Page 70 of Insomnia

My mother’s song.

A picture forms in my mind. A truth. A story weaving everything odd that’s been happening together, and it makes no logical sense, but at the same time makes impossible sense. My head feels clearer than it has in days.

I need to talk to Nina. My foot is tapping. What’s the worst that can happen when I ask her what I’m thinking? She thinks I’m mad? So what? She can get in the bloody line on that one.

A bright flash of lightning cuts through the rain and the phone rings in my ear before the thunder catches up. We’re not in the eye of the storm yet. My knuckles are white, gripping the steering wheel. I blink and see knuckles in the gloom clutching a pillow. I blink it away. I am not mad.

But maybe I am my mother’s daughter.

56.

Nina picks up after four rings. “Emma? Are you okay?”

“I’m sorry to call you so late. I know it’s the middle of the night—”

“Oh, I’m never in bed before two. I’m a night owl, not an early bird. It’s fine. But what’s the matter?”

The warm night rain is coming down so hard now the car is steaming up. I start the engine and blast the fans. “Are you in your car?” she asks.

“Yes, I’m at the— It doesn’t matter. I’m not driving. I need to ask you a couple of questions. They’re important. One was something you said yesterday that I didn’t really grasp at the time.” I go with the saner question first. The one that will give me something concrete.

“When you said that social services wouldn’t let you foster us, you said something aboutespecially after the tragedy with that family.What tragedy? I don’t understand.”

“Oh my gosh.” I can hear her shifting at the other end, and then the click of a lighter and a soft inhale. “I always presumed you knew.”

“About what?”

“The family that were going to take you in. What happened to them.”

“They changed their minds.” I remember the house mother at the children’s home sitting me down and telling me that unfortunately I wouldn’t be going to a new home that day. I remember how heartbroken I felt, having to unpack my little suitcase, and I remember Phoebe’s victorious look. Was it victorious? I look at the memory again, this time analyzing it with an adult’s eye. Yes, she looked pleased. But maybe she was pleased we were staying together for a little while longer. Perhaps she was hurt that I’d been so happy to be going off to a new life without her. All that anger she’d shout at me about going mad, that was all just hurt and rejection.

“No, that may be what they told you—and I can understand why, given all that you’d been through—but that’s not what happened. It was awful really. Such a tragedy. They were coming to get you when they were in a head-on collision. The husband was killed outright. The wife was lucky to survive but was left paralyzed in both legs.”

My mouth is dry and my head is spinning. “Did they have any children of their own?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says, and I know the answer before she speaks. “A little girl. A couple of years older than you. She escaped the accident unhurt, thank god. She was in the back seat. Although I imagine it probably didn’t leave her unscathed. The other driver didn’t stay. She was left there alone with her dead father and severely injured mother for about half an hour, I think it was. Must have been terrible.”

Enough to drive you mad.

Everything falls into place as I think of the disabled bathroom Caroline hasn’t updated yet, from sharing a house with her mother. The transition from teen carer to qualified nurse was probably themost practical career choice if that’s what you’ve been spending your life doing anyway. I remember her first-day-of-school picture. They all looked happy and proud. A complete family. Then I came along and broke everything. How must she have felt when she was reading to her mother and heard me call out my name in the hospital. Not my married name, that wouldn’t have meant anything to her, butEmma Bournett? A person who’d been the cause of her family’s ruin, her father’s death even, right there in the same place. Brought together by coincidence. It wasn’t my fault—it obviously wasn’t my fault—but for thirty-five years I bet Caroline has blamed me.

“Emma?” Nina cuts in. “Are you still there?”

“Yes, yes I am. Sorry, thank you. That’s very helpful.” I pause. “There’s one other thing. And you’ll probably think it’s crazy and maybe it is.”

“Go on.”

Lightning flashes, and a loud crack of thunder hammers the sky only a second later and another sheet of water crashes against the windshield.

“Do you believe that time is always linear? Or that maybe it’s all happening at once and there can be glitches?”

“Well, that’s a big question for the middle of the night.” I hear her take a long toke on her joint. “I don’t know so much about the physics of it, but I certainly think our brains are capable of a lot more than we’ve ever used them for. Attuned to more. And time is a concept that even scientists don’t fully understand. I know of people who’ve had dreams of a friend saying goodbye and have woken to find out that they’d died. I know some people think déjà vu is when we experience a flash of the future. Tarot card readers—and I don’t mean the charlatans—operate onsensationsof the future rather than visions. People in extreme emotional states often claim to have glimpses of crisis coming. Fishermen’s wives who’ve begged their husbands not to go out to sea because of a dream or a sense of dread, and the men have never come home. Why do you ask?”

“Do you think maybe these glitches, these flashes of premonition, can run in families?” I think I know the answer, but I want to hear it from someone else. Someone with books on all kinds of weird shit on her shelves.

“Oh, for sure. I would say almost definitely. DNA. That kind of thing.”

“Thank you,” I say. “Thanks very much. You’ve been a great help. I’ve got to go.”

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