“Impossible. They’ll hear me, and it will be worse. They’ll think this was our plan all the time. They’ll accuse you of conspiring and me of pretending or something. I’ll stay here until they go to sleep. It will be easier, safer. Go on. Get yourself ready for bed. Act as if I’m not here. Don’t mind me,” he said, then kicked off his shoes and lay back on one of my pillows.
“Summer.”
“Shh. I’m sleeping. Remember? I wasn’t feeling well before, so I need my rest.” He closed his eyes but kept that tight, small smile sitting on his lips.
I looked at the clock. My parents might not be up for more than an hour. Maybe it would be better if I prepared for bed and turned off the lights. There would be less chance of them stopping in. I went into the bathroom. I was never filled with so many conflicting emotions. It was exciting to think of him being in my room, lying in my bed, but my blood felt like it would run cold with fear, too.
I washed, got undressed, and slipped into my nightgown. When I stepped out, he was still lying on my bed, but he had folded down my blanket and moved to the other side. How did he know what side I usually slept on? He patted my pillow.
“Better put out the light,” he whispered.
“You’re going to make a lot of trouble for both of us,” I warned.
“Hope so,” he said, smiling. Then he turned serious. “You’re very beautiful, Sage. You have a glow I’ve rarely seen in a girl. I’d risk everything to be with you.”
“You have,” I said.
I turned off the light. My curtains were open, and the light of the new moon penetrating the gauzy clouds in the night sky gave my room the surreal look of a dream, full of shadows, changing all that I was familiar with into the props of some magic show. It made me again question the reality. Was he really here? In my bed waiting for me?
“Come to bed,” he whispered. My feet felt glued to the floor. “Don’t make me raise my voice too loud by begging.”
“Shh,” I said. He had already raised his voice too much for my comfort.
I went to my bed and sat. It still felt unreal. Summer was in my bed?
He reached for my hand. “Actually, this turned out better. Don’t you think?” he asked.
“No. Hardly.”
“I’m the first boy you’ve had in your room, aren’t I?”
“First I’ve had in the house.”
He tugged me to come closer. I listened and then lay back. He moved closer and kissed my cheeks, my forehead, and the tip of my nose before kissing me long but softly on the lips, his hands moving over my stomach to my hips. I think he was as surprised as I was at how quickly my body tightened and hardened.
“Relax. It’s all right,” he said, bringing his right hand up to my breasts. He slid my nightgown off my shoulder and kissed me on the neck, his lips then grazing over my collarbone and then down to my increasingly exposed breast. In the soft moonlight, his eyes were radiant, shimmering.
He kissed me again, and the sweet taste of his lips was mesmerizing. My lips were magnetically drawn to his for another kiss, but then I pulled away.
“Summer, don’t,” I said. There was a twirling sensation going on in my stomach, a sensation I had never felt but still recognized as an alarm sounding inside me. Was it warning me about myself, my own desires, or against him?
“If I plead, I’ll get too loud, and then they’ll hear us,” he warned.
“You’re blackmailing me.”
“No. Just helping to convince you of something you want yourself,” he said, and he brought his lips to my now fully exposed breast just as we heard my parents coming up the stairs.
I pushed him away. “They’re coming up. They might open the door. Go into the bathroom,” I said. “Quickly!”
Reluctantly, he slipped off the bed and started toward the bathroom.
“Wait. Your shoes,” I whispered. He scooped them up and retreated just as my parents stopped at my door.
I held my breath, waiting. I could hear the handle turning, but then my father said something, and the handle stopped. I heard them move off to their own bedroom. The house became quiet, but I didn’t move or call to him. I wanted more time to pass to be absolutely sure that my mother didn’t change her mind and return to say something. Finally, impatient, he stepped out of the bathroom.
“Well?” he said.
I put up my hand to keep him from moving or speaking and then got up and went to my bedroom door. I stood there for a moment listening, and then I opened it slightly and looked out into the dimly lit hallway. I closed the door. When I turned, he was standing there, ready to embrace me again.
“No,” I said firmly, putting my right palm against his chest. “You’ve got to go. My mother gets up during the night. I’ve heard her many nights come by my room and stand just outside my door listening. Sometimes she peeks in.”
“Now, when you’re this age?”
“Yes.”
“Why? What does she expect to find you doing? Or does she think you might sneak out or something?”
“I don’t know. It’s her way. It’s always been. Please. Go out the way you came in. Be very careful.”
“I’m going home pretty frustrated,” he said.
“We’ll be together again soon. I promise,” I said.
“I don’t trust promises. Never have. Promises are excuses for excuses, mostly to put off reality or ignore it. Make no promises, and you’ll disappoint no one. That’s a lesson I’ve learned the hard way.” His face was in the shadows, but I could sense something about it that wasn’t pleasing. He wasn’t only frustrated. He was angry.
“Please,” I pleaded. “Just go. This is so dangerous.”
“Ridiculous. You shouldn’t be living here anymore. You shouldn’t be with them.”
“It’s too late for that sort of thinking, Summer.”
“No, it’s not,” he insisted.
“Please,” I begged again. “I’ll work on them. I’ll get permission to see you sooner on a date. I’ll be remorseful. My father will feel sorry for me and convince her to relent. It’s worked before. That’s not a promise; it’s a real plan, okay?”
“Sure,” he said, soaked in pessimism. “Work on them. Scheme. Make plans. This time, it’s different. I can see how far that will get you when it comes to seeing me.”
“All I can do, Summer, is try. Please. Give me the chance.”
“All right. I’m not going to let you fail, but let’s not worry about the future right now. Let’s enjoy the moment. I don’t have to leave just yet. Like I said. Give them a chance to fall asleep,” he said, surprising me by taking my hand. “It’ll be safer.” He tugged me back toward the bed.
“No.”
“I want you, and you want me. Forget about them for a while. Think about me,” he said. “Think about us.” He sounded as if he was trying to hypnotize me. “Me . . . and you . . . together.”
My resistance did weaken. He was drawing me closer, and as he did, he grasped my nightgown and began to lift it over my head. I tried to stop him, but it was as if my arms were strapped against my sides. In a moment, I was naked, and he embraced me, kissed me, and moved us onto the bed, but when he began to undress, that swirling alarm not only began again in the pit of my stomach but this time shot up through my body with an electric speed, shocking my heart, tightening my throat, driving me quickly to a panic like none I had ever known in life or in any of my strange, unexplainable memories.
“No!” I cried, and now, with not only a return of my strength but an even greater strength, I practically lifted him away from me and got up. I quickly put my nightgown on again and stepped away.
“What’s wrong?”
“You must go. This is too dangerous. They’ll keep me locked up for a year and not a month.”
He sat up and shook his head. “It’s okay. They’ve gone to sleep.”
“It’s not okay. I’m not comfortable this way. It will be no good for either of us.”
“All right,” he sai
d, this time seeing and hearing my determination. “I’ll go, but you have to promise to meet me at the lake next to your house tomorrow afternoon at two. You’ll find a way to get out. Tell them you need fresh air or a walk. Just come. Will you come?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You’re not saying that just to get rid of me, are you?”
“I’ll come. Go,” I said.
He moved to the door. I opened it very slightly again. He still wasn’t wearing his shoes, which I thought was smart.
“Kiss me,” he said. “Or I won’t go. But kiss me like you mean it.”
“Blackmail again?”
“Whatever gets me there,” he replied.
I kissed him. I tried to kiss him the way he wanted me to, but it was either because I was standing in a pool of cold fear or something else, something that began reviving that twirling in my stomach again, but whatever it was, I couldn’t kiss him the way he had hoped I would. I knew he wasn’t satisfied the moment my lips lifted away from his. “I’m sorry. I’m too nervous.”
“Naw. You just need more practice, that’s all,” he said. “I’m an expert. Lessons begin tomorrow.”
I stepped back. He slipped through the door and did move amazingly quietly, sliding through the shadows to the stairway. I kept the door open to listen, expecting one or more of those old steps to creak. They always did, but for some reason, somehow, they didn’t. At first, I was afraid he might not have even begun to descend. Maybe he had changed his mind and was going to return to continue to blackmail me into being passionate. I waited and waited and finally felt confident that he had gone down and left the house.
I released a hot held breath of trepidation and closed the door. For a moment or two, I stood there reliving it all. It still felt more like a dream. Had he really been here? Had we almost made love? All my life, I had distrusted things I saw, because too often my powerful imagination was able to conjure up things, people, places no one else would see or remember. Why couldn’t this have been another example of that? I half hoped it was.
But when I returned to bed, that doubt died a quick death. It wasn’t simply the sense of him having been there. It wasn’t the scent of his aftershave or his hair. It wasn’t the creases in the pillows or the warmth still under the blanket.
It was hard, metallic.
I felt it and then put on my lamp to look at what I had in my right hand. I had his pendant. He had left it behind. He wanted me to be sure he had been here and that I had almost given more to him than I had to any other boy. I thought it was his way of telling me I would, and not because he blackmailed me into it. The pendant left behind was another symbol of his confidence, his often annoying arrogance.
But that didn’t make it any less true.
I had wanted to give myself to him. What kept me from doing so was not the fear of my parents overhearing us and finding him in my room. It was something else, something inside me, a shrill voice coming from a place I had never been. It was quiet now, for the moment satisfied, but it was no longer asleep. To be sure, it wasn’t simply every girl’s guardian of her virginity, her natural reluctance to be too easily won. It was more.
And as I lay there thinking about it, I realized that it wouldn’t be long before I understood completely. It was a thought that should have brought me comfort, should have helped me ease myself into a restful sleep, but it wasn’t doing that. It was sending me back through time to a place I had no reason to recollect, a place somewhere in some eastern European village, where the church bells were being sounded with an intense sense of alarm. Candles were being lit in every house. Parents were checking on their children. Door locks were being rechecked. Something terrible was sweeping down from the cold, dark north. There was a parade of villagers carrying torches through the main street of the village and singing hymns. They formed a wall of light and stopped whatever it was from entering their world, their hearts, and their souls.
Children slept peacefully. Dawn was never more welcomed.
I saw and heard it all before I could feel my body soften and accept the embrace of welcomed sleep, a dreamless sleep. I had no idea where the images of those frightened people had come from and where they had gone, but I was grateful they had left.
When the morning light pushed the darkness aside, I rose slowly and took longer than usual to dress. I gazed at myself in the mirror, thinking I still looked half-asleep. It was as though I had traveled for days through endless nights to get to the new morning. Cold water on my face helped, but every muscle in my body was complaining. I started down the stairway like someone descending into a dark pit, and when I stepped into the kitchen, my feelings didn’t change very much. Of course, my parents were up and waiting, as usual.
From the way my mother was looking at me when I moved to the table, I half expected her to say, “I know he was in your room.” There was so much accusation in her eyes. My father glanced at me and then looked down at his newspaper. I was surprised he didn’t say good morning.
“Why didn’t either his father or he call you to tell you anything last night?” my mother asked the moment I sat. “And don’t tell me he was too embarrassed. His father knew about our concern. You called to see how he was. They don’t sound like very reliable people. I’m hoping you will open your eyes and avoid this boy now.”
“Avoid him? Why?”
“He’s not right for you.”
“That’s not true. How could you know that from looking at him once? You just don’t want me to have any sort of social life,” I countered. “Maybe you want to turn me into a nun.”
My father raised his eyes from the newspaper, looking just as surprised as my mother at how aggressively I had come back at her. “Sage,” he said.
“I’m sorry, Dad. She’s so eager to have my blossoming relationship with Summer die on the vine.”
“I gave you permission to go out on the date, didn’t I?” she said.
“Reluctantly,” I muttered. “And no, you couldn’t wait to restrict me to in-house arrest for a month.”
“It’s what any good parent would do. You should appreciate our concern for your welfare. Too many parents are too self-absorbed to concern themselves with their children and then wonder why they go wrong.”
“I’ve always been wrong,” I said, almost in a whisper. “I don’t know why, but in your eyes, I’ve always been a bad seed. Why didn’t you fulfill the threat you always used to frighten me, that you would return me to the orphanage? Maybe you wouldn’t be as miserable as you are.”
“Stop it, Sage. This isn’t like you at all,” my father said.
“I don’t care. I can’t help it,” I said, and started to cry. The tears surprised me, too. Usually, I was good at keeping things locked up, tears falling inside me and not streaming down my cheeks. “I’m not hungry,” I said, and shot up and out of my seat.
“Sage!” my father called after me as I charged up the stairway. I didn’t turn back.
Something had changed in me. It wasn’t only my courage to be defiant. I wasn’t running up to my room to sulk like any other teenager. Something bigger had exploded within me, something that had been pent up and building for a while now. Oddly, I didn’t feel like a mop soaked with self-pity. I felt stronger. It was as if my tears had unlocked someone else inside me. Everything felt different; my vision, my hearing, all of my senses were sharper, stronger. I was like someone hallucinating after taking a mind-altering drug. I seemed to grow taller, giving me a different perspective about everything around me. I had awoken in a dollhouse and would soon crash through the walls, the floor, and the ceiling.
After another moment, the room began to spin around me. I realized that I was falling into the same sort of swoon I had experienced when I first confronted the large pentacle in my father’s office. I was having trouble breathing. I gasped and then managed a cry, before I felt myself sinking to the floor. It was odd. I wasn’t falling. I was oozing down onto it, forming a puddle of myself. I was grateful to lose
consciousness.
When I awoke, I was lying in my bed. For a few moments, I stared up at the ceiling. The room wasn’t spinning, but my mind was fumbling with thoughts, stumbling through a fog. It all began to clear, and I realized I had passed out again. I turned and started to sit up, expecting to see my parents standing there.
They were.
But they weren’t alone.
Moving toward me on the right was Uncle Wade, and moving up on my left were my great-uncle Alexis and my great-aunt Suzume. All of them seemed to have the same eyes, black, the pupils swirling. My parents stepped forward to the foot of the bed. They were all staring at me as if I had metamorphosed into a giant butterfly or something.
“What happened? Why is everyone here?” I asked.
“Because it’s time you knew who you are,” my father said.
20
“Who am I?” I asked in a deep whisper.
My heart was pounding. All my life, I had been anticipating this day. Even though I never fully expressed it to myself or anyone else, I knew it would happen. What I didn’t know was whether it would result in my being sent away. I had grown up under a cloud, a threat that thundered in my mother’s every angry glare or comment and my father’s suspicions and disappointments, from the first day I could talk and tell stories about my dreams and visions. Having been adopted provided trepidation and insecurity enough. I didn’t need that added layer of doubt and fear.
“You’re one of us, the Belladonnas,” Uncle Alexis said. “Not full-blooded, but nevertheless one of us. We know that now.”
One of them? That sounded like more than just being in a normal family. Who were they? I looked from face to face and stopped on Uncle Wade’s. He smiled and stepped forward to take my right hand into his.
“I think,” he said, “in your heart you always knew.”
I shook my head and looked again at my parents, who did seem different. They seemed more mellow, like two people who had come a long way and now could relax. The tension I had always seen and felt wasn’t there. What did all this really mean? I turned back to Uncle Alexis.
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