What I Hadn't Dreamed
I had spent years remembering the hand and forgetting everything around it.
Sometimes it returned in dreams: pale fingers moving in a dark doorway, a sleeve brushing the frame. I always woke before I reached it. By morning, the memory felt foolish enough to leave alone.
Now my mother's handwriting lay beneath my thumb, telling me it had happened.
I checked the date. I had been ten.
The same age Ivy was now.
I sat back against the cedar box and tried to remember the rest. That bedroom had belonged to my grandmother when she stayed with us. There had been a patchwork cushion on the chair, a glass of water beside the bed. I remembered passing the open door on my way to the bathroom.
Then she had called my name.
I hadn't seen her face. Just the hand, curling its fingers toward the room, and the cardigan I knew from afternoons sitting beside her while she showed me how to crochet.
Rose had appeared at the bottom of the stairs before I went inside.
I remembered her shouting. That was why the night had stayed with me: my mother rarely shouted my name like that.
She had hurried up the steps and carried me down, although I was too old to be carried. Her chin pressed against my hair. In the kitchen, my grandmother sat beside a cooling cup of tea.
I had asked how she got downstairs so quickly.
The answer never made sense. After a while, I stopped asking.
I looked back at the journal.
I found Lily on the landing without her crystal. The clasp was open. We searched until morning before finding it beneath the chair in Mother's room.
My fingers went to my own pendant.
She insists she never took it off.
The attic bulb hummed above me. I pictured Ivy beside the front door, holding the mug she had made for a woman who was already dead. If I had stayed upstairs another minute, would she have opened it?
"Lily?"
I flinched so hard the journal slid against my knees.
Denise stood below the attic opening, one hand on the ladder. "Sorry, honey. I didn't mean to scare you. Ivy's asking for you."
I leaned forward until I could see her face clearly.
She frowned. "Are you all right?"
"I'm coming."
I returned the papers to the cedar box, keeping the journal and Rose's letter. As I closed the lid, I noticed shallow scratches around the latch. They could have been there for years. Still, I took a photograph before climbing down.
Denise waited on the landing. Her gaze dropped to the journal, then returned to me. "Find what you needed?"
"Some of it."
She touched my shoulder. "There's no rule that says you have to sort everything tonight."
I almost told her. The words crowded behind my teeth, but downstairs Ivy called again, and I couldn't bear another conversation in which someone looked at me as though grief had made me confused.
"Would you stay a little longer?"
"Of course."
Ivy sat curled on the couch, fighting sleep. I settled beside her, and she moved into my lap without asking. Her legs were too long to fit the way they once had. I adjusted the blanket over both of us and held her while Denise went to make tea.
"Are we sleeping here?" Ivy asked.
I had meant to take her home after visiting Rose. Our overnight bag was still in the car, packed only because the nurse had warned me that things might change quickly.
"We can."
"I don't want you upstairs."
"I'll stay with you."
She touched the quartz beneath my shirt. "Grandma gave you that one, right?"
"She did."
"She said yours was for keeping bad things away."
I closed my hand over hers. "I want you to keep yours on tonight. If the chain bothers you, tell me. Don't take it off by yourself."
Ivy studied me. "Because of the lady at the door?"
I made myself meet her eyes.
"Yes."
"She looked like Grandma."
"I know."
Her mouth tightened. "You believe me?"
The question hurt more than I expected.
"I believe you."
Ivy nodded, then rested her head against my shoulder. I sat there until her breathing deepened and Denise returned with two mugs. We spoke quietly about the calls I would need to make in the morning. Ordinary tasks sounded almost impossible, but I wrote them down on the back of an old envelope.
After Denise left, I checked the doors and retrieved the spare key from beneath the flowerpot. I left the porch light on. Then I returned to the couch, positioned myself between Ivy and the hall, and opened the journal again.
The entries after my childhood encounter were brief. Rose recorded replacing necklace clasps, marking protective boundaries, and speaking with Alejandra. There were long gaps where nothing happened, followed by pages crowded with questions.
Near the back, the handwriting changed. The letters grew uneven, the dates closer together. I reached the beginning of her final year and stopped at a sentence underlined twice.
Mother is gone. The mark is mine now.
So much of what I had called a sudden illness had begun here.
I checked the date against tonight's, counting the months with my finger on the page. Exactly a year. I remembered bringing groceries that week, remembered Rose insisting I leave early to pick Ivy up from school. She had known what was coming while I complained about the traffic outside her house.
I read until my eyes ached. Rose described nights without sleep and a voice calling from empty rooms. In one entry, she admitted she had answered because she wanted to hear her mother say her name.
I understood that too well.
A folded page marked a later entry.
If Lily is reading this, she needs the room. The journal cannot hold everything.
Below it was a small drawing of the upstairs landing. Rose's bedroom was outlined, and an arrow pointed toward her closet.
Remove the bottom drawer. The catch is behind it.
I looked toward the ceiling.
Above us, somewhere inside my mother's bedroom, a drawer scraped slowly open.