6. From the dream journal of Cassandra Whelan
6
FROM THE DREAM JOURNAL OF CASSANDRA WHELAN
Last night I dreamed of home. The day Dad died.
It wasn’t home yet to me. It wouldn’t be until Mom left for good. Then it was still the place we lived while Dad was away. The place Mom—Sibyl—was forced to go because we couldn’t stay at a base anymore. The place she hated more than anything else.
I was in the living room folding laundry while she was fussing with something in the kitchen. Gran was somewhere else. I don’t remember where. The garden, maybe, or out in the orchard talking to her trees.
“Pick up the towel, and do it right. I don’t want to have to ask you again.”
Sibyl always said that like it would make a difference. She was still fiery back then, a red-haired flame against the dark woods and gray slate of the kitchen.
She always burned a little too brightly, even when she scowled.
I just kept arguing. “You can’t See that sort of thing. You told me so yourself.”
“I didn’t have to See what you were doing. It was more than obvious that you’d rather watch the surf than do your chores.”
Then it was my turn to scowl. No matter what I did, it was never good enough. Even with things—like laundry—that she never seemed to do it herself. A great injustice to thirteen-year-old me.
The argument continued. I know it word for word even now.
“If you had just let me go surfing this morning like I wanted, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” I sneered, though I was already refolding the towel.
“And what am I, your chauffeur? Between swim team and school, I spend half my life carting you up and down the 101. Now I have to do it on the weekends too so you can frolic with the sharks? The gods know I’d have never had children if I’d known they would turn me into a bus driver.”
The same argument we had constantly for the last year. Ever since Dad had received his orders to go to Baghdad and made Mom bring me here instead of staying on the base.
Manzanita wasn’t Pendleton. Fifty degrees most of the year instead of seventy-five. The average age of the sleepy town’s three hundred and sixty full-time residents was sixty. But at least I still had the ocean, and now she was threatening that too.
“Who cares!” I tossed a folded towel onto the sofa. It fell to the ground. “It’s not like you do anything anyway.”
“Cassandra!”
“Well, you don’t. If he were here, Dad would take me surfing. He’d probably go with me.”
“Do you have any idea how spoiled you sound right now? Your father is off fighting a war, and you can’t even deal with folding a couple of towels.”
“That’s because there’s no point. They’re just going to get used and rumpled all over again. We should just hang them up.”
“Cassandra, I swear to the goddess, I’m in no mood for this right now. If you don’t shut that mouth of yours, I’ll?—”
“You’ll what? Practice a little voodoo on me? Make me think I’m a frog? Yeah, I’ve been listening to those threats for years. You don’t have the guts or the talent.”
Silence suddenly yawned across the house. The back of my neck pricked with tension as I looked away, away, away from the fire in my mother’s eyes. When I finally did have the guts to look at her again, she had crossed the room to sit next to me.
She reached out a hand. I flinched as if she had threatened to hit me.
“You wouldn’t,” I whispered.
“Wouldn’t I?” The fingers edged closer.
“I’ll tell Gran.” My voice was unsteady as I watched their progress. “She said seers don’t do that.”
“That’s right. ‘The world’s conscience.’” A joke to Sibyl. She got along with her mother as well as I got along with her.“Well, Penny is not your mother. She is not the one who has to teach her impossible child some respect.”
“This is Gran’s house, not yours,” I said, though my bravado was draining. “You don’t make the rules. She does. You’re just her daughter, same as I am to you. Except you’re a terrible mother. And a terrible seer. You’re nothing, you’re pathetic, you’re?—”
My mother gasped, sharp and pained. Her eyes rolled back into her head, and her thin, stark form began to shake. Her hand latched around my wrist with the jab of a snake bite. And a vision—my first vision—lanced through my mind, as violent as a stake.
The beach was gone. The house disappeared. I was standing on a street where the light was yellow, the air was filled with dust, and people were running, screaming, between buildings as gunfire peppered overhead.
Behind me, a tank roared.
“Whelan!” a man’s voice shouted. “Move!”
The street disappeared. I was back in the house, keeled over the couch while my mother stood, milk white and shaking in the middle of the room.
“What was that?” I demanded. “What just happened?”
Her eyes were still white where the pupils should have been. Her mouth opened in an O of silent pain.
Behind me, the creaky French doors leading to the kale yard banged open. “Sybil!”
Gran ran in, her red skirt billowing around her like a blood-soaked bandage.
“What’s happening?” I cried. “Gran, what’s going on?”
My face was wet. Tears, but it felt like it could be blood.
“Quick!” She grabbed my hand and pulled me up to my mother, then gathered us into her warm, capable body with one hand around my neck and her other at Sybil’s waist.
I was back on the dusty street, just in time for the road in front of me to blow open. Chaos erupted. And then my body did too.
“Aieeeeeeeee!” a voice keened on the wind.
Sybil, I thought in a voice that wasn’t mine. A deep voice. A familiar voice. Sibyl, I’m sorry.
Daddy.
Pain shot through my body.
And then I was no more.
The house returned, and we split apart—Sibyl to the couch and me to the floor, desperate to touch the uneven wood. Something solid. Something real.
That strange wail still filled the room. I looked up to find my mother rocking in Gran’s embrace, tears streaking her pale white face.
“Jimmy,” she whispered in between siren-like sobs. “Oh, my Jimmy!”
“Dad?” I croaked, tears already starting to fall. “Was it Daddy?”
It was Gran who answered, not my keening mother.
“He’s gone,” she told me in her matter-of-fact way. “To the next world. You’ll see him again there. Come, girl. We’ll find comfort together.”
She beckoned me close again, and despite what I’d Seen, I didn’t hesitate. Sometimes touch is the only thing that heals. Even if it brings pain right along with it.
But as I allowed my grandmother to encircle us once more, pressing my cheek to my mother’s to weld our grief together, the truth both of them forgot to hide flew through our touch with the fluidity of the tears on our cheeks.
Sibyl burned Jimmy’s death into all of our minds, the memory I’d just lived flashing like a strobe. But I Saw more there than she intended. I Saw how much my mother loved my father, and how much he grounded her, tied her to the earth in a way she could never do herself.
I also Saw that she had always known.
That she had been waiting for years for this to happen, allowed the bitterness of the fact to poison her insides and her love for him and me.
I Saw that Sibyl had known my father was going to die, and she hadn’t done a thing to stop it.