Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books) by Suzy McKee Charnas Read Free Book Online

Viennese songs, most of them off-color: girls going into the woods to pick strawberries and coming back pregnant, that kind of thing. She had a beautiful voice.”
    “My people didn’t believe in coddling children,” Ricky said wryly. “I took my lead soldiers to bed with me for company, and there was an old claw-hammer that I kept under my pillow in case of monsters.”
    She had a strong impulse to say to him, there’s something I want you to see, let’s go home,= and I’ll take you down the arroyo and show you a surprise…so you won’t worry about me so much. So you’ll know that dreams or no dreams, I’m functioning where it matters — in my work.
    Instead she said, “How about that beer?”
    Not yet, then. Maybe tomorrow.
    It’s because it’s not finished, you never liked to show work in progress, it’s too vulnerable.
    He cooked that night when they got back, making a much more elaborate dinner than she normally made for herself. She had gotten into the habit of eating simply, like many people who eat alone. He was lavish with the spices, and though he scarcely ate anything himself, he watched her devour his masterpiece with evident pleasure.
    They talked about the old days back east, friends they had in common. How in the tall bay-windowed living room of a Greenwich Village apartment during one memorable party, a well-known female concert-pianist, a friend of the host’s, had worked over the poor old upright with great exuberance, declaring at length with gusto as she banged shut the lid, “Well, that’s that!” And so it had been, as far as the piano was concerned. Next morning it was found that six of the wooden hammers inside had been snapped right off their stems.
    Dorothea put on some music, starting with the Mozart clarinet quintet that always made her skin creep with a kind of holy joy. Ricky made a fire on the hearth. They talked late into the night. It was a lovely, lazy evening. At the end of it, she still had said nothing to him of the wall.

    So she was off to Albuquerque, to get supplies she said, though she was vague about what supplies exactly. Sensing a closed area, he had backed off at once, wondering what supplies she could need that were not available in Taos or Santa Fe. Alone in the quiet of her home, he looked for the hundredth time over the notes on her dreams, on which he had determined to spend enough time to wrest some insight from them, some step forward in the frightening puzzle they made.
    He sat out in the back patio, the notebook pages held down by a full glass of apple juice because a light wind was blowing.
    Serious reading was difficult for him these days. While not a Mickey Finn in its effects, the hospice prescription did tend to take the edge off his concentration. His mind would wander, turning over chips of memory one after another: the topiary lion in Grandfather’s garden; slates falling from a rooftop and shattering on the walk so close that slivers hung from his bare knees, and the blood drops, starting; the way Miss Anstey rustled all the time as she walked, not cloth sounds but paper; the fat little Ho-tei figure, polished red wood with arms stretched to Heaven in lazy joy, standing on the table in his room at Winchester; the lifelong repeats of that moment when he first knew that he was going to cut himself while shaving, and did so — letting his own blood, the very stuff that was now carrying death throughout his body, victor at last; seeing a play in London and knowing that there must be more to Kenya than that — paper palms and wicker furniture and khaki clothing!
    He had enough stored up to go on with forever, if he chose. Would it be an error, to spend his last days foraging in the jumble of his past?
    There were, after all, issues to be addressed. He had a letter from one of those issues in his breast pocket.
    His sister Margaret wanted him to come home. She might have learned of his situation and his whereabouts through any number of chains of