Chapter Eleven
I wake up to full-blown daylight, still exhausted. But I am in my bed. Well, not my bed. Not in New York. Not home.
Midas, Iowa. In my grandmother’s house.
Not cavorting about near flood walls and in old antique shops in the dark of night, because of course, I dreamed all that.
I sit up blearily. Everything kind of aches. Not surprising considering how old this mattress has to be, and after a night of extremely long and detailed nightmares.
That often leads to waking up with tight muscles and achy joints.
I know it was a dream, because I have no memory of getting back into my bed last night. The last thing I remember is Jack’s
green gaze meeting mine while Harrison’s words echo in my head.
But I wouldn’t, if I were you.
Uncomfortable with the sheer vivid reality of the dream, I try to do a little full body shake to wake up my brain to reality. I clearly never left this bed. I did not meet Jack on a dark street or limp with Logan to hear crazy demon-deal stories from an antiques purveyor.
There’s a prickle in my eyes, all too familiar. The knowledge that things are bad again. That whatever control I thought I’d gained these past few years has slipped away in this brand-new place.
I stretch forward, then from side to side, trying to find a center of calm that will stop this from becoming a spiral.
Last night was hardly a full-blown nightmare. It was weird and creepy, no doubt. But I’ve certainly had worse. Usually, I
end up dead in those worse ones. And then, for extra fun, I tend to wake up somewhere strange.
Luckily, most people who encounter me in that state assume I’m on the tail end of a wild night out. Or perhaps a whole series
of unfortunate life choices. I usually pretend I’m having an ordinary, run-of-the-mill hangover and walk of shame, and call
Logan.
I’m a little too relieved that I’m not doing that right now, from the side of some country road instead of in a city with
abundant and convenient taxis.
Last night was fine. It was just . . . involved. My dreams are clearly bored of their own shit and decided to switch it up a little.
That said, I refuse to take off my socks and double-check my feet. They feel a little tender, but this wouldn’t be the first
time a dream lingered physically the next day. Looking for proof makes me feel like more of a lunatic, more like I might need
to consider that all my years of progress are tenuous at best.
The only way to handle any lingering is to ignore it. Sometimes, it’s the only way to get through these episodes. Along those same lines, I am certainly not going to search this room for a tiny delicate key with a locket on one end, either.
Because that would be a step toward the kind of indisputable mental instability I’ve been afraid of all my life. Things had
been better before Iowa, and if I continue to behave as though they are remaining better, then it will have to be so.
Mind over matter. Even if the mind is a questionable beast.
I get out of bed and head out into the kitchen, all of three steps, hoping Logan made coffee recently.
Instead, I find an empty house. Unease settles on me hard, but there is a piece of paper on top of the dusty coffeepot—always
my first destination on any given day, no matter where I find myself. In Logan’s scrawling script it says: Meet me at the diner.
I scowl at the note. And the empty, not-used-in-some-while coffeepot. I don’t know how my own twin can’t grasp the concept
of a pre-coffee: The coffee you drink before you get presentable enough to go get your real coffee.
Grumbling the whole way, I change out of my bright cheese pajamas and into clothes fit to be seen in. I don’t go for a sweater
today, not after yesterday’s blazing sun incident.
After I decide I can live with my hair and the makeup doing its best to cover up the bags under my eyes, I grab the keys Logan
left for me and head outside.
It is, of course, freezing. Even with the sun shining, the air is cold. Brittle leaves skitter across the walk on an even
colder breeze. I’m about to turn back into the house to begrudgingly grab a sweater when I see a woman out of the corner of
my eye.
Cleo is standing on a path through the grass that leads from the side street I haven’t investigated yet to the back exit of
the knitting shop. I haven’t quite oriented myself with the town. I get the feeling she was walking, but stopped when I stepped
outside, or maybe when she heard the door close.
Is she waiting for me? Or wishing she could have avoided me?
When my gaze falls to her, she seems to make a decision and starts striding for me. So no sweater for me. For some reason, I feel honor bound to walk to meet her.
We reach each other right behind the knitting shop. With a shudder, I look toward the back door where we stumbled upon entrails yesterday.
Was that really only yesterday? It feels like ten lifetimes ago.
When I rip my gaze away to meet Cleo’s dark one, she’s watching me. Closely.
“No more dead animals, I hope?” I ask.
“Not yet.”
Which feels . . . ominous.
She eyes me critically, then gestures at the same door I’m in no rush to go through again. “I’m grabbing Nora on our way over
to the diner. Come on in.”
She says this almost welcomingly. Like yesterday’s knitting store standoff never happened. Like we are friends. Second cousins who are more than names on the
same family tree. Like she does not blame me for the bloody guts of a raccoon—when she most assuredly seemed to yesterday.
I have no idea what to do with that. So I just follow her as she goes to the back door and unlocks it with what must be her
own key to the shop. My dead grandmother’s shop, I remind myself. My dead grandmother, who everybody knows, but Logan and
I don’t.
“So, you knew my grandmother.”
“Amelia was my grandmother’s sister,” Cleo says, and she doesn’t sound grudging or curt. “They were tight. Never went a day
without talking to each other.” She slides me a kind of considering look. “They were twins.”
Twins. I think about that black-and-white photo on the mantel of two women who looked almost exactly alike. It’s not unusual, of
course. Twins run in families—I’ve been told that my whole life. But something about this feels weighty. It seems meaningful that Logan and I are twins who also talk every day, like my grandmother and hers. No matter what.
“I don’t have a crafty bone in my body,” Cleo continues. “But if I did, no doubt Amelia would have taken me under her wing.
As it was, she was around a lot.” Cleo’s expression gets kind of sad. “They were each other’s best friend. In fact, before
I can remember, my grandma lived in that house.” She nods at the little house I just came from. “And Amelia lived up above
the shop.”
There’s a strange kind of grief in that as we step into the warmth of the back room of the shop. I would say it’s similar
to the grief I feel when I think about my mother—I never knew these people. I’m grieving the never knowing them or their stories and pasts rather than them.
But there’s something different about this—because my mother has been dead all my life. No one knew her or experienced her
in all these years. Amelia was apparently alive, being best friends with her twin sister, and taking people under her crafty
wing.
People who are not me, who happen to have a whole lot more than one crafty bone in her body.
Cleo pauses in this back room and looks up the stairs. “Nora, we’re here,” she shouts, using the word we as if Nora was expecting us, not just her.
I push that away because there’s probably a group chat. In my experience, there’s always a group chat. I look around the back
room. I am itching to get my hands on some yarn. Cleo is looking at her phone.
No crafty bones. No interest in yarn. And she’s being a little forthcoming today, so why not ask? “If you don’t want the store
or anything to do with it, what do you do?”
She doesn’t look up from her phone. “Airplanes.”
I am not sure how that’s an answer—what does she do with airplanes? Fly them? Fix them? Ride in them? Become one, like a transformer?
Before I can decide if I want to press, Nora hurries down the stairs, fastening an earring to her ear as she does so. “Sorry,
I’m late and a little frazzled this morning. Weird dreams.”
She doesn’t meet my gaze, but something inside my stomach clenches with anxiety. I don’t like the idea we’re both having weird
dreams.
But hey, aren’t we both under some stress? Dealing with some anxiety over the fate of this store? It’s just . . . how brains
work. Not some deep, dark sign of something horrible.
She’s got more makeup on than she did yesterday and she curled her hair—or did something different with it. Cleo, on the other
hand, looks exactly the same. Black on black on black, only she’s not scowling at me today as Nora leads us through the shop
and out the front door.
Outside, it’s still freezing.
“Oh. Here.” Nora shrugs out of her finely knit cardigan and hands it to me. “That T-shirt isn’t going to ward off the chill.”
She has a pretty blue long-sleeved shirt on under the cardigan, and even though I want to refuse to take it, I’m freezing,
and Nora is the kind of person I have a hard time saying no to. I feel like if I say no she’ll crumble into dust, though I’m aware she’s given me no reason to think that.
I shrug her cardigan on—and admire the stitchwork—as Cleo and Nora walk across the street toward the diner. Where I’ll no
doubt have to face Jack and the fact he appeared in my dreams last night as a kind of grumpy savior. It’s like having a sex
dream about a coworker that renders it impossible to ever look that coworker in the face, and I really don’t need to be thinking about sex dreams around Jack.
Why couldn’t Logan just make us coffee himself?
But I’ve got these two women being nice to me when that was not how it seemed to be going yesterday. Two women who know this town and everyone in it, so why not ask? “What’s Jack’s deal?”
“He’s a direct-descendant Bellamy,” Nora says, like that answers anything.
“What does that mean?”