CHAPTER 29
Chicago, November 1, 2019
RORY PULLED HER CAR TO THE FRONT OF HER HOUSE, THE passenger-side wheel hopping the curb as she did so. She stumbled up the stairs, keyed the front door, and headed up to her bedroom. She hadn’t experienced such a powerful attack since childhood, and she understood the devastating effects they could have if she failed to stifle it. She fell into bed. Rising above the white noise in her mind—above the revelation that her parents had hidden her adoption, beyond the notion that Aunt Greta was not the person she had always believed her to be, and louder than the incessant whispers that she was due in front of Judge Boyle and the parole board with Thomas Mitchell tomorrow—were the unrelenting calls from Angela Mitchell.
Atop the panic was the lure of a mysterious woman who was somehow linked to all the people Rory had loved in her life. It was a pull Rory could not ignore. It reminded her of her childhood, when a similar sensation had taken hold of her. She folded the pillow over her head and pressed it to her ears to quiet the whispers that came from within.
Rory worked to control her breathing. She closed her eyes and cleared her thoughts. There was a process—a way to manage the attacks. She tried to remember the tricks. The breathing exercises that always brought her to a proverbial fork in the road. In one direction was a restless night during which her mind would not cease, with wild and relentless thoughts keeping her awake. In the other direction was the calming lure of sleep and the charm of shutting down her brain, allowing dreams to run effortlessly through the folds of her mind.
She worked for thirty minutes on her breathing, pushing all other thoughts from her mind other than an image of her lungs expanding and contracting. Finally she skirted onto this other road, the peaceful road, and soon her breathing was deep and rhythmic.
* * *
Rory woke in the bedroom of the old farmhouse.
It happened every so often. A few times every summer. Aunt Greta would put her to bed, tuck her in, and shut off the lights.
“Remember,” Aunt Greta would say, standing in the doorway. “Nothing can scare you unless you allow it to scare you.”
Greta would close the bedroom door and Rory would fall peacefully to sleep, the way she always did during her stays at the farmhouse, where the angst and worry had never been able to find her. Rory would typically sleep straight through until morning. But tonight was one of the times she woke in the small hours of night, her body filled with energy that put a buzz in her chest and in her head and in her fingers and toes. She literally vibrated with vigor, overcome with an awesome desire to explore. The sensation had her tossing and turning in bed. The first few times she had encountered this phenomenon Rory fought against it. She kicked the covers and reset the pillows until sunlight filled the window frame the next morning, spilling around the blinds to finally push away the urge to wander into the night and discover the source of her unrest.
Rory was careful never to mention this feeling of angst to anyone. Her parents sent her to Aunt Greta’s farmhouse to escape the anxiety she felt during the rest of her life—to dispel it, really—and if they knew about these rare bouts of midnight disquiet, they might decide that Rory’s visits to Aunt Greta’s were no longer serving their purpose. She loved her long weekends and summers in this peaceful place, so Rory kept the odd nights of sleeplessness a secret. That, and because describing the middle-of-the-night sensation as anxiety wasn’t quite right. Rory felt no worry when these spells of wakefulness came to her at the farmhouse, only the temptation of the unknown and the call for her to climb from bed and explore its meaning.
She was ten years old the night she decided to give in to the lure. When Rory woke, fully alert and without a trace of grogginess, the bedside clock told her it was 2:04 A.M. Her chest vibrated with the familiar curiosity she had come to know after many summers at her aunt’s farmhouse. Throwing the covers aside, she climbed from bed, pulled by an invisible need. She opened her bedroom door and endured the whine of the hinges. She crept silently past Aunt Greta’s bedroom, beyond the second doorway that led to the workshop, where the restored dolls stood in perfect rows on the shelves, and down the stairs. She opened the back door and slipped out into the night. The stars shimmered down on her from the heavens, obscured occasionally by thin sheets of shadowed clouds traced silver by the moon. Far off in the distance, a lightning storm ignited the horizon with off-and-on flickers of brightness, delivering a low rumble of thunder minutes later.
Standing on the back porch, Rory gave in to the pull in her chest. Her feet followed like a magnet drawn to a giant slab of faraway metal. She walked without effort through the field behind the house, found the low, two-rung wooden fence at the edge of the property, and followed it, her hand gliding over its smooth surface as she walked. Near the back of the property, where the fence cornered and turned at a ninety-degree angle, Rory found what was summoning her. On the ground, she saw the flowers she had watched Aunt Greta collect earlier in the day.
Every morning, Rory observed Greta gather flowers from the garden. It was Rory’s job to bundle them with twist ties. Rory always asked Greta about the flowers, and she had asked that day as well. She questioned what Greta did with them each day, and where they ended up. Rory’s inquisitions were met with vague answers. Tonight, however, she found them. The roses had been placed on the ground in a gentle heap, isolated and alone in the back corner of the property.
Another lightning strike appeared far off on the horizon, adding just enough light to the gray glow of the moon to bring to life the cherry petals. Rory crouched down and removed a rose from the bunch, lifted it to her nose, and inhaled the sweetness. The buzzing in her chest dissipated, and a soothing calm came over her. The feeling of tranquility had always drawn her back to her great-aunt’s farmhouse. Tonight, under the tarnished glow of the moon, she harnessed that serenity in a single rose placed to her nose.
When another lightning strike brightened the area, Rory bent down and gently replaced the rose on the pile, then turned and ran back through the gray night until she reached the house. She climbed into bed. Sleep came instantly. Throughout the rest of her childhood, and for all the remaining summers that Rory stayed at Greta’s farmhouse, the mysterious middle-of-the-night insomnia never again found her.