The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

My scream is still echoing in my ears as I twitch, kicking my feet and fighting away phantoms of sleep, tossing off the coverlet, when I feel a soft hand flop against my cheek. My eyes fly open. I’ve soaked through my nightdress, and I’m damp and hot. The sheets are twisted around my legs. Gasping, I clutch the mattress and look crazily about myself. I’m awake. I’m not in the dream anymore.

I’m awake.

I’m in my bed. My own bed, at home. The horsehair mattress rustles under my weight. My face is pressed to my favorite pillow, the lumpy feather one that’s been flattened ’til it’s just right for my cheek. I feel soft breathing next to me, and the hand on my cheek coils itself into my hair, getting caught on the rags I use to tie my curls into place at bedtime. Slowly my eyes trace to the left, to the owner of the hand.

My sister’s sleeping face rests on her own pillow in the bed next to me. The rag doll I sewed for her when she was a baby is nestled under her chin. One of its button eyes is missing, the empty socket erupting in frayed thread. She’s too old for a doll, and Mother has tried to hide it from her more than once, but Lottie or I generally find it and smuggle it back to her. My sister’s mouth opens and emits a soft snore.

Without moving, I let my eyes roam around the details of the room, suspicious.

I’m at home. I’m in the room I share with my sister, upstairs from Mother’s room. This is puzzling, as I don’t remember coming back from my aunt’s. Did we come back here after the flotilla and the parties last night? But I would remember that, surely. I’d remember being loaded into a carriage in lamp-lit streets littered with castoff bunting, laughing and heady with wine and our journey on the barge, and the carriage jouncing over the rutted streets uptown, tossing my sister and brother into me and Mother and Papa. I’d remember pulling up to our house, because I’d be relieved it was safe for us to come back.

Wouldn’t I?

Anyway all our clothes are at Aunt Mehitable’s house. I’d expected to awaken in Hudson Square.

I try to raise myself on my elbows, but my sister tightens her grip around my neck with a contented sigh and I’m trapped. I resign myself to waiting.

The light is thin, so it must be early yet. I hear the last tittering birds of the season in the elms outside the window, and someone’s moving about downstairs. Mother is awake. Papa would be, too, much earlier, as he’s in the Canal Corporation on top of his job at the bank downtown, and has been beyond busy. We barely see him. A knot of worry twists in my gut. Why would Papa let us come back again, without first . . .

But I can’t argue with the fact that I’m in my bed. At home.

Everything looks completely the same.

The room that Beatrice and I share is on the third floor, with two tall windows looking over the kitchen garden and privy at the rear of the house, windows dressed in dark wool hangings now that the weather’s turned cool. Mother is still choosing the furniture for the drawing and dining rooms, but she’s already appointed her and Papa’s rooms. Their beds are as heavily carved and draped as old Spanish galleons, topped with plumes of ostrich feather. Beattie and I share her old bed, which sags in the middle and has hangings that are kind of mothy, but still warm. A soft pop tells me that Lottie’s already come in while we were sleeping and stoked up the fire.

Everything in our room is just as we left it. My own childhood sampler, complete with its crooked S and lopsided laurel leaves, is framed over the mantel. Beattie’s sewing basket sits abandoned on the floor by the rocking chair. The washstand that always wobbles is in the corner. A shelf with my books, Pilgrim’s Progress and A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, together with a few others, is pushed against the far wall. The dead fern that I forgot to water is curling in a piece of cracked chinaware on the mantel. A faint, but sharpish, smell suggests that Beattie used the chamber pot in the night, and it’s marinating under the bed. Even the shawl Beattie started knitting in August and finally abandoned in a heap, rests untouched on top of our dressing table.

“Beattie,” I whisper, nudging her with an elbow.