The Last Dreamwalker, page 15
“What the actual hell was that?”
Aunt Jayne, several feet ahead, went rigid, not turning, not speaking. A second passed, a single breath of time, then, without a word, she climbed down into the boat, taking her place at the tiller.
Layla turned, locking eyes with Aunt Therese. “They hated each other,” she said, more statement than question.
“Wasn’t always like that,” murmured Aunt Therese. She glanced at her sister who sat in the stern of the boat, staring off into the distance. “Once, they was like two halves of the same person. Always together.”
She climbed down the short ladder and settled herself into the boat. Layla hesitated, glancing over her shoulder back toward the island before following.
“Charlotte ’bout two years older than your momma. Always a little peculiar,” Aunt Therese went on after a moment. “Sickly, screaming all the time. Didn’t nobody know what to do with her. Wore Aunt Mercy clear out.”
As her sister spoke, Aunt Jayne fired up the motor and pointed the boat toward open water. Overhead, a white heron took flight.
“Then Elinor came along.” Aunt Therese raised her voice to carry over the sound of the motor. “Couldn’t nobody explain it. Only body could get Charlotte to settle. Aunt Mercy started bringin’ her by the house just so Charlotte’d go to sleep for a bit. Elinor the only one on this whole island could get that girl to eat, to mind.”
Water sprayed Layla’s face, cooling her. She tasted salt on her tongue.
“All the way up through high school. Charlotte was your momma’s shadow. Never saw one without the other,” Aunt Therese went on. “Summer before your momma left for college, somethin’ … changed.”
“What?” asked Layla, leaning toward her.
Aunt Therese shrugged.
“Asked them once,” said Aunt Jayne, speaking for the first time since walking away from the Old Place. “Elinor said everything was fine. Charlotte didn’t say nothin’. But somethin’ was different. They were different. Elinor got quiet and Charlotte got … mean.”
Aunt Therese opened her mouth as if she wanted to say more, then seemed to think better of it. She pulled her rucksack close and hunched low in her seat. The three women rode the rest of the way home in silence.
* * *
“Thank you,” said Layla as they walked into the foyer. “For taking me out there.”
“Welcome,” said Aunt Jayne. She gave a tight smile. “I’m a go lie down for a bit. Feelin’ a little worn.”
“Want some tea?” asked Aunt Therese after her sister’d gone up.
Layla nodded and followed her into the kitchen.
“I hated her too,” Layla murmured.
Aunt Therese froze, pitcher held in midpour, her expression stricken.
“I mean, she was my mother and I loved her, but…” Layla rubbed her face. “But it was so hard with her. Everything was just so hard.”
“Oh, sugar.” Aunt Therese slid into the chair across from her and reached for her hand. Layla pulled away.
“I don’t … You have no idea what it’s like. Growing up thinking something’s wrong with you. And all the while…” Layla’s voice trailed off.
She sat for a long moment in the warm kitchen, jaw clenched, poking at the ice in her glass with one finger.
Aunt Therese sighed. “She loved you, baby. No, no she did. All she wanted … She just wanted … I don’t know. Something else. To be something else. Someone else. Normal. No dreamwalking. No island. Just … normal. After she had you, the one daughter, she thought she had everything she could ever want then. The fine man, the fancy job. And then you…”
She sighed again, sagging in her seat.
Layla laughed, a harsh, broken sound. “Do you think she thought I could be cured? That if she ignored what was happening it would just … stop? Like a bad habit? Like thumb sucking or cursing or something?”
She laughed again, but there was no humor in it. Part of her hoped that was true. Maybe she could forgive her mother—a little—if she could believe her mother was trying to help her, was doing her best.
“Oh, sugar, I don’t know.” Aunt Therese reached for Layla’s hand again and this time Layla let her take it. “Hope is a powerful thing, but it can blind folks to some pretty big truths.”
“Hope?” asked Layla. “Or denial?”
Aunt Therese flinched, sighed. “I think I’ll go up for a bit too. You?”
Layla shook her head.
Her aunt stood for a minute, gazing through the back kitchen window. “We got a fair bit of your momma’s stuff in the shed out yonder if you want to take a look.”
Layla looked up, surprised.
“Couldn’t never bring ourselves to throw it out. No idea what’s out there. Mice might a got to everything by now.” She turned to look at her niece. “Might want to wait for the sun to go down a bit though. Be cooler.”
She studied Layla a moment longer, emotions playing across her face, then walked from the kitchen.
* * *
Near the tree line at the back of the property stood a small shed, just visible through the sheets fluttering on the line. It was the same shade of blue as the house, though it seemed to have had a more recent coat of paint. Pink, white, and violet sweet peas climbed a rusted trellis that leaned against one wall, scenting the air with their perfume. Late afternoon had brought clouds, but the air was still heavy and warm.
The lock hung loose, and as Layla pulled open the wooden door, the smell of oil and grass and dust assailed her. The only light came from the small, dirt-grimed windows, but it was enough to see that the shed was crammed top to bottom. There were garden tools, bits and pieces of several bicycles, two ancient-appearing push mowers, shelves overflowing with jars, some empty, others filled with nails and screws of various sizes, a wheelbarrow, a leaning pyramid of old paint cans, wooden fruit boxes, a stained mattress.
Layla played her flashlight over the space, the drifting dust sparkling like stars. There was nothing here that looked like it might belong to her mother. She was backing out when her light caught a low, tarp-covered mound in the corner nearest the door. She peeled back the tarp, coughing as gritty dust exploded into the air.
Two cardboard boxes were stacked neatly atop a battered suitcase, their corners crumbled and mouse chewed. On the side of the top box was written “Elinor.”
Layla carefully dragged the boxes out onto the grass. She sat for a long time in the warm grass, the sky turning shades of gold and orange above her in the waning afternoon. The past weeks had been full of so many revelations about her mother, not all of them pleasant, and she felt a shiver of nervousness at what these boxes might uncover.
“Alright, girl,” she muttered. She took a deep breath. “We got this.”
Slowly, she pried open the first box and the smell of mothballs filled her nose. She ran a hand over threadbare sweaters and dry-rotted shirts, her heart thudding hard, surprised at the surge of emotion. Her mother had worn these things long before she was anyone’s mother. She picked up an empty perfume bottle and held her nose close, hoping to catch a scent of the young Elinor. But there was nothing.
There were mildewed textbooks and old school assignments, her mother’s faded handwriting loopier, more girlish, than it would become later. Layla took her time, savoring each object as if it might hold the key to her mother, to the things she was coming to know about the woman who would become her mother.
In the second box, beneath a Howard University sweatshirt, was a stack of old newspapers and National Geographic magazines. Sitting neatly atop the stack were two wooden cigar boxes, the word “CHURCHILL” burned into the wood.
She opened the closest one to find a wild jumble, postcards held together with twine or brittle rubber bands: the Statue of Liberty, the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, Niagara Falls. Most bore postmarks from four, five decades past, the signatures nearly worn away. But there were a few where she could see the addressee: Charlotte Fortenberry.
As Layla rummaged through the cigar box, sorting through the contents, she felt an echo of familiarity. There were matchbooks advertising the Roostertail supper club in Detroit, the Four Queens Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, flyers from gas stations and universities and bowling alleys.
She inhaled sharply, realization striking her.
This was exactly like the Adventure box. Less organized and more haphazard perhaps, but otherwise, it was simply a shabbier version of the box that sat in the back of the closet in her mother’s house. Were these trips her mother had made? And with who?
There were photos, dozens and dozens of photos. Mostly black and white and nearly all of the same two girls. Sometimes together. Usually alone. She plucked one from the center of the box. The photo showed two girls, maybe ten or eleven, their arms draped across each other’s shoulders, standing in water to their knees.
The taller one was grinning, her free hand up, as if waving to whoever held the camera. The other girl was shorter, skin a shade lighter, lean. She was smiling, too, but she seemed more hesitant. She was turned slightly away from the camera, a half step behind the other girl, as if trying to disappear into her shadow.
Layla gasped, pulling the picture closer. The girl in the picture was Charlotte—Charlotte as a young girl—but unmistakably Charlotte. The young Charlotte had the same wide face, the same wiry build. And the girl next to her, the girl with the exuberant, gap-toothed grin, was Elinor Hurley. Her mother.
“Holy crap!” she whispered.
She opened the other cigar box. In picture after picture, there was Charlotte and her mother, her mother and Charlotte: dragging driftwood down a beach, sitting on a log beside a fire, on a porch swing. They were very young in some of the pictures, grade-school-aged with scuffed knees and wild, unkempt pigtails, in others they were teenagers, easily recognizable as the women they would become.
In every picture, her mother faced the camera, head thrown back in laughter, or mugging for the photographer, eyes crossed, tongue stuck out; and then there was Charlotte, always just a quarter step in Elinor’s background.
Layla touched a finger to one of the photos. Her mother hung upside down by her knees from a tree branch, blouse falling free exposing her smooth, brown belly, mouth open in obvious joy. Layla traced her mother’s face, barely able to reconcile this wide-eyed, laughing girl with the fierce, driven, everything-in-its-place woman she knew.
“I remember that.”
Startled, Layla jerked, nearly spilling the contents of the cigar box into the grass. Aunt Jayne stood over her, gazing at a picture that lay in Layla’s lap, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. Layla looked down. Her mother, eyes swollen, bandage covering one side of her forehead, was grinning, two fingers held up in a peace sign for the camera.
“I am too fat for this.” Aunt Jayne groaned, dropping into the grass beside Layla. She picked up the picture. “Elinor ever tell you how she got that scar on her forehead?”
Layla shook her head. At one point, she and her brothers had all asked about the moon-shaped scar at their mother’s hairline, but the only answer they ever got was that it came from “having more nerve than sense.”
“Well, your momma read this story in school ’bout some boy that wanted to fly, so he made himself some wings. But they were made out of wax and when he flew too near the sun, the wings melted off and he ended up fallin’ out the sky. Your momma said, ‘What kinda jack-eyed idiot makes wings outta wax?’”
Aunt Jayne studied the picture, chuckling softly. “Next thing we know, Charlotte’s screamin’ bloody murder out in the yard and your momma’s up on the roof of the house.”
She shook her head. “Elinor had got Momma’s best bedsheets and strapped them to a bunch of pine branches, then lashed that whole mess to her arms with Daddy’s dress belt. Quicker’n you could say get your fanny down here, that fool jumps.”
Layla gaped at her aunt. “That did not happen.”
Aunt Jayne laughed out loud. “Oh yes, ma’am, it happened just like that. That idiot girl flappin’ her arms all the way down. Thank the baby Jesus, she landed in a pile of brush Daddy had stacked by the house to burn. Still managed to gash her head wide open. Couldn’t nobody believe she didn’t kill herself. After her head healed up, Momma tried to beat the black off her … for all the good that did.”
Layla was laughing. Her mother made wings out of branches and bedsheets and jumped off Granny Bliss’s roof? Her brothers would never believe it.
“Momma made Charlotte swear to tell anytime Elinor started even thinkin’ about some foolishness that was liable to end up with one a them dead. Charlotte swore, but there wasn’t no stoppin’ your momma. And truth be told, I believe the crazier the ideas your momma got, the better Charlotte liked it.”
Layla lifted a handful of matchbooks. “What’s this all about?”
“Oh goodness. I haven’t thought about those in years,” said Aunt Jayne softly, her expression darkening. “Didn’t even realize all this was still out here.”
She shook her head.
“Lord, those two would sit for hours clippin’ pictures outta magazines, talkin’ about the places they was gonna go when they grew up. All the amazin’ sights in the world. The Eiffel Tower, the pyramids in Egypt.”
She picked up the cigar box, staring at it for a long time. “They were gonna ride camels and climb mountains. Leave Scotia behind and have big adventures together. Anytime anybody left Scotia they’d bring those girls back a little somethin’. Matchbooks, playbills, napkins, or some such and they’d add it to their collection.”
She was quiet as she gazed at the picture of her youngest sister, grinning at the camera despite her injuries.
“But then something happened,” said Layla softly.
“Something happened,” echoed Aunt Jayne, not looking up.
“It must have been really bad.”
“Yes,” agreed her aunt. “For the life of me, I can’t even imagine what could possibly have turned those two against each other.” Her aunt sighed. “But it must have been something hellacious. Getting late,” she said, struggling to her feet. “Come on in for supper.”
“In a minute,” said Layla.
Aunt Jayne stood staring down at the pictures, the postcards a moment longer, then headed to the house.
Layla pushed the cardboard boxes back into the shed. As she swept the postcards, letters, and pictures into the cigar boxes to take into the house, one picture caught her eye. Charlotte and her mother were older, possibly late teens. They were sitting on a pile of bricks, the ruins of the Ainsli Green manor house recognizable in the background.
Her mother’s hands were folded demurely in her lap, the broad, mischievous grin from earlier photos replaced by the tight, closed-mouth smile that Layla had known her whole life. Her hair, which in nearly every other photo had been an exuberant frizz, had been straightened and was pulled back from her face with a yellow headband.
Charlotte, crouching a few feet away and nearly out of frame, was staring at her cousin, her expression a mask of rage.
Layla felt the hair rise on the back of her neck. What was the thing that had happened between her mother and her cousin? Shivering, she closed the box.
16
High above, the sky stretched an endless robin’s-egg blue, the sun bleaching sea and sand to shades of silver and white.
She was on Scotia Island. Far below, tiny sandpipers scurried along the beach.
Layla frowned. Was someone crying? Following the sound, she found herself back near the ruins of Ainsli Green, and there, standing several yards away, were her mother and Charlotte. Somehow, Layla realized, she had entered Charlotte’s dream and instinctively clung to the shadows of the loblolly grove.
It was her mother who was crying. Head bowed, she was wearing a white blouse and white skirt, her hair wild around her head. Charlotte stood in front of her, holding a steaming cup.
“Drink this, Elinor. You need to drink this.”
Layla’s mother shook her head. “I can’t.”
“You can.” Charlotte forced the cup into Elinor’s hand. “He did this thing to you. This will make it alright. Like before. You and me. Everything be just like before.”
Elinor, still sobbing, took the cup and drank. As Layla watched, a stain, dark maroon, appeared and began to slowly spread across the front of her mother’s white skirt. Layla gasped. Blood. She could smell it in the air. Even as her mother’s cries dissolved into hiccupping moans, the stain grew larger.
And then it was night. They were on the beach, the full moon reflecting bright off the water. Shaken, Layla held herself still. Her mother and Charlotte were only a few yards away, but they seemed oblivious to her presence. Her mother, still wearing the same blood-soaked skirt, was staring out over the water, her anger palpable even from a distance.
“Elinor?” Charlotte sounded uncertain, frightened.
“He did this thing. You said that. And you were right,” said Elinor, her voice hard, barely recognizable. “Justice is not a sin.”
She held out one hand. Charlotte hesitated for a long moment, then took it, and the two girls turned toward the trees lining the beach. Seconds later, a man emerged onto the sand. He was young, well built. Barefoot and shirtless, he was carrying a gun, and Layla unconsciously took a step back.
“Elinor?” Charlotte said again, her voice cracking.
But Layla’s mother said nothing, merely clasped her cousin’s hand and watched as the man made his way down to the water’s edge.
Layla frowned. Something was off in the way the man moved, in the way he carried his rifle. Almost as if he was … sleepwalking.
Alarm spiraled through her.
This was wrong.
Something about this was very wrong.
Layla stepped forward. To call a warning. To intervene. To …
Whatever her intention had been, it was forever lost as the man walked to the water’s edge, placed the gun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.
