Chapter 4: Dream Barrier

In 221, Constance Campbell mentally calculated her weekend wages as she wiped the kitchen counters before bed. If she added her hourly wage to the holiday pay, she might earn enough to pay off a few niggling bills that troubled her. She shook her head. If the Doctor and the Judge would consent to pay her off the books, Constance would earn that much more money. But the Judge hoped for higher office someday, and had learned from watching Zoe Baird on C-Span; Constance’s wages were paid through a service called NannyPay.
The smell of the vinegar that Constance used on the steel sink and refrigerator filled the kitchen. She opened the sliding door that led to the deck and looked at the big house at the side of the yard. From the deck, still warm under her sandals from the heat of the day, she could see bumps in the slate roof, gaps where grackles nested every spring. Caroline named them Mr. and Mrs. Bird after a book, The Best Nest, that Constance read to her each naptime since she was a baby. Six years old now, Caroline recited the words aloud with her nanny, and always gripped a stuffed animal during “the exciting part,” when Mr. and Mrs. Bird were separated from one another.
The balmy springtime air hinted at rain and made Constance restless. She liked Orange Heights Avenue, loved Caroline, and found the Doctor and Judge easy bosses. Still, she longed to see more of this world. When the Doctor and Judge emailed her their itineraries – this weekend, they were in Nova Scotia for a wedding – she longed to travel not with them, but instead of them. Sure, they took Constance along when Caroline traveled with them, but that wasn’t the same. That was simply babysitting in an unfamiliar place, more difficult and less convenient than home, with all the challenges of finding chicken nuggets and fat-free milk in a new town. What Constance wanted, as she shook her cleaning rag over the side of the deck, was freedom, a few days or weeks of unaccountability.
“I want to be off this leash,” she said aloud to the night air. Constance watched the neighbor boy from 217 walk his mongrel dog past the big house, the dog’s tags jangling in the silence. “You do too, I expect,” she said in the dog’s direction.
From an open window upstairs, Constance heard her name.
“Constance, Constance, come now,” called Caroline.
Constance sighed and rushed up the stairs. Another bad dream. The child was plagued with nighttime visions of adults coming to steal her from the bed. The tall faceless figures that Caroline saw in her dreams disappeared during the daytime. Constance wondered if the dreams were hazy memories of her earliest months in China, when her birthmother entrusted the child to an orphanage. Or were the night terrors simply that? Simply the worries and fears that this sunny child didn’t seem to feel during the day.
By the time Constance reached her, Caroline had fallen into a deep sleep again. Constance rearranged the line of stuffed animals in front of the door – Caroline called them her “dream barrier” – and pulled the sheets tighter around her charge.
She noticed that, with new neighbors in the big house, light shone into Caroline’s room and made shadows on her bed and floor. Bunny and Bear, the two sentinels at either end of the line of stuffed toys, were spotlighted. Constance pulled Caroline’s sheer princess curtains tighter across the windows, and backed slowly out of the room. The kitchen cleanup waited, and it was a good moment to browse airfares online in the Doctor’s study.