The Book of Dreams (8 page)

The two hurried away but it wasn’t long before they joined up again.

“Finished?” they asked each other, exchanging looks of surprise.

It was only when they were a safe distance away that they broke their silence.

“I put some stuff on the sills,” Gwen said, mystified, “but then I stopped. I got the strangest feeling—”

“Me too! That it wasn’t necessary?”

“Yes! Because—”

“The house is already protected,” Laurel concluded.

They had stopped under a street lamp. Bathed in a soft yellow light, both were breathless and excited.

Gwen looked back up the street. “A beautiful presence,” she said softly. She could hug herself she felt so good.

“And jolly as well.” Laurel wanted to laugh, but she also felt shy. “Full of fun and laughter, but also sacred and powerful. The way I imagined Santa Claus when I was little.”

“We’re not alone,” Gwen whispered.

“Other forces are gathering around the girl,” Laurel agreed. “This is good. This is very good.”

For the first time since the blow was struck, the two were hopeful.

“Right, then. Let’s get a taxi to her school,” said Gwen. “We’ve got plenty of charms left for the job.”

“School and home,” said Laurel, nodding. “That should do it. Where else would you find a thirteen-year-old?”

Reaching Bloor Street, they kept watch for a cab. Despite the late hour, the avenue was busy. Restaurants, pubs, and coffee shops were bustling with late-summer trade. There was a mild chill in the air, but the night was still amenable to strollers.

“How about lattes and Nanaimo bars In the little café?” Gwen suggested.

“Work first, then treats.”

“You are so like my cousin,” sighed Gwen.

• • •

When they arrived at Dana’s high school, their hearts sank. Not only was the building locked and shuttered, it was ablaze with security lights and video cameras. Gingerly they approached the first window. Laurel flung a handful of salt through the metal grate, while Gwen pressed a primrose petal onto the sill.

Neither was prepared for what happened next.

Flower and salt burst into flames, even as a blast of hot air flung the two of them backward.

They hit the ground hard. Both had the wind knocked out of them. Gwen cracked her elbow. Laurel smacked her head. Stunned, they lay there a moment. Then, groaning with pain, they helped each other up.

“We’re too late,” said Laurel.

“It’s been claimed by the other side,” agreed Gwen. “We’re not safe here.”

Glancing around them fearfully, they hurried away.

• • •

Back at Laurel’s, any thought of treats was long forgotten.

“I was afraid of this,” Gwen said, sickened. “We’re failing already.”

“We’re dancing as fast as we can,” Laurel countered, but she also looked grave. “With her school compromised, Dana’s in serious danger. We’ve got to join up with her.”

Gwen frowned. “Granny’s instructions were clear. It’s her mission, not ours. We are just to be like guardian angels. Watch over her from afar.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Laurel argued. “We can protect her better if we are with her. Things are getting serious. And she’s only a kid.”

“She’s more than a kid. She has power of her own.” But Gwen sounded uncertain.

“The situation has changed since you last spoke with Granny,” Laurel pointed out. “The plan must change too.”

“All right, we’ll contact her,” said Gwen, though she didn’t look happy. Talking about Faerie was never easy; could they do it with a complete stranger and a teenager at that? She thought out loud, as much to reassure herself as Laurel. “I’m good with young people. And she’ll recognize you since you look like the High Queen. It shouldn’t be too difficult getting her to trust us.”

“Okay,” said Laurel. “First thing tomorrow, we tackle her.”

• • •

Had that meeting taken place, all of them might have suffered less, but it was not to be. Things were about to get worse.

I
t was Aradhana who noticed how ill Dana looked when she came home from her first day at school. Dana’s face was so pale, she was almost translucent, and her eyes had a feverish look. She was sent to bed immediately.

“Are you feeling any better?” Radhi asked gently when she came into the room with a cup of chamomile tea.

Dana smiled wanly but was unable to muster a livelier response.

“Your temperature is very high,” her stepmother said worriedly, placing a cool hand on her forehead. The scent of jasmine was comforting.

In the days that followed, Dana grew worse, as if some poison were working its way through her system. Unable to eat, she complained of mysterious aches and pains. Her sleep was fitful and broken as a recurring nightmare plagued her. She would find herself back at the portal and under attack. Cords of sickly green mist snaked around her to choke off her air. In the distance, a shining figure reached toward her in vain. Dana could hear the terror in her mother’s cries. It was Dana’s attempts to call back that would wake her up. Then she had to face the dreadful truth once more: she was all alone and cut off from Faerie.

• • •

“It’s most likely a virus,” the doctor told Gabriel. “No use treating it with antibiotics. We’ll give it a few days and if there’s no improvement, I’ll order some tests. Between you and me, it could be psychosomatic. Some kids are traumatized by starting high school. They adjust with time.”

Gabriel sighed. He had thought as much himself, though his wife didn’t look convinced.

When the doctor was gone and Gabe had left the room to make dinner, Aradhana sat down beside the bed. Her voice was quiet as she clasped Dana’s hand.

“Is everything all right between you and your mother?”

Dana stared into the dark, thoughtful eyes. Her stepmother’s question showed how special Radhi was. Both Gabriel and Aradhana had discovered the truth about Dana’s mother before they left Ireland. Gabriel soon forgot what he had learned about his first wife, remembering only that she had promised to stay in touch with Dana. It was the nature of Faerie. The spell of forgetting was woven like a wall around it. Adults in particular could not hold the reality of fairy existence for long. If they did remember, they inevitably dismissed the experience as a dream or a figment of their imagination. There was a time when Dana wished she could have shared that side of her life with her father, but his forgetting made things easier. She could move between the worlds without permission or explanation.

Up to that moment, she had assumed that Aradhana, too, had forgotten the true story.

“I respect your privacy,” her stepmother said now. She chose her words carefully. “Your life with your mother is not any of my business. But I want you to know, my Irish Barbie, that if you need to speak of such matters, you may do so with me. In India we live with many gods and spirits. They are not strangers to us.”

Tears pricked Dana’s eyes. She felt as if she were at the bottom of a dark well, looking up at her stepmother who peered over the edge. She wanted to call out to Radhi, but found she couldn’t. All she could do was shake her head.

• • •

By the end of the week, Dana began to feel better, as if the shadow that had fallen on her had finally dispersed. When her father announced they were going to her grandmother’s in Creemore for the last family gathering of the summer, she couldn’t have been happier.

The village of Creemore was just an hour and a half drive north of Toronto. It was given its name in the 1840s by Judge James R. Gowan. He called it after a townland in his native county of Wexford in southern Ireland. The founding father of the village, Edward Webster, also came from that townland, but his family had emigrated to Canada long before the judge. While there is no recorded history of the moment, Edward and Judge Gowan may well have christened the village together over a malt whiskey in Kelly’s Tavern on the main street.

The modern Creemore was a picturesque village of tree-lined avenues, old churches, and stately homes of red or yellow brick. Nestled in the valley of the Mad and Noisy Rivers and surrounded by rich farmland, it was a quiet, sleepy place during the week. Every weekend, however, it would fill with tourists as well as the city dwellers who kept summer cottages in the Purple Hills. The main thoroughfare of Mill Street was a browser’s delight with quaint storefronts, hanging flower baskets, and hand-crafted street signs. Antique shops, art galleries, and tea rooms bloomed like roses. The village also boasted North America’s smallest jail, little more than a shed.

Dana’s grandmother, Maisy Gowan, was “bred and buttered” in the village, as she liked to say. Though married, she was called by her maiden name since she belonged to one of the oldest and most respected families in the town. A small, sturdy woman of endless energy, she wore her salt-and-pepper hair in closely cropped curls. On Sundays she dressed in a skirt and blouse with pearls or brooches and sometimes a hat, while the rest of the week saw her in tracksuits and running shoes. In her late sixties, she lived a busy life, working in her garden and keeping up the family home. She also served on various committees including the Creemore Tree Association, the Creemore Horticultural Society, the Purple Hills Arts and Heritage Society, and the Royal Canadian Legion.

The Gowan home was just off the main street. Built by Maisy’s grandfather in 1901, it was a fine big house of red and cream brick with stone quoins on the corners and gabled windows. Geraniums blossomed on the sills. A wooden veranda encircled the house, furnished with a swing seat, a rocking chair, and wickerwork tables. A wide front lawn ambled down to the road, shaded by maple and cherry trees. In the past, the rooms were heated with wood stoves whose pipes went up to warm the second floor before connecting to the chimneys. According to Gran Gowan, the house was never as cozy once “newfangled” central heating was installed. But old-fashioned comfort was still to be found in polished pine floors, iron beds with goose-down quilts, and open fireplaces. In the backyard was a drive shed where the horse and carriage were once kept. Now it housed Gran’s pride and joy, a dark-green Triumph Herald that once belonged to her husband.

Dana loved her grandmother, who doted on her and also her two aunts, Yvonne and Deirdre.

Though they were older, Dana’s aunts looked and acted like teenagers. At thirty-two, a painter and sculptor, Yvonne was a brash blonde who dressed in dramatic colors, usually scorched orange or red. She liked tight skirts and slinky dresses, stockings with seams, stiletto high heels, and ruby red lipstick. Younger at twenty-nine, Deirdre, also called Dee, was a filmmaker who specialized in radical documentaries and political animation. Having shaved her head for years, she now sported a blue brush-cut. Slashed jeans and leather jackets were Deirdre’s preference, worn with hobnailed boots, but sometimes she added strings of pearls to “soften” the look. Given their own idiosyncratic tastes, the aunts would not interfere with Dana’s appearance despite their older brother’s pleas.

“There’s no such thing as a good influence,” Yvonne told him. “As Oscar Wilde said, ‘All influence is immoral.’”

“Is she saying ‘grunge’ do you think?” Dee wondered. “It’s a valid statement.”

“What,” snorted Gabriel, “‘I will not wash?’”

“‘I will not be a slave to conventional forms of beauty,’” his sister corrected him. “Didn’t you see my doc on youth and fashion? Does no one in my family look at my work? I’m a prophet in my own home, unrecognized and undervalued.”

“I know all your work,” Yvonne pointed out, “and Gabe was out of the country for that one.”

In the end, of course, Gabriel knew it was hopeless. His sisters would never side with him against Dana. He was a parent: “one of them.” She was a daughter: “one of us.”

• • •

The barbecue and corn roast was held in Gran Gowan’s back garden with its broad lawn bordered by a fence and tall privet hedges. The smell of charcoal mingled with that of hamburgers and hot dogs sizzling on the grill. A pot of boiling water bobbed with yellow cobs of corn. On a cloth-covered table were baskets of crusty bread and soft rolls along with bowls of potato salad, coleslaw, mixed greens with tomatoes, sliced beet-roots and pickles, and various pots of mustard and relish. Ice clinked in wet jugs of homemade lemonade sprinkled with white sugar. As Gran Gowan did not approve of alcohol and barred it from the premises, the aunts had been forced to stash a cooler of beer in Dee’s bedroom. Getting it up the stairs without their mother noticing involved stealth and timing, but they were practiced hands. Gran also didn’t approve of the vegetarianism of her son and granddaughter who had brought lentil patties to accompany the corn and salads.

“I have no objections to Aradhana not eating meat,” Maisy stated in her no-nonsense way. “It’s her religion and I would never stand between someone and their God. You two, on the other hand, are just being contrary.”

As the afternoon meandered on and they all had eaten their fill, the croquet set was arranged on the lawn.

“We’ll divide into teams,” Yvonne declared. “Radhi and Gabe, Maisy and Dana, Dee and me.”