and crawled into bed. “Can I really reveal myself to others? I feel antsy tonight, but I haven’t had a sleeping pill since we got here. I don’t need one now.” She closed her eyes, but her mind kept replaying that dream about the satin sheets. Her mother always had satin sheets on her bed, so maybe she was thinking about something that happened when she was just a little girl. Had she walked in on them when they were making love? No, that couldn’t be right. Her mother and father had slept in separate rooms. Maybe her mother had yelled at her when she’d tried to crawl into bed with her during a storm.
She shook her head. Neither of those could be right. They locked their bedroom doors at night, and it was Viola, her nanny, who took care of her, right up until she was in the sixth grade. That was the year Victoria announced that Emma had outgrown the need for a babysitter. Emma had been glad to see Viola leave, because at the end of every day, the woman tattled to Victoria if Emma did one thing or ate anything that would upset her mother.
She finally slung back the sheet, turned on the bedside lamp, and got out of bed. She hadn’t finished the apple dumpling that Sophie had brought her for supper, so she started to the kitchen for a midnight snack and noticed the framed piece on the wall again. She stopped and read the whole thing: Love will put you face-to-face with endless obstacles. It will ask you to reveal the parts of yourself you tirelessly work at hiding. It will ask you to find compassion for yourself and receive what it is you are convinced you are not worthy of. Love will always demand more. Surrender to being seen and being loved. Surrender to the beauty of revealing yourself to yourself, and to the ones who saw you before you saw you.
It was signed Vienna Pharaon. Emma made a mental note to look that person up on the internet. She either had gone through something traumatic herself or else she had an amazing understanding of folks like Emma.
Compassion. Worthy. Revealing. Those words kept going through Emma’s mind as she got the rest of the dumpling out of the refrigerator and carried it out to the porch. The few times she’d tried to go outside by herself in the dark after she had come home from college, she had had a panic attack. That night she eased down into her chair, but her chest didn’t tighten up and she had no trouble breathing. Out in the distance, a coyote howled, and another one farther out answered him. The mountain, more than a mile out there, was a black blob with a half-moon hanging above it. A single star left a million others behind, trailed by a long tail as it streaked across the sky.
Sophie had told her when they were children that you got a wish when you saw a star falling out of the sky. The only other time that Emma had seen one before that night was the evening before she went off to college. That night she wished for the hundredth time that she would someday be a famous artist.
She watched until the shooting star was completely gone and then shut her eyes and wished that she could remember those repressed memories. Not knowing was harder than facing the fears—or was it? She frowned at the thought. Maybe she wasn’t as strong as Sophie thought she was, or even as that quote on her wall talked about—could she reveal parts of herself that she worked so hard at hiding? Would knowing what they were destroy her altogether?
“You couldn’t sleep, either?” Josh’s voice coming out of the dark startled her so badly that she almost jumped up and ran into the trailer.
He was standing at the end of the porch steps, and Coco chose that moment to jump up into her lap. She remembered what she had wished for and wondered if fate had sent Josh to help her.
“Yes. I mean, no. What I mean is that I couldn’t sleep.” She hoped that she didn’t sound like a total idiot. “So, you have trouble sleeping, too?”
“Yep,” he answered. “Sometimes a walk helps me calm down. I have trouble settling down at night. No, that’s not right. I have the same trouble in the daytime, but my artwork helps me with that.”