We’re at the pool, but it’s not our regular pool, it’s more like a lake with rocks and big trees but not a lake, a pool, and it’s a bright sunny day and there are parents and kids playing everywhere and people with fancy drinks and it feels like a very chic hotel until the men come to round us up. They are wearing black helmets and black clothes and they have some sort of weapons and they don’t really threaten us but they make it clear that we have to go with them, right now.
The part of me that knows that this is a dream thinks that this is PRECISELY WHY I should always have a change of clothes in the pool bag. And then thinks what a stupid thing that is to worry about now.
They take us to some kind of detention center and we wind up in the infirmary, Wade and the boys and I, because apparently something is wrong with me although I feel fine, but Henry is coughing and coughing and Wade starts to worry because it can’t be good for him to be coughing, and I misunderstand why he is so worried and decide that I will ask the nurse for help because she seems kind or at least neutral and less frightening than the men at the pool and so I explain that my son has a cough and he was taking medicine for it but we don’t have it with us and she asks what kind of medicine and I say oh just an antibiotic and she stares at me with a completely blank face while Wade is hurrying the kids down the corridor because I have not understood that if Henry is sick they will take him away from us and we will never see him again and I watch them running down the hall and I see Charlie looking back at me while Wade pulls him along and I hear Henry coughing and coughing and coughing and I know that they will be looking for him now.
I wake up with a sick feeling in my stomach and hear Henry really coughing (he has terrible allergies or a little cold or something). I get up because I am afraid that if I go back to sleep the dream will start again and I don’t want to know what happens. I get water for Henry and he drinks it and then I lay down with him in his bed and he curls up next to me and closes his eyes and leans against me and goes to sleep, without coughing any more.