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Some days Heather cleans. She strips the sheets, cleans the kitchen floor on her hands and knees, even scrubs the toilet. Her dad always follows her around when she does this, saying "Oh, sweetie, you don't have do that! I'll do it myself, or I'll hire a maid!" Heather knows her father will never do either of those things, but that isn't why she keeps cleaning. It's because the nightmares are filled with dirt and rust and she's trying to wash them away.
She tries talking to her father about the nightmares when she is still little. She goes into his room, saying "I saw the girl again," meaning the girl in the blue dress who doesn't seem to have any skin. Or she'll say "a monster was chasing me and it looked like a dog but it was a monster." Her father sometimes listens and tries to comfort her but sometimes he snaps at her, saying "Those dreams aren't real! Do you hear me? They're not real so stop talking about them!" Any other time, her father never yells at her, even if she breaks something or talks back. Heather is in her teens before she realizes that most parents don't react that way to their children's nightmares.
She does try talking to her friends. When she is in the first grade she tells another little girl about a monster, a huge lumbering white thing that chases her while she desperately crawls away through a rusty tunnel. The dream is vivid and she describes it in detail: the cuts on her arms and knees dripping blood, the stench of the monster's flesh, its hands on her when it inevitably catches up to her. She is hoping that the other girl will tell her that everyone dreams like that. But instead her friend starts having nightmares about monsters too and her parents complain to the school about Heather. Harry tells her solemnly that he loves her very much but she should just play games with her friends like an ordinary little girl. Heather had thought that she was an ordinary little girl.
On other days Heather can't even get out of bed to clean. The nightmares have taken her over. She always tells her dad some lie about a stomach bug or a cold, and he always pretends to believe her. He calls her in sick to school, and Heather lies in bed wishing she were in her boring chemistry class, or even that she really were sick. But she isn't, she is just seeing the blood and rust and the creatures moving through it and this time even the cleaning won't be able to get it out of her head.
Sometimes the dreams are nice. She dreams of a delicate blond girl who plays games with her and tells her secrets that she can't quite remember when she wakes up. There's a nurse in some of her dreams, a pretty woman with red hair who keeps saying her father's name, Harry, and asking her if she hurts. Sometimes she dreams of a church with stained glass windows. She is praying there, waiting for some heavenly force to take her and the whole congregation to another place.
She tries going to church, to many different churches, some with subtle organ music, others with singing, even one where the people speak in tongues. She tries many religions, in fact, but the worship always seems empty and strange to her. The sermons and books all seem like made-up stories even though she doesn't know what the true story is either. She never gets the same feeling she does in her dreams, that the world is about to split open like an egg and everything will change. Eventually she stops going to church.
Heather doesn't tell her father about the nice dreams either. It upsets him, and in the end he always just tells her that dreams mean nothing and she shouldn't pay any attention to them. She is still young when she finally starts saying to her father that she doesn't ever remember her dreams. After all, she's lucky to have such a great dad, someone who loves her and buys her presents and is a writer instead of something boring like an accountant. He's always there for her and seems much nicer than her friends' fathers, except now and then when she tells him her dreams. Heather doesn't even mind usually that she doesn't have a mom.
And that's the other thing she can't talk about. She knows other children who don't live with their mothers, but they all have a mother and know who and where she is. Heather doesn't even have that much -- there are no photographs in her house of a lost mother, and her father never tells her stories about when she was born. When she asks, he says that her mother "has been gone for a long time" and tries to change the subject. Heather gets angry at first but in the end she stops trying to get him to talk about her.
For a while she thinks that her mother is dead, and that her father feels too much pain to discuss it. Other times she makes up stories, good ones and bad ones: her mother is secretly a spy, her mother is in another country with a new family, her mother is in prison. When the children at school ask she picks the latest story she has been telling herself and tells them that too. It confuses everyone, and after a while they stop asking about her family.
When she's older she fakes being ordinary as well as she can. She buys the same clothes as the other girls, and talks about the same music. After a while she makes a few friends, and she tells them, too, that she never remembers her dreams and that she doesn't like to talk about her mother. Her friends never pry too deeply, which Heather appreciates, but she also wonders if she can have any true friends when she has to hide her real fears from them.
Once, on one of the worst nights, Heather has a dream she's never had before. This dream is a horror far more painful then the others. Someone looms over her, and she knows it is her mother, the way one knows things in dreams. There are flames, and a dark house, and a voice saying "Let me burn." Rather than feeling comfort or a happy memory Heather feels terror.
After that dream she does ask her father, just one more time. He's working on some manuscript and when he can no longer pretend not to hear her he looks up. "Heather, please. I know it's hard for you to accept, but you must realize by now that you never really had a mother."
And Heather knows just enough to wish that were true.