The Number in the Sun

The summer I turned thirty, I began to dream of a woman who was not my mother. She stood in a field of sunflowers, their heads bent as if in prayer, and she held up three fingers on her right hand. Behind her, a man with a face like a faded photograph watched from the shade of a lone oak. I knew they were my grandparents, though they had died decades before I was born. My grandmother had passed when I was a child, and my grandfather had left this world long before I existed, but their faces were as familiar as my own from the yellowed albums in my mother’s attic.

I was pregnant with my first child and due on the fifteenth of November. But the dream was insistent, and the numbers shifted each time: first three, then six, then nine. I woke with a certainty that I could not shake, and I told my husband, Mark, ‘She is coming on the twenty-first of September.’ I took time off work, rearranged the nursery, and waited with a conviction that bordered on obsession.

My cousin Elena, who was like a sister to me, was also pregnant, due in early August. She laughed at my certainty, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand as we sat on her porch, the cicadas screaming in the heat. ‘You’re just anxious, Ava. The dreams are your mind processing the changes. It’s nothing to be afraid of.’ But I could not let it go. I felt the number in my bones, in my blood, as if it had been written there before I was born.

On the morning of September twenty-first, I woke with a start, my hand on my belly. There was a pressure, a deep ache, and I knew she was coming. I called Mark, and we drove to the hospital under a sky the color of old bone. The labor was long and hard, and the hours blurred into a haze of pain and beeping machines. At 11:47 PM, my daughter was born, and as the nurse placed her in my arms, I counted her tiny fingers. There were ten. I counted again, and then I saw it: a small, round birthmark just behind her left ear, shaped like a perfect circle. The nurse smiled and said, ‘She’s a healthy little thing. Born at 11:47, a good time.’

But I was fixated on the birthmark. It was the same shape as the one my grandmother had in a photograph I remembered, a small circle on her cheek. I named my daughter Clara, after her.

The months passed in a blur of feedings and diaper changes, but the dreams did not stop. They changed. Now, Clara’s face appeared in the sunflower field, and the woman would reach out to touch it, her fingers leaving trails of black seeds. And the man behind her would raise his hand, revealing the number twenty-three on his palm. I woke gasping, my heart pounding, and I would go to Clara’s crib to find her sleeping peacefully, her small chest rising and falling like a tiny tide.

When Clara was nine months old, I received a call from Elena. Her voice was thick with tears. She had just given birth to a stillborn son, a boy she had named Peter. The funeral was held on a gray afternoon, and as I stood by the grave, I noticed the headstone behind hers: it was my grandmother’s, and her date of death was October twenty-third. I felt a chill race down my spine, and I knew that the dreams were not about a birth date at all.

After the funeral, I began to research my family’s history, digging through old letters and photographs. I discovered that my grandmother had died in a car accident on a road that was never built, and that my grandfather, who had been a pilot in the war, had perished in a plane crash on the exact same date, twenty years later. The number twenty-three appeared everywhere: in receipts, in license plates, in the time on the clock when I fed Clara at night. I started to write them down, and they formed a pattern I could not decipher.

One night, I woke to find Clara standing in her crib, her eyes wide open, even though she was too young to stand. She was pointing at the window, and when I looked, I saw a figure outside, a woman in a long coat, her face in shadow. She was holding up three fingers, and then she pointed at Clara, then at me. I ran to the window, but the yard was empty, and the streetlamps cast long, grasping shadows. When I turned back, Clara was lying down, asleep, as if nothing had happened.

The next day, I took Clara to the doctor’s office for a routine checkup. The waiting room was quiet, and I sat in a chair next to a window that overlooked a small park. Clara was on my lap, playing with a small toy, when I saw a figure in the park, a man in a dark suit, standing under a tree. He was staring at me, and he slowly raised his hand and showed me the number twenty-three written in black ink on his palm. I blinked, and he was gone.

I confronted Elena about it, hoping she might have some insight. She was still grieving, but she listened to my story with a strange look, and then she said, ‘You know, after the funeral, I had a dream about my grandmother. She was standing in a field of sunflowers, and she was holding a small, gray stone. She said, ‘For the girl who was not born.’ I asked her what it meant, but she just smiled and faded away.’

I could not shake the feeling that Clara was somehow connected to all of this, that her birth was not a coincidence but a message. On Clara’s first birthday, I held a small party in the backyard. The sky was clear, and the sunflowers I had planted were in full bloom, their faces turned to the sun. As I watched Clara tear at her cake, I felt a static in the air, and for a moment, the sunflowers all turned to face me, their dark centers like eyes. The number twenty-three appeared carved into the bark of a tree, as if it had always been there.

That night, I had the dream again, but this time it was different. The woman, my grandmother, stood close to me, and she spoke for the first time. Her voice was like dry leaves rustling. ‘She is not the first, and she will not be the last. The number is not a date, but a step.’ She pointed to her own chest, and I saw that her heart was glowing, a faint white light through her dress. ‘You have to let her go, so she can finish what I started.’

I woke in a cold sweat, and I knew that something was very wrong. I went to Clara’s room, and she was sitting up in her crib, perfectly still, her eyes fixed on the wall where the shadow of the window cast a distorted shape. As I approached, I saw that the shadow was of a woman, reaching out, and in the center of the wall, written in what looked like dust, were the numbers 23:23.

I scooped Clara into my arms and ran out of the house. I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew I couldn’t stay. I drove for hours, until the sun came up, and I found myself on a deserted road in the middle of nowhere. I pulled over, shaking, and looked at Clara. She was calm, her small hand wrapped around my finger. She pointed out the window, and I saw a tree that was somehow familiar. In the distance, there was a field of sunflowers, and I realized it was the field from my dreams.

I got out of the car, carrying Clara, and walked into the field. The sunflowers were tall, reaching above my head, and they swayed in a wind that only they could feel. In the center of the field, there was a clearing, and in the center of the clearing, there was a single stone, about two feet tall, with the number 23 carved into it. I knelt down, and Clara reached out and touched the number. The stone felt warm, and as her fingers made contact, I heard a voice, not from outside, but from inside my own head.

‘She has to stay. The circle must be closed.’

I looked at Clara, and her eyes were not a baby’s eyes. They were ancient, filled with a knowledge that made my blood curdle. And then, as if in a trance, she started to hum a lullaby, an old song my grandmother used to sing to me when I was a child. I had never hummed it to her, but she knew it perfectly.

I wanted to run, to take her and leave that place, but my body would not obey. The sunflowers closed in around us, and the sky turned a shade of purple I had never seen. Clara reached up and touched my face, and her fingers were cold, so cold. She said, ‘It’s time, Mama. She is waiting.’

And then I woke up. I was in my bed, in my own house, with Mark sleeping beside me. The clock on the nightstand read 3:33 AM. I ran to Clara’s room, and she was there, asleep, normal, her tiny chest rising and falling. I picked her up, held her close, and sobbed. I thought it was over, that the dream had passed.

But when I looked out the window, I saw the man in the dark suit again, standing under the streetlight. He raised his hand, and this time, I saw it clearly: the number was not 23. It was 24. And I felt a cold dread settle in my chest, because I knew that the numbers had only just begun to count.