I’d need to be up in three hours for my first day at my new school. I wanted so bad to figure out the dream. Or to make it stop. I’d prefer to figure it out and then make it stop, but neither choice seemed open to me at the moment.
With a sigh I pulled back the covers and sat up, rubbing my chest where the mark was burning. I took a few deep breaths and pushed myself out of bed. I knew from experience that I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep.
Padding out of the room, I made my way to the kitchen, careful to step around the few boxes that hadn’t been unpacked yet, when I heard a noise behind me and jumped.
“Lily?” Mom said. “Honey, it’s two thirty in the morning. What’re you doing up?”
The light came on, and Mom was standing there. She looked like I felt—tired to the bone—but probably for very different reasons.
“Couldn’t sleep,” I told her.
She shuffled over to me and put a hand on my brow. “You’re coated in sweat,” she said. Then she cupped my face and peered down at me. “Do you feel sick?”
“No, Mom,” I assured her. She had enough on her plate without worrying about me. “Just had a bad dream.”
But Mom’s brow lifted and she said, “The one with the boy in the field?”
“Yeah,” I said, a little surprised. I’d been having the dream most of my life, but we hadn’t talked about it in years. “How’d you know?”
Mom seemed surprised herself. “I didn’t,” she said. “But it’s always been the only one that can do this to you.”
I shrugged. “I’m so tired. I want to turn it off.”
Mom’s mouth tilted down into a concerned frown. She wrapped her arms around me, pulling me close, and stroked my hair. “Sounds like you’ve had this nightmare more than just tonight.”
I sighed heavily against her. “Just a couple times recently,” I admitted. I didn’t want to tell her the truth, because I didn’t want to lay a guilt trip on her.
Before she could press me about it, I moved out of her embrace and over to the refrigerator to open the door and peer in. “Want some cocoa?” I asked, trying to change the subject.
There was a pause then she said, “Sure,” and I heard the chair slide back from the table. I busied myself for a few minutes at the stove, hoping she’d let it go.
“How long have you really been having the dream, Lily?” Mom asked again, her tone serious.
I stirred the milk, avoiding her gaze. “Ever since we moved in here.”
I heard Mom’s breath catch, but she managed to hold her tongue. I sighed as steam lifted from the milk in the pan. After pouring the milk into two mugs, I brought them to the table.
“Tell me about it,” she said, her eyes creasing in the corners with worry.
So I did. And Mom listened in patient silence. At the end she simply studied my face while our cocoa cooled, before reaching across the table and putting her hand on mine. “It’s been a tough couple of months, hasn’t it, kiddo?”
I sighed, staring into my mug. “Yeah. For both of us.”
“You know that the dream is probably about the divorce, and your breakup with Tanner, right? Maybe it’s time to see someone professionally, Lily, you know, to talk about all that you’ve been going through.”
I’d balked at her earlier attempts to enroll me in therapy. Mom had first made the suggestion shortly after she and Dad filed for divorce. Dwelling on all my problems in some stranger’s office didn’t sound very therapeutic to me.
“I don’t know how the dream connects to all that, though, Mom. I mean, I started having it when I was a little kid. How could it be about your split with Dad or my breakup with Tanner when it started happening twelve years ago?”
That seemed to stump her. “Is it exactly the same dream?”
I nodded. “In every way.”
Mom tapped her finger on the tabletop. “Well, that’s odd,” she said. “And maybe even more of a reason to talk to a therapist.”
I shook my head. “Please don’t make me.”
Mom smiled patiently. “I’ve been talking to one.”
My eyes widened. “You have?”
“Yes,” she told me, as though that was hard to admit. “It’s helping, Lily. It’s how I managed to swallow my pride and accept Maureen’s offer.”
The feud between my grandmother and Dad was something of a mystery to me. Mostly I think that it had to do with the fact that my grandmother was really, really wealthy, and she liked to control people through her money.
I suspected that at some point in the past my grandmother had tried to control my dad one time too many, and he’d rebelled enough to cause her to cut him off. He’d gone on to become successful anyway, and I think that irked her.
It worried me a little that Mom had accepted Grandmother’s offer to live on her estate and work at the hospital where she was so influential, but even this situation beat staying in Richmond.
“I didn’t know,” I told her.