9. Rayner
Rayner
“Years,” I say, because it’s true, and I’ve never seen a good reason to hand her anything else.
Her face does several things. I watch all of them and understand none, which is normal — I’ve watched her face for years and it has never once told me what it was going to do next. That was half the reason I kept coming back.
She goes down the stairs without another word.
I should probably be worried about that.
I’m not. I can’t be. All of me is full of the same two words that have been ringing since she stood up on that bed and pointed at me like I was a fire.
She remembered.
Nobody remembers. That’s the first thing you learn, and the last thing, and every lesson in between.
Dreams dissolve. That’s not sad, it’s just what they’re made of — you can guide a child out of a fever dream and hold her hand until the burning house turns into a garden, and in the morning she’ll hug her mother and remember nothing but that the night was long.
You can find a hunter lost in a blizzard three valleys from home, walk into the white behind his eyes and turn him until he’s facing his own door, and when he stumbles in alive two days later he’ll call it luck. I’ve been luck for a lot of people.
None of them have ever looked at me across a waking room and said you.
She remembered.
I follow her down to a kitchen that’s already working — Erik at the stove, coffee going, and the smell of it pulls everyone in like it always has.
Elara takes the chair at the end of the table like she called this meeting.
She did. Erik puts a mug in front of her, milk already in it, and she wraps both hands around the body of it, not the handle.
The mug stops me for a second.
Dream-her holds things the same way. Both hands, around the middle, like everything warm might be taken from her if her grip is bad.
I have watched her hold a cup of starlight exactly like that on a rooftop that doesn’t exist, and I never once thought to ask myself why my imagination would invent a detail so specific and so sad.
“Sit,” she says. “Talk. Dream guy first.”
Gunnar drops into a chair with his own coffee. He’s enjoying this. He isn’t even pretending not to. “Yes, dream guy. First.”
I sit down across from her. Where I can see her face. There was never any chance I’d sit anywhere else.
“I’m a dreamwalker,” I say. “Dreams are a place. I can go there.”
She stares at me. “Dreams are not a place. Dreams are — " she gestures at her own head — “in here. Private. Mine.”
“Yours are now,” I say. “Yours are the only ones I’ve ever heard of that anybody could keep.”
“That’s not — okay. Start earlier. Start at the part where you’re in MY head.”
“I was never in your head.” And this is the part I need her to have, so I put the coffee down and give it to her the way I’d want it given to me.
“Dreams aren’t inside people. People go to dreams, like you’d go to a shore.
Most people can’t choose where, and can’t stay, and can’t carry anything home.
I can choose. That’s all the gift is. I can walk in, and sit with someone, and leave, and by morning I’m gone from them completely, like a tide went out.
Nobody remembers, Elara. Not their names for me, not my face, nothing. Ever. In my whole life, nobody—”
I stop, because the next word won’t line up.
“Except me,” she says.
“Except you.”
The kitchen has gone quiet around us. Erik has stopped pretending to cook.
Brock is watching her, not me, which means whatever’s on her face right now is worth more than whatever’s on mine.
Leif leans against the counter with his arms crossed, letting me have this, and I feel him waiting behind it — the bigger conversation, the one with her name at the center of it, sitting in the room with us like weather. Not yet. This first.
“So all those dreams,” she says slowly, working it like a knot, “the stars, the — all of it. You walked into my private, personal dreams, on purpose, for—” she does the math and I watch it hit — “for YEARS—”
“No.”
“No?”
“I thought I was dreaming you.”
Her mouth is open around the next accusation and it just stays there.
“You have to understand what you looked like from my side.” I turn the mug on the table, one slow circle.
“I find a woman in a dream under stars that aren’t ours.
Fine. Strange stars happen. But then I find her again.
That doesn’t happen. Dreams are a shore, remember — you never find the same wave twice.
And then again, and again, the same woman, year after year, a woman who talks to someone who isn’t there and laughs at her own jokes before she finishes them and holds her cup with both hands.
There is no version of that which is real.
So I decided the obvious thing. I decided I’d made you up.
” A breath goes out of me, and it takes something old with it.
“I thought you were mine. Something my own sleep built to keep me company, out of old stories and wanting. I visited you the way you’d visit — " and the true word arrives before I can pick a smaller one — “the way you’d visit the best part of your life that you knew wasn’t real. ”
Nobody says anything.
Elara is looking at me like I’ve handed her a box with something alive in it.
“You were lonely,” I say, because she should have all of it.
“In the dreams. You didn’t say it. You didn’t have to.
I came because you were lonely, and so was I, and neither of us was real, so there was no harm anywhere in any of it.
That was the whole arrangement. Two made-up people, keeping each other company. ”
“I—” She stops. Starts again. “I thought YOU came from a book. I filed you under fiction. I told my best friend about you like you were a character.”
“I know.”
“You KNOW?”
“You told me,” I say. “Under the stars. You said if I were real it would ruin everything.”
The sound she makes is not a word. She puts her face in her hands, and from inside them, muffled and furious, “I need you to stop knowing things.”
“Probably fair.”
She surfaces to glare at me, and finds me smiling, which by her face is the wrong response, and I try to fix my mouth and it won’t go.
I’ve had a lot of practice being calm. None of it applies.
The woman from under the strange stars is glaring at me across my own kitchen table with milk-coffee in both hands. No practice covers that.
“And that last night? Before the crossing, before — " she waves at the world — “this. Were you—”
“Yes.” No point softening it, and I don’t want to. “I didn’t choose it, that time. I fell asleep on your floor and the pull took me through — it does that, with you. And I landed in the middle of everything you hadn’t let us see. I broke your door, Elara. Four strangers…”
I pause looking at Leif.
“Three strangers stayed in your home all night, and you held yourself together in front of every one of us, chin up, jokes ready. Then you finally got to rest and the whole day came off you at once. I needed to make sure you were okay. I wasn’t going to leave you alone with it.
So I stayed, and I kept the watch. Gerald helped. ”
I see Erik’s smirk. I don’t bite.
“…Gerald.”
“He likes you,” I say. “He’s very protective.”
“My houseplant.”
“Yes.”
“My POTHOS.”
“He shows up in your dreams to protect you, Elara.”
She looks at the ceiling. She looks at the ceiling for a long time. I don’t know what she’s asking it for. I hope it helps. Gunnar has both hands over his mouth and his shoulders are shaking, and Erik refills her mug without being asked.
“I need so much more coffee,” she tells the ceiling.
And then she comes back down, and looks at me, and something in her face has changed while she was up there. The anger’s still in it. But it’s different now. I can’t tell in what way.
“You really didn’t know,” she says. “That they were mine. The dreams.”
“I didn’t know there was a yours for them to be.” And there it is — the thing I’ve been circling all morning without seeing, arriving the way the true things do, all at once and from behind. “You thought those dreams belonged only to you.”
“Yes, Rayner. That’s what dreams ARE.”
“Not for me.” But I’m hearing it now. She had one place.
One place in her whole lonely, complicated life that she believed was entirely hers, one room no neighbor could hear through the wall or an ex that could break through, and I was in it, being happy, for years.
I make myself hold that all the way, and it costs, and I don’t look away from it, because she’s had to hold it since she woke up.
“I’m not sorry I was there,” I say, and Brock’s head turns, and I keep going anyway, because she’d know if I lied and I’d rather be wrong than false.
“I can’t be. You were the best part of my nights for years and I didn’t even believe in you.
But I am sorry that you found out you were never alone in the one place you were sure you were.
That’s a real thing I took, and I didn’t know I was taking it, and knowing it now doesn’t give it back. ”
She doesn’t say anything for a while.
Then she picks up her coffee, both hands around the body of it again and I have to hold back a smile. She takes a sip, and says, to the mug more than to me, “The stars were nice, though.”
I let go of the edge of the table. I hadn’t noticed I was holding it.
“They’re real,” I say. “The stars. From the ridge, in deep winter. I’ll show you.”
“I haven’t forgiven you.”
“I know.”
“Any of you. There’s a list. There’s an entire — Gunnar, why are you looking at me like that.”
“No reason,” Gunnar says, with every reason, and Leif pushes off the counter, and I feel the weather in the room shift as the bigger conversation loads.
Under the table, where nobody can see it, her foot is tucked up beneath her on the chair, the same way it always was in her dreams.
But now she’s here, real and right in front of me. Living a life where she drinks coffee at my table and argues with me in daylight and remembers, she remembers, she remembered the whole time.