That night, in the dead-to-the-world sleep of sheer exhaustion, Great-Grandma Dorothy came to me in a new dream.
Mary had said Great-Grandma Dorothy haunted the attic bedroom of our house. I had brushed it off as my pesky little sister showing off for attention, calling spirits on her own when Magda wouldn’t include her. But for Mary to commune with Magda’s mother Dorothy, whom Mary had never seen alive in her lifetime, that should’ve really been something, but Magda didn’t have the time of day for Mary.
I was ten days old when Great-Grandma Dorothy died. That year also took Grandpa Earl. Mary came along about a year later. Before that, Great-Grandma Dorothy lived in the attic bedroom up the back stairs. Mom and Dad moved into the attic a few months after she was gone. When I was little, I pictured Great-Grandma Dorothy hanging upside down like a bat from the rafters when Magda spoke of her toiling over her grimoires up there. That room smelled like cedar dust, even after my mother covered the scent with lavender and sage. I associated that cedar smell with Great-Grandma Dorothy, even though I wouldn’t have known her scent in the few days we crossed paths on earth.
Mary said that Great-Grandma Dorothy hovered at the top of the stairs outside Mom and Dad’s door. She stood just there, her hand pressed against the door like she was feeling for fire or life, like the door was anchoring her in place. She called Mary sometimes in the middle of the night, and obedient, sweet Mary would go to her. Mary said when she got too close, though, Great-Grandma Dorothy would fix her with a ghostly stare and disappear.
She only appeared to Mary and, to my surprise, to Annie once, the first time she slept over when we were ten. Annie asked me the next morning, “Who was that old lady outside your mom’s room last night?” I never asked what Annie had been doing there, but I knew there was no way she had seen the framed cameo of Great-Grandma Dorothy on Magda’s dresser. Dorothy appeared another time when Dad’s cousin Glenda and her husband stayed with us once, visiting from Milwaukee on their way to a funeral in Grand Rapids. Glenda saw an old woman draped in black, bright-blue eyes staring, one hand poised on the door to the room of her granddaughter Helene, waiting, waiting, waiting for someone to see her or to ask her what she was waiting for.
But that night, after my conversation with Magda and my excursion with John, I saw Great-Grandma Dorothy for myself. In my dream, I was seven years old again.
I hadn’t yet learned to respect the barriers between the physical and spirit worlds.
I skimmed like a fish in a stream, slipping between the worlds brazenly, recklessly.
But suddenly I had gone too far.
The river turned white around me and flowed backward.
I was drowning in the infinite depths of the spirit world on the other side, where I—a living child—did not belong.
But there, on the horizon, through the rocking waves of white light, I saw a familiar glow of amethyst purple on the horizon—Magda.
Spirits rushed at me from all sides, hungry to tell a living soul their stories, threatening to overwhelm me.
The purple light blinked and was gone in the tangle of white light and souls returning to pure universal energy.
I tried to push upriver but was borne back by the current of energy.
Help me, grandmothers, my seven-year-old self and my eighteen-year-old-self whispered as one. Help me.
I smelled smoky rosewood oil suddenly, reminding me of Magda, and the white light began to part, a teensy, tiny bit at first, enough for my energy to inch back upstream toward the world of the living.
Magda’s amethyst purple glowed brighter on the horizon again.
I came to the place where the spirit worlds flowed away from each other, the living energy lines stretching away in a rush of vibrant color that hurt my eyes—the crossing-over point between the living and the dead.
Suddenly, I felt myself borne forward on a warm, white light, carrying me toward the side of the living.
Here, mein Liebling, Great-Grandma Dorothy whispered.
Thank you, Grandmother. Protect me, Grandmother, I radiated back at her.
Always, she whispered. I can’t go with you there, but I’ll be here to catch you.
She pushed me through the whirlpool of white and rainbow flashes of light that burned bright before losing their color, until I could grasp the lip on the side of the living.
I reached toward Magda, a hand stretching toward me in the dark.
Not that way, Great-Grandma Dorothy whispered. My daughter lost her way long ago.
She pushed me forward then into the world of the living; brilliant color exploded all around me in life, life, life.
I awoke gasping with the memory of Great-Grandma Dorothy whispering the words of protection; they settled around me like Friedrich’s thick blankets of winter snow. I was stunned, but somewhere underneath the adrenaline, I was relieved that it was a different dream waking me this time, relieved that it wasn’t Magda’s hands tearing me away.
As my breathing slowed, Great-Grandma Dorothy’s voice fell from my mind, leaving me cold and bitter. Thanks for the warning. But what the hell am I supposed to do now?
There in the dark, when my brain quieted and I strained toward sleep, from the safety of my heavy quilt, hand-tied by one of Mom’s talented cousins on Grandpa Earl’s side, I knew what I had to do. Magda wanted me to be her perfectly docile Watry woman. No one had asked me what I wanted. I didn’t know exactly, but I knew I was done having decisions made for me. I was going to have to be everything Magda feared I already was—reckless, loose, brash—to make my point.