Guilt came rushing in a moment later, because it was kind of late for what-ifs. What if I’d been home more? What if we had more time? There was no more time.
I closed the browser window and put my head down on my knees.
After a moment, I heard the front door open. Dad boomed out “Wyn, we’re home!” in the fake cheerful voice I was growing to dread. I looked up. Mom walked in briskly with a large overnight bag, and Gee Gee followed.
I rushed to Gee Gee and hugged her, cautiously, like I couldn’t help doing now. Afraid I’d be too exuberant and hurt her; afraid to be too tentative and seem like I was pulling away. I tried to hide my indecision by going back over to the couch and patting the cushion next to me.
“Croeso!” I said, managing a smile. Welcome.
Gee Gee’s eyes crinkled as she smiled broadly in reply. “Diolch yn fawr! Don’t mind if I do.” Tiredly, she navigated around the coffee table and sat down next to me. My dad put her bag in the office and returned with a huge throw pillow for her back, strangely awkward in his movements as he settled her against it.
She’d lost a lot of the plumpness that I recalled from childhood, and even since she’d moved in. A blurry memory drifted through my mind of being very small, sitting on Gee Gee’s lap. I’d reached up toward the dimples in her smiling face, which was framed with soft, wavy gray hair that tickled my hands. Her face had gotten so much thinner now that the dimples were all but gone, but her warm smile was the same, her strong features, and her bright, sharp eyes. Eyes that made me feel a bit awed under their powerful gaze.
“Gran, can I get you anything else? Do you need a blanket?” Dad rested his hands on the back of the couch for a moment, looking more exhausted than I’d seen him in ages.
“No, thank you, Rhys dear.” She smiled up at him. “We’re both fine.”
Dad left to join Mom in the kitchen. In a moment I heard clinking noises, and the sound of water filling the electric teakettle.
“How was the hospital?” I asked, and then felt like cringing. What a stupid question.
“Oh, I detest those places.” Gee Gee waved off the question, then reached over and tucked a lock of my hair back behind my ear.
Another image flashed through my mind, an old picture from Dad’s family photo album: Gee Gee with long, straight dark hair similar to mine, standing proudly next to my great-grandpa. Rhiannon and John said the handwritten note on the back. Great-Grandpa John had died suddenly of a stroke eight years ago, but Gee Gee might suffer for weeks, even months.
I clenched my hands in my lap, bunching up my skirt into a crinkly wad. “Me too. I’m glad you’re back,” I said, my voice almost a whisper.
“I’m glad to be back, too,” she answered, her mouth curving up into a gentle smile.
I tried to smile in response, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say. My breath hitched in my chest for a moment. I looked at my hands in my lap, the vase of slightly wilted lilies on the end table, the prints on the walls; everywhere except at Gee Gee. Why was talking so hard all of a sudden?
I glanced at my laptop. “Gee Gee, can I ask you something?”
“Of course, cariad.” Her face was serene, and I wished I had even an ounce of that serenity.
“Are we … are we related to anyone whose last name is Lewis?”
Gee Gee raised her eyebrows and I rushed to explain.
“The thing is, I got a random email from this guy named Gareth Lewis who was reading my blog. And he’s from the UK and recognized my name and thought, wouldn’t that be funny if we were related somehow.” I trailed off, realizing how ridiculous it all sounded. I wished I’d thought of something else, anything else, to talk about.
I could have tried practicing my Welsh. Too late.
Gee Gee was looking back at me, keenly. “Well, as you know, Rhiannon Davies is my maiden name. There were plenty of us Davies in our village. All of us related somehow, it seemed at the time.” The ghost of a smile passed across her face, then disappeared. “The war killed one of my brothers, the Second World War. The ones left, my younger brothers—we weren’t close. And on your great-granddad’s side, they were all named Evans, you know.”
“Nobody named Lewis married in later? Maybe Gareth is related to some random cousin.” I realized that deep down, I was hoping for a connection. Another small part of Gee Gee that would still be alive even after she was gone.
“Heavens, love, I can’t speak for everyone in the extended family.” Gee Gee leaned back onto the overstuffed pillows and yawned. “But that’s about the sum of it. Davies and Evans,” she said, the conversation obviously closed.
It felt kind of strange, because normally Gee Gee was happy to tell me about Wales. I didn’t even have to press her. We’d had a ton of conversations about what it would be like this summer, how it would be different from here: Accents. Driving. Village life. How it would be the same: Gray skies. Ocean. Rolling hills.
“I wonder what happened to that tea?” Gee Gee mused. It almost sounded like she was trying to distract me.
I frowned, but I let it go. She was probably just tired. “I’m on it.” I got up, wanting to ask more but not knowing exactly what I wanted to ask about.
As I walked toward the kitchen, she said, “Oh, Olwen fach. My lovey.” Her voice was like a sigh, apologetic. “We could read the Olwen story again tonight if you like. Or do you remember how much you loved Peter Pan when you were a little one? Maybe you don’t recall, but you always wanted to be Wendy, soaring through the starry sky. Too old for that, now, I expect,” she finished. My heart constricted.
“I do remember,” I said, my voice breaking. “I never want to forget those moments.”
“No, we mustn’t forget,” Gee Gee said softly, but her eyes weren’t meeting mine now. They looked elsewhere, somewhere above my left shoulder, or inward, to something still unsaid.
It seemed to take a monumental effort to pick up the phone, even though I had Rae on speed dial. I felt awkward. It was Sunday night, and she still hadn’t called even though she’d said she would.
She picked up after one ring and started talking. “Wyn, ohmigod, did you finish the Chem homework?”
“The molar equations? Yeah, I finished it yesterday. Are you still not done?”
“No! Crap. I’m so screwed.” I could tell she was flitting around, doing stuff; I heard papers rustling in the background. “I’ve been so busy. There was a tennis tournament last night, and we had to hold the ASL meeting at my house today so I spent all week trying to get everything cleaned up and my brother’s crap out of the way. You know.”
I didn’t know. “You should have called me,” I said pointedly. “I would have helped.”
“But I didn’t want to bother you! I figured you’d want to spend time with, you know, your family and all.” I could picture her flapping her hands, all flustered, but the mental image didn’t make me giggle like it normally did. She still should have called me. What if I wanted her to bother me?
“Or you were ‘too busy’ to call,” I muttered. “Or text.”
“Look, I’m sorry. I—things are just crazy. Is everything going okay? Did you have a chance to talk to your Gee Gee? Or someone?” Rae’s voice was solicitous, but I felt cranky now. Like things weren’t crazy for me, too? I decided that if she wasn’t going to keep me posted, I wasn’t going to talk, even if that was petty.
“Everything’s fine,” I said, trying to sound blasé. “I’m fine. We’re dealing with it.”
“Oh. Uh. Okay.” Rae sounded disconcerted, and I was perversely glad, even though it really wasn’t her I was upset at. Not entirely.
I hung up the phone, flopped back on the bed, and turned out the light. The three weeks left until the end of the school year felt like an eternity—slogging through final projects and essays I couldn’t bring myself to care about, waiting in the wings for Rae. Watching
Gee Gee get sicker.
At least someone was reading my blog now. I’d have to decide whether to answer his email or not.
I’d only been lying on the bed for a minute when raised voices started filtering through my open door. I lifted my head. Mom and Dad were having what they called a “reasoned debate” in the kitchen. Dad sounded annoyed. I got up and crept to the door. Their voices got quieter, rising and falling, until I heard Dad say something like, “If that’s where she wants to stay, we’ll find a way! We have to. It’s what Dad and Granddad would have wanted.”
“I know it’s no question for you,” Mom said, “but you’ve got us to think about. And your mother, too. She always had a good relationship with Rhiannon before your father passed.” There was a tense silence. “Anyway, she’s going on that Alaskan cruise and the timing couldn’t be worse. I just wish we were … ” Their voices dwindled to a murmur again.
I sighed. Even the littlest things were a big deal now—what we ate for breakfast, the type of pillows on Gee Gee’s bed. The amount of time I was spending on the computer, which my mother blamed for my lack of sleep.
I returned to bed and twisted onto my right side, then my left, trying to get comfortable. I was not going to give in and turn on the light tonight. Instead, I composed sentences in my head using my limited vocabulary. Maybe this Gareth character spoke Welsh. I could try to email him in Welsh tomorrow and see what happened. For instance, I could say:
Mae Cymru yn hyfryd. Wales is lovely.
Mae’r tywydd yn braf heddiw. The weather is fine today.
Dw i’n hoffi te. I like tea.
I must have been dozing. My mind went fuzzy for a while, free-associating, and then I heard a voice, singing:
Ar lan y môr mae rhosus cochion.
I sat bolt upright and looked around. Of course, nobody was there. My room was dark and empty; the house was silent. It had sounded like … well, it had sounded like Gee Gee, singing me to sleep the way she had when I was little. I touched my face and felt tears on my cheeks.
When I lay down to go back to sleep, I couldn’t help hearing the haunting, soft melody as I slipped into dreams, a woman’s soft voice singing low and sweet.
Ar lan y môr mae rhosus cochion
Ar lan y môr mae lilis gwynion
Ar lan y môr mae ‘nghariad inne
Yn cysgu’r nos a chodi’r bore.
Beside the sea there are red roses
Beside the sea there are white lilies
Beside the sea my sweetheart lives
Asleep at night, awake at morning.
This dream was different; new. I was walking by the sea. A field of white flowers. My footsteps made no sound, but waves crashed and wind whistled.
The smell of salt air; the faint tang of nearby farmlands. Real enough to touch.
On a clifftop stood a man and a woman. The man, tall and rangy with short brown hair riffled by the breeze. The woman with long black hair and a homespun dress.
Nearer now. The man and woman were Gee Gee and Great-Grandpa John, but younger, like in old photos. The woman held a baby in her arms, and both their heads were bent toward him.
Then somehow there was a little girl standing there, too, but the couple still did not look up. The little girl was thin, frail, and her face was contorted with anguish. She opened her mouth but I couldn’t hear what she said. The girl reached out to the couple, but suddenly they receded into the distance. Farther and farther. She turned and looked directly at me, pleadingly. Her eyes were dark little caves of sorrow.
I jerked away in fear. Suddenly the little girl, the couple, the seashore were all gone. The woman with white hair stood before me, but not blurry this time. No, her features were clear, and it was Gee Gee, white hair hanging down long and brittle. The skin-crawling sensation of dread returned, all too familiar, and a black cancerous patch of mold spread over her dress, her limbs, her face, until she was no longer recognizable.
I kicked away the covers, opening my eyes to bright morning light. It was Monday morning, and the sun was streaming through my flimsy curtains onto my bed, making me sweaty. The clock read 7:05 a.m., but I felt as though I’d hardly slept.
I hurried out of bed and into the shower, letting the hot spray rinse the sweat off my body. Drying off afterward, I noticed Gee Gee’s lily-scented powder in a small cylindrical container on the edge of the sink. I pulled off the lid and a small cloud of powder drifted into the air. The flowery fragrance was sweet, almost cloying. That had been the smell of her house. Sweet and strong.
Gee Gee was alone in the kitchen, and I slipped quietly into one of the blocky wooden chairs at the kitchen table.
“Good morning, my dear.” She smiled, moving with slow and measured steps across the kitchen with a plate of hot muffins.
“Bore da,” I answered, yawning.
Gee Gee set down the muffins and sat down across the table from me, her eyes lingering on my face. “Didn’t you sleep well, cariad ?”
Was it that obvious, again? “It was just a nightmare. A really vivid one,” I said. I couldn’t meet her gaze. “There was a little girl, and you and Great-Grandpa John were there with a baby, by the sea, and … ” I realized I didn’t want to tell her about the image in the mirror, the spreading darkness. I didn’t want her to think I couldn’t handle her illness. I didn’t want her worrying about me on top of everything. “I guess I still feel weird. I know it’s stupid.”
Gee Gee sighed, her expression pensive. “Well, no. It isn’t stupid. You’re a Davies, through and through, and we Davies women … ” She paused, as if choosing her words carefully. “We’ve always been sensitive dreamers, you might say.”
A sudden chill sent goose bumps up and down my arms. “It could just be stress,” I pointed out. I didn’t want to think about it being anything else.
“Maybe,” Gee Gee said. She lowered her voice, speaking almost too quietly to hear. “But every single Davies woman has been … intuitive, somehow. Our dreams sometimes tell us things that our waking mind won’t. That’s true for everyone, you know. We’re just a little more in tune with it than most people.”
There was a long pause. I took a muffin and turned it around and around in my hands, but suddenly I wasn’t hungry.
“It’s a blessing and a curse,” she finally said.
I nodded, but I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure I could believe what she was telling me—about my dream, about “Davies women.” It seemed too out there. What if the cancer was affecting her mind now? How would I know?
Then I thought of the dream again, the girl, all alone, and shivered. The baby had to be Grandpa William, but was the girl supposed to be me? I wanted to ask what it meant, but I felt paralyzed.
Gee Gee reached across the table and gripped my hand tightly. “You listen to me, Olwen fach. It will be all right. When you feel afraid, remember … ” She trailed off, looking lost for a moment. “Remember this moment. That I’m here with you, holding your hand. You aren’t alone.”
I wasn’t sure whether she was talking about my dream now or the whole situation. Cancer. Death. So many questions were clamoring in the back of my mind, but all that came out was a tiny voice I hardly recognized, asking, “What will I do?”
“You’ll understand one day. Some things … can’t be explained in words.” Not for the first time, I got the strangest feeling that she meant something more than she was saying outright. “But it does get easier. Maybe not right away, and there are always hard times in everybody’s lives.” She gave me a long look. “It’ll be all right, I promise.”
I could hear the conviction in her voice. But I still felt lost.
7
Cof a lithr, llythr a geidw.
Memory slips, letters remain.
Welsh proverb
Gareth was in the schoolyard with Anita Kessler. She was tossing her hair around the way she always did, tel
ling him she was breaking up with him, which struck him as funny because he hadn’t remembered going out with her in the first place. That was when he realized he was dreaming.
He laughed, and was about to let her in on the joke, when the scene shifted to something else entirely. Everything went dark, and he felt like he was falling, his stomach flipping with vertigo. A wind from nowhere whirled around him, buffeting him from all sides. Something that looked like white fabric whipped past his face. The smell of the sea was all around him. Then he was moving more and more quickly while a dizzy whirl of images zipped past like a movie on fast-forward: a cairn, his parents standing together in the distance, an inscribed piece of slate, the huge slabs of the cromlech, a hole yawning darkly into the ground and growing ever closer.
“Slow down,” Gareth found himself saying, fear making his voice break. “Stop.”
The blurring around him began to resolve into discernible images. The fact that the dream seemed to be obeying him was somehow even more frightening.
When the whirling stopped, he was standing over the dark gray slate plaque. He felt sad, but it was a distant sadness, like the memory of a feeling rather than the feeling itself. Then abruptly he was falling again, for a timeless instant, the cromlech a deep dark pit in front of him, surrounding him with walls of stone he couldn’t see. More images flashed past him: the small, frail girl in the white dress; his dad’s worried face, seeming tiny and far away. A whispery voice, a song on the wind. Who? Who was it? But everything was slipping through his fingers now, the images disintegrating.
Whispers echoing in his ears, he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
He woke up the following morning when the family cat, Fortran, jumped on the bed and meowed loudly, right in his face, five minutes before his alarm was set to beep.
The Truth Against the World Page 4
