by Suzy Turner
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The following day I was awoken by the gentle sound of Gabriel's voice.
“Another dream, Meredith? I guess I have no choice now but to tell her the truth. I had hoped the dreams wouldn't have started until she was at least eighteen. I understand now that it is a sign. She must be told. It's such a shame that this is all happening now. She is so young,” he'd said.
I could hear the sadness in the way Gabriel spoke and that made me feel sad too, even though I had no idea what he had to tell me. I finally felt relief. Relief that, at last, I would know the truth. But along with the relief came the dread. After all, it must be bad for there to have been so much secrecy in the first place.
Now that I knew he planned to tell me, I waited for him to broach the subject, so that day I just acted as normal, I went to school and completed my homework before dinner. It was after we'd eaten and washed the dishes that something finally happened.
He had summoned my father's brother and sister, Wyatt and Meredith, who had arrived just as we had finished washing the dishes.
“Lilly. It is time,” said Gabriel, as Meredith took my hand and led me into the living room where we all sat in silence before Gabriel produced an old battered shoe box and took off the lid. In it were photos and letters. He handed me a picture of a very beautiful young woman with long black hair. There was something vaguely familiar about her. In her arms was a tiny newborn baby. Clearly the photo had been taken in a hospital immediately after the baby had been born.
“Who is this?” I asked.
“Her name was Serena,” answered Meredith with a sad smile, “Lilly. This is your mother.”
I gasped and shook my head.
“No, my mother is Vivian. This isn't Vivian.”
“No, Lilly. Vivian isn't your mother. Serena is. And this little child is your sister, Neleh,” said Gabriel as he passed a number of different photos to me. All were the same little girl at different ages. One was the photo Ben had taken to the airport to identify me with. Gabriel told me it was the closest image he had of me. “You two looked so alike when you were babies.”
In another the little girl was about four and was being cuddled by my father on a beach on a lovely sunny day. He looked like a completely different person, so happy. I had never seen him happy before. Another pictured her aged around 10, posing happily for the camera in this very living room with Gabriel laughing to her side. The most poignant image was that of her as a teenager pictured with Serena and my father. The image of a very happy family – it was then that I noticed Serena was pregnant.”
Wyatt spoke. “She was carrying you in this picture, Lilly.”
I shook my head but deep down I knew. It was obvious to see. I looked very much like Neleh and Serena. And as I looked at the photos, I realised that Serena was the woman from my dream. I didn't know what to think. For so many years I had grown up believing Vivian was my mother yet I had never felt any kind of bond with her. She had always made it blatantly obvious that she didn't care for me. It made sense. I felt my eyes welling up so I blinked hard to try and get rid of the tears before they spilled down my face.
“Lilly,” said Gabriel, “this is just the beginning. There are things we need to tell you that you are going to find hard to believe.”
I nodded, unable to say a word.
“Just after you were born, Neleh was killed,” said Wyatt.
I gasped and gulped back the tears as it hit me that I'd once had a sister, but now she was dead.
“And shortly afterwards... Serena died too. I'm so sorry, Lilly,” he said sadly.
“What? But how? Why?” I cried, looking down at the picture of the happy family, ripped apart by two deaths.
“Nobody knows exactly what happened, dear. All we know is that Neleh was murdered in the forest. By who or what we don't know for sure – although there were suspicions at the time,” said Meredith as she held my hand tightly in hers.
“Suspicions?” I asked.
Gabriel looked so angry, but before he could speak, he was interrupted by Wyatt, “Lilly there is a man in that forest who is believed to have been responsible for Neleh's death. His name is Sammy Morton.”
Gabriel gave me another photo showing Neleh probably a couple of years older than me, pictured with a handsome young man with olive skin and black hair and even darker eyes. They looked so happy together.
“Is that him?” I asked.
Meredith nodded.
“But they looked so happy. Why would he kill her? I don't understand.”
“Nobody understands. But he hasn't been seen since. There was a lot of talk. But we can't be sure,” added Meredith.
The angry look on Gabriel's face suggested he thought Sammy was guilty.
“But what about Serena? What about my mother?” I asked.
“Your mother killed herself, Lilly,” said Wyatt, quietly.
“How could she do that? How could she just leave me, her baby. Her own daughter?” I cried.
“Again, Lilly dear, we do not understand that either. Grief is a funny thing. People react to it in such unusual ways. She must have been so heartbroken and she just couldn't believe that her eldest daughter was dead. That combined with postnatal hormones. We simply don't know. We wish we knew what had been happening. Perhaps we could have stopped her from doing what she did. Serena was my best friend, Lilly. It was very hard to understand for me too,” said Meredith as she choked back the tears.
“Tell me,” I asked slowly, “tell me how she did it. How did my mother kill herself?”
Gabriel stood up abruptly then and turned his back towards me, as if he was still struggling to come to terms with what had happened all those years ago. He spoke slowly and quietly, “She just walked out of the hospital in the middle of the night and continued walking until she reached the highest point in the forest and she threw herself into the river. She must have half frozen to death before she even got there. All she had on was a hospital gown. She didn't even have any shoes on. It was December. It was freezing.”
I could barely breathe. My mother. My true flesh and blood. The woman who had carried me for nine months and had given birth to me had killed herself just after I was born. I could picture her walking through the snow, barefoot – yet she was probably barely even aware of the cold. Clearly all she could think of was the death of her precious daughter. My sister. Both were dead. Tears rolled down from the corners of my eyes. I couldn't stop them. Soon my face was completely wet.
Gabriel approached me and crouched down in front of me. He placed his hand on my shoulder and patted me. Looking me deep in the eyes, he said, “I didn't just lose my grandchild and my daughter-in-law that night, Lilly. I lost your father and I lost you too.” He held me close to him then just for a moment.
There was a knock on the door. “That'll be Rose,” he said as he stood up.
“I'll get it,” said Wyatt as he stood and went to open the door. “Hi Rose. Thanks for coming,” I heard him say. She whispered something and I heard him respond, “yes, she knows everything up until Serena's death.”
“Oh, the poor dear,” I heard her say.
Rose walked in then, removing her warm fur coat and throwing it accurately on the coat hook on the wall. “Darling, Lilly,” she said as Gabriel and Meredith gave her room to embrace me tightly.
She said nothing for a few minutes. We just sat in silence while the tragic news sank in, making my heart feel so heavy. The sound of the kitchen clock could be heard ticking, almost in time to the beating of my heart. To the beating of all our hearts.
Rose looked at me then. She really looked at me as if she was looking deep into my soul.
“You are my sister's daughter,” she said, nodding. “Yes, Serena was my darling little sister. She was the most wonderful person, Lilly. Everybody loved her. When she was born, she was a little miracle. That's what my parents and I had called her. 'Our little miracle'. My parents were getting on, you see. They never thought they'd have another child
so when she appeared, it was a huge shock... a wonderful shock, of course, but a shock nonetheless,” she said smiling.
Gabriel laughed then and I thought what a lovely face he had when he laughed. I hadn't seen much laughter in him since my arrival.
“It was a shock to the whole community,” he said. “Your mother was nearly seventy,” he chuckled as he spoke to Rose and they shared a smile together.
I was amazed too. A woman of nearly seventy had given birth, naturally, to a healthy baby girl. Not something you heard much of these days, I thought.
“She was embraced by everyone here,” said Rose, “and I raised her as my own after mother and father passed away nearly ten years later. I was happy to do it though, with the... absence of children of my own. Serena wasn't your average ten year old. She was so mature and bright. She and Jack were the best of friends from a very early age. We all knew that they were soul mates, so when they told us they wanted to get married, we were overjoyed. It was the most natural thing in the world for them both. She was nearly 16 and Jack was 19.”
“She became pregnant with Neleh almost immediately and they loved that child. They doted on her. Neleh was exactly like her mother... your mother...” she said, nodding at me, “she was headstrong, beautiful and intelligent. Everybody loved her. So when the cycle started to repeat itself again, nobody was worried. Neleh and Sammy seemed like soul mates too. They had wanted to get married themselves and start a family at a very early age. We didn't worry. We thought it was the most natural thing in the world – Neleh following in your mother's footsteps,” she stopped then and asked Meredith for a glass of water, who quickly poured her a drink and passed it to her, before she continued.
“Sammy Morton was a very well liked boy here. He was an orphan, raised by a foster family in town. We really thought he and Neleh were well suited. What went wrong between them, we don't know, but that day when he carried her lifeless body back into town, he just looked different. He didn't look like the same person. He looked crazed somehow. And everybody just started believing that he had murdered her. He disappeared that day and nobody has ever seen him since. Some people say he still lives in the forest, some people say he is dead and haunts the forest. Whatever happened, he disappeared within that forest, Lilly, which is one of the reasons Gabriel doesn't want you to ever go in there.”
“But what happened to his foster parents? Didn't they want to find him?” I asked.
“They couldn't accept what had happened and so they left Powell River a few weeks later.”
I found it hard to believe that his foster parents would just up and leave like that, unless they thought he was guilty too.
It was so much to take in that my head began pounding harder and harder and the sound of blood pulsing through my veins became louder and louder until I could barely hear myself think. I felt hot and uncomfortable and I just needed a moment to myself. I excused myself for a couple of minutes and went and splashed my face with cold water in the bathroom.
As I stood there, I looked at myself in the mirror, but I couldn't see myself. All I could see were the morphing faces of Neleh and my mother.
Again, I recalled the dream I'd had in the forest. The woman that had tried to speak to me in my dream had been Serena. Had my mother been trying to tell me something? I suddenly remembered Gabriel's words to Meredith that morning: 'I guess I have no choice now but to tell her the truth. I had hoped the dreams wouldn't have started until she was at least eighteen. I understand now that it is a sign. She must be told'.
Were my dreams real signs? I thought of Oliver and the feral cats and a cold shiver ran down my spine.
As I returned to my family, they were whispering among themselves. They quietened down as I approached them and sat down.
“I know there is more... so please go on,” I said bravely, although I didn't feel so brave.
This time, Meredith spoke. “Lilly, what we are going to tell you now might sound fantastical and surreal but we need you to keep an open mind, okay?”
I nodded.
“When your father left us and took you away to live in England, we believe that he did so against his own will. We believe that a witch cast a spell on him,” she said nervously.
It was like an epiphany to me and it was then that I knew they were talking about Vivian.
“Vivian was a witch. Yes, it makes sense to me now,” I whispered.
I could feel a weight being lifted not only from my shoulders, but from those around me too. I could hear sighs of relief. I thought once again to that strange black room and Gabriel's words: black was a magical colour.
“Lilly... why does this make sense to you? Did she ever do anything to you? Did she ever hurt you?” asked Gabriel.
“She never laid a finger on me but she did hurt me in other ways. She stopped my father from spending any time with me. She tried to stop him from loving me. Although he withdrew from me, he would never have stopped loving me, would he?” I said. A few more tears fell down my cheeks as I began to see Vivian in a totally new light. The truth hurt.
“Of course not, Lilly. You mean the world to him. I'm sure of that,” said Meredith.
“How did you know that Vivian is a witch? What did she do?” I asked, wondering how it had all begun.
Between them, they explained how my father had met Vivian at the hospital when I was born and that she had not left his side after my mother had died. My father, apparently, had changed instantly and it wasn't the kind of change that happens after the death of a loved one. It was an inexplicable change. A change that could have only occurred through some kind of skulduggery. In this case they believed that skulduggery to be witchcraft. And the person responsible was, undoubtedly, Vivian.
“She somehow stopped us from seeing you, and Jack,” said Wyatt. “We did everything we could to see you both but there was some kind of physical force preventing us from doing so.”
“We spent a lot of time at Serena's graveside, hoping that we would see him there but he never appeared. Not once. That wasn't the Jack we knew. And before we knew it, we found out that Vivian was taking you both to England. When we confronted her, she became so angry, she threatened us. She said if we ever tried to come after her, she would... she would hurt you,” said Meredith.
“That's why we've never been able to see you or why we never tried to call you, sweetie. God knows we wanted to. We desperately wanted to but we couldn't risk it. We couldn't risk losing you for good. We managed to track down your address and wrote to you but we're sure that Vivian disposed of the letters before you ever saw them.”
“So you've not seen my father since my mother died?” I asked.
They shook their heads.
“That must have been so awful for you all... and now we don't know if we'll ever see him again,” I cried.
“We have no idea what has happened to him... or to Vivian, but I sincerely believe that they are both still alive. The fact that they vanished without a trace suggests more witchcraft though. We have been doing everything we can to find Jack and we have reason to believe that they are somewhere in Canada,” Gabriel said.
I asked him what they have been doing to try and track them down and why he felt they were still alive but before I could get an answer from him, Rose spoke instead and I certainly wasn't prepared for what she was about to tell me.
“Lilly, dear, for us to answer that question, you need to learn the truth about who you are.”
Confused, I nodded.
The truth turned out to completely change my view of the world.