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“Only you can undo the curse,” she says, and I try to watch the movement of her mouth, the flash of her fangs, to see how she can speak without lips. “The clues are everywhere. We don’t have much time.”
This is a dream, I remind myself. A deeply messed-up dream, but a dream just the same. I’ve even dreamed about a cat before. “Did you bite out my tongue?”
“You seem to have it back,” the white cat says, her shadowed eyes unblinking.
I open my mouth to speak, but I feel claws on my back, nails sinking into my skin and I yelp instead.
Yelp and sit up. Wake up.
I hear the steady patter of rain against my window and realize that I’m soaked, blankets wet and clinging. I’ve been outside. I might be back in my room, in my old bed, but my hands are shaking so hard that I have to press them underneath my body to make them stop.
5
WHEN I STAGGER DOWN to the kitchen in the morning, I find Grandad boiling coffee and frying eggs in bacon grease. I have on jeans and a faded Wallingford T-shirt. I don’t miss my itchy gloves or strangling tie; comfort’s the consolation prize for getting booted, I guess, but I don’t want to get too used to it.
I found a leaf stuck to my leg while I was getting dressed, and that was enough to make me remember waking, drenched with rain. I’ve been sleepwalking again, but the more I think about the dream, the more confused I get. Nothing lethal happened, which takes the Zacharov revenge scenario off the table. So maybe it’s just guilt that makes me dream of Lila. Guilt makes you crazy, right? It festers inside of you.
Like in Poe’s “The Tell-tale Heart,” which Ms. Noyes made us read out loud, where the narrator hears the heart of his victim beating beneath the floorboards, louder and louder until he confesses, “I admit the deed! Here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!”
“I need to talk to you,” I say, taking out a mug and pouring milk into it first, then adding the coffee. The milk billows up from the bottom, along with flecks of dust I should have probably checked for. “I had a weird dream.”
“Let me guess. You got tied up by lady ninjas. With big hooters.”
“Uh, no.” I take a sip of the coffee and wince. Grandad made it ridiculously strong.
My grandfather shoves a strip of bacon in his mouth with a grin. “Guess it would have been kind of weird if we’d had the same dream.”
I roll my eyes. “Well, you’d better not tell me anything else. Don’t ruin the surprise in case I have it tonight.”
Grandad chuckles, but it turns into a wheeze.
I look out the window. There are no cats on the grass. As I watch Grandad pour ketchup onto his eggs, the red liquid spreading, I think, There’s too much blood, and I don’t remember stabbing her, but a wet knife is in my hand and the blood is smeared over the floorboards like a thick glaze.
“So are you going to tell me about the dream you did have?” My grandfather sits down at the table, smacking his lips.
“Yeah,” I say, blinking as I remember where I am. Mom said those sudden, sickening flashes of the murder would get better over time, but they just got less frequent. Maybe some small decent part of me didn’t want to forget.
“You waiting for an engraved invitation?” Grandad asks.
“The dream started with me outside in the rain. I walked out to the barn, and then I woke up in my bed, with mud all over my feet. Sleepwalking again, I guess.”
“You guess?” he asks.
“Lila was in my dream.” I force the words out. We never talk about Lila or the way the whole family protected me, after. How my mother wept into the fur collar of her sweater and hugged me and told me that even if I had done it, then she was sure that little Zacharov bitch deserved it, and she didn’t care what anyone said, I was still her baby. How there was something dark under my fingernails and I couldn’t seem to get it out. I tried with my own nails and then with a butter knife, pressing until I started to bleed. Until my blood washed away the other darkness.
So my own conscience is finally doing me in. It’s about time.
Grandad raises an eyebrow. “Maybe it would help if you talk about her. Talk about killing her. Get it off your chest. I’ve done bad things, kid. I’m not going to judge you.”
Mom got arrested not long after Lila’s murder. Not because of me, not exactly, but she was off her game. She wanted a big score and she wanted it fast.
“What do you want me to say? I killed her? I know I did, even if I don’t remember it. I always wondered if Mom paid someone to make me forget the details. Maybe she thought if I didn’t remember how it felt, I wouldn’t do it again.” There’s got to be something dead inside me, because normal people don’t stand over the corpse of someone they love and feel nothing but a distant, horrible joy. “Lila was a dream worker, and so I guess the sleepwalking and the nightmares seem ironic. I’m not saying I don’t deserve them; I just want to understand why they’re happening.”
“Maybe you should come down to Carney. See your uncle Armen. He can still do some memory work. Maybe he can help you remember.”
“Uncle Armen has Alzheimer’s,” I say. He’s a friend of Grandad’s from when they were kids, and not really even my uncle.
Grandad snorts. “Nah. Blowback. But let’s see what that fancy doctor thinks first.”
