Not a Dream by Caitlin McGill

When I see him, I’m standing outside my open garage door, watching the black olive tree tremble. Green worms hanging from its leaves. How much wind can their silk strands withstand? I’m nine. Maybe ten. The neighbor friend from the end of our cul-de-sac, the man whose garage sale I went to recently, is on his blue bike. Long legs growing near.

He wants to know: Where’s Dad?

I shrug, study his jeaned shins, his silver hair hiding his eyes like the palm fronds shading our yard. Where is Dad? Maybe the phone or the bathroom. Maybe checking a tennis score. Maybe cleaning another notch on his head, another clumsy, mid-tinkering thunk. I wonder how much blood.

How ‘bout a ride, the neighbor asks, around the circle? His house is at the end of the circle. The circle where I learned. Glitter tassels riding invisible waves. My Velcro sneakers whirlpooling low wind. Not allowed, I say—strangers. He says, I’m not a stranger. Not a stranger, he says. 

My head, shaking. My eyes looking left, toward Dad’s stilled table saw, then back outside, where my bike hugs the house, rubber clutching concrete. To its right, the wooden cubby Dad built reaches higher than my head, an aqua hose coiled inside.

This is probably maybe a nice man. But as he thumbs his handlebars my stomach feels so full of churned Cheerios and milk, pulling me down, my feet back.

Eventually, he leaves. What has he even asked?

That night, Dad finds me sleeping beside Mom in their bed. She’s getting so big, everyone says.

Then he reaches for my leg.

Dad reaches for my leg and my dream, whatever it was, flickers. 

Dad reaches for my leg and I blink into the room, my muscles tensing as I think of the man at the end of our cul-de-sac, as I remember what might’ve been a dream or an elementary school teacher’s warning: then the little girl, she was hurt; the man hurt her; stay away from that main street. Dad’s fingers should be safe have been safe but now they’re slipping beneath my kneecaps and I can’t tell if I’m dreaming or waking, can’t tell if I’m imagining another man’s hands circling that other little girl—she was hurt—but either way that’s when I recoil from the man who wants to carry me to my own bed.

Dad, stepping back from the mattress. Mom, snoring, alarm clock burning beside her bangs. My palms printing sheet, levering body. Dad—back, back. My feet dusting floor as I mutter-question the time and try, like my Etch-a-Sketch, to shake away the clock’s stenciled digits, the stubborn cerise, as I wonder what Dad’s doing even though I think I know—time for bed—even though I think I know: he just wants to help me.

I leave my parents’ room for mine. Eye the garage-sale trinket I recently bought with my tooth-fairy dime, the nice neighbor’s palm-sized porcelain dish, now on my nightstand, pastel yellow and blue swirling along its empty shell. I still haven’t put anything inside.

Beneath my Mickey Mouse blanket, I graze the cool part of my thigh where Dad’s hand isn’t—a phantom fear. Not of my father but of any trespass, my body absorbing a new expertise, my spinning stomach knowing nothing specifically, but everything clearly.

Caitlin McGill’s work has appeared in Blackbird, The Chattahoochee Review, CutBank, Indiana Review, Iron Horse, McSweeney’s, and others. Caitlin McGill is writing a Miami-based, coming-of-age memoir about intergenerational silence, the American legacy of denial, the forces that break and unite family, and the fragmented, complex nature of survival and empathy.