Regina De Villasante ‘25
He had never been here before. Usually, he ended up in the same places. The living room sofa watching re-runs of Friends. Near the fridge with a bowl of leftover pasta by his feet. Under the old fig tree in the backyard on warm summer nights. He was never surprised by where he woke up. It was all part of his dreams. From dreaming about a date with the new girl he liked from work and waking up in his car outside her house after dropping her off, to dreaming of him and his cousin playing with their Lego sets and waking up in his aunt’s basement. His mom had always worried about it.
“What if one day you decide you’re an Olympic swimmer in your dreams and drown in Scott Lake?” she asked agitatedly after he was found one morning near the train tracks that ran by his neighborhood. “Or you get run over crossing the road?”
“I don’t know, Mom,” he sighed, exasperated by her constant worrying. “Nothing has happened to me yet.”
“Maybe we should look into an institution, Victor,” his mom had whispered to his father over breakfast one morning as he walked out the door to school. “I can’t lose another child!”
He spent one year at Ridley’s Home for the Mentally Troubled. Somehow, despite being chained to a cot, with a tracker around his ankle, in a locked cell, in a barricaded hallway, in a wing of a high-security facility, he never stayed in bed. Each morning the nurses would come to his room to find the bed empty. There were no signs of struggle. The chains lay in a pile near the foot of the bed. The ankle monitor, fully intact, sat on the dresser. The door was closed but unlocked. They would sound the alarm only to see him appear at the end of the hallway rubbing his eyes as he woke up. The nurses would sit him down and ask him questions.
“How did you escape?” the young woman in the pink scrubs would ask.
“I don’t know,” he told them every time. “I don’t remember.” He was lying, but he was good at that now.
“Where did you go?” asked the man in the purple scrubs as he scribbled on his clipboard. He knew what he was writing. Patient shows no sign of recollection. Patient shows no signs of physical harm. He had seen the pages before. He had seen the thick folder in his doctor’s office titled Thomas Thatcher. For all the time they spent watching him, you would think they would know more about what he was doing. “Thomas?” the man repeated, snapping his fingers in his face.
“I don’t know.” The man scribbled on his clipboard again. Patient is unaware of his actions during his somnambulism.
He knew where he went. At Ridley’s, he only ever went to the same place. The graveyard. He stood there, barefooted in the soft earth, hands clenched around the thorny stems of roses as he stared down at the small granite tombstone surrounded by other dying flowers. Eliza Thatcher. 2000-2013. Loving Daughter, Sister and Friend.
The first time he sleepwalked was October 23, 2013. Eliza had heard his footsteps on the stairs and followed him. Followed him as he put on his boots and bright blue hand-me-down jacket. Followed him as he walked out into the backyard and jumped over the fence into the wilderness beyond.
She had been so focused on keeping up with the sight of the back of her brother’s bright blue jacket that she hadn’t noticed the rock-lined ditch in front of her. Thomas woke up the next morning on the back porch curled up against the door, covered in blood that wasn’t his own, holding his sister’s lifeless body in his arms.
Everyone had questions. What happened? What were you doing out of the house? Why didn’t you take care of her? He couldn’t explain it to his parents. How could he tell them that he didn’t know she was there? How could he tell them that he didn’t have control?
So now he visited her. In his dreams, he could see her playing hide and seek among the tombstones. Giggling as she kicked up the falling leaves or rolled down a hill. Some days she was the 13-year-old girl from his childhood; others she was 19, the age she would be now if she was still alive. He wanted to keep their visits to himself, so he lied. The doctors never quite figured it out.
“It is a phenomenon,” the doctors told his parents as they watched over him on a hospital gurney the day that he was discharged from Ridley’s. “We have no way to explain it. There is nothing more that we can do for your son.” He was sad to leave Ridley’s. It meant his visits to his sister would go back to happening only once a year after morning mass on October 23rd with his mother and father. It meant he would only visit his sister when he was awake.
But on his first night home, he woke up somewhere different. He looked around at the pale pink walls covered in old One Direction band posters and Polaroids. Most importantly, he saw the black and white photo of the girl; he knew she had long auburn hair, brilliant green eyes and a smile to light up any room she entered. That morning, he woke up in a room no one had entered since October 23, 2013.
Eliza’s.