She is six years old, and the room smells of medicine. It always smells of medicine. It has smelled of medicine for as long as she can remember smelling anything at all, the particular sharp herbal sweetness that clings to the curtains and the bedding and, eventually, to her mother herself, until the smell and the woman have become the same thing in her mind and she cannot properly separate them. The light comes through the window wrong. In the dream it is always wrong, too gold and too thick, moving slowly through the air like something poured rather than shone, and her mother's hand on the blanket is very thin and very pale and does not move at all.
YSE: Mama.
Her voice arrives strange in the dream, small and distant, as though spoken through water.
YSE: Where did papa go?
The question hangs in the thick gold light. Her mother turns her head, slowly, and her face is soft and tired and enormously kind, and she opens her mouth to answer, and the answer does not come. It never comes. In every version of the dream she has ever had, across eleven years of having it, her mother opens her mouth and nothing emerges, and the gold light thickens, and the smell of medicine grows stronger, and the answer never arrives. The room begins to fold inward at its edges.
She is nine years old, and it is raining, and the earth is very dark. The dream skips like a stone across water, and now she is standing at the graveside in a dress that does not fit properly, and everyone around her is enormously tall, adults in dark clothing whose faces she cannot see from this angle, and the rain falls in slow motion, individual drops hanging suspended in the air around her before continuing their descent. The hole in the ground is very deep. In the dream it is always deeper than it should be, extending downward into a dark that has no reasonable bottom. A hand settles on her shoulder.
It is not a warm hand. It is not unkind, either. It is simply a hand, placed correctly, at the appropriate moment, by someone who has understood that a hand should be placed there and has therefore placed it.
STM: What a terrible fate.
Her stepmother's voice arrives from somewhere above her, careful and measured and containing no particular grief at all.
STM: I hope that man burns in hell for what he did to you.
In the dream, Yseult does not know which man she means. She has never known. The dream never clarifies it, and the question sits in her chest, year after year, unanswered and unanswerable, while the rain continues falling in its slow suspended arcs and the hole in the earth goes down and down into nothing. The hand remains on her shoulder.
It does not tighten. It does not comfort. It simply remains, correct and dutiful and entirely empty, and the dream begins to fold again.
She is thirteen years old, and there is a door behind her. The dream does not skip cleanly this time. It lurches, the way the worst dreams lurch, and the gold light and the rain are gone entirely, replaced by something considerably darker and considerably closer, and she is standing with her back against a wall in a room she knows and cannot name. The door is behind her. She can feel it there. In the dream she always knows it is there and always knows, with total certainty, that it will not open. There is someone in the room with her.
She cannot see his face. She has never once seen his face in this dream, not in four years of having it, because the dream does not permit it, because the place where his face should be is simply dark, an absence rather than a feature, a blackness that swallows light and offers nothing back. He is not far away.
He is considerably closer than he was a moment ago, though she has not seen him move, and the room has grown smaller around them in the particular way that dream-rooms shrink, the walls arriving nearer without any visible movement, and her back is against the door and the door will not open and it has never once opened in four years. His hands reach toward her.
She can see them clearly. That is the cruelty of it, that she can see the hands with perfect, unbearable clarity while the face remains an absence, that the dream withholds everything except the specific thing she would most like to forget.
They come closer. The room shrinks further. The dark where his face should be leans in. She screams.
She screams properly, tearing herself upward out of the dream with her whole body convulsing against the blankets, her breath arriving in ragged desperate pulls, the room around her disorientingly wrong, unfamiliar shapes resolving slowly into a dormitory that took her several full seconds to recognize as her own. Her heart hammered painfully against her ribs.
There was light coming from somewhere. The washroom door, half open, spilling warm lamplight across the floorboards. Arthur's head appeared around its edge.
He had a toothbrush in his mouth and his hair was doing something entirely unreasonable and his expression carried the particular mild, unhurried concern of someone checking on a loud noise without any real expectation of finding a crisis.
ART: You good?
The absurdity of it landed with such total, disorienting force that Yseult, still shaking, still half caught in the shrinking room and the reaching hands and the dark where a face should have been, laughed. It came out wrong, cracked and unsteady and considerably closer to a sob than actual laughter, but it came out.
YSE: Yeah.
She pressed both hands against her face, breathing slowly, deliberately, until the shaking began to subside.
YSE: Yeah. I'm good.
ART: You sure?
YSE: Bad dream. It's an old one. It's fine.
He looked at her a moment longer, apparently weighing whether to press, and then, correctly, decided not to.
ART: Alright. There's water on the desk if you want it.
He disappeared back into the washroom, and the ordinary domestic sound of him brushing his teeth resumed, unremarkable and entirely mundane, and Yseult sat in the dark with her heart still slowing and found the sheer, stupid ordinariness of it more steadying than any amount of concern would have been. She reached for the water. Her hands had almost stopped shaking by the time she finished it.