Read Online This Shared Dream by Kathleen Ann Goonan - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Kathleen Ann Goonan
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a storybook.”
“Yes,” she said, transported. In Whens’ voice she heard Megan’s, when she was five, skinny and antic, always laughing or dancing. Whens, despite his similar voice, was serious, almost grave, with a sense of humor too grown-up by far, and she wished for a moment that he might imbibe some of Megan’s cheerful spirit here. But even Megan was serious, now.
Megan must have dusted the eclectic mix of furniture, and washed the gilded-frame mirror over the fireplace, for everything was splendidly clean. On both sides of the fireplace, shelves overflowed with an irregular tapestry of books. Old friends, some her mother’s: international policy, the brain, DNA, and ancient Chinese poetry.
Her father’s books were more concrete. World War II. Physics. Engineering. Watson and Crick and obscure journals. But after … after …
She sighed. Say it. After Mom Left.
After Bette vanished, Sam read more novels, almost as if questing after information about the physical world was completely useless. He devoured fiction, she recalled, lying on the couch and smoking, day and night, when he wasn’t working.
“Mommy.”
“What?”
“I’m thirsty.”
Jill returned to the present. “Ha! Look at this.” She rushed toward the kitchen, pulling Whens behind her. Manfred padded along, turning her head from one side to the other, inhaling and sorting the huge house. “No problem! We’ve got everything here. Electricity! Garbage pickup! I’ve started the Washington Post ! And—ta-daa”—she turned on the tap triumphantly—“water!”
Whens, unmoved, gazed at his mother and then at the sink, pondering. “We usually have water, don’t we?”
Jill smiled. “I know you take all of that for granted, sweetie, but it doesn’t happen by magic.”
A large, round oak table, painted white, anchored the kitchen. Glass-fronted cabinets, framed by dark walnut, reached to the ceiling, showing off their early-sixties contents. Green, yellow, and red Fiestaware, a Tupperware Popsicle-maker, Bette’s well-used electric coffee percolator. The backsplash was tiled with pale green tiles.
Whens frowned. “I don’t want water. I want a Slinger.”
“No Slingers. Too much sugar.”
She tried to ignore the doubleness she had come here to confront, the two lives, stretching out behind her, seemingly parallel and yet not, with that paradoxical break, its Möbius-like twist that baffled her ideas of continuity, linearity, cause and effect. Had she not gone to Dallas, what might be different here, now?
It was a good bet that Brian would have died in Vietnam. Headstrong and patriotic, he had joined the Navy, in that life, in that world, that she had run from. Had that world been completely obliterated? Did it go on, somewhere, elsewhen?
That was the timestream where her mother lived, and ran her school, there, down the broad hallway that led to the back of the house, in a huge, high-ceilinged room filled with manipulative materials whose scientific provenance was completely evident. The binomial cube, a physical, manipulative cube-puzzle showing the mass of each of the products; the little baskets holding the Exercises of Practical Life—shoe and silver polishing, table scrubbing, the contents to be laid out and used sequentially, accomplishing some purpose, some change in the environment, then put away and shelved by busy children.
Jill helped out in the school during summers. She saw herself, sitting next to one of the children, watching them think about how to make a hexagon out of isosceles triangles, or which letter to pick out of a box of letters in order to write “s-u-n.”
Memories of her family flocked around, and the present faded. She saw Brian building an Erector Set Ferris wheel on the kitchen table. Her mother frowned over a crossword puzzle while, behind her on the stove, rice burned.
Jill took a deep breath with her eyes shut, willing the memories, the visions, to be gone when she opened her eyes,
“Yes,” she said, transported. In Whens’ voice she heard Megan’s, when she was five, skinny and antic, always laughing or dancing. Whens, despite his similar voice, was serious, almost grave, with a sense of humor too grown-up by far, and she wished for a moment that he might imbibe some of Megan’s cheerful spirit here. But even Megan was serious, now.
Megan must have dusted the eclectic mix of furniture, and washed the gilded-frame mirror over the fireplace, for everything was splendidly clean. On both sides of the fireplace, shelves overflowed with an irregular tapestry of books. Old friends, some her mother’s: international policy, the brain, DNA, and ancient Chinese poetry.
Her father’s books were more concrete. World War II. Physics. Engineering. Watson and Crick and obscure journals. But after … after …
She sighed. Say it. After Mom Left.
After Bette vanished, Sam read more novels, almost as if questing after information about the physical world was completely useless. He devoured fiction, she recalled, lying on the couch and smoking, day and night, when he wasn’t working.
“Mommy.”
“What?”
“I’m thirsty.”
Jill returned to the present. “Ha! Look at this.” She rushed toward the kitchen, pulling Whens behind her. Manfred padded along, turning her head from one side to the other, inhaling and sorting the huge house. “No problem! We’ve got everything here. Electricity! Garbage pickup! I’ve started the Washington Post ! And—ta-daa”—she turned on the tap triumphantly—“water!”
Whens, unmoved, gazed at his mother and then at the sink, pondering. “We usually have water, don’t we?”
Jill smiled. “I know you take all of that for granted, sweetie, but it doesn’t happen by magic.”
A large, round oak table, painted white, anchored the kitchen. Glass-fronted cabinets, framed by dark walnut, reached to the ceiling, showing off their early-sixties contents. Green, yellow, and red Fiestaware, a Tupperware Popsicle-maker, Bette’s well-used electric coffee percolator. The backsplash was tiled with pale green tiles.
Whens frowned. “I don’t want water. I want a Slinger.”
“No Slingers. Too much sugar.”
She tried to ignore the doubleness she had come here to confront, the two lives, stretching out behind her, seemingly parallel and yet not, with that paradoxical break, its Möbius-like twist that baffled her ideas of continuity, linearity, cause and effect. Had she not gone to Dallas, what might be different here, now?
It was a good bet that Brian would have died in Vietnam. Headstrong and patriotic, he had joined the Navy, in that life, in that world, that she had run from. Had that world been completely obliterated? Did it go on, somewhere, elsewhen?
That was the timestream where her mother lived, and ran her school, there, down the broad hallway that led to the back of the house, in a huge, high-ceilinged room filled with manipulative materials whose scientific provenance was completely evident. The binomial cube, a physical, manipulative cube-puzzle showing the mass of each of the products; the little baskets holding the Exercises of Practical Life—shoe and silver polishing, table scrubbing, the contents to be laid out and used sequentially, accomplishing some purpose, some change in the environment, then put away and shelved by busy children.
Jill helped out in the school during summers. She saw herself, sitting next to one of the children, watching them think about how to make a hexagon out of isosceles triangles, or which letter to pick out of a box of letters in order to write “s-u-n.”
Memories of her family flocked around, and the present faded. She saw Brian building an Erector Set Ferris wheel on the kitchen table. Her mother frowned over a crossword puzzle while, behind her on the stove, rice burned.
Jill took a deep breath with her eyes shut, willing the memories, the visions, to be gone when she opened her eyes,
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