What We Keep by Elizabeth Berg

unavailable. I wanted to look at Sharla, to see what she thought about all this, but I wasafraid if I moved my mother would stop talking. I was somewhat distressed by what she was saying, yet I wanted to hear more.
    But then Sharla said, “I had a bad dream.”
    “Did you?” My mother turned toward her, yanked out of her reverie.
    “Yes.”
    “What was it?” Her voice was low and level now, silky; her tone once again that of competent caretaker. Never mind the dream; no matter what it was, she would take it away.
    “I dreamed …” Sharla said.
    We waited.
    “You had a third
eye,
” she told my mother, and shuddered on “eye” as though she were swallowing something raw. “It was on the side of your head. It blinked and looked around and everything, all like a real eye.”
    “I had that?” my mother asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Well,” she said. “Was it pretty? Was it green? I always wanted green eyes. Did it wink at you?”
    “This is not funny,” Sharla said. “It was scary. You’d had it all along, and you never even told us. And then we were outside and your hair blew up and there was another
eye
ball in your head. It was scary!”
    “I’m sorry,” my mother said.
    “It was a
dream,
” I said. Why did she feel she needed to apologize?
    “Well,” my mother said, “you know what I mean. I’m sorry she had a bad dream.” Then, to Sharla, “I don’t have a third eye.”
    Sharla said nothing.
    “You want to look?”
    “No.”
    “Oh, come on,” she said, and turned on the light, pulled her hair back. Then, “See? I’m just me.”
    Sharla yawned. “I know.”
    “All right then.” My mother turned out the light. She pulled the sheet up over Sharla, kissed her forehead. “Go back to sleep.”
    She started out the door, then headed over to me, kissed my forehead, too. I smelled perfume on her; I had never smelled it on her late at night before. She said she was herself, but she wasn’t. For instance, she smelled like Ivory soap at night, not perfume. Ivory soap.
    After a few minutes, I said, “… Sharla?”
    “What?” she whispered.
    “Was that what you wanted to tell me, your dream?”
    “Yes. But also that it was so
real.
”
    “I know,” I said. And I believed I did. I turned onto my back, put my hands one over the other across my chest. Sometimes I liked to pretend I was dead.
    As if somehow picking up on my thoughts, I hear the boy Glen’s voice floating back to me. “If there’s a crash,” he says, “would we all die?”
    Silence.
    “Dad?”
    “There won’t be a crash,” his father says quietly.
    “Glen!” his sister says, not quietly. “You shouldn’t try to hex us!”
    “I’m not trying to hex us! I’m just asking. I can ask whatever I want. There is no such thing as a stupid question, stupid.”
    “That’s only true sometimes,” his sister says. “They just tell you that sometimes, when it’s okay to ask anything right then.”
    “Well, now is okay, too. Isn’t it, Dad?”
    “Yes, it is, Glen,” the father says, and I hear a certain tightening in his voice. He is getting ready.
    “So,
would
we all die?”
    “Well. As I said, there is not going to be a crash. But if there were, the truth is I don’t know if anyone would die at all. Maybe there would just be some damage to the plane.”
    “But maybe also we
could
all die, right?”
    I see the older couple across from me look at each other, smile ruefully.
    Finally, “It’s theoretically possible; yes,” the father says.
    “Told you,” Glen says.
    “Why don’t we get another Coke?” his sister asks. “We can have all the Cokes we want, they have to give them to you whenever you ask.”
    Over Glen’s seat, the call button goes on. Give me a Coke; I could be ready to die over here.

O ne night after dinner my father asked who wanted to go to Dairy Queen. This was a silly question; all of us always wanted to go to Dairy Queen. But not on this night. On this night, my mother said, “Why don’t