He sits straight up in bed.
“Come with me,” he says suddenly. “Let’s leave this place behind. You don’t need to be here to recover. We can find peace and quiet anywhere. We go can together, Calla.”
But I pause and my hesitancy is answer enough, and Dare’s face falls.
“You’re not ready to leave,” he realizes.
“It’s not that,” I say slowly. “I’ll go… if there’s nothing else I need to know. Was this your only secret, Dare?” My hands trail along his chest, feeling his heart where it beats just for me. “Was this what you didn’t want me to know?”
He shakes his head.
“No.”
“There’s more?”
He nods.
The room swirls again and again, and I hold my hands out.
I’m falling,
Falling,
Falling, and I don’t know where I’ll land.
The world is a stage and we all act falsely upon it.
The die has been cast,
Has been cast,
Has been cast.
I feel it,
The truth.
It’s coming,
And it’s dark,
And I won’t like it.
I feel it.
I feel it.
We all have our parts to play, and I’ll play mine well.
But what is it?
I concentrate,
And think,
And more will come.
We’re all a bit mad, aren’t we?
Yes.
Chapter 24
Things change with Dare.
He’s still my Dare.
He’s still reserved, yet sweet.
Strong, yet vulnerable.
He’s guarded now, as though he’s waiting for something terrible,
the other shoe to drop.
It makes me uneasy, and even though we’re together night after night, I feel him growing away from me. It’s enough to make me panic.
At dinner, he watches me.
During the day, he walks with me.
He sketches me.
He loves me.
But there’s always something in his eyes, something hidden, something he won’t share.
“It’s not time,” he always says when I ask. “But soon.”
I feel like I should be progressing.
I should be growing.
I should be recovering.
But I’m not.
And the more I think about, the more I’ve decided why.
So in my room, after I’ve sipped at my tea, I know there’s something I have to do. Something I’ve been putting off, something that makes my heart heavy.
“Finn,” I say aloud, and instantly he’s beside me.
He grins at me with his crooked grin, and my heart breaks with what I have to do.
“I can’t see you anymore,” I tell him sadly, and he looks away.
“I know.”
“How am I supposed to be without you?” I ask quietly, picking up his hand. It’s pale, and I know that freckle on his knuckle. He’s had it since we were five.
He shrugs, and he tries to act nonchalant, but this moment is huge and he knows it.
“I don’t know, Cal. What’s anyone to do without me?” He grins and I cry, because I can’t help it.
Because he’s my other half, but I have to be sane.
“Don’t cry,” he says softly and he pats my back. “It’ll be ok. It’ll all be ok.”
“It won’t,” I sniffle through my tears. “There are so many things I don’t understand, and I can’t work through it without you.”
He laughs now and stands up, his brown curls flopping over his eye. “That’s absurd,” he tells me and humor makes his voice thin. “You can do anything, Calla.”
“I can’t keep saying goodbye to you,” I tell him and he’s knows that I’m right. “Every time it rips the band-aid off, and you take a piece of my heart with you.”
“So quit talking to me,” he tells me simply, looking through to my soul. “You’re my sister and you’ll always be my sister. I don’t need to be with you for you to know that.”
I close my eyes.
“I can’t.”
His hand is on mine.
“You can.”
There’s silence, and his hand is cold.
His hand is cold because he’s dead.
“Good night, sweet Finn,” I whisper. “Good night.”
I see his headstone, the dragonfly, the grave.
His hand is gone.
I open my eyes.
I’m alone.
I take out paper and a pen, and I write yet another letter to my father. I don’t know why I continue because he never answers.
But I write and write, and when I’m finished, I give it to Sabine.
“You’ll mail it this time, won’t you?” I ask. She nods.
“It’ll go out in the morning. I’ll make you a cup of tea now, child. And I’ll bring it to you in the salon.”
I sit and I wait, and while I do, I have a visitor.
Father Thomas.
Jones show him in, and I smile.
“It’s good to see you, Father.” Because it is.
He sits with me in the sun, chatting and holding my hand. He’s a soothing presence, and I soak it in while I can.
He stares out the windows at the gardens, at the statues and flowers and paths. “Do you like it here?” he asks quietly, and I have to shake my head.
“No. I thought I might get used to it, but I find that I’m really not.”
Father Thomas smiles. “It’s a daunting place,” he agrees. “And it’s not for everyone. Maybe it’s time for you to leave, child.”
I look away. “I know. But I don’t know where to go.”
The priest cocks his head, the light shining in his eyes. “Go home, child.”
Home.
The place where memories plague me. Where Finn’s shoes and his journal and his unmade bed wait, the things he’ll never use again.
Home, a place surrounded by death.
“Maybe,” I whisper.
He smiles. “Let me pray with you before I go.”
I nod, and he rests his hand on my forehead.
“Through this holy anointing may the Lord in his love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit. May the Lord who frees you from sin save you and raise you up.”
He removes his hand. “Amen.”
“Amen,” I murmur too.
I walk Father Thomas out and he waves as he drives away.
Then I roam the grounds, because Dare isn’t here and I’m restless.
The mausoleums are quiet, the gardens are still.
And then,
There’s the boy in the hoodie.
He stands just on the inside of the fence,
And his head is tilted just enough that I can’t see his face.
I step toward him, and he steps toward me.
His face is dark, and I peer toward him,
Then another step.
Then another.
He stops.
“Who are you?” I shout, and my words are carried on the wind. He cocks his head but doesn’t answer, although there’s a low growl in his throat.
“What do you want?”
He’s calm, his head is down. But his arm comes up,
And he points at me.
He wants me.
I run to the house without looking back.
Chapter 25
I feel like I need to go home.
I feel it tugging at me, pulling.
I’m not safe here.
But yet, I can’t leave Dare.
I can’t leave him because he’s mine.
The Dare he shows the world is different from my Dare, the one who holds me in his arms. I feel his secrets, though, through my skin, through my bones, and that’s not something he can fake.
I ache for him to take me into his confidence, to trust me that much, but he h
asn’t yet. There’s something left to know… an answer left to be had.
I need to find it.
I don’t make it far before Sabine finds me.
It’s like she was waiting just for me.
“It’s time to read your cards again,” she tells me, as though it’s not one in the morning, as though it’s such a normal thing.
I start to shake my head, but she won’t hear it.
“It’s important,” she insists.
Her gnarled fingers sink into my flesh, her fingernails biting into my muscle. I let her take me to her room, to where it’s dark and the moonlight is shining onto the table.
The cards are already spread out, in the same weird cross, the gold gleaming garishly in the night.
“You started without me,” I point out softly. She glances at me, and sits down.
“I read them every day,” she admits. “But recently, the night of the party, they changed.”
The night I was with Dare.
The night I found out what he did.
Of course.
Everything changed that night.
I felt it.
“Pick up a card,” she tells me. “The one on top.”
I do. It’s cool beneath my fingers.
A priest rises against a stained glass window.
“The hierophant,” Sabine whispers. “The teacher. It means you must listen to me now, the time to teach is here.”
“Teach me what?” I ask, my voice the merest of whispers. I’m scared now, at her tone, of these cards, of this place. I was wrong to stay here. I know that now.
There was a fork in the road, and I chose the wrong path.
“I have to teach you what you need to know. Your mother wouldn’t let me, she left. But you’re here and you must learn from me, child.”
Oh my god. This just gets weirder and weirder. I start to get up.
“I’m going back to bed now,” I tell her. “This just got too strange for me.”
“Sit,” Sabine directs, her voice stern and loud and unarguable.
I sit.
I can do nothing else.
Sabine sifts through the cards, her eyes moving so fast that I see them working back and forth, faster and faster, like she’s experiencing a dream.
Finally, she looks up at me.
“Your mind is a gift,” she says simply. “But you have to learn from it, or you will go crazy from it.”
Her words don’t make any sense.
I stare at her, not comprehending.
Her eyes contain a thousand lives.
I stare into them all, into her gypsy mind, and I see that she believes everything she’s saying as truth.
“It’s as much a part of life as the wind or the sun,” she says in her husky, old voice. “It’s not strange, it’s not abnormal. We know what happens while others don’t.”
She pauses and looks out the windows, out at the black waving grasses of the dark moors.
“You can see things,” she says finally. “Little things, things that might seem like dreams. You might feel sick afterward, you might have a headache. You might even feel crazy. You’re not.”
The crypts.
Dare’s parents’ room.
The Sanitarium and Dare’s mother.
I try to hide my expression, but Sabine has already seen and she smiles with her grotesque teeth.
“See? You know what I’m speaking of.”
“I’m not….it’s not… real.”
She cocks her head.
“Your dreams are important. Even when you’re awake.”
I want to scream from the insanity of it, because it does feel like a nightmare.
“Why am I here?” I ask her, because all along, I’ve felt like there was a bigger reason.
“To recover,” she tells me, but I know there’s more.
She hands me a necklace. It gleams gold in the night, a locket with a flower engraved on the front. A calla lily.
I try to open it, but it’s locked.
“It’s your secret,” Sabine tells me, her dark eyes so knowing.
“Why do I have a secret?”
“Because we don’t get to choose,” she answers cryptically. “Because we pay for the sins of those who came before us.”
With a sigh, I leave her room on shaky legs and retreat back to my own. Against my better judgment, I wear the locket to bed, and it nestles against my breast as I drift to sleep.
And that is the first night I dream of her.
Of Olivia.
Of Dare’s mother.
She wears a white nightgown, filmy and light, and she stands at the window.
Her hair falls down her back dripping wet, and her figure is small and slight.
She turns, her eyes just like Dare’s, and so very sad.
“I don’t know where I am,” she whispers, and her eyes beg me for help. “I don’t know.”
She turns away, looking out the window at the sea.
Behind us, the waves crash.
Pictures of Dare hang on the wall, from infant to adulthood.
She looks at them longingly.
“Can you bring him to me?”
I want to answer her, but I can’t.
My lips are frozen.
My words are ice.
I can’t melt them.
I can’t bring him.
Save me, save you.
I wake in a pool of sweat, alone.
“Finn?” I call out, desperate to feel calm, but he doesn’t answer.
There will come a day when I don’t, he’d once said. Is today that day?
The moonlight shines on my nightstand, and Sabine’s box of tea sits in the light. I grab it up and make a cup.
I have to be calm,
I have to be calm.
This must be the way.
The tea creates oblivion and I sleep for hours and hours. When I’m finally up and around the next afternoon, Sabine finds me in the library.
“Did you wear the locket to bed?” she asks.
I stare at her, annoyed.
“I dreamed about Olivia Savage. Is that what you want to hear?”
Something passes through Sabine’s eyes and I can’t read it.
“What did you dream?”
“Not much,” I have to admit. “I just saw her face. She had pictures of Dare on the wall. I could see the sea through the window. It’s like she doesn’t know where Dare is. She keeps asking for me to bring him to her.”
She nods now, satisfied. “That’s enough for now.”
Enough for what?”
But I’m afraid to ask.
“A letter came for you today,” she tells me and hands me a battered envelope.
I rip it open to find my father’s handwriting.
It’s time to come home, he says simply.
I think he might be right.
Soon.
It’s time to go home soon.
I leave Sabine in her room, and I search for Dare.
I find him in the secret garden alone.
My heart jumps when I see him, at the way he leans against an angel statue so irreverently, at the familiarity in his eyes when he sees me. I fight the urge to leap into his arms, but of course I don’t, because the warmth in his eyes has cooled.
“What are you doing out here?” he asks, so reserved.
I’m flustered.
“Hunting for you.”
“I’m not good for you,” he offers. “Maybe you should stop hunting for me.”
My heart twinges.
“Never.”
His expression falters.
“You need to let me figure out what’s good for me,” I add.
He looks at me sadly. “I can’t. You don’t know all of the facts.”
“So tell me.”
“I can’t do that, either.”
We’re at an impasse, a fork in the road.
There are two roads, and I always take the wrong one.
“You’ll destroy me,” I r
emember Sabine’s foreboding words. Dare closes his eyes, and nods.
“What does that mean?” My voice is raw.
There is pain in Dare’s eyes, real pain.
The kind of pain that can’t be hidden, can’t be contained.
“I want you to know,” he tells me, each word an honest rasp.
“But you can’t tell me,” I guess. He nods.
“Not yet. You’ll come to in it in order.”
In order.
In order.
In order.
Things must happen in order, Calla? Can’t you see? Can’t you see?
I remember Finn’s cries from before, but before what?
Time is blurring now, blending, and I can’t make sense of anything.
I’m standing on the cliffs, I’m staring at the ocean, but I’m not.
It’s Finn.
But it was me.
Cars.
Blood.
Sirens.
Darkness.
Good night, sweet Finn. Good night, good night.
Protect me, St. Michael.
Protect me,
Protect me.
My mind can’t take the stress,
It can’t take the flex.
My mind is an elastic band,
And it’s getting ready to break.
He’ll be your downfall, child.
It’s the first thing that makes sense.
Chapter 26
I sit in Olivia’s room, her locket in my hands.
It’s gold, it’s delicate, it’s real. It’s cool in my hands.
I concentrate on it, on the etched calla lily.
Symbolic? Ironic? Coincidental?
Nothing is a coincidence in this house. It’s something I’ve come to realize.
Sunlight from the window pours through the sheer curtains, throwing muted light into the room. I turn the pendant over and over, watching it glint, watching the calla lily come and go.
To and fro.
To and fro.
And then,
I see her.
Olivia.
As clear as day,
Standing in front of me.
“Can you bring him to me?” she asks, her voice low and soft. “That’s all I want to know.”
Confusion billows like waves, through me, over me, around me.
Can I?
“I don’t know,” I tell her. “Where are you?”
I’m puzzled, but the vision ends with nausea, the way they always do.
When I become conscious again, I’m on my hands and knees on the floor, the room spinning to a stop around me.