Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-four
Iris had a fitful night of sleep after she returned to Jonathan’s house.
The air-conditioning was too cold, the digital clock display too bright.
She ruminated on the argument with Gabe and rehearsed for new ones, running lines with her worst-case scenarios.
She should have heeded Hannah’s advice; she shouldn’t have brought Gabe.
It had been a mistake to introduce a new romantic relationship into a new professional one.
She could only hope her error hadn’t thrown both into jeopardy.
When she finally fell asleep, she had that dream where she’s lying in bed but can’t move, a version of the recurring nightmare that had followed her since childhood and resurfaced anew since the Hendricks explosion.
It always started out as a lucid dream, one in which she can tell herself You’re having a nightmare, this isn’t real .
But it doesn’t matter, she is still scared.
And soon she drops deeper into it, into a realm beneath her conscious control.
She’s in her childhood bed, and her body feels incredibly heavy, three times her weight.
She wants to get up, she needs to escape, she can feel the panic rising in her belly, clenching her throat, but she can’t move a muscle.
Her gaze is fixed above the window, where the wall meets the ceiling.
There is a stenciled border of a little house, a little barn, and little farm animals lining the room, a design that she and her mother did themselves.
Looking at them takes her back there, happily sponge-painting over the plastic shapes with her mom, who stands behind her on the ladder, fencing her in with her arms on either side.
You didn’t have to be careful with stencils, you could be messy and the picture would still be fine.
When Iris’s little arms got tired from reaching, they would switch, and Iris would sit on the bed and watch her mother take over.
She is back in her bed now, seeing her mother’s back to her on the ladder, and Iris wants her to turn and look at her.
Iris longs to see her face, her comforting smile, the reassurance that everything will be okay.
But her mother doesn’t turn, and she doesn’t see.
And then the daylight fades and her mother disappears altogether, and it’s nighttime in her bedroom again.
She can see the neighbor’s windows bordered with glowing Christmas lights.
Iris smells smoke. Instinctively she knows it signals danger.
She wants to yell, but she can no more cry out than she can move, her body is too heavy, her mouth choked shut, and it is getting harder and harder to breathe.
Her eyes water as a trail of black smoke passes over the little red barn and the little blue house, curving around the animals like a beckoning finger.
Then all of a sudden, the weight is lifted and she levitates out of bed.
She is moving toward her bedroom door, and as scared as she is inside her room, she’s more terrified of what’s outside it.
The door is a black rectangle bordered in glowing orange, her world in solar eclipse.
And just as she bursts through, into the searing bright light—
Iris woke up, like always. It’s always this moment the nightmare ends.
She never gets to the part where Jacob bravely navigates out of the smoke-filled house, or when he falls down the stairs holding her, protecting her instead of breaking his own fall.
For some reason, her memory never takes her to his heroism or their successful escape.
The dream dwells on her own inaction in bed and goes only as far as meeting the wall of fire.
For all her subconscious seems to know, she never got out.
Iris kicked off the blankets, her body now clammy and too hot, and she sat up to try to slow her racing heart.
But her mind was filled with the same old recriminations.
Why didn’t she move the moment she smelled the smoke?
Why wasn’t she the one to heroically warn her parents just down the hall, who never woke up before the smoke got to them?
Why did Jacob have to come upstairs and risk his life to get her at all?
She had had some therapy in her teenage years, and had learned to say she was only a child, and that most likely nothing could have been done to save her parents.
Their bedroom door was open, and that’s why the smoke got to them first, while hers was closed tight until Jacob arrived.
Her counselor told her to have compassion for her younger self, and Iris tried.
But it was a sympathy laced with disdain, more like pity. Poor kid.
Poor, stupid kid.