Fantasy Life (19 page)

Lyssa pushed the door closed and felt one more surprise. The entry, always the coldest place in the house, was warm.

Cassie smiled at her. The smile was several wattages duller than the one she had just given Emily, but it was a sincere smile all the same.

“Welcome back,” Cassie said.

Not
Welcome home
or
Good to see you.
Just
Welcome back.
And, all in all, that phrase was more appropriate than the others. Now that she was standing here, Lyssa felt as if she had never been gone.

“Thanks, Mom,” she said.

Cassie’s smile got a little wider. She set Emily down, then crouched and helped her take her raincoat off.

“I’m so happy to have you here,” Cassie said, looking at Emily. “I’ve missed you so much.”

Emily froze, as if the words hurt her. Cassie frowned and stopped unbuttoning the coat.

“Did you really, Grandma?” Emily asked, using that sad, small voice that seemed to belong more and more to her.

“Of course I did, baby doll. I miss you each and every day.”

Lyssa could see the side of Emily’s face. Her daughter’s cheeks had flushed, and not just from the indoor warmth.

“You won’t miss me anymore,” Emily said. “Mommy says we’re going to live here now.”

That’s not what Lyssa had said. She had said they were going to live in Anchor Bay. She had been careful not to say any more than that.

“I was going to ask you, Mom,” Lyssa said, “and Grandma too. I mean, I have enough money for a security deposit and everything. Emily and I can find an apartment. I figured that would be what you wanted.”

Cassie looked up, but didn’t break her crouch. Her face had fine lines on it that it hadn’t had before. Otherwise, she looked the same—her narrow features and wide eyes gave her a waifish look, but her sharp little mouth tempered it.

“Buckinghams always live in Cliffside House,” she said, then finished taking off Emily’s coat.

Lyssa’s stomach ached. That wasn’t the sentence she had hoped to hear. Even with all the problems she had had with Cassie over the years, Lyssa had hoped for something more. One of those sentences from the movies, maybe, or from a televised family show:
Nonsense, darling. We wouldn’t dream of having you stay anywhere else.

But she was a Buckingham, and apparently Buckinghams didn’t live anywhere else. Nor did they show an inordinate amount of affection.

“Where’s Grandma?” Lyssa asked.

“She was exhausted. She went to bed.” Cassie put Emily’s raincoat over her arm, then touched Yeller, whom Emily still held in a death grip. “Who’s that?”

“Yeller,” Emily said.

“As in
Old Yeller?”

Emily nodded.

“I always liked that book,” Cassie said. “Did you know there’s a movie too?”

“A movie?” Emily looked up at Lyssa for confirmation.

Lyssa nodded, feeling a little lost. She had forgotten about the movie until now or she would have found it for her obsessed daughter.

“How come we never saw it?” Emily asked Lyssa.

“It’s old,” Cassie said, standing up. “I’m sure it’s hard to find.”

Lyssa felt her own cheeks warm. Her mother had just smoothed things over for her.

Then Cassie handed her Emily’s coat. “Do you remember where the closet is?”

How could anyone forget that closet? It was large and endless and always had a breeze.

Lyssa almost asked,
Are you still afraid of it, Mother?
but that would really get things off on the wrong foot. Instead, she turned around and headed toward the back of the room.

Cassie took Emily into the kitchen, talking the entire way. Emily made small sounds in answer, but Lyssa couldn’t hear all of them. She waited until the voices faded before leaning against the wall.

The black rock surface was as smooth as it was shiny. Lyssa pressed her hot cheek against it, reveling in the coolness. She had already reverted: She used to do this when she was a girl, especially when she needed comfort.

She had been right. No welcome for Lyssa, but a welcome for Emily. Which was probably good. Her daughter needed all the love and warmth she could get.

What Lyssa hadn’t expected was Athena’s absence. Gabriel had told her that Lyssa was coming. Was Athena angry that Lyssa hadn’t called? That didn’t sound like her grandmother, but then, Lyssa hadn’t seen her in more than a decade.
Sometimes age changed people. Maybe it had changed Athena.

Lyssa sighed. Change and Athena didn’t seem to go together. Her grandmother had always seemed as solid as the cliff face. Wind couldn’t move her; rain couldn’t damage her; and even an ocean couldn’t alter her—not without taking decades of constant, incessant pounding.

Athena couldn’t be tired. She was avoiding something. Probably her recalcitrant granddaughter.

Lyssa stood up and wiped her cheek, feeling a bit of rain that she had somehow missed before. She carried Emily’s coat to the closet and, before reaching inside, took off her own.

Already she could feel the breeze. Once she had taken a flashlight and tried to find the back of the closet. Once she had gotten past the cloth coats her mother wore, and her grandmother’s perfume-scented cloaks, she had found a series of coats that didn’t seem to belong to anyone.

Some of them were furs, untouched by time and damp, their pelts thick and warm and smelling of tobacco and rose water. She found hats of all sizes and shapes, some with feathers and some with fake fruit, and some with tasteful nets that went over the eyes. First the hats were on a hat tree, and then, farther back, there were hatboxes and coat boxes and gloves, and steamer trunks and more treasures than a person could imagine.

She had been deep inside the closet, opening a steamer trunk, when her mother had found her. Cassie had come into the closet in a blind panic, grabbed Lyssa’s arm, and yanked her back to the entry. Then she had shaken her and told her never to go in the closet again.

Lyssa had been ten.

Oh, she had tried to go back. She had found the coats and the furs and the hat tree, but the steamer trunks seemed to have vanished, along with the hatboxes and all the other treasures. Each time, though, she seemed to find something different. A
lace wedding dress, so small that she doubted even her tiny mother could fit into it. Shoes that required hooks to close them up, and once, a cache of jewelry, ropes of pearls hanging off a jewelry tree, earrings sitting in a bowl, and fans, dozens of fans, some yellowed with age.

She never told anyone about these discoveries and she never removed them from the closet. It almost felt that to do so would be a sacrilege. The closet gave up the clothes it could part with; anything else would be theft.

The breeze grew stronger as she stepped inside the darkness. The closet still had its familiar musky cigarette smell, as if someone had just come home from a smoky nightclub after a night of partying.

Lyssa reached up for a hanger and overshot the bar—she was a lot taller than she had been when she used to spend a lot of time exploring this part of the house. She had to grope for a moment before she found an empty hanger, and then she put the little raincoat on it.

The moment felt monumental—something of Emily’s settling into the house. Lyssa ran her hand on the wet coat for a moment, feeling the familiar plastic, and apologizing ever so slightly to her daughter—not just for bringing her here, where the weird met the strange, but for bringing her into the world.

Like Lyssa, Emily could never be normal. And like Lyssa, Emily had once expected to be.

Only unlike Lyssa, for a short time Emily had experienced the kind of life everyone else took for granted.

Lyssa didn’t know if that was better or not.

She peeled off her own coat and shivered slightly. The closet was as cold as the entry used to be. She groped for another hanger, found it, and was about to place her coat on it when someone whispered her name.

“Grandma?” she asked as she turned toward the sound. It came from the back of the closet.

“Lysandra.” The voice was still whispering, but seemed to have more substance. “We’re dying here.”

And then her mouth filled with something thick and solid, and she couldn’t get her breath.

She clutched her throat, gagging, and staggered out of the closet, her heart pounding. The light blinded her and the warmth seemed too heavy. She tripped on one of the flagstones and sprawled across the floor, dislodging whatever it was that had caught in her throat.

Nothing appeared on the ground in front of her. Whatever it was had vanished as if it had never been.

She coughed, taking in air as if she had been drowning. No one came to see if she was all right. No one probably even heard her fall.

She sat up and brought her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around them and rocking. She thought the house had missed her. She thought it was going to welcome her back.

The house had never hated her. It hadn’t been her favorite place in the world, but it had been a refuge, and the closet—it had been her adventure, her secret place.

Lysandra.

The voice still echoed. She coughed again, and something flew from her throat. She caught it as it sprayed out of her, a little ball of black, solid as a handful of mud, but with a more rubbery texture.

Lysandra.

“What do you want?” Her voice sounded hoarse, as if she had been shouting.

We’re dying.

“How does killing me solve that?”

Help us.

“Do what?”

But the voice didn’t answer. And she knew as certainly as she knew this old house that whatever owned the voice was gone.

She coughed again and realized how she was sitting.

Just like Emily had on the day Reginald had died. Lyssa had crawled into the same position, trying to take comfort from her own body, rocking to ease the pain and fear.

She rolled the ball between her fingers. She and her mother would have a little talk after Emily went to bed.

There might be an apartment in Lyssa’s future after all. She wasn’t going to stay here if the house had somehow become malevolent.

Maybe there wasn’t a refuge anymore in this world for her. Maybe she was going to have to face whatever was out there with all the strength she had left.

Cliffside House

They let Emily fall asleep on the family room sofa, a cup of hot cocoa on the table in front of her. Cassie wrapped Emily in a quilt that she had made shortly after Lyssa had left—something to do with her hands, she had thought then, but she realized now that the quilt hadn’t achieved its real purpose until this night.

It looked warm and appropriate around her granddaughter, who seemed tiny and fragile and in a great deal of pain.

Clearly Lyssa knew that Emily had been traumatized by the events of the summer, but she probably didn’t know how deeply. Like the rest of the Buckinghams, Emily was secretive and protective. She felt that her mother had gone through enough and needed Emily’s support more than Emily needed hers.

Poor thing. She hadn’t even touched her cocoa before
she’d faded into that twilight between sleep and wakefulness.

Lyssa looked shaken too, and she refused to go to the rooms that Cassie had painstakingly prepared. She wanted to talk first, maybe see if she was welcome, which hurt Cassie more than she wanted to admit.

Of course her daughter was welcome. Why wouldn’t she be?

But Cassie didn’t say that. She hadn’t said much to Lyssa, sensing how deep the distance was between them. Besides, this Lyssa was a stranger to her. The short hair that looked as if it had been cropped in fit of anger, the sunken eyes from too little sleep, the skin pulled tight over her face, didn’t seem like Lyssa at all.

Lyssa had been freer than that, her hair flowing, her eyes sparkling, her skin reflecting her great good health. Stress and time had taken all of that away from her, and no one who looked at Lyssa now would think she was healthy. Just terribly unhappy.

The kitchen stopped Lyssa just as it stopped Cassie every time she entered it.

“Whoa,” Lyssa had said after she took in the steel appliances, the modern table, the expensive cabinets. “I guess back-to-nature is passé.”

Cassie’s cheeks warmed. Lyssa thought Cassie had remodeled the kitchen, going against all the things she had ever said about the environment and taking care of the creatures around her.

“Your grandmother did this.” Cassie kept her voice low and tried not to sound judgmental.

“Without your approval, obviously.”

Cassie shrugged. “It’s her house.”

Lyssa looked at her. The intelligence in those brown eyes was as sharp as ever. “I thought it was all of ours. That’s what Gram used to say.”

“I know what she used to say.” Cassie took the cookies off the sideboard and set them on the table. “Ownership of Cliffside House is a dicey thing. I’ve even gone to the county to see the records and was told that no one could find them. Later, the clerk called me and said not to worry about it. No one else did.”

She hovered near the Mr. Coffee, her hands fluttering toward the mugs. “Decaf? Tea?”

“How about some bourbon?” Lyssa asked.

Cassie’s breath caught. She hadn’t expected that.

Then Lyssa smiled. It was the old smile, impish and warm. “Is it herbal tea?”

“Peppermint.”

“And cookies.” Lyssa sank into a chair at the far side of the table. “I have come home after all.”

The word
home
warmed Cassie. She grabbed two mugs and brought them to the table, handing one to Lyssa. “You can stay, you know. There’s no need for Emily to sleep on the couch.”

Lyssa’s smile faded. She took the mug with one hand, but kept the other under the table. She didn’t even pour any tea.

“I was hoping you’d say that,” Lyssa said, “and then something weird happened in the closet.”

Her cheeks reddened slightly. It clearly embarrassed her to talk about the strange events of Cliffside House.

“Weird?” Cassie hadn’t sat down yet. She pulled the cozy off the teapot, then poured. The steam carried with it the soothing odor of peppermint. She hoped it would ease some of Lyssa’s stress.