“Yes.” He smiled. “You really are right here with me…aren’t you?”
“Of course, sweetie.” Eden pushed a wisp of short brown hair from her eyes. “Where else would I be?”
What he didn’t tell her was that in the dream he’d been running.
In a panic of frenzied terror he’d been sprinting through the streets of Boston as if a pack of wild dogs had been right on his heels…or perhaps as if he’d been one of those dogs himself…or something similar…feral and alone and lost in a rage of night, harsh, dangerous and without end.
“And I’m here, too,” he said, as if just realizing it, “with you.”
She cocked her head, baffled. “Are you still asleep?”
“No. No, I…I’m awake now.” He gazed at her beauty. “Come here.”
As she started toward him the buzzer for the door downstairs suddenly sounded, startling them both. Eden quickly threw on a lightweight robe and hugged herself, eyeing her husband nervously throughout.
Without a word, they crossed the apartment to the intercom just inside the front door. Jeff stepped aside and nodded for Eden to answer it.
She pressed the button. “Yes?”
“Eden!” a man’s frantic voice answered. “Let me in! Please, let me in!”
Jeff recognized the voice immediately but said nothing.
“Please Eden! You can help me, please- please -help me, let me in!”
She glanced guiltily at Jeff, unsure of what to say.
“Please! Let me in! I don’t belong out here!”
“I’m sorry, Ernie,” she said softly. “I can’t do that.”
She switched off the intercom, and together, she and Jeff returned to the bedroom. He slid into bed as she ventured back to the window for the bottle of water she’d left on the sill.
Eden looked at the street two stories below. The homeless man had returned to the base of their steps and gazed up at her, a crippling sorrow filling his eyes. For reasons unknown even to her, Eden felt inexplicably drawn to him ever since he’d first appeared on their street a few days before. She held his stare with an impassive version of her own. She could see his lips moving but couldn’t hear what he was saying, just vague whispers in the night.
She closed her eyes.
Behind her, she could hear Jeff slip out of his pajama bottoms, his breath heavy and excited. “Come back to bed, baby.”
Eden opened her eyes. The homeless man was gone.
