The Cure for Dreaming (25 page)

Father steered me out of my bedroom and down the stairs just as someone was clanging our brass knocker. The closer we got to the door, the more the knocking deteriorated into muffled thuds that sounded strange to my ears.

Another vision neared. I sucked in my breath and prepared for the worst.

Father lunged for the door and opened it up to a startling collection of sideshow oddities:

Sunken-Eyed John with his long, crooked teeth.

The bulging-eyed, dark-haired girl with the scrawny neck and blue lips from Sadie's party.

The lady carnival barker in the red-striped coat and straw hat.

A Draculean man with a white mustache, oddly arched nostrils, and teeth that protruded over a ruddy lip.

“Welcome to my house,” said Father, and I half expected him to quote the rest of Count Dracula's first spoken lines to the fellow who resembled Stoker's character:
Enter freely and of your own will!
Instead, he uttered a nervous-sounding, “P-p-please, c-c-come inside.”

The Underhills passed across our threshold, and my eyes readjusted. The delusion ceased. Our guests became a normal family of four, albeit a garishly wealthy one, with plush silk jackets for the ladies and solid-gold cuff links and pocket-watch chains for the gentlemen. The lady barker again
transformed into the brunette woman who was handing out pamphlets in front of the headquarters for the Oregon Association Opposed to the Extension of Suffrage to Women.

The dark-haired daughter snickered. “You were so funny at Sadie's party, Ophelia.”

“It's Olivia,” I said.

The girl stiffened her arms straight in front of her, and with her eyes wide and dazed, she droned, “‘All is well. All is well.'”

“That's enough, Eugenia,” said Mrs. Underhill, slapping her daughter's hands. “We're only here for a brief visit. Let Dr. Mead proceed with business.”

“Yes, very good.” Father closed the front door and lifted a metal bucket from the little hallway table. “As I already discussed with you, Mr. Underhill, sir, I have found an innovative solution to our state's peskiest problem. Imagine, if you will, your lovely wife no longer needing to manage the Oregon Association—and spending her precious time in more enjoyable pursuits.”

Mrs. Underhill arched her slender eyebrows.

“Imagine,” continued Father, “never having to worry about your dear daughter choosing the path of social impurity, or your son accidentally getting trapped with a shrew of a wife—a shrew who is only after your money so she can try to buy the vote.”

Mr. Underhill's white mustache twitched.

“All of these worries will disappear,” said Father, “and
become ancient relics of the past, with Henri Reverie's Cure for Female Rebellion and Unladylike Dreams.”

Father pushed the pail into my sweating hands, and I half expected the preposterous name for the treatment to materialize on the side of the container, scrawled in the curved black lettering of traveling hucksters' tonics and cure-alls.

Father lifted a piece of plain white paper from the bottom of the pail. “Mrs. Underhill, will you please do me the honor of slowly reading the words on this page so I may demonstrate the fruits of young Mr. Reverie's work?”

Mrs. Underhill took the paper and again raised her brows. She cleared her throat and looked between me and that bucket, while Sunken-Eyed John and his tall, mustached father blocked my path to the door.

To escape or not to escape
. . .

Mrs. Underhill drew in her breath and spoke the first word.

“Suffrage.”

My stomach moaned loudly enough to make John chuckle. He scratched his nose and muttered, “That's what happens when you dine where you shouldn't.”

Mrs. Underhill ignored her son and inhaled another short breath.

“Women's rights.”

I gagged and dropped the bucket to the floor with a clank.

Mrs. Underhill's next three phrases pelted my stomach like white-hot bullets.

“Suffragist. Votes for women. Susan B. Anthony.”

I covered my mouth and shoved my way to the door.

“College,” called Mrs. Underhill after me, and I tore out to the front porch, leaned my chest over the rail, and vomited into the bushes. Sweat dripped off my forehead and nose. Shivers racked my body. I just hung there, my ribs pressed against the rail, and let the fresh night air swim inside my head.

The soles of fine leather shoes pattered out to the porch behind me, but no one spoke a word until I turned around and slid down the splintery rail to the ground with a thump.

“You are most definitely coming to my election-night party, Dr. Mead,” said the missus, whose face blurred and wavered before my eyes—veering from slick carnival barker to silken society queen. “It'll be held at the Portland Hotel at seven o'clock. Bring that hypnotist. Bring this girl. And let's end this ridiculous fight for the vote.”

slammed my bedroom door shut behind me. Shelves rattled, wall lamps flickered, and wide-eyed china dolls smacked to the floor. A new sort of growl roared up from the pit of my stomach—not a moan of nausea, but a primal howl.

“I hate this!” I yanked on my hair and pulled out the tight pins. “I hate my life!”

I lunged toward the window and pulled back the curtains, ready to fling up the sash and climb down the trellis, despite my shoeless feet.

Bars blocked my exit. Thick copper bars that shone in the
moonlight, secure as jail cell barriers—or the rungs of an enormous birdcage, as in the popular song.

She's only a bird in a gilded cage
. . .

“You're not real.” I backed away. “I know you're not real. Stop looking like you're actually there.”

I grabbed my shoes and house key, shut my bedroom door, and stole downstairs to our tiny wood-paneled bathroom, a pine-scented closet added behind the kitchen when I was thirteen. Father—probably already sloshing about in a brandy-induced stupor—didn't make a peep from his closed office hideout.

I gave the sink's stiff spigot a twist, and the pipes trumpeted their usual high-pitched racket before water squirted into the cast-iron basin. I washed my face, scrubbed my teeth, and gargled with Holmes's Sure Cure Mouth Wash until my tongue and cheeks burned.

My feet then swished back down the hall, silent as spider-webs, while I carried my shoes in my left hand. In his office, Father began singing some old ditty from before I was born.

I held my breath and opened the front entrance.

More bars—fat steel ones. I shut the door and bang-bang-banged my forehead against the wood.

You will
see
the world the way it truly is—not accept it. You will not accept it
.

I lifted my smarting head with gold specks buzzing before my eyes.

You will not accept it
.

I reopened the door. The bars vanished.

Without even grabbing my coat or hat, I closed up the house and leapt into the night.

Out in the side yard, my red bicycle waited for me against the house's chipped planks. After buttoning up my shoes, I hopped onto the saddle like a dime-novel cowboy, wobbled my way across the front yard's sparse and lumpy patches of grass, and pedaled toward the city with legs propelled by wrath.

The streets lay empty and silent, with rows of white arc lamps dangling from wires overhead, guiding the way, whispering,
This way, this way, kill him, kill him
. I pedaled faster, faster, faster, faster, hopping aboard smooth sidewalks to avoid getting slowed by ruts in the streets. A man stumbled out of a tavern and tottered into my path, but I swerved to avoid him and felt the graze of his arm against my elbow. He shouted a curse word, so I shouted it right back at him, even though I'd never cussed aloud in my life.

Outside the great Henri Reverie's hotel, I tossed my bicycle to the ground and threw open the establishment's front door. I marched straight toward the staircase sign at the back of the lobby with my nails sharp and poised to fight.

“Olivia?” asked a voice from one of the lobby's chairs.

I stopped and whipped my head toward the sound.

Henry set aside a newspaper and rose from an armchair with a baffled expression that grew even more perplexed when I walked over and pushed him three feet backward.

“You made me vomit! In public!”

“I told you to trust me.”

I pushed him again. “You humiliated me.”

“You made your father torture me.”

“I threw up in the bushes in front of those people.” I kept shoving. “I got sick as a dog.”

“Olivia, stop. Be quiet.”

“Don't tell me to be quiet. Who do you think you are?”

“Please—”

“You made me vomit, Henry. You're as horrible and controlling a jackass as he is.” I raised my arm. “I could kill you!”

My nails sliced down his cheek, and to my horror, blood rose to the surface of four long gashes that stretched from his eye to his mouth.

He cradled his skin and staggered backward, dazed and whey-faced.

“Take your lovers' quarrel outside, you animals!” yelled the hotel clerk with the Vandyke beard, and other voices joined in the commotion—those of concerned guests, a hotel employee in a round cap, and then Henry, who took hold of my arm and tried pulling me away while telling the clerk that everything was fine.

But my feet wouldn't budge.

In a gilded mirror across the lobby, a red-eyed devil stared me down, her dark hair hanging in her face like poisonous black asps, her teeth bared and clenched, the dagger nails of her right hand dripping fresh red blood that stained the green rug below her. Every muscle in my body stiffened at the sight of her—of me—yet I couldn't pull my eyes away.

“Olivia, please! Come outside.” Henry gave my arm a good yank and guided me out of the hotel.

The crisp blast of autumn air snuffed out some of the fire blazing inside me. With a whimper of exhaustion, I collapsed against a brick wall beyond the front window and leaned my cheek into a fuzzy blanket of moss. My legs quivered, the muscles and tendons straining to keep me upright.