cold she knew, winter or early spring, a frigid wind blowing bits of sand and seaweed and foam. But she wasn’t cold, didn’t feel anything at all—not the wind or the spray. Where was her body? What had become of its writhings and rare pleasures?
Contemplating those pleasures, many associated with the sea but not this harsh one, the sea of warm sun and gulls gliding and a light breeze lifting a kite into the blue-white sky—remember Dad’s box kite designed and assembled from scratch that actually flew, too well as it turned out as the kite thrilled by ascendency jerked the coil of string from her young hands and danced wildly in the air for a few impassioned moments before rolling over and plummeting earthward like a colorful meteor’s streak in the daylight, crashing into the sea a hundred yards from land and promptly sinking, swallowed whole in its moment of ecstasy? Dad caught up to the fleeing spool of string and reeled in the sodden jumble like a prize fish and not his shattered days of labor, laughing the whole time and saying “Danced like a diamond, didn’t it, Sweetie?” in such a way that she didn’t question if a diamond could dance and forgot her shock and sadness at having let go the string—she eased herself back toward the blank sleep from which she’d arisen.
When the voice rose out of the dark, from that empty ocean of the night. At first the voice seemed little different from the sighing of the waves, maybe was the sighing of the waves. She tried to push the sound aside, out of her dream of pleasure. But steadily it called, rising in volume, separating from the waves’ rhythm, replacing it. The sound became a cry, of sadness or plea she couldn’t say. There were no words in this place, this dream become nightmare, not out of the sea, not in her head or in her mouth, only cries, forlorn, lost—of her mother, of her own.
Andrea reached around from behind her and whispered out of the dark, “What is it?”
At first Jodie shrank from those real sounds, words more frightening than those shapeless cries of her dreaming. She pulled into herself, clutching her knees to her chest, burying her face in that cave. Leave me alone!
But Andrea rose above her gently, searched then found the single patch of bare skin uncovered and vulnerable, a square of flesh the size of a postage stamp beside her right closed eye, between her hair and her knees and shielding crook of her pajama-clad elbow. She found this skin with her lips, and deposited there a dry kiss followed by the words spoken on the skin, puffs of breath more than vibrations of sound—I love you.
And as a key to a door and a door to a chamber and a chamber to heart long locked away, those vibrations freed the fetal ball to unfurl into arms and legs, hands and feet, and a full face, pale flesh somehow glowing now in the night briefly before it was buried anew, this time into Andrea’s T-shirt clad breast, wetting that cloth and the skin beneath with its tears.