Dreamology(2)

I stretch and sit up. “I must have nodded off,” I say, my voice a little hoarse.

“Motion has been knocking you out since you were a newborn,” my dad explains, perpetually in professor mode. “Planes, trains, and automobiles . . . You and Jerry have been out for hours, but you picked the perfect time to wake up.” He smiles in the rearview mirror. “Get a good look at your new city.”

He makes an awkward Vanna White wave, as though Boston were a puzzle made out of giant block letters yet to be filled in. We are just easing off of I-90, and the historic downtown greets us politely from behind a picturesque Charles River. It makes New York, where we’ve lived for ten years, look like . . . well, New York. Does anything really compare?

The sounds of our wheels on the concrete off-ramp create a rhythm—one-two-three, one-two-three—and I nervously tap the three middle fingers on my right hand to the beat, like I’m playing piano keys. I was never any good at the piano. My teacher told my father I “lacked discipline” before quitting me, which must have been a first in the history of music lessons. But I still love music, particularly rhythm. Rhythm is a pattern, and patterns make sense of things. I find myself tapping one out whenever I’m nervous or unsure.

I lean against the passenger side door on bustling Beacon Street, clutching a box labeled KITCHEN SUPPLIES that almost certainly contains winter coats and dog food. I shield my eyes against the August sun with one hand and try to get a good look at the two-hundred-year-old townhouse in front of me. It’s funny how everything seems so big when you are little, but when you revisit it at an older age, you realize in fact just how much smaller it is than you thought, and how tiny you were at the time. In the case of our house, which was my mother’s before ours, and her mother’s before that, this place is still gigantic. I wonder how I didn’t go missing for days as a child.

“You did, a few times,” my father calls from the front stoop when I voice these concerns out loud. “But we’d put Jerry on the case and he’d always find you.” At the moment Jerry is slumped against the backseat, head resting in his usual apathy as he stares at me through the window.

“You must have been more virile in your youth,” I say to him, raising an eyebrow.

The house is five stories of red brick, and the shutters and front door are painted jet-black, matching most of the other houses on the street. Lined up side by side, they remind me of the cliquey girls at my old school who all wore the same sunglasses. I can’t help but wonder just how much of a New York City block it would cover if we flipped the building on its side.

“This is all ours?” I ask.

“Yup,” my dad says with a grunt as he finally pushes the front door open, one suitcase tucked under his left arm. “Now that Nan is gone. Since your mom doesn’t have any siblings, everything goes to us.” He’s trying to be breezy about it, to mention my mother without weight. But it can’t be easy to come back to this house, where we all lived together before she moved to Africa and never came back.

I step into the circular, oxblood-painted foyer of the house, and gaze up the polished wood banister of a spiral staircase that seems to extend all the way to infinity. It smells old. Not bad old, just . . . dusty, as if the whole house is a box of antiques that has been left in a basement too long.

My father tours me through a formal dining room on the ground floor, decorated with landscape paintings and a heavy chandelier, and into the kitchen, which is spare but sizable, like it was designed solely to cater grand parties. Little things jolt my memory—eating cream puffs at the table with Nan, lying beneath the grand piano in the second floor living room while a dinner guest entertained a crowd, the mouse hole where I’d leave jelly beans at night that were always gone by morning, until my secret was discovered and the hole was sealed up. These are not the rooms of a modern family. There are simply too many to live in. And now there are just two of us. Well, two and a hairy half.

Eventually we find ourselves in a corner room on the fourth floor, with heavy blue brocade curtains and pale lavender walls.

“I thought this one could be yours.” My dad shuffles his feet a bit, searching for the right words. “It was your mother’s room when she was your age. It’s a little more grown-up than the one you slept in before we left.”

I look around, surveying the four-poster bed, photographs of faraway places, and the ornate fireplace strewn with little silver boxes and souvenirs shaped like hippos and giraffes. Now my mother lives in Madagascar on a research compound with real-life versions of these creatures.

“Okay,” I say.

“Are you sure?” my dad asks.

“I think so . . .” I hesitate.

“Great,” he says, and just like that he’s gone, back out to the car to continue the business of uprooting our lives.

I have just pulled what feels like my millionth box from the U-Haul, while Jerry follows me to and from the house, staring. They say most dogs don’t make eye contact out of respect and to show that they understand you are the alpha of the pack. Well, Jerry only ever looks me directly in the eye. What does that say about us?

Inside the foyer my eyes fall on a large manila envelope sitting on the hall table, with my name written in my grandmother’s scrawling cursive.

“I found that in Nan’s sitting room,” I hear my dad say, and look up to find him standing halfway up the staircase, struggling with a box labeled ALICE’S BOOKS. “Who knows what it is. She saved everything. She called it meticulous; I called it obsessive. You should go check out her closet. If I recall correctly, it’s color coded.”