The Dream Wedding

by MJ Rodgers

  Yes.

  Why did the scent of lavender on the dress make you think of something terribly unhappy?

  I don’t know. It just did.

  What happened next?

  The women were angry because I wouldn’t wear the dress. I felt upset, too. The more we argued, the more their voices sounded like barking dogs. I finally couldn’t stand it anymore. I ran from the room. That was when the dream ended.

  Michael once again stopped the tape. “Can you see that dress in your mind’s eye, Briana?”

  “Yes, it’s a wedding dress. I didn’t realize it before, but I can clearly see now that it’s an old-fashioned wedding dress.”

  “Is there anything else that’s clearer now?”

  “The dress belonged to the older woman. She wanted to have it altered for me, but I didn’t want to wear it. I didn’t like its smell.”

  “The lavender smell.”

  “Yes. It had been wrapped in lavender sachets.”

  “And the lavender smell made you unhappy.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve absolutely no idea.”

  “It’s very unusual to remember a smell in a normal dream, Briana, unless that smell is in the room you’re sleeping in.”

  “There’s no scent of lavender in the sleep lab, is there?”

  “No, which tells me that it is important to the meaning in your dream.”

  Briana opened her eyes. “Michael, is any of this helping?”

  “We know some things we didn’t know before. This argument over the dress took place in one of the bedrooms in the Ayton home. You knew the younger woman. The older woman was almost a stranger.”

  “Are you thinking they’re symbolic representations?”

  “Your dream seems to possess few, if any, symbolic representations. I think these are two women with whom you became acquainted during the missing weeks in your life.”

  Briana let out a deep, frustrated breath. “It’s still so hard to accept. Michael, it took me four months to pick out a new car. I just can’t believe I met and married Sheldon Ayton in three weeks.”

  That same bell chime that Briana had heard in Michael’s office that morning suddenly echoed through the gazebo. She turned around with a start.

  “Could it be Sergeant Vierra again?” she asked.

  Michael stood. “The only reason the police would be back is if they were acting on a court order.”

  “Michael—”

  “I have Judge Soares’s restraining order right here,” he said, patting his breast pocket “It overrides anything Ayton could have tried to push through today. There’s absolutely no cause to worry.”

  Michael moved over to the intercom.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “I’ve come to see Natalie,” an unfamiliar woman’s voice said.

  “There is no Natalie here,” Michael responded.

  “Then I’ve come to see Briana Berry.”

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Carlie Taureau.”

  Briana shook her head in response to Michael’s inquiring look. The name meant nothing to her.

  “Since Briana Berry has apparently forgotten me and Natalie, ask her if she remembers Hazel Doud,” the woman said into the intercom.

  Briana felt a jumpy, exuberant feeling forming in the middle of her stomach at the mention of her grandmother’s name. She shot to her feet.

  “Michael, she knows about Hazel!”

  “You want to talk with this woman?” Michael asked.

  “Yes, definitely yes.”

  “We’ll be there in a moment, Ms. Taureau,” he said into the intercom.

  Briana had to keep herself from running to the front of the institute, so eager was she to meet with someone who actually knew about her grandmother. Finally, validation of her life was at hand! If Hazel was real, so was Briana Berry.

  But as soon as Briana saw the woman standing on the doorstep, her excitement was replaced by an immediate foreboding. She recognized Carlie Taureau as the younger of the two women from her dream.

  How could this woman be from her dream and yet be from her real life, as well?

  Carlie Taureau was very attractive, with pleasing features and a trim figure. She had Briana’s height, deep auburn hair, pale blue eyes. She was beautifully groomed and dressed, a woman who obviously paid close attention to her appearance.

  In Briana’s dream, she had sensed that Carlie Taureau was around fifty. In the flesh, she barely looked forty.

  The moment Michael unlocked and opened the door, Carlie swept in and threw her arms around Briana, surrounding her with a cloud of expensive perfume.

  “Oh, Natalie, we’ve been just wild with worry, honey, thinking the most terrible things! I can’t tell you how relieved I was when Sheldon told us he had finally found you and you were all right!”

  Briana didn’t know how to respond to this woman’s sweet Southern accent, or to her generous embrace. She had an odd feeling that there was something else that was very familiar about Carlie Taureau—something she should know.

  “Who are ‘we’?” Briana asked, stepping gently back and out of the scented circle of the woman’s arms. “Who are you?”

  Quick tears filled Carlie’s pale blue eyes. “Natalie, honey, I’m your mama.”

  Briana stiffened. She suddenly realized what had looked so familiar about Carlie. This woman’s facial features were remarkably similar to her own new, flawless ones.

  No! a voice protested, reverberating through her skull.

  Acquiring a husband in her missing three weeks had been stretching the envelope enough. There was no way it was going to stretch enough to include a mother.

  “My mother died when I was three,” Briana said, quietly but firmly.

  “No, honey. That was when Briana Berry’s mama died and she went to live with her grandmother. Hazel Doud. You only think you’re poor little Briana. You’re really my sweet Natalie.”

  Bnana shook her head, in both denial and confusion.

  “Shall we discuss this matter in a more comfortable setting?” Michael suggested.

  He led them to a reception room in his wing with a couple of couches. Carlie sat on the end of one and beckoned to Bnana to sit beside her. Briana declined, feeling quite awkward around the woman’s open affection. She chose the chair across from her.

  “How do you know about Hazel Doud?” Briana asked.

  “At some time during your unhappy childhood, you decided to become Briana Berry. Hazel was the grandmother who you created to take care of you. You made her sweet and kind and attentive—everything that you had wanted in a mama, but never had.”

  “I didn’t create Hazel,” Briana said, irritated by the woman’s words. “She’s real, and she’s still alive.”

  “I know you want to believe it, Natalie, but it isn’t true.”

  Bnana didn’t know what this woman hoped to gain by these absurd proclamations. But she intended to find out. “You said my childhood was unhappy. Why?”

  “I wasn’t there to care for you, honey. Your daddy employed a succession of nannies, none of whom gave you the love you needed. And your daddy sure didn’t. Markam Newcastle never understood anything that had to do with tender feelings.”

  “I never knew my father,” Briana said. “And I’ve never heard of Markam Newcastle.”

  “Yes, that’s what you insisted then, too. You said you were Briana Berry, a poor little orphan who lived with her grandmother Hazel and didn’t have a rich daddy or a houseful of servants at her command.”

  Briana listened to the woman’s words in a kind of incredulous shock. This couldn’t be true. It just couldn’t.

  “Why are you saying these things?” she demanded.

  Carlie leaned forward, resting her hand on Briana’s knee. “Honey, Briana Berry and Hazel Doud aren’t real. They were just people you made up to cushion yourself against a world without any real affection in it. I blame myself for that. If I had been w
ith you—”

  “If you are my mother, as you say, why weren’t you with me?” Briana asked challengingly.

  Carlie removed her hand from Briana’s knee and let out a long, unhappy sigh as she slumped back against the couch.

  “Because I was selfish and thought only of myself.”

  Her words surprised Briana. “What do you mean?”

  “My mama and daddy were dirt-poor, honey. All I had was my beauty. It took me to the title of Miss Louisiana. First time Markam saw me, I was coming off that stage with a crown on my head. He up and proposed, right there and then.”

  The smile that had been growing on Carlie’s face disappeared before she went on. “It’s not like I ever loved him. But I thought he would provide me with the financial security that my own mama and daddy had so sorely lacked. And I thought he loved me.”

  She laughed—a bitter, unhappy sound. “What he loved was the idea of owning a beauty queen. He was fifty, I was but eighteen. I was just something pretty to warm his bed at night and be displayed to his friends during the day—much like one of his prize horses.”

  Carlie stopped, took a deep breath, her hands clenching. She seemed to be trying to control the bitter memories breaking through A moment later she continued.

  “When I got pregnant with you, Natalie, I thought maybe things would change between your daddy and me. I thought having his child would gentle him some. But it didn’t.”

  Her light blue eyes met Briana’s.

  “Your daddy never even came into the nursery to look at you after you were born. He instructed me to make sure you turned into ‘something’ he could be proud of, just like he instructed the servants in their duties. That’s all I was to him. Just another servant.”

  She sighed, looked down at her hands. “I was so young and so lonely.”

  Briana was afraid for a moment that the woman might break out in tears. But she didn’t. She took a deep breath, got hold of her emotions and continued.

  “Then Connor Taureau came to work in Markam’s stables. Connor was twenty-two, dark, handsome, and as attentive to me as your daddy was not. I suppose it was inevitable that we would fall in love—and Markam would catch us together.

  “I didn’t care that my marriage was ending. I didn’t even care that Markam was turning me out with nothing but the clothes on my back. But it broke my heart when he got sole custody of you. I never imagined for a moment that he would insist on taking you from me. You weren’t even eighteen months old when I lost you, Natalie. I didn’t even see you again until you were ten.”

  “You married Connor Taureau?”

  “Yes. We had twenty-two wonderful years together before he died. I knew the first time we were together that there would never be another man for me.”

  “You said you saw me again when I was ten. Why?”

  “The gardener at the Newcastle estate remained friends with Connor. He made it possible for Rory and me to see you at your tenth birthday party.”

  “Rory? Who’s Rory?”

  “Your brother, honey, or I guess I should say half brother. Connor was Rory’s daddy. I had told Rory all about you. He was just dying to meet his older sister. So we hitched a ride in the gardener’s truck and sneaked in to watch you blow out the candles on your cake.”

  Carlie sighed, shaking her head in remembrance.

  “Your daddy had gone out of town on business. You were surrounded with all these kids from your school. And yet you looked so lonely. That was the day you spoke about being this orphan girl, Briana Berry. You said you didn’t know Natalie or Markam Newcastle. You said your grandmother Hazel was taking care of you.”

  “And you claim this all happened on my tenth birthday?” Briana asked, not believing a word of it.

  “Yes. It was all my fault, Natalie. I wasn’t there for you!”

  Briana was very uncomfortable to see the tears welling in Carlie’s eyes again.

  “Why don’t I remember any of this?” Briana asked. “Why do I remember a childhood and adulthood that is totally different from the one you describe as Natalie Newcastle’s?”

  “Honey, I don’t know. I tried to read up on this a few years ago. From what I understand, doctors say split personalities often live parallel lives—their real one and the fantasy one they escape into.”

  Carlie’s eyes were blinking with new tears as she studied Briana’s face.

  “You’ve wiped Natalie completely away again, haven’t you? Even how you and Shel met, fell in love, your beautiful wedding?”

  Briana felt an odd buzzing in her brain at the mention of the wedding. She had no intention of admitting to Carlie that she remembered some of the wedding—at least in her dreams.

  She was afraid to admit anything. For if she admitted to any of this incredible story, she was afraid she might have to accept all of it. Briana was not ready to accept anything of the sort.

  But to find the truth, she knew she needed to find out more.

  “How did I meet Sheldon Ayton?” Briana asked.

  “At your box at the Derby.”

  “The Derby?”

  “Kentucky Derby. May third. Your favorite racing event of the year. You’ve always loved horses. It was a passion that you shared with your daddy.”

  “So you’re saying that Natalie eventually established a normal relationship with her father?”

  “I’m not sure the word normal would ever describe any relationship your daddy had. But I do believe your fondest memories of him are those when you sat together watching a race, talking about the horses.”

  “Memories of him? Markam Newcastle is dead?”

  “Oh, yes. Four years ago. A massive heart attack. It was sudden, honey. He didn’t suffer. Not even I would have wished him a painful death.”

  Briana searched for, but couldn’t find, any feelings for a man of whom she had no memories.

  “So Natalie met Sheldon Ayton at the horse races,” Briana said. “What then?”

  “Then he promptly fell in love with you.”

  “And she with him?”

  “Not right away. You were definitely turned off by his reputation.”

  “What reputation?”

  “Shel is nearing forty. He’s been a ladies’ man all his life. I’ve heard it told many a time that there wasn’t a woman who he couldn’t have.”

  “I’m not surprised I was turned off,” Briana said, thoroughly unimpressed.

  “Well, it’s to be expected,” Carlie added on a defensive note. “Shel is blessed with such substantial wealth and physical attributes. And charm.”

  “I hadn’t noticed,” Briana said.

  “You didn’t see him in his best light, honey. When Shel turns on the charm, well, he is quite irresistible. I suppose that’s why your continuing indifference to him drove him a mite crazy. Although you certainly didn’t do it to be clever, it was what made him propose. He had to have you. He knew the only way he could was to marry you.”

  “I can’t think why Natalie accepted.”

  “Can’t think why? But, Natalie, Shel is—was—one of the most eligible bachelors in the world! You made a brilliant match.”

  “Then why did Natalie run away after the ceremony?”

  Carlie frowned. “That is a puzzle, honey. Something must have happened. Don’t you remember anything?”

  “No,” Briana insisted. “Who was at the wedding?”

  “It wasn’t a large affair. Quite modest, really. Just a couple of hundred guests, most of whom were selected by Gytha. She’s your mother-in-law, honey. She chose the invitations, decorations, photographers, caterer. Gytha was quite stubborn about the specifics.”

  “Aren’t weddings usually planned by the bride’s family?”

  Carlie laughed. “Not Ayton weddings. Ayton weddings are controlled by Aytons.”

  “Christmas Eve seems an odd time for a wedding,” Briana said.

  “It’s a tradition in the Ayton family. Gytha was married on Christmas Eve, and so were apparently all the
Ayton brides in recorded history. She was not going to let you and Shel break with tradition.”

  “And Natalie went along with this?”

  Carlie smiled. “You were pretty easygoing about most of it. But you came very near to calling the whole thing off when she started insisting on your wearing her wedding dress.”

  Briana got a cold chill down her back as the dream argument with the two women over a wedding dress flashed through her mind.

  “Did Natalie wear her dress?” Briana asked.

  “Oh, no. You said you’d rather stay single.” Carlie paused to chuckle. “And you meant it.”

  “But Natalie didn’t stay single.”

  “Still, no amount of cajoling by Shel or me would change your mind about the dress. You weren’t angry about it. But then, you never do get angry. You just draw the line when you’ve had enough, and you had had enough. You told Gytha Ayton and Shel that either you selected your own wedding dress or there just wasn’t going to be a wedding. And you smiled when you said it.”

  Carlie laughed. “I think it was your smile that made the veins pop out in Gytha’s neck. I’ve never seen such a look like that on anyone’s face before. Honey, she was livid, her eyes just spitting sparks.”

  “Doesn’t appear as though Natalie has a very healthy relationship with her mother-in-law.”

  “Now, you know she wouldn’t have been happy with any woman Sheldon selected. Besides, she’s so used to deference, and you’re not one to give it on demand. But then, why should you? You are a woman of substance, after all.”

  “A woman of substance? Are you saying Natalie has money?”

  “Oh, you’re not rich like an Ayton is rich, of course. Just twenty million or so.”

  Just twenty million or so?

  “Natalie, doesn’t any of this sound familiar to you?”

  Briana didn’t know what to answer. For the truth was, some of this did fit into her dream.

  “Try to remember, honey,” Carlie said. “You were dancing with Shel. The ballroom was decorated all in white and red. Those are the Aytons’ coat-of-arms colors.”

  Briana found herself picturing the red dresses with white sashes that had been worn by the bridesmaids in her dream. She remembered dancing with a man. Had it been Sheldon?

  “It was no more than a few minutes later that one of the servants found that Mrs. Ayton had fallen,” Carlie said.