1
OVER THE YEARS THE DREAM REAPPEARED IN THE LATE winter, as if it were compelled by the irresistible force of the turning seasons. And ever since Dave had moved back to Huntington Beach, he dreamed even more often about the ocean. Sometimes, on particularly quiet nights, when there was heavy surf and an onshore wind, he could hear the distant breaking of the waves from his house near the park, and he had noticed that the closer he came to sleep, the louder and more insistent was the noise of the breaking waves, as if it were the waves themselves that swept away conscious thought, and submerged his mind beneath their silent green swell.
Unlike most of his dreams, though, there was nothing strange about the logic of this dream, and nearly nothing had changed in it over the past fifteen years. It almost never involved him actually trying to save the girl from drowning. Instead, he was alone in the ocean, swimming over the tops of increasingly bigger waves. He would scan the empty winter beach with a feeling of growing dread, the sky clouded by smoke rising out of the sand as if from a subterranean chimney, the whole world utterly still and silent except for the moving ocean and the moving smoke. A wave would crest in front of him, and in sudden fear he would dive underwater and swim toward the ocean bottom, into the green darkness, listening for the noise of the wave’s breaking and waiting for the inevitable shock when the turbulence hit him. What looked like swirling seaweed, like surge-washed eelgrass and kelp, would suddenly appear before him, and for one fleeting moment he would see the girl’s face in the weeds, ghost pale, her eyes open and staring, and he would feel her brush against him as the ocean dragged her downward to her death.
Often he would wake up afraid to move, with the sound of the dream ocean sighing in his ears like the beating of a vast heart. He would lie there waiting, certain that something was pending, that something immensely terrible was about to be revealed. And then he would realize that it had already been revealed to him, whatever it was, that it lay waiting in some crevice of his mind, ready to germinate and bloom again like the seed of an alien flower.
WHEN HE AWOKE ON THE FRONT PORCH, DAVE FOUND that he was gripping the cold metal arms of the front porch chair as if something had tried to yank him out of it. He relaxed his grip, leaning back, shrugging the stiffness out of his shoulders. There was the smell of gardenia blossoms on the night air and the sound of a moth fluttering against the lamp globe on the porch ceiling. The fog was heavy out on the yard and street. He sat forward, realizing that he must have been asleep for some time. He was cold despite his jacket, and the book he had been reading lay open on his lap.
As ever, in his mind the last fragments of the dream fell away as the tide of sleep receded, but now he found himself still listening to a sound that came to him from out of the foggy night, like brush strokes on a drum skin at first, or like the soft pacing of someone dragging their shoe soles out on the wet sidewalk, and he knew that he had been listening to the pacing even in his dream, mixed up in the sound of the ocean and breaking waves. His heart raced with the realization, and he was instantly filled again with the certainty that something was pending, that something was about to be revealed to him.
And then, as if she had in that moment appeared from within a veil of fog, a woman stood looking at him on the front walk, her features unfocused in the murk so that she seemed almost faceless, her dark amorphous clothing misty beneath the streetlamp. Her hair was long and black. Momentarily her features nearly coalesced in the heavy mist, and he was struck with the feeling of vague recognition, but then a window seemed to open in the fog, and just as quickly as she had appeared, she disappeared. He heard the footfalls scraping again on the wet sidewalk, but even they sounded dreamlike, as regular as a heartbeat, and abruptly they fell away, and the night was silent around him.
He got up from the chair and descended the concrete porch steps to the front walk, and it seemed to him that there was cool air rising from the concrete like an upwelling of ocean water drawn to the surface by a passing wave. He smelled smoke on the wet night air, just a trace of it that lingered for a moment on the lanquid breeze and then was gone. The sidewalk and the street were empty. The street-lamps cast misty circles of yellow light on the curb and the grassy parkway. Moisture from the telephone lines dripped slowly onto the driveway, and now that he was out from under the shelter of the porch, he could hear waves breaking along the distant beach.
To satisfy an uneasy curiosity, he walked toward the corner. The neighboring houses were dark, their porches and driveways empty. He crossed the street at the end of the block and continued on, heading down toward the ocean, which was six blocks away. It seemed to him that she must have disappeared in this direction, although he couldn’t quite say why, since she had merely vanished from where she had stood, and might just as easily have ascended into the clouds.
The entire episode began to seem unreal to him, and it dawned on him that she might simply have been a waking hallucination, a trailing remnant of his dream. He turned around and headed home, realizing that he was merely chasing phantoms. It was time for bed—past time. His house loomed into view, the living room light shining out onto the porch. Through the screen door he could see his coffee cup on the table next to the couch. A folded-open copy of Fine Woodworking magazine lay on the floor along with the disassembled parts of an old wooden carpenter’s plane that he was restoring. He climbed the steps, picked his book up from the chair, and went inside the house, where he shut the door and bolted it. For a few more moments he peered out through the blinds, listening to the quiet night and watching the foggy, empty street.
He walked to the library table that sat against the back wall of the room, opened the single drawer, and reached far into the back of it, in among a scattering of old photographs, finding the beaded bracelet that he had kept in the years since Elinor’s drowning. He couldn’t say why he hadn’t given it back to the drowned girl’s mother, to Elinor’s mother, that morning on the beach. He simply hadn’t. The moment had never come. He hadn’t been able to face her. He had slipped away, crossing the Highway to where his car was parked on the dirt shoulder near the boatyard, the bracelet in the pocket of his trunks. He looked at it now, the ivory-white beads with blocky red letters spelling out her name, a heart and a diamond on either side. The rest of the bracelet was elastic string, which had lost its stretch in the intervening years.
After a moment he slipped it back into the drawer, losing it once again among the photographs.