A Glimpse of the Dream (4 page)

I hadn’t made a sound, and I was quite a distance from them, but Kane’s head snapped in my direction and his gaze seared me. Embarrassed for getting caught, I hurried back up the path to the house. He didn’t need his privacy invaded by me, especially since he had given so much of his time already to help me fit into my new life.

“Teagan, where are you going?” I heard from behind me.

Turning to Kane, I knew my cheeks were flushed because I felt awkward. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you had company.”

“Yeah, that.” He sounded disgruntled. “Camille and I—”

“Kane, you don’t owe me an explanation. It’s none of my business.”

“I know I don’t owe you one, but I’d like to give you one just the same. Camille sees us as a couple, but I’m not sure I want to go there with her.”

“Why not? She’s very pretty.”

“Yeah, she is—there doesn’t seem to be much more to her than that.”

The question was out of my mouth before I truly knew I was planning to ask it. “Did you go out to the island together?”

He looked hurt at that. “No. I promised to take you.”

Relief, waves of it, washed over me. “I couldn’t find you, and then there you were on the beach, so I just assumed I couldn’t find you because you were over there.”

“That island is ours, Teagan. We explore it first.”

“I feel the same. I just wasn’t so sure you still did.”

“Because of Camille?” he asked, his eyes bugging out in disbelief.

“Yeah.”

“Well, that’s just stupid. You’re you and Camille is just a girl.”

I couldn’t stop from smiling. “Where is Camille now?”

“On her way home. She had a minor temper tantrum over having our ‘moment’ interrupted, as she puts it.”

I felt the heat creeping into my cheeks again. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’d much rather be hanging out with you. You said you were looking for me. What’s up?”

“Oh, right, I almost forgot. Mrs. T is baking peanut butter cookies.”

He grabbed my hand and started pulling me toward the house. “I’d definitely rather be hanging out with you.”

Had someone told me when I’d first arrived at Raven’s Peak that I would find contentment, happiness even, I would have thought they were crazy. I had, though, and I owed that mostly to Kane. I’d never had a best friend, but I had one now. We understood each other, almost as if he were an extension of me and me of him. My eyes drifted to my nightstand. A small smile touched my lips. Every morning, for the year that I’d been there, I had awoken to find a glass of chocolate milk with whipped cream waiting for me. That first morning, Kane had brought it hoping to help ease the pain he knew I was feeling. I loved that he still did it—it was such a small gesture, but one that meant a lot to me.

I wasn’t as happy as I usually was, because it was exactly a year ago that Raven’s Peak had become my home, which brought my parents’ deaths front and center in my thoughts. I reached for the picture of them and felt my heart twist in my chest. It was my favorite photo, taken during their university years. Dad was smiling down at Mom as she lovingly looked up at him. She was wearing her Boston University sweatshirt, one she wore often, one that I now owned. I missed them, but I had learned to live without them, and I owed that to Kane. Without him, I would never have survived that first night, let alone the 364 that followed. I climbed out of bed, as I did every morning, before I walked to my door and held it open for him. He was usually leaning up against the wall waiting for me so we could start our day.

“Morning, Tea.” That was what he called me, because he thought Teagan didn’t fit my personality. I liked that he’d given me a nickname—one that was only his.

His bedhead indicated he’d only just gotten up, time enough to bring me the milk.

“Morning.”

Taking the milk to the balcony off my room, we sat together on the little sofa with the blanket from my bed wrapped around both of us. I handed the milk to him after I took a sip. The sun breeched the horizon, the large sphere casting an orange hue to the sky. A lightness filled my chest, from the view and from feeling Kane next to me. We did this every morning. Sometimes we just sat there in silence, sometimes we talked about anything and everything.

I had started contemplating what I would be when I got older. The one clear goal I had was that I wanted to attend Boston University, wanted to follow in my parents’ footsteps. Outside of that, I didn’t have a clue. Kane, two years older than me, must have figured it out already. “What do you want to be when you grow up, Kane?”

He shrugged, which was his usual response until he thought about a question. “I don’t know, but whatever I do, I want it to be here. I can’t imagine any place on Earth better than this.”

I followed his stare. He wasn’t wrong. We could hear the sound of the waves crashing against the cliff of Raven’s Peak. Mrs. Marks spoke of her house as a bird sitting on the topmost branch of a tree, and she was right, it really was.

“Sometimes I think it would be neat if Mrs. Marks would turn this place into one of those family-run inns. There are so many rooms that I don’t think even we’ve discovered them all, and we’ve really looked. It seems like a waste that so much of the house goes unused. We could run it, you and me.”

I thought of the conversation I’d had with Mr. Clancy over tea a few months back. To know there had been a time when the house was filled with family was as comforting as it was sad.

“Would you really want to be around strangers all the time?” I asked.

His head turned to me, those clear blue eyes looking into my green ones. “No, we would live on our island in a little house.”

I sighed. “I like that idea. A little blue house.”

“No, green.”

“Blue, with window boxes just like my dad made for my mom.”

His hand found mine under the blanket. “Window boxes, but a green house.”

“Fine, if I get the window boxes, you can paint the house green.”

“What about you, what do you want to be?” He looked very grown-up all of a sudden.

“I don’t know. I do know that I want to go to BU, want to find a connection to my parents by experiencing something they had.”

He squeezed my hand in understanding. “Sounds like a good plan.”

“And after college, I think I’d like to travel, so maybe I’ll get a job where I can travel a little, but what I really want is to be near you.” And it was true. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do for a career, but I did know that I always wanted to be close to Kane.

His shoulders relaxed and the biggest smile covered his face. “We can travel, since I’d like to see places with you, but we would come home here.”

“Sounds perfect.”

He jumped up from his spot and took the glass from me. “Come.”

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

He pulled me through the house until we ended up in the library. My feet just stopped in the doorway, my focus on the Christmas tree, the biggest one I’d ever seen, all lit with white lights. Mrs. Marks and the staff were in the room, all of them smiling at me.

“We know this time of year, this day in particular, is very difficult for you, Teagan, but the day doesn’t have to be a reminder of your parents’ deaths. We can celebrate the memory of their lives.” Mrs. Marks was wearing one of her lacy dresses, this one green, and she held two porcelain angels. “One for each of your parents,” she said. “We thought you’d like to hang them on the tree.”

My throat hurt, my stomach felt all funny, and my hands were shaking. Before I reached for them, she added, “It was Kane’s idea.”

Kane watched me with a sad little smile, and in that moment my young heart was no longer my own.

“It’s not that hard, Tea. Just relax.”

Three years after Kane and I had discussed swimming out to our island, I was finally ready to learn how to swim, but I wasn’t having much luck. “I’m trying, but I’m scared.”

“We’re in three feet of water. I won’t let you drown.”

“Okay.” Resting on my back, I tried to float like he’d showed me, but I kept sinking.

“Too many cakes, Tea. You’re dropping like a rock.”

“Are you calling me fat, Kane Doyle?”

“Round, not fat. Come on, you want to swim with me out to the island, but to do that, you need to know how to swim.”

“Okay. Let’s try it again.” I forced myself to relax, took a couple deep breaths, and almost felt lighter. For the first time all morning, I really thought I could do it. “You can let go.”

“I did already.” My eyes flew open and he was grinning at me. “Way to go, Tea.”

For the next hour I did float, for some of the time anyway. Though Kane was as eager as me to swim out together to our island, he never got angry or frustrated. Later, we did go to our island, taking the boat that was docked on the beach of Raven’s Peak.

We pulled the boat up on the sand, something we had done countless times. Kane fell silent, unusual for him. We started walking along the beach, but instead of engaging me in conversation as he always did, he just stared off at the horizon.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Yeah, I was just thinking about my mom.”

As much as I knew about Kane, he rarely talked about her. “Why don’t you ever mention her?”

“This is going to sound strange, but I don’t really remember much about her. What I have are impressions more than memories. She could be so happy sometimes, wanting to bake two hundred cookies, and we’d laugh and throw flour at each other, and she’d hug me and tell me how much she loved me. And then she’d be so sad, she wouldn’t climb out of bed for days. Mrs. Marks tried to explain to me that my mom was manic-depressive or something.”

“What happened to her?”

“She just left one day. I was in the hospital. I had tripped down the stairs and broken my leg. She never came to see me, and then the social worker came with Mrs. Marks, who adopted me.”

I couldn’t imagine my parents just leaving me without a word, being in the hospital scared and alone and having the one you needed to see the most not showing up. “I’m sorry, Kane.”

His next words were so softly spoken I almost didn’t hear him. “Don’t ever leave, Tea. You and me. Promise?”

Linking my fingers with his, I made the promise. It was an easy one to make, since I never wanted to leave him. “Promise.”

We returned to the house just before dinner, but Mrs. Marks didn’t join us. In the four years that I’d lived there, every year on the same day Mrs. Marks didn’t leave her room. Whenever I asked Mr. Clancy why, he only ever replied that she just needed a day to herself.

Kane and I were in the bathroom washing up for supper. I asked, “Why do you think she stays in her room?”

“I don’t know. I’ve asked her about it, but she never answers, but you know that tomorrow she’ll be her normal self. I heard her crying through the door last year. She sounded so sad that I was going to walk in and check on her, but Mr. Clancy stopped me. He told me that she just needed the day.”

“That’s so sad. I wish she’d talk with us about it, especially since she’s seen us through our own heartbreaks.”

“I know, but the best thing we can do for her is exactly what Mr. Clancy asked: give her space.” He started from the room. “Race you to the table, winner gets the other’s dessert.”

“Cheater!” I screamed after him, but later I watched as he devoured my pudding too.