M
artin Miller, a self-employed, under-employed handyman in Coyote Creek, near Escondido, California, returned home from a walk with his dog just as the sun was rising on a cool spring morning on a Thursday in May. He heard his telephone ring four times and stop before he could get in the door. No one else was home. Martin gave the dog a Milk Bone, went into the house, tapped two buttons to retrieve a message, and heard his father say, “Marty. This is Mom and Dad. Would you please call when you have a chance?”
This is not good, thought Miller. His parents lived on a farm in Fjord, Wisconsin. They phoned their eldest son nearly every weekend, but hardly ever on a weekday, and Martin’s mother almost always made the call. The last time his father had phoned, to the best of the son’s recollection, was probably three years earlier, when a slip-and-fall and a broken bone put Martin’s mom into the ICU.
Someone, Miller thought, as he dialed his parents’ home, has died. He guessed first that it might actually be his mother, nearly eighty and not in the best of health. What were his father’s words, again? This is Mom and Dad.... Oh, yes, Mom and Dad, Dad had said, but, still, it could be Mom who died. Martin often heard himself, from long habit, saying “we” when he meant “I” in conversation. And he sometimes spoke of his son Matthew in the present tense, though the boy was almost two years gone. Matt had had muscular dystrophy; he lived to age eighteen. Two years gone, but, somehow, the lad was ever-present and undiminished in Martin Miller’s life.
Mom and Dad. Someone had died or was very sick, but if it wasn’t Mom, then who? It could be anyone at all. Miller next thought of his “little” brother Wally, age forty-something now. Wally the smoker, the speeder, a cheerful, carefree fool. It could be Wally. Or one of Wally’s kids.
This is Mom and Dad. Nothing wrong with the grammar: Mom-&-Dad seemed an indivisible unity in their eldest son’s muddled mind. The verb in the singular served just fine.
The phone rang at the farm, and as Martin’s father said hello (not “Good morning”), a last random rush of relatives flashed through the brain of the California son: elderly aunts and uncles, a favorite cousin, and Martin’s mother once again.
But it was none of those. They, this day, were all okay. Martin’s niece, his sister’s daughter Jeannine, age sixteen, had, her grandfather said, been killed in a crash the night before, a few miles from the farm. Oh, dear Jesus! Martin wept but was too stunned to pray.
Not much was known for sure. In a pickup truck in heavy rain, Jeannine and two schoolmates had collided with a train at an ungated crossing on a country road. The driver and Jeannine had died; the third person in the truck, at last report, was hospitalized but still alive. The train, hauling freight, reportedly had rolled sixteen miles farther up the track before word reached the engineer that a boxcar had been battered by a truck.
After Martin and his parents said goodbye, he called his sister at her home. Having lost his own beloved son in the so recent past, Miller imagined he should surely have a few wise words to offer a mother in the first hours of her grief. But mostly all he did was cry.
O
ne still night, later in that same month of May, Miller woke from a deep, deep sleep, from a dream so real, and so sweetly surreal, that he got out of bed, staggered down the hallway, and scribbled out the rapidly evaporating details on the blank back of a lumberyard invoice on the cluttered desk in his office. He then went back to bed.
Matthew had been with Martin in the dream. Son and father had taken a long, brisk walk along a narrow, empty road on a warm and moonlit night. The son walked tall, no wheelchair at all. In the distance, across a foggy patch of sky between two high hills, a rainbow shone, unlike any ever seen, outside a dream, in the skies of San Diego County. It was blindingly bright, like the prismatic patch of color that sometimes streaks out of a fishtank in a sunny room and stays awhile on a wall. In the lower bars of color there was a burst of tiny twinkling stars, something like the short-lived shower from children’s sparklers on the Fourth of July. Martin, walking at the left side of his son, excitedly directed him to look at the sky, to the right. Matthew took a moment before he turned, but he saw the sparkles as they faded, and he turned again to face his dad. “Matt, are you still in love with Bonita?” Martin asked, referring to a high-school classmate of the boy. Martin had, in his waking life a few days before, exchanged greetings with that girl’s mother at a grocery store in town. So it made perfect sense for the girl’s name to surface in a dream. “Yeah,” Matthew said, in an older, young-man’s voice—the voice of a twenty-year-old, not of the eighteen-year-old who died—“Bonita and I just had a good talk a couple days ago.” Martin and Matthew walked on, down the road. They stopped at a corner, where there were houses. The sky had brightened; the psychedelic rainbow had disappeared. The father hugged the son. Very real! said Martin’s note on the invoice page. “Matt, Matt, are you really real?” he asked. “It feels,” Martin said, before the boy could answer, “like you’ve come back to life.” “Well,” Matthew said—and Matt’s father noted in the notes, he did not say Well, Dad—“my back hurts a lot.”
M
artin Miller described the dream to his daughter, Lena, six years younger than her brother Matt. Miller did not tell his wife. And he has no plans to tell his sister. Although he might. He might mention his walk with Matthew, if his sister, someday, asks what Martin believes in, beyond this earthly life. ♦
