The Cure for Dreaming (11 page)

I dipped my pen into the inkwell, caught my breath, and read my incendiary words, debating whether the phrasing
was too obvious. I tried to imagine what would happen if the writer were identified and made public. Father would likely shove our entire life savings into Henri Reverie's pockets to ensure my mind was altered beyond recognition. There might indeed be a trip to an asylum. I'd even heard rumors of surgeons removing wombs from the bodies of rebellious wives and daughters.

Unthinkable.

But maybe . . . if I was careful . . . just maybe the right anonymous signature would disguise me.

I tested out various examples in my head.

– An Angry Woman

– An Irate Female

– Your Long-Suffering Mothers, Wives, and Daughters

– A Highly Educated Woman

– A Girl Who Refuses to Be Silent

No. Too emotional for the tastes of stubborn men. I pictured Father shaking his head and calling the letter writer
hysterical
.

I tapped the nib of my pen against the well to dispose of stray drops of ink, sampled ideas for two more minutes, and then wrote the wisest, most reasonable approach.

– A Responsible Woman

dreamt about the hypnosis.

The procedure again occurred in Father's downtown office, this time back in his operatory, at night. The stark wooden room glowed in the light of a bare bulb that reflected off the spittoon and the neat row of dental tools lined on a small oval table. Leather straps clamped my head and wrists to the operatory chair—an uncomfortable piece of furniture padded in worn mauve velvet and braced by four metal feet sculpted like the paws of a beast, as if the chair would one day spring to life and devour some poor, troublesome patient.

Father, his hands still bloody from a leeching, polished the sharp tip of his drill with a white cloth. Behind him in the shadows stood Henri Reverie in his dark suit and a black magician's hat that appeared to be a taller, more ominous version of his real-life hat, but his luminous blue eyes were the only parts of him I could truly see.
Oh, Lord
—those bright and haunting blue eyes.

“Shall we begin?” asked Father, and he leaned over me, reeking of blood and chloroform.

He pulled open my mouth with his thumb, which tasted like everyone else's saliva, and his ears turned as pale and as pointed as the Count's in
Dracula
. Bat ears made of human flesh is what they were—horrifying flaps sticking out from the sides of his pasty-gray head with its fierce and bulging red eyes. He pumped the drill's foot pedal to make the needle spin.

I arched my back and froze against the chair, and that drill buzzed against one of my molars until bitter flecks of tooth sprayed across my tongue. My nerves throbbed with pain. I screamed bloody murder.

“Good heavens, Olivia!” called Father over the grinding and the shrieking. “Your entire head is rotten.” He stopped the drill and swiveled around to his little stand of tools. “Let's remove some of those troublesome spots.”

“No!” I kicked my feet and tried to wrench my wrists free of the bindings. “Don't take anything away!”

Father picked up a silver instrument, a hybrid of a key and
a corkscrew, with a small metal claw at one end and an ivory handle on the other.

“Let me just get this dental key in there”—both his fanged face and the instrument rushed my way—“so we can break apart that problematic piece.”

“No!”

He gripped my tooth with the metal claw and cranked the ivory handle. Pressure mounted on the molar, growing, pushing, squeezing,
CRACK!
—the tooth split in two.

I howled in agony, but Father muffled my cries by digging beneath the crumbling tooth, stirring up blood and more pain, stretching my cheek and lips with cold metal. He then grabbed hold of the shattered molar with a pair of long forceps and yanked each piece straight out of my gum.

“This rotten, broken tooth is your dream of attending a university,” he said, and he displayed the decayed rubble on the palm of his hand. “Mr. Reverie, would you please be of assistance?”

“Oui, monsieur.”
Henri whisked his hat off his head and held it out for Father, who tossed my tooth pieces inside with the sound of rustling gravel.

Father loomed back over me and went in for another molar. Over the high-pitched din of my screams and the thumps of my thrashings he called out, “This is your dream of voting.”

Yank, plunk
. The second tooth landed in Henri's hat.

He continued onward.

“This is your dream of working for a living.”

Yank, plunk
.

“This is your dream of becoming ‘A Responsible Woman' who publishes letters in newspapers.”

Yank, plunk
.

“This is your dream of wearing trousers while bicycling.”

Yank, plunk
.

The list went on and on, and my mouth grew emptier and emptier, until my wails weakened and my heartbeat slackened. My arms flopped over the armrests, my energy spent, and I witnessed Henri waving his gloved hand over the black silk hat with a graceful flick of his fingers.

“You see, Mademoiselle Mead?” He showed me the dark recesses of the hat's interior. At the very bottom lay a mirror that reflected my toothless mouth with blood spilling down to my chin. “If you stay with your father, he'll take it all away.”

I awoke with a gasp, my gums sore, but all my teeth, thankfully, intact.

ather's fiendish visage did not return during breakfast, thank heavens. I munched my toast without ever stopping to speak—a good, quiet girl—and every few minutes Father beamed at me over his newspaper, quite pleased with my angry silence, which he clearly mistook for obedience.

He left for work, and I attempted to walk to school—I truly did. My toffee-brown book bag hung off my shoulder, and my lunch pail dangled from the crooks of my right fingers. I made it a full block north before I witnessed a peculiar sight.

Our neighbor Mrs. Stanton exited the front door of her narrow green house on the corner of Main, followed by her three little ducklings: a pair of twin girls in white bonnets and a toddler boy in a navy-blue sailor suit. She sold preserves to grocers in the city, and she and her children often emerged from their house with a wooden pull wagon stocked with jars of brightly colored jams and vegetables swimming in pickling vinegar.

Obviously, all of this wasn't the peculiar part.

No, here was the strange thing that caused me to stop walking and gawk at the woman with my arms hanging by my sides: On this particular morning, Mrs. Stanton was a ghost.

The trees she passed, the white picket fence bordering her house—they were all visible through her skin and clothing and her tea-stain-colored hair, which looked as translucent as the layers of an onion. She was a cobweb woman. Barely there. Almost gone.

A nothing person.

“I FOUND THIS LYING ON THE SIDEWALK OUTSIDE THE
building,” I said to the statuesque receptionist manning the front desk of the
Oregonian
's nine-story headquarters on Sixth and Alder.

The female employee, sporting half-lens spectacles and a thick black tie, sat with her posture so impeccably straight, I felt the need to stretch my neck a little higher. Rows of lady workers in tailored dress suits typed behind her in a commotion
of clicking keys and high-pitched dings that signified the ends of typewritten lines.