covers up until they were snug around her throat.
She turned over, wrapped her arms around the pillow, and closed her eyes. But the vision still hung in the darkness, and a moment later she rolled over again, this time opening her eyes to look at the dimly glowing hands of the alarm clock that sat on the scarred table next to the bed.
Just a little after midnight.
Though she felt so tired from unpacking boxes all day that her whole body ached, she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep until she banished the terrible image of her dream from her mind.
Throwing back the covers, she got up, pulling the blanket off the bed and wrapping it around her shoulders. She moved toward the closet, intending to open the door to prove to herself that nothing was inside except the clothes she’d hung there herself. Yet when she reached out to turn the knob, her hand hovered in the air a few inches from it, and she found herself unable to close her fingers on the brass.
She went to the window then and gazed out at the huge maple across the street, and slowly the vision of the horror inside the closet began to fade as the memory of the tree’s branches reaching out to her rose in her mind once more.
But in the dream, the tree had been covered with the bright green foliage of summer, and now, as she gazed out into the autumn night, she could see that its leaves had shriveled and fallen, until now its branches were almost bare.
It didn’t look at all as it had in the dream.
Turning away from the window, Angel gazed again at the closed door of the closet.
This time she closed her fingers on the cold brass, she turned the knob, and pulled the door open.
Just as she had told herself, there was nothing inside the closet except the clothes she’d hung up this afternoon.
On the floor were her three pairs of shoes.
On the shelves were some boxes filled with stuff she hadn’t been able to bring herself to throw away.
And nothing else, except for a strange odor.
The odor of something burning…
“Angel?” Myra Sullivan said as her daughter came into the kitchen the next morning. “Are you all right?”
“I guess I didn’t sleep very well,” Angel replied, rubbing her eyes with the sleeve of her bathrobe. “I had a bad dream—”
“Well, that’s hardly a good sign, is it? You should have had wonderful dreams on your first night in our new house. What was it?”
As Angel tried to recall and relate the strange dream she’d had, Myra found the box she’d packed especially for this morning — buried, of course, under half a dozen other boxes, all of them heavier than the one she was after — opened it, and began taking out cereal bowls, glasses, and plates. “Rinse these for me while we talk,” she told Angel, stacking them on the counter next to the sink. “Everything gets so dirty when you pack it up.”
Angel ran the hot water and began rinsing and drying the dishes and silverware as she began once more to reconstruct the strange dream she’d had the night before, but already some of the details were starting to slip away.
“But the weirdest thing was that when I finally woke up, the whole thing still seemed so real that I got up and looked in the closet.”
Her mother smiled thinly. “Just like when you were little, remember? You always made me open the closet door in your room to prove that there were no monsters inside.” She looked up from the oatmeal she was stirring. “And you didn’t find anything, did you?” she asked, her voice taking on an edge. “It was just a nightmare then, and it was just a nightmare last night. You didn’t actually hear anything, or see anything, did you?” Angel shook her head. Yet the look on her face told Myra there was something her daughter hadn’t yet told her. “What is it?” she pressed. “There’s something you’re holding back.”
“I–I don’t know,” Angel stammered. “It’s just — well, it sounds sort of crazy… ”
Myra stopped stirring the oatmeal. “I think I can be the judge of that. Why don’t you just tell me what you think happened, and maybe I can figure it out.”
Angel hesitated, and then blurted it out: “I smelled smoke.”
Myra frowned. “Smoke? You mean like wood smoke?”
Again Angel hesitated. “Well, sort of, but not really — I mean, it sort of smelled like burning wood, but there was something else too.”
“Something else?” Myra prodded when Angel fell silent. “Am I supposed to figure it out myself, or are you going to tell me?”
“Well, it was weird,” Angel said. “Remember when you burned yourself with the iron?”
Myra winced at the memory, and her eyes went to the scar that still showed clearly on the back of her left hand. It had happened five years ago, when she’d been talking to Angel while pressing Father Raphaello’s vestments and accidentally placed the scorching steam iron on her own hand.
“It smelled like that,” Angel said. “And like the time I scorched my hair trying to blow out the candles on my birthday cake.”
“Good heavens! I thought you would have forgotten about that years ago. You were only two.”
“Forget it?” Angel echoed. “I’ll never forget it — I thought I was going to burn up!”
“Well, there you are, then,” Myra told her. “That’s probably where the dream came from — maybe moving into our own house made your subconscious decide to start clearing out a bunch of old memories. And if lighting your head on fire scared you as much as it scared me, I’m amazed you haven’t had nightmares about it for years.” She moved the oatmeal off the stove and started scooping it into the three bowls Angel had rinsed and dried. “But if it scared you that much, how come you never told me? We could have talked about it.”
“I didn’t want you to think I was a baby.”
Myra laughed out loud. “But you
“Come on, Mom,” Angel groaned, pulling away from the embrace. “I hardly even remember it. Maybe I don’t — maybe I only remember Daddy talking about it on every birthday I’ve ever had, and I just feel like I remember.”
“If you didn’t really remember, I don’t think you would have had that nightmare. And if you thought you smelled smoke, why didn’t you wake me up? Or wake your father up?”
At the mention of her father, the memory of him walking in on her when she’d been changing her clothes yesterday rose in her mind.
Walking in on her and looking at her and—
The image of her father framed in the doorway of her room was abruptly replaced by the reality of his figure framed in the kitchen door.
“Wake me up?” he asked. “I’m awake — what’s going on?”
“It’s Angel,” Myra explained. “She had a nightmare last night.”
“About me?” Marty Sullivan asked, his eyes fixing on Angel with an intensity that made her pull the bathrobe more tightly around her. “Why would she have a nightmare about me?” he asked, speaking to his wife, but his eyes remaining fastened on Angel.
“It wasn’t about you,” Myra said, barely glancing at her husband as she put the dishes of oatmeal on the table. “She had a nightmare about a fire, and when she woke up, she thought she still smelled smoke.”
“In the house?”
“Well, of course in the house,” Myra replied. “She wasn’t sleeping in the backyard, was she?” She glanced at her watch, then shifted her gaze to her husband and daughter. “You’ve got half an hour before we have to leave
