Queen of Dreams by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Page B

sobbing so hard that I could barely understand what she was saying. I held her and stroked her hair, and slowly I gathered that she’d had a dream. She didn’t tell me any more, and I didn’t ask. I took her back to her bed, and when she fell asleep, I returned to my sleeping mat. But an hour later, she was back, crying again. She’d had the same dream, only more of it.
    In the first dream, she told me, she was walking through a crowded department store. She was alone, but she thought nothing of it—there were so many people around her. She was looking for a mirror. She asked a saleswoman where she could find one. The woman pointed her in a direction. She moved past lingerie, lots of lingerie, hanging from racks placed so close she had to push through them to move ahead. She was sweating. She couldn’t see any other shoppers. Then she heard the footsteps. They were so heavy they made the floor creak. She was sure they weren’t a woman’s. What would a man be doing in the lingerie section? She spun around, but there was nothing. Or almost nothing. She thought she caught a blur, like a hand pulled back fast. She knew that if she turned away, it would be back. She was afraid of what it would do. That’s when she woke up the first time.
    The second time she fell asleep, she was already in the lingerie section, pushing through nightgowns and camisoles. They crowded around, their slippery silkiness pressing against her face. She couldn’t breathe. She tried to go back to the entrance of the store. But her body moved onward, as though it had a will of its own. She knew what was coming—the footsteps, lurching around the corner of her vision. She saw the hand more clearly this time. No, it wasn’t a monster hand, just an ordinary male one. No, it didn’t hold a weapon. She looked past the hand to the arm, the torso encased in a white shirt. She couldn’t see the man’s face—it was hidden behind a rack of slips. She didn’t know why his hand, reaching out to her through gauze and silk with its neat, blunt nails, should frighten her so much. The hand came closer; she was frozen with fear; the index finger touched her wrist. Then she woke up.
    Now she clung to me, refusing to go back to her bed, refusing to sleep again. “He’ll be waiting there,” she kept saying. “He’ll do something terrible, I know he will. And the worst thing is, a part of me wants him to do it.” Then she asked, “Why do I keep dreaming this dream? What does it mean?”
    There was a threat in the dream. It radiated heat, like a burner someone had forgotten to turn off. But I couldn’t gauge its nature, or where it might come from.
    She said, “Help me, Mom.”
    I tried to remember what I’d been taught about recurring nightmares. What to do about them. But none of the answers seemed to fit. The only way to help her was to see the dream for myself.
    I lay down beside Rakhi and put my head on her pillow, though I’d promised myself I’d never try that again. I kept thinking of what had almost happened the last time, when I’d been trying to teach her to read dreams. How I’d almost lost her. Yet how could I abandon my daughter to her terror?
    I closed my eyes and willed my breath to slow, my conscious mind to fold itself inward. I could feel heat pulsing from my daughter’s head, her frantic thoughts whirling like broken glass. I loosened my hold on my body and dropped into that whirlpool. I’d done something similar once or twice, with clients I couldn’t help in any other way. I expected the same pull into the vortex, the images slowing down and becoming clearer, myself passing through the whirlpool into my daughter’s dreaming eye.
    But it wasn’t so. I passed through the whirlpool, yes—but when I emerged on the other side, I was swathed in a veil. I could see nothing. I could only hear. I heard Rakhi push through the racks of clothes, the satiny swish of them closing behind her. The man’s footsteps were cautious at first,