I climb into bed, rolling my father’s dart between my hands. I hear Will challenge Miles to a game of checkers, followed by an amused “Hot dog!” barely five minutes later. Miles rarely loses games. He never loses at checkers.
Someone changes the record to Billie Holiday, her voice drowsy and warm. She was Mother’s favorite. I return my dart to the nightstand and use my pillow to block out the music and the sound of the rain.
It’s the first night in three weeks that I do not dream of her.
Chapter Three
The summer I was thirteen, there was a storm that swept through during the night. The thunder was loud enough to wake us all, and Miles cried out until Mother went to him. I don’t know if she ever went back to sleep, but at dawn she knelt to wake me.
“Come with me,” she said, pulling me from the warmth of my bed. I was grumpy until she handed me a mug of hot chocolate. “The sunrise is always best after a big storm,” she said. We pulled on coats over our nightgowns and shoved our feet into rubber boots, and she led me out to the garden.
Mother toweled dry one of the rusty wrought-iron chaises so I could sit and keep her company while she cleared out the debris cast by the storm. She hadn’t lied about the sunrise. It started out a soft pink and then heated into a searing orange.
“I was reading the other day about it raining frogs and fish,” she said. She wore gloves, picking through the splintered branches and tucking dirt back into divots. “It’s been documented as really happening. Can you imagine what it would be like if you were just walking along, minding your own business, and you got thumped in the head by a falling fish?”
She’d been laughing about it until she abruptly stopped. She bent down to nudge a nest that had been battered. I could see the white shards of egg by her boots. “Poor birds,” she said, her mood suddenly darkening.
Sometimes she was like that. A paper crane, folding in on herself without warning. I didn’t say anything else, and neither did she. I hated her moods. I could never tell when they would strike or how long they would last. I just watched her step around the puddles as I sipped my hot chocolate until it grew cold.
“I’m sorry about the birds,” I said when we were taking off our boots in the front hallway. “I’m sorry it made you sad.”
“Not the birds, honey,” she said. She tucked my hair behind the ear she never wanted me to hide. “Just reminded me of someone I used to know.”
“Tell me more about the frogs raining down, then,” I said, and just as quickly as it had come, her mood passed. After that morning we’d never say it was raining cats and dogs outside. We’d say our version instead.
Frogs and fish, I’m thinking when I wake, and for a moment I’m disoriented. I’m not in my own bed. The quilt on top of me is stiffer than the one I’m used to and it isn’t thrown to the floor, the sheets tangled around my legs. I must have slept peacefully.
Because I didn’t have the dream.
My heart isn’t racing and freshly torn apart, and that makes me feel lighter than I have in weeks. I push free of the covers, throw on a white cotton dress, and comb my fingers through my hair. But a thought nags: Shouldn’t I want to have the dream—?even one that tortures me—?if it’s the only way I can still see her?
When I reach the kitchen, Genevieve hands me a steaming cup of coffee, which I take even though I wouldn’t normally drink it. “Morning,” she says briskly. “He’s out there,” and she points me to the garden.
Miles is sitting alone at a table, surrounded by a spread of popovers, jam, cream, and berries. It’s more food than the two of us could ever eat, and I can’t help but think of the rations back home. Miles barely stops shoving food into his mouth to acknowledge me.
“Good morning to you, too,” I say. The air feels clear and new after the storm. I bet this morning’s sunrise would have been worth waking to see.
I set my coffee down, fill my plate, and point to a pitcher of orange juice. “Does that have any feathers in it?”
Miles rolls his eyes. “I haven’t called pulp ‘feathers’ since I was five.”
I grin obnoxiously at him and pour myself a glass. The juice is tart and thick, the freshest I’ve ever had. “Where is everybody?” I ask.
Miles shrugs. “Will’s at school. Dr. Cliffton’s working. Mrs. Cliffton is running errands but said she’d be back soon. Look.” He nods behind him. “They have hens.”
While I’m looking, he slips two extra pastries into a napkin and tucks it into his pocket.
“Don’t do that, Miles,” I say. “It’s tacky.”
“Do what?” he asks. Now it is his turn to smile—?his widest gap-toothed smile. Sometimes that smile is worse than a flick straight to the forehead.
I sigh. “Never mind.”
“Mrs. Cliffton gave me some new pencils. I’m going to draw,” he says. He waves his notebook and saunters away through the garden paths lined with jewel-toned monkshood and patches of hyssop. I take a sip of coffee, surprised at how much I like its bitterness. And how sleep, a little sun, and a real breakfast can make everything seem infinitely better than it was yesterday.
As I reach for a pecan bun, Miles’s head bobs between sprays of orange Oriental lilies and a cluster of snowy hydrangeas, then back again. He is so close to the flowers, they are all but up his nose.
For the love of everything holy—?why can’t he ever just act like a normal person?
“Aila,” he calls. “It’s wild. None of these smell.”
“Okay,” I say. I don’t move. This is another one of his tricks, just to make me get up when I’m enjoying a nice breakfast.
“I’m not ragging!” he calls. “I haven’t smelled a single flower in this entire garden. See for yourself.”
“Okay,” I repeat. I start grinning again as a thought comes to me. “So does that mean your finishing word is non-scents?”
“Har har,” he says. He puts a hand on his jutting hip. “But bully for you. You remembered how to make a joke.”
I saunter toward him and lean down to where he points, expecting to breathe in the sweet fragrance of fading summer. But—?for once, anyway—?he isn’t exaggerating. There isn’t even the hint of a scent. It is as if the lily petals are cut from scraps of colored paper. I take them in my fingers. They feel like velvet; they feel alive.
“Huh,” I say, thinking again of Mrs. Cliffton coming in from the rainstorm, of the words Will had started to say. Each strange little thing seems like a puzzle piece, or like the riddles Mother always loved. Riddles: the use of maddening clues, subtle wordplays, and obscure patterns to point to an answer no sensible person would ever think of.
I hate riddles.
Miles rests his notebook and pencils on the table, then strikes out on a mission to personally smell every flower in the garden. I watch him as I fill a plate with blueberries and a second sticky bun. “I’m taking paper,” I call to Miles. “To write Cass.” I flip through his endless pages of colorful drawings and tear out a blank sheet near the back.
But instead of a letter, I start a list.
Flowers without scents, I write, in very small letters.
Something called Mind’s Eye?