Chapter Eleven
ELEVEN
It was the same nightmare she always had.
Faye was back in the house she grew up in in Passaic, New Jersey. The cramped detached row house, whose lawn was always too high and blinds always closed tight. Lost inside, she pressed her hands up against dusty walls, traversing a maze of never-ending hallways, trying to get out, trying to escape...all while her mother’s voice, demanding and terrifying, screeched for Faye to come find her.
She awoke in a cold sweat, her wrist hurting.
Anxiety coursed through every cell in her body. All the feelings of her childhood, all that chaotic and consistent trauma, returned in full force. Despite her bravado, she felt exposed. Vulnerable. She swore she could hear someone, something dangerous , shifting about down the hall. She was going to throw up.
Tossing off her covers, she sprinted from her bedroom, down the hall and to the bathroom. She was so mired in her own fear, in staving off yet another nocturnal panic attack, that she barely even noticed Greg, still awake at the end of the hallway, reading a book. Hillel resting patiently on the windowsill above the pullout bed.
Locking the bathroom door, she double-checked that it was secure behind her, jiggling the handle erratically, before turning on the sink in her bathroom, letting it run ice-cold. She put her whole face beneath the freezing water. The shock on her skin, the feeling of it stinging her cheeks, brought her back to reality.
Lifting from the water, she grabbed a towel, leaning back on the bathroom wall. She reminded herself these feelings were not real feelings. They were memories, words etched onto an epitaph somewhere, triggered in the wake of an anti-Semitic attack. And Greg possibly being a criminal. She couldn’t help but think it.
She also couldn’t believe she had ever thought he was a golem.
She stood there, feeling numb—escaping into the familiar safety of her own dissociative tendencies—when Greg knocked on the door.
“Faye?” Greg called out.
She’d been in the bathroom with the water running for several minutes, and he was worried that she had full-on drowned in there.
When she didn’t answer, he knocked again. “You...okay?”
Still, no answer.
He stepped back from the door, and a new type of tickle appeared in his chest. “Faye!” The words came out strong and clear. “If you don’t answer me right now, I’m coming in.”
No response. He peeled up the sleeves of his T-shirt, ready to charge shoulder-first into the wood. Finally, the water turned off.
Faye opened the door and looked up at him with a half-hearted smile. “That was a very good sentence.”
He considered her statement. “Must have been...the nerves.”
“Nerves?” she asked, curiously.
“I was...worried about you.”
He suddenly understood the tickle, the anxiety for her safety, because it went away at the sight of her safe. And yet, looking at her before him, he got the feeling that something was wrong.
Her cheeks were flushed. The tips and edges of her hair, along with the top of her nightgown, were soaked through. Her nipples—two perfect little stones—were erect and visible beneath the drenched material.
“I didn’t mean to worry you,” Faye said. “I had a bad dream. A nightmare, actually.”
He angled his head curiously. “But why are you all wet?”
“Sometimes,” she explained, stepping out into the hall one inch, “the water helps me calm down. Or, in the very least, keeps the feelings associated with the nightmare from getting worse.”
He didn’t like seeing her afraid. He didn’t like hearing that her dreams were so bad, she had to practically drown herself in the bathroom sink to stave off the negative feelings. Granted, he didn’t know all of Faye’s backstory, but it seemed to him that she was such a good person. Unique, with a type of fearless courage that came from trusting your gut that he couldn’t help but admire. She deserved better than to spend all night being terrorized by specters.
He wanted to tell her these things, but he noticed a shiver run through her body.
“Let me get you a robe,” Greg said.
Faye nodded. “That would be great.”
Quickly he made his way to her bedroom. Grabbing the robe off a hook by the door, he returned to her, helping her slink her arms through. When another shiver passed through her, he rubbed his hands up and down the length of her form—her ample and beautiful body—before bringing her over to his makeshift bed.
From there, he grabbed the extra blanket she always left him, laying it on her legs. He pulled apart her modular vase, creating a glass, then went to the kitchen to pour her a cup of warm water.
“Here,” he said, handing it to her.
She drank. “Thank you.”
Her hands were shaking. Greg sat down beside her, and the room fell into silence once more. Her eyes drifted towards nothing, landing in darkness, spacing out. Greg thought back to the book he was reading.
“Do you...have them a lot?”
Faye returned from wherever she was. “What?”
“The nightmares,” he said.
She shifted in her seat. “I used to get them a lot, but not as much since moving to Woodstock. I guess... I’ve just had a lot on my mind recently. Between the flyers, and...well, other things.”
He couldn’t help but get the sense that he was the other thing .
“What was it about?” he asked. “The nightmare.”
“Honestly, it’s always the same dream for me. I’m in the house where I grew up in New Jersey. But it’s not actually my house. Instead, it’s just this horrible fun house maze...and my mother is calling my name.”
“Your mother?” Greg didn’t understand. “Shouldn’t that be a good dream then?”
“Not for me.”
He looked down to see her rolling her wrist.
“Is your wrist hurting?” he asked.
“Hm?” she asked.
“You were...stretching it out, I guess.”
“Oh.” She stared down at her own left hand. “I didn’t even realize.”
Faye often talked about her father. He came up in bits and pieces during their last few days together, such as the tradition of eating hard kosher salami, or being there for him when he was dying. And yet, having become more aware of the relationships missing in his own life...he noticed the ones missing from hers.
“You don’t...talk about your mom a lot.”
“My mom was sick,” she said quietly.
“Sick.” Greg tugged on his ear, wanting to understand. “Like your dad?”
“No.” She pulled the blanket closer to her. “Sick, in her mind.”
Greg still didn’t completely understand. Faye tried to explain.
“The truth is,” she continued, “my mom never stayed in therapy long enough to get one clear diagnosis...or any help for her disease. But she would get angry. There were times when she could be kind, where she could be loving, where she could act totally normal... But then, she would go through these episodes, tearing through the house, yelling and screaming. That’s how I broke my wrist. She was holding on to it, dragging me down the hallway. I just was...never safe growing up. Never protected. By anybody.”
His heart ached at her words. He couldn’t imagine how someone who was supposed to love you, and protect you, could be so cruel.
“You know,” she said, shaking her head, “the worst part about my mom is that she didn’t just disable me physically. She disabled me emotionally, too. My whole life—even when I’ve gone to therapy, changed my entire life by moving to Woodstock, staved off love for my own protection—I’ve never been completely free. I’m just the by-product of her choices, this person she made me. I think that’s what hurts the most. She changed me. I was someone else once, someone whole and unbroken, and then she made choices—cruel choices, totally unnecessary choices—because she couldn’t control herself, her rage, and her anger. And those choices changed the person I was meant to become. That woman...ruined me.”
He couldn’t help but think back to her pottery, the way she was always complaining it wasn’t good enough, perfect enough...that it wasn’t worthy of being loved or valued. He couldn’t help but sense that she treated herself in the same way.
“Where is she now?” Greg asked.
“Florida.” Faye shrugged. “I check in on her every now and then, do my due diligence as her daughter, make sure the Medicaid is going through in the assisted living center where she lives. Occasionally, I’ll even call her on a holiday. Rosh Hashanah. Yom Kippur. Maybe one day I’ll even get that apology. But otherwise, we don’t have a relationship. It’s not healthy for me to have a relationship with her.”
Greg nodded, and thought back to the book he had been reading. “You deserve to be with people who bring out the softness in you.”
Faye blinked. “What?”
He continued. “You deserve to be in relationships where you’re safe. Where you have clear boundaries, and they are respected. You deserve to have your needs met. But first, you must untangle the unhealthy knots that have bound you to these patterns.”
Her lower lip fell to the floor. A look of shock spread across her face. And then her eyes darted over to the nightstand, where the book Embracing Your Eggshells was sitting open. Reaching back, she grabbed it, opening to the same page he had been on when he had put it down.
“You were reading this book?” she asked.
Greg answered honestly. “I thought it was about making breakfast.”
For the first time that evening, she laughed. Seeing her relax made his heart happy, before she angled her head sideways. “And you remembered all that?” Faye squinted. “Just from reading it tonight? You remember these words?”
“You highlighted it.”
Indeed, she had covered the words in a yellow marker, scribbling notes all over the side like REMEMBER THIS and SCREW STUART!!! Greg had no idea who Stuart was, but he decided to obey her command. He committed those words to his memory.
It wasn’t all that difficult. For one, his mind was currently functioning like a sieve. Without a memory, he had plenty of space to fill up with the magic of books. Plus, he had been eating a lot of baladur cakes. Mostly, however, he valued his relationship with Faye. If the words were important to her, then of course they were important to him.
“Who’s Stuart, by the way?” Greg asked curiously.
Faye seemed confused. “Stuart.”
“His name was—”
She cut him off. “I don’t want to talk about Stuart.”
He left the conversation at that.
Faye returned to staring down at his book. “It’s actually kind of remarkable that you can do that, though. Remember what you read so succinctly.” She shook her head. “Most people don’t have that type of eidetic memory.”
Eidetic. He liked the word. But also, he couldn’t help but notice how those beautiful and soft lips had morphed back into a concerned frown.
“Is that a problem?” he asked seriously.
“Not necessarily.”
“But you seem...worried.”
“It’s just,” she stammered, “I’m concerned that you’re not actually remembering things, developing back to your original personality—whatever that was—but just becoming a repository of my books. It’s great that your aphasia is diminishing...but the whole point of bringing you here was to help you remember your past, get you home.”
Home.
He thought back to the families he had met when they visited Magic Mud Pottery, and his heart returned to that strange place between an ache and a fear.
“Actually,” Faye said, shifting in the seat closer to him, “Eric did offer us another option.”
“Another option?”
“We could go down to the police station, run your prints...find out if you have a record.”
She began to explain. If he had a record, if he had done something bad— not really bad, obviously, she didn’t believe all that —just something as simple as not paying a bunch of speeding tickets... “Then the police might have your real name and real address on file. Wouldn’t that be great, Greg? We could figure out who you are...and just like that, you could go home.”
It sounded like a reasonable next step, but he was having difficulty agreeing.
“Eric is your friend?” Greg said quietly.
“Yes.” Faye nodded. “Eric is my friend.”
“And you trust him?”
“I trust him, completely.”
“But,” Greg said, meeting her eyes directly, “he doesn’t have a red bracelet.”
She cocked her head sideways. “What?”
“A red bracelet.” He lifted his left wrist to remind her. The red string dangling there, connected to his heart, connecting him to Faye. “If Eric is your friend, and you trust him...why doesn’t he have one?”
She swallowed. “I guess...because you’re special.”
Their eyes met, and an electric tension filled the room. A flicker of desire passed through him, and he wanted to kiss her. He wanted to take these swirling, breathless feelings and find refuge in her own heady craving.
And yet he couldn’t kiss her.
Because Greg didn’t know who he was.
He could have people out there that he had forgotten—a wife, maybe even children—and his mind wandered back to the book he was reading. If he wanted a better future, he had to untangle the knots of his past.
“Okay,” Greg said finally.
Faye blinked, surprised. “Really?”
“Yeah.” He forced a smile. “Let’s go...figure out who I am.”
She threw her arms around him in a tight embrace. And he held her there, her warmth pressing against his own, the scent of her filling his nostrils, causing those pleasurable feelings, alongside the rising tide of questions, to work their way through his body once more.
Faye locked the door to her bedroom.
She had done it. She had talked to Greg about going down to the police station, running his prints. It gave her some small measure of relief. If Greg was a con man, he was about to be found out. And if he was simply a man with amnesia, one who was beginning to tear down her walls and work his way into her heart...
Honestly, she didn’t want to think about that option.
But she could hear her own heart beating wildly inside her chest. It sounded like some siren song, a sea Gorgon tempting men to her shorelines before turning them all to stone. It was lonely being a monster. Until finally, crawling into bed that evening, she found herself wondering—would living with a golem really be that bad?