Hugo & Rose (37 page)

Adam had treated the whole thing as an adventure: quite proud of how he had gone to find an usher when he could not find Mr. David; excited to have ridden in the back of a police car, though disappointed they had not turned on the lights or sirens for him.

He continued to play with his Lego map of the island, though playing Hugo lost some of its luster when Isaac refused to go along with it. Rose knew Hugo was on his way out when she overheard the two of them conducting a very serious conversation in the car:

“Superheroes are either aliens or mutants.”

“Or gods.”

“Yeah, or gods. Like Thor.”

“And Wonder Woman.”

“What about Iron Man?”

There was silence a moment.

“Okay. Superheroes are either aliens or mutants or gods
or
 … rich guys.”

“Yeah. Or rich guys.”

When they got home, Adam had asked for a Green Lantern costume for his birthday. Rose said she'd put it on his list.

*   *   *

The first of the new dreams was strange to Rose. In one, she carried a cat from room to room in an enormous house, ultimately giving it to her college roommate when it grew a pair of human hands. In another, she was stuck to a piano bench, playing music for party acquaintances and celebrities she neither admired nor liked.

But most of the dreams, Rose did not remember at all.

And since the dreams she did remember were either ephemeral or silly, this seemed to her to be a good thing.

The police seemed disappointed when Rose told them she did not want to press charges. Rose and Josh had painted for them a fuzzy picture of that night's events. Miscommunications and interactions lost in a drugged haze. The truth of the story felt like a fiction, so a fiction was preferable to lawsuits and criminal trials.

And after all, what was the point, with Hugo as he was?

Through the police, they found out that the doctors did not know if Hugo (
David
) would ever wake up. His brain was still active, but comas were mysterious things. He could wake up tomorrow or never.

Rose visited twice. She felt compelled when it became clear that there was no hint of the island in her dreams.

Both times before she left, she told Josh what she was doing. And both times Josh had nodded and said nothing.

On her first visit Rose did not go into his room, choosing instead to stand in the open doorway. Hugo lay on the bed, sheet and blanket tucked neatly under his arms, IVs and monitor leads radiating outward. Once in a while his eyes rolled beneath their lids. Dreaming.

Rose wondered if he had gone back to the island. She imagined him alone on their old playground, restored to his ideal self. Beautiful, brave Hugo. Wasn't this permanent sleep what he wanted? To be forever the dream of himself and never the reality? In the end, after he had rewitnessed the tragedy of the dam break, acknowledged the losses he had taken there, after he had coalesced into that lovely bright boy that flew into the sky … after all that, had he still returned to his island?

Maybe. She didn't (
couldn't
) know. Hugo's mind was a shut door to her now.

But she hoped not.

Instead, she hoped Hugo was having all the dreams he had not had because he had been on the island. The weird, slippery things she had just started to experience, with cameos from his dead parents and half memories from his past, new places with impossible architecture populated by strangers and composites of old friends.

Real dreams seemed less lonely to Rose than what the two of them had shared. And whatever she wished for Hugo, she did not want him to be lonely.

She did not get farther than the door on her second trip either.

As she had crested the corner, she had seen a woman sitting by Hugo's bed. About Rose's age. Thin, denim shorts and a tank top.

In the corner of the room, a little girl of about seven lay on the floor, lost in a game on her phone, a lock of hair between her teeth.

Rose stopped short, just as the woman shouted her name.

“Rose!”

The little girl looked up.

“I said spit that out! I swear, you'll get hairballs.”

The little girl spit out the damp strand as Rose turned and hurried toward the exit.

On her way home, she allowed herself the bright fantasy of Hugo awakening to his wife and daughter. Of the three of them packing up his house and driving eastward, toward the green, fertile promise of Florida with its real beaches and actual jungles.

Maybe someday she'd get another manila envelope in the mail with another comic book. This one telling the story of man reclaiming his life. A mundane adventure in the mundane paradise of everyday life, where the only monsters are the ones trapped inside ourselves.

Rose hoped that was how it would be. But she never went back.

*   *   *

Life after
.

That was how she thought of it.
After.

After Hugo. After the island. After everything.

Life after felt easier to Rose. As if she had been living her life before with weights on her legs and shoulders. Like that Vonnegut story she had read in middle school.

Things after mattered more and yet somehow less. If the neighbors' faces were filled with curious pity, Rose did not begrudge them their right to curiosity. She only denied them answers.

The monitor in the boys' room had lost power during a thunderstorm. When the power came back, Rose had simply turned off the insistent, beeping receiver.
They didn't need it anymore anyway. They hadn't needed it for years.
The receiver eventually fell behind her nightstand, forgotten among the dust bunnies beneath her bed.

And finally, Rose began to notice her husband. Not Josh's absences while he was at work, but his absolute presence when he was with them at home. The way he was there with them, seeing them all, loving them all.

I've been the one who's been away,
she thought
. Not him. I'm the one who has been missing it.

She was sitting in the grass of their front lawn with Penny, the blades tickle-itching her legs, watching Josh teach Adam how to ride
his
new bike, Isaac rolling rings around them, when it visited her again. That canker of a thought, in the mouth of her mind.

Of what consequence are the dreams of housewives?

A bubble of laughter escaped her. Her dreams for her children, for her husband, for herself … these things mattered so much more than the odd plays that rehearsed themselves in the stage of her mind at night. It was these dreams and not the others that had the true consequences.

Rose stood up, brushing herself off.

“Isaac!” she called. “Give me your helmet. I want to learn to ride.”

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Someone asked me, long before I started this book, what kind of “stuff” I wrote. Without hesitation, I answered, “Mommy nightmares.”

At the time, I was living in Los Angeles and making a habit (rather than a living) of writing femalecentric screenplays. They were the sort of scripts film executives love to read but no one intends to make, since movies with unarmed female leads rarely do well at the box office.

And “nightmare” was the right word for these yarns I was spinning, since I was using them to channel my anxieties about raising my son, living in a city, and adjusting to the pace at which modern life is evolving.

Hugo & Rose
began life as one of these tales. I had a dream in which I was talking with a man in what appeared to be the hull of a ship. He was vividly real to me, more like a dream about visiting with my mother than some sort of amorphous dream archetype. He had a name (it was not Hugo) and a history, and it was clear to me from the way we laughed together that we had known each other for a long time.

Over breakfast with my husband, I wondered about the man. He had been so real that it seemed completely plausible for me to someday meet “the man of my dreams.” As my husband handed me my second cup of coffee, my first thought was “How inconvenient.” I was in love with my husband, my son, and, quite frankly, my life, and the thought of some cosmic connection with a stranger messing with the order of my world seemed more of a threat than a blessing. The idea took hold, and this book of literal “mommy nightmares” is the result.

Shortly after I finished the first draft of
Hugo & Rose,
I became pregnant. When the ultrasounds revealed identical twins, my husband and I experienced the unique combination of joy and terror that accompanies every diagnosis of multiples. We felt fortunate and overwhelmed … but mostly just fortunate.

I spent the pregnancy revising the novel and hobbling after our five-year-old.

In September 2013, just as this book was going to market, I delivered my girls, Gideon Rose and Haven Emerson. They were ten weeks early, born by emergency C-section, due to an abruption of their shared placenta. Though they were small, they were perfect creatures, with their father's dark eyes, my ax-handle jaw, and dancers' toes of unknown provenance. Peering in at them in their million-dollar incubators, my husband and I held each other's hands, thankful for how lucky we had been and prepared to settle in for a long stay in the NICU.

On their third day of life, Giddy took a turn.

She died sixteen days later, on a dark Thursday, in my arms. We sang her one last song and kissed her sweet forehead. Then we spent the night holding her sister, our Haven, whose name now seemed prophetic.

Hugo & Rose
found a home with St. Martin's Press three days later. It was a dream come true, amid my own personal nightmare, and one for which I will be forever grateful. The idea of this book finding its way to readers gave me something pleasant to think about in the midst of the grief, loss, and worry that had suddenly consumed my life.

The pace of publishing being what it is, as I write this, Haven is ten months old. She is crawling everywhere and holds forth during her diaper changes in a stream of happy babble and drool. She is our joy.

One of the cruelest blessings of losing an identical twin is that we will always know what Giddy would have looked like.… It is all too easy for us to imagine her among the toys cluttered in our family room, grinning a familiar smile, drool running down a similar chin. The edge of her loss is sharp, made more keen by the happiness Haven has brought us.

The process of editing this book after losing a child has been strange, since I now have firsthand experience of things I had previously only imagined. The playground scene in which a monster devours an identical twin was written well before the girls were conceived, but it now has new poignancy. Rose's father's vigil, and his helplessness in the face of her condition is now something I have experienced, rather than just written about.

And like Rose, I now know exactly what it is like to watch someone grow up in my dreams.

Despite my scripts, and this book, being about “mommy nightmares,” I have never been so cruel to one of my characters as to actually take one of their children. I do not know if in the future I will be so kind to them. Some stories do end in sorrow while others begin in them.

And even more stories have sorrow in their centers. But I know now that joy and possibility can branch out from the pain, made brighter by the darkness beneath.

*   *   *

I would like to thank to Arun Chopra, Helena Crowley, Yanick Vibert, Ogechukwu Menkiti, Brandon Poterjoy, Ara Moomjian, Ralph Schrager, Steven Snyder, and Katie Zeigler at St. Christopher's Hospital for Children and Abington Memorial. They had nothing to do with the creation of this book, but instead were Virgils through the ring of hell that is having a baby in the NICU.

Jillian Junod, your name is etched in my heart. Thank you.

There is a very real possibility that I never would have finished this book without the regular support of Kate Pickett. I swear I didn't know your middle name until the book was done.

Thanks to Paul Foley and Tim Lebbon, whose input at the inception and conclusion of this project (respectively) shaped the book you are holding today.

If heaven is a library, then the librarians at the Bucks County Public Library are angels.

No mother would ever write a book without someone to watch her children. For that I must thank Nancy Deputy, who loved my boy for who he is while I was working.

Constanza Flores, Jen Prince, and Ashley Christie, who constituted
Hugo & Rose
's first book club, thank you for your input and encouragement. The depth of your friendship humbles me.

Chris Van Etten, I love you. That is all.

Brandy Rivers, thank you for constantly asking where Hugo was and for putting up with me. I was so happy when I was finally able to say “Here he is” to you.

Brandi Bowles, thank you for your patience, your kindness, and your insight. Were it not for you, they would both still be lying on the floor.

Rose Hilliard, a woman who understands this book in ways even I don't comprehend, you are the editor of my dreams. I look forward to sending you many poorly worded e-mails in the future.

A thank-you to Terry Foley for teaching me that synaptic jumps make for more interesting stories and that's why they shouldn't build Two Forks Dam. And to Patti Foley for being my first copy editor and fan of my work. When I grow up, I want to be just like my mom and dad.

To my boy, Harper Benjamin, there is so much of you on these pages and yet you are neither Isaac nor Adam. You are something else entirely, and I am so glad that it's my job to spend the rest of my life getting to know you better.

To my girl, Haha, I do hope that by the time you read this, you see nothing of your mother in Rose. I doubt that will be the case, but I can hope.

And finally to Stephen, you are both the man of my dreams and the man of my waking life. Thank you for saying yes.