Don't she'd say in the dream, oh God, please, please, don't!
Hush, sweetheart, he'd whisper, and then Charon's Crossing would explode in terrible, agonizing slow motion and she'd shoot upright in bed, screaming and screaming, until Beverly came rushing in from her bedroom across the hall, switched on the lights and took her in her arms.
"It's all right, darling," her mother would croon, rocking her as if she were a child instead of a grown woman. "Don't think about it anymore."
She hadn't, after a while. Weeks of therapy had done the job. She knew now that what she'd remembered about Charon's Crossing wasn't true. The house had been real, and the fire.
But not Matthew. He had never existed. He had been a creation of her own imagination.
"Stress," Dr. Whalen had told her, "stress, Kathryn. It can do amazing things to the human psyche."
"You don't understand," Kathryn had insisted, at the beginning. "Matthew was real!"
"His journal was real," the psychiatrist had said gently. "I've no doubt you found it, read it, and absorbed it. Your mind did the rest."
Gradually, she had come to realize that the doctor, and Beverly, were right. There were no such things as ghosts. How could she have ever thought there were? She'd regained her appetite. She'd begun to sleep through the night even though she knew she sometimes still dreamed without ever remembering the dreams. Why else would she so often awaken with tears in her eyes and a lump in her throat?
Kathryn looked down at her hands, wrapped around the balcony railing. The knuckles were white and sharp. She forced herself to take a deep breath and de
liberately loosened her grip on the railing.
She was having a bad time today. She kept thinking about Charon's Crossing. About Matthew. No, no, that wasn't right. How could you think about a man you'd never known? Dr. Whalen would say she was obsessing on a dream image she'd created.
Of course she was. But it was an image so exciting and wonderful that no real man would ever be able to take its place...
Kathryn shut her eyes tight. "Stop it," she whispered.
What was the matter with her today?
Just last week, Dr. Whalen had given her a clean bill of health. Sessions on the couch, three times a week, coupled with medication, had done the job.
"It's graduation day," the doctor had said, and smiled. "We're going to reduce our sessions together to once a week and lower your dosage of medication. You're going to be fine," she'd said, patting Kathryn's hand, "absolutely as good as new."
And I am, Kathryn thought firmly, as good as new and maybe better.
For the first time in years, she and Beverly had a positive relationship. Beverly had been her rock since the night of the explosion, the only one who'd been able to get through to her as the pillar of fire touched the sky.
Kathryn had no recollection of what had happened. She knew only that she'd raced back towards the flames through the night, that sirens had wailed, that people had surrounded her and held her down as she clawed and fought to go to Matthew.
"He's burning," she'd screamed, "Matthew, Matthew, my love..."
She remembered a sea of faces—Amos and Hiram and endless others, and then one face, Dr. Simpson's, and the sharp, cold prick of a needle.
"No," she'd said, "no, please..."
Beverly's arms had closed around her.
"It's all right, Kathryn," she'd said, and Kathryn had tried to tell her that it wasn't, that Matthew was trapped somewhere inside that hellish inferno...
And then she'd tumbled into a bottomless well.
The days had passed in a blur of light and dark. She knew now that she'd been heavily sedated. Still, she remembered asking Beverly the same question each time she'd surfaced.
"Is he dead?" she'd whisper, and her mother would kiss her forehead and tell her that everything was going to be fine.
Eventually, she'd stopped asking. The periods of light had increased until they'd outweighed the dark. Beverly had taken her back to New York via charter flight.
There'd been no real question of Kathryn going back to her own apartment. She'd been too ill. Once she'd started to get better, she'd known she could never walk into those dreary rooms where she'd first dreamed of Matthew. And it took no great genius to figure out that one gurgle from the ancient hot water pipes in the Greenwich Village walk-up would have sent her screaming into the street.