"I know."
And Jean forgot the anomaly of her wardrobe, never thought to ask how she might know his favorite dinner. It was as though someone had found the room in his mind that housed his curiosity and simply turned off the light and closed the door quietly behind them as they left. The riddles remained, but his questions were gone, just like that.
5
In older, more superstitious days, it might have been said that Candida had bewitched him, for theirs was a whirlwind romance— especially at that time, in that community. They met in September, but the odd circumstances of that meeting had been forgotten. They were married in January, a quiet civil ceremony, because neither had any other family. They had their first and only child late the next September and named her Sophie.
Jean didn't read his detective novels and magazines anymore— he didn't need other stories. At night when they lay in bed, Candida would tell him hers. She had an impossible storehouse of tales tucked away behind her eyes; like Scheherazade, she had so many, she never had to repeat one. In response, Jean felt an unfamiliar stirring in his own mind, a need to communicate his love for his wife and their child, a desire to share with them dreams that were his own, instead of the fantasies he had borrowed from his books and magazines.
Once he had carried a secret life inside him, an ongoing adventure in which he was the tall man in the trenchcoat with the brim of his hat pulled down low over his eyes, who acted when others stood by helpless, to whom the hurt and lost were drawn that he might find them justice, to whom men looked with respect and women with desire. Now the hat and trenchcoat were put aside. Now he had a child who had offered him her unconditional love from the moment he first saw her in the hospital. Now he had a wife who was not only his partner and his lover, but also his best friend. His life was so complete that he had no need for that old secret life.
6
But there was still something unusual about Candida, even if Jean could no longer see it. Though he wasn't alone in that particular blindness, for no one did— not in their circle of friends, not in the neighborhood, though no one ever did remember her quite the same. To some she was tall, to others she was of medium height. To some she had a classical beauty, others thought her a little plain. Some, when they looked at her, marveled at how she retained an unaffected girlishness, belying her motherhood and maturity; others were reminded of their mothers, or their grandmothers.
She was a charming conversationalist, and an even better listener, but it was only to Jean that she told her stories; stories, and cryptic remarks to which Jean never gave much thought until much later.
Because he'd been bewitched, some would say.
7
"Where does she go when she sleeps?" Candida murmured one evening, leaning on the windowsill in their bedroom, looking out at the moon where it hung above the brownstones of Upper Foxville. "Does she go into another world? Or does she only dream?"
She often watched the moon, noting its phases, her eyes not so much reflecting the light as absorbing it. But that night Jean wasn't looking at her. He sat on the bed, giving Sophie her bottle, and thought Candida spoke of the baby.
"If she's dreaming," he said, "I hope they're sweet dreams."
"Oh yes," Candida said, still looking at the moon. "We can only hope they're so sweet as mine."
8
Another time she told him, "If I should ever go, it won't be for lack of loving you— not you, not Sophie. It will be because I am called away. It will be because I will have no choice."
Jean thought she spoke of her death. He didn't like to consider death, little say speak of it. He held her closer to him.
"Don't even think about it," he told her.
He felt her sigh. "Sometimes I can think of nothing else."
9
One time Jean asked her how she knew so many stories, and she replied that they came from her dreams.
"We have to believe in our dreams," she said, "because without them we are nothing. Dreams are how we make sense of the world, but they're also how we remember it. When your dreams are real— if only to you— when you believe in them and make them a part of the story that is your life, then anything is possible. You can go anywhere, be anyone, mend any hurt— even a broken wing."
"A broken wing?" Jean replied, puzzled.
"We fly in our dreams. But if we break a wing, we have to work that much harder to keep them real, or they fade away." She gave him a sad smile. "But the trouble is, sometimes we heal ourselves so well that we go away all the same."
Jean shook his head. "You're not making sense tonight."
"Just promise me you'll believe in your dreams. That you'll teach Sophie to believe in hers."
"But—"
"Promise me."
For a moment Jean felt as though he didn't know the woman lying in bed beside him. A sliver of moonlight came in through the window, casting strange shadows across Candida's face, reshaping the familiar planes and contours into those of a stranger.
"It's important, Jean. I need to be able to remember this."
"I... promise," he said slowly.
She moved out of the moonlight and the familiar features all fell back into place. The smile that touched her lips was warm and loving.
"When we look back on these days," she said, "we'll remember them as mythic times."
"What do you mean?"
"It's as though we stand in the dark of the moon and anything is possible. We're hidden from the sun's light, from anything that might try to remind us that we only borrow these lives we live, we don't own them."
"If we don't own our lives," Jean asked, "then who does?"
"The people we might become if we stop believing in our dreams."
10
Years later, Jean had trouble remembering all the stories Candida had told him. When he tried to tell them to Sophie, he got them mixed up, transposing this beginning to that ending, the characters of this story into that one, until finally he gave up and read her stories out of books the way other parents did. But he never forgot to remind her to believe in her dreams.
11
Candida went to the store to get some milk one evening, almost three years to the day that they had first met on the back steps of the brownstone, and she never came back, leaving Jean's life as mysteriously as she'd first come into it. He remembered looking at her as she turned back from the doorway to ask if there was anything else she should pick up, and being astounded at the vision he beheld. For one long glorious moment he imagined he saw her bathed in a nimbus of radiant light that shone from her every pore, gold as honey, bright as flames. Wings rose up behind her, huge magnificent feathered wings, each with a span twice her height.
The vision held, one moment, another, and then it was gone, and it was Candida standing there in the doorway, the Candida he'd married and who was the mother of their child. But it was that vision of her that he remembered— as an angel, a faerie, a shaft of moonlight, a gift of wonder that had strayed into his world from some nevernever, drawn by his need, or perhaps her own, to weave the strands of her dreams with his, his with hers. Their time together was too short, far too short, but at least they had had that time together. That was what he reminded himself whenever despair threatened to overwhelm him. The memories... and Sophie... were all that enabled him to carry on.
He remembered Candida as others remember the myths of their ancestors, and he taught their daughter to believe in her dreams. Because in time he came to understand what Candida had meant when she told him that stories begin in dreams and without the stories that we dream, we live someone else's life rather than our own. It wasn't something he realized all at once; instead, he happened upon the fragments of the puzzle, one piece at a time, finding them in the spaces that lay between his memories and his dreams, until one day, when he was sitting alone on the back steps of his apartment building after having put Sophie to bed, the puzzle pieces all came together and he understood.