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Mostly, I just hope to make him proud, wherever he may be.
Marc pulls into the gravel driveway of a two-story house with bright-white siding and a shiny, black metal roof. The front door is painted red, and orange leaves have fallen from the maple tree in the front yard, blanketing the emerald-green grass and the wrap-around porch.
I shake my head as he turns off the engine. “I can’t wait to see the ‘before’ pictures, because the ‘after’ is stunning,” I say, turning to Marc. “I’m so proud of you.”
He smiles. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”
Initially, Marc was averse to the idea of restoring the house he grew up in, where so much pain had been inflicted on him and his mother. But eventually, he came to understand what I understood the moment I opened my eyes from that coma: It’s easy to throw away painful memories. It’s far more difficult to say good-bye to the good ones. But all memories should be treasured.
Without our memories, even the painful ones, we’re forced to live a half-life.
After my husband spent his entire adulthood trying to bury his memories, my father spent a year planning how to hold onto his. In the end, I was the one who reaped the wisdom of the lessons they learned. And in turn, my daughter will learn those lessons from me.
I turn around to look at Sunny, but I can’t see much with her in the rear-facing car seat. Quietly, I exit the car and slide into the back seat with her. As I suspected, she’s still fast asleep
“Should we let her sleep a bit longer?” I whisper to Marc.
Sunny’s head leans against the side headrest of the car seat. Her pert pink lips hang open slightly, and her rosy cheeks stand out against her fair skin. The loose curls in her brown hair stick out in all directions from her nearly three-hour nap, but her favorite stuffed bunny rabbit is tucked safely in the crook of her chubby arm.
Marc shakes his head. “She’ll never fall asleep tonight if we don’t wake her up.”
Marc had the brilliant idea of bringing some bedding from our townhouse in Chestnut Hill to the Waterford house. We plan to place it in Sunny’s crib, so she has something that smells and feels familiar. I’m sure I read it somewhere that remembered scents and textures are comforting for babies in a new environment.
On Marc’s orders, I wait in the car with Sunny while he unloads our luggage from the trunk and carries it into the house. The sound of the trunk lid slamming shut finally wakes her, and her delicate pink eyelids flutter open.
I lean over a bit, so my face is the first thing she sees when she opens her bright-blue eyes. “Hey, pumpkin,” I whisper, and she smiles. “Hold that grin, baby. Mommy’s going to get you out of there.”
I unbuckle her car seat and lift her out. Then I balance her squishy thirteen-month-old body on my hip and stare at the house for a minute as Marc makes his way toward us.
“Come here, Sunny Bear,” he says, and Sunny practically leaps out of my arms to go to him.
He nuzzles his nose in her neck, and she giggles as his beard tickles her. I never get tired of seeing them do that.
Marc holds her in his left arm as he digs into his jeans pocket to pull out his phone. He navigates to the Photos app and opens up a ‘before’ picture of the house as seen from where we’re standing.
“Oh, my God,” I blurt out.
Before the renovation, the exterior of the 140-year-old house looked almost like a shack. I smile as I think of how it looks nothing like the house in my dream. It’s a hundred times more rundown. And in the distance, behind the house in the picture, I see the wooden privy Marc told me they used as a toilet.
I look up from the phone, in the same direction, but I can’t see into the backyard the way I can in the picture. Marc has expanded the back of the house and enclosed the yard in a six-foot-high white privacy fence. But I can see the two-car garage at the end of the long, gravel driveway, and it also looks nothing like the garage in my dream.
I don’t know why, but I find it slightly unsatisfying to find nothing looks the way my coma brain imagined it.
Marc leads us up the new steps to the recently added wrap-around front porch. The detail in the woodwork around the posts and railing is beautiful. I remember Marc staying up late many nights while working on the blueprints for the renovation. But I didn't realize the amount of sweat, tears, and love he’s poured into this house until now.
“Are you ready?” he asks me, and the excitement in his eyes reminds me of the boyish quality I remember from my dream.
I nod and watch with anticipation as he pushes the red front door open.
The entryway is flanked on our left by a coat closet, and on our right by a set of French doors. Straight ahead and slightly to the left stands a gorgeous white staircase, the steps lined with a vibrant red and gold Persian runner. To the right of the stairs, a two-story-high corridor gives way to a transomed opening. This doorway seems to lead to the kitchen, as I can see a breakfast nook from here.
Through the glass panes of the French doors on my right, I see a beautiful study with gleaming white bookshelves, a simple mahogany writing desk similar to my father’s, and a cozy reading nook near the bay window.
I turn to Marc, and he has the ‘before’ pictures ready on his phone. The room where the study is now used to be a tiny kitchen with cabinets painted three different colors. But when he shows me the ‘before’ picture of the space where the current coat closet is located, I’m rendered speechless.
The door in the picture leads to a bedroom. But the hole in the door, where the knob should be, suddenly makes this all so real. The memories Marc shared with me about the day his father died are now as solid as if they were my own.
I look into his eyes, and he doesn’t turn away in shame. This is his story, and he is finally learning to embrace it.
He leads me into the kitchen, where the biggest transformation has occurred. What is now a grand chef's kitchen was once a screened-in back porch, which looked as if it could be demolished by a stiff breeze. But as we move toward the breakfast nook, the ‘before’ picture on Marc’s phone stops me cold.
“Wait a minute. Go back,” I say as he swipes his finger across the phone screen to go to the next photo.
“Why?”
“Just go back, please,” I beg.
He laughs as he swipes back to the previous photo.
My mouth drops open in shock. On the wall of the rundown back porch is an abstract painting of The Last Supper.
“Did you hang that there after I told you about the dream?”
He shakes his head as Sunny attempts to play with his beard. “No, that’s the original painting I told you about when you were in a coma. Why?”
I look into his eyes and see no signs of deception. He’s not playing a practical joke.
When I told him about my coma dream, in the months after I woke, I told him about The Last Supper painting in the breakfast nook. We both agreed it had appeared in my dream because Marc must have mentioned it during the countless hours he spoke to me during those two months.
/> As a student of the mind, I accepted this as the most logical explanation. But seeing the art piece now, I came to a totally different conclusion. Because there was no way I could have dreamed of the exact same painting by merely listening to Marc talk about it.
“Where did you put the painting?” I ask, a note of desperation in my voice.
“Downstairs in the basement, I guess.”
“Take me to it.”
Despite appearing more than a bit confused, Marc takes me down to the finished basement, then through a hallway past a door to a room set up as a home gym and another door leading to a bathroom. At the end of the hall, Marc pushes open the door to a storage room, which is the only room that carries the old musty scent I imagine the whole house once had.
He leads me through a narrow opening between the stacked boxes labeled with descriptions of their contents. I will definitely have to look through the box marked ‘FAMILY PHOTOS’ at some point in the near future.
Leaning against the back wall of the storage room, behind the stacks of boxes, are dozens of canvas paintings. Marc hands Sunny to me so he can pluck a canvas from the middle of the bunch. He holds it up in front of his chest so I can get a better look at it.
“Is it what you imagined?” he asks, oblivious to the kind of moment I’m having.
I shake my head. “No, it’s like you imagined.”
Marc appears puzzled by my reply, but only for a moment before it seems to dawn on him, and he narrows his eyes at me. “Are you saying…this is exactly like the one in your dream?”
I nod for fear that if I speak I may say something that makes me sound even crazier than I must already seem. It’s insane to believe my coma brain could conjure up the exact combination of colors and brushstrokes as Marc had so many years ago. Either I was still suffering from the head trauma that took four months of speech therapy and six months of physical therapy to overcome. Or… Or Marc and I shared a different kind of experience during the two months I was lost in that dream world.
