I was thinking the same exact thing!
Normally I’d say that’s impossible
but my life has been weird lately.
LewzerBoy: is everything ok? how’s yr great-gran,
is she doing all right?
OlwenNia: Yeah.
she’s been talking about her old life a lot, back in Wales.
LewzerBoy: really, like what?
uh oh, mum’s calling me. gotta go
OlwenNia: Can we talk again?
LewzerBoy: yeah, i’ll email you. or we could
video chat if you want
bye
OlwenNia: Bye.
I closed the chat window and stretched back in the chair, the hard wooden slats pressing into my back. My smile had grown even bigger, despite our conversation being cut short.
And, of course, despite knowing better about random conversations with strangers online. My parents would freak if they knew.
The thing was, Gareth didn’t feel like a stranger. And he was obviously a real person. I hadn’t quite believed it until today.
He sounded really British, the way he talked about his “mum” and my “gran.” Maybe he sounded like a BBC star. We might video chat next time, and then I’d know for sure. Maybe he spoke Welsh.
I squeezed my eyes shut. I could have asked Gareth if he spoke Welsh. I should have asked where his family was from, even if we weren’t related. I wanted to ask a lot of things, but maybe it was better to take it slow, especially with someone halfway around the world.
Of course, I’d be halfway around the world myself in a week and a half. Instead of waking up in my familiar old room, the sounds of the city all around me, I’d be sleeping in a cottage in Gee Gee’s tiny home village, which probably had nothing going on at night. Would it be too quiet? Would there be the rumble of cars driving past? Would there be crickets, or night birds? Or nothing but the smell of the sea and the sound of the wind?
All of a sudden, I ached to talk to someone, tell somebody about Gareth. I hadn’t confided in Rae lately, but … I didn’t want to leave things the way they were. I wouldn’t see her much this summer. Maybe not until school started in the fall, if Gee Gee hung on for that long. I’d have no way to put our friendship back the way it was, not from a distance. I unfolded myself from the chair and retrieved my phone from the foot of the bed.
“Hi!” she chirped. I could hear voices in the background; her dad’s familiar rumbling laugh.
“I’m not interrupting, am I?” I sank down on the foot of my bed.
“Nah. We just finished brunch. What’s up?”
“Not much.” I shifted to face my laptop, which had already reverted to screen saver mode: a montage of photos. Rae and me. Me and my parents on vacation at Disneyland. Gee Gee from years ago, holding my dad as a baby. “Well, okay. This guy … Gareth. He emailed me about my blog.” I paused. “He lives in London.”
She squealed. “What? I can’t believe you didn’t tell me! Did you email him back? Did he send you a picture? Ooh: is he cute? English accents are so hot.”
“His avatar picture is really tiny. He has glasses. Don’t sidetrack me!”
Rae gave an evil chuckle.
“Anyway, I was trying to tell you we talked on IM,” I said. “Just now.”
“You did ?” She drew in a sharp breath. “That’s, um, wow.”
“Yeah, I know.”
I gave her a quick recap of the conversation. “We thought we might be related. He said my name looked familiar.”
“Total pickup line,” Rae said.
“You would say that.” I felt kind of annoyed, even though that was what I’d thought at first, too. “He was serious, though. He reads my blog posts,” I pointed out.
“Oh, so maybe he’s a stalker!”
I chose to ignore that possibility. “I did ask Gee Gee about it. Whether we had Lewises in the family. She said no, though, so I don’t think we’re related.”
“Great. It won’t be incest if you guys hook up.”
“Thanks for that,” I said.
“So what now?” Rae asked.
“Well, we decided we should talk on Skype sometime, face-to-face. Then he had to go help his mom. His ‘mum.’”
“Ooh, Skype.” Rae laughed, then went quiet, as if waiting for more. “Is that it?”
“Yeah, but … ” I didn’t know how to explain it to her, because I didn’t know how to explain it myself. But it felt like Gareth and I were supposed to find each other, somehow. If I said that aloud, I knew Rae would laugh. Not in a mean way, but she and I looked at the world very differently. She didn’t seem to have the same sense of … the magic in the universe.
When I was little, I used to believe everything. I believed the Greek gods and goddesses were real, and the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, and of course all the stories Gee Gee read to me, of King Arthur and Taliesin the Bard and the mythological Olwen. I wanted them all to be real.
I wanted this, this one small good thing in my life, to be real.
“Are you there?”
“Yeah.”
“Is everything okay? How’s your, um, family stuff? You know, just because you don’t like to talk about it doesn’t mean I don’t care.”
“Oh, Rae, I don’t know.” I felt my throat tighten. “I’m glad we’re going to Wales, but this is so hard.” It wasn’t just that I wouldn’t be home this summer. Watching Gee Gee dying was the hardest part. But I couldn’t get those words out. I could write them, but I couldn’t seem to say them.
“I know it’s hard,” Rae said quietly. “But you’re strong. I know you. You’ll manage.”
That was another way we were different, I thought after we’d hung up. Rae was the strong one, the one who took charge, the one who kept me from tripping over cracks in the sidewalk because I was too busy daydreaming to watch where I was going. On my own, I wasn’t sure I could manage.
I hunched over on the edge of the bed, hugging my knees. Rae could sound certain because she had no idea what was going on under the surface of all this. And there was no way I could explain it to her—no way to tell her that it wasn’t just the near future that worried me, the things that I knew were inevitable, like Gee Gee dying.
How could I explain the insistent feeling that there was more going on than even I knew? And that somehow, soon, I needed to find out what was real and true?
In the dream, I’m walking by the sea, along the softly rolling hills. Grass is under my feet, stretching away to either side. The ocean crashes against the rocky cliffs far below, and the faint sting of salt spray needles my skin. It’s just like before, but this time, there’s more. On one side is an old abandoned church, moss and leaves pushing through cracks in the crumbling stone. I’m moving as if propelled, stiffly, like a marionette.
I pass the church, and the ocean cliff grows nearer. Then I see it: a group of huge rocks stacked on top of one another like a low, sunken doorway. A strange electricity gathers in the air under the gray, overcast skies, and suddenly I’m beyond the stones. In the grass a young woman is kneeling, her back to me. Her long dark hair spills over her shoulders, which are heaving, shaking. Over the loud pounding of the sea, I hear quiet, keening sobs.
The hairs on my arms stand up, as if the atmosphere is charged with static, and then abruptly there’s a profound silence, the sounds of the ocean receding into the distance. In the stillness, I hear the young woman let out an anguished cry.
A shiver crawls up my spine. Her voice, low and rich and rough with sorrow, seems somehow familiar. “Olwen,” she cries again.
Then the dream is slipping away and my eyes are opening.
Someone was calling my name. It was Gee Gee.
“Olwen … Wyn, are you here?”
Her voice drifted down the hall, quavering but insistent. I hauled myself out of bed, glancing at the clock:
6:27 a.m. I turned off the alarm I’d set for 6:30 and padded quickly in my slippers to Gee Gee’s room. Inside, it was dim, the curtains blocking most of the early morning light, and all I could see was a slender, shadowy shape sitting up in bed, surrounded by blankets.
“Are you okay?” My voice was tight with anxiety. I lingered in the doorway; I didn’t know what I would do if something was really wrong. “I was just getting up. Do you need me to get you anything? Do you need help up?”
Gee Gee pressed a button, and the back of the hospital bed slowly hummed its way upright. “I should be the one asking you if you’re all right,” she said with a gentle smile. “I thought I heard you crying out.” She started to scoot her legs over the side of the bed.
“No, don’t get up.” I hesitated. “I’m fine. I was having another nightmare. I guess I was talking in my sleep.” I walked in and tucked the blue-and-green quilt around Gee Gee’s shoulders, my heart twisting as I felt their fragility, their narrowness.
“Oh, my dear,” she said. Her voice was sad, as if she felt sorry. I wouldn’t be able to take it if she felt sorry.
“It’s okay,” I said quickly. “I’m getting up for school now anyway. Are you sure you don’t need anything?”
“No, dear, I’m quite comfortable.” She patted my hand, her touch papery, ghostlike.
I hated to think about it, but I knew she didn’t have a lot of time left. We’d go to Wales, and then … It struck me that I didn’t want to be left wishing we’d talked more. Or regretting the fact that I hadn’t asked her all the questions I could possibly think of before she was gone.
I sat down at the foot of the bed. “Gee Gee, I know this might sound silly.” I swallowed, my throat dry. “Can I tell you about the dream I had?”
“Of course you can, dear.” She looked at me, and I could see the worry lines etched into her forehead. “This dream, though. Was it what we talked about before?” I tensed up, waiting for her to elaborate. “A sensitive dream?”
“I don’t know.” I hooked one arm over the bed’s metal safety railing and stared down at the quilt. “I saw … I keep seeing a woman who looks like you, but younger. Everything’s green, and I know somehow it’s in Wales. There’s an old church, by the sea. And she’s crying, like someone’s died.” Tears sprang to my eyes. “It’s so sad. Was it … ” I swallowed hard. “Was it real?”
“Oh, Olwen fach.” Gee Gee squeezed my hand. She didn’t seem surprised. If anything, my dream seemed to have plunged her into her own memories. “You know, life was very hard in those days when I was young. I know I’ve told you about the times during the war when we had to go without so much.” There was a long pause. I opened my mouth to ask how I would even know if it was a sensitive dream, and if so, what it meant—why she’d cried my name in it—but she continued, in a soft voice.
“We were very poor in Cwm Tawel. All the villages were.” She was looking somewhere past me now, her eyes vague and half-closed. She seemed to want to talk. And I wanted to know, so I kept quiet. “It was a hard time, with so many gone to fight. The men too young or infirm, of course, had to find other work, in the coal mines and the munitions factories. Dad was older, so he was on night watch with the Home Guard.”
Gee Gee stopped, put a hand to her head; started again. “Once—it’s funny I remember this so clearly now—Dad’s team had to take away an unexploded bomb that had landed in the middle of the Morris’s vegetable garden. We were so worried it would go off before they got it to Bomb Disposal. Of course, I had to keep the little ones, Petey and my brothers, from running over there to ‘help.’” She let out a small laugh, which turned to a dry cough. I handed her the cup of water from the end table next to the bed and settled back in, lying on my side with my head propped up.
“What about the rest of the time?” I asked tentatively. “You didn’t have to take care of the boys all day, did you?” I wanted to know more about the cliffside, the sad young woman; I wanted to know more about her, but I didn’t quite know how to ask.
“Well, with so many of the men away, a lot of us women had to do factory work. But I was at home, yes. It might sound strange to you now, but the truth is I longed for that life, the working life. The parties they used to throw for the war volunteers in the cities. The handsome American soldiers.” Her eyes crinkled with humor. “A girl from our village, Mair, she was so pretty, and she knew it. Just a year older than me. She had curly golden hair she was forever tossing about as if she thought she was a movie star.” Gee Gee smiled wryly. “The boys called her Jean Harlow. The girls called her … other things.”
I snorted a giggle.
“Well, Mair would go to work in Swansea and come home evenings with grease all over her face, looking like she’d been through a war herself, she did! I wasn’t so jealous of her after that. And anyway, she couldn’t keep all of the boys for herself. Still, she was independent.” Gee Gee drank a few more sips of water, then sank back onto the pillows and closed her eyes. In a barely perceptible voice, she mumbled, “That snooty Mair. She didn’t have children to contend with, did she?”
I frowned. “What?” Was Gee Gee stuck with children? Whose? Her younger brothers, maybe? I searched her face, hoping for an answer, but she had already drifted back into a snooze, something that was happening more and more now.
After pulling up her blankets again, I got up gingerly and tiptoed out of the room. I wasn’t sure what she’d meant, or why she’d told me that story, but it was time to get ready for school.
Only later, my boots pounding the dirty sidewalk on the way to school, did I realize that Gee Gee’s story didn’t fill in the blanks, didn’t answer all the questions still brimming inside me. And the more I thought about everything she’d told me, the more questions I had. Why wasn’t she working in a factory, if she wanted to so badly? And what did that remark mean, about Mair not having children to contend with? Gee Gee only had one child, Grandpa William, and he was born after the war. Maybe Gee Gee was thinking of other women she used to know. Or maybe she was getting confused; I’d heard that could happen. I could feel tears gathering at the corners of my eyes.
There was so much I didn’t know. And deep down, the same thoughts kept nagging at me. What was Gee Gee not telling me? Why? And why did I keep dreaming about it?
9
Ym mhob cyfyngder y mae addysg.
There is a lesson in
every perplexity.
Welsh proverb
Gareth patted down his hair in the hallway mirror for at least the tenth time. The stiff waves were still in place. In fact, he’d used so much of his dad’s hair gel that there was no chance it was going to move. Not that Wyn was going to be able to see his hair that well through the webcam, but at least it was something he could exert control over. Nothing else in his life seemed to be quite cooperating.
He heard the jaunty Skype ringtone and raced over to the computer desk.
“Hello?” There was no answer at first, no image, and for a moment Gareth was afraid the odd thing that had happened on his phone was now happening on the computer. He sucked in a breath, but finally an image loaded.
Her image, long brown hair and all. The window in the room behind her made it a little difficult to see her, but he could tell she had a sprinkling of freckles across her nose that he hadn’t noticed in her photo. She didn’t look like the little Olwen, and yet … she did. He suppressed a shiver.
“I’m here!” she said. Her voice sounded nervous, quiet—not like the other Olwen at all—and she was smiling. “Hi. Shwmae?”
Gareth couldn’t help smiling back. “Da iawn, diolch. Um … and that’s all the Welsh I can remember,” he said apologetically.
She laughed, and he kept grinning like a fool, all through their awkward first few sentences. He started to relax as she asked him more questions about himself, about his parents and his childhood in Wales. She was there, and she was real. Sh
e was so enthusiastic that he wished he did remember the Welsh he’d learned in primary school.
“I guess I was just too young to pay much attention,” he said, ducking his head.
“My Gee Gee speaks Welsh,” Wyn said. “But she didn’t really teach my grandpa. I never met him, anyway. And my dad doesn’t speak any.”
“Same with my dad,” Gareth said. “’Course, he didn’t learn much of it in the first place, and then he forgot it all when he went to London for university. And my mum’s English.” Wyn looked a little disappointed, so he rushed on to say, “My great-granddad still lives in Cwm Tawel, and he speaks it some, even though he’s English. He moved there when he was a boy.”
“Cwm Tawel?” Her face went pale.
“Yeah, it means ‘quiet valley,’” he said.
Wyn was quiet for a moment. “No, I know. It’s just …
You’re talking about Cwm Tawel in South Wales, right?”
“Only one I know of,” he said, tilting his head questioningly.
“Well, you won’t believe this,” she said, “but that’s where my Gee Gee’s from.”
Gareth blinked, and the world spun crazily around him for a moment. He took a deep breath and things steadied again. “No fooling. You’re right, I can’t believe it.” They both stared at each other silently for a moment. “Do you think they know each other?” he asked, his voice shaking a bit. “His name’s Edward Lewis.”
“I don’t think so. I asked her about Lewises in Cwm Tawel, but she didn’t seem to know any.” Wyn’s voice sounded uncertain, though.
“I’ll have to ask my great-granddad about it. It’s not that big a town. You’ll see.” Gareth tried to smile.
There was a long pause, and then Wyn cleared her throat. “Could I ask you something? It’s kind of personal … and weird.”
“Okay,” he said, wondering how much weirder it was possible for this conversation to get.
She looked off into the distance, not meeting his eyes. “Do you believe in things that can’t be explained?”
The Truth Against the World Page 6
