Liyana laughs. “It won’t be much of a story if it can’t keep you awake.”
“It will,” I say. “You won’t hear me snoring, I promise.”
“Glad to hear it,” Liyana says. “All right then: ‘Once upon a time there was a little girl as good as she was pretty. She had big blue eyes, long golden hair, and a smile so lovely that it brought joy to everyone she met. The girl reared baby birds fallen from their nests, rescued worms that’d veered onto paths, enticed wilting flowers back into bloom . . .’”
When Liyana finishes the story and falls silent, I find I can’t speak. I should say something, should thank her again, but I’m so shocked that my sister could know my life and my heart so exactly that I’m lost for words.
11:59 p.m.—Scarlet
That night, Scarlet dreams of a fire and a flood. It’s a flood that started a month ago with a leak unseen and spread by stealth. A flood that destroys the only home she’s ever known. It’s a fire from a decade ago. A fire stoked by feelings, by fear and fury. The feelings build until sparks snap at the tips of her fingers. One spark falls onto the rug on which eight-year-old Scarlet is standing. She watches it glow, white hot. She watches as it burns itself a tiny hole, singeing the wool, then is extinguished.
Another spark lands on the sofa cushion. This time it eats into the cotton, beginning to burn more brightly. Suddenly, it flares, a flame that’s quickly engulfing the cushion, the sofa, the curtains, licking up the walls to the ceiling.
Scarlet wakes with the scream in her throat and sparks on her fingertips. She started it. The fire, the fire that burned down their house, the fire that killed her mother. She started it. How can she not have known this? How can she have forgotten something so seminal? As her screams fall into silence, as her heart slows and the sparks cease, Scarlet understands. Her mind wasn’t backfiring like her grandmother’s; it was an act of protection, of defence. And she’s grateful for one thing: that although she has at last remembered this dreadful thing, her grandma has, if she ever knew the truth, now forgotten it.
Less than a decade ago
Everwhere
Memories of Everwhere mix with the random everyday images thrown up in your dreams, tainting them with a silver moonlit edge and a pale sepia sheen. Sometimes you find yourself awake just past three a.m., especially on nights when the moon is at its first quarter. Sometimes you can’t get back to sleep, the question of whether you’ll ever return keeping you awake until morning. For a while, you become nocturnal.
Bea
“In a few years we won’t remember each other anymore,” Bea said, suddenly and apropos of nothing.
We were sitting in the glade half-heartedly playing games: Scarlet was setting light to twigs before blowing them out, Liyana juggled three dense balls of fog, Bea floated leaves above open palms, and I coaxed tight-curled shoots of ivy from the earth. Bea sat slightly apart, breaking the circle, watching us surreptitiously through her leaves. It was our third night in a row in Everwhere, and we were all more exhausted than we’d admit. But I did love it when we were together like this, and our affection for one another always seemed stronger during our silences.
“What?” Liyana looked up, dropping her balls of fog, which evaporated into the mists as they fell to the ground. “Why wouldn’t we remember? Anyway, I thought we agreed that, when we’re eighteen, we’ll do what our father wants so we can—”
“Speak for yourself.” Scarlet’s flaming twig flared. “I’m going to fight him.”
Liyana ignored this terrifying notion. “But until he—I’m not going to stop coming here, are you?”
“We’ll all stop coming.” Bea smiled that smile she had when revealing an unexpected and unpleasant secret. She let the leaves waft to the ground.
“I won’t,” Scarlet said. “I’ll come here every night for the rest of my life.”
Bea’s smile deepened. “Only till you’re thirteen. Then you won’t be able to anymore.”
The flames on Scarlet’s twig spat fire and sparks. “That’s rubbish,” she said, sweeping the stick in a half-circle. We all pulled back from the flames, even Bea. “Why won’t we be able to come back?”
Bea shrugged. “Because that’s the way it is. Mamá told me how it works. When we’re young we can come here, but by the time we’re teenagers we’ll be—our thoughts will be