Perchance to Dream

Eva frantically rummaged through her blue leather tote. 

They’ve got to be in here somewhere, she thought, as she pulled out old CVS receipts, gum wrappers, an extra phone charger, hair pins, unused Kleenex, notepads, pens, everything she seemingly needed to hold her life together, except the one thing she desperately sought.  

Why couldn’t she find her sleeping pills? There had to be some left. She only took them once or twice a month, max. Those were the nights that she knew if she didn’t take something, she’d be sitting in front of the TV watching some 1940s Barbara Stanwyck melodrama when the first hints of daylight began peeking through the blinds.  

Tonight, would be one of those nights. To make matters worse, even if she was able to find “The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers” or “Stella Dallas” among her streaming subscriptions, nothing could drown out her next-door neighbor, Mr. Sonny Man, firing his gun to bring in the New Year. Besides Eva could never not watch the Times Square ball drop. It’s how she and Russell had spent the last three years of his life. Of course, those years were spent doing a lot of other things, as well; doctors’ visits, chemo, radiation, hospital stays. But even as he played tug of war with cancer, Russell always seemed to summon enough strength to sit on the couch with his wife and watch the ball drop on New Year’s Eve. 

 Last year, she begged Russell to go to bed. “You’re worn out,” she’d told him. “No, no, no. I’m okay,” he insisted. “This is our tradition. This is what we do.” So Eva dressed him in his fleece pajamas, covered him with two blankets and sat next to him. She could feel all the bones in his hand as she held it, and she knew that this would be the last New Year’s Eve they would ever spend together.  

Russell had played football in college and had kept himself in “good shape, somewhat,” he used to say. Eva met him at a car wash. She was vacuuming the floor on the driver’s side of her Toyota when she heard a deep voice say, “Don’t forget the back.” Eva stood up to see this huge, bearded man with a shiny bald head smiling at her. “Don’t forget to kiss my ass,” she replied. “Somebody must have got up early and ate your corn flakes,” Russell shot back. “That’s how much you know, I don’t even eat corn flakes,” she said, trying to stifle a smile. “Well, what do you eat? I need to know before I ask you out to dinner.”  

That’s how their romance began. Eva fought it every step of the way. Who could blame her? Ernest Andrew Fulmore had shredded her heart and scattered the pieces to the wind. “I have nothing left,” she would tell the friends who tried to set her up on blind dates. They should know this already, she thought. They were there.   

The destruction of Eva LaVonne Durant’s heart was witnessed by 250 of her and Andrew’s closest family members and friends, her pastor Rev. Abernathy, Mrs. Lampkin, the church organist, six bridesmaids, one maid of honor and six groomsmen. Fifteen minutes before she was to become Mrs. Fulmore, Andrew, the man who wooed her for a year, called the church clerk’s office and left a voicemail message. “I’m so incredibly sorry. Please, tell Eva that I cannot marry her today. Please, let her know that it’s not her. It’s me. It’s all me.” Miss Mary Atkins, the church clerk, just happened to be in her office, picking up some of the extra wedding programs, when she saw the voicemail light.  

The sequence of the events that followed went like this. Miss Mary, who tried her best to not look like somebody just died, walked downstairs to the women’s dressing room and asked to speak to Eva’s mother in the hallway. “What the hell?” Elaine Durant shrieked, forgetting that she was in God’s house. Hearing her mother, Eva ran into the hallway. When she saw the look on her mother’s face, she knew. She collapsed on the floor, screaming. Her bridesmaids came running. Miss Martha informed Rev. Abernathy, who then made the announcement to the guests. 

Eva didn’t leave her apartment for a month. She’d already taken a two-week vacation for her honeymoon. She tacked on two more weeks of sick leave as authorized by her doctor. Maybe a month would be enough time for the office gossipers to get all the whispering out of their systems. Two years later, there was still talk, especially when a new person was hired and gossip extraordinaire Nadine could be heard whispering, “Yeah, that’s the girl that got left at the altar” as they walked past. Eva brushed it off, like dandruff. Her life consisted of working as a middle school administrator Monday through Friday, and attending church on Sunday, with a stop at the car wash one Saturday a month. 

She was a 32-year-old woman who had no interest in men nor love. Occasionally, she might entertain accepting a date from one of the guys, her friend, Sasha tried to set her up with. Then, she thought about Andrew and all the humiliation and pain. “It aint worth the risk,” she’d tell Sasha. “Eva, you can’t spend the rest of your life afraid of getting hurt again,” Sasha would say. “Not me. Love don’t live here anymore,” Eva replied. “I don’t want to hurt your friend.” 

Why she entertained Russell’s initial flirtations at the car wash, she did not know. Yes, she did. She liked their banter. Russell proved to be a worthy verbal foil. Whatever she threw it at him, he could toss it right back. She was much more attracted to that, than she was to his tattooed biceps. However, nothing beat his broad dimpled smile. Still, it took her a month of phone conversations before she agreed to go out with him, and it was three more months before they had sex. Two months later, Russell proposed and two months after that, they were married by a judge at the city-county building. 

The first year, they spent New Year’s Eve among the throngs in Times Square. It was 30 degrees and Eva had left her gloves on the train. She shoved her hands in Russell’s coat pocket and despite being among thousands of people, it seemed like they were the only two people who existed. “That’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” Russell said as they snuggled in bed back at the hotel. The following year, Russell and Eva hosted a New Year’s Eve party. Eva had spent all day preparing appetizers and desserts, and making sure her champagne flutes were spotless. “Looks like you and love have moved back in together,” Sasha said to Eva that evening, while helping her in the kitchen. Eva smiled. As her guests counted down to midnight, she looked at her husband and whispered a simple prayer, “Thank you, God.”  

Now, Eva had no words left for God. It was the first New Year’s Eve since Russell’s death and all she wanted was sleep. She could hear the TV in the background, as she searched. Eva always slept with it on, but she couldn’t bear to see the ball drop without him. She knew she had some sleeping pills somewhere. There weren’t any in her tote bag, nor any in the medicine cabinet. Eva began looking on top of the book case next to her bed. There was nothing between the lamp and the alarm clock. She looked at her bottle of blood pressure medicine and wondered what would happen if she took five or six or all of them at one time. She’d probably die. She didn’t want to die. She just wanted to sleep.

Dejected, Eva sat on the edge of her bed and looked down at the floor. There it was, the edge of a tiny pack containing two purple pills sticking out from beneath the book case. “Thank you, God.” She downed both pills with one sip of water, got under the covers and began clicking through channels as she waited for them to kick in. Twenty minutes passed. Her eyelids began to get heavy. Five minutes later, as she drifted off, she heard “10, 9, 8, 7 …"