The cars drive on. The people hurry to and fro. They sigh and want and cry and dream. Taken together, their symphonic whyohwhy might reach the heavens and make the angels weep. Alone, they are no match for the noise of industry. The jackhammers. The cranes. The streetcars, subways, and aeroplanes. The constant whirring machinery of the dream factories. And do these things dream of more?
Another day closes. The sun sinks low on the horizon. It slips below the Hudson, smearing the West Side of Manhattan in a slick of gold. Night arrives for its watchful shift. The neon city bursts its daytime seams, and the great carnival of dreams begins again.
Evie woke in the middle of the night with a throbbing headache. With tremendous effort, her eyes struggled open. The room wobbled, then settled into focus. She had a vague memory of kissing Sam. In a woozy panic, she looked down, relieved to see that she was still in her party dress and alone. A wave of boozy nausea washed over her and she stumbled to the bathroom, where she splashed water over her puffy face. It was early, before dawn. Plenty of time to sleep, and to figure out a way to let Sam down easy. Evie angled her head to drink straight from the bathroom tap. Then she crawled back to bed to sleep it off.
It was the light that woke her.
Evie blinked, her eyes adjusting to the buttery morning sun bathing her room in a hazy glow. But this wasn’t her room at the Winthrop. This was her room on Poplar Street, back in Zenith. Slowly, she took it in: the dresser with her silver hand mirror, the painting of a Victorian girl selling flowers, the star-pattern quilt sewn by her grandmother when she was born. She was home.
Hurriedly, she dressed and went downstairs, passing through the living room, where the Philco had been left on and a familiar voice burbled out of the radio cabinet’s speakers: “Now, dear Mr. Forman, you must let me concentrate! The spirits are throwing a real lulu of a party.…”
How could her voice be coming from the radio if she was here in her parents’ living room in Ohio? She vaguely remembered standing on the platform in a pretty subway station and boarding the sweetest little train. She must’ve fallen asleep. This was a dream. That she knew this was a dream didn’t lessen her excitement. Quite the contrary; she felt everything even more, as if she were one step ahead of the moment and desperate to hold on to it. As if she would do anything to make it stay.
The smell of bacon wafted out from the back of the house. Evie followed it through the dining room and into the familiar blue-and-white kitchen with the big window over the sink that looked out on a neat row of black-eyed Susans lining the gravel driveway.
“Good morning, dear.” Her mother smiled as she settled flapjacks onto a plate. “Breakfast is nearly ready. Don’t play too long.”
“I won’t,” Evie said, her voice quiet and even, as if she were afraid that to speak any louder would break the spell and end the magic of this dream.
Her father strode into the room and kissed her mother on the cheek before sitting at the table with his newspaper. He looked up at Evie and smiled. “Don’t you look pretty as a picture today!”
“Thank you, Papa.”
Still at the stove, her mother called over one shoulder, “Evie, be a dear and call your brother in to breakfast, won’t you?”
Evie’s heartbeat quickened. James. James was here.
Light poured through the screen door, so bright she couldn’t see what lay beyond. She pushed through and saw that it was all as she remembered it—the rope swing tied to the enormous oak tree, the summer garden with its ripe tomatoes, her father’s Buick parked by the toolshed. The hazy sun bathed it all in ephemeral beauty. Birds tweeted at the feeder. Cicadas buzzed pleasantly in the sweet, feathery grass.
Someone was singing. “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile.…”
Through the hedges, Evie spied a flash of arm, a dangling leg, and her calm fell away as she ran toward the figure sprawled on the weather-beaten bench.
“James?” Evie whispered so faintly she wasn’t sure he’d heard. But then he sat up, smiling wide at her. With the sun behind him, he glowed.
“Well, if it isn’t my brave sister, Artemis, come to us from the hunt! Pray, what news from Olympus?”
Every night, James would read to her from tales of Greek myth. They often spoke to each other in code that way—she was Artemis, he Apollo. Papa was Zeus. Mama was Hera. It was how they made it through insufferable social gatherings: “But soft! See how yon harpies descend upon the buffet,” James would whisper as a group of church ladies took the best treats at a luncheon. “Release Cerberus,” Evie would whisper back, giggling.
She was supposed to tell him something for her mother, but her heart ached so much that she couldn’t remember what it was. “I… I just missed you. That’s all.”
“Well, I’m right here.”
Evie’s throat tightened. He was there—golden and sweet, her brother-protector, her best friend. A thought intruded, a terrible thought. Evie tried to push it away, but it buzzed at the edges of her consciousness, a bee in the garden.
“No. You’re dead,” she whispered. It felt strange to her that even in dreams, she knew this. Even in dreams, she wasn’t safe from pain. She lost her battle with the tears. And then she felt the shock as his fingers wiped them from her cheeks.
“Now, now, old girl. Don’t you know brave Artemis doesn’t cry? Here.” He plucked a black-eyed Susan and handed it to her. “Hold on.” From the bench, he retrieved a book of poetry—Wordsworth, his favorite. He nodded to the open page. “Here. Put it here.”
Evie laid the flower in the book’s crease, and James read the poem beneath it: “Though nothing can bring back the hour / of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; / We will grieve not, rather find / Strength in what remains behind.” Smiling, he slammed the book shut. “There. Preserved for all time.”
Mama’s voice drifted to them from the back porch. “James! Evangeline! Your breakfast will get cold!”
“Yon Hera beckons us to Olympus.”
Evie wanted to grab the edges of the dream like a blanket and wrap it around her, safe and happy. The sun warmed her face. The cicadas grew louder. Across the lawn, her mother and father waved from the back porch, happy and bright. But something wasn’t quite right. The house flickered just slightly. For a brief few seconds, it seemed almost like the entrance to a tunnel rather than a house, and something about the dark inside made Evie very afraid.
“James?” she said, panicked. “James!”