The Quilt

Her name is Clair. We were sitting on the front swing. A woman was in the house. She was talking to Clair through the screen, I don’t know who the woman was, I couldn’t see her. We were sitting on the front porch swing and I was describing the house, I have never been inside it and yet I was able to describe it in great detail. I was talking like I had lived there myself. I am listening to myself say words that are unfamiliar to me and I am just as surprised to hear them as Clair is. I suppose I told her my name, I don’t remember, but she knows it. She seems uneasy at first to see me there and then for some reason becomes more comfortable. I tell her about the house, I even tell her I lived there, though I have never been there before. Why am I telling her these things? She is just about to ask me a question, the screen door opens, and I wake up.

She put down her pen and went back in her memory to a time when life for her was good. ‘There is something,’ she thought to herself, ‘something that is drawing me to this woman, I have to be honest with myself as well as the doctor if I am ever going to find out why I keep seeing her in my dreams.’ She thought back to the time when she was the happiest she’d ever been. A time when she had all she would ever need, and her future was perfectly clear.

She was in her second year of college, he was in his third. They met quite by accident-- literally. She was driving home from college to spend the Holidays with her mother over the winter break. She was driving down a two-lane road that was slippery from the rain. From out of nowhere, it seemed, a deer leaped out right in front of her, she had time to hit her brakes but the driver behind her didn’t. He hit her, sending her car into a violent spin. When the car came to a halt, she was upside down. The driver of the other car was uninjured, and was immediately at her driver’s side door. She was shaken but uninjured. He helped her out of the car and to her feet. His attempt at pleasantries went unnoticed as she assessed the damage to her car. He gave up trying to be kind and just opted to exchange information while she phoned the police. Her car was towed and she was delivered safely to her mother’s house to recuperate while her insurance took care of replacing her totaled car. Two weeks later, she reluctantly accepted a phone call from the man who rear-ended her car and relented to go to dinner with him. At the accident site, she paid not the slightest attention to him. All she wanted was to get to her mother’s house and forget the whole thing happened. He however, was smitten with her.

"Was it my total disregard for the kindness you showed me, or the way I left without giving you a second thought that grabbed your attention?" she teasingly asked over dinner.

"It was the way you told me that I was following you too close, and that I could have killed you that won me over!" he retorted.

She was glad that he called her and invited her to dinner. Seeing him this time was like meeting him for the first time. He wasn’t gasping for air with a look of terror in his eyes, and she wasn’t shaking from head to toe and bleeding from her forehead. They had a wonderful meal and good conversation. It turned out that they were attending the same college and their mother’s lived just a few miles from each other in the same town. They continued to date and had just begun to make plans to be married when he suddenly died from a massive heart attack at the age of 24. She was devastated. She still finds herself crippled by the sadness she feels whenever he comes to her mind.