Chapter 13 #2
He stared at the quilt, which had turned so obligingly into the Atlantic for her.
It stared back at him. He tried to picture it moving, turning a greenish-blue, but the fabric remained still and exactly as Nan had stitched it—a patchwork riot that always made him think of the last gasp of fall, orange and brown and cold starry nights.
After a long stretch of nothing, Beatrix cleared her throat. “What are you thinking about?”
So he described the image in his mind, the waves and the color, and she shook her head. “I don’t think that’s specific enough. What time of day is it? Is the air warm or cold? Imagine the smell of the ocean, the sounds—”
“I can’t,” he said. “I’ve never been in real life.”
She looked at him as if he’d admitted a horrifying secret. “Never?”
“There was always some reason not to go on a vacation after I graduated from the academy, and before that …”
He didn’t have to put it into words. She knew how poor he’d been.
She took his hand. “I wish I’d invited you. I wish we’d been friends.”
“I think your mother would have vetoed that,” he said, the instant before considering that her mother was a dangerous topic of conversation. “Besides,” he said hastily, “we’re going now. I hope. What does the ocean sound like? Crashing waves?”
“More of a whoosh, unless it’s stormy. Rhythmic. Calming. Hypnotizing, really.”
He pulled her closer. “Tell me about the rest of it.”
“Well—you can smell the salt, taste it in the back of your throat and feel it on your skin, sticky-tacky, after you run into the water. And you should run in because if you try to go in bit by bit, you’ll give up.
That’s how cold the water is. But once you’re entirely wet, you won’t want to get out.
Oh—and early morning is otherworldly. The sun sparkles on the water.
Dolphins swim by. There’s no one else around. ”
He could picture all of that. His quilt lay over them, in its oranges and browns and blacks, and he imagined that he’d just jumped into it—not warm as it really was, but cold, so cold, breath-knocked-out-of-your-chest cold.
He shivered. Did the temperature drop, or was that just the power of suggestion? The next instant, he felt perfectly warm again, like a man wrapped in a handmade quilt should—and the speed of the change proved what he was doing had worked for just a second until he’d stopped.
He sat up, closed his eyes and took a deep breath, focusing, imagining he could smell the salt.
Salt in his nose, salt in his throat, salt sticky on his skin.
Chill water, shocking and invigorating. Mild waves cresting and falling, swelling around them, deep blue-green.
Birds flying overhead. He pictured this until he could just barely taste the salt, feel the waves, hear the birds, like a faint echo of the real thing.
The mattress under him sagged. His eyes flew open in time to see it falling away into a fathomless depth that swirled orange, brown and black, and he had to grab Beatrix’s hand and kick to avoid following it down, his feet pushing against something that was not quite water but also not quite fabric.
Nan’s quilt roiled around them, rippling outward, growing until it reached the walls and then pushing through, the walls themselves folding into the quilt, everything giving way, until there was nothing but deep-rose sky above them and the quilt below—lapping at their necks.
He trailed his fingers in it and this time the feeling was indistinguishable from water.
Blues and greens rippled outward, the fall colors disappearing.
A seagull flew by, sharing its opinion of their presence.
They were in the ocean. So far into it, in fact, that he couldn’t see anything but.
“Sand first next time, I think,” Beatrix said, kicking in place next to him.
He laughed. The rest of it wasn’t as hard—he remembered the feeling of her sand under his bare feet, the painted-white lifeguard chair, the boardwalk. All of it settled into place a short swim from where they were.
“This is … this is …” he said, struggling to describe it.
“I know,” Beatrix said. And she smiled, which was beautiful to see.
They stayed in the water a long time. When they finally dragged themselves out, Peter collapsed on the sand, eyes closed, and she sat beside him, wondering if it was possible to fall asleep in a dream. Or if perhaps she could simply stay here and never go back out.
What she’d said to him wasn’t entirely true.
She didn’t, in the end, think she wasn’t her daytime self, just as she’d stopped believing the dayside fiction that what she got up to at night had nothing to do with her.
But now, for the first time in this semi-split existence, it was dayside Beatrix she was ashamed of.
And she suspected Peter was half-right about her Vow to him—it probably was contributing to her panic attacks because she wouldn’t give up on Plan B.
She didn’t know what to do. She wrapped her arms around her legs, shivering.
“Come here,” Peter said, taking her hand, rearranging her so she lay pressed against him on the sand. “Much warmer this way.” He waved his free hand to encompass everything in front of them. “How did you realize this was possible?”
She appreciated the distraction. This question, at least, she could answer. “Because we were already doing it.”
“Really?” He gave a thoughtful frown. “Without realizing it?”
“Yes, exactly. I’d taken for granted that we had no power over the setting. That the Vows were dictating it, or something like that. And yet we could manipulate things within it, like our clothes.”
She levered herself up on one arm, the better to look at him.
“What if, in that first truly shared dream we had—when I ran from the house and you chased me—what if we were able to make that happen because we just assumed it was possible? I opened the front door and had no doubt I’d see the lawn, so I did—we both did.
And when you took me upstairs two nights later—”
“I was convinced I’d open the door and my bedroom would be there as always,” he murmured, nodding his head.
“And so you made it and I could see it, too. Even though I’d never been there in real life.”
He smiled at her, eyes crinkling. “So you thought you’d put your hypothesis to the test by trying to gin up a completely different place?”
She nodded, not trusting her voice. She’d tested her hypothesis for the purpose of keeping him from asking his nightly question, not in the interest of science.
If he asked her here, now, she would have to tell him. There was no way to dance around it anymore. This could be the day rang in her ears—but if he asked her, the choice would be out of her hands.
If he asked her, it wouldn’t be her fault for telling him.
“Well, now we’ve replicated the results,” Peter said, and if he realized something was amiss, he didn’t show it. “What tipped you off? When did the idea occur to you?”
So she told him. She opened her mouth, and out it rushed.
“The night we appeared in the basement rather than the bedroom. The night I said I wanted to start a whisper campaign.”
He went very quiet. After a moment, he said, “I suppose we were still mentally in that room even after we left it.”
“Yes. So that’s where we showed up as soon as we started to dream.”
Her heart thudded in her ears as she waited for what he would say to that. She’d opened the door. She’d all but invited him in.
The silence stretched out. He wasn’t going to make this easy for her, was he? But she knew what she should do. Tell him. She licked dry lips.
“Peter …”
And then she opened her eyes with a start in her bedroom, woken by the alarm clock, and clutched at her covers in horror of what she’d almost done.
Yesterday was unsettling, of course it was, but she and Ella had handled it.
And that awful thought she’d had as she crouched in Miss Sadler’s house was just that: a thought, a passing thought.
She wouldn’t have acted on it. And she absolutely couldn’t tell him.
Never mind distracting him in their dreams. From now on, she would have to distract herself.