Amelia

AMELIA

“Wake up!”

I say it three times, gently shaking him, before Adam opens his eyes.

He stares at me. “The woman, she—”

“What woman?”

“The woman in the red—”

This again. I should have known.

“The woman in the red kimono? She isn’t real, Adam. Remember? It was just a dream.”

He looks at me the way a young child looks at a parent when they are scared. All the color has drained from his face and it’s covered in sweat.

“You’re okay,” I say, taking his clammy hand in mine. “There is no woman in a red kimono. You’re here with me. You’re safe.”

Lies can heal as well as hurt.

He barely spoke to me when we came down from the bell tower earlier. I don’t know whether it was the shock of almost falling with the crumbling wall, or the bats, or too much red wine, but he got undressed, climbed into the unfamiliar bed—that looks just like our own at home—and went straight to sleep without a word.

It’s been a while since Adam had one of his nightmares, but they happen often enough and are always the same, except that he sees the accident from a different point of view. Sometimes in the dreams he is in the car, in others he is walking along the street, or there are the dreams where he is watching the scene from the window of a council flat on the thirteenth floor of a tower block, banging his fists on the glass. He never recognizes me straightaway afterward—which is normal for us given his face blindness—but sometimes he thinks I am someone else. It always takes several minutes to calm him down and convince him that I’m not. His dreams have a habit of haunting him, regardless of whether he is asleep or awake. His mind isn’t panning for gold; it’s searching for something much darker. Tiny nuggets of buried regrets sometimes slip through the gaps, but the heaviest of memories tend to sink rather than rise to the surface.

I wish I knew how to make them stop.

I consider stroking the freckles on his shoulder, or running my fingers through his salt-and-pepper hair like I used to. But I don’t. Because I can hear bells.

After playing a creepy tune, the grandfather clock in the corner of the bedroom starts to chime midnight like an apprentice Big Ben. If we weren’t fully awake already, we both are now.

“I’m sorry I woke you,” he says, his breathing still faster than it should be.

“It’s okay. If you hadn’t, the clock almost certainly would have,” I tell him. Then I do what I always do: take out my pad and a pencil, and write it all down as soon as possible afterward. Because it isn’t just a dream—or a nightmare—it’s a memory.

He shakes his head. “We don’t have to do this tonight—”

I take a silent register of his emotions, ticking off the familiar pattern one by one: fear, regret, sorrow, and guilt. It is the same every time.

“Yes, we do,” I say, having already found one of the few blank pages left in the notebook. I always thought I could excavate his unhappy memories and replace them with better ones. Of us. These days I’m not so sure.

Adam sighs, leans back on the bed, and tells me everything that he can remember before the edges of the dream fade too much to see.

The nightmares always begin the same way: with the woman in the red kimono.

Despite the attire, she is not Japanese. Adam finds it hard to describe her face—he struggles with features in dreams the same way he does in real life—but we know that she is a British woman in her early forties, around the same age I am now. She’s attractive. He always remembers her red lipstick, in the exact same shade as her kimono. She has long blond hair like me too, but hers is shorter, shoulder length.

He doesn’t say her name tonight, but we both know what it is.

The order of what happens in the dream sometimes changes, but the woman in red is always there. So is the car in the rain. It’s the reason why Adam doesn’t own one and doesn’t drive. He never even wanted to learn how.

There is a teenage boy in the nightmares too and he’s terrified.

Adam saw it happen: the woman, the car, the accident.

Not just in a dream, in real life.

It was the night his mother died. He was thirteen.

Adam couldn’t recognize the person in the car almost thirty years ago, when it mounted the pavement and collided with his mum as he watched. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t know who they were. It could have been a friend, a teacher, a neighbor—all faces look the same to him. Imagine not knowing if someone you knew was responsible for killing someone you loved. No wonder he struggles to trust people, even me. If my husband didn’t suffer from prosopagnosia, his whole life might have unfolded differently, but he wasn’t able to describe who he had seen to the police. Not then, not now. And he still blames himself. His mother was walking his dog when it happened, because he was too lazy to do it.

It makes me feel sad how he idolizes a ghost.

By all accounts, Adam’s mother was a nice enough woman—she was a nurse and very popular on the estate where they lived—but she wasn’t perfect. And she definitely wasn’t a saint. I find it strange how he compares every other woman in his life to her. Including me. The pedestal he put his dead mother on isn’t just wonky, it’s broken. For example, he seems to have conveniently forgotten why she was wearing the red kimono. It’s what she always wore—along with the matching lipstick—whenever male “friends” came to visit the little council flat that they lived in. The place had thin walls, thin enough for Adam to hear that his mother had a different “friend” stay in her bed almost every week.

Memories are shape-shifters and dreams are not bound by truth, which is why I write everything he chooses to remember down. I want to fix him. And I want him to love me for it. But not everything that gets broken can be repaired.

One day he might remember the face he saw that night, and the unanswered questions that have haunted him for years might finally get answered. I’ve tried so hard to make the nightmares stop: herbal remedies, mindfulness podcasts before bed, special tea … but nothing seems to help. When everything is written down, I turn off the light so that we are in darkness again, and hope he’ll be able to get back to sleep.

It doesn’t take long.

Adam is soon gently snoring, but I can’t seem to switch off.

I swallow a sleeping pill—they’re prescription, and I only take them when nothing else works—but I’ve been popping more than usual lately. I’m too preoccupied with the growing number of cracks in our relationship, the ones that are too big to fill in or skim over. I know exactly why and when our marriage started to unravel. Life is unpredictable at best, unforgivable at worst.

I must have dozed off at some point—the pill finally kicking in—because I wake up with an unsettling sense of déjà vu. It takes a few seconds for me to remember where I am—the room is pitch-black—but as I blink into the darkness and my eyes adjust to the light, I remember that we are in Blackwater Chapel. A sliver of moonlight between the window blind and the wall illuminates a tiny corner of the room, and I strain to see the time on the face of the grandfather clock. Its slender metal hands still suggest it is only half past midnight, which means I haven’t been asleep for very long. My mind feels fuzzy, but then I remember what woke me because I hear it again.

There is a noise downstairs.