Dream Weaver (Dream Weaver #1) (31 page)

Chapter 26 The Willing Well

             
I lifted my face to the caress of the summer sun, absorbed the warmth that pierced through my skin to saturate my soul. The heat drew the fragrance of raspberries from the bushes, mixed with the scent of rich, freshly-watered soil. The early evening light glinted off drops of moisture that beaded on the leaves like clear, cool diamonds. A grey-brown squirrel with only half of a tail stretched herself out on her belly on the damp shady lawn, sprawled out fully to cool herself. My father laughed. Like the mist of the garden, I drifted to him and hugged his arm, rested my head on his shoulder.

             
“I’ve missed you, Daddy.” I tried not to cry. I wanted to be tough. Like he taught me.

             
“I know, baby. I’m sorry.”

             
“It’s been so hard. I don’t want to live without you,” I confessed.

             
“But you must. And you know that.”

             
“I do know. Doesn’t make it easier though.”

             
“I’m sorry we left you so abruptly, so violently. I know that’s been hard for you, too,” he apologized. “I know something worse has happened to you…”

             
“I can’t talk to you about that.” I had always been able to talk to him, about almost anything. But not that.

             
“How ‘bout me?” My mother stepped between rows of vibrant flowers, surrounded by a rainbow in the blossoming garden. Her vibrant green eyes sparkled like dew on clovers.

             
“Mom!” I dropped my father’s hand, ran to my mother, and gracelessly threw my arms around her neck. “Mommy, I wanna come home. I want to be with you.”

             
“You need to live.”

             
“It’s so hard.”

             
“Did I ever promise you life would be easy?”

             
“No,” I pouted, and felt every bit the spoiled child.

             
My mother fingered the bracelet around my wrist, and smiled with the patience only mothers possess. “You were our dream, Emari Jewel. You must go on.”

             
I whimpered and hugged her tighter. She stroked my hair and rocked me in her arms. She couldn’t say she understood how I felt about the rape; she had never been violated in that way. She didn’t need to, though. Compassion flooded my senses like a sweet perfume. Just knowing that she knew was consolation.

             
“I miss you so much.”

             
My father rejoined us. “And we miss you,” he said, and took my small cool hand in his own, rough and warm.

             
“You must live now. You must find your own dreams and make them come true,” Mom said.

             
“I just feel so cheated. I never got to say good-bye; never got to hug you or kiss you. I couldn’t even see you again because of the…” the words lodged in my throat, captive of my grief.

             
“We know, baby.” My parent’s arms encircled me, surrounded me with their warmth and love. “That’s why we’re here, sharing your dreams, to give you the opportunities you were deprived of.”

             
We stood in the lush green garden, a content little family. Like a sentient entity, kindred devotion and wisdom filled and overflowed me, a sensation so real, an energy that recharged my heart. I would have stayed there forever, if I could; would have died happy if my life ended in that moment. But, I couldn’t and wouldn’t and so—life must go on.

             
My mother wrapped her arms around me and held me for a long time. Minutes ticked by and still, she held me. I knew she would have to let me go eventually, but at that moment I didn’t care if eventually ever came. “I love you, Emari,” she finally whispered. “I will always be with you as long as you hold me in your heart.”

             
“I love you too, Mom. I don’t want you to leave.”

             
She lifted my chin to look her in the eye as she did when I was a child. I smiled; I would forever be her child. She stepped away, held me at arm’s length, and gazed into my eyes with the warmth of the sun on verdant leaves on a late summer day. “You are my heart, alive and beating, the breath that filled my lungs. You are an enduring, abiding part of me. In that, I will never leave you.”

             
I nodded with a tearful smile. “I love you.” I couldn’t say it enough; couldn’t catch up for all the ‘I love you’s’ I’d missed.

             
“I love you, Emari.”

             
“Good-bye, Mommy.”

             
“Good-bye, Emari. I will always be in your heart.”

             
My mother drifted away like mist into the heart of the garden and vanished.

             
“Emari, my jewel.” Daddy stood behind me, his hands on my shoulders. I turned into his perpetually warm arms and sobbed. He held me until my crying ceased, then held me even longer. He, too, would have to go, eventually. Finally, his voice rumbled in his chest under my cheek. “Dare to dream, for in the daring there is defiance to live beyond your circumstances. Dream big, don’t settle for good enough. Follow your dreams,” he pinched the heart charm at my wrist between his fingers, “Because your dreams can take you places beyond your imagination and in their path you find freedom.” When he released the charm, it radiated warmth against my skin.

             
I nodded silently against his chest, as I affirmed and memorized each of his words. “I love you, Daddy.”

             
“I love you, Em.” He was silent for several moments. I couldn’t say the next words; they were a boulder in my chest. “Are you ready?” he finally asked.

             
“No.” I laughed through my tears, tried to be brave.

             
My father chuckled as he kissed my forehead and squeezed me in his arms again. He waited.

             
“Good-bye, Daddy,” I said with a final resigned sigh.

             
“Good-bye, my Jewel.”

              I awoke with a start. My body felt sore, stiff. I wallowed out of bed, stumbled to the bathroom and flipped the switch. The image in the mirror recaptured my attention. I launched myself closer and grasped the sink to steady myself. It seemed somehow wrong in my memory…I couldn’t explain it. My face, my eyes—they were—just wrong. My face was swollen, a lot more than I thought I remembered it. Crimson capillaries, spider-web fine shot through the whites of my eyes and a small explosion of burst veins orbited my left iris.
I thought…
I crushed my brain with the cavernous creases in my forehead. I couldn’t make sense of what I saw.

              The heel of my right hand ached but I didn’t remember hurting it. I staggered out toward the kitchen but as I passed the built-ins, I heard a soft crunch of glass and pain shot up the ball of my foot. After hobbling to a dining room chair, I flopped down and pulled my foot into my lap. Tiny dots of crimson blossomed across my white skin. I pulled glistening fragments of glass from my flesh, and pressed my hand to the wounds to stop the bleeding and searched for the culprit.

             
The antique glass of one of the built-ins was shattered in pieces on the floor. My head spun, jumbled thoughts scrabbled to the surface, visions that pushed toward the surface only to disappear into the mire. Nothing clarified or made sense. I studied the bandage on my hand. A dark memory flashed through my mind. I tripped. I think. I must have put my hand through the glass.
Damn it. That was antique glass. Irreplaceable.

             
My mind grasped hopelessly at the fleeting images, groped for the one, any one that would anchor the rest in place and make it all lucid. Then everything turned to water and every picture contorted and fled from me, sifted through the fingers of my memory.

             
I hobbled the rest of the way to the kitchen and washed the blood from my hands and foot. Crimson tinged water faded to clear and swirled around, down the drain.
Blood, lots of blood.
This was nothing. Probably my hand had bled a lot and I’d cleaned and bandaged it here.
But, why hadn’t I cleaned it in the bathroom?

             
My retro tea canister caught my eye and I lifted the lid, inhaled the licorice-herbal-sweet aroma of a long-gone and vaguely remembered tea. I closed my eyes. Images sparked and guttered, a foundering candle. I tried to wrap my head around something that wasn’t tangible or cohesive enough to capture. The canister slipped from my distracted grasp, hit the counter with a metallic clatter. I stumbled back to bed, ignored the pain in my foot, careless of the blood that I left in my wake.

             
I flopped onto my bed and buried myself in heavy, familiar blankets. My throat constricted as I closed my eyes and pressed into my cold pillow. The tremors ripped through my body. I wished for someone to wrap themselves around me, to stroke my hair, to tell me all would be okay.

             
“I don’t want to be alone,” I told my pillow through pinched vocal chords that ached from a suppressed guttural scream.

             
There was nothing, no one to greet me but silence; no one to hold me, or pet my hair. No strong, safe body to cling to, to guard me. My body convulsed; the fissures in my crumbling composure widened and the tears eked out from under my lashes. There were no soft lips to speak my name, or kiss my face. No warm hands to caress away my despair. No strong, firm chest to lay my head on. No, there was nothing. Nothing at all for me.

             
Images of angels and demons cavorted with my memory. An angel that loved me. Perhaps I dreamed of an angel sent from God to comfort me. Maybe I’d read a few too many vampire and immortal books; too many damsel-in-distress/knight-rides-in-on-white-horse-to-save-the-day novels. Like that ever happens in real life.

             
I twined my fingers into my copper spikes, and pressed my knotty white knuckles into my scalp. If only I could force my brain to focus. I squeezed my eyes closed tighter. My life lay scattered around me, a thousand piece puzzle; all of those tiny little bits of memory littered my mind. So confusing. So jumbled.

             
I was never any good with puzzles; they had never been any sort of an attraction for me. So how would I ever put this thing back together? It was such a mess and all the pieces were blank. I had to find the shapes that fit together, but every piece was identical.

             
I sat blind to the world, and stared inward. But there seemed to be less to see there than with my eyes. It was as though every sense had shut down, as if memories had just—disappeared. Everything; sensations, images, emotions, events—everything that should have been there but just—was not. Deleted, like a picture from my digital camera. The press of a couple of shiny silver buttons and the pictures were gone. Sent to mega-pixel heaven.

             
I closed my eyes and reconstructed the edges, built a base for the reality I knew for sure. My name? Emari Jewel Sweet. And? I am seventeen years old. An only child of my parents, Zecharias and Jane Sweet, who were now deceased; victims of a horrible auto crash on their way home from Cali. And? I worked at Cash’s in the Mall with my girlfriend Ivy. My heart skipped a beat. I remembered the attack—when the brother of my friend and coworker, Jesse, savagely raped me. How could I be so amazingly calm recalling these facts?

             
The frame completed itself in my thoughts. The basics I got, but that innermost part was a jumbled mess, like I ought to know what it was but didn’t, and I couldn’t decipher it. It was maddening.

             
I opened my eyes and focused on the bundle of fur curled up at my side. His paws flopped wildly in the air as his dreams brought the joy of the chase. Sleep muffled his immature hound dog bays, his jowls drooped and vibrated with play-vicious snorts and snarls. If only I could find such joy within my dreams.

             
After the attack, I had finally followed my father’s advice and gotten myself a dog. Not that a ten-week-old beagle pup was much of a guard dog. Or that he’d have done me any good at work. He did help to keep me sane, though there was no accounting for what transpired now.

             
The bristle of Eddyson’s pelt was therapeutic as I raked my nails through it. Yet my fingers ached for something more, my arms were heavy with emptiness, my body—my being yearned for the something that was greater—though I couldn’t possess it, couldn’t even begin to define it.