Somewhere to Dream (Berkley Sensation) (29 page)

But Soquili’s expression had softened, losing its tight mask of hatred and easing into what Jesse recognized as a smile. His voice was calm, warmed by an emotion Jesse couldn’t place.

“You killed my brother’s killer, Jess-see. My brother, he gave you this.” A broad grin brightened Soquili’s entire face. “I was right from the beginning,” he said. “You carry my brother’s spirit. You
are
my brother.”

Just a few months before, Jesse never would have considered the idea. Now it felt natural and wholly possible.

“I thank you, Tloo-da-tsì,” Soquili said quietly, folding both hands over the shell.

Jesse watched Soquili get up and leave, his step lighter than it had been. When he was gone, Jesse glanced back at Adelaide, who appeared slightly bemused.

“That was interesting,” Jesse said.

She shook her head. “It was something.”

Adelaide wasn’t well enough to stand and bid the Cherokee farewell, but Jesse was able to gently carry her closer to the window so she could watch them ride away. The day was done, the excitement over; the feast at the village beckoned the Cherokee. Jesse stood behind Adelaide, loving the gentle pressure of her body in his arms as she leaned against him for support. But at the same time he felt a tug on his heart, watching the riders disappear.

You are wrong, brother
, he thought, smiling to himself.
You will see me again. You can’t get rid of me that easily.

CHAPTER
45

By the Hearth Fire

It had to be a dream. And yet . . .

I stood in the middle of a wide-open field, my parents’ home a stark, wasted skeleton in the distance. I knew the trees bordering the field, saw the contrast of vivid green against the faded yellow grass swaying at my feet. I knew the endless blue overhead, though the clouds were forever new. I didn’t want to see the house. Didn’t want to be back in this place. Too much of me had been broken there, on that day, in that other lifetime. Despite that, something in my heart yearned to step closer so I could run my fingers over the splintered boards I knew so well, to reach out for the memories that clung to the yellowed walls.

Time and place do not matter in dreams. They do not exist. And so it was that I found myself at the front door of the house, averting my eyes from the spot on the wall. But while time and location have no place in dreams, neither do self-imposed rules or desires. My eyes were drawn inexorably back to the place where my mother had died. The bullet had flown so swiftly into her brain that she hadn’t had time to cry out, though I knew my sisters and I had screamed. But now, when I looked, the blood was gone. Any sign of her was gone . . . except for a small hole. A bullet hole. Would the murderous piece of metal still be inside? A narrow passage, but wide enough that my smallest finger fit inside. The passage was splintered, unconcerned with the intrusion, but not very long. At the end of it, I touched cold steel.

“Good-bye, Mother,” I whispered.

I wandered inside, my eyes taking in familiar knotholes in the walls, my ears listening for the distinctive creak I had come to expect from each board underfoot. My hands braced against the walls as I mounted the stairs because I knew the steps weren’t trustworthy. But I reached the top without stumbling, and I followed the corridor to the room where my sisters and I had all slept, curled together under pungent wool blankets. The world was a dangerous place, but as long as I was with my sisters I had always believed I was safe. That belief was long gone.

Once upon a time, we had played in that room, giggled about silly little girl things, cried in each other’s arms, whispered deep into the night when we could hear my father’s snores in the next room. One time, little Ruth carried a jar of raspberry jam in there, then sat in the corner and dipped her tiny fingers into the sticky red fruit. She wasn’t allowed to have it in there, and she knew it, but who could take it away from her, as sweet as she looked with the telltale jam smeared over pudgy lips and cheeks? When she dropped the jar, Maggie and I did our best to wipe up the spill, clear away any evidence, but the juice soaked quickly through the wood floor, staining it forever. We slid our dresser over top, and no one ever knew but the three of us.

The dresser still stood guard over the damage, and in my dream I twisted the rickety piece of furniture out of the way. The stain had faded into a dull gray, disappearing along with the echoes of our childish giggles, but it was still there. I stooped and touched the spot, my heart finally calm, finally strong enough to accept the truth.

“Good-bye, Ruth.”

Then I was outside again, but far from the house. I stood at the entrance to the forest, at the place between the trees where the monsters had ridden through, carrying the three of us as if we were mere sacks of flour. Once we’d crossed into that dark, cool world, we’d lost all hope. I’d lost any sort of courage I’d ever had. I’d lost myself.

Now I stared at the forest, aware of small hushed sounds moving within. A bird fluttered by, and leaves rustled under tiny, scraping claws, but I heard no sound of horses, no gruff male voices. I knew the feel of that cold earth under my back, the unyielding rocks and roots that lined the forest floor, cutting and bruising bodies and souls. I knew the canopy of branches overhead that stretched out limbs to cut off the sun.

“Good-bye fear,” I whispered, then stepped into the trees.

Jesse stood just within, waiting.

“You’re safe,” he said. I wrapped my arms around his waist and nodded into his chest, breathing in his scent, feeling calm and complete.

“Adelaide?”

I sighed and held him tighter, but he asked again. His voice sounded far away, as if it drifted overhead like a wisp of cloud.

“Are you with me, Adelaide?”

The dream. I had followed it here, and yet . . .

I’d never once needed to flee what might happen. And I knew that when I opened my eyes, I would meet Jesse’s intense, golden gaze. A long time ago, I’d wanted to run from him as well, I remembered. A very long time ago. But he’d never given up on me.

His fingertips grazed my brow, lifting the fringe of hair and letting it tickle back into place. I sighed with pleasure at the exquisite sensation of goose bumps rising through me. I was aware that I was smiling, but I wasn’t yet ready to let the hazy dream go. But when his lips touched mine, warm and gentle, I floated to the surface like a bubble underwater, reaching for the air he breathed.

“There she is,” he said quietly when I opened my eyes. “There’s my girl.”

He lay at my side, propped on one elbow, watching me. I reached over and touched the soft gold curls at the back of his neck, then pulled him back to me, needing more.

“Dreaming?” he murmured against my lips.

I nodded. “Saying good-bye.”

He didn’t blink, just stared into my eyes, his own alive with questions. Then he looked away and relaxed onto his back. “It doesn’t have to be that way,” he said softly.

“Yes it does. We’ve talked about it, Jesse. It wouldn’t work,” I told him, squeezing the words through a tightening knot in my throat. I turned my head toward him and tried to laugh. “Besides, you wouldn’t want to live with the Cherokee forever.”

A gentle, cool gust pushed through the trees, waving the thinning branches like flags over our heads. The season was about to change, but I didn’t fear the cold, dark days ahead. Instead, my mind conjured the warmth of a hearth fire, its crackling cheer spread over a gathering of flickering orange faces. The faces of my family, including a little girl new to the family . . . a tiny, dark-haired child named Ruth.

Jesse chuckled. “You’re gonna have to make the introductions this time, you know. I wasn’t exactly welcomed the last time I dropped by.”

So much had happened since then. Since the day he’d first said he loved me. Since the day I’d run away, fleeing to Maggie. I was a different person now.

“Everything has changed, Jesse. You’ll be welcomed like a brother.”

The look in his eyes held doubt, but his lopsided grin made me smile. “But what about the village?” he asked. “Won’t you miss them?”

“Sure. But I need my family, and they need me. And I need you.” A thought occurred, and I sat up quickly, shocked that I hadn’t asked before. “Why? Did you want to stay in the village?”

He shook his head, but it wasn’t the definite motion it would have been before. “You’re right, though. Everything has changed. I never would have pictured wanting to stay there, but now . . .”

“You’re not angry anymore.”

“And you’re no mouse.” He shrugged, looking content. “Why should I be angry? Everything bad in my life is done, I figure. From here on in, it’s you and me and only good stuff. We’ll set up our own place—”

“Beside my—”

“Beside your sister,” he assured me, “and make some kind of life.” He narrowed his eyes. “What about your dreams? Seen what we’re gonna do yet?”

“I’m not going to look.”

He frowned, but I shook my head. I knew the question in those eyes.

“No, it’s not because I’m afraid,” I told him, lying back down. “It’s because I want to see it with you for the first time.”

That wasn’t exactly a lie. I hadn’t looked ahead with the intent of envisioning our future life, and in truth, I had no idea about how it would be. But without meaning to, I had seen something. On a blanket by the hearth fire, in a room I’d never seen before, little Ruth played with a doll, making the little thing dance and sing just like her namesake had done years before. Also on the blanket, staring up at Ruth with guileless adoration, sat a smaller girl. One with long blond hair, golden eyes, and a smile of tiny teeth that filled my heart with light.

I stared up at the sky, seeing that sweet little face, and felt my entire body tingle when Jesse reached for my hand. We would name her Cherokee.

IF YOU ENJOYED
SOMEWHERE TO DREAM
, DON’T MISS THE COMPANION NOVEL BY GENEVIEVE GRAHAM

Under the Same Sky

AVAILABLE NOW FROM BERKLEY SENSATION

PART
1
: MAGGIE

From This World to the Next

CHAPTER
1

A Dubious Gift

He has always been there. That fact is as important to me as my own heartbeat.

I first saw him when we were children: a young boy with eyes as dark as rain-soaked mud, staring at me from under a mane of chestnut hair. I kept him secret, invisible to everyone but me. He should have been invisible to me as well, because he was never really there, on the same windblown land, under the same sky. We never stood together, never touched as other people did. Our eyes met, and our thoughts, but our bodies were like opposite banks of a river.

When I was little, I thought of him as just another child. One with a slow smile and gentle thoughts that soothed me, as if he held my hand. When he didn’t fade with my childhood years, I began to wonder if he were a spirit, communicating through my dreams. In my heart, I knew he was more. His world was the same as mine. He was as human as I.

I was born in the year of Our Lord 1730 on a patch of grassland in South Carolina. Our pine-walled house, dried to an ashy gray, stood alone, like an island in a sea of grass. Its only neighbours were a couple of rocky hills that spilled mud down their sides when it rained. They stood about a five-minute run from our house, just close enough to remind us they were there. The house barely stayed upright during the mildest of storms, and we had no neighbours to whom we might run if it ever collapsed. When winter struck, the wind sought out gaps in the walls, shrieking around bits of cloth we stuffed into the holes. The cold pierced our skin as it had the walls, and we wrapped our bodies in dried pelts that reeked of tanned leather. Our barn offered even weaker shelter to one aged horse and a few poorly feathered chickens who, fortunately, were good layers. My father owned a rifle, and he occasionally chanced upon a prize from the nearby forest. He also ran a tangled line of traps that provided most of our meals. Beyond that, we had little. What we did have we mended many, many times.

I was never a regular child, spending my days with nothing but play and chores on my mind. How could I be? My dreams showed me what would happen an hour, a day, a year before it did. I had always dreamed. Not symbolic imaginings of flying or falling, but dreams that showed me where my life would eventually go.

I could also see what wasn’t visible, and hear what made no sound. When I was a toddler, my mother encouraged my odd abilities through games. She would pry a toy from my grip and hide it somewhere, then return and say:

“Go, Maggie. Go find your toy.”

I ran to the target and came back every time, prize in hand.

Mother said I had “the Sight.” I never told her there was more. I never told her about the boy I could see, who spoke to me without words. I wanted to keep him safe within secrecy, as if sharing him might make him disappear.

My dreams introduced me to people I had never seen, and took me to places I could never have known existed. Most nights they appeared and vanished, leaving vague memories in the back of my mind. Other nights I awoke bathed in sweat, drowning in images I didn’t understand: hands flexing into fists, bristled fibres of rope chafing my skin, the thunder of horses’ hooves. And blood. So much blood.

Mother didn’t experience dreams like mine, but she knew I had them. Their existence terrified her. Mother was a small woman of few words. When she saw me awake from the dreams, my head still fuzzy with half memories, her face paled and she looked away, helpless and afraid.

Her mother, my grandmother, had had the Sight. Mother both respected and feared its power. My grandmother saw her own death a week before it happened. She felt the hands as they tied her to a stake, smelled the smoke as the tinder beneath her bare feet caught fire, and heard the jeering of the crowd as they watched her burn as a witch.

Mother told me the story only once. That didn’t mean it couldn’t repeat itself.

Mother did the best she could. Many nights I awoke in her arms, not remembering her arrival, only knowing she came when my screams jolted her from sleep. She held me, rocked me, sang lullabies that ran through my body like blood. But her songs held no answers, offered no way to chase the images from my mind. She did what she could as my mother, but I faced the dreams on my own.

Except when I was with the boy no one could see. Sometimes he would brush against my thoughts like a feather falling from a passing bird. Sometimes we conversed without words. We could just
be
, and we understood.

As an infant, I lived with my mother and father and our decrepit horse. My sister Adelaide was born two years after I was. When I first saw her, wrapped like a pea in a faded gray pod, I stroked her little cheek with my finger and loved her without question. We were best friends before the newborn clouds faded from her eyes. Two years later, she moved out of her crib and my bed became ours.

Our brother was born that year. He died before he drew his first breath. We named him Reuben and buried him next to the barn.

Little Ruth arrived on a cloudless day in March when I was six. Ruth Mary Johnson. She was soft and fair and filled with light. Even my father, a man with little patience and less affection, gentled at the sight of her.

Neither one of my sisters had the Sight. Like my mother, they were slender and delicate, like fair-skinned deer. My mother’s skin was always so pale, even under the baking sun, she looked almost transparent. The only way to bring colour to her cheeks was to make her laugh, and my sisters and I did our best to paint them pink. I took after my father, with his brown hair and plain face, though my hands weren’t as quick to form fists as his. My arms and back were built for lifting.

By the time I turned seven, my dreams had become more vivid, and more useful to the family. I was able to catch Ruth before she tripped down a hill, able to find a scrap of cloth my mother sought. One winter I dreamed of a corn harvest, and my mother, daring to believe, planted a garden of it that spring. Her gardens never provided much food, because the ground around our home was either cracked by drought or flooded by heavy rains that stirred the dust to mud. That summer, though, the corn grew high.

Usually my dreams came when I slept, but sometimes they appeared when I sat quietly on my own. They weren’t always clear. Most of the time they had faded into wisps of thought by the time I came back into focus, but they never fully disappeared.

My mother and I never talked about my dreams. Neither of us acknowledged them out loud.

Just like we never talked about my father’s death.

It happened on the night of my seventeenth birthday.

I dreamed of a wheel from our wagon, its spokes blurred to a quick gray. Our ancient gelding pulled the bumping wagon over a moonlit ridge as my father returned from a late trip to town.

He slumped on the wagon bench, his weary body jiggling over every bump. I saw him lift his chin and glance toward the sky. Low-lying storm clouds glowed in the light of the full harvest moon. Everything around the wagon took on a strange orange tinge: the sparse patches of spring grass, the heaps of boulders casting pointed shadows in the dark. Tufts of salted brown hair peeked from under my father’s hat, and he tugged the brim lower on his forehead. My father was not a patient man. He clucked to the horse and snapped the reins over the animal’s back. In response, the gelding tossed his head and picked up speed just as they reached the peak of a long hill. My father should have known better. The pitch was too steep. Once the wagon started racing down the hill, the horse couldn’t slow. The wheels spun out of control, bouncing off rocks and jolting my father so he barely stayed in his seat. He leaned back, lying almost flat as he strained against the reins, but couldn’t slow the panicked horse.

The wagon clattered downhill, too fast to avoid a boulder in its path, and the front wheel smashed into splinters. Jerking in reaction, the wagon staves twisted from the horse’s harness, ricocheted off a solitary oak, and hit the ground with a sickening crack. The horse screamed and ran faster still. My father struggled to loosen the reins tangled around his wrists, but couldn’t do it fast enough. He was yanked from his seat and tossed into the air like a sack of flour. He hit the ground. Hard. His body crashed against rocks and shrubs as he struggled to free himself from the reins, tearing his clothes and scraping long gashes in his skin. The horse raced down the hill, eyes white with terror, chased by the screams and the body that thumped behind him like an anchor.

After a while, the screaming stopped. The horse checked its wild run and trotted to a stop, sides heaving, the insides of his back legs wet with white foam. His nostrils flared, and he bobbed his head nervously at the scent of fresh blood. But he sensed no imminent danger. He dropped his head to a patch of grass and began to graze. My father’s lifeless body rolled to rest a few feet away.

The dream ended and I sat up, gasping, the neckline of my shift soaked with sweat. I twisted toward the window, but all was silent, silver under the moon. I threw back the covers and stood, shaking, on the cold floor.

I knew where to find my father’s body. Not far—the horse had raced past a familiar oak my sisters and I often climbed.

I woke my mother and we ran without a word along the dimly lit path, faded nightgowns flapping around our ankles.

My father’s body was little more than a heap of bloodstained rags. The horse stood nearby, chewing, glancing at us before dropping his head to the grass again. Scraps of cloth fluttered along the pathway the wagon had taken, bits of clothing caught on rocks. My father’s tired gray hat lay at the top of the hill.

I stared at what was left of him and wasn’t sure how I felt. He hadn’t been a kind man. The only thing he had ever given us was beatings.

Still, I should have been lost in grief beside my mother, but my mind was on something else. My dreams had changed. For the first time, they had occurred simultaneously with the event. My dreams were no longer limited to vague messages forecasting the future.

Burying a man in hard ground is difficult work. It took two full days for Adelaide and me to manage a trench large enough for his mangled body. Even then, we had to bend his knees a bit so he fit into the hole. My mother read from her Bible, then nodded at me to shovel the earth onto his body.

Our father had never spent much time with us when he was alive. Even so, the house seemed eerily quiet after his death. It was strange not hearing his heavy footsteps, not hearing him gripe about the sorry state of his life. We mourned, but not terribly. When he left the living, my father took with him the stale reek of alcohol, a sullen expression, and a pair of overused fists.

My mother, my sisters, and I were forced to take on my father’s duties, which included driving the wagon to town for buying and selling. The ride took over two hours each way, but once we arrived, we forgot every bump. My sisters and I never tired of the activity in town. The painted building fronts with fine glass windows, the people who walked the treeless street, kicking up dust as they visited the stores. Dirty children watched like sparrows on perches while fancy ladies strolled the boardwalks under parasols, protecting their faces from the sun, tucking their hands into the arms of stiff-backed men in suits and hats. Sometimes they were shadowed by people whose eyes gleamed white out of sullen black faces. My mother told us they were from Africa, brought to America as slaves.

The town of Saxe Gotha boasted more than two skin colours. Fierce tattoos and feathers enhanced the bronze skin and black hair of men who moved with the casual grace of cats. They avoided the plank walkways, preferring the dust of the road under their feet.

My father had told us stories about Indians and their bloodthirsty ways. We had stared open-mouthed as he regaled us with violent tales. So when I saw the Indians in town, they both frightened and intrigued me, but I never saw them attack anyone. They were in town for the same reason we were: to trade. An uneasy peace existed between them and the white men while business was conducted. They brought deerskins and beaded jewellery and left with weapons, tools, and rum. No one spoke to them on the street, and they offered no conversation. Business complete, they leaped onto the bare backs of their horses and disappeared into the shadows of the trees beyond the town.

I felt an odd connection to these men. When my mother led my sisters and me into the local shop to trade eggs or small hides for blankets or whatever else we needed, the other customers avoided us as if they were afraid our poverty might touch them. At the end of our day, we climbed onto our clumsily rebuilt wagon, pulled by the only horse we’d ever owned, and were gone.

We crossed paths with the Indians, but never came close enough to make contact. And yet their images began to appear in my dreams, to emerge from the trees and surround me with purpose, the tight skins of their drums resonating with the heartbeat of the earth.