Celie,” the robe on its hook seemed to say, but she ignored it and stayed in her clothes, afraid that if she gave in to the impulse she might fall asleep on the couch with the ravioli still boiling on the stove and not wake up until the kitchen caught fire.
She ate her meal, prepared for bed and fell asleep before ten.
The sound of a baby crying came to her ears after several hours of good rest. It seemed so close that it startled her awake. Or—But, no, was she awake? She found herself at the window, although she didn’t quite remember how she’d gotten there. Had she walked? Or floated? Someone whispered a sound. Soothing the baby? Or calling her name?
The cries still came. In this room? They sounded close enough, but no. She looked around. There was no baby here. Outside, then? Downstairs?
The sound seemed distinct and real—as real as sounds and senses could feel in a dream, heightened more than they were in daily life.
Celie pushed the curtain aside and looked out. She’d kept the window open, as the April night was mild. The street looked quiet. She couldn’t see anyone. Maybe the crying came from the apartment below. It sounded a little fainter to her ears, now. The couple downstairs didn’t have a baby of their own, but they could have visitors staying with them.
She stepped back, and was about to let the curtain fall back into place when something on the windowsill gleamed in the moonlight and caught her attention. She picked it up. It was a hat pin, old-fashioned, with a long shaft of dull, dark gray metal and a big glass pearl at one end.
And that means I’m definitely dreaming, she realized, as part of the dream. Because I’ve never seen this before.
The glass pearl was pretty, and she imagined a dark-haired young woman with a wide, mobile mouth and friendly eyes, standing in front of a mirror and reaching her hands up behind her head as she used the hat pin to fasten a broad-brimmed creation of straw and chiffon into place on her thick pile of hair.
“This is a very nice dream,” she told the woman. “If only that little baby would stop crying.”
“Nick will go to him and soothe him back to sleep,” the woman said. Her smile at once began to calm Celie’s concern.
And a few seconds later, the baby stopped crying, so the woman pinning her hat must have been right. Nick had picked him up. Of course he had! Celie could see him with that little dark head settled on his broad shoulder and brushing against his clean-shaven cheek. His shirttail had escaped from his waistband again, but he was too absorbed in the baby to notice. Everything was fine.
Celie tucked herself back into bed with a smile on her face.
In the morning, however, the hat pin still lay there on her windowsill, and that was distinctly strange.
Dressed in her blue-striped flannel pajamas and only just out of bed, she picked it up and twirled its metal stem in her fingers as if the glass pearl was a little flower. So pretty, the way it caught the morning light. It made her think of Victorian lace, hand-stitched fabrics, elaborate hats and porcelain figurines. Despite its spiky point, it felt feminine.
When she thought about it, there was a perfectly rational explanation for its presence on her windowsill, too.
No, okay, not perfectly rational.
She wished she could find a better one.
But it was plausible, if you were prepared to stretch. The attic apartment directly above this one was in the process of renovation. The construction team had really torn into the place, pulling up floorboards and ripping ancient plaster off the walls. The hat pin must have gotten lost a hundred years ago, fallen through a crack in the floorboards and—
Well, here it was on the windowsill, so something like that had obviously happened, even if Celie couldn’t quite picture the physics of it, right now.
And the baby—Nick’s baby, protected in his strong arms—had been purely a dream.
For some reason, Celie didn’t want to risk losing the wandering hat pin again, so she put it in the little zippered compartment on the side of her purse. After her usual light breakfast, she went to the mall.
“Sorry I’m late,” Celie said breathlessly, as she entered Nick’s office.
He looked at his watch.
She was right.
She was late.
By a whole two minutes.
And she looked a little different. Fresh, energetic, happy and well-rested, for a start, although he felt there was more to it than that. Her hair looked extra silky, and the clips had to be new. He didn’t think she usually wore clips decorated with little flowers. They went some way toward undercutting the severe styling of her skirt, he thought, as did the pastel top she wore.
She definitely looked different.
This fact niggled at him a little, although he didn’t have time to work out why. They had a lot to get through this afternoon. He allocated only a few seconds to the topic, and told her sincerely, “You look very nice.”
She nodded, and said, “Thanks,” and he knew she wouldn’t expect him to pursue the question any further than that.
“Let’s get right to those regional figures,” he told her.
With various interruptions, the regional figures took most of the afternoon, and didn’t leave Celie much time to contemplate her slightly disturbing morning at the mall. In the few moments she did have in which to think about it, she felt churned up inside. On the one hand, fluttery in the stomach, like a child going to a birthday party, but on the other, ill at ease.
At the mall, she’d kept thinking about her dream last night and about the hat pin. She’d even gotten it out of her purse a couple of times, to prove to herself that it was real…although she might have felt more reassured if it hadn’t been. She’d been twirling it in her hand when the hairstylist had asked her, “Just a trim?”
And she’d felt the strongest temptation to answer, “No, I’d like to try something completely new.”
She’d resisted it in the end. There was a good reason she always kept her hair up and out of the way. With the hairstylist waiting, and the hat pin still twirling in her fingers, Celie had needed several seconds to remember what the reason was—that it wasn’t very efficient to have hair in her face when she was focused on work—but it did come to her in the end, and she opted for the usual trim.
She and Nick got through the regional figures by the anticipated time, and her boss was happy. When Celie got home that night and opened the closet to hang up two of the new, more softly styled tops she’d bought this morning to pair with her skirts—she’d worn the third top to work—the closet seemed to approve.
Several hours later, the bed wasn’t so friendly. Tonight’s dreams clattered into her mind with more violence, and the images were harder to put together. A figure lay on the floor of the kitchen. Her kitchen? The room looked familiar, and so did the figure itself, but then her dream lurched off into a different direction, she heard the sound of tearing fabric, and lost the image of the figure in the kitchen before she could decide exactly who it was, and what was going on.
The baby started crying, and
