Delphina Phillips sat rubbing her swollen belly, thinking about what lay ahead. Del had never given birth before, and until six months ago, she didn’t think she ever would. They tried for almost two years before breaking down and going to see a specialist. The problem, for lack of a better word, was with her eggs. The doctor told Delphina that she wouldn’t be able to conceive naturally, and that the chances of success with invitro were slim.
It was a hard time waiting, but two months later, when the doctors told them that the IVF stuck, she and Arthur cried.
She looked over at him now, asleep on the couch with his feet propped up on a stack of pillows. He looked so peaceful, so comfortable. Must be nice to sleep. Del hadn’t had a restful night’s sleep since the baby took root and sprouted.
Despite the resentment she felt at his comfortable doze, Del loved Arthur and Arthur loved Del. It was as simple as that. Not that it was difficult to love Delphina Phillips. She had an air about her, her laugh was contagious, she was kind and generous, and everybody who talked to her walked away feeling good. But it wasn’t always that way. There was a time when talking to Delphina made people uncomfortable, even a little depressed. It took a lot of therapy—and a lot of medication—to transform Delphina Phillips into the woman she eventually became. Arthur knew her before the nightmares stopped and the healing began, which is perhaps why their bond was so strong.
If you were to run into Delphina in the supermarket and a conversation sprang up (the way they sometimes do between two strangers), she might ask you your opinion regarding the ideal amount of marbling in a steak, or if all the different butters are really any different. But back then, back before she got better, the conversation would have been geared towards the sky, the stars, the Grays.
You might have laughed, might have assumed it was a joke, but Delphina wouldn’t be laughing. Her eyes would look at you, and you would feel like you were looking into a pit. They wouldn’t see you, only search the air around you, search to see if you were really you, or if you were actually one of them. One of the Grays.
Delphina sat in the recliner, rubbing her pregnant belly, and the jealousy at Arthur’s comfortable doze slowly melted away. Tears fell silently down her cheeks, and in that moment, nothing in the world could wash away her happiness. Everything was all right. She was loved, loved Arthur in return, and loved the baby growing in her belly.
Feeling the baby tumble around inside of her, she decided it was time for bed. She kicked down the leg rest and it snapped into place. Then she rocked back and forth, building up the momentum necessary to propel her out of the chair without injury. This type of preparation, Delphina found, saved her back from spasms that would otherwise leave her moaning in pain. It’s only gonna get worse. She stood, arched her back, and tapped Arthur’s foot.
“Let’s go to bed, Art.”
One eye opened, then fell back down.
“I’m gonna go brush my teeth. You should try it sometime. Come on, don’t sleep on the couch all night. I’ll miss you.”
“Mmhh, all right.”
Del went into the bathroom, ran water over the bead of toothpaste, and went to work. She stared at herself as she brushed and saw how her auburn hair caught the light from above the sink. Her face was fuller, vibrant, glowing. She turned sideways to examine the growing bump, and smiled.
Her joy was undeniable, but there was still that—something. All the pain from her past; the nightmares, the delusions, the fear, seemed as impossible to her now as a combustion engine must seem to an ant. But that stuff didn’t just go away, not for Delphina. All of it—but mostly the fear—sat in the back of her mind, waiting to spring forward. She pictured that fear as a crouching cougar, stalking her in the dark, waiting for the right time to leap out and strike.
But what was she afraid of? Fear of fear itself? Or fear of them?
“Why’d you let me fall asleep?”
Arthur came into the bathroom. His hair was disheveled, and his green eyes were squinted against the bright lights until they were almost completely shut.
“I didn’t let you do anything,” she said, around the toothbrush in her mouth.
He pinched her behind.
She spun around, smiling, and smacked his hand away.
He smiled in return, but his squinted eyes made him look like the mugshot of a drunk driver. He pulled her in close and she tried again to say something through the toothbrush.
“Can’t understand you, mushmouth,” he said.
She took the toothbrush out. “I said leave my butt alone.”
He kissed her. Del had only one choice. She pushed foamy toothpaste out of her mouth and into his. It oozed from between their lips and fell onto the floor, making a splat sound. Arthur spat the rest into the sink, laughing hysterically. Del put on a half-joking, half-serious seductive face, and asked if he wanted some more. He said he did. They fumbled into the bedroom, their lips stuck together like the teenagers they once were.
Afterwards, they fell asleep in each other’s arms.
***
The idea of Yin and Yang is simple; life is about balance. There is light, and there is dark, good and evil, water and beer. Delphina was familiar with this concept. She believed she had experienced the darkest parts of her life at a fairly young age. It was a coping mechanism to believe that the worst was behind her, but it had worked so far. An image of a taijitu danced on the back of her eyelids as she tottered the line between wakefulness and sleep. She breathed deeply, comfortable and safe in Arthur’s arms, and watched as the black and white circle began to spin. It swirled until the colors blended and mixed, turning gray, and then she was asleep.
The gray circle followed her into her dreams. In the world outside of Delpina’s mind, her body stiffened, but Arthur didn’t notice. Her muscles tensed and her heart raced as the spinning gray circle transformed into a being she hadn’t seen in nearly a decade. It spun so fast that it no longer looked like it was spinning at all. Two black orbs popped out of the gray mass, then a mouth, and finally, two slits in between the two. A body sprouted from the head, gangly and angular.
In the dream, Del screamed, but in the world outside of her mind, her foot only twitched.
Now she was lying on a table, and her back was cold and the lights above her were bright, too bright for her to see anything. She tried to turn from them, but her head was locked in place. Her knees were bent, her feet were flat on the table, and her legs were spread. Metallic instruments clicked and someone (or something) stuck a needle into her arm. She woke up screaming.
A few years ago, someone tried breaking into Del and Arthur’s home. It was two or three in the morning, and when the alarm sounded, Arthur jumped up and grabbed the baseball bat leaning on the wall next to his side of the bed. When Del screamed that night, he’d reacted in much the same way. He was up, feet planted on the floor, ready to fight, ready to run, ready to do whatever needed to be done.
Her scream was high in pitch and long in duration. Once he realized what was happening, he went to her and tried to wake her up, but she wouldn’t come out of it. When Delphina opened her eyes, she slapped him across the face.
She looked around the room as if she’d never seen it before in her life. Her head jerked one way and then another, searching for that wandering hand and the black orbed eyes. Then the world slowly came back to her. There was the oak dresser that Arthur’s parents gave them for their one-year anniversary. Over on the wall was the framed Theodor Geisel print they bought last summer in San Francisco, the one with the smoking cat playing pool. She looked at Arthur, his eyes wide and concerned, one hand nursing his red right cheek.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Are you all right?”
She sat up and instinctively put her hands to her belly.
“Do you remember any of it?”
She shook her head.
“Maybe you screamed it right out of your memory. That’s probably better. You okay?”
She smiled and said, “I’m okay. Come back to bed.”
He climbed back in and kissed her forehead.
She closed her eyes and saw the cougar, only it wasn’t crouched down anymore. It stood tall and vicious and mean. She lay awake for a long time and took a tally of every awful thing from her past. They marched out from the shadows in a single file line, feeling safe now that the cougar had emerged.
***
The next two months passed without incident. Arthur got a promotion that kept him in the office more. Del missed him like crazy, but the added income made everything else a little easier. They bought new clothes for the baby and repainted the nursery, even got an expensive monitor that came with a camera and a sensor that you strapped to the baby’s ankle. It would send an alert to Del’s phone if the baby’s heart rate or breathing dropped below a certain point.
Arthur picked up most of the household duties and Del took early maternity leave. Her back ached, and so did her head, and it seemed as though acid was literally being pumped from her stomach into her throat. Every muscle in her body was sore, and it was a chore just to get from one room to the other. All of this was expected, and although she was uncomfortable, she was glad that there were no more dreams. Glad, but not unaffected by the first.
The morning after the dream, she made an appointment with a psychologist. She told Arthur it was just a precaution against the hormones, which was true, but she never told him about the dream. Her old psychologist, Dr. Bernbaum, was dead, so she made an appointment with Dr. Becky Renfrow. She was hesitant to schedule the day because she went by the name Becky instead of Rebecca, but Becky had the closest available appointment. She listened well and offered sound advice. They agreed to hold off on any medication until after the baby was born, if it was needed at all.
She spoke with Becky twice a week—once in person, once over the phone—and went through her entire history over the course of eight weeks. Becky told her that this was vital before moving on to interpret the meaning (if any) from her most recent dream.
Del woke up early, went into the kitchen, and boiled the water for coffee. She went to the calendar and there was a note in the box for the twenty-fourth. It said: DR. BECK-8A, and beneath, 38 WKS-OB-10A. Arthur said she was nuts for scheduling both appointments on the same day, but there was no way around it.
Arthur was already at work. It seemed he left earlier and earlier every day, while Del slept later and later as the weeks progressed. She was tired. Exhausted was more like it, and she had to set an alarm special for today.
She got to the office early and waited in the small lobby with a book.
“Morning, Del,” Dr. Becky said, “I’m ready whenever you are.”
Dr. Becky’s office was neat and had a smell like vanilla and lilacs that made Delphina nauseous. The curtains were pulled to the side and the sun shone through without impedance. Del sat in her accustomed chair and wondered if Dr. Becky let her patients choose the chair, and then wondered if that said something about them. Do the patients who choose the chair closer to the door have a strong urge to flee? She was thinking about this when Becky sat down across from her.
“You look like you could go any minute!”
“It feels like it, too.”
“Can I offer you something? Tea, water?”
“That’s okay.”
“Are you comfortable?”
“No, but that’s not a judgement against your chair.”
Becky smiled. “Great, let’s begin.”
“Okay. Well, Arthur and I were lying in bed and—”
“I’m sorry, before we really get into it, I had a question—where is it—here. When we last spoke, you told me about a dream you had, before the one from eight weeks ago. I believe you were—” She shuffled through her notes.
“I was about fifteen, maybe sixteen. Arthur would know, we had just started dating.”
“That dream—are you comfortable talking about it?”
Del nodded and forced a smile.
“Stop me any time. That dream started like all the others before it. The lights, the feeling of weightlessness, the cold table. And they all ended with you seeing the beings you call the Gray’s. My question is very simple: did it ever occur to you to wake up?”
The question struck Del. She thought about it, and the more the question tumbled around in her over-tired mind, the more it irritated her.
“No, waking up had never occurred to me, because I didn’t think I was asleep. I was really on that ship, and those gray—things—really did have their hands all over me. If I thought I was dreaming I would’ve happily forced myself awake instead of undergoing dozens of gynecological exams a thousand feet above my bedroom,” There was an unrecognizable rage building. How dare she? “I was sick. How could I have known?”
Dr. Becky absorbed Del’s response with infuriating patience. Then she jotted a note down on her pad. “Tell me about the dream.”
Del breathed deep and let it out. By the end, she was sobbing and fairly certain she was going into labor. Dr. Becky offered her a tissue and had the receptionist bring in a bottle of water.
“Are you okay?”
“I think so.”
“How did that make you feel? Going through the dream like that?”
Del looked at her with tears streaming down her face as if to say, Do you even have to ask?
“It’s important that you say your feelings out loud. Do you find that difficult?”
“Yes.”
“I see. That may be at the root of your issues.” She jotted another note and then said, “You and your husband had trouble conceiving your child, correct?”
Del nodded.
“Have you considered this dream recurred because of these troubles? Maybe it’s your mind’s way of rationalizing, of defending your own infertility. Your subconscious is grasping at straws, trying to make sense of a perfectly normal phenomenon by substituting it with a supernatural one.”
Del thought it stood to reason. The first dream came when she was twelve and every one since had been gynecologically focused. Dr. Bernbaum suggested it was her subconscious way of coping with puberty. She didn’t agree. Not at the time, at least.
Del was getting ready to respond when an alarm chimed on Dr. Becky’s phone.
“I’m sorry, that’s all the time we have left. Just think about it. We’ll talk on Thursday.”
***
Del walked to her car and suddenly found herself in full agreement with Arthur. She felt like it would be impossible to make it to her OB appointment. Time wasn’t the issue; it was her body. She was racked with pain from her head to her toes. She was mentally exhausted, and the thought of driving all the way across town forced about a cup of acid to push its way up to her throat.
Dr. Mafferty was young and childless, but that didn’t make her any less qualified in Del’s opinion. What she didn’t know from experience, she more than made up for in sense of humor and an ability to listen. Once Del had mentioned her ligaments felt like they were going to pop, Dr. Mafferty got her in that afternoon and imaged her abdomen, just to be sure. Everything was fine, of course, but they both felt a little more at ease when they saw the baby happily swimming in its own goop.
This appointment was mercifully quick. The baby was just the right size, and Del looked healthy and normal. Dr. Mafferty suggested yoga positions that might help with the discomfort and begged Del not to whack her upside the head for doing so. They both laughed, and laughing was good. Del left the office feeling better.
When she got home, she dropped her purse by the door and immediately changed back into her pajamas. She made lunch—jelly and cream cheese on whole wheat—and watched TV in bed.
When she woke up, she felt disoriented. She didn’t know when she had fallen asleep, but the sun was almost completely down, and darkness threatened outside the windows. She could hear the banging of pots and pans coming from the kitchen downstairs and smell the tantalizing aroma of frying onion and garlic.
Del lay in bed, absorbing the sweet, savory smells coming from the kitchen, when the room lit up like a forest fire. There was a sound like a vacuum, then a popping noise. Her body rose slowly from the bed, hovering just above the sheets like a feather over an air hockey table, and Del realized she was dreaming.
Did it ever occur to you to wake up?
The question that once infuriated her now calmed her, and she realized it wasn’t really meant as a question. It was a suggestion. She let herself float to the ceiling, through it, up above the house, towards the craft that waited to greet her like a loyal dog. The air smelled like the coming rain, and the higher she rose, the clearer she could see the last shades of the sun as it set below the horizon. Now that she knew she was dreaming, she felt at peace.
Del floated up, into the craft, down its well-lit halls and through its wide doors until she was lying on the cold metal table. She waited to see one of the Gray’s. She had an idea to talk to them, tell them she knew this was only a dream, nothing more than cold feet before the baby came. Then she would get up, walk over to the control panel of the ship, and explore the universe. That was her idea of heaven, exploring the universe as an entity, leaving her physical body behind and soaring through space. Del could witness a supernova, maybe even happen by two galaxies on a collision course. That would be something to see.
A Gray came into her field of view, its black eyes staring, its head tilting this way and that. Its cold fingers were exploring her body the way she looked forward to exploring the universe, feeling her bump, feeling her baby.
She had had enough. Her courage was spent, but when she went to speak, nothing came out. She tried lifting her head but couldn’t move. Something slid into her, and she felt the baby being manipulated, grabbed, and twisted. Pulled.
When she woke, she screamed and Arthur called up from downstairs. She told him she was okay, no labor, just a bad dream, she’d be down in a minute. Del had never experienced a false awakening before, and she didn’t like it. She lay still for a long time, afraid to move, wishing she had left a lamp on and wasn’t shrouded in darkness. As the real world slipped back into place, she regained some courage. She swung her feet from the bed, but in her haste, she forgot to rock back and forth to gain the momentum that would save her from a blown back. Sitting bolt upright, she waited for the pain to come, but it never did.
She pushed herself up from the bed with almost no trouble. She felt—good. Her back didn’t hurt, and neither did her head. The acid in her throat even seemed to have subsided. She went into the bathroom, feeling better than she had in a long time, thinking maybe the dreams needed to come out, that maybe she never really got over what she went through when she was younger.
Walking down the dark hall towards the bathroom, her hands went instinctively to the place they had spent most of the last nine months. She laid her hands on her flat stomach and screamed.
***
There wasn’t much of a trial. The prosecutor merely had to suggest to the jury that Delphina Phillips gave birth to her baby and disposed of the body. There was no evidence, but what else could it have been? All the rest worked itself out. Del insisted, against her attorney’s advice, on testifying. Arthur sat in the front row, unable to look her in the eye, and listened to everything he’d heard before.
She was found not guilty by reason of insanity and sentenced to treatment at Maberly Asylum. Dr. Samuel Trask was her psychiatrist, and the book he wrote on the anonymous baby killer left no one fooled. Arthur only came to see her once to have her sign the divorce papers. His eyes, which once resembled the brilliant green hills of his ancestral Ireland, now looked dull and lifeless. She pleaded with him to believe her, but he didn’t. She signed the papers.
Delphina eventually realized that it was useless to fight the staff in Maberly. They were big and strong and most of them were men. She fell in line and took whatever pills they told her to take. After a while, she was able to participate in group activities. She took up writing poetry and amassed a respectable little library in her small room. But she never forgot about her baby.
It was rare that the nurses in Maberly forgot to administer medication, and it only happened one time that Delphina was aware of. About five years after the incident, she dreamed of the Gray’s again. She stood in their ship, and they waved to her, their black orbed eyes looking somehow emotionless and smug at the same time. There was a little girl beside them. She had Delphina’s auburn hair and Arthur’s green eyes, and she was waving, too. When she woke, she took a pencil from her desk drawer and planted it into her jugular vein, in and out, in and out.
Delphina never did get to explore the universe.
