This Shared Dream by Kathleen Ann Goonan Read Free Book Online

clipped to the end of the bed. “Sam, this is 1991. Wink didn’t tell us that!” She blinked. “So much time … just gone … we’ve got to leave!”
    Sam kept talking to Jill, his voice low and urgent. “Now we know that it is possible, but we don’t know all that much about it. It’s difficult to … move around. There are other forces at work. Other people who want to know what’s going on, and we keep finding things out—”
    What things ?
    “We have to go, Sam. Now.”
    As Bette yanked on his arm, Sam said, “Read my notebooks, Jill. If you still have the house you still have them.” He looked very old, and very tired. “I love you.”
    Bette bent down, gathered Jill up with strong arms, and crushed her face to Jill’s, so that her muffled voice was close to Jill’s ear. “I love you so! And I’m so, so sorry. We’ll be back.”
    “Bette, you can’t promise that.” Jill heard anguish in Sam’s voice.
    “I promise, Jill,” she said in a firm voice. “I promise that we’ll be back.” She kissed Jill.
    “We really do have to go,” said Sam. He gave Jill a long hug, a short kiss, and held both of her hands for a moment while gazing at her as if to remember, Jill thought. And she looked on them as if it were her last look, gathering their dear faces into herself.
    Bette and Sam stood facing Jill, arms around one another’s waists, and looked at her for seconds that, for Jill, were stripped of everything except their shared gaze. Then Bette pulled Sam from the room. Jill heard Bette’s heels and Sam’s heavier tread recede down the hall.
    Come back, she shouted, with the voice in her head that didn’t make it to her lungs, her vocal cords, the voice that was so submerged she couldn’t even open her mouth.
    But the intensity of her interior cry finally forced her mouth open. She sobbed: deep, hoarse, alien sounds that took all the air in her lungs. She could not stop. She didn’t want to.
    A nurse came in. She turned off a beeping sound, frowned, and said, “Don’t you dare touch your IV line again or I’ll tie down your hands.” She opened the line and left.
    She remembered then that she’d had another visitor, earlier, before Mom and Dad. She had no idea what time he had been there, of course. He had looked vaguely familiar to her semi-dreaming, drugged mind.
    He sat in the chair in the corner. His short beard was grayish, perhaps, but most of his face was shaded with a fedora with the brim snapped down over his left eye, so that she could see only the right one, appraising and somewhat sympathetic. Shadows obscured any details of what looked vaguely like a government-issued uniform. His ankle rested on his right knee as he sprawled back in his chair, so one muddy, well-used boot was visible in the sliver of light from the doorway.
    She went over it in her mind after he got up and left, which was as soon as she tried to sit up. A loud, medical beep signaled that she had pulled something loose.
    He had a long stride. One, two—and he was out the door.
    “Hey,” she heard from down the hall. “Who are you?” Then someone—presumably that same nurse—paged security. “Dr. Yellow to third floor east, please.”
    As Jill sank back onto the bed, she realized that, despite the drugs, her heart was beating very fast. She rather thought she had seen him earlier that same evening, after they had done the evening bustle to get her battened down for the night, and dimmed the lights. Or maybe it had been some other time … so hard to remember …
    She closed her eyes and tried to memorize him, but he rapidly became entangled with a long-ago cartoon of Popeye and Brutus fighting, and then she was back in limbo, and then Mom and Dad showed up.
    When the third man came, she screamed.
    *   *   *
    I was born in 1950 , Jill wrote in her imaginary journal. The War was over, at least on paper. Germany had been divided in a series of ad hoc agreements.
    She started over again, in her