Free This Shared Dream by Kathleen Ann Goonan

so she could concentrate on her son—although, admittedly, getting a plastic tumbler from the cabinet next to the large porcelain sink, rinsing it, and filling it up did not take up much of her mind.
    “It’s not cold,” he said, after taking a sip.
    “I don’t think we have ice yet.” Her heart was beating hard—a paroxysmal problem, she had learned, for which she now took pills—and she felt like crying.
    “Mommy, what’s wrong?”
    “Oh, I’m just sad.”
    “Why?”
    “I miss my mom and dad.”
    “I miss my daddy.”
    “You little rascal!” She laughed and sprang toward him, ignoring her pounding heart.
    He shrieked and fled, running through the dining room, spattering water everywhere, and then through the family room, before she scooped him up, drenching them both with the water left in his glass. “Don’t try to pull that on me. You see your father almost every day.”
    “But I want to see him all the time.”
    “He has to work.”
    “Yes,” said Whens, as if talking to himself. “He has to work. Okay.”
    Jill put him down. “Look, isn’t this a wonderful backyard? I think the first thing I’ll do is cut the grass. Then we’ll go get a swing set.”
    “A swing set!” Previously, they’d had to walk to the park for such a luxury.
    “With a slide.”
    The lawn mower was in the shed. The boy that cut the grass used it, so it worked, and there was almost a gallon of gas in the gas can next to it. Through the years, grass-cutters had ignored the perimeter of the lawn. Opportunistic plants had advanced with enthusiasm, some of them small trees now, so that the lawn was a much smaller place than when Jill had grown up here.
    Jill bent over the oil-encrusted mower to fill it with gas. Drops of sweat fell from her forehead and sizzled on the hot metal. It immediately stalled in the knee-high grass, and Jill’s shoulder soon ached from pulling the starting cord. Whens played in the creek where she could see him, and the roar of the mower isolated her in thought.
    Yesterday, she had successfully defended her dissertation. Koslov, to her surprise, did not even hint at the gaffe she’d made the day of her breakdown. She had kept her two histories quite straight, never letting one pollute the other, and the other professors were polite, though not at all soft. Jill’s dissertation was titled Postwar Russia and Germany: Strategies That Led to the Postwar Russian-German Manufacturing Powerhouse . She received summa cum laude and suspected that someone had twisted Koslov’s arm to make it unanimous.
    And so, she had invited her Georgetown crew, including Koslov, the World Bank crowd, and all the neighbors to her Fourth of July party. Since her release from the hospital, it seemed as if she had revved into high gear. A manic phase, her therapist warned her. You have to tell your brother and sister what’s bothering you. It’s like a pea under your mattress. It’s distorting your life. Unspoken subtext: It’s so ridiculous that once you talk about it all that energy will dissipate.
    Yes, she thought, going up one straight row, then turning and making a square of the uncut grass in the middle, it’s true.
    She had to tell Brian and Megan.
    Right.
    Bette
    May 5
    A TAP ON HER SHOULDER startled Bette awake. “End of the line, ma’am.”
    The train conductor moved on amid the bustle of passengers retrieving luggage from overhead racks before she could ask him where here was. She unwound from her curled-up sleeping position, neck aching and hair, she was sure, a mess. An unfamiliar black patent-leather purse, wedged just below the window, yielded a brush, which Bette ran through her hair, not taking the time in the general hubbub to further survey the purse’s contents. The hair left in the hairbrush was golden blond, not brilliant white, as it had been at one time … when? Where? She had been a lot older, obviously, but that was all she could infer. If she ceased worrying about it, the information