Jacob's Dream

Chapter One My Mother's Ghost She visited me nearly every night that summer after she died. She always did something to wake me. She never spoke to me, but I knew when I saw her standing there, that it was her who had made the shutters bang in the wind, who had dropped the book off the shelf, who had whistled or stomped or did something to startle me awake at that still hour. She came as an unclear form of herself, like a picture in the midst of being developed, the colors of her skin and hair and clothes stitched widely against the air. It would take a minute for me to see her and even when I did I struggled to make my eyes adjust more, thinking that it was me who was unable to bring her into focus. She would be wearing the cotton dresses I remembered her by, the ones that, as a child, I loved to grab and hold as she held me on her lap. The dress was much clearer than her face, and it frustrated me that I could not ingest, once again, the details of her – her wide nose, and soft, brown eyes, and the clean white space of forehead ending at the even part of her long, yellow hair. She would be there, standing beside the bed, when I woke. But, as I came to, she would move, often drifting to the rocking chair, where she worked diligently, darning needle in hand, at some colorful cloth spread out on her lap. Often, in the depths of her struggle with her illness, she had sat someplace all alone in the house knitting for hours, fashioning blankets and scarves that would never be finished. Most of the time, I could rally her from these sad ruminations by jumping on her lap or telling her I was hungry. But not her ghost. Her ghost did not look at me. Not once. Sometimes, during those nights, she would go to the window, and, sitting up in bed, I would try to look where she was looking, above the spruce trees, past the stretch of building-shapes, to the stars. I thought she wanted to tell me something – “That is where I’ve gone to,” I wanted her to say. A few times she stood in the doorway, facing the other way, as if prepared to step through when she was called. I have often heard that the recently deceased remain in a kind of limbo before they go to wherever they are destined. It seemed that my mother was caught in this kind of in-between state, but because I was too young to understand I didn't know how to help her. All I wanted was for her to be alive again. I learned early on, however, to stay right where I was. For if, in a moment of anguish and excitement I rose too quickly and I reached out for her, she would retreat backward, away from me without looking and then disappear, her stitches of color fading until only the hard shadows of house-things remained.