The Faceless Dream

I woke as she turned her head, just as I had a million times. I was about to see her face then I was staring at my bedroom ceiling. I closed my eyes and tried to find that place, as I had over and over again, but once I was awake, it was over. She was gone. Almost never the same dream, but always the same woman, whoever she was, in a thousand different situations.

It started when I was about seven years old. My father got a new job, and we moved to a different small town. The first night in our new house, I closed my eyes and saw her standing barefoot on a ladder, painting the top of a wall where it meets the ceiling. Her steady hand cut in the paint with practiced precision. Long blond hair pulled into a messy pony tail. She wore cutoff jeans and a pink tank top, both speckled with paint. In my dream, I walked to the ladder, but no matter where I stood, I couldn’t see her face. She just kept painting and humming a song that lingered in the back of my mind for days.

Night after night, I’d fall asleep and see her. Sometimes I was walking through a house, and I’d see her from behind, cooking dinner or reading to children. Other times, she’d be working in a flower bed with a big straw hat, but no matter how hard I tried, my vision couldn’t pierce the shadow cast by that hat. I saw her riding by on a bicycle. I saw her playing on a beach, long blond hair blowing in the wind and covering her face like a veil.

I saw her with a veil once, all dressed in white. She was standing on a stage or pulpit, long blond hair cascading over her bare shoulders in a beautiful, form fitting dress. A wedding—she was the bride. I tried so hard to see through the white lace veil.

Throughout my life, the recurring woman in my dreams was just something I was used to. I didn’t see her every night, but with some regularity. My mom, whom I’d told about the dreams during my adolescence, would occasionally ask if I’d seen the faceless lady recently. She always seemed amused by it and curious. My mom was very “curious,” though most just called her nosy.

After college, I took a job with an architectural firm near where I’d grown up in my early years. Most of the scenery had changed, and I certainly didn’t have many memories of my friends from before we moved away. But there were a few friends I never forgot. There was Clint, a boy my age who I’d been in Cub Scouts with and played soccer with. We were always staying over at each other’s houses when we were kids, building forts and playing with our G.I. Joes. There was another friend, Kim, a girl with stringy blonde hair who lived behind us. She was a year or two younger than me but lived close and was always over. My mom liked feeding us Otter Pops, those popsicles that come in the clear plastic tubes, and sending us out to play. I remembered how Kim was always barefoot. She was always filthy, but then again, so was I at that age. My dad used to tell us, “You two must be Indians, part of that Blackfeet tribe.” It tickled him every time he said it.

Clint was my first best friend, and Kim—well, she was my first kiss. It wasn’t some big romantic thing. We weren’t in any sort of relationship. Who is at five years old? She was just the blond-haired, glacier blue-eyed, feral little girl who shared a fence line. We played in the dirt and climbed trees together. Sometimes we were at our house, sometimes at her house.

One day, we were playing under a little cedar tree in the side yard, catching ant lions with broom bristles or making mud pies. Kim looked at me and said, “We should kiss.” Quite often, whatever she came up with to pass the time was what we’d do, and this was no different. We discussed it a bit. We reasoned that we’d seen men and women kiss, and we’d seen our older siblings and cousins, boys and girls, kiss. So, it made sense that we should give it a try and see what it was all about.

At some point during the conversation, Kim grabbed me by my ears and pulled my face to hers, my lips to hers. Somehow, we avoided a near-fatal nose collision, and for the first time, my lips touched a girl’s lips that didn’t belong to my mom, grandmother, or one of my forty-seven aunts. I come from a particularly kissy family. For a couple of seconds, we held that position, lips pressed together, mouths closed. I’m pretty sure my eyes were closed. When she released my ears and I pulled back, I licked my lips and tasted blueberry popsicle and maybe a grain of sand or two.

We carried on and played as usual. Nothing changed between us. We didn’t discuss that little experiment any further. It was just something we did to see what it was, and then we went about doing the things we always did and having fun together. When my family moved away, I never saw her again.

I sometimes wondered what happened to that little girl. Did she grow up, go to college, and move away? Did she get married? It was ridiculous for a grown man to wonder about such things. Whoever she was now, Kim had her own life, and it was a long way from mine. Clint, I’m sure, was living his best life as well. We probably weren’t going to find each other on social media and build a stick fort in the woods anytime soon. Those days were over and behind me.

One day, on a job site, a builder was showing me an issue he was having, and we were discussing potential fixes. A staircase needed to be moved, but moving it affected several other spaces inside the new high school building. We couldn’t cut a science lab in half, and if we moved it the other way, the girls’ bathroom would be reduced to a single stall with a three-foot-tall doorway. These were the kinds of things I was called in for. Most of the time, I worked at a desk at home, but every now and then, I had to go to the field to fix other people’s mistakes. It paid well, and I enjoyed getting out and seeing the structures in person. It gave me a sense of pride when I was able to come up with a solution that worked.

As we were wrapping up our tour of the building and making arrangements for a conference call with the school administration about changes to be made, a woman strolled by. Head down and moving quickly, she knew it was a construction site and she wasn’t supposed to be there.

“Excuse me, Miss!” The builder wasn’t going to let her sneak by. “Excuse me. Can you stop for a minute?”

It wasn’t my building, so I stood by with my mouth shut. “I’m just going to see where my new classroom will be,” she said without stopping. “I won’t be long.”

“Miss, I can’t let you walk around in here; it’s not safe,” the builder said, his tone authoritative but still polite.

She stopped and turned to face him, polite but defiant. Before her eyes reached him, they stopped at mine. At that moment, every dream—every one since I was seven years old—flashed through my mind. Every time I couldn’t see the woman’s face, now I saw it. I saw her on the ladder, looking back at me and smiling. I saw her doing dishes at the kitchen sink, turning around and flinging suds at me. It came back in a flood that almost knocked me off my feet. I felt lightheaded but couldn’t break eye contact.

“Billy?” she asked. “Is that you? Holy crap! You look just the same!” She was walking toward me now, and I couldn’t speak.

“William?” the builder asked. “Do you know her?”

“William? Is that what you’re calling yourself now? Oh my God, I haven’t seen you since we were kids!” I saw her face when she turned and looked back at me from the flower garden, winking at me from under that big straw hat, hands stained with dirt, bare feet in the green grass. I saw her face reading to a little boy in bed. I saw her face behind the veil on the pulpit.

“Don’t you remember me? I know you remember our first kiss, under that cedar tree. Billy Johnson, it’s me, Kim!”

I saw every moment, her perfect face in every one of those dreams and saw it all again but not in my dreams. I lifted that veil and there was her face, her glacier blue eyes staring into mine. I kissed those lips again and the first girl I ever kissed was the last woman I ever kissed.