Page 10 of Dreams of Falling
Knowing he was right, I nodded, unable to thank him. That would have meant speaking, and I wasn’t sure I could.
He held open the passenger door of my dad’s car before helping us all inside, then followed the ambulance down the unpaved road, its screaming sirens making a mockery of our slow progress.
It began to rain, heavy drops beating down on the car and the ruined house, darkening the ground and wetting what remained of theroof and the exposed floors, a final insult and ignominy for what had once been a place of beauty and pride. A place that had been kept hidden from me. Except once.
I turned my head to get another glimpse of Carrowmore, seeing the surprised faces and sightless eyes of the hanging gourds, and I remembered my first trip there, as a girl. The ribbon my mother had placed inside the trunk of the old tree; the words I’d finally read:
Come home to me, Ellis. I’ll love you always.
Hot tears slid down my cheeks. I wasn’t sure if they were tears for the mother I didn’t really know, or for a stranger my mother had once promised to always love.
five
Ivy
2010
The pain that radiates through my body tells me I’m not yet dead. But I’m not exactly alive, either. Maybe I’m a ghost, if that’s what being half in this world and half in the next is like. Or maybe this is all a dream and I will awaken and everything will be like it was before.
Except I’m not sure that’s what I want.
All I remember now is the desperate need to be at Carrowmore. And I remember the pain, different from the pain that throbs in my head and echoes through my back and my limbs. Pain that presses on the heart and makes me forget to breathe. Like what I felt when they brought me the news about Ellis. My heart hurts, but it’s not about him. Not this time.
Ceecee. It’s something to do with her, but I can’t think of what it could be.
I had something in my hand. Yes. I’d needed to bring something to Carrowmore. I hadn’t been there in years, visiting it only in my dreams. The same dream, over and over. I’d be in the house, and it would have a roof and floors and furniture. I’d be standing at a door with my hand raised to turn the knob. Ruffles covered my wrist andhand, a much smaller hand, like that of a little girl. But it was mine. I was sure it was mine.
I never knew what happened after I turned that knob. Those were the nights I woke up screaming, Mack trying to calm me down, his words like a teaspoon trying to bail out the ocean.
My nightmares are why Larkin’s so obsessed with dreams. It’s why she’s such an expert at analyzing them. She always believed that if she could figure out what they meant, they’d go away. I wish that she could have, for both of us. That together we could have vanquished whatever it was that haunted me in my sleep. It would have been something for us to share, besides the color of our hair and the shape of our noses. Something that would have made her happy. Or at least happy enough that she’d stop wanting to be like me.
I hear her voice, and my chest lightens. She’s here, and I want to think she’s come to see me, but I can’t be sure. There’s something about mothers and daughters, I think, that makes us always want to hold close at the same time we try to push each other away. I think she blames me, too, for what happened with Mack. And for that, I couldn’t disagree.
I don’t deserve her, this daughter of mine. God made a mistake when he gave a perfect child to this imperfect mother, and I think Larkin’s always known this. Even as a baby, she’d cry when I held her, quieting only when placed in Ceecee’s or Bitty’s arms. It was as if she knew there was something missing inside me, something I was looking past her to find. That’s the other thing about mothers and daughters—we always know where it hurts.
“Mama? Can you hear me?”
I try to open my lips, but it’s like somebody else’s body is attached to my brain. Still, I know it’s my Larkin. I can tell by her scent. Since she was a baby, she’s always smelled like sunshine and salt air. Not something a person can shake is what I told her when she said she was headed to New York City for college instead of the University of South Carolina. She and Mabry had already picked out matching bedspreads for their dorm room.
I should have expected it. Should have known she was never mineto keep. I’d spent most of her childhood letting other people raise her. She looked and acted too much like me, and it scared me.
So I stood back and watched, trying to distance her from me, mothering behind the scenes, filling in the missing pieces. Ceecee and Bitty were so good at mothering, anyway; I let them take all the credit.
A warm, soft hand folds over mine, and I know it’s Larkin’s. Her heart has always been as wide as the moon even though it shouldn’t be. Her ability to love easily made those who loved her most call her perfect in every way until Larkin believed it.
I want to open my eyes, to tell her I’m sorry, but I can’t remember for what. I’m so tired, and I can hear Ellis’s Mustang. It’s not too far away, and it’s coming closer, and all I know for sure is that I’d better have it all figured out before he gets here.
•••
Larkin
I stood outside my mother’s hospital room without moving, unaware of people walking past me. I’d stared at the bruised and bandaged woman in the bed, spoken to her, and touched her hand. I’d even willed some kind of emotional response, but it was like squeezing a dry rag.
Until I’d remembered her asking me once if I thought dying would be like dreaming. It had been after one of her really bad nightmares, one about being in the river at night. The memory jarred me, made me wonder why she’d been found at the burned-out ruins of an old house by the river. And it reminded me of how little I knew my mother.
When I was five years old, Ceecee told me that the woman I’d always called Ivy was my real mother. I’d told Mabry and Bennett that I didn’t have a mama, and they’d said that everybody had one. So I’d run home and cried to Ceecee, who explained it all to me.
Ceecee was the one who packed my lunch box and drove me to school, who took me shopping in Charleston and planned my birthdayparties. But Ivy was my mother, the beautiful woman with hair just like mine who took ballet lessons and sang in various bars and music festivals and who wore colorful clothes she made that matched the watercolors on the walls of our house that she’d painted. That’s when I started calling her Mama, so everyone would know she was mine.
