“I’m not asking as if she’d be happy — I’m asking if she would do it.”
For a long moment he didn’t say anything. Then, finally, “I honestly don’t know.”
* * *
We didn’t talk much the rest of the way, each of us absorbed in our thoughts as the long dusk finally gave way to night and a thin yellow crescent moon rose above the mesa to our right. By the time we pulled off at the 260 and began heading toward Cottonwood, I could feel my stomach protesting its current empty state. We stopped at the Denny’s in town because there wasn’t much else open at that hour, and ordered some burgers. After that it was back up the winding road to Jerome, back to the quiet Victorian house waiting for us on the hill.
By then I was completely exhausted, and it seemed that Connor was, too, because we fell into bed and only held each other, too tired for anything else. My sleep was heavy, deep and dark, quiet, until I heard a keening sound and realized it was the sound of gulls. Below that came the deep rhythmic murmur of the ocean crashing against the shore.
Well, I’d just come from the beach, so I supposed it wasn’t so odd that it had invaded my dreams as well. The image in my mind brightened, almost as if the sun was coming up over the water. But no, that had to be wrong, because in Newport the sun set over the ocean, not the other way around.
Not that dreams had to make any sense, of course.
Someone was walking down the beach, her loose hair whipping in the wind. As she got closer, I saw that she was slender, although her belly was rounded, in the later stages of pregnancy.
My mother.
I’d often wished I would dream of her. When I was younger, I used to sit and stare at the one picture of her my aunt kept on her desk, thinking that if I looked at my mother’s face long enough, memorizing her features and how they were similar to mine, then she’d have to appear in my dreams. She would come and talk to me, tell me she missed me and loved me. That never happened, though.
But she was here now. As she stopped a few feet away from me, I realized our eyes were nearly level. So I was dreaming this as my now-self, and not the wistful little girl I used to be.
“I’ve been waiting for you a long time,” I said.
“I know.” Her hand dropped to the curve of her belly, and she smiled. She was wearing a loose jumper-style dress with a T-shirt underneath it, and Mary Jane–style Doc Martens. Looking at her, I realized she was exactly the same age I was now.
In a way, it was eerie to watch her, to see in her face my own straight little nose and arched brows, the rather wide mouth. My hair was darker, my eyes brilliant emerald where hers were bright blue, but anyone seeing us in that moment would have thought we were sisters.
“Why did you come here?” I asked.
“Here?” she asked vaguely, looking around.
“California.”
“We’re not really in California, you know.”
I’d had these sorts of circular conversations in dreams before, so I knew the best thing to do was press on. “It looks like California. Close enough.”
“I wanted to see the ocean.”
“And that’s the only reason?’
Her dreamy expression cleared, and the look she gave me was almost sharp. “You of all people should know why I wanted to get out of Jerome.”
“I should?”
“Are you happy, being prima?”
The question took me aback. I hadn’t ever really stopped to think about it that way. Not that I’d had much of a chance to stop and think about anything, what with how crazy my life had been for the past six months. I was certainly happy with Connor, but that happiness wasn’t dependent on my being prima. In fact, things would have been a lot less complicated if I had just turned out to be your ordinary garden-variety witch.
“I don’t think it’s a question of being happy,” I said slowly. “It’s what I was born for, so…I guess I’m settling into it.”
“Rachel trained you well,” she remarked. “Making sure you were raised to be a good little prima. That wasn’t me.”
I didn’t bother to hide the bitterness in my voice. “Apparently not, since you took off at the first opportunity.”
“As I said, it wasn’t me. Their expectations were crushing me.”
“So you just left? And what about me? Having a baby was just something you did for kicks, like going to look at the ocean?”
In real life, she probably would have taken offense. In my dream, though, she only looked away from me, at the sun rising in the wrong place. “No. I wanted you. Or at least I thought I wanted you. Until….”
“Until you found out my father was really a Wilcox, and not whatever he told you?” A far braver question than I would have asked if she’d really been standing there in front of me. But I guessed that my subconscious understood this wasn’t real, and had decided to go for broke.