Meg followed me from time to time out here, making the walk take two or three times longer. I didn’t mind that though. We liked her close. Dee always reminded me, Meg should be watched. Dee noticed something was different with her from the minute she grew in my belly. Shouldn’t let her stray too often. Keep an eye on this one. Won’t have enough strength to make it through this life without being led by the hand. It had been harder to do over the past few months as school grew closer.
She hadn’t come out to the cabin with me in weeks. Not since she realized she’d be heading off to kindergarten soon; a true big girl. The moon no longer rose and set with Aunt Dee and Mama. Not in any of the children’s eyes anyhow.
The teakettle whistled, and Dee took it down, filling two mugs. I opened her book of shadows, always left out on the table during the day. Wasn’t anyone around to take it. The page opened to earth connections. Guiding the plant life around to one’s will.
“The leaves are changing earlier this year,” Dee said.
I glanced in my mug. “The tea?”
She smiled. “No. Out in the forest. It’s as though the lines of life were clipped while we slept last night.”
Growing up with Granny Darling, Dee had more education in the old ways than I ever did. Even with as much time as I spent with the two of them, it seemed as though she was born doing things I’d never learn. Reading leaves, seeing signs in the forest, spotting auras. That was all her. I fell more to traditional brewing, and of course, I had learned long ago to hear the other girl in my head. But Dee, she saw everything.
“Second sight,” I said, closing her book and swirling my cup of tea. The sweet aroma rose, settling around me like perfume. “You either got it or you don’t.”
“You’ve never had time for it. I know.” She scooped a handful of dirt from the floor and dropped it on the table, patting it down and doodling strange shapes and designs into it. “Something’s different this time. There are lines merging, others diverting off their path. It’s as though—”
She froze, staring at the dirt.
“What? It’s as though what?”
“Little Meg.” Dee lowered her face to the dirt and blew so it spread into the cracks of the table. Shaking her head, she lifted another handful of dirt and dropped it on the table, running her finger in it. She drew a letter from the runic alphabet. “Algiz.”
Possible meanings rolled by in my head as if they were on a scroll. We most often used the symbol on wards and necklaces we sold to women running from something. “Protection? Protect Meg from what?”
She shook her head slowly, staring thoughtfully at the symbol. “Communication. With the divine or…”
“The dead?” I asked. “Who would want to talk to Meg from the other side?”
Spending most of our lives together, I was used to Dee’s sudden disappearances into her craft. Hell, I had my own. Her drifting mind. My loss of time. But never had she seemed so ghostly while talking about one of my children. I needed to go to Meg.
As if a strong breeze blew by touching only the book, the cover slammed open. Its pages stood in the air, then blew back and forth. There was not a spot of breeze anywhere else around us.
“I’ll be damned.” Dee looked up at me, her eyes swimming with tears. “Tell me, Geraldine. Do you still feel like a book spine?”
“The pages keep moving.” I watched the book. “I don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow.”
“And you can’t remember where you’ve been? Never? Not just, you didn’t want to tell me? But you really can’t remember?”
Some things were meant to be held close. I lied. “It’s always like a dream, soon as I try to grasp onto one part of it, the whole memory fades.”
The book slammed shut.
A child screamed from somewhere in the forest, a blood curdling and desperate cry for help.
“Mama!” Angela’s voice, but it wasn’t her face that flashed before me.
“Meg.” I jumped to my feet, turned to the path and ran toward the house. The birds flew ahead showing me the way. The forest split open for me for the first time in my life.
Angela screamed again followed by shouts from the boys, just as my mind went foggy and sideways, pulling me far away from my life. “No, please. I have to stay.”
I gripped onto a tree, desperate to root myself in the moment. It was too late as I flipped through random moments of my life and the girl in my head’s life.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
I grasped my head, not sure of how I had gotten to the hospital when I had been in the woods just a second earlier. But I hadn’t been, had I? Another dream of Mama seeped in during my waking hours. I cleared my mind, and focused on the moment I stood in, and not the one in the woods that was already leaving my memory.
The hospital sat on a hill looking over historic downtown and smelled like Dad’s workshop; bleach overdosed with lemons in a failed attempt at covering the sneaky odor of death and sickness. Cecelia was the only patient in her hospital room though there were two empty beds closer to the door. A metal folding chair leaned against the wall. A single television sat up high in the corner of the room and a daytime soap played on mute.
“Cess?” I asked, touching Cecelia’s arm. Her eyes fluttered open, like blue beads against a pale moon.
An IV fed into her arm, another led inside of a vein on the back of her hand. A blood pressure cuff and oxygen reader attached her to a beeping machine. I couldn’t believe I’d just seen her a few hours earlier.
“Meg?” she asked. Her dry and hollow voice made her sound far removed from her usual self.
“Thirsty?” I asked.
She nodded and rubbed at the needle tapped into her hand, and I filled her water mug. After a brief hesitation, I brought the straw to her mouth instead of handing the cup to her.
I watched as she drank, imagining I saw some of the hollowness below her eyes filling. She shivered and pulled away. “What happened to you?”
“I guess I got worse,” she said, closing her eyes. I placed the water back on the table and looked for a place to sit.
“Gary said when he found you, you could barely move,” I said, pulling one of the folding chairs up to her bed.
A chunk of her hair lifted and fell at the side of her head as she nodded. “I’ll be okay though. Doc said I have enough fat to feed off of.”
“That’s rude,” I said, silently agreeing with the doctor. If I caught whatever Cecelia had, I’d probably die in five minutes. “Are you contagious?”
She shook her head. “Not anymore. You know? I got my flu shot and everything earlier this year. First time I’ve ever had one, because they made all the staff get one. Now, I’m sick for the first time since I can’t remember when.”
I let out a sigh of relief, trying to cover it up with a sympathetic noise. “Poor, Cess. Is it the flu?”
“Something like that.” She smiled. “When did you start calling me Cess?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
She interrupted. “No, I like it. My friends back home called me Cess when we were kids. I miss it. You saying it makes me feel like they’re here. Like everything’s how it should be.”
I nodded. Remembering what it was like to miss someone. It had been a long time since I missed anyone but Angela and Bethany. Or at least, a long time since I admitted to missing anyone else.
“Are you ready for tomorrow?” Cecelia asked, fiddling with a wire.
“Tomorrow?”
“The auction house. Tomorrow is Thursday, right?” The whole house situation came crashing back on me out of nowhere, and I closed my eyes, and groaned. Cecelia dropped the wire she’d been fiddling with. “What?”
“The house—” There was no reason for me to get all emotional unbalanced girl over the whole thing. A month ago, I didn’t even know this money was coming my way, and now it was gone. If it had been a week ago and Dad’s house had been destroyed, I wouldn’t have cared. Wouldn’t have known. “I lost my g
et out of jail free card.”
“Huh?”
“Bobby. It had to be him. He came out to the house this morning while I was gone. He wrecked everything. Every single thing. I’ve got nothing except a mattress and Wolfy.”
“What? Meg. My head must be foggy or something, I don’t understand what you’re going on about.”
“He came out, and he broke everything. There’s isn’t a single thing that isn’t smashed, ripped apart or written on. I can’t sell anything and make money at the auction because everything is gone.”
Cecelia’s eyebrows drew together. “Oh sweetie, it can’t be that bad, now can it? Not everything?”
“Everything.”
“What about those little ceramic angels?” she asked. She had asked about those when we first met; I should have let her then instead of being stubborn.
“Little wings pulverized,” I said, picturing the heads and ceramic bodies broken into bits and shards in the room.
“Oh, sweetie. I’m so sorry.” She paled further. I didn’t want to make her upset, didn’t want to make her sicker than she already was, but that was exactly what I was doing. “Explain to me, get out of jail free?”
“I’m broke. Like, so broke that my negative dollars have negative dollars. I am fucked. I was sleeping on my friend Tracy’s couch before I came here. Didn’t have a job, debt collectors everywhere. I am so overwhelmingly fucked. I-I thought I’d be able to take this money and go move closer to family. Get a job and start over.”
“If it helps, you’re close to family now,” she said, reaching pitifully out to pat my hand.
“I meant my sister.”
A nurse with orange lipstick and grass green scrubs appeared, and we quieted. The woman checked the IV and looked at Cecelia. “Hmmm.”
“Is that a good ‘hmmm’ there?” Cecelia asked, smiling.
The nurse adjusted the IV drip and stepped back. “Hopefully that should flow better. Press the button if you need me.”
We watched the nurse leave, and Cecelia wiggled the needle before speaking again. “I know a sister’s different, I got two of my own. But we’re both outcasts, different than our siblings, don’t you think?”
“I’m not an outcast,” I insisted. More lies.
“Just give me a minute to speak my mind if you please. The words are here,” she tapped her forehead, “but it’s a real effort today to get them out. I know we don’t know each other well, but you remind me so much of the old pictures Mama used to show of Aunt Gerald— your mama. We’re related by blood, which can be a powerful thing if you let it. Blood in our family will take us a long way. Now, I know your sister is blood too, I ain’t saying she’s anything but...but she’s got a little one, right? A busy life? A single mom?”
“I’d be able to help her.” I’d thought about it before. She’d be happy to see me. Maybe not at first, but after a little, when she realized I could help her. I wouldn’t be in the way.
“Not saying you wouldn’t, but I’m just here plugging along. I’ve only got Gary, and we really only see each other on the weekends if we’re lucky and he ain’t pulling an extra shift. Now I love my little life I’ve carved out here, my little place in the world smack dab here in Cedar Valley. But we got room for one more. I know Jordan’s got room for you still. And if you’re looking for something more, Tristan’s been asking after you.”
“Tristan isn’t really my type. I mean, for any more than just a few hours.”
“Hush. You don’t have to fall for the first man who’s asking after you. If we did, I would have ended up with Clement Dostermeyer, and never left Mama’s side.”
“Clement Dostermeyer?” My upper lip curled. What a name.
“But Clement was still a hoot and a half to kill time with.” She blushed. “My point is, this place don’t have to hold the same faces and bad thoughts you ran from all them years ago. And if you let it, Cedar Valley will open its arms up to you, making you part of the scenery. Just like it’s done for me. Breathing here is just as natural as the trees breathing.”
“Is this where you start on that magic stuff?” I asked, forcing a teasing tone in my voice, but half wanting to tell her about the dirt woman at the diner.
“It’s the family’s way, but I won’t bother you with any of it till you say you want to know.”
“I don’t.” Something told me I needed to run as far away from magic talk. Make my life simple. A task hard enough to do without ghosts following me. The idea of opening myself up and letting in more? No way.
“You might. Just wait and see.”
“Even if I could stay,” I said, shifting uncomfortably in my seat, “I have nothing now. Everything was destroyed.”
Cecelia took in a labored yawn.
I waited a moment and then said, “I should let you sleep so you can get better. I bet the ladies down at the home don’t know what to do without their perms.”
“You should stay. Wait a second.” She wheezed and pushed her call button. The same nurse came in, checked a few things, and I moved to the window to give them the illusion of privacy. The nurse adjusted the little knob on Cecelia’s finger that tested how much oxygen Cecelia was getting.
Stay? What would I do if I stayed? I thought about the house. I had the mattress, enough cash for a few months of groceries, and a clothing filled backpack.
I had the fucking wolf and a forest full of trees with their watching eyes. Creaks and bumps in the night. Monsters, and my dead aunt. I had myself, Aunt Dee’s vegetable garden, Cecelia and Jordan. Nightmares. Tristan.
Oh crap, Tristan. I wasn’t good with the post-coitus avoiding thing. Not as much as I wanted to be.
The nurse walked out of the room, and I stepped back over to Cecelia. Oxygen tubes rested inside of her nostrils now.
“My lungs are tired,” she said. “Only a little more talking, then I’m going to sleep.”
“Cecelia, what do you have?”
“It’s just a virus, nothing to worry about.”
She looked bad enough that it would make most people worry. I started towards the door. “You go to sleep, I’ll—”
“We clean up.” Her voice came out stronger than I’d heard it yet.
“Huh?”
“I might not be able to help for a few days, no lying, probably longer, but Gary will. We can rent a dumpster. Gary’ll bring out a few friends—I’m sure Tristan’ll help — and they’ll haul out every single piece of broken crap. His company come pick it up for an employee discount.”
She formulated plans faster when she was sick than I did sober. “I don’t have any money.”
She rolled her eyes. “You talk about your sister and family. Well, she sent you here to do this thing on your own without any support from them. Like your father’s life was your entire mess to clean up. She can send money for the dumpster to be hauled. She can help that much, right?” I shrugged. “Good. You’ll call her and tell her what happened. As soon as I’m up to it, I’ll help you paint, do the floors, whatever.”
I shook my head. “I can’t let you do that.”
“You can, and you will. I might have a full happy life, but part of it has been dull and broken. And that’s the part that misses family. Even before I left, I wasn’t as close to my mama and sisters as I let on. If I help you, you don’t turn around and sell the house right away. You stay. You give Cedar Valley—” She paused and looked up at the ceiling. “—a year. You give it a year and if you still hate it, I’ll bake the cookies for the open house myself. You told me when you got here your sister and brothers said you should stay on for a while until you were ready to move. Well, do it then.”
I sat there, letting my options roll over in my head. Not a whole minute passed when I heard Cecelia’s heavy breathing. She had fallen back to sleep, exhausted herself by what was her usual talkative personality. I walked over to the window and looked outside. The sun set behind the parking lot, casting a yellow glow down the mountainside. A storm cloud rolled in from the w
est, and I saw the silhouette of the giant horse at the entrance of town.
Nowhere was quite as beautiful as Cedar Valley. Everything I’d taken for granted as a child was most of what I thought about as an adult. Lush green forests. The rivers. The way the storms rolled in, drenching the world clean.
I had nowhere to go. If I moved near Angela, she would need to pay up front for anything I needed. She would, too, if I only explained the situation correctly, but could I let myself rely on her? Fall deeper into Angela’s debt without guilt?
Not to mention, there was no guarantee that the ghosts following me around this town would leave me alone once I passed city limits. Would I bring them to Bethany? I thought of the weird things that had happened in California, and how much I tried to push them from my memory. The ghosts had never left me alone, not all the way. They’d only grown worse with my return. Could I do that to Angela and Bethany? Could I stay and do this to myself?
Bobby. He thought I’d pushed him into traffic and gotten away with it. He destroyed my house because of it. Could I stay in the woods all alone, knowing he was in town?
A phone sat on Cecelia’s nightstand and I lifted it. Who was I going to call? I crossed my fingers and opened the top drawer, finding a phone book, and shuffled the pages until I found the Sheriff’s station. The woman who answered transferred me to Ken.
“Hey, Meg,” Ken said. “How’s Cecelia?”
“Sleeping, but I think she’ll be all right.” I twisted the spiraled cord around my forefinger. “How did things go at the house?”
“We lifted prints, but none of them match Bobby or any of his usual suspect friends.”
“Which means?”
“We questioned them, but they deny everything. Without some kind of proof, we can’t do anything.”
Fuck.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Oregon, 1995
Geraldine, 34 years old
“Get moving, Geraldine.” Dee’s voice pulled me back into my skin. Like I’d been plucked up and then dropped onto the path, I fell to the ground on my hands and knees.
Going Home (Cedar Valley Hauntings Book 1) Page 22