The Darkest Evening of the Year

eerie gaslight, she delivered her grandson with a calm and skill that had not been lost with the generations of her family who had first settled the plains above.
    “In the dream, I watched myself be born,” Brian said. “I was a wrinkled, red-faced, cranky little bundle.”
    “Some things don’t change,” Amy observed.
    Because not all twisters descend with suddenness, because some storm watches can last hours, the cellar had been furnished with two old mattresses on frames. Angela delivered her baby on one of these, and the cover was wet with amniotic fluid, blood, and afterbirth.
    Cora unpacked plastic-wrapped blankets from a shelf, dressed the clean mattress, and encouraged her daughter to transfer to it with the newborn.
    As it turned out, the storm had piled a great weight of debris against the shelter door, and they would have to wait nine hours for rescuers to locate and extract them.
    “So my grandmother,” Brian said, “dressed the mattress with what little she had, but with as much care as if it were a guestroom bed being prepared for an important visitor. When she finished tucking the covers around my mother and me—the infant me—it was a perfect little nest, so neat, so tidy, so cozy. She smoothed the wrinkles out of the blanket, smoothed them with such tenderness, smiling down at my mother….”
    The scene still lived in his memory as no scene from a dream had ever before endured.
    Amy said, ”And then?”
    “Oh. Yeah. Suddenly I’m not an observer of the dream, I’m a part of it, I’m the baby, gazing up at my grandmother. She smiles down at me and her eyes are amazing, so full of love, so much more vivid than anything else in the most vivid dream I’ve ever had. And she winks. The last thing I saw was Grandma’s wink. Then I woke up. And that’s the incredible thing. The bed is like you see it now. Perfectly made. I’m lying on top of the covers, and the bed is neat enough to pass a military inspection.”
    He expected amazement. She stared at him.
    “All right, see, when you hauled me out of here last night to go save a dog from a crazy-drunk-violent guy, I left the bed a mess. And when I crashed for a nap this afternoon, it was still a mess.”
    “So?”
    “Spread hanging over the footboard, sheets tangled, a pillow on the floor. But I wake up, and the bed’s been made under me, as if my grandmother in the dream turned around and straightened up this one after getting my mother and baby-me settled.”
    “‘Baby-me’?”
    “Come on, Amy. You understand what I’m saying.”
    “Do you ever sleepwalk?”
    “No. Why?”
    “Maybe you made the bed in your sleep.”
    “I didn’t. I couldn’t. That’s impossible.”
    “Yeah. It makes much more sense that your dead grandmother came out of a dream and made it for you.”
    Eye to eye with her, he chewed for a moment on his lower lip, and then he said, “Why are you being like this?”
    “I’m not being like anything. I’m just being practical, prudent, levelheaded, smart, sober, and rational.”
    He took a deep breath. He blew it out. “What if, okay, what if I believe Antoine the blind dog can drive?”
    “The dog isn’t blind.”
    Brian put his hands on her shoulders again. “It’s not just the bed, Amy. It’s the uncanny vividness of the dream, so bright and so detailed, like real life, and being shown the night I was born. It’s the way those drawings flowed through me, just poured out of the pencil. And the hallucinations—that sound, those shadows—except they were not hallucinations. Amy, something is happening here.”
    She put one hand to his face, feeling his beard stubble. “Have you eaten anything today?”
    “No. I drank a Red Bull. I’m not hungry.”
    “Sweetie, why don’t I make you something to eat?”
    “I’m not hallucinating from hunger, Amy. If you could have seen Grandma’s eyes, that wink .”
    “I’ll make pasta. You have a jar of that terrific pesto sauce?”
    Brian leaned closer to her and narrowed his eyes. He could tell that she wanted to look away from him and that she didn’t dare.
    “Something’s happened to you, too,” he said. “You do have a story of your own. I thought so earlier. What’s happened?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Something.”
    “Just a thing,” she said uneasily.
    “What thing?”
    “It’s just the way Nickie is.”
    “What way is she?”
    “Watchful. Wise. Mysterious. I don’t know. Actually, it’s not even new. Sometimes you get a dog and