by Cathy Lamb
Tilly also saw a therapist named Kate. Kate was compassionate, smart, and experienced with working with traumatized kids. She tried to get Tilly to open up. Once a week Tilly went to her appointment, and they played cards together. Eventually Tilly said yes or no, then spoke in short sentences. With the kind steadiness of her new foster parents behind her, she started to talk more. She started to remember what happened that night, bits and pieces sliding in and out of her mind, one vision after another.
Tilly remembered her father yelling at Johnny and Johnny yelling back. They were fighting about her mother, who had left when she was five years old. There was something else she was trying to remember. It nagged at her brain. It was right there, almost there, a whisper, a hidden secret . . . something happened that night before her mother left . . . what had she seen? What did she know? What was trying to come through from the
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prickly shadows of her scared and damaged mind? It had something to do with her mother . . . something Johnny said.
Her therapist told her that her memory was coming back and not to push it but to embrace it. To be brave. Tilly tried not to push it, but whatever it was scared her, like a threatening monster of hate. The monster was trying to tell her things that made her shake. Not only about the night her father died, but about a night that happened two years before that.
Tilly eventually realized that she needed to remember everything for Johnny. For Betsy.
So she allowed her memories to crawl back in, inch by inch, so they wouldn’t kill her, which was one more brave thing that Tilly Kandinsky had to do in a life filled with fear and other utterly terrifying events.
C h a p t e r 2 8
I entertained myself with daydreams of Marco and me. Why did I do that to myself? It hurt. It made me feel lonely and lost and hopeless.
I did it anyhow. I daydreamed of us dating and in bed and taking care of all our animals and reading on his deck as the sun slid down into the ocean and being in bed together and hiking around the island and going to the cool lake and hugging through the night in bed.
I daydreamed when I worked, and rode Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and chased the goats who escaped again, and tossed a ball to Sundance, Butch, and Cassidy. I daydreamed about Marco when I was with my mother and aunts at their house and we were making hats.
“Are you all right, dear?” my mother asked when we were at Rose Bloom Cottage on a warm evening, the ocean frothing at the edge of our property, a greeting of sorts, the clouds puffy.
We were making hats for a fund-raiser for the community center. My mother had piled her white hat high with faux roses in pink, white, and red. It was definitely a Dr. Seuss kind of hat.
She had strung red buttons together and wrapped them around the roses like a ribbon. At the top of the pile of roses she had placed a tiny red, sequined hat. “A hat on a hat,” she’d told me, smiling.
“I believe that something is off with your spirit,” Aunt Camellia said. Her hat was the widest hat she’d ever made. It
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was burgundy, floppy, netting over the front. There was a magical garden all over it, complete with daisies, irises, and tulips, a willow tree, a small barn, and a tiny light blue house. “I have re-created our garden.”
“Everything going well with the bookstore?” Aunt Iris asked.
Her hat was blue felt, and simple, until she glued silver sequins all over the brim, then attached a giant two-foot-long peacock she’d bought online. “For some reason, peacocks remind me of how important correct money management is.”
“I’m fine.”
They glanced at each other, worrying.
“Don’t worry,” I told them.
“It’s what I do best,” my mother said. “Worry about you.”
“She’s quite talented at worrying about you,” Aunt Camellia said. “As you know, dear. It’s in her genes, she cannot remove it.
It’s part of who she is, as your mother.”
“It’s going to cause you to get an ulcer, Poppy,” Aunt Iris said. “You have to stop.”
“Mothers worry,” my mother said. “We can’t stop.”
“I love you three,” I said. My hat was something you would see a woman wearing to the Kentucky Derby. Red. Enormous brim. I was adding twenty purple ribbons to the back that would hang down about three feet. To the front I pinned felt flowers in yellow and white, with pink centers.
“I love you, too, darling daughter,” my mother said. “You and your sister and my sisters.”
“I love you, too, my fairy sprite,” Aunt Camellia said, attach-ing a plastic butterfly that wiggled on a spring.
“I’ve always loved you,” Aunt Iris said, pressing down on the sequins. “No need to get mushy about it.”
It was a sweet moment.
Until a cloud came over my mother’s face, dark as a thundering night.
After school one day, when I was fourteen years old, I had a premonition. I hadn’t told my friend Emily I had premonitions because my parents said I shouldn’t tell anyone on the island.
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Jules was sworn to secrecy, too. They did know that sometimes I took action with the premonitions in order to prevent them from happening, and they helped me sometimes, too, to save someone, but we all tried to work as quietly and as anony-mously as possible.
My father, being in the military, was especially helpful on our
“reconnaissance missions,” or our “spy sorties,” or our “Victorious Adventures.” He named them so that I wouldn’t be so afraid of what I’d seen and would view helping people as an adventure, not a scary burden.
I had a premonition about Emily’s mother, Patsy. I saw her with a man I didn’t recognize. He was tall with a reddish beard.
In my premonition, they had a terrible fight and he shook her, then pushed her, and her head hit the wood floors in her kitchen with a bounce. The blood spilled into a dark puddle, and she died.
The boyfriend stood over her, panting, furious, then scared.
He started to shake her, calling her name, begging her to “Wake up, Patsy! Oh, my God. Oh, my God! Patsy!” He started to cry.
I was petrified. Sure enough, Emily told me that her mother had started dating a man she didn’t like. I met the man, who had a reddish beard, and I didn’t like him, either. I told my parents my premonition, and I swear their faces went white.
They invited Emily; Patsy; and the boyfriend, Gavin, over for dinner at Rose Bloom Cottage. After they left, my parents talked and I eavesdropped.
“I can see it, Poppy,” my father said to my mother when they thought I was in my bedroom. “He’s controlling. He’s too intense. He watches Patsy all the time. In the military we get rid of that kind of guy.”
“I didn’t like him at all,” my mother said. “There’s a simmer-ing anger there. He’s so possessive and suspicious.”
My parents sat down to decide what to do. Both of them soon told Patsy, gently, that they didn’t like Gavin, didn’t trust him, were concerned. She was offended and hurt and did not break up with him.
So that strategy didn’t work.
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Then, when Patsy had a bruise on her face, my mother called the police chief, who arrested Gavin. But Patsy didn’t want to press charges, she said she fell against her car, and she let Gavin back in the house.
So that didn’t work, either.
My father went to talk to Gavin, who used to work in construction but now seemed to laze about their house, now and then doing odd jobs around the island. He told Gavin he knew he was beating Patsy and it had to stop. He told Gavin he would regret hurting Patsy. Gavin was scared of my father, who was tall and had a steely gaze, but it didn’t stop him.
The bruises kept coming.
My father bought Patsy a gun. They later learned that Gavin found it, though Patsy had hidden it in the back of her underwear drawer, which showed that Gavin was going through her things. Gavin was “hell
fire furious at you,” she told my father, weeping. “He says he’s going to beat you up.”
My father laughed.
Finally, desperate, I told Patsy what I had seen for her future when I was at her house after school playing warrior princesses with Emily, even though my parents told me I should never tell anyone on the island about my premonitions.
“Miss Patsy,” I said in a whisper, even though Gavin wasn’t home, “Gavin is going to kill you. You’re going to get in a fight and he’s going to push you hard and you’re going to crack your head open on your kitchen floor and die.”
She looked alarmed, shocked, then she said, “Stop it, Evie.
You’re like your parents. I get it. You don’t like Gavin. But I love him, he loves me. He’s got a temper, but he can be kind and he treats me like a princess. I can change him. Love can change him. He’ll change, you’ll see. He had a hard childhood.” She knitted her hands together. The hands that made such unique, colorful art. Her pottery sold right off the shelves at Island Pottery, my mother told me, “as soon as she can make it, it’s gone.
Patsy has such talent.”
“You aren’t a princess,” I whispered to Patsy, so scared.
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“He’s going to kill you unless you tell him to get out of your house, and then Emily is not going to have a mom.”
“I can’t believe you’re talking like this, Evie. Like you can see the future when you can’t.”
Patsy looked at me with fear, her eyes blinking rapidly. She didn’t believe what I was saying, for the most part, but inside she knew what I was saying could be true. It could happen.
Gavin was violent. Patsy was young. She’d had Emily when she was nineteen, and she was still naively hopeful, blaming herself.
“I provoke him. I make him angry. But we make up. He doesn’t hit me very hard and he’s always sorry. Plus, this”—she waved at the bruise on her face—“doesn’t happen often.”
“It happens a lot, Mom,” Emily said. “He hits you and hurts you and you cry. You think I don’t hear you crying, but I do. It’s scary. He’s scary.” Emily burst into tears.
Patsy opened and shut her mouth.
“I hear it when you two are in your bedroom. I can hear you crying when he’s saying bad words to you. That’s why I pound on the door. To make him stop. I don’t like him, Mom. I don’t want him here.”
Patsy was shocked, but defeated, too, and infinitely sad.
Gavin was a master manipulator, and Patsy had been alone and lonely and vulnerable for a long time. Sometimes he could be endearing, engaging, charismatic, and sensitive. Gavin had money.
He bought her new clothes. They were conservative clothes, high necked because he said he didn’t like Patsy “looking like a sexy, dumb hippy” in her island clothes, but Patsy wore them anyhow.
She went from embroidered, flowing, modern clothes, with necklaces and tight jeans, to high-necked sweaters in gray and white.
But she had a man! She had a boyfriend! Gavin would provide. He’d already told her that he would put Emily through college. She was not able to see the facts, though: The man hardly worked. How could he put anyone through college?
“How do you know he’s going to kill her?” Emily asked me, her voice weak and scared. “How?”
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“Sometimes I can see the future.” I whispered the words, not wanting to tell my secret, but I had to tell them because Patsy was so nice and I didn’t want Emily to have no mother. “But don’t tell anyone. Please. It’s a secret.”
“No one can see the future,” Patsy said, but her voice wavered. “Don’t lie, Evie. That’s wrong. I’m going to talk to your mother about this.”
“Go ahead. She already knows. That’s why my parents keep trying to get you to break up with Gavin.” Her face went white.
“Miss Patsy, he’s going to kill you. You have to break up with him. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. You can come and live with us until the chief can get rid of him and get him off the island. My dad is in the army and he has guns.”
But Patsy wasn’t ready to kick Gavin out. She loved him! He was always so sorry after he lost his temper. He was getting better.
“Leave him,” my father told her.
“Leave him,” my mother told her. “Come and live with us.
Let my husband handle Gavin.”
I remembered what Patsy was wearing in my premonition when she was killed, and every day after school when she picked Emily up, I looked at her clothes. Nope. She wasn’t wearing the brown sweater, beige slacks, and a pumpkin scarf. I even told Emily, “When your mom is wearing the brown sweater and beige slacks and her scarf with pumpkins on it, bring her to our house. Hide her. That’s the day she’s going to get killed.”
“Okay, Evie.” She took a deep breath. “I’m scared.”
The school’s Halloween dance was coming up, and Emily and I and Jules and her friend Sunflower were going to be characters from The Wizard of Oz. My mom made our costumes. I was the wicked witch, Jules was the straw man, Sunflower was the good witch, and Emily was Dorothy.
We were all so excited that when I saw Miss Patsy in the car waiting to pick up Emily after school, I forgot to check her clothes. So did Emily. Emily and I decided that she should come to my house right after school. Her mom said yes, and we ran off while Patsy drove off to her bloody death, her life spilling out of her on her kitchen floor.
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If I hadn’t been so excited about Halloween, I would have noticed what Patsy was wearing. I would have told my parents, and they would have helped me figure out what to do. Maybe they would have raced to get Patsy, or invented an errand, or my dad would have taken Gavin off for a beer or down to our boat.
We could have prevented it.
But I was young and having fun, and I forgot, and Emily, my best friend, and her mother, Miss Patsy, a beautiful young woman, who was trapped, paid the price.
“I’m coming over to the island soon!” Jules said. “I’m packing up all my wedding stuff in the truck. I’ve been painting motorcycles night and day because these orders keep coming in, and I’m almost done. Last night I painted a mermaid. The owner wanted her to have purple hair. So pretty. Anyhow, I’m going to take time off to relax before the wedding and the honeymoon because we’ll be in bed all the time, and I don’t want to be sleepy!”
I smiled at Jules through Skype. She was packing as we talked. “Look at our gifts for the wedding guests!”
Oh. My. They were black cloth headbands with JULES AND
MACK FOREVER in white along the front. You tied them in the back and the ends hung down through your hair. Very stylish and motorcycle-ish.
“They’re cool and radical and perfect,” I said. “Everyone will love them.”
“It’s a way to unite everyone, pull us all together on the day when Mack and I commit to our passion and come together forever and ever as one body.”
“I can’t wait to put mine on. Finally, I will be cool, look cool.
Your wedding is going to be a bash.”
“Oh, Evie,” Jules choked out, her fingers laced together, tears coming forth. “You’re always so supportive of me. Everything I do. You’re so encouraging. You told me to start my motorcycle painting business, and now I have six people working for me.
And you told me to give Mack a chance and I did, and now look. He’s my soul mate. My love mate. My bed mate. We don’t even fight. If we have a disagreement he says, ‘Let’s go to bed
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and think about it,’ and then we make love and we forget what the little argument was about. He goes to work and takes care of all those sick kids and they love him and I do my business and then he comes home and we have a quickie before dinner and then we talk and I tell him my problems and worries and he hugs me in bed and lets me lie on top of him until I feel better.
And all because you said, ‘Give Mack a chance.’ You’ve always wanted
me to be happy and yet you have to deal with fortune-telling and it’s made your life so hard, yet you want me to be happy . . .” She stopped, overcome. She blew her nose. She snuffled.
“You’re making me cry again, Jules. Please don’t.” I wiped my tears.
“Okay, okay! But I love you, love-sister!” Her voice pitched up, chin trembling. “Wait. Evie.” She wiped her tears away. “I know I’ve asked you this already, but have you had any premonitions about us?”
“No, I haven’t.” And that was true. Premonitions work in odd ways. “But I feel your happiness. I feel his happiness. I feel your love together.”
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” She put her head down, hands to face, overcome.
“Don’t do it, Jules, don’t do it! You’re making me cry more!”
My voice broke. Dang it! She makes me cry too much! We both burst into a fresh round of sloppy, noisy tears.
“I can’t believe you’re getting married!” I sobbed.
“Me either.” She put a hand to Skype, and I touched her finger-tips to mine.
It’s so exhausting being this emotional.
On a sunny morning, blue and sweet, Mr. Jamon told me he wanted a book “set in Africa. I’ve never been there, I obviously won’t go now, so I need to learn about it. I’ve only read about twenty books on Africa—I checked my book list on my computer—so my education is lacking on that continent. What do you have?”
I gave him my two favorites.
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“And one more romance.”
We went to the romance section. He chose another bodice ripper set in the 1800s. He winked at me. “Getting to know my feminine side in 1850.”
I laughed.
“We all need love, don’t we?”
“We sure do, Mr. Jamon.”
“I’m an old man who still believes in romance!”
It is hard to catch goats.
Goats are quick and they are tricky. They don’t like to be caught, they don’t want to be caught, they want to be independent and free.
I finally grabbed Mr. Bob and threw a rope around his neck.