She rolled off me. I could no longer see her beside me, but I could hear her breathing. Soon she was snoring, leaving me wide awake in the infinite darkness.

15. SEEING THINGS

Think of your first good kiss. Was it life-changing, or was it no big deal? Do you remember how old you were? Did it matter, at the time, who gave it to you? Do you even remember who it was?

I’ll tell you this: when you’re thirteen and your mother gives you your first good kiss, you better hope someone matches it or eclipses it—soon. That’s your only hope.

I wanted my mom and the snowshoer to hit it off. I even admired the lawlessness of the way she kissed him. But when she kissed me that way, her lawlessness frightened me. Wasn’t the way she kissed me a bad judgment call?

At thirteen, I’d been in the habit of telling Nora everything. I couldn’t wait to tell Nora about the kiss my mother gave Elliot Barlow. “When you’re old enough, Adam, you’ll have secrets,” Nora had told me. I was old enough. I had a secret I kept from Nora. I didn’t want Nora to know how Little Ray had kissed me.

“The issues we have, about being Brewsters, are all about sex,” Nora had told me. Does the secrecy in families start with sex? In my case, it started with the snowshoer kiss. My mother’s kiss marked the beginning of my having something to hide.

Yes, I felt I was a traitor to my mom. Whenever I found myself thinking that the snowshoer kiss she gave me was unsuitable or inappropriate, I felt I’d joined forces with my evil aunts. When they called Little Ray a hippie or a free spirit, they were putting her down.

When you’re a child, you think childhood is taking too long—you can’t wait to grow up. One day, the growing up has happened; you missed it, and you’re trying to seize it after the fact. When you keep secrets from people you love, you don’t sleep as soundly as a child. That’s when you know the growing up has happened, though you still have more growing up ahead of you—I certainly did. That’s when my dreams started, when I stopped sleeping like a child.

Now I know they weren’t dreams, but I didn’t know what to call them then. Can you have premonitions of things that happened before you were born? Now I know that premonitions and dreams are the wrong words for what I saw in my fitful sleep; nevertheless, I first thought of them as dreams. They began soon after the kiss of questionable judgment. I still see them; I always will.