Chapter Twenty. Betty, 1964
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Shortly before he was assassinated, President Abraham Lincoln was said to have recounted this dream: ‘There seemed to be this death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping…’ According to the account, he heard a guard say that the president had been assassinated.”
—Smithsonian Channel
Betty jolted awake from a dream so vivid and terrifying her vocal cords felt frozen. Her brain seemed bifurcated, with half lingering in a surreal world where she was trying to snatch the yellow baby blanket out of the road before a truck drove over it.
She turned her head and saw Ivy lying on a twin bed, staring at the ceiling with a haunted expression. Kathleen and Helen were lined up in matching beds, too.
Slowly, she became oriented: It was Monday morning, and they were in the basement of the college’s library, a cavernous space with a cement floor that was mostly used for storage and to house the giant furnace, boiler, and water tank.
Now this subterranean space was Dr. Trimble’s newest testing ground.
He’d made them sleep here, in identical cots, in matching stiff white nightgowns Mrs. Trimble had sewn.
A gentle bell sounded, then repeated a moment later more loudly.
Dr. Trimble’s instructions from the previous night came back to Betty: He would awaken them at 5:30 AM. Before they spoke or stood up, they were to take the notebooks and pens on the floor next to them and write down everything they could remember about their dreams.
Yellow blanket, Betty wrote in cursive. Then she snuck another peek at Ivy.
Ivy wasn’t looking particularly well. None of them were.
Even beautiful Kathleen looked drawn and her lips were slightly chapped.
But Ivy was suffering the most. She was always squirming in her testing chair, trying to get comfortable, and she had to use the ladies’ room every hour.
Sleeping on that tiny bed with a thin mattress at seven and a half months pregnant had to have been an ordeal.
But there was more. Ivy had confided in Betty that her husband, David, wasn’t happy that her work with the institute meant she sometimes couldn’t get a hot dinner on the table when he came home.
“It’s normal for him to be a little jealous,” Betty had whispered to Ivy, squeezing her hand. “They’re used to having us all to themselves.” Ivy had nodded, but her natural buoyancy hadn’t returned.
Now Betty watched as a tear slowly crept down Ivy’s cheek before being absorbed by her pillow. David had surely given Ivy a hard time about being away overnight.
Before she could change her mind, Betty quickly finished the sentence on her notepad.
Dr. Trimble entered the room a moment later, still in his dark pants and white shirt from the evening before.
His shirt was wrinkled and the ring of hair above his ears was sticking up on one side.
Had he slept here, too? Betty wondered. She shivered at the thought of him slipping into the room, looming over them in the middle of the night.
“Tell me about your dreams,” Dr. Trimble ordered.
Helen spoke of a beautiful bridge she’d seen that was located twenty miles away, the giant steel structure arcing over a body of water. “It’s a real bridge; I saw it when I first came here,” she added.
Kathleen described playing baseball with her husband, swinging the bat at his pitch. “I have no idea what that’s about,” she commented when Dr. Trimble pressed her for more details. “My husband plays on a league one night a week, but obviously it’s men only. I’ve never even touched a bat.”
Ivy was more subdued. “All I could see was a window, but it was covered with a dark screen. I kept staring out the window, but I couldn’t see a thing. I have no idea where it was.”
When it was Betty’s turn, she read aloud from the note she’d hastily jotted: There was a park with a yellow blanket and a picnic on it with food spread out. It was a beautiful, sunny day and birds were singing. A butterfly danced nearby.
If I don’t write down what I saw, she thought, maybe it won’t come true. But she was only trying to fool herself; she knew it didn’t work that way.
She had seen Ivy knitting a yellow baby blanket exactly like the one in her dream. Ivy kept it tucked in her bag and brought it out now and then to work on during lulls in her testing.
“It’s for my baby,” Ivy had said, stroking the soft skein of yarn.
“It’s just gorgeous,” Betty had replied. “Nicer than anything you could buy at a store.”
Betty could barely let herself think about the implications of her dream. She, Betty, desperately trying to pick up the baby blanket. The vehicle blasting by, running over the blanket, leaving a thick black tire mark rolling through it.
She knew exactly what the symbolism meant.
Ivy’s baby was going to die.