Chapter 7
Grandee’s house comes into view as my phone vibrates. I keep my eyes focused on the sky-blue siding and bright green plants and faded white railings of the worn porch, instead of looking at the black bag that buzzes on the seat next to me.
Linden has texted me no less than five times and called at least as many to ask me where I am, but I’m not sure how to tell her what I’ve done.
With Grandee on a cruise and Linden busy with the first week of school, I assumed I would have more time to formulate a plan of how I’m going to explain why I’ve dropped out of college.
They will try to convince me to go back, but I won’t. I can’t.
Because even if this is a dream, Carter will live.
He will never date me, and he will be happy.
I park the car and head up the drive. Rory Sheepmore gives me a blank stare, but in her dark eyes, I can see the judgment. Luckily, I have time to think of an excuse since Grandee’s gone for the next two weeks.
Was it two weeks? Or was it three?
I wish I could remember last year better.
I’ll need to explain to her that I’m suffering some kind of mental break, or that this is a dream and it doesn’t matter. Grandee will get it, she’ll understand, she—
“What the fuck are you doing here?” Grandee’s voice booms from the porch.
She’s wearing the clothes she wears when she typically treats wool.
A threadbare and stained T-shirt with flowy linen pants covered in dirt and splatters that look like watercolor against the fabric.
The leather apron she normally has tied around her neck hangs folded in half at her waist.
And most importantly, there is a phone attached to her ear.
“Yeah. She’s here.” Grandee never takes her eyes off me. “I don’t know, because she hasn’t spoken yet. Maybe if you stopped interrogating me like you work for the FBI, I could find out.”
I don’t have to ask to know who’s on the other end. It’s Linden, and now she’s realized I’m gone.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, still holding my bag of clothes in my hand.
She hits a button on her cell phone and pockets it before letting out a deep sigh. “I think that’s my line.”
“You’re supposed to be on a cruise.”
She gives me a confused look. “A cruise? Where the hell would I get money for that?”
Money? I’ve never heard Grandee talk about money before. Not in the way that people do when they hurt from it.
I look around the porch and notice the paint is chipped and fading. But Linden and I painted it last summer. And Grandee’s car is missing from next to the ancient farm truck that was her mother’s.
Something’s wrong. None of these things happened before. Linden and I talked about her going on a cruise just yesterday. How did that change, too?
She holds the screen door open without another word to me.
But inside, Grandee’s house is exactly as it always is. How it was when I went to bed after she burned my yarn in the fire.
Same furniture in the same places. Same pictures on the same walls. Same number of baskets sitting by the fireplace with our family blankets in them. Two plates of almond cake sitting on the dining room table. Except—
June sits at the table.
June from next door.
June, who has been dead for ten years.
My hand goes to my throat, and I take a step backward and close my eyes. “Wake up, wake up, just wake up.” I’m saying it to myself like it’s a prayer or a command.
“Nieve, girl. What’s wrong?” I feel Grandee’s hands cup the sides of my face, chapped and dry from so much wool work.
I’m still here in the past, but now everything is different. The dream has changed.
When I open my eyes, Grandee looks at me with concern. Her brown ones crinkle at the corners, and her brows furrow. Familiar, warm, caring.
“Grandee.” Her name comes out on a sob, and I can feel my own tears. “I’m losing my mind.”
She looks back at June for a second, who only nods as if she understands and gets up and walks out the door.
June, who should not be here.
But she can’t understand, because this isn’t something that makes any sense. She doesn’t make any sense.
As Grandee’s arms come around me, I cry into the fabric of her shirt. She smells like lavender and dye and dirt. Anchors to the Grandee I know.
“My sweet girl, what’s wrong?”
“Everything.” And I mean it. “Everything is wrong. I woke up in the wrong place. Or wrong time? I don’t even know. And you’re supposed to be on a cruise, the porch isn’t painted, and Carter died because of me. I ended up back at school and—”
“Carter?” She turns my face up to hers. “Carter died? Linny’s friend?”
My mouth gapes open because I don’t know what to say to her. Linny’s friend.
No. He’s my friend. My …
“Yeah,” I tell her. “But I remember him. He was my—I don’t know if that was a dream or … if this is a dream, but I’m changing it somehow, and everything was wrong … is wrong.”
Grandee is nodding like I’m making sense. Her eyes are bright and serious as she listens to me babble on about the fractures in my mind. Not once does she look at me the same way Linden did. Or Carter.
Or Max.
It’s with understanding, a little bit of sadness.
She seems to come to some sort of conclusion, but I can’t imagine it’s the right one, because even I don’t understand what’s happening.
“All right,” Grandee says. “Come on.” She takes me by the hand, and she sits me in front of the fireplace.
Pulling my blanket from the basket, she wraps it around my legs, tucking me under.
“I’ll make some tea.”
Tea won’t fix me, but I don’t tell her that.
I’m comfortable here, safe. I stare at the fire and think about the last time I saw Grandee, when she threw my old yarn into it and asked me to start crocheting new wool.
I look down, expecting to see that old yarn, but it’s gone. The end piece frays from where Grandee pulled it apart …
In the past. Or the future? I can’t tell. My brain feels like it’s playing tricks on me. Foggy and blurred. The teacup being set against its saucer pulls my focus back to Grandee.
“Something is wrong with your blanket.” It’s not a question; it’s a fact and one that makes the skin on my arms pebble.
“Yes.” It comes out on a hoarse whisper. “What happened?”
“Well, I assume something happened to you.” She takes a sip of tea and pulls a face that makes me think her tea might not be tea. “You saw that Carter boy? The one with all the hair?”
I nod my head yes. “In my…” What was it? “My dream, maybe? But I saw him today, and he doesn’t know me. And the date. Everything feels like … I think … I think I’m losing it.”
She nods. “Should he have known you?”
I don’t answer, because I start crying instead.
“And the blanket? You took the yarn out, but did you add to it? After?”
“What? No. You yanked out the yarn and lit it on fire and told me to start over.”
Grandee isn’t helping. She’s asking me about crocheting? “Is anything else different? What about the cruise?”
“You went on one to celebrate the empty house or nest or whatever.”
“The yarn was burned?”
I look at my grandmother now, because I recognize the voice she’s using. Curious but hiding something. I’ve heard her use it before when she questioned Linden about where the keys were after she had been drinking all night at Brandon’s Bar in town.
This can’t be happening. It can’t.
“Oh, my love.” Grandee’s hand comes over mine, and when I look up, her eyes are gentle. “I’m so sorry.”
Everything feels the same but slightly different, as if someone were showing my life in a fun house mirror.
Stretched and changed but only in certain places.
I run my fingers across her palm. Something that is still the same.
Something that feels familiar and right.
“Do you think it’s possible that I imagined the whole thing? ”
“What thing?” she asks softly.
My entire freshman year. Falling in love? My heart breaking into a thousand pieces? My voice is small when I tell her, “Everything? It felt so real.”
“Time, my love, takes what it wants. Even when we try to stop it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Maybe it was a dream, maybe it wasn’t. Does it matter?”
Does it? I don’t know. Carter is alive. He’s here and …
My pulse is beating in my ears so loudly that I’m sure it’s shaking the room around us. “This sounds insane,” I tell her.
“You know I hate that word. Do you think I’ve lost it?”
I’m going to say yes, but she stops me.
“There is a whole other life that you can remember. You get to choose what you do with that.”
Past and present blend together in my head like oil into water, separate and swirling and breaking.
“Grandee. You’ve been spending too much time at the crystal shop.”
She makes a noise like she agrees as she sits back. “Remember when you were little, and we would throw rocks into the pond?”
I nod.
“You loved when you threw a big one into the water and it splashed. The ripples would meet you at the shore, and you girls would try to catch them.”
I do remember. We would paint rocks with wishes, and Grandee would tie yarn around them before we tossed the stones into the water, hoping dinner would be cotton candy or that Davis Jenkins would accidentally eat his own boogers in front of the whole school.
Sometimes we would get cotton candy, and sometimes we wouldn’t. All the while, Grandee told us that sometimes time has other plans.
“The bigger the rock you threw into the water, the bigger the waves.” She’s trying to make a point, and her eyes are serious when she says, “You can’t make a big splash without it affecting everything else.”
My face folds in on itself in confusion.
“Do you understand what I’m saying? You need to go back to school, or you’re going to keep … affecting the tides.”
“No, I don’t understand. I—”
Grandee sighs. “You want the life from your dream?”
My tears are from frustration and anger and because I’m scared. And because yes. I want my dream life. I want Carter.
“Then you need to make small ripples. Understand? Small. Otherwise, you’ll end up with mothers who don’t remember you and cruises that never happened and…”
Carter living doesn’t feel like it would be small. It feels enormous. “What if I want to make a big one?”
She lets out a tsk. “Time will always try to correct itself. Every choice you make will change something, and time will always try to recenter. Like a train on tracks.”
My fingers run against the edge of my blanket. I can’t even remember the color of the yarn that had been there before, but in the basket is a spool I would recognize anywhere. The yarn I made only a day ago with a mother who has vanished. Too yellow, too blue, too much.
I look at the almond cake sitting on the table and wonder how many times Grandee has undone her blanket.
She hands me the crochet hook.
“Start again?”
And I do.