Fever Dream: A Novel(4)

“No, don’t worry.”

“Nina!” Carla calls out to her, and only then does Nina see us in the car.

Nina smiles. She has a divine smile: her dimples show and her nose wrinkles a little. She stands up, picks up her mole from the beach chair, and runs toward us. Carla reaches to open the backseat door for her. She moves in the driver’s seat with such naturalness it’s hard to believe she got in this car for the first time today.

“But I have to smoke, Amanda. I’m sorry about Nina, but I can’t finish this story without another smoke.”

I make an unconcerned gesture and hand her the pack again.

“Blow it out the window,” I say while Nina gets into the backseat.

“Mommy.”

“What, sweetie?” says Carla, but Nina ignores her and asks me:

“Mommy, when are we going to open the box of lollipops?”

Well trained by her father, Nina settles in and buckles her seat belt.

“In a little while,” I tell her.

“Okay,” says Nina.

“Okay,” says Carla, and that’s when I notice there’s nothing left now of the drama from before she started to tell her story. She’s not crying anymore, she’s not leaning her head against the steering wheel. She is unbothered by the interruptions as she talks, as if she had all the time in the world and were enjoying this return to her past. I wonder, David, if you could really have changed that much, if for Carla telling it all over again brought her back, if only for a moment, to that other son she claims to miss so much.

“As soon as the woman opened the door I thrust David into her arms. But people like her are sensible as well as esoteric. So she put David down on the floor, gave me a glass of water, and wouldn’t start talking until I’d calmed down some. The water brought a little of my soul back to my body and it’s true, for a moment I considered that my fears might all be a fit of madness, I thought of other possible reasons why the horse could be sick. The woman was staring at David while he played, arranging the decorative miniatures that were on the TV table into a single-file line. She went over to him and played with him a moment. She studied him attentively, discreetly, sometimes resting a hand on his shoulder, or holding his chin to look him straight in the eyes. ‘The horse is already dead,’ said the woman, and I swear I hadn’t said anything yet about the horse. She said David still had a few hours, maybe a day, but that soon he would need help breathing. ‘It’s poison,’ she said. ‘It’s going to attack his heart.’ I sat there looking at her. I don’t even remember how long I was like that, frozen and unable to say a word. Then the woman said something terrible. Something worse than announcing to you how your son is going to die.”

“What did she say?” asks Nina.

“Go on inside and open the lollipops,” I tell her.

Nina takes off her seat belt, grabs her mole, and runs toward the house.

“She said that David’s body couldn’t withstand the poisoning, that he would die, but that we could try a migration.”

“A migration?”

Carla puts out her unfinished cigarette and leaves her arm outstretched, almost hanging from her body, as if the whole exercise of smoking had left her completely exhausted.

“If we could move David’s spirit to another body in time, then part of the poison would also go with him. Split into two bodies, there was the chance he could pull through. It wasn’t a sure thing, but sometimes it worked.”

“What do you mean, sometimes? She’d done it before?”

“It was the only way she knew to save David. The woman handed me a cup of tea, she said that drinking it slowly would calm me down, that it would help me make my decision, but I gulped it down in two sips. I couldn’t even put what I was hearing in order. My head was a tangled mess of guilt and terror and my whole body was shaking.”

“But do you really believe in those things?”

“Then David tripped, or it seemed to me he’d tripped, and then he didn’t get up. I saw him from behind, wearing his favorite shirt that had little soldiers on it, trying to coordinate his arms so he could stand up. It was a clumsy and futile movement that reminded me of the ones he’d made when he was still learning to stand on his own. It was an effort he didn’t need to make anymore, and I understood that the nightmare was starting. When he turned toward me he was frowning, and he made a strange gesture, like he was in pain. I ran to him and hugged him. I hugged him so hard, Amanda, so hard it seemed impossible that anyone or anything in the world could take him from my arms. I heard him breathing very close to my ear, a little fast. Then the woman separated us with a gentle but firm movement. David sat back against the sofa, and he started to rub his eyes and mouth. ‘We’ll have to do it soon,’ said the woman. I asked her where David, David’s soul, would go, if we could keep him close, if we could choose a good family for him.”

“I don’t know if I understand, Carla.”

“You do understand, Amanda, you understand perfectly.”

I want to tell Carla that this is all a bunch of nonsense.

That’s your opinion. It’s not important.

It’s just that I can’t believe a story like that. But at what point in the story is it appropriate to get angry?

“The woman said that she couldn’t choose the family he went to,” said Carla. “She wouldn’t know where he’d gone. She also said that the migration would have its consequences. There isn’t room in a body for two spirits, and there’s no body without a spirit. The transmigration would take David’s spirit to a healthy body, but it would also bring an unknown spirit to the sick body. Something of each of them would be left in the other. He wouldn’t be the same anymore, and I would have to be willing to accept his new being.”