The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

by Griffin Dunne

He awoke to see Dominique sitting at the foot of the bed. Alex described her as not ghostly but three-dimensional, and though the bedroom was dark, the moon illuminated her face, hands, and even the buttons on the cotton shirt she wore. He wanted to reach out and touch her, but didn’t for fear she would go away. “Alex,” she said to him, “I’m okay, everything is fine with me, but I’m worried about you. I need you to hold it together. I can’t move on if you start flipping out and worrying Mom. She needs you to be strong, and so do I.” Alex told me the next morning that he promised her he would, and how they continued talking well into the night. I knew he’d gone to bed sober, and never doubted for a moment that his visitation was real. It was so like Dominique to appear only to Alex, because even though he had been surprisingly strong, she worried he might not hold on much longer and that the only person he’d listen to would be his little sister. And she was right. Alex was far from saddened or disturbed by their conversation; in fact, her visit seemed to bring him peace. He took a risk in telling me what happened, because I might have thought him crazy, and when I didn’t, he decided not to push his luck by telling anyone else. What I didn’t tell him was that I felt shamefully envious that Dominique hadn’t come to me.