Lincoln's Dreams

She tightened her arms around me and pressed her face against my neck. “I don’t want you to leave,” she said, and lifted her tear-stained face up to mine, her face full of love and sorrow. Her eyes were wide open, but she wasn’t looking at me. Whoever she was clinging to, begging them not to go, it wasn’t me.

Her nightgown had come unbuttoned at the neck and was pulled away from the long curve of her throat. I could feel the uneven catch of her sobs through the thin cotton of the nightgown. “Annie,” I said, and the pain in my voice brought her awake.

Her eyes focused on me, frightened or surprised. “Where am I?” she said, and looked bewilderedly at the stairs and the fog-shrouded Rappahannock. “Did I have another dream?”

“Yes,” I said, disengaging her hands gently from my neck. I stepped back and down a step, almost onto the cat. “Do you remember it?”

“I was at Arlington,” she said. She looked down at her unbuttoned nightgown. “What did I do?—when I was asleep?”

I shoved down the bar of the door and it opened. “You did a little sleepwalking, that’s all.” I motioned her through the door, standing back, not touching her. The cat stood up and sauntered after her, and I shut the door in its race and then jammed the door down into its lock position and followed Annie into the room.

She was standing with her head bent, buttoning up her nightgown. I locked the door and put the chain on, which was what I should have done in the first place. If I had, none of this would have happened.

“You said you were at Arlington in the dream,” I said. “Was it the same dream as before?”

“No.” She took her blue robe off the bedpost and put it on. “I was standing on the porch with the waitress from the coffee shop, the one with the red hair, and she was getting ready to leave.” She cinched the tie belt of the robe and sat down on the bed, holding the robe closed at the neck with one hand. “We were waiting for the carriage. There were a lot of suitcases piled up on the porch. I didn’t want her to go.”

“I got that much,” I said, thinking of her arms around my neck, of the beautiful curve of her throat. “Why did you say, ‘No tears at Arlington’?”

“I didn’t. He …” She frowned and looked past me. “We were standing on the porch and then …” She leaned forward as if she were trying to reach something, though her hand remained fastened on the collar of her robe.

“Why don’t we talk about this in the morning,” I said. I stood up and pushed the green chair over against the door. “This probably won’t stop you if you sleepwalk again, but it’ll slow you down long enough for me to hear you.” I balanced the volume of Freeman on the arm. It would fall off if she tried to move the chair.

“Jeff,” she said, clutching the blue robe light against her neck. “I’m sorry I … about all this.”

I wanted to shout at her, “I’m not Richard. I’d never take advantage of you while you were asleep, for God’s sake,” but I wasn’t sure that was the truth.

“There’s nothing to be sorry about. You were dreaming,” I said, and went into my room and shut the door.

My collar was wet from Annie’s tears. I took off my shirt and put on another one and then went over and stood by the window, waiting for it to get light and thinking about Richard. “I wasn’t trying to hit on her, it just happened,” he had said when I accused him of taking advantage of Annie. “I was trying to help her.”

“That’s no excuse,” I said out loud, and didn’t know if I was talking to Richard or myself.

When it was light enough to read, I picked up volume one. I had left volume four, the one with the index in it, out on the chair for a sleepwalking alarm, but I didn’t know what to look for anyway, except for the reference to Arlington. If the dream had really taken place there, then this dream was from before the war, which meant my carefully worked-out theory was shot to pieces and I could start over, and volume one was as good a place to start as any.

I read till eight-thirty and then went out my bedroom door and over to the coffee shop and had breakfast. The redheaded waitress was there. “Your name wouldn’t be Katie, would it?” I asked her when she refilled my coffee cup.

“No,” she said disapprovingly, as if she thought I was trying to flirt with her in Annie’s absence. “It’s Margaret. Did you guys make it out to the battlefield yesterday?”

“No,” I said. Maybe we should have, I thought. Maybe then Annie would have dreamed about Fredericksburg again, and I would have known what to tell her when she woke up.