Then, yesterday morning, Martin came in and kissed my forehead tenderly.
“I’m going into the woods to do some hunting. I was out scouting earlier and saw some nice tracks—a large buck, from the look of them. Amelia is coming by this afternoon. She’ll fix you lunch and sit with you until I’m home. I’ll be back before dark.”
I didn’t bother to nod, just rolled over and went back to sleep.
I dreamed Martin was chasing a deer through the woods; then the deer, somehow, had come into the house and was standing at the foot of my bed. I lifted my head for a closer look and discovered it wasn’t a deer at all, but Auntie.
She looked older, wiser, but still wore her deerskin coat with the quills, beads, and painted flowers. She smelled like leather, tobacco, and damp, tangled woods. I felt instantly comforted, and believed, for the first time in days, that things would be all right. Auntie was back. And Auntie could fix anything.
Auntie was talking to me. At first I couldn’t understand what she was saying, and I thought she was speaking the language of deer, which is silly, because deer are silent animals. The bedroom was dark, full of shadows that moved and twirled around us. The bed felt high up, as if it were floating over the wide pine floorboards, going up higher and higher, Auntie perched at the end like the masthead of a ship.
“Where did you come from?” I asked.
“The closet,” she told me plainly. I was relieved that she was speaking words I could understand.
“My Gertie is gone,” I told her, beginning to weep. “My little girl.”
She nodded and looked at me a long time with her coal-black eyes. “Would you like to see her one more time?” Auntie asked. “Would you like a chance to say goodbye?”
“Yes,” I said, sobbing. “Just one moment with her. I would give anything.”
“Then you are ready. Do you hear me, Sara Harrison? You are ready.”
The bed came floating back down to the floor. The room brightened. Auntie turned and walked back into the closet, shutting the door behind her. I closed my eyes, opened them. I was awake. The room smelled like the air after a lightning storm. Judging by the light, it was still morning. Martin hadn’t been gone long.
I lay there a minute, thinking of the dream—of the deer and of Auntie. Remembering what she told me that long-ago afternoon when I first asked her about sleepers:
I will write it all down, everything I know about sleepers. I will fold up the papers, put them in an envelope, and seal it with wax. You will hide it away, and one day, when you are ready, you will open it up.
I leapt from my bed and ran down the hall to Gertie’s room, which was my own bedroom when I was growing up. I was weak. My body felt as light and floaty as a bit of dandelion fluff, but was humming with a new, strange energy, a drive such as I had never known before.
I hadn’t been in her room since that terrible day, and I hesitated for a second before pulling the door open. Everything was just as she’d left it: the unmade bed, the tangled covers we’d hidden under together on that last morning. Her nightgown was thrown on top of the bed; her closet door was open, and one dress was missing—the dress she put on to follow her father out into the yard and woods.
Look out, Papa. Here comes the biggest cat in the jungle.
The dress she had chosen was her favorite, blue with tiny white flowers. We had made it together when school first started, out of material she’d picked out at the store. She helped cut the pieces and even did some of the sewing herself, pumping the treadle and guiding the fabric through the machine.
It is the dress we buried her in.
Over on the right side of her room, there were shelves that contained a few toys and books and little treasures she’d collected: pretty rocks, the beautiful magnifying glass Amelia had given her, a few funny little animal sculptures she’d made out of clay from the river, a ball and jacks I’d bought her at the general store. (Martin had asked me not to spend money on such things, but how could I help it?)
It took my breath away, being in her room. I could smell her, taste her in the air around me. It was almost too much to bear. Then I remembered what I’d come for.
I pushed the heavy, wood-framed bed aside, found the loose floorboard where the left rear foot of the bed had rested. I dug my fingers into the crack so deeply that I tore a fingernail, but soon I was able to work the board free.
There was Auntie’s envelope, right where I had hidden it when I was nine years old, the wax seal unbroken.