Dreams about Lizards

Sometimes, when Annie is alone, a starburst begins in her chest and radiates outward until her extremities feel numb and all she can hear is the blood thrumming in her ears.

When she gets like this - the doctor says they're panic attacks - she prays.

She prays because her pastor says that you are not alone when you walk with God. When she prays, focusing on the words of the Our Father or the Hail Mary or the Glory Bee, that Holy Trinity of Catholic invocations, her breathing steadies and her blood pressure evens out. It is as if God is answering her prayer, as her pastor says he is.

The panic attacks are a new development following the death of her husband Peter of pancreatic cancer. Peter and Annie were married 32 years and birthed two wonderful children, a girl and a boy, both of whom are adults and long gone from her house north of Chicago, and she has forgotten what it's like to be alone.

Her pastor, a middle-aged man named Father Brian Halloran, helped her through Peter's treatment, hospitalization, and hospice care. Annie considers him more than a spiritual guide. He is a friend, someone who has been there for her through the worst period of her life, who has guided her into the healing light of God, who has shown her the importance of regularly receiving the eucharist and confessing her sins.

One strange thing that began happening to Annie following Peter's death is a recurring dream. In this dream, she is chasing Bulldozer, the third grade class lizard her son Michael brought home and who subsequently escaped somewhere inside the house, never to be seen again. She can see the lizard ahead of her at all times, moving through the house, but her limbs are heavy, and she can't move quickly enough to reach the animal, and soon he is out of sight and she is still moving through molasses. She wakes up from these dreams intensely frustrated, sometimes confused as to where she is before realizing she is in the bed inside the room inside the house she has occupied nearly her entire adult life. The bed she once shared with her husband, where they made love, where he snored deeply, waking her almost nightly in his later years, where her son Michael and her daughter Caroline sometimes crawled into at night after bad dreams of their own.

What she does when she wakes up from these dreams is she prays. She prays and soon she has fallen into a black, dreamless sleep, the kind of sleep she always imagined death to be before she embraced the afterlife promised by Jesus. It is not bad, this sleep, because in it there is no pain, no suffering, and neither her nor Peter exist or ever existed, and there was a time that this might have been a comfort to her, back when she was watching Peter struggle to breath, when his heart eventually burst and his eyes filled with blood. Images that will remain with her for as long as she lives.

And when she imagines these images, she prays and they go away.

She has shared these things with Father Brian, things she has tried to share with her sister Meredith, who has looked away from her or changed the subject. Maybe Meredith is worried that these images and emotions will infect her somehow. But her pastor, Father Brian, absorbs her pain like a sponge. He sits and he listens and he absorbs, his face kind and understanding, his soul filled with the Holy Spirit. His intentions pure.

Aside from their dog, Frankie, who lived to the ripe old age of 16, Annie has not known this level of devotion. This kind of unconditional love. She passes her suffering on to Father Brian, the pain leaves her body, and he absorbs it. She doesn't know what he does with it afterwards, if his soul is a machine that crushes up misery and transforms it into something beautiful, but he does not retain it, does not look older or more stressed on account of hearing it. In fact, he only looks upon her in a kinder way, and it isn't pity he is offering her but something else, something harder to define, but it is rooted in love.

Nearly three years after Peter's death, Annie is about as healed as she imagines she will ever be, filled with the Holy Spirit, attending daily mass. Confessing weekly with Father Brian, even when it's uncomfortable, when it's about her needs as a woman, the things she thinks about in that twilight before she drifts into sleep. A man's strong body, strong hands caressing her, sliding himself inside her and filling her with his love.

She can't see Father Brian through the screen but she senses his embarrassment. What she does not sense is his judgment, and this makes her feel more comfortable, and after a time she confesses her fantasies in stark detail. Confessing these thoughts to Father Brian, who she considers sexless, who she can't even imagine having a penis let alone knowing what to do with one, takes the power out of them, draining them of their sensuality and her of her temptation.

One night, she offers to cook Father Brian a meal at her house. They have shared dinners like this on a few occasions. Father Brian prefers this to going out or having her over to the rectory. Dining alone with a woman, he confides, is the kind of thing that can cause unnecessary scandal.

If there's nothing to gossip about, people will imagine their own, he tells her, drinking his second glass of red wine.

Sometimes there is something to gossip about, she replies.

His face reddens.

I mean, there were cases, she clarifies. Were there not?

Priests are human, Father Brian says.

Pedophiles are not.

They are, Father Brian says. Humans in Satan's grip. Everyone is salvageable. Even pedophiles.

Bold of you to say, she says. I'm not sure I'd be capable of forgiving someone who touched a child inappropriately.

God's forgiveness is boundless, Father Brian says.

Annie knows this to be true. But it is one of many things in her religion that she can't fathom.

Of course, the role of faith is to accept the things you can't fathom. And so she does accept it, and nods to Father Brian to communicate this to him.

Annie asks Father Brian if he would like another glass of wine. To Annie's surprise, he accepts.

Let me go down to the basement to grab one, she says before disappearing down the wood stairs. Her wine sloshes in her own glass and some splatters on the stair. She mentally notes this so she can clean the stair later and returns up the stairwell with a bottle of pinot noir.

They've already finished dinner, and the second bottle of wine is just about gone.

You know, Annie says, the wine starting to go to her head. I'm thinking about Peter less these days.

Father Brian purses his lips and waits for her to continue.

And that makes me feel

Guilty.

Yes. Guilty.

It's a normal part of the grieving process. You will never stop thinking about him. He'll always be in your heart. But you can't let your grief dominate your life forever. At some point, you need to move on. And that means you'll think about him less. And that's okay.

How do you know all of this? Annie asks. How are you so wise when

When I've never been married, he says, finishing her thought. When I've never had a family.

I wasn't going to say that.

What were you going to say?

Annie says nothing.

I'm human, too, the pastor explains. I have family. I have friends who are like family. I love and hurt and feel. And I've spoken to so many broken people. So many. You learn about people that way. Hearing how they suffer. Seeing the things that heal them. In some ways, I'm like a therapist. Only it takes people months, sometimes years, to really open up to a therapist. People come to me and they just

He opens his hands and moves them from his mouth outwards.

It must be a lot of pressure, she says.

He shrugs.

This is what I signed up for. I care about people.

But isn't it lonely?

The priest's face darkens for a moment. Then he smiles.

I told you once, he says, that you are not alone when you walk with God.

But being alone and being lonely, Annie says. They aren't the same thing, are they?

She watches him across the table, his face flush with the effects of the alcohol, a strange look in his eyes.

Then, before she can process what's happening, he leans across the table and kisses her.

She moves away, pressing her hands against his chest, and sits back, her mouth hanging slightly open.

The pastor stares at her, confusion blooming in his face.

I'm sorry, I

No, she says, it's my fault. I think I was giving the wrong signals.

That was...well, yes, I suppose I thought you wanted me to do that just then.

But. You're a priest.

Priests are human, too. It's a sin. But committing sin is human.

It's against your calling. It's...I'm sorry. I don't...I can't think of you like that. And I couldn't be responsible for leading you into that kind of sin.

Father Brian is crestfallen. A range of emotions running through his face - confusion, anger, pity, shame.

And suddenly, after the moment has been ruined, Annie decides that she wants him. Maybe, she thinks, because she can no longer have him.

I'm sorry, he says. I should go.

She says nothing, just watches him as he goes out of the room and listens as the front door slams shut.

A shiver runs through her entire body, like she's exorcising some kind of demon.

Here she is, in her own house. Alone.

She feels the panic start and staves it off with a quick Hail Mary.

She empties the dregs of the pinot noir into her glass and curses. She is not done drinking. She stands, wobbling, her head dizzy, opens the basement door, and lumbers down the steps.

When her foot hits the spilled wine, it shoots out from under her and she tumbles down the staircase, hitting her head several times on the way down. She lands hard on her chest on the cement floor, her head cocked to the side.

Pain radiates through her. Her head feels wet. She tries to move but finds her body isn't ready to communicate with her brain just yet, and so she lays there, praying, her eyes searching the darkness under the washer.

Imagine her surprise, her utter bewilderment when, all these years later, a small green head appears from the darkness under the machine, its tongue flitting out to taste the air, before disappearing back into the darkness, back through the veil of existence into a realm beyond human understanding, beyond the limited ability of religion to explain the wonders of the world, back into a place beyond dreams.

Annie smiles and closes her eyes.