Page 7 of Dreams of Falling
“One at a time,” I shouted, the long travel day and my lack of coffee catching up with me. “You first,” I said to Ceecee, knowing she’d expect that.
“We’re going to your grandmama’s old house. The place where your mama was born.”
“Carrowmore? I thought it burned years ago.”
Ceecee shared a look with Bitty. “It did. But the ruins are still there.”
I glanced at Bitty in the rearview mirror. “I don’t understand. The land was given to the state before I was born. We don’t even own it anymore. Why would my mother be there?”
Bitty’s eyes went wide. In the passenger seat, Ceecee bent her head, studying her hands. The nails were clipped sensibly short, but she wore pale pink polish on them, the same shade she’d worn ever since I could remember. It never ceased to amaze me how little things changed.
“What?” I said. “What am I missing?”
Bitty leaned forward and placed her hand on my shoulder. “Your family still owns Carrowmore and all the property down to the river. It’s a dangerous place, so everyone agreed we’d make sure you understood it wasn’t a place for you to go.”
“I don’t understand,” I said again, the shock of Bitty’s words hitting me. Not for the first time, I found myself wishing that my family wasn’t so complicated. That I wasn’t so ignorant. That I was the orphan I pretended to be in my new life in New York.
“I wish I hadn’t come back,” I said under my breath, the way a child does when scolded.
Ceecee frowned at me, and I saw her as the old woman she was, seventy-seven, her face lined and sun-spotted from too many years on the beach and in her garden. “Don’t talk like that, Larkin. Your mama could be hurt and needing you. Or worse.”
Bitty squeezed my shoulder. “And if she is hurt, just tell yourself that there will be a better day, honey. Don’t you forget that.”
She’d said that before—the day I’d left Georgetown for good and she’d given me the gold chain necklace with a thin circle from which dangled three gold charms: a quill pen, a palmetto tree, and a pointed arrow. Bitty had told me that she was proud of me for embarking on this new adventure, but she wanted to give me something to always remind me of my dreams and of the place I’d always call home, whether I believed it or not. When I’d asked her about the arrow, she’d just said that I’d have to figure that one out. I hadn’t taken off the necklace since and wore it tucked securely under my clothes so no one would ask me about it.
“Your mama is special, Larkin,” Ceecee said. “Just like you. She’ll get through this, like she’s gotten through everything else in her life.”
I stole a glance at Ceecee, all anger and tenderness rolled up together like a sweet gum tree seedball, impossible to separate. She’d let me, from an early age, plow through my life with the belief that my Darlington birthright meant I was without flaws, that I was the smartest, the most talented, and the most beautiful. That despite all evidence to the contrary, I was destined to be a star.
My desire to be like my free-spirited mother, who was never afraid to try something new and who never worried what other people thought, fueled the illusion. For most of my growing-up years, I thought that running roughshod over my peers and loved ones could be excused because I was on the path to greatness.
My attitude actually won me friends at first, girls who wanted to be swept up into the stratosphere of stardom, until they tired of my false air of superiority and my mastery of the humble brag. Everyone except for Bennett and Mabry. They’d stuck with me up until the moment I discovered they were just like everybody else.
I turned my head to focus on the road, feeling the weight of Bitty’s hand on my shoulder. It was as if she were helping me hold in the words that threatened to spill out of me.
As we drove, Ceecee spoke about Carrowmore and the origins of its name. There was an oak they called the Tree of Dreams, and once, when Ivy was a little girl, her father had brought her to Carrowmore to put her own ribbon inside the ancient tree.
“Just that once?” I gripped the steering wheel tightly, frustrated and angry. “Just that once, and you think for whatever reason that that’s where she must be now?”
Bitty spoke up from the backseat. “She went more than once—quite frequently, actually, as soon as she learned to drive and could get there by herself.”
Ceecee looked sharply at her old friend. “How do you know that?”
“Ivy told me. She said she went there to feel closer to her mother. To Margaret.”
Crossing her arms over her chest tightly, Ceecee said, “She never told me that.”
“She didn’t want to sound disloyal to you.”
I sensed Ceecee stiffen beside me. She leaned forward, bracing both hands on the dash. “Slow down—you need to take the next right. It’s a small road and easy to miss.”
“I’m surprised you remember how to get here,” Bitty said softly.
“Maybe Ivy’s not the only one who visits.”
Scrubby pines crowded together on each side of the two-lane highway, blocking from sight everything that lay beyond. It had never occurred to me before that parts of the Lowcountry preferred to remain hidden from outsiders, keeping their secrets like an evening primrose before dusk.
“Turn here,” Ceecee said.
