STORY: What If

Sometimes at night, I lie in bed staring at the patterns that the streetlights make coming through my windows onto the carpet and the wall. I think about the people out there and what they are doing. I listen to the bed sheets rustle in my son’s room across the hall. I know the morning will call upon all my energy, so I close my eyes and will myself to fall asleep.
But without the distractions of the outside world, my mind reveals pictures I don’t wish to see, thoughts I don’t wish to have, and regrets I don’t wish to remember. But the mind is wanderlust, following nobody’s trail but its own.
A college campus, looking like some castle or fortress of years long gone, stands before me. I watch my daughter climb the stairs, long hair swinging like a pendulum behind her with each step, ticking her way to her future. Sometimes I stand alone, sometimes next to her father, sometimes next to my husband. Either I hug myself or he hugs me, and my cheeks hurt from smiling. I am so happy, so proud. There is plenty of time to be sad when I go home, I tell myself. This is a moment of joy. This scene is so familiar, that whenever I return to this dream I am instantly at ease.
I turn away before the tears reach my eyes and I walk back to the car. I see long, winding roads through trees – yes, plenty of trees with leaves ready to change their colors but not there yet – not until I return to pick her up for her long weekend in October. Every song on the radio reminds me of her, and soon I see the car and the road from above with a touching soundtrack accentuating the mood perfectly – happy and proud yet profoundly sad, reminiscent. I’ll have to remember this song, my dreaming self tells my waking self in an odd state of awareness, knowing all the while that I never will.
Soon I sit in my living room, a mug of herbal tea in my hands, a quilt and photo album on my lap. I sit transfixed on some picture or another, lost in the memory of the childhood that once was. Awake, I can picture clearly the photographs in the album that my dreaming self put together through the years.
A young me wears a hospital gown, holds my daughter in my arms, hair matted and sticking up in a most unbecoming fashion from twenty-two hours of labor. Nurse-swaddled in a hospital blanket, the baby’s eyes are large and green. Beautiful eyes, bewitching eyes, just like my son’s. In fact, sometimes the pictures are interchanged in the dream.
Seven-years-old, my daughter has her hair in two braids and smiles with a missing tooth. She holds a piece of cake and wears a cowboy hat, thrilled to be having the rodeo birthday party we had promised her, complete with a pony. I picture countless hours of whining and pleading and promising to clean her room and do the dishes and take out the garbage if please, please, please, I could have a pony at my birthday party. I smile in my sleep and in my dream, as her father and I exchange knowing looks and agree nonetheless.
Puberty, the talk, I look at the picture taken at the beach the day before she had her first period. Her short hair blew in the wind as she sat staring at the sunset. She looked so calm, so mature, yet so at ease. She has turned to look at the photographer when her name was called, but she hadn’t smiled. The result is astounding, and I am haunted by this picture for days after I dream of it.
But these dreams never tell the real story. Never do I let myself dream of the pain, the guilt, the burden of secrecy, the resulting depression. All that is implied. When I wake up, I am crying. I am overwhelmed by an incredible sense of sadness of what I have missed all these years.
I get out of bed and walk across the hall. I stand in the doorway, sometimes until the sun finally rises, and watch my son sleep. I relive all the actual milestones that I have actually witnessed, berating my overactive imagination for having created a complete lifetime of memories where none exist.
Always the dreams are idyllic, idealistic. Never do they reflect what really would have been. When I awake crying after one of these dreams, I force myself to envision the more likely truth. Only then can I feel the relief and reassure myself that I did indeed make the right decision.
The castle-like campus appears again, but this time it stands at a greater distance, and I look upon it through my car window as I drive by. I have never been inside, but my dream self is saddened by the sight of the school, or perhaps by life. I drive to the restaurant where my daughter is working, check my watch, then close my eyes and rest my head on the headrest. The sound of the door surprises me, and I smile at my daughter, who is obviously exhausted. As I drive, she pulls out her scrunchy and runs her fingers through her hair. We drive in silence, still tense from the morning’s argument, which neither one of us can fully recall. I wish to say something, to mend us, but apparently too much has already been said. As we wait at the red light in front of the college, I stare at the school.
“Mom, it’s green,” she says.
I look ahead and drive.
“You just can’t stop, can you?” she says.
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m not going to college,” she says. “So just stop it. Stop staring at the school every time we drive past. Stop leaving applications in my room. Stop introducing me to your successful college graduate friends. Just let me live my life or I’m outta there.”
So this is how it feels to have dreams die, I think. I get it, I really do. She’s chosen to waste her life and there’s nothing I can do to change that.
When I wake up, I try to remember what I was driving, what I was wearing, whether I was working or stayed at home. Nothing. I try to think back to that day, but then I remember it never really happened.
My worst dreams show me not getting along with my daughter. I dare not dream that she would run away and support herself through prostitution, or would succumb to drugs and become a dealer. Now that I have imagined what she would really look like, now that – at least in my dreams – she has become a real person, I cannot submit her to those nightmares and fears that led me to deny her existence so many years ago. No, that is what my waking self sees.
But the fear that grips me most, the emotion that leads to the greatest grief and thus the greatest sense of relief, is the thought of my daughter going through what I went through, living through the decision I made. But I suppose in the end that I guaranteed she would never have to suffer and that is my solace.
I drive past the clinic that started my nightmares years ago. No, that isn’t fair. Outside stand picketers, women and men – but mostly men, why is that? – slowing down and displaying their signs. Do they know? Can they feel my pain? Could they have saved me from a life of regret, of sadness? Had I but heeded their words then, maybe I would not feel as I do now.