A long time ago, Lee had been certain that there was a recipe for love, all she had to do was learn it and she could win Silver’s heart. But now, after knowing each other for nearly five years, whenever she imagined the future with Silver she imagined herself in a cold bed, forever waiting for his heart to begin a slow orbit of affection. She knew that she was a widow whether she stood in black beside a grave or stood right next to Silver at the kitchen sink, and when she thought about her son sleeping in the rear bedroom she felt like weeping out loud. Jackie had the same blue eyes as she did, the same fears: silence, speech, a father whose heart was as distant and dark as onyx. It would be easy to stay with Silver until the day one of them died; they were roped together with marriage vows, lashed together with disappointment. But when she tried to imagine Jackie grown up and living in the same house as his father, she couldn’t do it. Now Jackie retreated when Silver came home, he went into his room and closed the door; sooner or later he’d grow up, he’d have to speak, have to argue and face his father. Sooner or later Lee would lose one of them, and on that night when Silver handed her ten thousand dollars the future that called to Lee sounded like the click of a suitcase, it was the hollow sound of high heels on the sidewalk, the slow rustling of sage surrounding a patio where a woman sat alone, while upstairs, in a bedroom painted yellow, a boy practiced chords on a guitar, and no one told him to be quiet.
“I know you tried to do the right thing,” Lee told Silver, “but it turned out all wrong.”
She got out of bed and began to dress. She pulled on a skirt and a pale green sweater, she slipped into her high heels without bothering to put on stockings or socks.
“Get serious,” Silver said. He reached for a cigarette, and when he lit a match his hand looked strange, as if it wasn’t his own. “You can’t take care of yourself. You can’t take care of Jackie. I’ve always done everything. Everything,” he told her. “You’ve always had food, and a roof over your head. I may come home late but I’m home every night.”
“So what?” Lee said.
“So what?” Silver repeated. “So we’re married, that’s what.”
“You don’t love me,” Lee said quietly.
“What the hell has that got to do with anything?” Silver said.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” Lee said. She had finished packing, she put her suitcase by the door: she went and sat down on the bed and took one last cigarette. “I think if you love anybody at all it’s Teresa.”
“That’s crazy,” Silver said. He reached over and grabbed Lee by her shoulder, he could feel the straps of her slip beneath her sweater. “Don’t ever say anything like that about me and Teresa again.”
“All right,” Lee said.
“And don’t think after all I went through you’re going to be the one who decides to leave. Maybe I’ll take that money back right now. Then what would happen to all your plans?”
He tightened his grip on her shoulder, he knew he was hurting her, but Lee didn’t flinch. “Stop it,” she told him, and he did; he felt foolish, he had been acting as if he wanted her to stay with him when all along he had spent each year of their marriage wishing he had never met her. When he let go of her, Lee put out her cigarette and got off the bed. The closer it came to morning, the more Silver wished Lee would just shut up and come to bed, but instead she stood in front of the bureau mirror and brushed her hair. “If you want to know the truth,” she said, “it’s you who left me.” The sky outside was growing light now; Lee put small ruby earrings in her ears. “I might just get myself a divorce,” she told Silver.
“Sure you will,” Silver said. “You leave me and you’ll be back here in a week.”
“And when I get a divorce I’m going to tell everyone in that courthouse the truth,” Lee said, just before she picked up her suitcase and her purse. Later, when the sky was light, she would pack another suitcase full of Jackie’s clothes and telephone a taxi. But right now the clouds in the Mission District were Prussian blue, and down the hall, in the rear bedroom, Jackie dreamed in the bed where Teresa had once slept, and Silver had begun to believe that his wife might really be leaving him.
“I’m going to tell everyone I see,” Lee whispered before she walked out the door. “You were the one who left me.”
When winter came to Villa Lobo it came slowly, but it came with the steadiness of a huge, dark wolf. Each day the hills and the ridgetops were greener, soon they were the color of clear jade. The rains that had begun in autumn now fell continuously; morning and noon were untouched by any source of light. In town, the shop owners put wooden slats over the muddy pools that formed in the main street; wild jays stood on porch railings like a band of robbers; old women, whose husbands had brought them to Villa Lobo when the logging camp was still working only to desert them by early death, wore high rubber boots and covered their heads with thick, embroidered scarves whenever they left their houses.
In Joey’s trailer, in a bed Harper had always thought too lumpy for a good night’s sleep, Teresa slept for so many hours that Joey couldn’t help but worry. He boiled cans of soups, he offered to get her amphetamines, to take her to the hospital in Santa Rosa, to bring her black cups of coffee till dawn.
“Will you please stop worrying?” Teresa told him. “I’ve always had a problem with my sleeping. But I’ll be better in a few days. I always am,” she promised.
But, if anything, her spells grew worse; she slept more often than she had that summer in New Mexico or up in her second-floor bedroom in Santa Rosa. And after a while, Joey realized that he was no longer worried, he began to enjoy the shared silence in the trailer when she slept, he was surrounded by the sound of her steady breathing, the odor of roses which seemed to rise up from the bed, as if Teresa were dreaming of the loveliest garden on earth. He began to think of her waking hours as another man might think of a rival—when she was asleep in his bed she was his alone, and there were times when his passion for her was uncontrollable, times when he made love to her while she slept. It didn’t seem like a violation to Joey; he was certain that she responded to him, her arms held him tight, she whispered what Joey was sure was his name. But then he made the mistake of wanting their special sort of lovemaking discussed. And so, one night, when Teresa awoke to find Joey in bed with her, holding her tight, he asked her what she had dreamed about. Teresa was covered with a thin film of perspiration, her hair was tangled, her eyes couldn’t yet focus.
“I didn’t have any dreams,” she told him. “I slept like a rock.”
He never made love to her that way again; instead he only watched her, he breathed in the scent of roses, he noticed that while Teresa slept the trailer filled with plum-colored light, and he felt so peaceful that each breath he took was like a thick narcotic.
At Christmas that year Joey and Teresa exchanged thin golden rings. The rains were so heavy that the river was near the flood line. It was then, before the New Year, that Teresa began to have nightmares, dreams that left her terrified of both waking and sleeping. Her visions were filled with natural disasters: earthquakes that shook the house, tornadoes that lifted up horses and cars, bolts of lightning with the energy of a thousand angels. She dreamed that Dina was dressed in black and surrounded by a field of white lilies, that her brother Reuben was lost in a desert, dying of thirst. She dreamed that every lover she had ever had chased her through a landscape where the earth was salmon colored and the sky a too bright blue. Most of all, she dreamed of Silver—he walked through her dreams in a cloak of despair, he rode through a tundra bordered by rocks so strange they might have dropped to earth from Saturn. In her dreams Silver called her name, he was circled by a ring of fire, consumed by flames, and sometimes when she woke from dreaming about him Teresa felt as if her flesh had been singed, she searched in the mirror for burns, for spots of fire left behind.
Teresa grew terrified that she might get trapped in a sixteen-hour sleep, she would be stuck in nightmares, forever prowling through dreams. She couldn’t ask Jo
ey for help, she couldn’t even talk to him about it; he would laugh at the series of earthquakes and storms, he would be shocked that she dreamed so often of her brother and never of him. She decided to visit Harper, and she hoped that the herb garden that grew in back of the house contained something for her dreams.
“Don’t tell me,” Harper said when she opened the door and discovered Teresa on the porch steps, dripping with rain. “Now that you’ve got Joey you’ve decided to come back for my car.”
“I just want to talk to you,” Teresa said. From where she stood she could see inside to the living room and kitchen: a copper kettle was on the stove, a rabbit’s-foot fern hung in the front window, a blue jacket had been thrown over the back of a rocking chair that still moved back and forth.
Harper opened the door wider and motioned for Teresa to come in; she noticed that Teresa was wearing Joey’s yellow rain slicker. She was fairly certain that Teresa wanted more than just talk, but she waited until she had made some camomile tea before she asked what Teresa wanted.
“If you’ve decided that you don’t want Joey any more and you want me to take him back, forget it,” Harper said. “I know what he’s looking for—he wants to find a chapel in the pines, he wants a wife—one who’s never even looked at another man.”
“It’s not Joey,” Teresa said. “I’m having nightmares.”
“You move in with a guy and you start having nightmares.” Harper nodded. “I’d put two and two together if I were you.”
“You must have something for bad dreams.”
“My grandmother used a valerian mixture,” Harper admitted.
“All right,” Teresa said. “Fine. I’ll take it.”
“Wait a minute,” Harper said. “I get paid, you know. I’m not a charitable organization.”
Teresa reached into the pocket of her rain slicker for the grocery money Joey had given her the day before. She put two dollars on the table, hoping that Joey wouldn’t ask for his change back.
“Gee, can you spare it?” Harper asked, but before Teresa left the house Harper had given her a mixture of anise and valerian root, and a packet of rosemary to keep under her pillow. Each night Teresa took a teaspoon of the mixture she had bought from Harper, and she tucked the rosemary into her pillowcase so that Joey would not find it. She knew that Joey didn’t believe in what he called Harper’s “potions,” that he didn’t even want Teresa to talk to Harper if they met in town, much less go to her house. But in less than a week Teresa’s nightmares had disappeared, her dreams began to fill with common things: patios and parsnips, oranges and wildflowers. When she combed her hair the scent of rosemary spiraled from every strand, when she woke up, she felt rested, no one had been chasing her, Silver wasn’t in one of her dreams. She was thrilled with the cure’s success, and she wondered now if Harper might also be able to cure her sleeping spells. Even when Harper shook her head and said that she didn’t think she could diagnose what Teresa had, much less cure it, Teresa insisted.
“I’ve been to doctors,” Teresa said. “They couldn’t figure out what I had. I’m just asking you to try, and I’ll pay you really well.”
“Oh, yeah?” Harper said. It had been raining for weeks, and Teresa had finally persuaded Joey to let her take the laundry into town. She had arranged to meet Harper there and now they sat on a wooden bench near the row of washing machines, and the odor of detergent made Harper wrinkle her nose. “How are you going to pay me? I know you don’t have any money of your own.”
Teresa reached into the neckline of her heavy sweater for the platinum chain she wore around her neck; she held up the sapphire Silver had once given her. In the light of the laundromat the stone was ice blue, it shimmered like water. Harper felt herself wanting the necklace in spite of herself; she had never had any jewelry other than a wedding band she no longer wore, and a few pairs of earrings made of beads.
“I’d be robbing you,” Harper said to Teresa. “Even if I could find a cure that would work it wouldn’t be worth that much.”
“It would be to me,” Teresa said.
Her spells were growing worse each day, and for the first time since she was a child and the spells were mysterious and new, Teresa was afraid of them. They were no longer comforting, they were no longer a relief, they lasted too long; and each time she slept, Teresa felt as if she were surrounded by hopelessness. And so, when Harper gave her a gallon jar of rosemary tea the following week, Teresa was delighted. For several nights Teresa slept with a new packet of rosemary under her pillow and in the morning and afternoon she drank rosemary tea, poured out of the jar she kept hidden in the cabinet beneath the sink in the trailer, alongside the containers of Comet and Ivory Snow. But Teresa continued to sleep, once for more than fourteen hours; the only difference now was that her dreams were filled with blue globes of light. When she went back to Harper’s house, on a night when Joey had gone to Santa Rosa to play poker, Teresa got a second mixture, one made with mistletoe.
“Be careful with this,” Harper advised. “My grandmother used to use this. It speeds up your pulse rate and your heart. No way you’re going to fall asleep after you drink this.”
But when Teresa telephoned two weeks later, Harper could tell from the tone of her voice that the mistletoe had failed. She decided to get into her Mercury and drive to Cotati to see Harriet Vance, a woman nearly as old as Harper’s grandmother had been when she died. Harriet had ingredients that couldn’t be bought in health-food stores or grown in anyone’s yard, plants that couldn’t be found anywhere else in the county. When Harper got to her house an old orange cat was sitting in the sun beyond the window, a lemon tree grew so close to the front door that Harper had to crouch in order to reach the doorbell. They shared a pot of jasmine tea, and then Harper told Harriet that this time she was looking for a special cure.
“You’re telling me that this woman’s been to doctors and they couldn’t find anything wrong with her nervous system and they couldn’t find a virus?” When Harper nodded, Harriet went to the cabinet where she stored her herbs and took out a brown bag full of leaves. “She might have a metabolism problem—doctors overlook that all the time. But she could have something nobody can cure; even your grandmother might not have been able to.”
“You’re talking about a hysterical reaction,” Harper said.
“I don’t believe in hysterical illnesses. This woman’s got something all right, we just have to figure out what it is.”
Harper was given some Mexican damiana and told to make it into a tea with palmetto berries and mint. And later, when Harriet walked Harper outside to her car, the old woman stopped to pluck a lemon from the tree that grew near her front door. “Frankly I’ve always thought that the best cure for most things is hot lemon juice and a little time,” she told Harper.
Before she got into her car, Harper took out a five-dollar bill and tried to pay for the damiana, but Harriet refused to take it. “Come on,” Harper insisted. “I’m getting a goddamned sapphire for this sleeping cure, the least I can do is pay you five bucks.”
“A sapphire?” Harriet said. “A real one?” She took the five dollars from Harper and then asked, “Is this friend of yours rich?”
“She doesn’t have a cent,” Harper admitted.
“Then this woman wants something more than a cure for her sleeping, whether she knows it or not. She wants to get rid of this sapphire. It has some connection to her sleeping, and she wants you to take it away.”
Harper felt her face grow hot. “I feel like I’m being used,” she said.
“So what if you are?” Harriet said. She handed Harper the lemon from her tree. “The biggest favor you can do for her is to take the sapphire. If you decide to sell it you can take me out to Nina’s for dinner and I’ll order one of everything on the menu.”
Harper got into her car and turned on the engine, but before she drove away she called out the window. “What if it’s catching?” she asked Harriet.
“It’s not catching,” the old
woman assured her. “It’s something that belongs to this woman alone.”
When Teresa finally came back to Harper’s she apologized for her long absence—she’d been sleeping more than ever, and it was harder and harder to get out of the trailer without Joey’s knowing.
“You’re crazy to be so dependent on him,” Harper said as she poured the damiana mixture into a jar. “You might as well be married to him if you’re going to let him boss you around the way he does. My ex-husband once posted a list of all the things he didn’t want me cooking for dinner: macaroni and cheese, hamburgers, tunafish casserole. I made him tofu and spinach just once, and he took that fucking sign down fast.”
“As soon as I get rid of these sleeping spells I’m going to go out and get a job,” Teresa said. She took the remedy and went to the door, carrying the jar under Joey’s yellow rain slicker so that he wouldn’t see what she had if he had gotten back to the trailer before her.
Standing at the open door, in a rain slicker that was sizes too big for her, Teresa looked no more than twelve years old, and Harper felt her heart go out to her.
“This cure’s not going to work, is it?” Harper said.
“It might,” Teresa answered, but then she shook her head. “The only time these sleeping spells ever go away is when he’s around.”
“Who?” Harper said. “Joey? Don’t give me that—you’ve been worse ever since you moved in with him.”
“Not Joey,” Teresa said.
Harper followed Teresa out to the porch where Atlas was waiting. “It’s that other man,” Harper said. “The one you ran away from. And he’s the one who gave you the necklace too, right? Well just forget it if you think you can pawn that necklace off on me.”
“I’m sorry I involved you,” Teresa said as she walked down the porch steps. “I shouldn’t have asked you to help—it won’t do any good anyway.”
Harper leaned against the porch railing. She could hear the river rising over tree trunks, reaching toward the flood line only steps away from her house. “I want to help you,” she called. “But I can’t do anything if you keep on believing you can’t be cured.”