“But what if it ends us?” I ask and I’m afraid. “If I prevent events from happening, maybe we’ll never be born.”
Dare shakes his head. “I don’t believe that. I believe in Fate, and we’re fated, Calla. We’re fated. I feel it.”
“But I won’t remember,” I tell him. “When I change things and I wake up, I never remember. What if I forget you?”
“Then I’ll find you, Calla-Lily. I’ll always find you.”
Hope leaps into my heart and his eyes are so sincere, so true.
“Do you promise?” I ask, and he smiles at me, and I’m afraid to hope.
“I do,” Dare says as he puts the ring in his pocket. “We’ll get this sorted.”
“What a British thing to say,” I say.
“That’s the meanest thing you’ve said all day.”
As we laugh, I feel like we’ve been here before, in this time and place and with these same words. But I’m getting used to that feeling. Because by night we are free, and things change, because we change them, and déjà vu is real, and we’re stuck in it.
Because of that, we’ll change things again, because time is fluid and malleable and it never stays the same. We’ll save my brother. I feel it I feel it I feel in my bones, in my hollow reed bones.
“Nocte liber sum,” I whisper to Dare.
He nods. “Keep dreaming, Calla Lily. And one day, we’ll be free.”
I squeeze his hand because I know.
After lights out, after the nurses have made the last rounds and given us all our medicine, I sneak from my room and into Dare’s.
“You can do this,” Dare whispers into my hair. “Think back to the beginning. Imagine it, imagine what happened. Let Salome die without creating the ring, without creating the curse. Let Phillip be her uncle, not her brother. Let them die without re-living over and over. Keep your mother from being with her brother, keep us from being related. You can do it. You can.”
His words empower me, and I believe him. I can do it, and I imagine what he says and I snuggle into his chest because his arms are home, and I close my eyes, knowing that I’ll dream.
And when I dream, I change things.
I sleep
And sleep
And sleep.
And when I open my eyes, it’s a beautiful Oregon morning, and my brother wants to go to group therapy.
I stretch and yawn and grouse, but he’s right. We should go. I roll out of my bed, get dressed.
“Drive safe!” my father calls out needlessly when we leave. Because of the way my mom died, among twisted metal and smoking rubber, my father doesn’t even like to see us in a car, but he knows it’s a necessity of life.
Even still, he doesn’t want to watch it.
It’s ok. We all have little tricks we play on our minds to make life bearable.
I drop into the passenger seat of our car, the one my brother and I share, and stare at Finn.
“How’d you sleep?”
Because he doesn’t usually.
He’s an insufferable insomniac. His mind is naturally more active at night than the average person’s. He can’t figure out how to shut it down. And when he does sleep, he has vivid nightmares so he gets up and crawls into my bed.
Because I’m the one he comes to when he’s afraid.
It’s a twin thing. Although, the kids that used to tease us for being weird would love to know that little tid-bit, I’m sure. Calla and Finn sleep in the same bed sometimes, isn’t that sick?? They’d never understand how we draw comfort just from being near each other. Not that it matters what they think, not anymore. We’ll probably never see any of those assholes again.
“I slept like shit. You?”
“Same,” I murmur. Because it’s true. I’m not an insomniac, but I do have nightmares. Vivid ones, of my mother screaming, and broken glass, and of her cellphone in her hand. In every dream, I can hear my own voice, calling out her name, and in every dream, she never answers.
You could say I’m a bit tortured by that.