by Cat Winters
“May I see him?”
She shook her head. “Not until he’s discharged. They made an exception for the hypnotized women.”
I joined her inside, and another long bout of painful waiting ensued, interrupted early on by the society ladies in their red, white, and blue dresses, parading out to the hospital’s exit from somewhere in the back. They spoke again—I heard complaints about sore backs and idiotic husbands mainly— but the return of those voices allowed me to better breathe.
Before she reached the front door with the others, Sadie turned her face my way, and I braced myself for bared teeth or a verbal dart that would make me feel even worse than I already did about the silencing.
She offered neither.
But I saw her—the true Sadie, a newer version. The rest of the hospital dulled around her, and she brightened before my eyes, a girl in plaid trousers and a thick red tie, with a bouquet of yellow ribbons pinned to her left shoulder. I swear she even offered me a smile of camaraderie, but perhaps that was my imagination stretching too far.
In any case, Mademoiselle Sadie Eiderling, the beer baron’s daughter, left the hospital that morning a burgeoning suffragist and a modern woman.
Of that, I’m certain.
ear three o’clock in the afternoon, Henry materialized. Not from a cloud of orange smoke on a stage but from the back hallway of the hospital—a far more impressive feat, considering the state of him the night before. His red vest and black necktie dangled over his arm, and he wore just his striped shirtsleeves and trousers and a pair of brown suspenders.
Genevieve and I sprang up from the bench and hurried toward him. I lagged behind a couple of feet so she could embrace him first.
She clamped his middle like a vise. “Are you all right?”
“I am,” he told her. “No need to worry anymore.”
She lowered her arms, and Henry moved on to me with an embarrassed-looking smile and a warm hug. His lips nuzzled against my hair near the top of my head.
“That wasn’t part of the plan, Monsieur Reverie,” I said into the soft sheen of his shirt.
“Those women were in a hell of a panic, weren’t they?”
“We all were.”
“I know.” He rubbed my back. “I’m sorry.”
“What about the hospital bill, Henry?” asked Genevieve.
“I told them to send it to Anne’s house in San Francisco.”
“Did Genevieve tell you about Frannie’s collection?” I asked.
“Yes, that was far too kind. I’m deeply grateful.” He stepped back and regarded my purple gown, his hand in mine. “You never went home last night?”
“I’m never going back home. Father knows.”
“New York City, then?”
“Yes.” I gave a small nod and a weak smile.
He swallowed as if tasting a bitter pill.
Genevieve cleared her throat. “Our bags are at the hotel. We still have the rooms if you want to change first. There’s a nearby streetcar if you’re too tired to walk all that way.”
Henry dropped his hand away from mine. “Then let’s get going. I don’t want to think about this departure much longer.”
BRUSHED AND SCRUBBED AND DRESSED IN MY ORDINARY brown skirt and winter coat, I stood in front of Henry and Genevieve on the vast tile floor of Portland’s Union Depot, waiting to purchase a railroad ticket that would take me up through Washington and then east. By the time I reached the ticket counter, my hands were sweating. I dropped my slick coins all over the place.
“I’m sorry,” I said to the grandfatherly man working the counter, and I caught a nickel before it clanked to the ground. “I’m a little nervous.”
“Going on a grand adventure?” he asked.
“That’s my hope.”
I sorted out the money, and in a matter of seconds I clutched a ticket between my fingers. The Rhodeses purchased their southbound fares and tucked the papers in their coat pockets.
Henry peeked at my ticket over my shoulder. “Your train leaves soon. We had better walk you out to the platform.”
I nodded and ventured outside the depot with the two of them by my side.
A black locomotive breathed white steam on the northbound tracks, while arriving travelers climbed out of the green passenger cars in their winter hats and traveling coats. Porters in blue jackets and caps lugged large leather bags and pointed the lost in the correct directions.
“Henry.” I grabbed his arm before we strayed too far from the bright terra-cotta bricks of the main building. “Don’t forget, I’m still under hypnosis.”
“Ah.” He swung around to face me. “I was wondering if you wanted to let go of that one lingering part.”
“Of course I do. I don’t want to keep seeing the world the way it truly is.”
He cocked his head. “Are you sure about that?”
“Help her, Henry.” Genevieve pushed at his shoulder. “Don’t you dare leave her stuck like that.”
“I want my mind to be entirely my own,” I added.
“Olivia ‘Scorcher’ Mead . . .” Henry cracked a smile, and the corners of his eyes crinkled with amusement. “There’s no doubt at all that your mind has remained your own this entire time.”
“Do it quickly, eh, before she needs to go.” Genevieve backed away with her plump black case—the smallest of their bags. “I’ll even leave you two alone for a few minutes if you want to be by yourselves.”
“You don’t have—”
“Do it.” Genevieve turned and wandered off to the opposite side of the platform.
Henry lowered their two larger bags to the ground beside him, which prompted me to set my Gladstone next to my feet alongside my skirt. We stood up straight and faced each other.
“Close your eyes—they’re exceptionally heavy.” He cupped my cheek, and my eyes fell shut, as if lead lined my lashes. “Keep them closed,” he said in a voice soft and lush, and he pulled my body toward him. “Your lids are now stuck together. Try opening them.”
I couldn’t.
“Good. Very good. I am now going to stroke the back of your neck with my free hand, and each caress will send you deeper and deeper into hypnosis.” He rubbed his palm down the base of my neck, over the topmost vertebrae. “Do you feel that wonderful sense of relaxation?”
“Yesss,” I whispered from somewhere inside a deep, delicious pocket of darkness.
“Now, listen carefully, because what I am about to say is extremely important.” His breath warmed my ear. “You will see the world the way it has always been. You will ensure your mind remains your own and never, ever allow a hypnotist or a domineering suitor or your father—or anyone else—to alter your thoughts beyond your control. Do you understand?”
“Yesss. My mind . . . will remain . . . my own.”
“You will not allow people like Percy Acklen to make you feel as though you’re lesser than they.”
“I . . .” I tried to reach my fingers up to Henry’s hand on my cheek, but my arm was built of limp rubber.
“Will you promise, Olivia? Don’t let people like him make you feel like dirt.”
“I promise.”
“Your mind will remain your own.”
“Yesss.”
I heard him swallow. “I am going to wake you up now. Are you ready?”
I nodded on the wobbly hinge of my neck.
“I’ll count forward to ten—we’ll take it slowly. One . . . two . . . three . . .”
“I want . . . to make sure . . . you’re going to be . . . all right, too.”
He lowered his hand from my face. “Pardonnez-moi?”
My eyes stayed shut, still too thick and dense to unseal, and my tongue remained heavy and cumbersome. “I feel . . . the urge . . . to tell you . . . things. Waking up . . . might change . . . my boldness.”
“It won’t.”
“You’re only . . . eighteen. Hospitalized . . . chest pains. Fatigue. Collapsed. Just eighteen. I can’t . . . be with you . . . need to
be . . . on my own. But . . . I care . . . about you.”
“I’m all right.”
“No. Not convinced.”
He was silent, and for a moment I just stood there with my arms dangling by my sides, relaxing in the mesmerizing hold of peaceful blackness.
“Are you ready to wake up now?” he asked.
“Swear . . . you’ll take care . . . of yourself.”
“I—”
“Swear. Let me speak . . . with less heaviness.”
His thumb traced my jawline. “All right. You’re easing upward to a lesser stage of relaxation. Keep rising up . . . up . . . up. Your tongue is no longer heavy. You can talk with clarity.”
My tongue loosened and stretched inside my mouth. I licked my drying lips.
“What did you want to say?” he asked with hesitation.
“There’s beauty in this world, Henry, and not everyone dies young. There’s so much hope. There’s so much work, too—ridiculous amounts of work—but above all, hope. I’ve seen it out there, alongside the darkness. Look at Frannie and what she did. Look at the times we had together.”
He didn’t answer. His hand trembled against my face.
“Henry?”
“I’ll count forward,” he said, a quaver in his voice, “slowly, so you can come up gently. One . . . two . . . three . . .”
“Were you listening to me, Henry?”
“Yes.”
“Will you put yourself back together?”
“Yes.”
“Promise?”
“Mon Dieu, Olivia”—he emitted a weak flutter of a laugh— “are you hypnotizing me while under hypnosis?”
“We’re partners, remember?”
“Yes, I definitely remember.”
“Then let my words persuade you to become the type of person you’re not afraid of looking at in the mirror. If you think your life is a farce, Henry, then change it.”
“All right. I’ll fix myself up.”
“Promise?”
“Yes. If it means that much to you, then . . . yes.” A self-relaxing breath loosened his voice. “Um . . . where was I?”
“Four,” I said. “And I want you to open up your eyes, too, when we get to ten. Five . . .”
“All right.” He took another breath. “Six . . .”
“Seven,” I said.
“Eight . . .”
“Nine . . .”
He removed his hand from my face. “Ten.”
We awoke, and I took a long look around me. Passengers and porters hurried about, and a train’s black smokestack hissed with impatience. In front of me, a boy blinked to keep his eyes dry before letting me go.
“They have to remove her whole breast,” he said. “It’s a fairly new procedure, but it’s the only thing that will save her. She’ll have a better chance than our mother did.”
I cast my eyes down to Genevieve waiting on a bench with her leather bag. “She looks brave.” I peeked back up at him. “And so do you. You’ll both be strong for each other.”
He nodded without breathing.
I reached up and kissed his lips, which faltered beneath mine. We clasped our arms around each other and hugged instead, and Henry whispered in my ear, “Un jour, lorsque tu es prête, on se reverra encore.”
“What does that mean?” I asked with the left side of my face pressed against his shoulder.
“One day, when you are ready, we will meet again.”
No words found their way to my mouth. My eyes welled with tears and turned Genevieve’s brown coat and gray skirt, down the way, into blurs.
A blue-capped conductor checked his pocket watch and called out, “All aboard,” and a crowd of people clamored forward to the passenger cars.
Genevieve shot off her bench and jogged past them all to reach me.
“Thank you.” She grabbed my face and kissed my wet cheek. “Thank you for your help. Please send me Frannie’s address so I may write to her.”
“Oh, that reminds me”—I pulled a piece of paper out of my coat pocket—“here’s my mother’s address.” I slipped the paper into Henry’s hands. “Please promise to send me a postcard when Genevieve has recovered.”
Everyone bustled past us as if they couldn’t get on board quickly enough. Time shoved against me.
Henry grabbed hold of my hand, and I kissed him again—a proper good-bye kiss, just in case we were about to turn into mere memories for each other. He pulled me against him by my waist, and we stayed together until the conductor shouted his last boarding call.
I broke loose and climbed aboard the train without looking back at either of them.
A young black Pullman porter in a white coat greeted me at the head of the aisle. “May I help you with your luggage, miss?”
“Yes, thank you.” I handed him my bag, and for a moment I saw straight through him to the green floral rug running down the aisle.
No, I told myself, and I rubbed at my eyes. No—you see the world the way it has always been.
I followed the porter, and four seats in we passed a man with engorged lips and his dissolving wife, whose neck bled in a bright red bloom.
“No! Oh, no.” I turned to leave.
Two young ladies in wide-brimmed hats maneuvered their bags up the aisle and blocked my exit.
“Oh, dear, are you trying to get off?” asked the woman in front, turning sideways.
“I just . . .” I cupped my hand over my forehead and heard the rustle of paper in the left sleeve of my blouse.
“Personally, I think you’re traveling in the right direction,” said the second woman, who had a distinctive glow in her cheeks. “This train passes through Idaho, where women voted yesterday. That’s where we’re headed.”
“I don’t know where I’m going.”
I swiveled back around and grabbed hold of the wooden backs of seats to navigate my way down the aisle behind the porter. The floor swayed and bobbed below my feet, as if in a dream. I reached under my left sleeve and drew out a folded piece of paper that had been stuffed up there like the tickets Henry had snuck into my glove while we were in the restaurant with Percy.
Another message, written in the same hand as that previous note, met my eyes.
I believe you have always seen the vampires and the fading souls in the world, Olivia. You just never paid close attention to them before. As I’ve learned through my own ordeals, once you start viewing the world the way it truly is, it is impossible to ignore both its beauty and its ugliness. Look around you.
You can’t stop seeing it, can you?
I glanced up and witnessed a girl near my age with a bruise swelling near her eye. A second later, her body puffed into a thin haze of smoke.
A young bearded man with burning coals for irises glared at the black porter walking by him with my bag, and I swore I saw the man tying a rope into a noose.
My eyes strayed back to the message.
There is some of the unexplainable in me, ma chérie, but there is also a great deal of enchantment in you. Keep telling the world what you see.
Help others to see it, too.
I dropped into an empty seat and slid across the bench to the window. Using my fist, I rubbed a circle against the condensation fogging up the glass.
Down below, Henry and Genevieve roamed the length of the car with their bags at their sides and craned their necks, as if they were looking for me as well. With a frenzied wave, I caught Henry’s eye, and I pressed the letter against the glass. He stopped and gave a small nod.
The train lurched forward, and the Rhodeses stood there on the platform, amid other travelers in black and gray and the faded browns of the autumn leaves. They blended in with the surroundings, and I held my breath in fear of them going one step farther and disappearing.
“Don’t fade,” I said. “Please don’t fade.”
Time seemed poised to swallow them up, but before the train chugged past them, a switch flipped. Henry and Genevieve ignited into the blaze of colors from their Halloween
performance, Henry in his bold crimson vest and Genevieve in her peacock-blue gown. I pushed my palm harder against the glass to see them more clearly—a beautiful, blinding brilliance.
Another light flared to life in the glass—the reflection of a girl with an ordinary face and unremarkable black hair, but she shone like the brightest stage lights of the Metropolitan.
The train clacked onward, gathering speed. My reflection remained, but the Reveries fell out of my view. I felt them around me, though, in the velvet-padded seats, between the strangers. Henry and Genevieve. Frannie and Kate. Agnes, Gerda, and Mr. and Mrs. Harrison. Even Mother and Father. They were all there, everyone a part of me, by my side, making sure I stayed on that train until I reached my destination.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’M EXTREMELY GRATEFUL TO THE FOLLOWING INDIVIDUALS and organizations.
My husband and two kids, my parents, my sister, and the rest of my close family and friends, for always being supportive of my dreams, even when they’ve seemed impossible.
My agent, Barbara Poelle, for becoming an instant champion of this book as soon as she read the first chapters.
My editor, Maggie Lehrman, for believing in me a second time around and for spinning her magic to make my work shine.
The rest of the team at Abrams: Susan Van Metre, Tamar Brazis, Laura Mihalick, Jason Wells, Maria T. Middleton (designer extraordinaire!), Tina Mories in the UK, the copyeditor, proofreaders, and everyone else who played a role in making this book as strong as it could possibly be and putting it into the hands of readers. Such diligent work is much appreciated.
My early readers, Carrie Raleigh, Kim Murphy, Francesca Miller, Adam Karp, and Meggie, for their enthusiasm and much-needed feedback.
Miriam Forster, Teri Brown, Amber J. Keyser, and Kelly Garrett—my Thursday Morning Coffee and Writing Team— for getting me out of the house!
My fellow members of The Lucky 13s, Corsets, Cutlasses, & Candlesticks, and SCBWI Oregon, whom I can always count on for advice, emotional support, and exuberant cheers of celebration.
The Mark Twain Foundation, for assistance and permission to quote the great Mr. Clemens.