The Love That Split the World(71)

“And if nothing jumps out at you?”

Alice scrunches up her mouth. “Then I keep waiting until it does. That’s why this takes so long. But still, it’s easier than starting from the very beginning, wasting hours in a room full of memories about birthday parties and balloons and beets. And it worked, didn’t it? I mean, minimally, but it worked.”

Beau appears in the doorway. “Come in, come in,” Alice says, waving him forward.

He takes a step and leans against the doorway.

“We’ve had a revelation,” Alice says, clapping her hands. “Three days after Natalie completed the EMDR process, she quit dancing. Prior to that time, she encountered Grandmother several times a year, and she’d been dancing since shortly before her first visitation, her Opening. There could be a link between your decreased level of physical activity and your losing track of Grandmother.”

“Doesn’t that seem like a coincidence?” I say.

Her head wobbles. “No,” she says firmly.

“And that’s because a light string told you so?” I ask.

“Light strand, but yes. This is important. I feel it. Besides, think about it: It’s a physical activity, a ritual of sorts, but there’s also a sort of meditative or artistic quality to it. That’s the point of ritual: When you’re comfortable enough with an action, your mind is able to disengage from the actual, physical motions and focus elsewhere. When we dream or hallucinate, multiple separate parts of the brain are active. It’s possible that dance, which marries physical and mental actions, enables you to access Grandmother’s world better than simple stress or emotional fatigue would on its own.”

Beau looks at me. “Like with the piano,” he says.

“What’s that?” Alice says.

Beau shifts his weight to his other leg. “I can move between the worlds when I play.”

Alice taps her fingertips together. “Perfect. An accompanist.”

“But I’ve never seen Grandmother while I’ve been dancing,” I pipe up.

“Maybe not,” Alice says. “But there are so many reasons this could have an effect. For one, it’s possible that dancing regularly affected your sleep. After all, this phenomenon starts as a dream state. Completing the EMDR might’ve cleared out some of your stored, unprocessed trauma, making those heightened dream states unnecessary. But you’re still having a recurring nightmare. You’re still able to move between your world and a world that exists as a dream state for most of us. I still think pinpointing your trauma is the key here, but deepening your sleep might help too. We don’t want to use any drugs that could augment your dream patterns or keep you from waking up when Grandmother appears, but we can naturally exhaust you as much as possible. We’ll send you to the studio late at night, and when you get home you can take some melatonin to help you sleep.”

“Studio?” Beau says.

“The NKU dance studio,” Alice replies. She rifles feverishly through the papers on her desk. “Where the hell did I put my phone? The dance studios have pianos in them already. It’s perfect, strangely so even. Two people from two different versions of the same town, with the same gift, accessed by complementary activities. It means something.”

“Light strand,” I say, and she points one finger at me vehemently.

“Light strand! Light web, really. Which you two will untangle as soon as possible. We’ll start tonight. I’ll get you a key.”

“And what, you’ll just sit in the corner and channel Degas?”

“I wish,” she says. “But people rarely experience these kinds of visitations with spectators around. The point of this is for you two to combine your abilities, not for me to become the Berlin Wall of hypnopompic hallucinations.”

I turn to give Beau an apologetic look, but he’s already staring at me, concern evident along his brow. “All right. Tonight, Cleary.”



Beau picks me up in the middle of the night again, parking his truck up the street like he did before. There’s that same electric feeling that there always is between us when I get in the car, the same lag when he looks down at my spandex dance shorts and bare legs. During the day, the tension between us shrinks to a manageable intensity, but at night it’s practically unbearable to be close to him but not touching.

The highway’s deserted, and when we reach NKU, the parking lot is too, except for a green-and-tan Subaru covered in bumper stickers bearing political slogans and Rorschach inkblots that all basically resemble a person giving the peace sign. I see Alice’s silhouette by the building’s front doors, and she lifts her arms over her head, waving at us. Beau parks, and when we get out into the intensely hot night, I feel some relief from his magnetism.

“Hello, hello,” Alice says vaguely, fumbling in her pocket. She pulls out a key ring, jiggles one key in the lock, then pulls the door open. She hands me the keys. “Now, the gold key unlocks the studios. It should work on any of them, so just choose your favorite. Be out by six A.M., and make sure you lock up.”

“That’s it?” I ask as she starts across the parking lot.

She holds her arms out to her sides. “That’s it. Make me proud.”

The building is frigid and dark, the air conditioning set so high the vents blow my hair and give me goose bumps as we make our way down the hall.