I hadn’t known. I frowned, trying to work out how everything fit. “When did they get married?”
“Oh, I don’t know, dear. You’ll have to ask your dad about that,” Margie said. “It was long before I was paying attention to things like young lads and boyfriends.” She winked at me. “If you’re interested in the history, you ought to pay a visit to the museum. My Peter’s got some stories to tell. He lived in Rhiannon’s house from the time he was eight until he was twelve and moved to the farm to work.” She looked at her wristwatch. “Dear me, it’s time I went back down the bus station before the eleven o’clock gets here.”
Margie ambled off down the lane, apparently not in all that much of a hurry. I stayed there under the trees in front of the cottage for a few minutes, my thoughts in a frenzy. Great-Grandpa John, married and widowed before even meeting Gee Gee. Why hadn’t anybody said anything about it? Was it some big family secret?
Was Olwen his daughter, from his earlier marriage?
Time-wise, it would make sense. But, I realized, if this was the case, wouldn’t I have dreamed about Great-Grandpa John more? If my dreams really meant something.
I shook my head, my hands clenched into fists at my sides. I still didn’t see how all the pieces fit together.
I got out my phone and dialed Gareth’s number.
I tried once; twice. But Gareth didn’t pick up. I was desperate to talk to him, so I went inside and scrabbled through my backpack for the number he’d given me for his great-granddad’s house. Back outside again, I dialed, waiting as the unfamiliar double-ring on the other end of the line repeated itself several times.
Finally, somebody picked up.
“Hello?” The voice sounded elderly, and grumpy.
“Is this Mr. Lewis? Could I speak to Gareth, please?” I said.
“Who is this? Who is calling?”
“This is Gareth’s friend, Wyn. Olwen Evans.” There it was again—it was as if being in Wales somehow made it more natural to use Olwen and not have to explain myself.
There was a long, awkward silence on the other end of the line. Long enough for me to start wondering if he thought I was some friend of Gareth’s, making a prank call. Then I heard him sigh heavily.
“Gareth isn’t available. He’s in the shower. Call back later.”
“But—can I leave a message?”
“He’ll be out in a minute. I’m sure he’ll ring you. Goodbye now,” he said tersely, and hung up.
What was his problem? I thought I’d been downright cordial. Frustrated, I shoved my phone into my back pocket and stalked off down the path toward the farmhouse.
On my way back from checking email, I finally got a text message from Gareth: Stopping by in a bit.
I read for about an hour until there was a knock on the door. When I opened it, Gareth was standing there holding a bakery box.
The moment I saw him, I broke out in an uncontrollable grin. “Hi,” I said.
“Hi. Er—I brought this cake. It’s lemon. From the bakery,” he added. His cheeks reddened slightly.
“Oh! Thanks. Come on in.” I stepped aside so he could enter.
He wiped his feet carefully on the mat—clearly he was well trained—and set the cake on the table near the kitchenette.
“Are your mum and dad here?” He looked around the cottage curiously.
“They’re in the back.”
“Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Evans,” he called, in the general direction of the back bedroom. After a moment, my mom came out.
“Hi, Gareth, it’s nice to see you again,” she said, and introduced my dad.
“I brought a cake.” Gareth shook my dad’s hand.
“That’s very thoughtful,” Dad said. Then there was a long silence while we all stood around. I couldn’t think of how to fill the conversational space, and my parents seemed to be giving Gareth the once-over.
Gareth started to look uncomfortable, and finally said, “Look, I don’t go around meeting people online usually. Just Wyn, I guess. I think it’s brilliant that your family’s so proud of being Welsh.”
“Yes, she takes after her Gee Gee there,” Mom said.
Gareth looked over at me with a small smile, then looked back at my parents. “My great-granddad sends his best wishes for Mrs. Evans.”
“Thank you,” Dad said, his face serious. “I’m sure Wyn will fill you in on how Gran’s doing.” He started for Gee Gee’s bedroom, Mom following behind. “You kids have fun chatting. We’ve got soda in the fridge.”
After they’d gone, Gareth pulled a super-serious face and repeated, “You kids have fun chatting” in what sounded like a cowboy voice.
I raised my eyebrows at him and went to get two bulbous bottles of Orangina from the fridge. “Is that what Americans sound like to you?”
“Well, uh, no,” he said, following me into the kitchenette. “Okay, sort of. I can’t help it. Sorry.”
I smiled. “I’ll start butchering some Welsh for you, then you’ll be sorry.”
I sat down on one side of the table and Gareth sat across from me. I slid one of the sodas over to him.
“Thanks,” he said. “Your Welsh is probably better than mine. It’s been years.”
“I haven’t had that many chances to practice on actual people,” I pointed out.
“Yeah,” he said. He looked away. “Sorry,” he said again. “It—all of this—must be difficult.”
“Yeah,” I said. I stared at the table. Then, suddenly, it all spilled out: Gee Gee’s decline, the scare of the previous day, and how frustrated and devastated I was feeling that I would probably never be able to talk to her again, never hear her voice again as she sang to me or read to me. I felt the burning of tears behind my eyelids and blinked rapidly. I would not cry, not now.
Gareth just looked at me steadily, his eyes slightly magnified behind his glasses, letting me talk.
After telling him what I’d learned from Margie about Great-Grandpa John, I finally ran out of words, breathing hard as if I’d been running.
“I can see why you’d be cheesed off, not knowing that,” he said. “’Course parents never do tell you what you want to know. They’re good at keeping secrets.”
“I guess my family’s really good at it,” I said, twisting the Orangina cap around and around in my hands.
“Yeah, well … every family’s got ’em. You’ve got me thinking there’s something going on with my family now.” He softened his words with a half smile. He ducked his head a little, and a completely unruly and slightly tangled section of hair flopped partially over his glasses on one side. I had the momentary urge to reach out and tuck it back behind his ear.
“Hey,” he went on. “Do you think maybe your parents don’t know about your great-granddad being a widower? I mean, if your great-gran never talked about it, maybe she didn’t even tell them. Maybe she just didn’t think it was important. It was a long time ago.”
“I don’t know.” I frowned slightly. “I’ll ask my dad tonight, I guess.”
There was a short silence.
“Oh, I brought this for you,” Gareth said, pulling a folder out from underneath the cake box. Inside was a tattered map of the South Wales coast.
“Wow, thanks.” I flipped open the map, absently. “You know, I tried calling you earlier. I tried to leave a message with your great-grandfather, but he sounded … I don’t know. Weird.”
“Weird?” Gareth looked surprised.
I considered my words. “He actually sounded sort of mad. Angry. I told him who I was, and he just went totally quiet for a minute. Then it was like he couldn’t wait to get off the phone.”
A puzzled expression crept over Gareth’s face, then a tiny frown.
“I didn’t know if maybe he didn’t like girls calling you or what,” I said, flustered. “But I was really hoping to talk to h
im sometime. Ask him whether he remembers anything about Gee Gee, or even Olwen.”
“Hmm. Well, it’s probably not you,” Gareth said. “He doesn’t like the telephone. He usually sounds a bit like a hermit using the phone for the first time in decades.”
I tried to smile.
“It’s weird, though,” he continued. “He’s been cranky since I got here. More than usual, I mean. And quieter. He hardly said a word to me when he gave me your phone message. And I wouldn’t count on getting any stories out of him, either,” he added with a note of regret. “I couldn’t get much out of him for my family tree project.”
“What’s that? A school thing?”
“Yeah, for history class.” Gareth nodded. “That’s how I found you—your website, I mean. I was doing research on public records. I was going to interview him about old times, but he didn’t want to talk.”
I looked at him more closely. “What do you mean?”
“I guess he just wants to forget all about it. Maybe it was really tough.” He took a gulp of soda.
“Maybe,” I agreed. “Seems like a pretty common story.”
“I don’t know much about his life. You probably think that’s pretty sad.”
“No, I—” I was about to tell him what a weird coincidence it was that neither one of our great-grandparents seemed to want to talk about anything, when there was a knock at the front door. I swallowed the rest of my sentence as Mom appeared and let in the nurse for her afternoon check on Gee Gee. Then, not five minutes later, there was another knock, and Hugh and Annie swept in with a huge vase of wildflowers.
Now the tiny cottage really did seem to be bursting at the seams. Nurse Morgan, my dad, and Hugh were all crowded into Gee Gee’s bedroom, while my mom exchanged pleasantries with Annie in the front room and Gareth and I sat uncomfortably at the table. There were several conversations going on at once, voices everywhere—Hugh’s bass rumble, Dad’s slightly more subdued tones, the nurse’s bubbly briskness, Annie’s cheery alto, Mom’s crisp and polite guest-voice, and nowhere, nowhere to be heard but in my mind, Gee Gee.
I put my head in my hands, trying to tune it all out.
“Okay?” Gareth asked.
I nodded, but after a moment I could hear my mom’s voice getting shrill.
“Don’t get the teacups down; I’ll take care of it,” she fretted, shooing my dad out of the tiny kitchenette. “There’s only room in here for one of us.”
I shot Gareth a pained look, and he smiled sympathetically. “I should go,” he said.
Part of me wanted him to stay, but the other part of me wanted to run into my room and pull a pillow over my head. “Thanks again for coming. I wish we could have looked at the map more.”
“Well, maybe tomorrow?” Gareth stood and put on his jacket. “I’ve got a few more photos to show you.”
“Definitely,” I said, walking with him to the door. “How about meeting at the museum in the morning?” I hoped Gee Gee would be okay while I was gone, because this was something I had to do, while I was here. I didn’t want to live my life tentatively, in fear of what might happen. And I already knew what was going to happen with Gee Gee. It was the past I didn’t know about; it was the past everyone seemed to be afraid of.
And I didn’t think Gee Gee had ever lived tentatively, no matter how bad things had gotten.
“Right,” Gareth said. “See you then.” There was a long silence. He didn’t seem to want to leave, and I couldn’t seem to close the door and go back inside.
Then: “Sleep well,” he said, “and pleasant dreams.” He looked right at me, intensely, his eyes boring into mine, before turning away and heading back down the path toward the lane.
I sat up in bed, not sure what had disturbed me. The next thing I knew I was standing next to my bed, looking down at my own sleeping form.
Watching myself sleep made me intensely, viscerally uncomfortable, so I turned away and opened the door that led into the main room.
When I stepped across the threshold, instead of entering our doily-festooned sitting area I was back in that darkened room with the carved, gold-painted mirror—the room where I’d seen Olwen in another dream. The windows were draped with black, not letting in even a scrap of moonlight.
A very pregnant, very young Rhiannon was sitting in a high-backed chair in the corner. An older woman hissed at her, “If you won’t go into the hostel, you’ll be having it here like a common whore, and everyone will know what you are!” The young Gee Gee recoiled, cringing away in her unyielding seat.
I backed away, astonished, through the door I’d just opened, but instead of being back in my bedroom, I was in yet another version of the same living room. The dark draperies had been replaced by curtains of some kind of plain cloth. I was facing the mirror, and reflected in it was a cot in the corner of the room, next to a heavy wooden bureau. There was a figure lying on the cot, but not asleep; curled up in a fetal position, shoulders shaking. The bottom drawer of the bureau was pulled out and a toddler lay asleep in it, emaciated and small. At the sound of a muffled sob, I turned around.
The room changed again. I was back in the dream I’d had before, the candle glow from the hall growing brighter as little Olwen rounded the corner. A racking cough shuddered her tiny frame.
I couldn’t escape. I was trapped in this claustrophobic little bungalow no matter what I tried to do.
I desperately ran toward what seemed to be the front door—muddily, as if slogging through glue—and then I was outside, gulping in the clean air and sun on a clifftop near the sea. Green swaths of grass surrounded me; a crumbling stone steeple was just visible over a rise to one side. In front of me was Rhiannon, crying silently next to pile of stones, Great-Grandpa John standing behind her. His face was stoic and haggard despite his youth. She was gently placing a series of small objects—papers? trinkets?—in her lap, just out of my field of vision, obscured by her body.
A gust of ocean wind, salty and freezing, blew right through me with paralyzing chill and swirled me up, higher and higher, until I felt myself dissolving into it, the molecules of my being dissipating into nothing.
16
Nid doeth ond a gais.
No one is wise but
he that seeks.
Welsh proverb
Gareth kicked a stray ice-cream wrapper into the gutter, his hands shoved deep into his pockets and his shoulders hunched. He was meeting Wyn at the Cwm Tawel Museum in ten minutes, but he still wasn’t sure what to say to her. She’d just picked up and moved thousands of miles to a cramped cottage to watch her great-grandmother die, and she had to deal with all of her parents’ issues as well. Everything he came up with sounded like a platitude. Besides that, he was impatient at making so little progress in finding Olwen, and annoyed at his great-granddad for being weird to Wyn.
He turned onto Heol Owain Glyndwr. The street was empty, and his footsteps crunched in the gravel on the side of the road. Owain Glyndwr, the great Welsh hero. Gareth had studied him in school, back when he’d lived in Swansea. Owain had led some kind of revolt that had ultimately been quashed.
Gareth hoped it wasn’t a sign.
He rounded a curve in the road and caught sight of Wyn standing in front of the small, brick-fronted museum. She gave him a quick wave, her gray raincoat flapping in the wind. Don’t be daft, now, he told himself. Just be normal.
“Hey,” Wyn said, smiling a little. “The museum doesn’t open for another ten minutes.”
He watched as she tried to smooth down the billowing sides of her coat. Her eyes were red-rimmed and dark-shadowed. “Get any rest last night?”
“Not really.” She stepped onto the path of white rocks that led around the neatly manicured little flower garden in front of the museum; Gareth followed. “I couldn’t sleep, actually. I talked to my dad about what Margie said.” She paused, and stopped to smell a rose from
a small tree that had been pruned into a perfect ovoid.
“And?”
“You know, I was so sure that Dad had to know about his grandfather. I mean, how could he not?” Wyn didn’t look at him, just kept trudging around the short, circular garden path. Gareth stayed quiet, though he was itching to know what had happened. He took off his glasses and cleaned them, the garden and Wyn refracting into blurry versions of themselves.
“When I asked him about John being a widower, he got all weird on me,” she finally said. “I guess it’s a lot for him to take right now, but I wish he’d told me what he was thinking.”
“So he just said nothing?”
“He changed the subject. It seemed like he didn’t want to talk about it.” Wyn picked up a piece of white gravel and clutched it in her hand. “The strange thing is, I was kind of glad.” She looked at him.
Gareth could relate to that. It would be even worse if they tried to explain about Olwen and nobody believed them.
“I’m not really sure how much Dad does know,” Wyn continued. “It seems like Gee Gee kept everything secret from her life before. In Wales.”
Gareth tried a smile. “It’s the opposite in my family. My mum’s such a gossip, she knows everything even remotely scandalous. Dodgy business transactions, babies conceived slightly out of wedlock—if it happened, she knows about it!”
Wyn smiled at him wryly. “Even if it was your second cousin thrice removed?”
“Yeah. ’Course, I’m not really sure what that even means—‘thrice removed.’ It’s like whoever got removed three times had to have done something really horrible, you know, to get their membership in the family rescinded,” he said.
Wyn laughed a little then, a fluttery-sounding thing, and it was like a tiny spark fired up in his brain. He blushed and looked away.
He’d made her laugh, which was good. But this was all a bit intense, this thing between them. Too many coincidences and too much that couldn’t be explained, except to each other. That small knot of fear in his stomach that wouldn’t go away.
The Truth Against the World Page 15
