I was locked in.
Locked in. Alone. Helpless.
No! Please no!
My mind knew that the penthouse was not the two-story house on the swamp, but my feelings could not separate it. The great hall shrank and flipped before my eyes into the room with boarded-up windows. My arms and legs went numb and my teeth chattered as if I had the chills. Before I even reached the door, I sank to my knees, unable to breathe calmly or control my body. Eventually, I was lying on the white marble, my cheek on the cold stone.
I heard his footfalls climbing the stairs.
Do you feel that, little lady? Isn’t that enough for you? You want more?
Isaac’s voice whispered in my head. Horrible words, horrible threats. My whole body was shaking and my scars burned like a phantom pain. I wanted to get up and throw myself out the window so it would stop and silence his voice inside me, butdespite all my panic, I knew that there were no windows at this height that could be opened wide enough. Later, I thought of the gallery with its arabesque railings, but the thought of Nathan losing someone he loved again held me back. So, I lay there, waiting for it to cease as I had had to do for most of the winter. At one point, I burst into tears because Isaac had defeated me once more even from his grave. He was inside me, still alive, an immortal, invincible demon.
Chilled by the cold floor, I staggered to my feet and dragged myself to my bedroom, a leaden tiredness in my bones. That was always the case after a panic attack. My body was exhausted as if I had run a marathon. I forbade myself to think about the locked door and sank into the pillows of my four-poster bed. Exhaustion did the rest, and my soft bed, my wonderfully soft bed in which I had not slept for a year, rocked like a barge on the gentle waves of oblivion, like a cutter or a yacht.
For the first time in months, my nightmares stayed away, but Mom appeared to me instead. To this day, I don’t know if I dreamed of her or saw her in her ghostly form because the temperature dropped that night. In New York, it was so many degrees colder than in Louisiana. Perhaps she had returned from the in-between world, but I never said that thought out loud not even to Nathan.
When I noticed her, she was sitting on the edge of my bed in her white Fendi dress, her cinnamon-brown wavy hair curling around her delicate face like a bridal veil.How beautiful she is, I thought.Was. She must have been watching me as I slept and her presence, a cool breath of air like a southern fan, had woken me. She smiled at me. “Nevaeh, my love.”
“Mom,” I whispered. Never had I seen her so distinctly in all these years, her contours almost crystalline sharp. “Mom, why are you here?”
“You’re searching for the truth, but you only see part of it. You don’t dare think the impossible. But it’s all there, everything is inside you. You simply have to find it. Remember!”
“What?” Now I was sitting upright on my bed. I still remember that the moon was shining on the spot where Mom was sitting on the edge of the bed, bathing her in unearthly light. Her hair was fluttering as if an invisible breeze was blowing through my room.
“Something. An image. A feeling. A scent. It’s all there.” She stroked my cheek gently and hummed a gentle melody that turned into verse inside me.You are my everything, my day and my night, my star in the sky and my earth. You are my yesterday and tomorrow. My now. My eternity.
I was startled by a thought that arose inside me, and in an instant, it was gone, like a word that had been on the tip of my tongue.
Suddenly wide awake, I glanced around my room, but Mom was no longer there.
“What is the impossible?” I whispered into the empty room. “What do I not dare not think possible?”
Chapter 15
The next morning I woke up early, but Dad had risen before me and was sitting in the living room in his tailored suit, his legs crossed with theNew York Timesin his hands.
I was still wearing the shirt and sweater from yesterday, so I only had to put on a pair of sweatpants. “Why did you lock me in? And where’s my cell phone?”
Dad peered over the newspaper and smiled kindly. “Good morning, darling. Are you feeling better?”
I looked at him silently and folded my arms across my chest.
He sighed. “You seemed to be in a miserable state yesterday. Almost unpredictable. I didn’t want you to rush out of the house or maybe make phone calls that wouldn’t be productive.”
“Not productive?”
“I was afraid you might call Grandma Anna.”
Luckily, Nathan hadn’t saved his number, otherwise, Dad might have used a trick to find out where he was. “Why Grandma Anna?” Because of everything that had happened, I hadn’t thought about her or the letter recently. Dad had, apparently.
“Grandma Anna has interfered in our family affairs far too often.” He placed theNew York Timeson the table and stood. “What I told you yesterday about Isaac McCormack is the truth.He’s a madman, a psychopath.”Even I would agree with that. “And your mom was sick, Willa. She suffered from pathological paranoia, one reason why your grandma came up with such terrible theories. She believed her. She didn’t want to believe that your mom was psychotic.”
I remained silent.You don’t dare think the impossible.
Dad continued talking, saying he had given the staff a week’s vacation so that we could use the time to rekindle our father-daughter relationship undisturbed. We had gone long enough without each other, but he would drive back to the office later and order dinner from Jacques again this evening even if I hadn’t touched anything yesterday.
“You’ve gotten terribly thin, Willa.” He looked at me carefully. “Maybe you should start painting again. That used to do you good, didn’t it? Painting always helped you. And you should talk to Dr. Moore if you don’t want to confide in me. You were the victim of a violent crime and, obviously, had to go through some terrible things.” He looked as if he was remembering the scars on my body and seemed hateful for a few seconds. “We have to call the police or…”
