He always woke at the gate.

Marcy at the Gate
by Suzan Donamas

Carl had the dream again.

It always began the same way: he woke in Marcy's bed, in Marcy's room, except in the dream it was his room, had always been his room, and there was no seam of strangeness to snag on. That was the cruelty and the mercy of it. The dream did not present itself as a wish. It presented itself as a fact he'd simply forgotten while awake.

The dawn came in through her windows the color of the inside of a shell. He rose and crossed to the mirror the way you cross to a window to check the weather, expecting nothing, and the reflection that met him was hers — and his — the two of them folded into one person the way a word can mean two things at once and lose nothing. He did not stare. In the dream there was no reason to stare. You do not marvel at your own face over your morning.

He dressed. A short red skirt. A pale blue blouse with a collar that lay soft against the throat. A St. Christopher medal, the little traveler's saint, cool then warm against the skin. Shoes with a modest heel, the buckled kind, the kind that make a sound. He knew where everything was without looking, the way you know the stairs of your own house in the dark. There was the faint clean scent of her powder in the air, and it did not belong to a stranger. It belonged to the morning, and the morning belonged to him.

Then out into the day, and the pavement, and the sound the shoes made on it — a small, certain tapping, a metronome of belonging. Her girlfriends came out of their houses and gathered to her like filings to a magnet, and they walked, and they laughed, and their laughter was the thing he could never quite carry back across the border into waking: light and quick and overlapping, little bells rung at jokes he didn't fully hear, at some shared private weather of being them, together, on a morning, on their way.

Every time. The school gate would rise up ahead, black iron, and the girls would be almost through it, and the sound of the bells would be brightest just there — and then his own ceiling, his own quiet, the dream draining out of him like water through cupped hands no matter how tight he pressed his fingers.

         *   

He lay still a while, the way you do. Then he got up in his own room, which had always been his room, and looked at his own reflection, which was only and exactly his. He picked a t-shirt off the chair, sniffed it, judged it wearable, and pulled it on. Ordinary boy in an ordinary mirror. Nothing to marvel at there either, though for the opposite reason.

Downstairs, his mother was at the stove with the radio low, and his little sister was vibrating in her chair over a bowl of cereal, too excited to eat it. Field trip today — the city pool — and a new swimsuit, and she narrated all of it at once, the swimsuit especially, how it had a ruffle, how Dana's didn't. Carl said the right things —that's great, don't forget your towel— and ate his cereal, and something in him turned over quietly at the pure uncomplicated joy she had in the thing she got to wear, the day she got to be exactly and only herself in it.

He didn't envy the swimsuit. He envied the ease.

         *   

On the walk to school, he did what he did most mornings, which was to leave his body a little behind and go somewhere better. In the daydream he was going to the pool too — but as Marcy, with Marcy's friends, the whole giggling flock of them, all of them easy in the sun and easy with each other, belonging to the day and to the group and to themselves in that seamless way that in the dream cost nothing at all. In the daydream nobody woke at any gate. In the daydream the bells went on and on.

He reached the actual gate and did what he actually did. He lingered.

He lingered near the black iron and waited, and after a while they came — Marcy and her friends, down the same sidewalk, real this time, their real laughter carrying ahead of them thinner and more ordinary than the dream's but still, still, little bells. And Carl watched only long enough to be sure it was her, and then he turned and went in through the doors and lost himself in the corridors and his classes before she could come close enough that he might have to speak. He did this nearly every school day. He was very good at it. He had made an art of the almost.

Was this love? he wondered, the way he wondered most mornings, filing to his first class. Did he love Marcy?

And because he was, at least in the privacy of his own skull, an honest boy, he made himself answer it truly, and the true answer was no. What he felt when he saw her was not the wish to have her. It was the wish to be her — a passionate, hot, green envy that could hijack a whole afternoon, that lit up at the mere chance of glimpsing her in a hallway, that turned the faint scent of her powder as he passed the girls' table in the lunchroom into something that ached behind his eyes. It was not desire pointed at her. It was desire pointed at a life that fit, worn by someone standing three feet away who didn't even know she was wearing it.

That was a harder thing to hold than love would have been. Love you could confess. Love had songs. This other thing had no name he'd been given, no song, no gate he knew how to walk through.

         *   

"Hey, Carl."

Billy DeWight. Billy always spoke to him, easy as breathing, and always seemed to mean it. Billy was kind in the offhand way of people to whom the world has been kind, and Carl went tongue-tied every single time, his answers coming out in pieces, and hated himself for it a little, and could never work out why the wires crossed the way they did.

Because sometimes — at the oddest hours, drifting off, or wide awake and stalled over a math problem — Carl would find himself imagining Billy with Marcy. Billy leaning close, saying something, and Marcy laughing up at him with all her little bells.

Except in the imagining, Marcy was Carl. Was him, wearing the life that fit. And Billy smiled at her — at him — the way you smile at someone you're glad to be near, and it was so warm and so impossible and so far on the other side of the gate that Carl wanted to fold himself down into the smallest possible space, somewhere dark, and stay there. What undid him was not that Marcy could make Billy smile. It was that he wanted to be the one who could and to be her while doing it, and he could not tell where the one wish ended and the other began, and there was no one on earth he could ask.

So he said something broken back to Billy, and Billy said something kind, and the bell rang — the real one, the school one, flat and metal — and they went to their separate rooms.

         *   

That night he lay a long time in the dark before sleep, listening to the house tick and settle, hoping and dreading in equal measure that the dream would come. It so often did. He would wake in her room that was his room, and the shell-colored light would pour in, and the shoes would make their certain sound, and the girls would gather, and the bells would ring brighter and brighter as they neared the iron — and then, always, always, the gate, and the waking, and the water running out through his fingers.

But lying there in the dark, on the near side of sleep, Carl let himself wonder — carefully, the way you test a floorboard you think might hold — what it was the dream kept stopping him just short of. Why he only ever got as far as the gate and never through it. Whether the gate was a wall the dream built to protect him, or a door the dream kept offering, night after night, patient as a saint, waiting for the morning he'd finally have the nerve to walk the rest of the way and go in with the others, bells and all, into the bright ordinary day on the far side.

He didn't know. He was fifteen and had no name for the country, no map of the border, and no one to ask the way.

But he noticed, drifting off, that he had stopped hoping to wake before the gate.

He had started hoping, just a little, to make it through.