Tooth and Nail (3 page)

I pushed up and flipped him over on his back, my knees straddling his hips. I yanked my tank top over my head and flung it away. He laughed.

I loved democracy.

>=<

That night, I had the dream again.

The dream that kicked my ass; the dream that was always an omen, a warning to me that life was about to spin into confusion.

I crawl out of bed and stumble, and my hand goes to my mouth, which hurts. It hurts from the inside of my lips to the back of my throat and all around. I press my back teeth together and instead of feeling the comforting close of molars, it’s shaky in there, like a city sidewalk moments after an earthquake. I blink hard and grab the door frame, pulling myself into the hallway. I let go of the wall and
try to take one step, but setting my bare heel down on the thick carpet is too jarring for my fragile mouth, and a small, smooth tooth drops onto my tongue. It slides around, sticky, salty, metallic, and I spit it out. It hits the carpet with a physically impossible but distinct echoey tinkle, and the sound and horror of looking at my own tooth weakens my knees and I fold down onto the floor. I fall hard and struggle against my fear and fatigue to prop myself onto my forearms.

My jaw is on fire but I can’t open my mouth—I won’t open my mouth. I don’t want another tooth to drop out. I seal my blood-sticky lips together until it fills up, my mouth fills up with it, the pressure building behind my lips until I can’t breathe, and I open wide, gasping like a guppy from an overturned bowl.

In a gush of blood and saliva, my teeth fall out. All of them. I press my chin to the scratchy rug fibers and stare at the macabre, wet little pile. My mouth is still hanging open, and as I breathe, I can feel cold air whistling through the new holes in my gums. A warm stickiness trails from my jaw line down my neck and pools hot into my collarbone.

I collapse onto the mess, and my freed teeth push sharp into my skin, biting my cheek.

Then I abruptly scramble to get up and grab at the teeth. I have to get them. I have to put them in my pocket. But every time I get a fistful, they slide from between my fingers and fall away again. No! I have to collect them, save them, keep them, I need them… But now I hear whispers, musical laughing whispers. I can’t make out the words, yet I know what they’re saying: Grab the teeth, get them all, don’t lose them...

I woke up sweaty, blurry, disoriented.

I flailed an arm out and my knuckles thumped a sleeping Avery. He clasped my hand and held it still against his hard chest. I poked my tongue against my front teeth, testing their fortitude, and stopped upon realizing they weren’t going to pop out in front of my face.

I slid my hand out from underneath Avery’s and went to stand naked by the window. I stared through the transparent curtains as they blew into the room, kissing my forehead, sliding against my nose.

I wondered, and worried.

Stupid dream, stupid nightmare. I hadn’t seen this punch coming.

In the boxing ring, I had to know how to land a punch, but to win, I also had to know how to evade one. And I was pretty good at the landing and the evading. Boxing was a dark kind of dance, moving in and out of invisible boundaries, touching while remaining untouchable. When I was fighting evenly matched, I won more than I lost.

But this dream was never my fair opponent.

It waited—sometimes for years—until its chosen night, when I was asleep and vulnerable, when I’d surrendered my physical ability and my mental control. Then it held me down and unleashed one sucker-punch after another. I couldn’t fight back and I couldn’t pull away. I could only scream into a black void until the dream chose to release me, and I awakened sweaty, blurry, disoriented, and afraid to stand.

Tonight, I hadn’t seen it coming.

I knew recurring dreams weren’t an unusual phenomenon, and I’d began extensive research on the dream, oh, maybe the third or fourth time I had it, years ago, and I learned teeth-falling-out is one of the most common dreams that people have. I collected all the different interpretations and so-called deep meanings. There were a lot of them: anxiety about outward appearances, fear of embarrassment, feelings of powerlessness, fear of uncontrollable events, fear of getting old.

The one time I told my mother about the dream, she seemed strangely alarmed for a moment, but then told me that she’d heard the losing-teeth nightmare signifies a loss of childhood innocence. I surmised at the time that she was digging for information the way wily single moms do, so I said nothing further to incriminate myself.

Eventually, I decided I might never narrow down the meaning as it pertained to me personally, but I did pinpoint a pattern to the dream’s occurrence—always immediately preceding a significant life- and attitude-altering event.

Example: One week before I graduated high school, I had the dream. It kicked off a week of insomnia, in which I panicked every moment I spent in the dark, wondering how I would eventually pay off my college loans, find a great man, deal with the pain of childbirth—maybe more than once—on top of doing my own grocery shopping and laundry. The prospect of adulthood crushed down on me, pinning me to my bright yellow sheets and daring me to struggle against it. I did finally fall asleep—at the graduation ceremony, during the speeches, my head dropping down. My mortarboard landed on the scuffed gymnasium floor.

Another example: I had the tooth dream, then three days later, my college sweetheart-slash-fiance informed me that he was trading in the previously unbreakable love that we shared for a woman he met on the subway and had sex with within the hour.

And the first time I had the dream was the night before the day my father left us.

So now, I stood shivering in the warmth of the dark. It had rained while I dreamed, and I breathed in blossomy fresh water evaporating off the steaming sidewalks. I worried more, and I wondered more.

Was it possible that this time, this one night, my omen dream simply had the timing wrong? That it was just a little late? Because my life-altering event had just happened last week, when I’d moved in with Avery and taken a leave from my polling job. It marked the first time in my adult life that I wouldn’t be working, the first time I’d be a “domestic partner,” and the first time I had offered up such a commitment to—anyone.

And I hadn’t been scared to do it. I had been confident and sure, even upon leaving the office with my box of desk supplies, even upon collapsing on my end of the sofa after we hefted it into our new living room. Especially when Avery had slammed the door and we both jumped into the sofa to make love, a still-open U-Haul on the street with half our belongings inside.

In my personal history book, this was a life-changing, noteworthy event. I was about to become a full-time stay-at-homer, helping Avery in his campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives. Going to fundraising parties and getting my picture taken. Watching daytime TV and reading magazines. Training at the gym. A temporary life of leisure. Still, a very big change.

He was having a great run.
We
were having a great run.

I shook my head, took a deep breath and pushed the curtains aside to smile at myself. My white teeth grinned at me in the window, my form a darkening shadow against the brightening dawn. I nodded at myself, acknowledging the familiarity of my own face.
That’s all
, I told myself, before turning around, peeling back the damp sheets on my side of the bed and sliding back beside Avery’s warmth. The dream was just a little late. Maybe even a
good
sign, confirming this important milestone for me—for me
and
Avery.

My worry took a few more minutes to dissipate, minutes in which I allowed the sound of my breath to overtake the lingering sound of those sweet, teasing whispers. They faded away, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to clearly recall their laughing entreaties until the next time I heard them, another night.

Tonight had to be a mental blip, an aberration, a break in the pattern. Nothing more.

Convincing myself that I’d just convinced myself, I soon fell asleep again.

>=<

“Gemma.”

“Mmmf.”

“I’m leaving,” Avery said softly into my ear. “I have that early meeting.”

I rolled over and got a mouthful of pillow. “Why didn’t the alarm go off?” I asked, muffled and confused.

“It did. You were dead to it.”

“I had a bad dream.” As soon as it was out of my mouth, I wished I’d held it in. It was childish, frightened, wimpy. But my face was still smooshed into the pillow. Maybe he hadn’t heard me.

“What was the dream about?” he asked.

I flipped over and looked at him.

I could have told him. I could tell Avery anything. But the timing was no good. I would have had to explain not only the dream but its place in my history—that it was my harbinger of difficult times of change. Given his tendency to worry about his campaign anyway, he might buy into the omen theory, and he didn’t need that now.

“I don’t remember,” I told him. “It’s already gone.”

“That’s the way with dreams,” he said, and disappeared out the front door.

I didn’t like the sound of that.

I lay staring at the ceiling, then realized after a few minutes that I was actually trying to decide what to wear to the dentist’s office, as it was my big outing of the day besides the gym. Pathetic. Yesterday, my highlight had been staring at the TV, hypnotized by Rachael Ray as she manipulated ground turkey for thirty minutes. The day before that, the digital cable telemarketer and I discovered we had a soap opera in common, and after twenty-five minutes of chat, I was kind of obligated to sign up for the deluxe package. I didn’t think Avery was yet aware of our new nudie channels, but I thought it safe to assume it wouldn’t lead to much of an argument when he did figure it out.

That was the way it was going, day after day. I
did
miss my job. I missed crunching numbers, making phone calls, seeing my work published on our online site, and sometimes cited in newspapers and on TV. More than ninety percent of the polling at the company was market research, but there was a small amount of political polling, and it was enough to worry both Avery and myself when he announced his candidacy.

I would go back soon. But I’d never been out of work, not since I was fourteen and earning paper route cash. In college, I was a scholarship student, but I needed to work during my non-class hours to buy my hefty statistics textbooks for both undergraduate and graduate courses. I worked to pay for my membership at Smiley’s. I didn’t realize until recently that I really didn’t know how to
not
work.

Complaining was pointless because I took the leave from work out of love and support for Avery—the most important reason.

But I had to face it: After three weeks, I was isolated, teetering on the precipice of ennui.

I needed something to do with myself. Soon.

CHAPTER 3

"G
o ahead and rinse.”

I sat up, reaching an awkward hand for the little Dixie cup as my paper bib swiped my chin. I sipped and spit, watching drops of blood and disgusting bits of God-knows-what slosh into the—I didn’t even know what it was. Fountain? Spittoon?

I kept rinsing until my mouth was clean, then I leaned back. My skull hurt from the slightly misplaced headrest, and it didn’t help matters when some kind of power tool zoomed to sudden loud life in the adjoining exam room.

“At least I don’t have it as bad as the poor patient next door,” I remarked.

Denise, the hygienist, laughed, displaying her own shiny teeth. I wondered about hygienists. When they woke up and before they went to bed, did they brush each individual tooth in their mouths to a count of sixty? Or did they figure, “The hell with it, if my teeth go bad, I get a discount at work”?

“No, hon,” Denise said now. “We’ve got contractors renovating in there. Dr. Gold retired last week.”

I grinned, remembering last night’s banter with Avery. “Finally, huh?”

“You’re not kidding. We practically had to shove him out the door and down to Florida. You’d think he’d want some relaxation by now.”

“So what are the renovations?”

“New dentist taking over the practice. He wanted to make some changes.”

I raised a brow, which I could do really well, by the way. “Dentists’ offices generally aren’t known for their hip and original interior design. It’s usually minimalist. Chair, sink, tray of terrifying sterilized weaponry.”

“Yeah, well, I have no idea what he’s doing in there, and I don’t want to know. I just come in, clean teeth, and leave.” She unclipped my bib and scrunched it up before tossing it in the trash can. “You’re good to go.”

“I can’t tell you how much I enjoy our time together,” I told her, standing and sliding my tongue over my smoother teeth and sorer gums.

“Me too,” Denise said. “I know! Let’s do it again in six months.”

“Great idea!” Corny as I could be, I still loved it when people went along with humor. It gave me a nice we’re-all-in-this-together feeling about humanity. “Thanks for omitting the flossing lecture.”

“Please. Everyone’s negligence keeps me off the unemployment line.” She laughed again. “I guess I shouldn’t say that. See you, Gemma.”

After I tore out a check for the receptionist and booked my next appointment, I stepped out into the D.C. sun. My overwhelmed eyes immediately teared up, since I’d spent the last hour with my eyes shut so as to avoid staring into the scare-tactic poster of a gaping, rotting grimace on the exam room wall in front of me. I dropped my gym bag at my feet and kneeled down next to it, shoving aside my black sports bra and sweat socks to unearth my sunglasses. Mall shoppers passed me, paper shopping bags bumping against their legs. I watched the 54 bus rumble by, and the rush of dust in its wake kicked up into my face.

Before I could put the glasses on, I saw him.

He was across the street. Just standing there, lazy, leaning against a lamppost as if time was nothing to consider. He was casual blond, and long-legged in beat-up jeans. I’d never seen him before in my life.