In My Dreams I Hold a Knife by Ashley Winstead
Chapter 26
December, senior year
Memories are powerful things.
But—and this is important, my therapist said—so are the dark spaces. The things you choose, consciously or not, to repress. Always, they’re the things you need protection from. The too much: too terrifying, too shameful, too devastating. The things that, if allowed, would threaten the very core of who you’re supposed to be.
It turns out the real you is a quilt, made up of the light and the dark. The life you’ve lived in sunshine and your shadow life, stretching underneath the surface of your mind like a deep underwater world, exerting invisible power. You are a living, breathing story made up of the moments in time you cherish, all strung together, and those you hide. The moments that seem lost.
Until the day they’re not.
The day before Christmas, senior year, the morning my father overdosed, I woke from a terrible dream that I was trapped, held with a gun to my head. The gun kept going off, over and over, and the last thing I saw each time was a pair of eyes so dark the pupils drowned in them. When I jerked awake, heart hammering, I lost the thread of the dream, but gained a memory. It rushed back, all at once: I was eight years old, a dreamer. A naive kid with her head in the clouds. More than anything, I loved to write and draw stories. And I loved my parents—worshipped them. My angelic mother, always there when I needed her. My handsome father, an important man, someone everyone looked at with a shining admiration.
They said he was better than the steel company where he worked, a temporary job to make ends meet. He was a Harvard man with promise, after all, and eventually he’d find his way to where he belonged. Even his friends whispered it, even my mom—he’d go to Washington like he’d planned, work among the important dealmakers, use the economics degree he’d worked hard for. It was his destiny. He was so smart, so valuable. Any day now, he’d do it. Any day.
The thing about my father was—he was getting sick. At eight years old, I noticed it, even when no one else did, even as they kept whispering about where he’d go (up, up, up) and when (any day now). He’d started spending hours alone, turning the lights off in the living room and staring at the ceiling, arms hanging off the sides of the recliner like deadweight. Sometimes he nodded off, but a lot of nights, he just stared and stared at nothing.
Finally came the day when everyone else noticed. My dad arrived home first, red-faced, beelining to his bedroom and slamming the door. My mother followed minutes later, eyes bloodshot, held by her best friend—back when she had a friend, the wife of a man my father worked with. No one said anything to me, as if I didn’t exist. So when my mom went into the kitchen, I hovered at the door like a ghost, listening.
I couldn’t understand what they were saying—He betrayed me, from my mother. Threw himself at the boss, no one can believe it, from my mother’s best friend. Told her he was better than this, that he belonged at the top, with her. Everyone’s talking about it. I didn’t know what it all meant, but I knew my mother was crying, and it had something to do with my dad. Suddenly, I realized what it had to be: they’d discovered his sickness.
I knew what to do. I’d been thinking about it for a while. Whenever my mother was sick, I drew her pictures and told her a story, and it always made her feel better. I went to my room and took out my pencils—precious things I’d gotten for my birthday, the kind real artists used—and drew for an hour until I had the perfect thing. I gathered my drawings and slipped into my parents’ room.
My dad lay slumped on the bed in the dark, an arm hanging limp. I climbed up and perched next to him, sitting close to his face so he could see better. Then I took a deep breath and shook his shoulder.
He woke with a gasp. Immediately, my stomach clenched, instincts whispering, bad idea. His eyes were cloudy as he struggled to focus, his dark hair sweaty, breath shallow, rapid, like he’d just run a race. For a second, the face that stared back at me was a stranger’s.
“Dad?”
His voice was garbled. “Who are you?”
My heart squeezed painfully. “Jessica,” I whispered.
His gaze listed to his nightstand. He extended a clumsy hand, groping for an orange bottle just out of reach. It fell to the floor, top popping off, white pills scattering.
“Goddammit.”
“I’ll clean it, I promise.” I held up the drawings. “I drew you a story.” I peered around the paper. “Once upon a time, there was a king, see—” I pointed to the picture. “He had a beautiful wife who was the queen and a daughter who was the princess.” I pointed out the drawings of my mom and me, which I was proud of, as I’d done very good noses. “One day”—I switched to the next piece of paper—“an evil witch cast a spell on the king, and he fell into a deep sleep. It was up to the princess to break the curse. She—”
“Get off.” My dad’s voice grew sharper. “I need to rest.”
I moved closer to him, lifting the drawings. “Dad, see? It’s you and me, and Mom, in the story. I made us into kings and queens. Your wife and daughter—”
“I don’t have a wife or daughter.” He rose abruptly and I lost my balance, tipping off the bed to land, sharp, on my knees and elbows. My father stumbled from the bed and dropped beside me, sweeping the spilled pills into a pile with shaking hands.
My eyes filled with hot tears, knees and elbows burning. But I didn’t let myself cry. I watched him, his trembling fingers.
“I’m young,” my dad said out of nowhere. “I have my whole life ahead of me. I’m going to get out of this shithole town and go to DC. Use my damn degree and stop wasting my potential.”
Hunched over in the darkness, arms spread over the floor, my dad looked nothing like the king I’d drawn. I was frozen and afraid; I wanted the ground to swallow me whole. For time to race backward and deposit me, safe, back in my room.
My drawings were scattered, but I was too scared to pick them up. Instead, I crouched, watching my dad put the pills back in the bottle. Then he slumped against the dresser and looked at me. Really looked.
“I hate it here,” he whispered. He squinted at the light over my shoulder, which came from the door I’d left cracked open. His pupils turned to slits, like a cat’s. “I really do.”
“No,” I said, feeling my chest cleave.
As he dropped his gaze from the light, his pupils dilated, the blackness pooling in each eye. I watched the change with horror.
“Why do you insist on dragging me down?” he whispered.
I scrambled back, head hitting the wall.
“It’s supposed to be better than this.” His eyes were now twin black holes, pupils drowning the white. And I knew, with sudden clarity, that I didn’t hold the cure. I was the thing making him sick.
My mother flung open the door, and light flooded the room. My father shrank back, and they stared at each other for one horrible, frozen moment. And then they started screaming.
Hours later, I let my mother hug me, apologize, cry. She brought my drawings back, and I let her put them next to me in bed, waited until she left the room before I tore them to pieces and stuffed them in the trash. For days afterward, I told her I was okay. For a year, I stayed quiet, especially after we moved from Bedford to Norfolk, so my dad could transfer to a different branch of the steel company.
I pushed the memory of his sickness, and its cause, so far down it formed a tiny rupture in the center of me, a small black hole of my very own. And no matter how many years passed, I never looked inside.
Until senior year of college. Home for Christmas, when I woke from that nightmare gasping, still feeling the cold gun pressed against my forehead, still seeing the drowning pupils of the drug dealer, and the dream terror was replaced, by sinister sleight of hand, with the sudden rush of memory, unburied after fourteen years.
Only hours later, we got the call: my father had been found in a motel room, arms splayed over the side of the bed, dead of an overdose.
No one came to his funeral. When my grandparents arrived at the burial plot and saw it was just me, my mom, and the priest, my grandmother burst into sobs so violent my grandpa had to hold her to keep her from crumbling. Instead of hugging us, patting my shoulder like she did when I was young, my grandmother pointed a trembling finger.
“It’s your fault,” she said, eyes blazing at my mother. “You trapped him with your pregnancy. You made him miserable. You killed him. And look!” She flung her arms at the empty grounds. “No one even cares he’s gone. He was supposed to be somebody.”
My mother took two steps forward and slapped my grandmother hard across the cheek. She staggered back, mouth open, and my mother strode from the burial plot, out of the cemetery, never looking back.
So in the end, it was just the three of us. My grandparents and I stood silent as the priest read the burial rites and my father’s coffin lowered into the ground. It was a freezing winter day, and I’d left my coat in the car, but the strange thing was, I could barely feel a thing. There was this snowy fuzz, a blanket of white noise, both inside my skin and out. As the dirt fell, shovelful after shovelful, two voices echoed in my head, on a loop timed with the soft patter of earth hitting the coffin. My father’s voice, pulled from the recovered memory: I’m supposed to be better than this. And my grandmother’s: No one even cares he’s gone.
I did, of course. But perhaps I didn’t count.
When the holiday break was over and I returned to Duquette, I avoided everyone, sleeping during the day, walking around campus at night, when Heather and Caro were asleep. Sometimes I had clipped conversations with my mom. Strangely, she’d started calling me, which she’d never done before.
Then one night I got back to my dorm and Caro was waiting on my bed, tears in her eyes. Somehow, though I hadn’t told her, she knew what had happened. She wanted to hug and talk, to be my best friend, but I pushed her aside, told her I wasn’t ready. She’d just nodded and thrust a sheet of paper at me before leaving.
I dropped to my bed, looking at the paper without interest. It was a poem by Mary Oliver. I scanned until I came to the last line, a question: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
I sat up with a surge of anger. Why should I be satisfied with one wild and precious life? A vision of my father’s grave flashed, three small figures huddled around it. It wasn’t fair. People deserved more than that, more than a small, brief existence, only to fade away in the end.
Tears stung my eyes. I tore the poem and stuffed it in the trash. One life, full of mistakes, and not enough time—not enough chances—to do it right. It wasn’t enough. Who was this Mary Oliver, encouraging people to accept smallness, while in the meantime she was famous? While in the meantime, she knew her life would be infinite—her thoughts and words repeated for hundreds of years. I wanted that. I wanted to become big enough, important enough, to never really die. Then I would never get trapped in a hole in the ground like my dad, with no one around to care.
I knew exactly what to do. I sat at my desk and booted up my computer, tapping impatiently as I waited for it to start. If my grandmother was right and my dad’s life had ground to a halt because of me, I had to show him I was worth it, make him proud, and live for both of us: Harvard for grad school, then Washington, with the important dealmakers. I’d go up, up, up, and I would take him with me. He wouldn’t have to end like this. I would give him one more wild and precious shot.
***
I waited until the last student left the lecture hall before I approached him. Dr. John Garvey, Duquette’s campus celebrity, its shining star economist. Double Harvard: Harvard undergrad, Harvard PhD. Economic advisor to two presidents, and the school’s pride and joy. His classes were nearly impossible to get into unless you’d declared an econ major, with the exception of Heather, who had gotten into his class last semester even though she was an English major, because that was the kind of luck she had.
Dr. Garvey was tall, with thick, dark hair that was starting to gray. He’d probably been handsome, in a professorial sort of way, when he was young. No student had ever seen him outside a well-pressed suit, bow tie knotted expertly around his neck.
He was gathering his papers, picking up his briefcase, preparing to leave. It was now or never. I clutched the application so hard I nearly bent it. The Duquette Post-Graduate Fellowship, informally known as the Duquette Fulbright. The fellowship awarded one senior per year a full ride to the graduate school of their choosing. And it nearly guaranteed, with that honor on your résumé, that you’d be accepted anywhere you applied. Even to an Ivy League school.
I wanted this more than I’d ever wanted anything. This was our last shot, my father’s and mine. I needed to wow the fellowship committee, and nothing would do that better than a recommendation letter from Dr. Garvey.
“You’re hovering,” he said, stuffing his papers in his briefcase.
I cleared my throat. “Um, Dr. Garvey, I wanted to ask you something.”
“So? Spit it out.”
Butterflies soared in my stomach. Timidly, I held out the application. “I’m applying for Duquette’s Post-Grad Fellowship, and I was hoping…since we’ve had four classes together and I’ve gotten A’s in all of them, and you wrote on my last paper that I had very sophisticated thinking… Well, I was hoping you would write me a recommendation letter.”
There. It was out.
He stopped packing his briefcase and looked up. Scanned me, head to toe. I forced myself to remain still, shoulders high.
“Remind me of your name.”
“Jessica Miller,” I managed to say, though my throat ached all of a sudden. “Jessica M.”
Dr. Garvey stood looking at me in silence for so long that I began to grow deeply uncomfortable. Sweat gathered at my neck. He was going to say no. Of course he was. It was humiliating. Crushing.
“Have dinner with me,” Dr. Garvey said, and the fact that he’d finally spoken was enough of a shock that it took me a second to process what he’d said.
“Dinner?” I repeated.
“If you want a recommendation, I’d like to get to know you better.” Dr. Garvey snapped his briefcase shut. “I’ll take you to dinner Friday night, and we’ll talk.” He walked to the door and adjusted his bow tie. Then he turned to look at me over his shoulder.
“Well, what do you say, Ms. Miller? How bad do you want it?”