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After lights out, after the nurses have made the last rounds and given us all our medicine, I sneak from my room and into Dare’s.
“You can do this,” Dare whispers into my hair. “Think back to the beginning. Imagine it, imagine what happened. Let Salome die without creating the ring, without creating the curse. Let Phillip be her uncle, not her brother. Let them die without re-living over and over. Keep your mother from being with her brother, keep us from being related. You can do it. You can.”
His words empower me, and I believe him. I can do it, and I imagine what he says and I snuggle into his chest because his arms are home, and I close my eyes, knowing that I’ll dream.
And when I dream, I change things.
I sleep
And sleep
And sleep.
And when I open my eyes, it’s a beautiful Oregon morning, and my brother wants to go to group therapy.
I stretch and yawn and grouse, but he’s right. We should go. I roll out of my bed, get dressed.
“Drive safe!” my father calls out needlessly when we leave. Because of the way my mom died, among twisted metal and smoking rubber, my father doesn’t even like to see us in a car, but he knows it’s a necessity of life.
Even still, he doesn’t want to watch it.
It’s ok. We all have little tricks we play on our minds to make life bearable.
I drop into the passenger seat of our car, the one my brother and I share, and stare at Finn.
“How’d you sleep?”
Because he doesn’t usually.
He’s an insufferable insomniac. His mind is naturally more active at night than the average person’s. He can’t figure out how to shut it down. And when he does sleep, he has vivid nightmares so he gets up and crawls into my bed.
Because I’m the one he comes to when he’s afraid.
It’s a twin thing. Although, the kids that used to tease us for being weird would love to know that little tid-bit, I’m sure. Calla and Finn sleep in the same bed sometimes, isn’t that sick?? They’d never understand how we draw comfort just from being near each other. Not that it matters what they think, not anymore. We’ll probably never see any of those assholes again.
“I slept like shit. You?”
“Same,” I murmur. Because it’s true. I’m not an insomniac, but I do have nightmares. Vivid ones, of my mother screaming, and broken glass, and of her cellphone in her hand. In every dream, I can hear my own voice, calling out her name, and in every dream, she never answers.
You could say I’m a bit tortured by that.
Finn and I fall into silence, so I press my forehead to the glass and stare out the window as he drives, staring at the scenery that I’ve been surrounded with since I was born.
Despite my internal torment, I have to admit that our mountain is beautiful.
We’re surrounded by all things green and alive, by pine trees and bracken and lush forest greenery. The vibrant green stretches across the vast lawns, through the flowered gardens, and lasts right up until you get to the cliffs, where it finally and abruptly turns reddish and clay.
I guess that’s pretty good symbolism, actually. Green means alive and red means dangerous. Red is jagged cliffs, warning lights, splattered blood. But green… green is trees and apples and clover.
“How do you say green in Latin?” I ask absentmindedly.
“Viridem,” he answers. “Why?”
“No reason.” I glance into the side-mirror at the house, which fades into the distance behind us.
Huge and Victorian, it stands proudly on the top of this mountain, perched on the edge of the cliffs with its spi
res poking through the clouds. It’s beautiful and graceful, at the same time as it is gothic and dark. It’s a funeral home, after all, at the end of a road on a mountain. It’s a horror movie waiting to happen.
