The Big Dark Sky (7)
She was always a child in these dreams, sometimes as young as six, at other times perhaps as old as nine, which was the last year that she’d lived on the ranch. For seven nights, there were only the trees and young Joanna as she wandered or else hurried among them, under their fragrant boughs and leafy branches. Rustling trees, soughing trees, whispering trees . . .
After a week, when the dreams failed to relent, animals began to populate them: great flocks of rock doves winging through the conifers in the last orange light of day, a herd of elk encircling her as she proceeded with them through a misty dusk. Frequently, a pack of lantern-eyed coyotes swarmed around her, under a polished-pearl moon; and though the mood was ominous, the threat she sensed did not come from those creatures, but from something unknown in the starlit currents of the deep, cool night.
She didn’t wake in alarm from these eerie scenarios until the grizzly bear entered them. She sometimes encountered it in the dream woods at twilight, where it loomed eight feet tall, shambling along an aisle of trees parallel to a deer path that Joanna followed. Its wet black nostrils were flared, the better to gather her scent, and its eyes glimmered with golden light as it watched her.
In the early hours of Thursday, the sixth of August, in another sleep-crafted fantasy, as she plucked wildflowers from a hillside a hundred yards beyond the horse stables, with the sun an apocalyptic red ball balanced on the horizon behind her, a long and vibrant snort caused her to look up from the petaled riot of color and discover that the bear towered over her, no more than fifteen feet away. She was a small girl, maybe seven years old, and the grizzly was enormous, perhaps twenty times her weight, with four-inch claws that could kill her with one swipe. As with the raw-boned coyotes, she didn’t fear this creature, not in the dream, but smiled at it and held forth the bouquet. The bear cocked its head, as if it found her unique in its experience, a puzzle to be solved. When it didn’t come forward to meet her, she slowly approached it with the offering of flowers. The behemoth raised its head and let out a wild sound—part hoot, part rattling honk, part fierce blat—which made young Joanna giggle. Undeterred, in the crimson light of the setting sun, she followed her frail shadow to within a few feet of the monstrous figure, holding the bouquet high, and then the bear—
Joanna woke with a cry of alarm. She sat up in bed, threw aside the covers, thrust to her feet, and stood trembling.
Although usually she slept in darkness, recently she had been leaving the bathroom door ajar, projecting a simple geometric of pale light on the red-and-black Navajo rug. Shadows ruled the chamber, but none was deep enough to conceal an intruder.
She had been sleeping in a T-shirt and panties, under a thin coverlet and top sheet, because the room wasn’t cold. The chill that stippled her with gooseflesh was a response to the dream rather than to the air temperature.
During more than nine years at Rustling Willows, she had never been threatened by an animal, by neither a coyote nor a bear, nor even by one of the rattlesnakes that were common to the territory. The vividness of these dreams and the intensity of her reaction to them had nothing to do with threats that she had survived. However, though she’d never seen a grizzly except in photos, she understood why that beast, if not the others, might haunt her dreams.
The bedside clock offered her a time that she didn’t want to accept—2:40 a.m. When she fully woke from these dreams, she could never nod off again. This would be another night in which she got less than five hours of sleep.
The TV wasn’t on. She didn’t know why she thought it would be.
She slipped into a pair of yoga pants and, barefoot, went through the house to her study, switching on lamps along the way.
In these hours of lost sleep, Joanna wanted coffee prepared with cinnamon added before brewing, then poured black, not because she needed it to stay awake, but because the aroma and the flavor reminded her of mornings at Rustling Willows, in the kitchen with her mother, whom she’d lost when she was nine, the same year she’d also become fatherless. Her mother, Emelia, had drunk coffee this way, and Joanna had been allowed her own cup by the time she was six, though her coffee was diluted with condensed milk.
A coffeemaker stood on a corner table in her study. She brewed eight cups. She wouldn’t drink that much, but she took comfort from the sight of it in the Pyrex pot and from the aroma that lingered as long as the Jamaican blend remained on the warming pad.
At her desk, she booted up the computer and opened a document titled The Color of Never, a manuscript in progress. At thirty-three, during the eleven years since graduating college, she had written six novels. The most recent two were modest bestsellers. Her sales increased novel by novel in an age of high-tech barbarism when it seemed that books might fade entirely from fashion and that vast fields of information, digitized but rarely accessed, would soon become graveyards of once essential knowledge.
She sipped the coffee, which warmed away her chill, but her creativity remained frozen. Her fingers could find no words in the keyboard. The current novel had gone well even when the strange dreams became a nightly occurrence, but she’d made no progress whatsoever after the animals became a part of them.
Never before had Joanna suffered from writer’s block. Her frustrating inability to create suggested that the exceptionally vivid dreams might be either a symptom of some physical malady—perhaps related to the brain—or evidence of a psychological knot that needed to be untied. Slowly, day by day, she had ever more seriously considered seeking help.