CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I slept as well as I thought I might. No clue when I finally drifted off, but when the morning sunlight elbowed in rudely, something was crushing my organs. I hinged one eye open. Anne Shirley.
“What, huh, okay,” I mumbled, and tried to remove her furry red lump. She gave an ornery meow, hopped off, and slinked toward my bedroom door.
After dragging my half-dead self into the bathroom, I tried to predict what Her Majesty wanted. Food?
Sure enough, Anne Shirley attacked her kitty kibble without any turkey add-ins.
I deflated into a kitchen chair as everything from the previous night dropped into my head.
The watch was asleep, the second hand as frozen as it had been since I’d exited the highway and steered the truck back into Sacred.
That was when Penn was supposed to have disappeared last night.
Not at Cottage Grove Lake. Not while I was talking to Del.
I’d tried to wind the crown again last night while it still ticked, reasoning that I could use it to make Penn return to me. I’d wound and wound until my fingers ached. Nothing.
What had I done? And did it have anything to do with what Del had seen, or heard? I’d replayed it like a worn-out single. It’s not your time. If the words truly were about me, the notion fit into many slots around my parents, my friends, even my Perfect Triangle plan.
Could it have something to do with the actual timepiece? Did Del’s revelation mean I wouldn’t be able to fix and unload this watch after all? That it wasn’t truly mine to use?
Basta—enough. I dropped my forehead onto the breakfast table, willing my mind to empty.
After an unknown number of measured breaths, softness grazed my ankle.
I lifted my head up. Anne Shirley pushed her warm, purring body into my leg, dragging her little whiskered face up and down my shin.
My heart squeezed, and suddenly, all I wanted was to cup my hand over the furry space between her ears.
I scratched, and she nudged into my palm, pressing in as if she were trying to reach for my pulse point and drag it down to baseline.
“Thanks, Anne Shirley,” I said. “You’re not so bad.” Purr, press, tickle. “Don’t make me have to take that back.”
She let me hoist her into my lap, her paws kneading into my thighs, and together we became all the way awake.
I clicked into my morning. My skin had dried up to lizard levels overnight—time for body butter, stat.
And about a gallon of water. But it was then I noticed things were off around the cabin.
All the pleated shades were still down. Tía Viv’s favorite Oregon Ducks coffee cup was still on the drain rack from yesterday. It was well past work time.
I sprang up to search. Vivian’s bedroom was dark and vacant, the coverlet neatly tucked in. I toed into Birks and found the creek and bridge empty of humans. That left the workshop.
“Tía?” I called from the doorway. Task lights blared, but her arsenal of noisy saws and lathes stood dormant.
I quickened my steps around all her stuff, gasping when I found her body slumped over her worktable.
She sat on a padded stool, arms pillowed, her head resting over them. She wore yesterday’s clothes.
Maybe it was all the true crime podcasts I’d listened to with Grier and Ana, but I checked my tía’s pulse first. A steady throb drummed against my two fingers, so I called her name again, exhaling when she stirred.
Disoriented, she lifted up on a scratchy “Ay, Sylvie.”
“Seriously? You’ve been here all night?” Sawdust and whorls of freshly shaved wood poked into her hair, dusting her tank top and denim shorts. But her eyes were clear, and her face glowed with the kind of rest normally found on luxury mattresses, not rough work surfaces.
She shook out her hair like a dog. “I guess I got carried away.”
“Like usual,” I quipped, but today, her work loomed like a skyscraper.
A superyacht. Colored glass fragments were piled everywhere.
Metal frames were half-bent, waiting for heat and tools.
Behind the stool, massive planes of cherrywood, which would eventually form cabinet doors, rested.
Critics and fans had called her art transcendent.
Otherworldly. But my family truly knew how hard she toiled for her success.
With the recent announcement that she was going to make one hundred dream boxes in the fall, how many nights like this were ahead of her in Topanga?
All my life Vivian had watched over me. But now .
. . “Am I going to have to come check on you while you’re making all the new cajas de suenos?
The thought of you with a preorder list is a little scary. ”
She snorted a laugh. “Gracias, pero I have my production schedule all planned out. And I won’t be taking any more furniture orders until next summer. My priority will be las cajas. After so many years, I’m ready to give everything to the boxes again.”
Tía Viv had quit making the cajas de suenos before I was born, so I didn’t understand their significance until I was older.
My mother owned one of the first cherrywood cajas her sister had crafted, topped with an intricate night-sky motif.
The heirloom would be mine one day, like Abuela’s watch.
But I didn’t covet a place to store my dreams. I was too busy forming real plans.
“Why did you stop making them, really?” I asked.
Growing up, I’d never thought to question Tía too much about the boxes.
They simply were a part of her mythos, something she told gallery owners and collectors and reporters that she was too busy to make now.
But after so many summers together, that answer felt false.
She exhaled a rush of air. “The truth? Making them became too hard after my own dream died.”
“A broken heart?” I asked. Tía Viv had never married, but I knew she’d lost a great love before I came along. It was another part of her life I hadn’t pried into.
She nodded. “Claro. The boxes were meant to carry the future owners’ dreams, not mine. But I couldn’t leave space for them in my grief. The last caja I made was the only one inspired by my own heart—or heartbreak.”
She gestured toward the door then.
“I made that caja in this part of Oregon. Before coming here, I’d quit making much of anything.
My creativity was shot. So I went to the nearby forest to search for peace and inspiration.
Instead of cherry, I gathered cascara wood.
I made a deep stain from the berries.” She shook her head as memory flooded.
“I didn’t use gloves. The stain remained on my fingers for days.
But I wanted to be connected to the land, to something solid.
The final box was forged, but the experience only left me heavier.
Making that last caja took too much of me. ”
“So you destroyed the cascara dream box?” I asked, my own memory failing. I’d heard only some parts of this story throughout my life.
“No, no, I could never do that. I left it with another artisan. Heard she’d sold it at some point.
” Her mouth cracked over a tiny smile. “I eventually moved on—spectacularly, I might add. But to get there, I needed to leave las cajas behind. Not just that last one, but all of them. That part of my life was done.”
“So why make more now?” I asked.
She gave another, pensive smile. “It finally feels like the right time. I don’t have a better answer than that.”
I didn’t need one. Not after my experience with the gold watch, with Penn, had challenged everything I thought I knew about time.
My tía’s sudden movement brought me back. “Damn,” I said as her agile hop off the stool rivaled a gymnast’s dismount. “You make sixty-two look like thirty-two.”
“Sí, verdad,” Viv mumbled over a giggle. “I can hang with the best of them. Too bad I never tried on your cute cheer skirt or got to shake those pretty pom-poms. We could have had a dance-off.”
“I still have my old poms, Tía,” I told her. “Maybe when we get home, I can show you some cheers.”
Her grin ignited as she wiggled her hips. “I’ll out-move your ass by a mile, mijita. No contest.”
Absolutely none.