Hugo & Rose

 

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For my Giddy girl

 

one

Were you to ask her boys, they would tell you that for Rose, there had always been Hugo.

This was not strictly true. He had come to her first when she was six. Before that was a desert stretch of forgotten dreams and nightmares, populated with the common anxieties of childhood: monsters made of discarded laundry; princes and dresses and tiny pink ponies; mean, dirty neighbor children.

Before Hugo came, Rose dreamed like any other girl child, small damp fists curled, heart-shaped face placid, the calm rise and fall of small lungs under a tangle of blankets.

Of course, she looked the same while she slept after he came to her … but her dreams were very different.

Rose could recall only one of the dreams that came before Hugo: a nightmare. Lost in a department store, she'd searched for her mother inside an enormous rack of clothes. As she'd pressed her face farther and farther into the slick polyesters, the clothes began to smother her, closing in until she couldn't move. Terror and loss overwhelmed her and she woke racked with sobs.

Sobs that brought (
oh my sweet, oh my darling
) her mother. Reunited and reassured, little Rose was able to return to sleep.

Rose thought she must have been about four when she'd had this dream. She remembered faint images of the nightmare, but these were slippery and unsure. She wasn't certain if she was truly remembering the dream or if she was picturing the story she must have recounted to her mother that night in the darkness.

This was unlike her adventures with Hugo in every way. These she could recount as easily as she could list the things she had accomplished since breakfast.

Rose knew this was out of the ordinary.

*   *   *

In college, when their excitement for each other was still new and “above the clothes,” and Josh's nightly stubble was still exfoliating patches of cherry on Rose's face, the man who would be her husband told her about a particularly raunchy dream she'd featured in.

“I've never had a sex dream,” said Rose.

“I don't think that's possible,” said Josh, his hand tracing the denim seams on her leg.

But it was, and that early, early morning was the first time Rose told anyone about the boy in her dreams.

Stretched close to Josh on his twin bed, their heads on a single pillow, atop a twist of sheets in sore need of a wash, Rose began to describe the world she'd inhabited since she was a little girl. A place she'd gone to every night that was more familiar to her than her parents' home.

She described an island ringed by a beach of pink sand.

“Not Bermuda pink, more like flamingo pink.
Pink
pink.”

“Like Pepto?”

“Do you want to hear this or not?”

Josh laughed, filled with the smell of her. Her breath warm on his face. “Of course I do.”

The sky there was almost always covered in clouds, but when the sun broke through, shafts of light would strike the beach, changing the sand. The grains would begin to sparkle.

“When they do that, if you hit them right … Run at them just right, they throw you into the air.”

“Like flying?”

“More like bouncing, really, really high. It's fun.”

“Hmm.”

“This feels weird.”

Rose sat up. She was still dressed, miracle of miracles, but somehow she felt that Josh had hidden her clothes. Tucked them into a dark corner of his dorm room.

She shouldn't have said anything. Shouldn't have betrayed her secret. Or Hugo.

“I'm sorry.…”

Rose was quiet in the dark. She stared down at the silhouette of his cheek on the pillow and fought the panic that she'd blown it.

Shit, she'd blown it.

But after a moment Rose felt his wide, warm palm come to rest on the small of her neck. Its gentle gravity
inviting
her toward his chest … but not insisting that she go there.

“Please. I want to hear … I want to know everything about you.”

Rose decided then that maybe she didn't need to tell him all of it … maybe she could just stop at the beach.

But somehow that night, after she succumbed to the pull of Josh's body, she told him everything. Unveiled the secrets of her dreams, of the life she had lived with Hugo. In the dark, Rose painted a landscape of her hidden childhood: the warm waters of the Green Lagoon, the fields of saw grass tall as corn, the Blanket Pavilion and its hundred rooms fluttering in the breeze. The Bucks. Blindhead. The Natters. Spider Chasm. The Plank Orb. Castle City.

And Hugo.

Beautiful. Brave. Heroic Hugo.

Josh listened to Rose carefully … more carefully than he had listened to any lecture, any seminar. He
wanted
her to quiz him: for her to know how well he attended to her dreams. Because he already knew he loved her … though he wouldn't tell her for months yet.

This night was, in its way, more intimate than the night they first made love, three months later. Or the night of their wedding.

On the night Isaac was born, after the doctors and nurses had cleared away, leaving Josh and Rose alone to admire this new tiny being they had made—only then did they experience the same unfolding, the naked shift into the new, that they had the night that Rose told Josh about Hugo.

*   *   *

After Isaac came Adam, born the first year of Josh's residency. There was then a short duration of years, hemming, hawing, and negotiations, before the arrival of Penelope made their family complete. While Josh was busy with the work of becoming a surgeon, Rose settled into the business of motherhood. Diapers and cracker crumbs littered Rose's waking life in those early years.

When Josh found a placement in the dry reaches of Colorado—a nice-sized hospital, he said, enough population to give him a steady stream of bodies to practice upon—Rose moved house with an efficiency of lists. School districts were researched. A mortgage was calculated. Without too much drama they found a nice home in a nice neighborhood in a nice suburb.

Rose had pictures hanging before they went to sleep that first night.

“It feels more like home that way,” she said, curling into the crooked “S” of Josh's body.

*   *   *

Rose and Josh quietly slipped into the pause between youth and middle age—the moment when all the questions that plague the young have been answered: “Who will I marry? What will my children be like? How many will I have? What will I be when I grow up?” They reached an age when one realizes that all these questions have been answered and now the only thing is to watch one's life unfurl. There were still questions, of course, but these questions were by their nature less exciting than the ones that came before: “Will we get sick before they grow up? Will we be able to afford to keep the house? What if that
terrible something
happens? That nameless
something
that waits for those unlucky masses?”

Rose, for example, was saddened by the fact that someday, inevitably, either she or Josh would have to experience the death of the other. She hoped she would go first—though it seemed unfair to wish the pain of loss on Joshua.

It was, however, the unavoidable cost of having someone so dear that the idea of living after they're gone seems impossible.

*   *   *

And so Rose and Josh watched their life unfurl. The boys grew from sweet, sticky toddlers into wild-legged children, their shouts and protests the music of the house. Penny toddled after, happy to simply be acknowledged.

Josh put in the early work of a career surgeon. His hours were long and odd, leaving and returning while the house was still abed. The lessons he now learned were more terminal, in the meat of the human body.

This left Rose alone with the routine of motherhood. Children up. Bodies dressed. Breakfast made. Book bags packed. Every day a list to be checked off.

She was a good mother. Loved by her boys, who also knew enough to fear a certain pitch her voice could take when they played too rough.

Perhaps because it didn't seem to matter otherwise, or perhaps because this is just the way of things, Rose settled into the sweatpants years. The close attention she paid to the dressing and care of three little bodies left little room for her to attend to the dressing and care of her own. Her body bloomed, thighs no longer the straight, taut lines Josh had traced that night so long ago. More often than she would have liked to admit, the shirt she went to sleep in was the one in which she had woken up: though since Josh was rarely around, there was no one to witness Rose's resignation to piggishness.

*   *   *

She could not remember precisely when she began telling the boys about Hugo.

The beaches of her dreams were populated with tiny white crabs, their shells and legs constructed of the delicate tines of feathers. When they were young, she and Hugo would place these creatures on each other's necks, to see which of them could tolerate their ticklish skittering the longest.

“Tickle Crab” was a favorite bath-time game for the boys when they were very small. Rose would lean over the edge of the tub, her belly soft and round with Penny, snatching at their slick, brown bodies. The “Tickle Crab” would grind them into giggling submission, until she would relent, pulling away.

Adam would kiss his tiny wrinkled fingertips against each other.

The sign for “
more, again.”
And then a gentle swipe across his chest, “
please.”

Of course, little boy, littler boy.

*   *   *

As they grew, the boys learned to ask Rose about her dreams. The simple, straightforward adventure of their mother's nightly visits with Hugo appealed to their testosterone-fueled little-boy fantasies. Isaac and Adam would reenact Hugo and Rose's never-ending quest to find a way into the glowing spires of Castle City. They would beg her to pull the chairs and unfold the sheets to make a “Pavilion” for them. They recruited Josh—when he was around—to play the part of a giant Spider (
Bigger, meaner, Daddy!
), whom they would kill and then resurrect, but only so they could kill him again.