The Last Dreamwalker, page 12
“I fine, child,” she said, more gently. “You find Aron?”
Lavender smiled, even as she studied her mother through narrowed eyes. “Did. Left him climbin’ trees up island.”
Gemma patted her daughter’s hand, waited for her to go lie by her sisters.
She stared up at the low, cracked ceiling. She’d gotten lost. Without even dreaming, she’d gotten lost.
From a deep corner of her memory, she heard Tuesday’s voice: “Ain’t no wide space ’tween dreams and madness.”
“I’s fine,” she whispered.
Above her in the shadows, faces, memories, formed then melted away, her eyes playing tricks. Unconsciously, she stroked the space on her left wrist as she recited the lineage. “Lavender, third daughter of Gemma. Gemma, third daughter of Tuesday. Tuesday, third daughter of Nola, a seer from over to Africaland. Dreamwalkers.”
Tears flowed unheeded down her face as she whispered into the darkness, “I’s a Dreamwalker.”
12
Scotia Island rose gradually from the sea, its grassy hills pocked with shoulder-high clumps of sea oats, their honey-colored frills bobbing in the light breeze. A narrow trail led upward from the dock, disappearing from sight in a clump of stubby trees at the crest of the dune. Sand stretched several yards on either side of the dock, forming a beach of sorts, before petering out into muddy flats. Layla grabbed hold of the wooden ladder attached to the dock and pulled herself out of the boat.
“How many people live out here?” she asked.
“Three, four dozen or so, full time. Maybe twice that still got places and come out time to time,” said Aunt Jayne. “The full timers’re mostly old folks.”
She pulled her bag from the boat. “Back in the day, school only went to eighth grade. Kids got ferried off island if they wanted more schoolin’.”
“Less and less young folks came home,” added Aunt Therese. “Even those that wanted to stay. Well…,” she sighed. “It just got harder and harder to make it out here. Oysterin’, fishin’ guide for rich folks maybe. Workin’ off island and commuting back and forth stretched folks thin. So…” Aunt Therese shrugged.
“Most folks stayed close though. Got small places in the Royal like Daddy, or maybe Charleston, Beaufort. Never far from their home place, their people,” said Aunt Jayne. “But some, well they traveled further.”
“Like Mom.”
The Aunts nodded.
“Like your momma,” agreed Aunt Therese.
Layla gazed at the island around her. A faint wind rustled the tall grass. Tiny brown birds on spindly legs ran jerkily along the water’s edge. She tried to imagine her mother here, standing knee deep in the cold, salty water, lying on the beach shoulder to shoulder with her sisters, the sun shining on their faces as gulls wheeled in the crystal-blue sky overhead.
“Charlotte never left?”
In the silence, she turned to find the Aunts gazing up the trail.
“No,” answered Aunt Therese.
“Why not?”
Aunt Jayne turned to look at her, her expression unreadable. “Charlotte just…” She sighed. “There wasn’t nothin’ off island for Charlotte.”
Once more, the two sisters exchanged a look, a silent conversation passing between them.
“Well,” Aunt Jayne said, finally. “Best start headin’ up ’fore it gets too hot.”
The trail leading to the top of the dune was steeper than it looked. Layla slipped again and again as she labored upward, the pluff mud on the soles of her sandals attracting the sand like a magnet. Almost immediately, her dress was damp with sweat. It clung to her thighs, her back, her buttocks. Something bit her near the shoulder, and she hissed. When she finally reached the top, she dropped to her knees and crawled gratefully into the shade of a stand of pine trees.
“Can you believe we used to run up and down these hills twenty times a day?”
Layla turned, watching in silent admiration as the Aunts slowly but steadily made their way up the hill behind her. More than four decades older, they seemed to be having less trouble navigating the trail than she had. They joined her in the shade of the trees, the ocean breeze washing up the sides of Scotia, leaving a fine salty glaze on their skin as it dried their sweat. From where they sat, the island rolled out in a palette of greens and blues, browns and golds.
Layla felt the familiar itching in her fingertips, that craving for her paints she felt whenever overtaken by the urge to capture an image on canvas. Below them, the sea rolled away from the island’s edge, first a brown-tinged gray, then silver, then blue. She inhaled the complicated fragrance of earth and sea into her lungs. “It’s beautiful here.”
“Yeah.” Aunt Jayne dabbed at her face with a handkerchief. “Sure can be.”
“How often do you come out here?”
“Not so often. Not anymore,” said Aunt Therese. “Way back when, we’d spend days and days out here. Would take the boat outta Port Royal for the oyster harvest in the fall and this place would be so full you couldn’t barely find a place to put in. Everybody was here: folks who grew up here, their kids, their kids’ kids. Good music. Good eatin’.”
She was silent for a long time. “It was somethin’,” she added finally.
Her sister, staring off across the wide expanse of water, said nothing. Layla studied the Aunts for a long moment.
“Aunt Terese, this Dreamwalker thing,” she said at last, breaking the silence. “Let’s say I believe it’s a real thing.”
She held up a hand as both Aunts leaned forward to protest.
“Wait, wait, wait! Okay, you gotta admit it’s … Let’s just say I believe it. I do. I mean, I think I do.” She shook her head. “But it doesn’t make any sense.”
“What doesn’t?” asked Aunt Therese.
Layla swallowed an incredulous laugh. None of it, she wanted to say. None of this made any sense. She tugged at her hair, wrestling with the questions that had been nagging at her since the Aunts had first told her the story in the jon boat. “Well, for starters, the whole third daughter thing. How does that work? I mean, Mom was Granny Bliss’s third daughter and I assume Granny Bliss was…”
“Gracious…,” supplied Aunt Jayne.
“Excuse me?”
“Gracious,” said Aunt Jayne, nodding. “Gracious Johnson. Momma’s momma.”
“O … kay,” said Layla slowly. “But how could Charlotte and Momma both be the third daughter of a third daughter. Granny Bliss was the third daughter, right? Not Charlotte’s mother. Mercy? And what about me? I’m an only daughter.”
Aunt Therese reached into her bag, pulling out a slender bottle of ginger ale, condensation coating the glass. Layla took the offered soda, shivering as her hand wrapped around the near-frozen glass.
“That’s the mystery, isn’t it?” said Aunt Therese. “How things start. How things change. All those ripples that seem so small at that time but…” She stopped, sighed.
“Siamese twins,” said Aunt Jayne. “That’s when we think things changed. When the Siamese twins came.”
“Conjoined,” murmured her sister.
“What?”
“Conjoined,” said Aunt Therese. “Not supposed to say Siamese anymore. Supposed to say conjoined twins now.”
Aunt Jayne stared at her sister, her lips pursed in annoyance.
Layla sat staring, the soda frozen partway to her lips.
“Anyway,” said Aunt Jayne, rolling her eyes. “Momma and Aunt Bliss were born Sia … conjoined twins.”
“I don’t…” Layla closed her eyes, opened them. She pressed the icy bottle to her cheek. “I don’t understand.”
“Conjoined,” said Aunt Therese. “You know. When babies born connected to each other.”
“I know what…” Layla dropped the soda into the sand and leaped to her feet.
She stood for a long moment, looking from one aunt to the other as confusion and shock slid slowly into anger. She felt the heat of it crawling up her neck and into her face.
Layla turned away and bent, hands on her knees, breathing hard. This woman, her mother, was more of a stranger than she could have ever imagined. She felt something crumple then collapse inside her.
“What the fuck,” she muttered.
And then she laughed, the sound harsh and ugly. She felt herself empty out, could almost see her pain, a thick and oily mass, spewing into the damp, hot air. Aunt Therese reached to stroke her back, and Layla recoiled.
“No,” she snarled, the laughter abruptly cut off. “No.”
She straightened and stared off at the silver water, the only sound that of birdcall from the trees behind them. She stood there for a long time before finally turning to face them.
“Why?” she said. “Why keep all this a secret? The island. Her family. I don’t understand.”
There were tears glistening in Aunt Therese’s eyes. “We don’t know, baby.”
Layla blinked, then slowly moved back into the shade of the pines, slumping onto the sand. “What happened to the twins? Why did that change things?” she asked, her voice flat.
“When Momma and Aunt Mercy were born, Grandaddy Finn, your great-grandaddy, bundled them into the bottom of his oyster boat and carried them off quick quick to Beaufort. White doctors told him nothin’ to be done,” said Aunt Jayne. “Told him take ’em home and let ’em die peaceful.”
“But they didn’t die,” said her sister. “And they kept not dyin’ and not dyin’, until folks started hopin’ for some kinda miracle.”
Layla wrapped her arms around her knees and pictured her great-grandparents hoping, praying for a miracle, day after day, for the miracle that might save their babies.
“What happened?” she murmured.
“Island folk prayed over those baby girls night and day. Anointin’ them with sweet oil to keep their little bodies soft,” said Aunt Therese, her voice barely above a whisper.
“And then peculiar things started happenin’.” Aunt Jayne was staring into the distance, a faint smile on her lips. “Folks all over Scotia started complainin’ of headaches. Strange dreams, the same one over and over.”
“What dream?”
“Every night, at dusk. Just as the sun was dropping below the horizon, a woman would come walking out the forest. A big woman. Naked as a jaybird. Folks said she looked familiar. Like somebody they oughta know. But no one could quite place her,” Aunt Therese answered quietly. “They said that in the dream, the naked woman would walk right to the edge of the sea and just stand there until a huge black bird appeared in the sky. A raven. First one. Then another. And another. Until the whole sky was filled with black birds, blockin’ out the setting sun. Screechin’ so loud they drowned out the sea.”
Layla’s mouth went dry. “Black birds?”
Aunt Therese nodded. “Hundreds of them. Thousands. They dove at that naked woman, and she stared up at them like she was darin’ them to come for her, darin’ them to attack. And they got close. Comin’ at her face over and over, before veerin’ off at the very last minute.”
“What happened?” Layla asked again, her voice hoarse.
“They say that just before the sun sank below the horizon and everything went dark, that woman, that woman nobody could quite place, threw her head back and screamed like some kinda demon. The sound just horrible. Like maybe she was talkin’ back to all those birds. And then they say those birds surrounded her like a big, black tornado, whirlin’ and screeching, ’til couldn’t no one see her. They whirled and whirled. And when they finally flew off, that woman was gone.”
“Layla? Baby?”
Layla blinked. The Aunts were standing, bending over her, their round faces pinched with concern, and she realized it wasn’t the first time they’d called her name.
“You feelin’ alright?” asked Aunt Jayne.
For a long moment she didn’t answer as an image played in her mind: black birds slamming into the back door of her mother’s house, the screen pulling loose, the deafening cawing, furious, dangerous.
“Here, baby, drink your ginger ale,” said Aunt Therese. “This heat sneaks up on you if you not careful.”
Layla reached for the bottle, her hands shaking, and took two large gulps.
“What happened to the babies?” she asked.
“Well, they lived didn’t they or we wouldn’t be sittin’ here.” Aunt Jayne chuckled. “Momma and Aunt Mercy kept right on livin’ and growin’.”
Aunt Therese placed her hands on her broad hips and stretched with a grunt. “Turns out what connected their two bodies was just a thick piece of skin. As they got bigger, the place that held them together started drying up—like some kinda strange umbilical cord. One night, the dreams, the one with the naked lady and the ravens, just stopped. Next morning, when Grandaddy Finn went to pick them babies up, there they were layin’ face-to-face, and separate as you and me.”
Layla gaped.
“Only thing showin’ they ever been connected at all was this dark line on the middle of their chest that they both had ’til the day they died,” added Aunt Jayne. She stood slowly and stepped from the meager shade back onto the crest of the hill. “We best be gettin’ a move on if we want to see any fair amount of this island today.”
“But … the change. What changed?” asked Layla, not moving. “How can there be two third daughters?”
Aunt Jayne turned to face her. “You don’t see?”
Layla shook her head.
“Conceived together in the womb. Formed from one egg. Born joined together. Living as one, all those months. They were both, Momma and Aunt Mercy, the third of three. Both third daughters. Both with the power to dreamwalk, even after they separated.”
Layla held herself motionless, afraid to breathe.
“But bound to each other, connected all that time. Something happened,” said her aunt. “The power changed. The way it changed in Nola when she came to this island. Different, stronger. Charlotte’s aunt Mercy’s third daughter.” She shook her head, her mouth set in a hard line. “And now there’s you.”
The hair stood up on Layla’s arms and she shivered. Yes, she thought, scanning the trees uneasily, and now there’s me.
* * *
The trail flattened out as it wove its way through the trees. In some places it was barely a foot wide, gray moss brushing their faces as it dangled from the tree branches, in other places, opening wide so that Layla saw flashes of lagoons and estuaries sparkling through the foliage. The air was thick with heat, insects forming a translucent cloud around their heads as they walked.
Layla plodded behind the Aunts in silence, replaying over and over the Aunts’ story, struggling to make it fit everything she knew about … everything. Granny Bliss, whom she knew only from the few photos on her parents’ mantel.
Conjoined twins.
Dreamwalkers.
The dream of ravens.
She gave an involuntary shudder.
She was so focused on her thoughts that it wasn’t until she walked into the back of Aunt Therese that she realized they’d come to a stop.
They were standing beneath a stand of loblolly pines that opened onto a small meadow. To her left, another trail led to a thickly wooded area before disappearing into the shadows within. To her right, she could just make out the deep sound that fed into the Atlantic. Directly in front of them, perched atop a low hill, stood what appeared to be the ruins of a large house. Nearly completely overgrown, rotted timbers jutted toward the sky like javelins, the red brick remains of the two chimneys scattered in piles at either end, honeysuckle vines snaking their way through the remaining mortar.
“What’s this place?”
“This is … was Ainsli Green,” said Aunt Therese.
Layla inhaled sharply, shivering despite the bright, hot sun overhead. “This is Ainsli Green?”
She break covenant and take me dreams? She want to take Ainsli Green?
Aunt Therese nodded. “Ruins of the old rice plantation that used to be here long long back.”
“The papers in the folder said it’s supposed to be haunted.”
“White folks think so,” replied Aunt Jayne, laughing. “More’s the better for us.”
“Really?” Layla frowned. “Why’s that?”
“White folks come from all over. Try’n to take what they got no rights to take. Buildin’ fancy hotels. Raisin’ taxes,” said Aunt Jayne. Her voice was hard. “Not just on Scotia. All over the Gullah. Disappear us so they can have themselves another Hilton Head. They think us haunted. Good. They stay away then.”
“But is it true? That stuff about what happened to the developers who came out here?” asked Layla. “The stuff they said in the papers?”
Aunt Jayne shrugged. “Ain’t nobody studyin’ them white folks and their nonsense,” she said with a snort. “For all we know, they ran off somewhere with their mistress. Or maybe they hidin’ out ’cause they were cheating their partners. Easier to blame it on ghosts and crazy Black folks than admit they doin’ what rich, white folks always doin’.”
Layla gave a sputtering laugh. Shaking her head, she walked slowly toward the ruin.
“Careful now,” Aunt Therese called after her.
The house appeared to have been built on the highest part of the island. From where Layla stood, she could see the land sloping in stair-step fashion all the way to the sea, the indigo water fusing with the sapphire sky.
Besides the chimney and shattered timbers, little was left of the house, though the ruins hinted at the solidity of the structure that had once stood on the site. Crumbling stone steps led up to nowhere. A dwarf orange tree grew in a corner of what may have once been the front parlor. Though no one had inhabited this place for many decades, Layla couldn’t shake the sense that she was trespassing. She could feel the Aunts watching her from the shadow of the loblolly pines as she picked her way along the remnants of the drive that ringed the perimeter of the ruins.
Halfway around, she stopped. The ground at her feet was littered with nutshells. And there, standing several yards away, was a lone pecan tree. It was old, reaching nearly a hundred feet into the air, its crooked branches heavy with dark green leaves. Still too early for pecans, the furry, yellow-green tassels of the pecan flowers swayed in the sea breeze.
