I overheard a bunch of Mom’s conversations with Ward when we lived at the Santa Maria. She wouldn’t let me swim at night and I couldn’t get too far from them in our rooms. I think I even heard their breakup talk.

I’m not sure it was actual breakup talk, because Ward kept coming around for awhile. He helped us move back into the house and I know he took the three of us out to dinner a few times. But he never acted the same after the night I heard her call him an acolyte, and she didn’t seem to care very much.

Ward was an okay guy. Not brilliant but smart enough, and everyone seemed to like him. He always had a pleasant low-key way about him. He told a joke well. But he wasn’t charismatic. He couldn’t care less about leading.

I heard Mom’s derisive voice before her words. I knew that tone well; it brought a layer of dread into any conversation. She said something about Ward needing to speak his own mind. Apparently he’d been acting like he agreed with some management nonsense from his boss at work, when he really had big objections. She said he should speak up – his job was secure – what did he have to lose? He answered with a no, thanks – if there was one thing he’d learned it was not to show disagreement with superiors. Mom scoffed – “learned!” – and made a comment about how Ward was always looking to a guru. She said men tend to have active role models while women mostly don’t, and that’s hard, but it means that a woman who does make it will be more confident about her ability to decide. Confronted with a new problem, her first approach won’t be to look for the colleagues who have already solved it. I don’t think she meant to be critical so much as observant. But she can be scary. And judging from Ward’s attitude afterward, her words must have cut, twisting in him like acid. He didn’t act as light after that.

Anyway, Mom already had a house, and we were all dreaming about it before we got to move back in. We’d come to realize that we didn’t own it so much as borrow it; we’d live in it for our years, but we were just one family in its history, and it likely had a future as long as its past.

We all visited it nightly while we slept, but Mom’s dream had an extra room. She told me she’d been having the same dream for years before the accident: our house but with a windowless hidden room deep in the interior, a spot she rediscovered just before waking, always regretting that she hadn’t yet furnished or used it, foreknowing that she’d forget it again until the next time she dreamed.

She said it would really bug her, to live in a house with an unused room. She was glad our place didn’t have a formal dining room or other waste of space. And that part of her dream bugged her too; she was always distressed in the dream when she found the room and she was distressed awakening to have had that vision again.

But here’s the corny truth: ever since we moved back into the house and she started writing these little stories… ever since then, she hasn’t had that dream.