Cat in Glass (11 page)

Outside I hear the night wind rushing from the land to the sea, prowling around beaverboard corners, scrabbling at the cheap window frames. This little box of a shelter feels like paper compared to Our Lady of the Harbor, with its thick walls, oak beams, and heavy, nail-studded doors.

“I don’t want any help,” I say. “I’ve made up my mind this dream is never coming back again.”

But Fairfax knows me too well.

She sighs and switches on my chipped bedside lamp. In its comforting yellow glow, our room is a perfect illustration of the differences between us. My side is cluttered with treasures I have gathered at random from secondhand stores and flea markets, while hers is stark and clean as a monk’s cell. I buy wobbly tables, hats with holes in them, and boxes full of crystals and buttons. Fairfax prefers modern European prints and slim watches with no numbers on their faces.

She sits beside me on the bed, naked except for a pair of kelly green satin bikinis and a thin gold necklace. She refuses to wear nightclothes. They get tangled around her like ropes in the night, she says, and they’re good for nothing.

She hugs herself in the cool night air. Her skin is covered with freckles and goose bumps. “Nobody, not even you, can just decide not to have a dream. You know as well as I do it’ll be back again. This isn’t normal, Electra. Something’s wrong.”

She looks down at the linoleum floor, looks up again, her chin held very high. “I think I really mean it. You and your nightmares are driving me crazy. If you don’t talk to somebody about this, I’m moving out.”

She turns off the light. I listen to the slap of her feet on the floor as she walks back to her bed. I pull the covers up and stare out the window at the thrashing treetops. In her own way, she is just trying to help.

The next morning, a Tuesday, Fairfax is sitting in her bathrobe playing her cello when I leave our room. I wave good-bye, as usual; she nods vaguely, as usual, without taking her eyes from the music.

I have an early class on Tuesdays, number theory, the only course I am taking this quarter. In June, when the summer term opened, the elegance and purity of number theory delighted me—made the world seem acute, well formed, and larger than humankind. But now it is August. For two months, dreams of wind and ships have robbed me of sleep. Often, the concepts our professor introduces make no sense to me, and sometimes proofs that would have seemed obvious before escape me.

This morning, just as I expect, I doze through the class. When the hour is over, the professor takes me aside. “Electra, I regard you as one of our most promising mathematics majors. But lately I’ve noticed a certain … shall we say … lack of concentration. Is anything wrong?”

“No. No, nothing at all,” I say, staring at my feet. Some men, most men in fact, make me nervous. In front of this male teacher, I’m an even more inept liar than usual.

He frowns and rubs his neck.

“Sorry,” I mumble. “I’m late. I really have to be going.”

I hurry out of the classroom toward the cafeteria, where I usually eat breakfast after class. On my way, I pass the campus
chapel and hesitate there, trying to compose my rattled nerves. In its distant beginnings, Las Piedras was a Catholic school. Now it is secular, but the chapel remains for those who wish to use it. I have been inside it often for Mass.

I stop on the terrazzo plaza in front to look up at the gilt mosaic on the chapel’s facade, of Christ walking on the water after he has calmed the storm. For no reason at all, goose flesh rises on my arms. It is a cloudless, brilliant day, and a warm breeze drifts inland from the ocean, heavy with the smell of seaweed. It blows my hair across my eyes so that all the world becomes the color of sand.

In that moment, everything reels and folds, and I am plunged into my nightmare without warning. This time, I seem to be looking down on the black ship from midair. It is the same ship, wooden, with seven or eight square sails. Towering waves ram her broadside, and she heels and screams. I gasp for air, afraid that I will die if she dies. I have had the dream many times before but never like this, wide awake, in the middle of a daily routine. I try to claw my way back to the solid reality of the plaza and the glittering mosaic.

But when I come to myself, I am not on the plaza as I expect to be. I am lying prone on a broad stairway with my arms wrapped around a wooden post—a communion rail, I slowly realize. I look up. I recognize the shape of the vaulted arches above my head and the stained glass depictions of the stations of the cross. I am inside the chapel.

I stumble to my feet, dizzy and disoriented. Beyond the rail, the altar stands bare. The altar cloth lies on the floor beneath it, a heap of embroidered laundry. A huge Bible lies
beside it, stricken from its stand, pages bent and torn, spine broken. I turn and face the pews. Missals lie scattered in the aisles. Smoke rises in ghostly ribbons from the wicks of a dozen extinguished votive candles.

My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and are spent without hope. O remember that my life is wind
. The words echo inside my skull.

A cold draft moans through the nave, ruffling the pages of the scattered missals; or is it someone laughing? The hair on the back of my neck stands up. My heart quickens, a hundred beats a minute, a hundred and ten, two every second. I bolt from the chapel, through the double doors, and into the sunlight.

I am halfway across the quad before I can overcome my panic enough to stop running. I pant and glance around to make sure no one has seen my windmilling flight. After a moment, I force myself to walk slowly, deliberately toward the cafeteria, repeating in a low whisper, “I am tired. I must have imagined it all. I am tired …”

When I reach the cafeteria, I buy a sugar doughnut and black coffee. While I stand in line at the cash register, a hundred wild thoughts jostle against each other in my brain, trying to dislodge my careful concentration on the mundane matters of napkins and correct change.

It doesn’t matter what I tell myself. I know what I saw was real. The chapel looked as if a gale had been set loose inside it. It looked as if my nightmare had come to life. But this is childish nonsense, and I am not a child anymore. I am twenty years old, twenty-one in November—too old to be
frightened by dreams, especially dreams like these. I have never been on a ship in my life. And as for the wind, I have always loved being out in it—flying kites, or even just walking, wrapped up in a snug coat and hat. I cannot recall any reason to fear either wind or ships.

But while I count out two quarters, a dime, two nickels, and place them in the cashier’s hand, the great fact of my life runs its bony fingers up my spine, as it has countless times before. I will never be an entirely known quantity to anyone, even to myself. I may never know where the nightmare came from. I am no ordinary person. I am not even an ordinary orphan. I am, in fact, a foundling.

I sit down at one of the tables outside and watch analytically while tears splash into my steaming coffee. I can’t bring myself to look up and see who is pulling out the chair across from me.

“Hey.”

It is Fairfax. She places the palm of her hand on my forehead and pushes gently, until my face is tilted up toward hers.

“What’s the matter?” she says.

I shake my head. I’m not sure I can talk yet, not even to Fairfax. But an instant later, the words come out in an unexpected rush.

“I … I was walking across the plaza. I had the dream.” My voice cracks and I stop, feeling helpless.

Fairfax wrinkles her forehead. Is it concern or incredulity? “About the wind? In the middle of the day?”

I nod miserably. “I had the dream and when I woke up I was inside the chapel. It was a mess. Fairfax, the wind had been blowing inside. It blew out the candles. It tore the cloth off the altar. What am I going to do?”

She smiles. It
is
incredulity. “Naw,” she says. “It’s just a dream. How could a dream do that? Come on, now. You know you were imagining things.”

“But I wasn’t. You don’t know what it was like. I couldn’t have imagined it.”

Fairfax presses her lips into a thin, determined line and takes me by the arm. “All right. Show me,” she says.

Tension arcs between us as we walk silently back toward the chapel. When we reach it, Fairfax pulls open the big wooden doors, and we peer into the nave. Even before my eyes adjust to the dim light, I know I was right. The chapel is alive with voices—high, angry, frightened. “You’re certain you didn’t see anyone? Who would do such a thing?”

Fairfax’s eyes grow huge as she surveys the damage. She grabs my arm and hustles me back across the plaza to a bench beneath a palm tree. “Electra, I think we should talk,” she says.

“I told you,” I say. “It really happened.”

She shakes her head violently. “This couldn’t possibly have any connection with your dream. Be rational. There’s got to be some other explanation.”

“No. It has something to do with me. I know it.”

“Don’t be crazy. It’s just a coincidence. Maybe it’s vandals. Or somebody playing a practical joke.”

“No. It’s me. The wind is trying to get me.”

“Fine. If that’s really what you think, then you should go see a doctor.” She almost shouts it.

“A doctor can’t help me!”

Fairfax closes her eyes and silently mouths the numbers one to twenty. Her temper is quick and terrible. Sometimes even the counting doesn’t keep it from getting out of control.

When she reaches twenty-one, she gets up, still red-faced, and slings her book bag over her shoulder. “I’m late for my class,” she says, biting the words off and spitting them out. She spins and stalks off across the plaza, leaving me alone beneath the tree.

I don’t see her again till after dinner, when she shows up at the trailer dorm with a familiar grin on her face. I have seen this grin before—the broad one that means she is pleased with herself and bursting to tell me about it.

“Sorry about this morning,” I say. I am sitting cross-legged on my bed, working proofs and watching a talk show on my television, an old black-and-white with all the dials missing.

She flounces down beside me. “Oh, forget about that. I’ve got a great plan.”

I look at her warily. Her last great plan was for me to sell my collection of comic books and put the money down on a used Alfa Romeo.

“I’ve spent the whole day getting all the details worked out. Look, this flimsy trailer is a terrible place for anybody who’s having nightmares about the wind. I think we should both get out of here.”

I frown. She is so impulsive. “Where would we go?”

Fairfax opens her book pack and pulls out a folded sheet of binder paper with a message neatly printed on it in soft pencil. “Room and board, reasonable rates. Dr. and Mrs. Axelrod Desmond, 713 Melville Street, 322–1732.”

“What’s this?”

“You know my physics instructor, Tony DiMarini?”

I nod. She has mentioned him once or twice, mostly in connection with his niceness. Fairfax, a music major, is in the midst of struggling through a required physics course. She told me when she signed up for it that she thought summer would be the best time to take it because instructors have more free time to work with students then.

“Well, I ran into him after class today,” she says. “He mentioned that there are a couple of rooms open at the place where he lives. It’s an old house near campus. Interested?”

I chew on my pencil eraser. The whole thing sounds to me like some kind of ploy on DiMarini’s part.

“It belongs to a retired English professor and his wife. They rent out the rooms on the top story for practically nothing, to any students who are willing to help with chores and yard work.”

“Sounds suspicious,” I say. “It’s probably a real dump or something. Either that or the yard work’s a full-time job.”

Fairfax breathes loudly through her nose. “Electra! Don’t be that way. I wouldn’t get you into anything like that. It’s a wonderful place.”

I squint at her, suddenly aware that she’s holding something back. “How do you know it’s a wonderful place?”

“Look … uh … I telephoned Mrs. Desmond. I went over to see it this afternoon. Oh, Electra, you’ll love it! It’s huge. It’s made of solid stone. And the Desmonds are terrific. They didn’t want to take the deposit at first, not till they’d met you …” Her voice trails off. “Uh-oh,” she says. She touches her lips with her fingertips.

“You mean you
rented
it? Without even asking me?”

“I knew you’d love it, I just knew it, and if I didn’t take it right then, somebody else would. Tony had to put in a good word for us, as it was. Oh, Electra, won’t you at least try it for a while?”

Fairfax is glowing with excitement. Her eyes shine like the sun on a green sea. At times like these, she is practically irresistible. I don’t suppose I can really blame DiMarini for trying to get closer to her.

I look at the address again, trying to be critical. 713 Melville Street. In spite of myself, I picture a high, bright room with a view. 713. Seven for good luck, thirteen for bad. I think of the way our dingy, cramped trailer shudders in the least breath of wind. I really do hate it. Fairfax is right. It is a very bad place for someone with dreams like mine.

“Oh all right,” I say at last.

Fairfax and I spend the next morning at the university housing office, getting out of our dorm arrangement. In the afternoon, we make the short trek to Melville Street, up a hill north of campus. True to Fairfax’s description, number 713 is a three-story house with thick fieldstone walls and a broad porch. An ancient willow tree guards the front yard, its roots buckling
the sidewalk into tilted plates. We walk up the steps and rap on the heavy front door but get no answer.

“I guess the Desmonds aren’t home, but trust me,” says Fairfax. “You’ll love it.”

I nod. “Probably right,” I say, with a faint sense of discomfort. I don’t like being pushed into such a big change. But as far as I can tell, Fairfax has been completely truthful about the house. It looks huge, sturdy, and inviting. Besides, now that the paperwork with the housing office is finished, it will be easier to move than to stay in the dormitory.