I started dreaming about my mother a lot as a result of Kelli’s nightly up-and-down. They weren’t sad dreams — that is, I knew she had died, in the dreams, but somehow it was incidental, it wasn’t a big deal. My reaction when I saw her was strangely casual. I thought: Oh, there she is.

So it wasn’t my mother’s presence itself that made the dreams bad. It was more the activities I found her engaged in, and even then, I couldn’t necessarily tell you why. In one, she was barbecuing a whole pig on a spit on the back balcony. She wasn’t using the barbecue, she had constructed an actual fire pit somehow. I didn’t know how the wooden boards beneath it could be standing up to the heat, but I figured my mother must know what she was doing. I asked her, Who’s going to eat all that? And she said, Kelli will eat whatever’s left over. Somehow I knew she was talking about the gross parts, the ears and brain and snout and feet. But I knew if I argued, my mother would insist that these parts were actually considered delicacies in certain culinary circles. So I stood there mute, as my mother slathered the pig in sauce, feeling paralyzed, muzzled by logic that she hadn’t even articulated.

In another dream, I knew my mother wasn’t dead, she was just living downstairs in the laundry room. I was impatient with her about this dumb, irrational decision; I could hear her bumping around down there and got up to confront her about being stubborn and not just coming back upstairs to resume her normal life. In the dream, my mother being noisy in the laundry room was the reason Kelli kept getting up in the middle of the night — I suppose I had gone to bed knowing I would be knuckle-dabbed awake in only a few hours and drifted off in a state of consternation, turning over the puzzle of Kelli’s wakefulness in my mind, and this was the funhouse mirror of an explanation my subconscious came up with.

I explained to her with what I felt was more patience than she deserved: Mom, it’s great you’re not dead, but for christ’s sake, come upstairs. You can’t have it both ways. Either die or come upstairs.

My mother said, All right, I’ll come up in a minute. And then I watched as she put a load of laundry in. And I realized she was full of shit. She was stalling me. She would never do what I wanted — she’d just agree to whatever I said and then do as she pleased.

Maybe these don’t sound like particularly bad dreams. All I can say is that they made my heart pound in such a way as I could hear it in my ears and I always woke up from them, with this sound like a washing machine in the spin cycle thumping in my head — I never simply drifted into other dreams.