Broken Illusions: A Midnight Dragonfly Novel (20 page)

“I know,” I whispered, stepping into the shadows that kept circling. “Chase told me.”

She tensed. It was hard to imagine considering how still she stood, but I could tell. “You were so pale. Even your lips. You were so pale, and still, and all I could think was that it was happening all over again.”

The raw honesty surprised me. And with it the last bit of uncertainty fell away. I moved without thinking, knowing that I’d done this to her. I’d thrown her back into a nightmare that I’d only begun to remember, but she’d never been able to forget.

“No.” Easing up behind her, I lifted a hand to her forearm. It made no sense how scared I was to touch her. This was my aunt. We touched every day. But much like our conversations, much like our sharing, only on the surface.

“It’s not happening again.”
The words were as tight as my fingers against her arm. “I’m okay.”

She shifted toward me, her eyes meeting mine. “But you weren’t,
cher,
” she said. “You weren’t.”

Not for the first time, I realized there are two levels to the spoken word: the level on the surface, and the level beneath—darker, guarded, laced with vulnerability.

“I can still see you,” she said, but her razor-thin voice told me she was no longer there with me in the candlelit room. “I was home for the weekend. It was after midnight. I was in bed and heard the phone ring…” Eyes dark, she never looked up from the suitcase. “I found Mama sitting on the side of her bed, staring.”

Much, I imagined, like my aunt was doing.

“The phone was on the floor.”

My throat tightened.

“I picked it up,” she said. “Detective Fourcade was still there.”

How had I never asked her about this? How had I never wondered?

“I … I got her dressed,” she went on in that same threadbare voice, the one in which the past still lived. “And we drove down there. And Mom just … stared the whole way. It was like she wasn’t even alive.”

I wanted to look away. I wanted to look toward the glow of the candles or the vintage crosses on the wall by her bed.

But Aunt Sara had not been given the luxury of looking away, and I knew I couldn’t, either.

“I’m sorry,” I said instead, and though the words were nowhere near enough, I needed to say them.

I’m pretty sure she didn’t hear me. “And then there you were,” she said. “All small and dirty, your hair sweaty and tangled, soot on your face and nightgown, all wrapped up in Jim Fourcade’s arms. Sleeping.”

The breath of warmth came from somewhere unseen.

“I’ll never forget that moment,” she said, although it was obvious she wished she could. “He looked up with those crazy silver eyes, and they were hollow and horrified. But he was holding you like you were made of the most exquisite glass, and he was afraid if he breathed too hard, you would crumble.”

It was the way his son had held me years later.

I closed my eyes and could see it in my mind, but had no idea if it was memory, or simply the image she painted. But I could see that look in Jim Fourcade’s eyes—ravaged, wild—the way he’d looked last fall when he’d emerged from his garage to find me standing on his property.

“Mary Mother of God,”
he’d said.
“You’re the girl.”

At the time, I’d felt my defenses snap into place.

Now I just wanted to hug him. And her. My aunt.

“I took you,” she said, twisting toward me, and I saw her, which meant either I’d opened my eyes—or had never closed them to begin with.

“I took you and held you and rocked you…” Through long side-swept bangs, her normally vibrant eyes were so beyond the point of seeing. “And I bathed you, dressed you. Sang to you…”

I felt my hand rise, felt my fingers press against my lips. Felt the hot salty sting against my eyes.

We weren’t strangers. We weren’t two people merely bound by blood and relatives and circumstance. At least, we hadn’t been. Once, there’d been so much more.

I didn’t remember.

But she did.

What must that have been like, was all I could think. What must that have been like to have me suddenly show up in her life and treat her like she was a stranger?

“At the funeral,” she was saying, and then it was her eyes that were filling, the tears she never shed that were sliding down her cheeks. “You never said a word. Not for the three days before, or the two after.”

I swallowed.

“You were so sweet and soft, and you’d just cling to me, your little arms curled around my neck. And then you’d pull back and peek at me with those big lost eyes of yours,
begging
…”

Without words. The feeling came rushing back, words and emotion trapped behind a dam in my heart, and I knew, I knew if I were to look at the triple mirror, I would have seen the devastation all over again.

But I couldn’t look away from my aunt.

“And then you were gone,” she said quietly. “Just … gone.”

EIGHTEEN

Illusions are funny things.

We all have them. They materialize from that deepest place inside of us, decorative fantasies we slap on the world around us to make it the way we want it to be: better, happier. Safer.

And yet rarely are we aware. We skate along oblivious to the deceptions that shape us—
deceptions we ourselves create
—until that one moment when the edges of reality break through, and the illusion crumbles. Only then, as the remains slice through our fingers, do we realize we’d been clinging to a lie.

And wish we could get it back.

But there’s no going back, not after you know. The truth is like the sun. It doesn’t matter if your eyes are open or closed. Once the clouds are gone, light shines.

And if you’re not prepared, you get burned.

I’d arrived in New Orleans with little more than my grandmother’s Buick to my name. Prior to that I’d lived in jeans and T-shirts and hiking shoes. I’d worn lip balm, not lip gloss, had never thought about mascara or straightening irons. I’d had no use for jewelry—or a cell phone.

And then Aunt Sara whisked me away in her sleek shiny Lexus, drove me through streets crowded with buildings old and new, to the Warehouse District, where a centuries-old factory had been revitalized, and she lived. From the moment she’d swept open the door to her condo, my life had changed—and the illusion had taken off.

My father’s younger sister was beautiful and glamorous, with expensive clothes and eclectic taste, perfect hair and makeup, awesome jewelry she designed herself, with friends and creativity and confidence.

That’s what had drawn me, fed me. Her confidence. She took everything in stride. She smiled, shrugged, moved on. Even when I’d confided in her about my dreams—
and they’d started to come true
—she’d kept everything together and walked me from one day to the next, as if this was just the way things were, and everything was okay.

And I’d started to believe.

But now, standing in the ashes of a past that had never fully gone away, the illusion—created by her, by me, I no longer knew—fell away, and there she was, not the hip artist who ran a shop in the French Quarter, but my father’s little sister, the nineteen-year-old who’d lost everything.

Because of dreams—and secrets.

Had she known? I found myself wondering, as what little color there was drained from her face, leaving the candle-cast shadows to dance against flesh the hue of death.

Had she known that I dreamed, too?

The firstborn daughter, of the firstborn daughter, of the firstborn daughter.

And with the memory, I had my answer. Yes. She’d known. Aunt Sara had known that I dreamed. She’d known that I saw, that I knew.

And she’d taken me in anyway. Even though the blood that ran through my veins was the same blood that had destroyed everyone she loved.

She stood there now, with the lavender dress wadded in her hands, looking at me through eyes that had seen too much.

“What do you mean, gone?” I asked.

“The moon was so bright,” she said, as if giving testimony. “Even though it was the dead of night, it was like the lights were on. And I ran. From room to room, screaming. For you—for Mom. All I could think was someone had been there, had come for you—and I’d slept through it.”

My breath caught.

“The note was on the kitchen table,” she said, her eyes no longer flooded, but unnaturally dry.
“‘I’ve taken her,’”
she said, and without being told I knew she was repeating what she’d read that night.

So many questions ran through me. But in the end, only one mattered. “Why?”

Her smile looked like it hurt. “He was her favorite,” she said, and without asking, I knew she was talking about my dad. “I always knew that. He was her best and her brightest, so very much like Dad. When she lost him…”

I moved without hesitation, crossing the space between us and putting my arms around her. Six months before I’d been the one in need. She’d been my anchor.

Funny how quickly roles could change. “No. She loved you, too. She talked about you all the time—”

“I lost everything,” she murmured. “The fire took my brother, and then she took you.”

I pulled back. “Not …
forever.
” It was amazing how that word kept slipping in. “I’m here.”

“She changed the locks,” she kept on as if I hadn’t said a word. “Two weeks after she left, I came home from college and found the house boarded up.”

I couldn’t imagine.

“Her attorney told me my mother didn’t want me inside ever again.”

The house that still waited all these years later, beautiful on the outside. Empty inside.

“Four years went by,” she said. “
Four years.
And then one day Jim Fourcade shows up and tells me to pack a bag.”

I felt myself go very, very still. This was my life. And it was being told to me like a story.

“And they brought me to her.”

“They?”

“Him and his son,” she said, and something inside me shifted.

Not strangers, I thought again. None of them. They’d all been there. They’d been part of my life. Even Dylan.
“You were the one sent away,”
he’d said.
“You were the one scrubbed of your memories—not me.”

That memory scraped through me, and for a fragile heartbeat I was back in that small dark room, crushed in his arms.

I always find you.

I blinked, blinked again, realized my aunt was still talking, and the image—
memory?
—went away, just like Dylan had done. A few hours. That’s all it had been. A few hazy hours, and a whole lot of … illusion.

Why, then, did he still come to me when I closed my eyes? And why,
why
had he found me in the darkness, and promised he would always be there?

“It took three days,” Aunt Sara was saying as I made myself stop,
stop it all
. Stop remembering. Stop wondering.

“We didn’t travel a single major highway. It was like…”

After all this time, confusion still darkened her eyes.

“He was afraid,” she said.

“That someone was following you?”

Her gaze met mine, and finally, I think, she saw me. But not as I was in that moment, not at sixteen. But at six. “You didn’t recognize me.”

The air slipped from the room. “Aunt Sara…”

“You were playing,” she said. “You were out back with Sunshine, and you were playing, and I walked out and called for you, and you looked at me—”

Like a stranger.

The same way I’d treated her when I came to New Orleans.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

Finally she moved, the dress for the wedding drifting to the ground as she brought her hands to my face, and cradled. “My sweet, sweet girl. You were there with those big beautiful eyes and pigtails, six years old, and I started to cry.”

My eyes filled.

“But then you ran off with little Jim and Mom came to stand beside me. She didn’t touch—she wasn’t that kind of person. But I can still hear her, still see the bright blue Colorado sky.
‘She doesn’t remember,’
she said.
‘She’s safe.’”
And finally the pain in my aunt’s eyes fell away, leaving a shimmer of warmth—and a tight smile. “And I knew she was right. I could see it. You were happy and safe and alive, and that was all that mattered.”

“Until today.” Finally I realized the full extent of what I’d done. Actions had consequences. But sometimes we didn’t know until it was too late. “When I quit breathing.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry,”
I whispered again, wishing I could take away the hurt. “I didn’t know. I didn’t mean to be so selfish.”

The strangest look came into her eyes. “Selfish?”

“All I thought about was me,” I admitted, hating the truth. “My life and my drama, my pain. I never once—”

“Stop that.”

Maybe it was the sharp tone, or maybe the way she pulled back, magically gathering herself into the illusion from before, the one of my hip aunt, poised and graceful despite the tangled hair falling into her face.

“Let me tell you what selfish is,” she said. “Selfish is holding on too tight, because you’re scared to let go, even though you know you have to.”

“Aunt Sara—”

“Selfish is keeping someone else in the dark because that’s where you want them—”

I swallowed hard.

“You’re so like her,” she murmured. “So like them both.”

My mind raced to keep up. “Who? My mother?”

“And mine,” she said. “I used to fault her. After she left, after she took you, all I could think was what a coward she was running like that, hiding up in the mountains. But now…” She let out a sharp breath. “It wasn’t about her,” she said. “It was never about her. It was about you, making sure you were safe, no matter what. She walked away from everything she loved…”

Including her own daughter.

“… to make sure you lived.”

My heart thudded hard. Guilt bled.

“My mom, your mom … they never could see eye to eye, but at the core they were exactly the same, always doing the right thing, no matter how hard it was. Putting other people’s needs first, making sure they did everything in their power to help, to protect.” A heavy beat of silence passed before Aunt Sara tilted my chin so my eyes met hers. “Just like you.”