Timeless Castles and Dreams

There is nothing more beautiful than a child’s dream, a dream of a place where love never dies, a place of sunshine and goodness. And kind Ms. Linville knew for certain, there are never dreams that cannot be. 

***

Sophie dashes up the street, dodges a flower vendor, jumps an open sewer ditch, and runs through a cluster of empty chairs spilling out over the sidewalk from a street café. She hears the street cries, a symphony of sing-song chants, a music box of sound, calling: cat meat, herring, second-hand clothing, kitchen utensils, pots to mend, rags, soap, hair. The hungry populace bawls lustily, screeching, whistling, hissing, haggling. A cab driver’s whip cracks over the back of an old hag of a horse, wheels rumble and grind under a mound of root vegetables and potatoes. Ragged children chase and squeal under foot. A push cart weaves over the cobblestone streets, a massive bouquet of flowers and scents.  A vendor in buttoned coat and checked beret pushes from behind, keeping a wary eye out for thieves. Sophie absorbs the sights, hears the sounds, breathes the smells, but all of this, as in a dream.

She darts down an alley to take a shortcut. Shady figures huddle in the doorways of squalid huts. The sounds of the congested street fade. A steam engine screams in the distance. Even the sky oppresses, its polluted gray seeming to touch the crooked rooftops. The alley takes a jog. From out of a dark corner a hand, wicked and thin, grabs her forearm. She shrieks and yanks away. Her predator has snatched an empty sleeve, but she has wriggled free and is running once more. She glances backward at his toothless face, dirty and snarling.

A pile of garbage sprawls across the alley. Like a tidal wave, the stench of poverty, hopelessness, and death, laps at her flying heels, tugging her back, but she lifts her shirt over her face and sprints on. A child scuttles in front of her, tattered rags hanging off delicate shoulders. Someone has wrapped its feet in torn cloth, for want of shoes. Its pathetic legs display open sores. A woman’s high-pitched scream follows it--the voice of the bedraggled, betrayed, and bitter.

Sophie’s feet patter on, quick and light. There is hope in those bright eyes. She reaches a second street, noticing the numbers listed above low doorways. She stops at one, looks, then grasps the iron-forged handle in two hands, and tugs it open. She steps inside and gently closes the door behind her. It makes a quiet click. She studies her surroundings for a moment—a dim hallway, lamp-lit, flagstone floor; then tiptoes up a flight of wooden stairs. They creak, a mousy creak, as the light footsteps ascend. The ceiling is low, but Sophie is small. A small child, with an outsized heart.

At the top of the stairs, a sister, black-robed with a wimple, looks down at Sophie over a pair of spectacles; she lifts a finger to her lips, then beckons the breathless child inside. Sophie draws the bed curtain aside with a small shushing sound, then falls to the floor beside the bed. In her mind, Sophie hears music: the gentle, low strings, the mellow woodwinds, the orchestra, swelling as one. The sounds penetrate mind, soul, and body, piercing the realm of dream and deepest imagination.  

Sophie kneels, stroking the pale forehead resting on the sunken pillow within. She touches the crimson cheeks, ablaze with fever. She shudders, as the convalescent launches into a coughing spasm. The gaunt body shudders. Then lies still, white, soundless-- like alabaster.

“Fantine…” Sophie whispers, her heart ablaze.

Fantine opens her golden-lashed eyes and looks, a sharp look, wild, and bewildered. “And Cosette?” her tragic breath rasps. Fantine’s mouth is toothless. Sophie trembles.

“Fantine—I found Cosette! I have a place where you can live together!”

Fantine’s head turns to Sophie. She nods weakly. “Yes, I have seen Cosette already.” Fantine is delirious again, and a wimpled head appears at the curtain edge. Sister Marie is tall and sedate, calm and resigned.

“It’s not too late!” Sophie is ecstatic. Her voice is high-pitched and passionate. “You will get better. I know a doctor who can cure you. I know a place where it is warm with sunshine, a place where Cosette can play. You will be together. Fantine, you will be beautiful again.” Sophie strokes what’s left of Fantine’s butchered hair.

A harp rings like a bell and Cosette begins, “There is a castle on a cloud…” Sophie hears strains of oboe, peaceful and lovely. In her sleep, the world is indeed a song. “And the world was a song, and the song was exciting… I dreamed that love would never die…” The symphony rises and falls in harmony.

Sophie is smiling in her sleep. Her pink floral quilt is tucked around her gentle face, and her hands fidget just a little. She is dreaming. In her dream, Fantine is smiling, too. As the first timid rays of morning light filter through the half-opened curtain, Sophie turns to her bedside cupboard. She breathes a sigh, as she eyes her book, Les Miserable. It’s still there.

***

Sophie always lived in the hearts and minds of her book characters, but when she studied Les Miserable, in Ms. Linville’s eighth grade literature class, she breathed the virtual air of Paris, 1862. Her heart bled with the revolutionaries, mourned the fallen, and cried with Fantine, the mother who wouldn’t get well. An unusual reader, Sophie devoured the 1,500 pages in only a few weeks. Pages and pages of rippling type, sprang to life in her deepest dreams. Ms. Linville bought her a copy, a chunky paperback, to keep as her own. When she reached the back cover, she started it over, and over.

Ms. Linville took Sophie to the New York Broadway show, a three-hour trip. The child’s eyes brightened once more as the lights dimmed. She hardly blinked as the curtain rose, and as the musical unfolded, she sang along in a whisper with every song. 

Sophie’s mother was terminally ill that year. Ms. Linville only wished she could protect her from “…those tigers that come at night,” those same tigers Fantine sang of in the theater that night. The tigers that tear hope apart.

Ms. Linville only wished she could have changed the plot for Sophie and her mom. She only wished Sophie’s dreams had come true.