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Always in our nightgowns, even long after morning had passed.
It seemed so idyllic back then, like some kind of fairy tale. There’s no way we could have known what was happening, what was really going on. Like the Lost Boys ofPeter Pan, calling out for mother, our freedom was an illusion.
What it really was, was neglect.
“No,” my mother says, shaking her head, a sad little squeak erupting from somewhere deep in her throat. “No, it wasn’t that. It was something more than that.”
Losing Ellie was the moment we lost my mother, too. The moment everything changed. Even then I felt it, though I didn’t understand. That feeling of death that was always there, always present, swollen and bloated and hovering over everything like it was just biding its time, waiting to claim one of us next. The strangeness of it, ofher, settling over the house, like we had all morphed into those plush fabric dolls, buttons for eyes, moving through the motions like nothing had happened.
Like none of us were reallyusanymore.
“I tried to tell your father that something wasn’t right,” she continues. “That I was feeling things,thinkingthings, that were starting to scare me.”
I suddenly remember the sound of my mother’s voice that night, seeping through my father’s office door as I stood on the other side of it, listening. The little beg that erupted from the back of her throat.
“You don’t know what it’s like. Henry, you don’t understand.”
I always thought she was talking about me walking through the house at night: eyes open, body rigid.It’s dangerous to wake a sleepwalker.I always thought she was saying that he didn’t understand what it was like living withme, dealing withme. That she was afraid ofme.
But that wasn’t the case. That wasn’t the case at all.
She was afraid of herself.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
“What did you do?” I whisper, the reality of what my mother is trying to tell me making the blood turn solid in my veins. “Mom, what did you do?”
I can hear the thumping of my own heart in my ears, like holding your nose and plunging underwater; I watch as she hugs herself, those long, thin fingers digging into the skin of her arms, and think back to that final night with Margaret again. It had been so hot,toohot, our bodies sticking together with sweat in my bed. I think about the way she had whined in the bathtub—“How much longer?”—and my mother’s fingers trailing across the cool water, leaving behind little ripples in her wake, like the fin of a shark barely breaching the surface.
“Not much longer,” she said. “We’ll be comfortable soon.”
“By morning?”
And then that smile again: sad and resigned, like someone so far past her breaking point. Someone who knew, deep down, she was about to do something wrong. Something terrible.
“Sure. By morning.”
I stare at my mother from across the room now, finally lettingthe pieces fall into place. She lets out a little wet choke, lower lip trembling, and something about the way the moonlight is hitting her face through the windows wiggles another memory free. It’s that dream again; that dream that kept repeating itself in the months immediately after Margaret died. But it wasn’t a dream at all, was it? Instead, it was a memory that emerged disjoined and unclear, like a reflection in a shattered mirror, fragments reflecting back to me as I lay in bed, restless and thrashing.
Dr. Harris had told me, after all, that sleepwalkers can sometimes remember: “It’s like recalling a dream.”
It’s of the two of us outside, Margaret and me, the glow of the moon making our nightgowns shine. Standing at the edge of the water, hand in hand, Margaret twisting her neck to stare at me as if asking permission before turning back around and facing the marsh. It always stopped there, the dream, but now I can see the rest of it: Margaret taking a slow step forward and sending a wave of ripples toward my mother, standing before us, water lapping at her calves. That white robe dripping, translucent against her skin, as she stretched out her arms and beckoned us forward.
That little smile on her lips, and her eyes glassy and gray, filling with tears.
“Why?” I ask, remembering how Margaret had stepped forward while I hung back, watching—seeing, but not reallyseeing. How she had trusted me. How I had let her go. “Why would you do that? Why Margaret?”
“It wasn’t about Margaret,” she shakes her head. “It was about us. All of us.”
“I don’t understand—”
But then I see my mother’s hand resting on Margaret’s cheek in the kitchen, staring at us like we weren’t even real.
“I wish you could stay my babies forever.”
“I tried one other time,” she continues, taking a step forward. “Ileft the gas on the stove overnight. I remember hoping it would be quick. Thinking it was the right thing to do, even. That we would just go to sleep and wake up together—allof us, somewhere else, and everything would be okay.”
She’s quiet, her eyes somewhere far away, remembering.
