“Yes, you should go,” I said.
“Sarah, I’ve told you already that I’d never leave you here. I couldn’t do that. I won’t.” I glanced at Constance from the corners of my eyes, and she looked like she was about to start crying. Seeing that pleased the paranoid woman no end, and the wound in me grew wider by some terrible, immeasurable increment.
“Don’t you dare start crying,” I sneered. I could say “the paranoid woman” sneered, but I’m not letting myself off the hook so easily.I sneered, and I balled one hand tightly into a fist. “It makes me sick to my fucking stomach, the sound of a woman crying.”
“Is this how you talked to Amanda?” Constance asked, covering the lower half of her face and turning away from me. “When she needed you, is this the way you treated her?”
“We’re not talking about Amanda,” I said, and clenched my hand so tightly that my short nails dug bloody half-moon grooves into the flesh of my hand.
“No,” Constance replied. “No, I don’t guess we are.”
“It’s only a tree,” I said through gritted teeth, full in the knowledge that I’d never told so great a lie in all my life, and would never find one to top it. “And if you think differently, I believe there’s an ax in the basement. Or Blanchard would probably loan you a chain saw, if you think you’re up to it.”
Constance wiped at her nose, and quickly stood up. It wasn’t hard to see that I’d frightened her, or, to be more precise, that I’d added another dimension to her fear. At the time, it seemed like I’d only evened the score.
“I’ll be in the attic,” she said, and left me in the bedroom, easing the door shut behind her. When the lock clicked, I went back to staring at the window, at the rainy day outside, and tried not to think about the tree. Later, though, I took the piece of human jawbone I found in my jeans pocket yesterday and tossed it out the back door, into the high grass and weeds.
I’m going to stop typing now. I don’t think I can bring myself to say anything more.
“The images produced in dreams are much more picturesque and vivid than the concepts and experiences of their waking counterparts. One of the reasons for this is that, in a dream, such concepts can express their unconscious meaning. In our conscious thoughts, we restrain ourselves within the limits of rational statements — statements that are much less colorful because we have stripped them of most of their psychic associations.
”Carl G. Jung,Man and His Symbols(1964)
The house is so awfully quiet this morning. Maybe Constance took my advice and left in the night. I would almost believe this, the house is so quiet. There is no sound of her footsteps from upstairs. I am dressed, but have spent most of the last hour sitting on my bed, watching the south-facing window, and the trees, and the sky. Occasionally, I have heard a bird or an insect, but these noises seem to be reaching me from someplace far, far away, and are muffled by distance. I am unaccustomed to there being such a profound silence in this house. You can always hear the birds, the cicadas, the wind, the creaking of venerable timbers still settling after hundreds of years, whatever. This is a new sort of quiet.
So, yes, I would think that Constance Hopkins has gone, and I am alone; that she left in the night, only I hardly slept. My body seems to have found some way around the meds. The Ambien has ceased to work. I don’t know. But I was awake, save maybe half an hour between three and four, and then an hour (at most) between about seven-thirty and eight-thirty. Both these intervals are plainly far too brief to have accommodated her departure. I feel certain of this. She couldn’t have gotten out of here that quickly. Constance wouldn’t have dared to go on foot, not after her talk of coyotes or wild dogs on the property, and a car or truck would surely have awakened me.
Am I alone? It should be a simple enough question to resolve. Leave my room, and learn whether or not I am alone in the house. I did leave once already, but only long enough to go to the bathroom. I didn’t try to find Constance, because, honestly, the possibility that she’s gone had not yet occurred to me. The profundity of this silence had not yet occurred to me. I figured she was sleeping, and then I realized that I couldn’t hear her window unit chugging away up there. That’s not so unusual, early in the day, but it started me thinking, I suppose. It would serve me right, after what I said to her yesterday. I am well enough aware of that. It’s nothing I wouldn’t have coming.
I’ll go looking for her when I finish this entry. I’ll go upstairs and knock on the door to her garret, and she’ll tell me to get lost, or we’ll make nice, or she’ll ignore me, but there will be some minute sound to betray her presence. I’ll press my lips to the keyhole and whisper apologies, and assure her that I wasn’t myself yesterday. I wasn’t. But I think that I’m getting better now.
There was a dream this morning, and I want to write it down, all of it that I can recall. I know it was the honesty that comes in sleep, that it was me trying to get through to me. I started to write it earlier, but didn’t get any farther than that quote from Jung. I suppose I intended it as some sort of an abstract or preface, a deep breath before diving headlong into icy waters. Then, as I was typing the last few words of the excerpt, there was a sudden rustling in the bushes below my window (the west window), and I had to stop and try to see what it was. But I couldn’t see anything out there, nothing that could have caused the commotion, and I’m going to assume it was only a rabbit, or a bird, or an errant breeze.
I have never been comfortable writing out my dreams. That used to mystify Amanda. Or she claimed that it did. I know that I’ve included only a handful of dreams since I began keeping this journal, back in May. I had a therapist, years ago, who insisted that I keep a dream journal as part of our work together. I reluctantly acquiesced, but made at least half of it up. She never knew the difference, and reading back over it, later, I discovered that I had a great deal of trouble distinguishing between the real dreams and the counterfeits. That bothered me at the time. What more intimate lie can a person possibly tell herself? I would suppose forgetting which was which was me getting some sort of cosmic comeuppance, if I believed the universe worked that way. My forty-four years have yet to reveal any consistent, compelling evidence of justice woven into the fabric of this world.
I’m digressing. I’m stalling.
In the dream, Amanda and I were on the road in the same sky-blue PT Cruiser that brought Constance here from Gary, Indiana. Amanda was driving, and I was sitting in the backseat. At first, I didn’t know where we were. I’d been listening to her talk, watching as we passed an unremarkable procession of woods, pastures, houses, farms, roadside convenience stores, and gas stations. Then I remembered Amanda’s funeral, and I assumed the whole thing — her death — had been some sort of misunderstanding. I didn’t bring it up, but there was an indescribable sense of relief, that we’d all clearly been mistaken in thinking that she’d died of the overdose, or of anything else. I know that these sorts of dreams are not uncommon, encountering a loved one who has died and “realizing,” in the dream, that the person never actually died. But, to my knowledge, this is the first time I’ve had such a dream about Amanda.