Chapter 20

Brian sat shoulder to shoulder with his dad at the basement worktable, sifting through mounds of plastic pieces. Shelves lined the walls, displaying models of houses, forts, Star Wars cruisers, and even the Eiffel Tower, all assembled brick by brick with painstaking care. They’d spent the better part of the afternoon preparing this latest project, a scale model of the Taj Mahal, by organizing its thousands of pieces by color and size into plastic containers.

“We’re missing the girl with red hair,” Dad said.

“We’re what?” Brian hadn’t broached the topic of Rebecca with anyone in his family. How could he? I’m seeing this girl, but mostly in my dreams—a relationship in dire need of progression beyond that obligatory modifying clause. Otherwise, his parents would interrogate him about drinking parties while his sister laughed her silly head off.

“There you are.” His dad pulled the tiny figurine of a red-haired girl out from beneath a pile of bricks. “Thought you’d get away, did you?”

Brian breathed. He needed to get a grip. The first trip home from school was disorienting enough without misinterpreting random comments into impossible conclusions.

“Do you guys need any help?” Kara pulled a stool up to the table. Home from college for Thanksgiving, his sister wore her finest black, as usual. She dyed her hair from blonde to midnight, too, bucking the trend set by legions of girls before her. Kara sometimes went so far as to gray her lips as well, but she’d spared them this time, going blood red for the Thanksgiving holiday.

Brian held a piece up. “We’re short one of these, I think.”

She went to work, rummaging through one of the piles. “I’ll bet you accidentally mixed it in with these single-nozzle fireplug thingies.” The missing piece did look like a tiny hydrant but with a nozzle on every side, unlike the set’s dozens of one-nozzle pieces.

Kara served as their finder of lost things. She had a knack for locating anything from a misplaced article of clothing to a miniature brick. Often during these construction projects, she’d sit on the stool and read a book or hum to herself or both, until the inevitable cry for help propelled her into action. Kara loved her small role in transforming chaos into order.

A finder of lost things. Brian studied her in a new light. “Kara, if you were looking for someone who lived off the grid, where would you start?”

The question flew past her and smacked unimpeded into a far wall of the basement. She’d already turned her attention elsewhere. “Your hair has more pepper than salt, Dad. What’s with that?”

Their dad flashed a Cheshire-cat grin. “It’s called dye, Sweety. Call me Red.”

“Oh. Too bad. I’ve been reading legends about people who never age.” Kara shifted her focus again. She gazed directly into Brian’s eyes, as if her words held a secret meaning just for him.

Brian didn’t know what the hell she was talking about, but her stare was intense. Knowing. He fought off a reflexive squirm.

“Nope,” Dad said. “The fountain of youth comes in a bottle.”

“Maybe that’s where Brian found his new girlfriend. Think she’s a genie?”

Huh? How could she know about Rebecca? As usual when confronted with something impossible—a recurring theme lately—Brian grabbed the Saint Brigit coin in his pocket. It was wide-awake cold. “Where did you come up with the girlfriend idea, Kara?”

“Maybe Mom told me.”

“I never told her I had one.”

Dad glanced at him over the top of his reading glasses. “I thought I noticed a spring in your step.”

“He isn’t moping around like he did all summer,” Kara said.

“I wasn’t moping.”

“Do you have a girlfriend or not?” she asked.

“News flash, I’ve had them before.” But how could his mom have told Kara about Rebecca?

Because Rebecca said she visited her in a dream. Except his mom shouldn’t have mistaken a dream for something that really happened.

And yet what had he been doing lately?

“Nothing wrong with playing the field,” Dad said. “Keep your options open.”

“Or just pick the one you love and don’t waste time with the bimbos,” Kara added.

This was getting out of hand. “I don’t hang out with bimbos.”

“No? Remember Trudy? Or Marla?”

He groaned. “Come on. I was thirteen, and we were in a study group.”

“Karen Steeplewood was a prize.” Kara laughed so hard she almost fell off her stool.

He would have been happy to help her along with a little shove.

Hurried footsteps pounded down the stairs. “Quick! Where can I hide?” Tall, blonde, and sloppy, Kara’s boyfriend, Brad, celebrated the holiday in his typical fashion, wearing a faded plaid shirt with tails hanging out over a pair of worn jeans.

“Brad?” Mom’s call chased after him from the top of the stairs.

He glanced over his shoulder, hurried across the basement, and hid behind some shelving. Kara giggled and followed him. “What does she want, Brad?”

“I don’t know, but I know what I want.”

“Oh, Brad!” Kara screeched with laughter.

“Get a room, you two,” Dad said.

“Brad!” Mom’s voice grew louder. “You come up here this minute and bring that silly girlfriend of yours with you. I need help setting the table and putting the food out.”

They came from behind the shelves hand in hand. “Why do you two guys get off so easily?” Kara asked.

“She knows we’re useless,” Brian joked.

After they left, he and his dad began laying the foundation of the palace, mostly in silence but with an occasional probing question thrown in with the bricks. “Getting used to college, Brian? Your aunt says you’ve taken to it.”

“Yeah, but I’m wondering what else is out there. Besides accounting, I mean. What do you think of journalism?”

“Stay the course.”

“Got it.”

“So what’s this girlfriend of yours like?”

Brian fumbled a piece to the floor. The simple question stirred up so much emotion it showed in his face for sure. “Rebecca’s great. Kinda mysterious. She gets stuck in my head a lot.”

“Sounds like your mom when I first dated her. Does she live in Chicago?”

“No, she’s pretty far from here.”

* * *

Brian lifted a savory forkful of turkey and gravy to his mouth. A mouthwatering chaser of cranberries waited its turn on the plate before him. The cozy gathering had his dad on one end of the table, his mom on the other, with Kara and Brad sitting together, across from him. Looking past them through the dining room window, he could make out a light snowfall in the glow of a streetlamp. He’d fallen into a Norman Rockwell painting, Danahey style, but he kept forgetting how to smile. He would have traded the entire Thanksgiving feast for a plateful of beets if he could have had Rebecca at his side.

Mom was in one of her quiet, broody moods, but everyone else tag-teamed him with favorite pantomimes, jokes, and skirmishes that never grew old, as if they sensed his malaise and rallied their forces to turn it. And why not? He probably had longing written all over his forehead.

Kara did something to make Brad jump. Her foot must have snuck up his leg.

“We need to buy a clown table,” Dad said. “You two can sit at it next time.”

She curled her lower lip into a comic pout. “If we did, you wouldn’t get to hear the things on my Christmas list, would you? Or my ideas for yours.”

“How many things do you think you’re getting?” Brian had gotten pulled into the banter. They’d recently decided on a thirty-dollar limit per person after haggling like Turkish rug merchants.

Dad speared some turkey, moved it to his mouth, but paused as if he’d come up with something better than food. He looked for it on the ceiling, then out the window, and finally around the table at each of them. “I’ve been thinking about that new scale model of the White House. Maybe we should raise the limit.”

“No way,” Kara said. “You’re the one who keeps saying times are tough, remember?”

“The set has six thousand pieces. Think how many we’d lose! We’re talking hours of fun for you, too.” Judging by the exaggerated, wide-eyed expression on his face, Dad was putting her on. He lived for ridiculous arguments.

“Why don’t you take your other models apart?” Kara asked.

Their dad dropped his fork. She might as well have debunked the dinosaurs.

A proven expert at playing this game, Kara took her time before continuing. “That’d be hours of fun, wouldn’t it? You can put them back in their boxes and sell them on eBay. Then you could buy the White House model and have money left over to get more Christmas presents for us.”

“Point for Kara,” Brad said.

Dad gestured to a magazine rack on top of the sideboard. “Where’s the circus catalogue we were looking at, Brian? We can order the clown table and set it up by the window.”

“My father used to whittle for a hobby.” All heads turned. The out-of-sync comment by Mom went over like a blow horn at a church service.

She’d been mostly silent throughout the dinner, doing her best impression of Edgar Alan Poe’s raven, sitting at the end of the table wearing a dress as black as her hair, and watching. Whenever Brian had taken his mind off his pining long enough to notice her, she’d had her eye on him. He couldn’t imagine what he’d done wrong, but her steely gaze made him fidget anyway.

“Whittling costs a lot less than a White House scale model,” she said. “And there’s nothing wrong with being old-fashioned, is there, Brian?”

He nearly choked on a mouthful of turkey. He searched her face for signs of a double meaning, but she stared back at him like a world-class poker player.

“I had building blocks as a boy fifty years ago,” Dad said. “They’re just as old-fashioned as whittling.”

Their dad might as well have tried talking to a tree. An argument over hobby preferences stood zero chance of interrupting Mom’s unwavering gaze. Without breaking eye contact with Brian, she sipped some water and motioned to the hallway where her woman cave lurked. “Let’s spend some time alone after dinner, Brian. I’d like to catch up on how college is going and what that new girlfriend of yours is like.”

An invitation to the dungeon. Brian slumped in his chair.

The rest of the meal was a blur until dessert. Even under duress, Brian couldn’t help but savor every warm, juicy bite of homemade apple pie. He dragged the dessert out, not only to prolong the taste but to delay an inquisition, although he still couldn’t think of what he’d done.

But nobody ever got summoned to the den for pats on the back.

When the last crumbs were gone and Kara started clearing the dishes and Dad hurried downstairs with Brad, ostensibly to work on the Taj Mahal but more likely to lie low, Brian followed his mom down the hallway. The den served as her lair. Visits by anyone were rare and by her request only, for a scolding or a lecture.

Typically, his mom would leave the door open while she browbeat him, but she cornered him this time, not only closing the thing but locking it behind them when they walked into the room. He glanced out the window, a ridiculous escape route. The storm window behind and nighttime darkness beyond didn’t offer any hope for such folly.

So he sat across from her at a table overflowing with newspaper clippings and magazines. A born hoarder, his mom never got rid of her old stuff. Brian cleared a space to keep some of it from spilling off the table onto his lap. Once settled in, and with the risk of an avalanche under control, he took a stab at controlling the conversation. “I’m thinking of changing majors.”

No dice. Mom’s pressed lips, the furrow in her forehead, and the scalding focus of her gray-green eyes trumped any diversion he’d ever come up with. “I had a visitor,” she said. “Sometimes, when I dream, I relax in a nice, secluded lighthouse with a wonderful view. I don’t appreciate anyone disturbing me when I’m resting in it.”

Dreams. So, Rebecca’s visit had triggered this little get-together, not the worn-out argument over career choices. But this made no sense. Mom shouldn’t have interpreted a dreamed interaction as real.

“We have a nice home,” she continued, “and the door is always open for a friend of yours to come over and say hello.”

“Yeah. About that, see—”

“My personal space, on the other hand, is mine and mine alone. You know how I feel regarding privacy.”

“Uh-huh.” He would have loved to melt through the window, run around to the front door, sneak back inside, and head downstairs to work on models with Dad. He didn’t follow how his mom could treat her dream encounter with Rebecca as if it were an everyday occurrence, only to be criticized for its rudeness. That suggested knowledge of a funhouse-mirror side of the world he himself never would have considered possible before meeting Rebecca. The line between reality and fantasy, once so sharp, had been wavering ever since his car broke down in Nebraska.

And apparently Mom was in on the cosmic joke.

A yellowing newspaper cupcake recipe on the table caught his eye. A distraction? New conversation piece? He slumped. Dessert wouldn’t be the best topic to capture his mom’s attention at the moment.

He could have argued people can’t invade dreams. He’d be diplomatic, of course, avoiding the suggestion she would have to be crazy to think they could. But the knowing look in her eyes stopped him.

He could have told the truth—Rebecca had gone through a dream-crashing phase just after they’d met—but that wouldn’t reflect well on her.

So he took one for the team. “It was my idea for her to say hello. She knows how to get into people’s dreams, and we didn’t think you’d remember.”

Mom took her time processing that. He braced himself for an outburst, but she surprised him with a smile. “You’re defending her!”

“No. I mean yeah, um—”

“Rebecca’s bringing your gallantry out. I will say she’s a lovely and assertive young woman. She has her flaws, but I’m touched she asked my approval to spend time with you.”

Rebecca. Mom remembered her name. He jumped in with both feet. “I have a book in my backpack she wanted you to see.”

Brian hurried to his bedroom, came back with the book, spread it open on the table. What to say? My girlfriend who pops into dreams, reads weird, hieroglyphic languages, too.

He said nothing.

His mom tried touching the ribbon nestled in the crease but pulled her hand back. “Oh!”

“What?”

“This is an enlightening rod,” she said. “It takes the fragments of thought from the corners of your mind and merges them into wonderful ideas at the center. All you need to do is touch it. This one’s charge feels weak, but it still has some power.”

“It’s a what?”

“You touch it and get smarter.”

Well, yeah, he’d been suspicious of that ribbon from the beginning but, “How would you know?”

His mom traced a finger along the length of the ribbon and mumbled something. The fabric transformed into a glowing green rod, maybe six inches long. She touched it again, and it reshaped itself into a ribbon. “No ordinary paranormal girl would have ever been entrusted with such a prize. How did she get it? Why would she pass it on to you, Brian?”

He gripped the edge of the table with both hands. “You’re asking me?” Things were moving too fast. If anything, he should have been the candidate for the national weirdness award, not his mom. “You just used ordinary and paranormal in the same sentence.”

“They can go hand in hand, but we’ve traveled well beyond that with this girl, haven’t we?”

His stomach lurched. How much did she know? What other info should he spill?

She flipped through the book, pausing here and there to gaze at a sketch or run her fingertips across the markings. Then she went back to the first page, pursed her lips, and looked up. “Well, I did learn this much when I met her.” She glanced back down at the page.

“When she finds her love she’ll need to speak in code

or read

the verses she has penned.

For the Witches Code has muted her, we’re told.

Cannot

reveal her tale to men.”

With memories of the Walt Whitman dream crashing through his head, Brian studied the page for an English paragraph or two, even a phrase, but he found nothing more than Rebecca’s Ogham scrawl. “How did you read that? It’s a dead language with no key.”

Mom leaned back in her chair. “Ogham is a language my mother taught me before I learned a single letter of the conventional alphabet. She was taught by my grandmother, my grandmother by my great-grandmother, and so on all the way back to our family’s earliest days in Ireland.”

“So what are you saying?” Why ask? He knew. From the minute she did the ribbon-to-rod thing, he’d known. He couldn’t process the bombshell in a thousand years, but he definitely knew.

A gust of wind hummed through cracks in the window frame, and branches of an overgrown bush scratched against the glass. His mom’s long, black hair riffled as if blown by the same breeze, and her steady gaze bored into his soul. “I’m a witch, Brian, just like Rebecca.”