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Maddy doesn't remember the dream.
Not exactly, at least. Not the way that Aunt Sarah does (or anyone else in Twin Peaks, apparently), where if she just closed her eyes, she would see it again, every detail there in her head waiting to be relived. She doesn't even really remember the general shape of the dream: who was where, doing what. She certainly can't give an accounting of every word that was said, or the details of someone's face. Her dreams have just never been that way.
But she does remember it. The dream. She remembers enough to call it that, enough that she never went back to sleep that night, nor the next, watching the ceiling cycle from dark to light as the line between the calendar days was erased, then getting up that next day to a phone call saying her cousin was killed. She remembers the feeling hanging over her the whole bus ride to Twin Peaks. She remembers being afraid to fall asleep that next night in the Palmers' guest room, only to be out like a light for a deep and dreamless eight hours exactly.
More than that, it's clear that some deep part of her remembers at least enough to recognize it in bits and pieces, day to day. That first moment in the morning, when she gets to the stairs and the room seems to sway, she remembers.
It's a shape writhing in the carpet. It's the scrub of plastic against her face, burning her cheek. It's fever and the shriek of an echo in a silent house, screaming and a needle under her fingernail. She remembers it in her sleep, wakes up tasting blood and realizing she can't remember the walls of her own apartment. The world where she doesn't live in a guest room. Where she watches TV and has a closet full of shoes. The place with a million little pieces of who she is day to day that now she can't remember the shape of.
She— It's stupid, but ever since she got to Twin Peaks, Maddy has been missing this one necklace, a gold thing with a flat disk of amber and the thinnest chain in the world, like air. It was one of her favorites, forgotten in the rush of the news about Laura, on the heels of that awful dream she had. She knew exactly where she left it: bottom drawer of her jewelry box, on the corner of her dresser. She remembered exactly how it stuck to her bare skin, how it looked in the mirror over her turtleneck. She wore it to work, to class, to the grocery store, to sleep. And now she can't remember the shape of it. She wore it almost every day since graduation and she can't remember what it looks like. As if the world outside this town faded out of existence with every passing hour, out in the morning fog, receding into nonexistence. All that's left is the shape in the carpet. The fever on her cheek.
She decides she has to get back to Montana long before she says anything about it. It's heartbreaking to leave James and Donna, when it's all still so fresh, but the Palmer house is like growing into a mold that's too small, like those Japanese watermelons they grow into cubes. Stunted into exact right angles. Bursting at the perfect seams. She feels it more and more, every day, how Laura went mad here. Her hairspray and perfume, her claw marks in the bannister, her school books still sitting on a side table in the living room where Aunt Sarah couldn't bear to touch them. Her angry ghost in the walls, her shape vibrating at the top of the stair.
There's another shape now, at the bottom of the stairs. Maddy passes it whenever she leaves the house, enters, goes anywhere. The guest room at the top of the stairs drives her over that threshold every morning and every night, shivering like someone walked over her grave. It's a phrase she wouldn't have thought twice about before coming here. She never would've thought twice about it. She thinks about it a lot now. Someone walking over Laura's grave. Dirt and flowers, bedding for a dead girl. Better than plastic tarp. Her father's body on the coffin.
They'd printed a photo of the crime scene in one of the less than reputable magazines at the checkout, when Maddy stopped downtown on her way into Twin Peaks. That is, the first crime scene. Where they found her. All you could see was a big rock and the ruffle of stiff plastic sheets (at least, on the cover, though the lurid text bubbles around promised more inside) but it was enough. It was more than enough. Maddy felt it that first night in her sleep, dreaming she was in bed as she was but with the duvet replaced with the same plastic sheet. It was cold and stiff and smelled like gas, and Maddy felt every inch of her body writhing, revolting at the contact, crawling across her skin. It took a forty minute shower to scrub the feeling off in the morning, and then another twenty minutes after she realized she used the body wash that was undoubtedly Laura's. Maddy knows, because her sheets still smell like it. The mix of vanilla rose is as bad as gasoline to her now, and it fills her dreams too.
That's the morning she decides to go back to Montana. She won't tell anyone, not for a little while, but that's when she decides. And Maddy packs her suitcase as quietly as possible, thinking about what she left behind in her closet with every shirt and sweater: all her books, her dishes, her necklace. TVs that play more than one soap opera. Chinese takeout. Things that don't fit in Twin Peaks.
And the shape at the bottom of the stairs writhes. And the dream comes on again.