Irene was an empiricist. She believed in science, and math, and numbers. She did not believe in love, or any god. She did not believe, “Someday you will be happy.” She was opposed to novels, most poetry, and dance of any kind. However, she was also a lucid dreamer. She could control her dreams. It was because her mother had been such a dedicated hippie, astrologer, mind reader, tea drinker, nutcase, and had pressed the lucid dreaming on Irene before life had taught her suspicion.

It started with dispelling nightmares, the same way any mother teaches any child to take control of a dream and turn it away from horrors. But Bernice hadn’t left it there. She’d shown Irene how to make her body fall asleep and keep her mind awake, how to travel, unencumbered, in a lonely world behind the waking one. She hadn’t gone there in years, had sworn she was never going again. But now she had to go, to know for sure if her mother was really, really gone.

Irene blinked three times and closed her eyes. She said the words, “I’m dreaming and I’m aware,” three times under her breath, and then she began to regulate and count her breathing. In her mind’s eye she was focusing on a little curio shelf in her mother’s house. This was her old way in, like a portal. Just one shelf, dark wood, stuck to the wall in her mother’s house in Toledo, and lined with bells. She went down the row of bells, ringing each one in her mind. The small dark bell from a sheep. The little gold bell that was a souvenir from Galveston. The silver bell from a wedding reception. The crappy, bulbous one that child Irene had made in a pottery class. The porcelain one in the shape of a cat entangled in yarn. A blue bell commemorating America’s bicentennial.

She knew that before she reached the bell on the end, which was bejeweled and had no ringer, her body would be asleep, but her mind would be awake. She would be in the place she and her mother called the Hinterland, and dreaming. And her mother, her mother might be there, too. She had to go and see.

* * *

When I pick up the final bell and ring it, I hear a ringing sound. The sound tells me I am dreaming and aware. I walk away from the shelf of bells, and out of my mother’s house.

Astrology is the mad mother of astronomy. My mother is a predictive astrologer, and also a psychic. She does it all: tea leaves, wrinkles in your hand, whatever seems to make you trust her. I have watched her clients sit there on the sofa, stretch out their necks, and tilt their heads, all earnestly listening like so many fools. All her magic comes down to advice a good professional organizer could give them. It’s always easier to see someone else’s problems, she would say. I can clean your house better than I can clean my own. Then she would take a sip of gin. A swallow of gin. A glass tumbler of gin, full to the brim.

Mother and I have a complicated relationship. Outside the Hinterland, she is a drunk and I am ashamed and afraid. Inside the Hinterland, she is always sober. So here I come, to find her. I miss her. I can’t help myself. Even now, when her body is dead, I wonder if her mind is here still. Maybe in death she has entered a final dream. Maybe here I will retrieve her from the alcohol. The Hinterland is bleak and spare. I make it this way. I have never allowed it to become elaborately decorated because that’s foolish and a waste of time. So there are very few things, besides her house, the gray dust of the earth and the gray rim of the sky. There is only one other structure. I call it Dark House. From the outside, it’s a Victorian mansion of three stories.

When I first dreamed into Dark House I was very young, dreaming of exploring an old house, opening room after room. At the center of it, between all the rooms, with a rim of broken beams and torn wires around it, I came upon a whistling chasm in the floor. I almost fell in, and it scared me, sent me skittering backward, a cold wind in my face. I could not even look into it. That was the first time.

After that I ended up in Dark House again and again in my dreams, always coming in from a different direction but headed for the same sinking center, back to the same bad place. Putting it inside the Hinterland, giving it walls and some exterior structure, let me have some control over that awful hole. I have never been sucked into the center of Dark House. Monsters, grief, immolation are there. Always right there at the edge. Sometimes I dream I am clever and free, but I wind up in the Dark House anyway, teetering on the edge of the blackness. A good dream is when I can get out without falling into the black. So they are all good dreams, so far.

When I was six, my mother burned our house down. Not a dream house; a real house. Down to the ground. I don’t remember anything before that. She wants to rebuild the house in the Hinterland, keep it forever, but I won’t let her.

“You make something then,” mother once told me.

“I did,” I said. “I made this.” This is a horror. But she doesn’t mention it.

I hurry now through all of the safe rooms until I am out of breath and I am still absolutely alone. I am out of places to look. “Mother!” I scream. She has to be here. I point my face into the center of the house and call again, “Mother!”

A bit of movement pulls at the corner of my eye. Is it she? I quickly turn to see a tall form step away and then recede behind a broken wall. That is not my mother. That is someone else. My mother is a small person with long hair. This stranger is a tall person and the hair is short. Someone else inside the Hinterland. Looking for me, for my mother, for the center of Dark House? My nightmare: someone’s come to push me in.

4

George had seen a picture of himself when he was two. He was a fat baby with a bubble pipe clutched in one hand. The camera captured him in the act of running, with a free hand up to catch the bubbles. What interested George in this picture was not himself. It was his mother and father in the background of the shot, which must have been taken by a friend or a neighbor, because it showed the whole family. His mother was young, with her blond hair down and long. His father looked happy, and his face was shaved. His mother was sitting on his father’s knee and grabbing his neck with her elbow, pulling him into her chest, and his father had a goofy look on his face. His mother’s teeth were incredibly wonky. They were all showing.

George’s mother was a tall person with smooth long limbs, like a model’s. In her youth, she’d had long blond hair, and her teeth had been horsey and huge. When she got some money, she had them fixed, and now they were normal, and she was a perfect-looking fifty-year-old woman. Wise, sure, with ashy short hair and dove-gray scarves to tie around her throat. For George, looking at his mother with these awful teeth was touching. Especially the fact that she was grinning like an ape, and clearly didn’t care.

* * *

George drove down I-75 toward Bowling Green, a college town just south of Toledo. He was going to retrieve his mother from the courthouse there. She had punched a client and broken his nose.

On the phone, his mother had said, “He was being an idiot. Had you done the same, I would have punched you, too. Everyone knows he deserved it. They’re just being careful because he’s a student. They all need punching.”

“Mom,” George said. “Please don’t punch anyone else.”

“I’m not making any promises,” she said.

“Do you want me to tell Dad?” George wanted to know.

“Don’t tell your father anything. In fact, go and lock my house so he can’t get in there until I get back.”

“Mom, I can be there in twenty minutes.”

“Don’t rush. I pick up clients when I have to stay in jail.”

Then someone had said, “Come on, lady. Let’s go.” And the phone went dead.

* * *

If George had to pin down the moment when his mother changed from the carefree woman with long hair and snaggle teeth to the woman she was now, so firm and sensible, brusque and put together, he would have to say it began when he was about six years old.

When he was very small, he remembered his mother walking with him through the woods, her huge long legs making whishing tracks through the brush and bramble, with him on her shoulders, and she’d sing “I got a brand new pair of roller skates,” and George could touch the treetops, he felt like. The mother of his youngest days was a beautiful, sweet, idyllic mother. He remembered a striped poncho she used to wear, and how they would eat peanuts in the car and throw the shells into the backseat, laughing.

She read to him from a book of Irish poetry every night. His favorite was written by Yeats, “The Stolen Child.” It was a song about the faeries enticing a small child away from the world he knew. Which seemed a bit sinister, at the end, but also beautiful. The faeries came, young George understood, and transported this lucky golden child to a land of enchantment, where there was magic and singing.

Sometimes he was allowed out of the house by himself, and he would run around out in a small dark wood, near where they lived out west of the city, by Lake Sawyer. George could remember sitting in a clearing in the woods, hypnotically entranced, to the point where he could hear the flapping herons and the drowsy water rats from the poem, and feel his lips upon the ears of sleeping trout, and know that he was sitting on that leafy island, leaving his mother and father behind. If he concentrated, George could remember a time when he had played with a faery, and he wanted to get back to that good feeling. He felt sure that the faery would come for him again out of the woods, and take him by the hand to lead him off. He could see the strange shape of her faery face from his memory. It was beautiful.

* * *

George’s car was a Volvo wagon. His mother had bought it for him when he graduated from college, hoping he would stay in New England or move to California, or anywhere really, the hell away from Toledo.

“I miss Toledo,” George had said. “I want to study at the institute.”

“Don’t come back,” his mother had said. But George had come back anyway. What happened to turn that laughing mother into the mother he had now? George often wondered. What happened, what happened? Now his mother was always certain of everything, and often angry. She referred to his childhood faery dreams as “that crazy crap.” She was hard on George’s father, hard on George.

The wagon rolled down the long flat stretch between Toledo and Bowling Green. It was late, late summer, and the sky was deeper blue than it had been all year, the rows of corn tall and brittle. The roadside swaths of grass were brown and the wildflowers waved on dry stalks. Northwest Ohio crunched under the foot of an encroaching fall. As an academic, George was disconnected from the planting and harvest cycles on earth, but he knew how to look up and tell what time it was at night. In the late summer he could see Sagittarius, the archer, Babylonian god of war, his bow cocked and arrow aimed straight for the heart of the scorpion twenty-eight degrees northeast.

* * *

By the age of nine, George became gangly, not so fat around the wrists and ankles anymore. He knew the faeries would no longer see him as some great prize to be lured away. Frustrated and crying in his room one night, with the lights off, he saw his mother and father both come to the door. She was working her way through the ranks at her firm at this time, trying to make partner, trying to make money. His father was painting, having art shows, traveling. He wanted to tell them, very privately, that he was sorry the faeries hadn’t stolen him away yet, and he was becoming afraid that it would never happen.

But when he opened his mouth to say it, he did not. Instead these words came out: “I miss her.” And when he said them, he knew that it was what he meant to say in the first place.

“I miss her,” he said again, more firmly, and then he began to cry. “I want her back.”

His mother came over and climbed into the bed with him, kicking off her shoes and pulling her long legs in nylons under the quilts. She held his arms close to his sides while he cried to her. His father sat at the bedside, silent.

“Who do you miss, baby?” she said. “Who is it that you miss?”

“There was a faery I knew,” he sobbed. “I knew her. I miss her.”

“You were dreaming,” said his mother. “There was no one. No one. It was a dream.”