“Oh, that’s all ancient history, girls,” Sally said, bringing Kate’s eyes back into focus. “Jess is an old married man now! With such a lovely wife!”
The scene began to fade before Kate’s eyes. Sally slowly vanished, as though she was evaporating. The other partygoers disappeared as the candles were extinguished and the room went dark. The wood and the floors and the doors and even the windows began to age, yellowing, cracking, gathering decades of dust in an instant.
She saw a man rushing into the turret at the end of the room, emitting an awful cry that sounded like a wounded animal on its deathbed. That scene swiftly faded into the picture of a child playing on the floor, growing up, and finally putting those childish toys away for good. Fires were lit in the fireplace and doused in rapid succession. Spider colonies came and went, mice were born, scurried about, and died, windows were opened, closed, and then shuttered permanently. All of it happened in an instant, in front of Kate’s eyes. And then, just as it had happened in this room once before, when she was a child, the air seemed to be sucked from the room. Kate couldn’t breathe.
“What’s going on?” Kate cried, gasping for breath as she slumped to the floor in the darkness. “Help me!”
“Honey! Kate! Wake up!” It was Simon, holding her. They were on the floor of the dark and dusty ballroom.
Kate stared into his face with wild eyes. She was confused, remembering with such clarity the scene she had just experienced moments ago, here in this very room—gleaming, beautiful, and new—juxtaposed with the dusty, neglected reality of the present. She hovered between the two worlds for a moment, not knowing which was real and which was the dream.
“Simon?” she whispered.
“Come with me.” He helped Kate to her feet. “We’re getting out of here.”
They didn’t notice the dark figure hovering in one corner of the room, dissipating into wispy smoke before disappearing completely.
Moments later, they were back in Kate’s room. Simon had retrieved a hot brandy from the bar, and she was crawling back into bed.
“Okay, now tell me what happened,” she said to him. “How did I get upstairs?”
“I came to check on you a few minutes ago, and you weren’t in bed,” Simon told her. “I thought maybe you had gone downstairs to the kitchen—or to the bar—and so I started down there, but then I noticed that the door at the end of the hallway was open. I went up the stairs to find you standing in the middle of the room. Just standing there. You were asleep, I think.”
“I’ve never been a sleepwalker,” Kate said, taking a gulp of the brandy.
“There’s a first time for everything, I guess,” Simon said.
“You will not believe what I was dreaming about,” Kate said. “You just won’t believe it.”
Simon’s eyes grew wide. “Don’t tell me it was another one of those dreams,” he whispered.
“It seemed so real,” Kate murmured. Her eyelids felt heavy and thick. “Harrison was in it. There was a gala party.”
“You sound like Dorothy, post-Oz.” Simon smiled, stroking her hair. “Listen, honey, there’s no place like home. You need to get some sleep, for real this time. This sleepwalking is not a good sign. God only knows where you’ll traipse off to next. Move over, kiddo. You just earned yourself a bed partner.”
Kate obeyed, slumping down on her pillow, exhausted by the day’s events. “I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow,” she mumbled. Within seconds of uttering those words, she fell into a deep sleep.
“I think he was cheating on her,” Kate said, chewing a mouthful of eggs at breakfast the next morning.
“Who?”
“Addie,” Kate said, surprised to find tears welling up in her eyes. “I think her husband might have been cheating on her.” The words of betrayal scratched her throat as she verbalized them, just as they had when she’d arrived at her parents’ house on the night of her birthday with the news that Kevin had been with another woman. Kate’s head pounded.
“Okay, out with it.” Simon leaned closer to Kate. “I’ve been dying to know. What in the world did you dream last night?”
Kate told him the whole story then—the party in the ballroom, the view of the town as it had been a century ago, Addie, standing in a corner like a wallflower. Harrison Connor, a dashing young man. The other woman.
“Jess was talking to another woman, and there was something about the way she was looking at me,” Kate started. “At her. The way the other woman was looking at Addie. She touched Jess’s arm like she owned him. And the things she said! Apparently she was an old girlfriend. It was all very subtle, and it could’ve been innocent, but it certainly seemed to me that something was going on between them.”
“Right here in this house,” Simon murmured.
“Right where we were standing day before yesterday.”
“So, tell me more,” Simon said, his eyes narrowing.
“I was looking out the window, and I could hear a party going on behind me,” Kate explained. “I wanted to turn and look at everything—I was dying to—but I couldn’t. My body, or more exactly, hers, wouldn’t move that way.”
They were silent for a while. “You know what I think?” Simon said. “If you really are dreaming about the past, then you’re dreaming about what was. Literally. You’re seeing, and living, what actually happened. You couldn’t turn and look into the ballroom when you wanted to in the dream because she didn’t in real life.”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking!” Kate said.
“But I have to tell you, last night’s dream might have been nothing more than the product of your overactive imagination. You found those newspaper clippings yesterday, and we had been up in the ballroom wondering what it might have been like in Harrison’s day. You had that weird encounter with . . . whatever it was that scratched your neck. That might be all it was.”
“Agreed,” Kate concluded. She stared out onto the street, remembering the detail of how it had been all those years ago. “But if that’s the case, I’ve got a very accurate imagination. I saw the sun set on Wharton out of the windows in my dream. I know exactly what this town looked like one hundred years ago.”
After breakfast, Kate walked out of Harrison’s House with Alaska at her side into a rush of chilly air. It startled her—she had been expecting a warm, summer day. No, she thought, that was what the weather was like in my dream. It’s autumn now. Summer’s over. She turned and began making her way down the hill, the same hill she had climbed and descended yesterday and many times before that. Yet this time, she was struck by how much it had changed. Pavement, houses one after another, shops, restaurants. Cars. People. Cell phones. As Alaska sniffed here and there, Kate thought about the past.
Where was the blueberry patch? Where was the house with the magnificent garden? Kate looked around and tried to mesh the streetscape she had seen in her dream the night before with the modern-day version of the same. There, on the corner, the white wooden house with the big front porch. That’s where the garden had been. Kate wondered if the people who owned that house ever found an errant carrot, a determined sunflower, a stubborn stalk of corn growing in their finely manicured backyard. Did they have any idea what had been there before their house was built? Did they know that someone had tended the earth, turned the soil, watered, and weeded and did it all to feed his family?