The dream was not what Caderina had assumed a dream would be.
To begin with, it was not dreamy. It was stark in its deep darkness and then sudden, surprising brightness. A brightness that illuminated a person emerging out of a fog.
At least, a person was the only word Caderina could think to use for the swirling material that slowly solidified into what in fact looked like the silhouette of a thick, masculine build. The man turned towards her, then was cast into darkness, as if someone had pulled a giant plug somewhere.
Then the brightness struck like lightning again, this time brighter, igniting giant, monstrous silhouettes in the distance behind the man, who was now moving towards her.
The man was not someone she recognized, but later Caderina would decide that it also wasn’t someone her brain could have conjured up on its own. Not a face that real, that innately familiar.
The lights went out again. When they blazed back moments later, the man was before her, except for now Caderina could tell that he wasn’t completely man. Bits of him fluttered off his shape like leaves in the wind, as if he wasn’t flesh and bone but dust and cloth with bright gray eyes: one slightly darker than the other. Both unmistakably terrified.
“You can’t be here. You have to wake up,” the man commanded. His shape quivered and reorganized as he looked over his shoulder towards the distant flashes and flailing silhouettes. “Do you hear me?” he turned back to her again, “You’re in danger, wake up!”
Caderina had never heard of dreams bossing around their dreamers, either.
But she did wake up from the dream the way she assumed most others did: with a dramatic gasp, her sunglasses knocked off her nose, and a bit of dribble down the corner of her mouth.
Her back ached as she pushed herself into a sitting position, the smooth round stones of the Nice city beach digging into her elbows. Never in her three years of living on the French Riviera had she dozed off on this rocky beach. It was simply too uncomfortable.
Which made it even more strange that it was here, on these warm and unwelcoming stones at this overcrowded and frankly overrated Mediterranean beach, that Caderina had dreamed the first dream of her entire twenty years of existence.
She did the first thing most disoriented people do: she dug through her straw beach bag to find her phone and check the time. As expected, she was late.
Caderina had a plan. She’d outlined it a year and a half ago, and if executed correctly, it would channel the next fifteen years of her life towards everything she’d ever wanted. Everything she didn’t have.
The plan did not include being late.
“Fanculo,” she cursed, propelling herself to her feet and shoving her beach towel into her bag. Her current beach read, Getting the Love You Want, quickly followed suit, and then she was off, scrambling across the narrow strip of stones to the nearest pedestrian crosswalk through the English Promenade, the road that separates the coastline from Nice’s old town.
She ran under the arches of the first row of pastel colored bars and restaurants, skidded around the statue of Jacques Chirac, but then was forced to a walk as she wove through the flower market. It was still choked with tourists despite the fact that the stalls had closed hours ago and the cleanup crew had already started to hose down the leftover fish guts and olive pits from the tiled piazza.
Some bistros were already opening for their evening shifts, crowding their wrought iron tables and chairs as far onto the cobblestone roads as they dared place customers close to cars—which was more than you’d expect. Caderina side stepped down a narrow back alley to avoid walking past the terrace of an Italian restaurant she’d waitressed at for exactly one week before she was fired for warning the customers off the overcooked pasta entrées. But that had been before the plan.
The tourist crowds continued into the deeper streets of old town, which had a way of pocketing the cool and stony dampness of the medieval buildings even on the hottest days. Caderina struggled through what she hoped was the last waves of tourists of the season before her strides finally lengthened across Garibaldi Place with its pretty yellow buildings, bright merry-go-round, and sporadic and likely unlicensed pop-up art stalls. The streets became larger, straighter, and decisively less pretty as she made her way towards the student neighborhood.
Despite being late she took a moment to wave at the local boulanger who never asked for her student ID when she ordered the student lunch special. Caderina wasn’t a student, and she suspected that the kindly old woman knew it, too. This hadn’t been part of the plan, but it was certainly a nice surprise.
It had been more difficult to convince the university student residence’s landlord to be as lenient. French bureaucracy made it hard enough for real students to live in university dormitories that Caderina hadn’t even thought about asking until Maribel had discovered that the landlord was looking for an Italian tutor for his son.
Before she knew it, she had a subsidized studio in the university neighborhood, and a commitment to teach Italian to a seven year old two times a week. Between the two best friends, Caderina was the more stubborn, but Maribel was the better saleswoman.
Caderina’s flip flops slapped against the bare cement of the internal staircase as she barreled up to her studio on the third floor, flung herself into the tiny shower, and was out in less than four minutes. She patted her still-wet hair with her sweatshirt as she ordered an Uber from the lobby of the student residence.
The plan didn’t usually call for expensive Uber rides to work, but Paul and Walter were special. And, plan or not, Caderina hated being late. When the Uber pulled up to the curb, she tied the now damp sweatshirt around her waist and ducked into the backseats.
The little sedan navigated through the winding one-way streets of Nice’s suburban neighborhoods, climbing higher and higher into the surrounding hills, every other turn revealing a slice of the sun setting over the sea. A view she could only look at for a couple of seconds before feeling nauseous. She used to let herself wonder if car sickness was something she’d inherited from a parent.
The sedan pulled into the driveway of a small Italian-style villa, and she thanked the driver before tapping through the gate code, crossing the manicured driveway, and letting herself in through the large front door.
“Coucou,” she called once inside. She slid out of her sandals and padded across the cold marble floors towards the kitchen, where she could hear Paul and Walter arguing over a soccer match on the TV. Or rather, Paul was arguing, and Walter was answering in his usual, soft-spoken tone.
“Caderina, please come tell Walter that it’s not the end of the world if I stick a bowl of oranges in the fridge without covering the top with tinfoil,” Paul said by way of greeting. The scruffy blond ex-pro soccer player pointed the remote control threateningly in the direction of his partner, then turned to kiss Caderina on both cheeks.
“All foods have energies about them. Even fruits with peels,” Walter pressed, rising graciously from the sprawling leather sofa in the living room. Walter was a tall, willowy man with an impeccably trimmed mustache and goatee. “Why would you ever want the energy of oranges to mix with the energy of our tagine leftovers from last night?”
Caderina laughed as she approached the kitchen counter to consolidate a couple of papers into a neat pile. “I think I’m going to stay out of this one. Natalie?”
“Already asleep. Your job is easy tonight. Paul, s’il te plait can you go change and stop ruining your appetite?” Walter waved his hand dramatically towards his partner, who was caught red handed at the fridge.
“I’m just being preventative, here,” Paul mumbled as he closed the drawer and retreated into the hallway, “I know even a three course meal at Le Pissarro won’t feed me enough.”
This was what Caderina wanted. What Walter and Paul had—the lighthearted banter sustained by the most solid relationship she’d ever seen. She wanted it desperately. This, too, was part of the plan.
“Want to know something crazy?” Caderina started, sliding onto one of the elegant wrought iron stools of the kitchen island as Walter waited for his partner.
“Always, dear.”
“I had a dream today.”
“Vraiment?”
“Je le jure,” Caderina confirmed. She’d been so stressed about being late that she hadn’t given the dream a second thought since fleeing the beach. But now, in Walter and Paul’s familiar home, she recalled the monstrous silhouettes in the distance, the man had told her to wake up. She was suddenly so excited about having dreamed at all that she didn’t consider the fact that it might have been a nightmare.
“How did it happen?”
“I fell asleep on the beach.”
“The city beach?” he asked incredulously.
“I know,” she laughed. “It was a strange dream. There was a man running at me. He kept telling me to wake up.”
You can’t be here, his voice still echoed in Caderina’s mind.
“And did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Wake up?”
“Oui.”
Walter’s brows came together pensively, “You know how I feel about dreams.”
Caderina nodded, though she wasn’t actually sure. All she knew was that he was a mythology professor in the ancient history department at the university Caderina pretended to attend, and that he had intense beliefs about energies.
“Is he testing his next lecture on you?” Paul responded before his partner could, waltzing into the kitchen in his smartest gray slacks and a linen white button down. Paul helped Walter roll up the sleeves of his checkered shirt, then Caderina accompanied them to the front door and waved them off.
When the front gates had shut firmly behind their Audi, she closed the door and retreated into the kitchen, where she picked the baby radio off the fridge and clipped it to a belt loop of her jeans before starting her usual rounds. Walter and Paul insisted that she was a babysitter and not a house keeper, but doing some chores around the house while Natalie slept made Caderina feel a little less embarrassed about the exorbitant money they paid her to keep an eye on a single well-behaved baby.
Plus, when it was only her and the sleeping child in the house, it was easy to pretend that the space was hers while she dusted or folded clothing. That this life was hers.
She collected the laundry bags around the house and carefully separated the pile into four different color groups before running the quick wash. While returning the laundry baskets to their respective corners, she spotted a couple of crinkled button downs strew across their master bed, and so found the steamer in the closet to smoothen them out. Once that was done, she returned to the kitchen where she rearranged the dirty dishes in the washer and started the machine.
This time, however, it was harder to fall into the this is my life fantasy. Her mind continued to wander back to her one and only dream as she walked out into the backyard to toss the trash, even though the kitchen bin had only been half full.
You can’t be here. You have to wake up! The man had yelled.
As if on cue, the baby monitor crackled with cries. Caderina padded into the hall and jogged up the large, circular staircase to the nursery on the second floor, where Natalie had already launched her pacifier across the room.
Caderina swiped up the pacifier and tossed it onto the counter before lowering the adjustable railing and reaching into the pile of soft blankets for the crying child. The little girl immediately wrapped her little legs around Caderina’s waste and tucked her forehead under Caderina’s chin.
The two-year-old had been adopted from an orphanage in Romania with no parental history nor medical record. A risky shot in the dark that Caderina wasn’t sure she herself would have made. Instead, she wondered what her life might have looked like if she’d been adopted from her girl’s home in Sardinia—Casa Degli Angeli—by a couple like Paul and Walter.
“Ninna nanna, ninna-o,” Caderina hummed the Italian lullaby as they both swayed in the fading light.
She could have spent less time on chores and more time on reading. Less time mourning the girls who were adopted before her and more time arguing with an actual sibling. She could have gone to a better high school, and been prepared for university. She could have afforded university.
“Questa bimba, a chi la do?”
The girl’s dark curls tickled Caderina’s chin, and her chubby fingers hung on the neckline of her sweater.
My child could look like this, Caderina thought, not for the first time. They both had dark hair and chocolate brown eyes. But where Natalie’s skin was fair and speckled with freckles along the bridge of her nose, Caderina’s was the typical Mediterranean olive. Even now as she moisturized maniacally to hold on to the last shades of a suntan.
Caderina had been a skinny child, and now was a skinny young woman. She was awfully self-conscious about her legs, which were peppered with the scars of childhood scrapes and she thought bent inwards at the knees too much. One particularly obvious scar was a puckered white streak that ran down the side of her calf, when she’d tumbled down a rocky outcrop at the age of seven instead of jumping into the turquoise water as the other girls else had.
Caderina slowly made her way across the nursery to stand before a full-body mirror fixed to the wall, careful not to slow the speed of her swaying.
Could a mother look like this?
Perhaps the greatest thing Caderina held against her absent mother was that just that: her absence. She wondered if even a bad mother would have been better than the void that had raised her, haphazardly filled by Signora Assunta to the best of her ability. After all, she’d had at least a dozen other girls to look after at the same time.
At last Natalie’s eyes fluttered shut and remained closed, the thumb she’d been sucking tumbling out of her lips and dragging saliva across Caderina’s sweatshirt. Caderina pressed a kiss to the soft baby skin of her forehead before gently lowering her back into the crib. She checked on the baby radio transmitter, and grabbed the dusty pacifier from the counter top before carefully tiptoeing back downstairs.
At least a bad mother would have taught her what not to be like. All Caderina had now was what she saw on TV, what she read in books, the tense relationship between Maribel and her own mother, and her gut instinct.
And, of course, her plan.
