Lincoln's Dreams

“I don’t know,” I said. I pushed the blankets aside and laid her open suitcase on the bed. “You muttered something about being cold a couple of times. It was cold in here. I put some more blankets on you and I wrapped you up in the bedspread.”

“I’m still a little cold,” she said, and shivered. She began taking things out of the closet and putting them in the suitcase, and I noticed that now that she was awake she was using both hands, but she moved a little stiffly, as if her back hurt.

“I’ll go check us out downstairs,” I said.

“Wait a minute. What about Dr. Barton? Weren’t you going to wait till he got back?”

“He called,” I said. “His sister said their father never mentioned any dreams.” I shut the door and went down the stairs, thinking how easy that had been, as easy as emptying a capsule into her food. For her own good.

I went across the street to the phone booth in the coffee shop and called the hospital. “I have a friend who’s sick,” I said, and then stopped. I would never get her to a hospital. They would want to know the name of her doctor, they would have a thousand forms and while I was filling them out she would call a taxi and disappear.

I called the Sleep Institute and asked for Dr. Stone. “I’m sorry,” the receptionist said. “Dr. Stone’s in California. Can I take a message?” I called Broun’s hotel in L.A. He had checked out. I asked the clerk whether Broun had mentioned where he was going, and he repeated, “Mr. Broun has checked out.”

He had checked out, and I didn’t know where his autograph party was being held today or who the neurologist was he was going to see on Monday, and he wouldn’t be home till Tuesday, which was three days from now.

Annie insisted on having lunch at the coffee shop so she could say goodbye to the redheaded waitress, but she was not there. Her little girl was sick, the manager told us. “Tell her goodbye for me,” Annie said and went on reading galleys as if we were not now cut off from everyone, the rear guard destroyed at Sayler’s Creek, Sheridan already at Appomattox Station, and Meade in the rear and coming up fast. Grant already writing the terms of surrender.

“No,” Nelly said when he told her, and he could hear the desperation in her voice, but this time he was the cause of it and there was nothing he could do. “The army won’t take you. You can’t even march. ”

“I’m walking pretty good,” Ben said. “Mebbe they won’t take me now, but there’s a time when they will and be glad of me. ”

“Why are you doing this? ”

“I gotta. I don’t know why. It’s the same as when I signed up. I just gotta. ”

“I will never know what happened to you,” she said.

“I been thinkin’ on that,” he said. He pulled a piece of folded paper out of his shirt pocket. “Friend of mine told me to put my name and my kin in my shoe, but that didn’t do no good. The boot was shot clean off and the paper with it. I want you should keep this. ”

‘“What good will that do? ”

Ben thought of her sitting by Caleb’s bed, holding his dead hand. “After the war’s over, you show them this paper and you point at one of them bodies and say, ‘That’s him,’ and they’ll put my name on a grave and write my kin, so’s they’ll know what happened to me. ”

“All right,” she said.

After he was gone she opened up the paper and read it. “Toby Banks,” it said. “Big Sewell Mountain, Virginia. ”

Annie stopped.

“I did have a dream,” she said. “I remember it now. I think I was in our church, the Presbyterian church on Main Street back home, and they were taking up the collection, only it wasn’t a church service. It was a meeting of some kind.”

A vestry meeting. At Grace Church.

“I don’t remember very much of it. It wasn’t like the other dreams.” Some of the panic came back in her face as she tried to remember. “It was cold. I remember thinking I should have worn my other coat and wishing they’d stop arguing so I could go home.”