Broken Dream

My mother sat beside my bed as I drifted off that night. It was late already, and I could see stars coming in through my window. I knew that once I slept, I’d dream all my last life back to me, and I stayed up as late as I could. But, such rest was as inevitable as the moon slipping away to make way for the dawn’s first sunlight. Twice, my eyelids tried sinking down, and twice I fought them back before a third time, they wrestled me down into the soft constraint of my mattress, my wings curling up around my unclothed belly like a sheet. My mother also draped a fluffy blanket over me.

“Congratulations, Miss Grove! It’s a girl…” I couldn’t much see anything. I was screaming. I don’t even know why. There were all kinds of smells, none quite pleasant, all about me, but they were local. Further away, there was a lighter smell like ammonia.

It was two days after my fourth birthday, and I was playing with a new toy when my older brother tripped me near the big, wooden staircase. It wasn’t on purpose, and I was barely hurt, but I was so angry at him. I was yelling for my mom, but he ran over and wrapped his arms around me, blabbering how sorry he was. Then he found where the toy, a little baby doll with soft, plastic skin and bright red cheeks, had tumbled down to and he brought her back to me. He pointed to her head and smiled sadly, “She got a really bad bump right here, and now I’m going to make her feel better by doing surgery, okay?” He rubbed his fingertips right on the doll’s forehead for a moment, with all the will and know-how of a doctor in his eyes, then he put his hand on my shoulder and said, “See? All better!” And, for some reason, I stopped crying.

My mother was late picking me up from singing practice when I was nine. She was really late, and the teacher kept calling her and calling her, and Mom wouldn’t pick up the phone at all. It started to rain, and I was waiting outside by the half-rusted bike racks on the edge of the sidewalk under a wide overhang. The teacher sat beside me when she got a text message from my father that she wouldn’t show me. And, as annoyed as she was about me staying so late, she knelt beside me and gave me a free singing lesson. My father arrived later, and I don’t remember the exact words he told me anymore. The first thing I’d seen of him was that he had been crying, and he was trying to hide it from me, and I couldn’t understand why at first.

We are at a little amphitheater in the middle of a nearby park. Long strands of white balloons were lined up at the front of the stage, and it was hard to see from the back row over all sorts of other people standing up and holding cameras. I sat at my younger sister’s high school graduation. I was already in university, but I broke down crying when she crossed the stage. I’d finished high school when things were all closed down because of a disease outbreak, and I never got to have a formal graduation ceremony. I was crying more than my father was, and I felt selfish because I was thinking about myself, even though it was my little sister getting her diploma.

I hadn’t sat in one of these blue plastic chairs since I was a little kid. I used to like putting my legs backward between the bars, so I could lean over the tall back of the chair, squishing my belly against it. The walls were decorated with posters containing the alphabet, some numbers, and one cool one about molecules and atoms. My old third-grade teacher lectured from the front of the room, and her wavy hair was dark instead of being dyed bright red like it used to be. She was still a good deal taller than me, but when I asked her if I could observe her teaching for one of my university classes she more than gladly accepted. There had been a small debate between both my third and fourth grade teachers if I could sit in on either of their classes because they both were eager about how I was also working to become a teacher.
There weren’t any kids in the building yet, and it was far away from where I’d grown up. I was lining up the chairs and desks in my sixth-grade classroom, and my eyes kept darting to the calendar on the wall. I took a deep breath each time I saw it, and I often stopped to glance out the window, each time wondering what my old teachers would think if they saw me now. I had an old picture of my mother on my desk.

It was the last day of the school year, and I had a meeting with my principal. I always loved the long desk down the middle of her office, and the soft desk chairs surrounding it. She’d really helped me all year when I was having trouble, and had done more than she really had to in giving me advice. She passed a card across the table to me that some of the parents at the school had signed. I didn’t know there was any such thing, but I’d been voted the teacher of the year in my first year. There was a one-hundred-dollar bill stuck in the little card, which I pocketed without thinking about it again, stopping by my classroom to stand the card up on my desk so that I could take a picture with it before taking it home with me.

It was a hot summer, too hot. I’d promised to give one of my students a book that I liked, and I walked down to the bookstore. I was two steps into the crosswalk, with the book folded between my arms. I reached up to wipe the sweat off my brow, and the book slipped out of my arms, falling onto the road. I leaned down for it, not hearing the horn of a truck swerving too quickly out of the wrong lane. I barely looked up before jolting backward, a deep breath in my lungs, and I was sitting up in my bed. It was like waking up from a nightmare, and I was back in my bedroom in the treehouse. I looked at my wings across my belly.

My mother had pulled up a little wooden stool so she could sit beside my bed all night, and now she was slumped over, quietly snoring. Her face almost looked like the picture I’d had on my desk. She had the same kind of pointed eyes and a little mole just under her nose. Her brown hair almost looked a similar amber in the moonlight streaking in through the window. I tiptoed over to the window and looked out over Tinborough. I could almost see the skyline of New York City, where I used to teach, superimposed over the little town by the mountain.

I kept watching as the sun slowly came up. At a point, my mother stirred and saw me just looking out the window, but she didn’t say anything right away. She slowly walked around beside me, her cheeks tiredly pressing upward against her eyes. “Hana?” She finally whispered.

“There’s a story about a doll,” I mumbled, “I really loved it there. I love it here.”

“Good. Imagine hating it there and hating it here.”

“I love you,” I imagined the little framed picture on the desk.