Chapter 7 #2
Angelina nodded. She crossed to the bed, set the basket down, and brushed a strand of hair from Gabriella’s forehead with a touch so gentle it barely disturbed the air. Gabriella didn’t stir. Angelina smiled, and when she looked at me there was gratitude there, plain and uncomplicated.
“Let her sleep,” she said, gathering the laundry from the chair by the window. “She needs it.”
“She always needs it. She just doesn’t usually get it.”
“Until recently.” Angelina’s eyes held mine for a beat longer than the conversation required, and then she was moving, basket on her hip, wings adjusting as she turned toward the door. “There’s tea downstairs when you want it.”
She left without closing the door behind her, which was Angelina’s way of saying she trusted whatever was happening in this room and had no intention of making it awkward by acknowledging it directly.
I finished dressing, ran a hand through my hair, and went downstairs to find the kitchen empty, a clay mug of tea steaming on the table, and the sound of the water pump carrying through the open window from the yard.
I found her there an hour later, hanging laundry on the line that ran from the porch to the oak tree.
The morning had warmed, the air carrying the green smell of cut grass and distant apple blossoms, and Angelina moved between the basket and the line.
Shirts, trousers, dishcloths, all of them catching the breeze and turning the yard into a gallery of gently moving fabric.
“Need a hand?” I asked, reaching for a clothespin.
She handed me a shirt instead. One of mine, from the looks of it, though at this point most of the laundry had blurred into a communal pool of fabric that belonged to everyone and no one specifically. “You can tell me about the nightmare,” she said. “The one she finally told you about.”
So I told her. The playground. The ladder.
The laughter. The falling. All of it, the details Gabriella had shared in the dark, the weight of them sitting in my chest like something with mass and temperature.
Angelina listened, her hands never stopping, pinning a dishcloth to the line, folding a towel, her wings flexing slightly with each movement.
“They never completely went away,” she said when I’d finished.
“The nightmares. Even after the worst of the bullying stopped, even after Sabrina made it very clear that anyone who hurt her sister would answer to her, the dreams kept coming. Not every night. Sometimes weeks would go by. But they always came back.” She shook out a shirt.
“Those first two years after you left were the hardest. She wouldn’t talk about it.
Not to me, not to Sabrina. She’d just wake up screaming and then refuse to tell me why, and by the time I got her calmed down she’d have herself so convinced that she was being ridiculous that she’d apologize for waking me.
A thirteen-year-old girl, apologizing for having nightmares. ”
The guilt landed exactly where it always did, a hot stone beneath my ribs. “I should have been here.”
“Maybe.” Angelina handed me another clothespin.
Her fingers were warm, work-roughened, the hands of a woman who had kept a farm running and a family fed through six years of war with too few hands to help her.
“But you weren’t, and we managed, and now you are, and she needs you more than she ever has.
Not as a soldier. Not as a war hero. But the one person she’s always trusted completely.
” She smiled, and the smile reached her eyes the way Angelina’s smiles always did, warm and steady and incapable of pretending.
“I’m grateful, Gabriel. Truly. She has someone she feels safe with again.
That’s worth more than any fence post or barn roof you could ever rebuild. ”
“It’s not enough,” I said. The words came out harder than I’d intended, edged with something that had been building since last night, since the meadow dream, since the moment I’d realized that holding her while she slept wasn’t going to fix whatever broken thing lived in the dark places of her mind.
“She shouldn’t have to live with this. The nightmares, the fear, any of it.
She’s nineteen years old. She should be thinking about festivals and friends and whatever young women think about when they aren’t carrying the weight of six years of loneliness. ”
Something surfaced then, from the silt of war memories, rising through six years of battlefields and field hospitals and the blur of exhaustion that made certain details stick when others vanished completely.
A fairy. Small, quick, her wings the pale green of new leaves, moving between cots with a wand in one hand and a vial in the other, her voice carrying over the moans of wounded men.
“There was a healer,” I said. “During the war. A fairy. She treated a wound on my shoulder, nothing serious, just a graze, but while she was working she mentioned another fairy. A friend, she called her. Someone who specialized in … emotional injuries, trauma.” I turned to Angelina, the clothespin forgotten in my hand.
“She said this fairy lived near Oakwind. Not on it, but close. Someone who could help with nightmares, with fear, with the things that don’t heal on their own. ”
Angelina was quiet for a moment, her hands still on the laundry line, her eyes on the middle distance the way they got when she was reaching back through years of village gossip and half-remembered conversations.
“Lyra,” she said finally. “That’s the name I’ve heard.
Not from anyone reliable. Old stories, mostly.
” She shook out a shirt, pinned it to the line.
“I don’t know where she lives. But someone on this island might.
There’s a man. Older than the trees, or so he claims. Lives in the village, near the playground.
Used to trade with the fairies before the war, or so the story goes. ”
“Would you show me? Where to find him?”
“Of course. We can walk there after I finish this. The village isn’t going anywhere, and neither is my daughter’s sleep, which appears to be the deepest it’s been in years.
” She reached over and brushed a bit of grass from my shoulder, her touch gentle.
“Let her rest, Gabriel. Whatever you’re planning, whatever healer you’re chasing, it can wait for a few hours of peace. ”
I nodded, and we finished hanging the laundry. The shirts turned in the breeze, the dishcloths snapped, and somewhere upstairs, Gabriella slept on, and for a little while, that was enough.
* * *
I went back upstairs to tell Gabriella where I was going, partly because it seemed like the responsible thing to do and partly because I wanted to see her face in daylight, to make sure the peace I’d watched on her sleeping features hadn’t been a trick of the dark.
The bedroom door was still open, the way Angelina had left it, morning light spilling across the rumpled quilt where Gabriella had been curled an hour ago.
She wasn’t there. The bed was empty, the pillow still dented from the weight of her head, the quilt thrown back where she’d pushed it aside. I stood in the doorway for a moment, feeling something that was equal parts relief and disappointment.
Her room, then. Two doors down, the smallest bedroom in the house, the one with the window that faced the orchard and the desk wedged into the corner where she did her numbers. I knocked, half expecting no answer.
None came. I pushed the door open and found her room exactly as it always was: neat, organized, the bed made, the ledgers stacked on the desk in descending order of thickness.
Morning light fell through the window in a warm stripe across the floorboards, and the room smelled like Gabriella, like pencil lead and clean cotton and the faint herbal scent of whatever she put in her hair.
She wasn’t there either. But her diary was.
It lay open on the desk, the pages spread beneath the window light, a pen beside it with the cap off.
I hadn’t meant to look. I really hadn’t.
I’d turned to leave the room the moment I registered its presence, some ancient code of conduct activating automatically in the part of my brain that still believed in boundaries, but my eyes caught the date at the top of the page before I could stop them, and the date was today’s, and the first line read He had a dream about me last night.
I stood very still. The sensible part of my brain, the part that had kept me alive through six years of war by making good decisions under pressure, was shouting something urgent and profane about privacy and respect and the category of hell that awaited men who read a girl’s diaries.
The rest of my brain, which appeared to be operating under different management this morning, was already reading.
He had a dream about me last night. I know because he told me it was the best kind, and then he blushed, and then he held me so tight I could feel his heart through his shirt, and I pretended to be asleep the whole time because if I’d opened my eyes I would have done something stupid like kiss him or tell him I’ve been in love with him since I was thirteen or both, probably both, and then where would we be?
I closed my eyes, opened them. The words were still there, Gabriella’s neat, precise handwriting marching across the page with the confidence of someone who had no idea her private thoughts were about to be weaponized against my nervous system.
I felt him wake up. Something happened, I don’t know what, but he got out of bed and changed his clothes, and when he came back he was shaking, and he held me like he was afraid I might disappear, and all I could think was that whatever he dreamed about, it was me, and it was good, and maybe, just maybe, I’m not the only one carrying this around.