tire swing she’d played on still hung from the lowest branch of a massive oak. Maddie’s body was draped through it now, her jean-clad bottom and legs and the soles of her scuffed sneakers all that were visible from this angle.
“She having more of those nightmares?”
Blythe turned to find her grandmother still standing at her elbow, her gaze also fastened on the little girl. In an attempt to hide the sudden thickness in her throat at the genuine concern in the old woman’s voice, Blythe lifted the steaming cup and took a sip. Despite the strong flavor of chicory, a remnant of her grandmother’s childhood in St. Francisville, the coffee warmed her almost as much as entering this house always did.
“Night terrors,” she corrected softly, finding it difficult to believe that the child they were watching was the same one who had trembled in her arms only hours before. “An appropriate name. She’s certainly terrified by whatever she sees.”
“But if she doesn’t remember—”
“I remember. I thought last night—” Blythe stopped, hesitant to put her fear into words, lest doing so should give it some actual power.
“You thought what?” her grandmother asked when the silence stretched between them.
“I’m afraid she won’t come back from wherever she is.”
“Oh, child. You don’t believe that. You can’t.” With one weathered hand, its fingers knotted with arthritis and the blue veins across the back distended beneath the thin skin, her grandmother touched her fingers as they gripped the cup, seeking warmth for the coldness that seemed to have settled permanently in her chest.
“You haven’t seen her. And anyone seeing her now…” Blythe didn’t finish the thought, knowing that she could never explain the gap between the picture below and the events of last night.
“Why don’t you tell me exactly what happens?” her grandmother suggested. “Sit down at the table, and we’ll drink our coffee while you tell me all about it.”
“I should watch her—”
“In Crenshaw? Who you gonna watch her from here?”
The old woman was right. The backyard was as safe as church, to use one of her grandfather’s favorite expressions. There was no reason to fear for Maddie’s safety. That was one of the reasons Blythe had decided to come home.
She’d been reluctant to talk to anyone about the terrors. More reluctant to mention the tapping. The kindness in her grandmother’s voice encouraged her to share her fears, however, just as it always had. Here in this kitchen, she had revealed a hundred secrets during her adolescence.
And this—whatever was going on—wasn’t even a secret. If she could share the particulars of her daughter’s nightmares with some dismissive stranger in Montgomery, surely she could confide in her family. Almost the only family she had left.
“Delores, would you get us some of that pound cake you made yesterday?” Her grandmother took Blythe’s arm to guide her away from the window, apparently taking her silence for consent.
“Yes’m. You all want some preserves to go with that?”
Delores Simmons, the ancient black woman who had looked after the household since Blythe could remember, was almost as old as her mistress. Although the two elderly women were closer than sisters, the traditional formalities that had existed between them for more than half a century were still maintained, even in private.
“Preserves?” Blythe’s grandmother asked, pulling out a chair at one side of the kitchen table and gesturing toward the opposite one. “Or apple butter, maybe. I made both, so I guarantee they’re good.”
Blythe slipped into the place, shaking her head in response to the question. “Not for me.”
“Just the cake, Delores. And make sure you don’t cut none of that sad streak either.”
“Now you know Miz Blythe always likes a bit of sadness with her sweet.”
Despite the fact that the women were talking about a common flaw that left a swath of butter-rich denseness through center of the cake, the words seemed symbolic. A little too apt.
“You said she calls you. That that’s how it starts.”
Surprised by the change in subject, Blythe looked up from her coffee. Her grandmother’s faded blue eyes were focused patiently on her face. “She calls Mama.”
Blythe wasn’t sure when the thought had crept into her head, but since it had, she couldn’t dislodge it. Because she was no longer sure Maddie was calling her. Just as she was no longer sure—
She shook her head, refusing to take the next step. If she did, it might take her down a road she didn’t want to consider.
“And you go to her, of course,” her grandmother prodded, “and then what?”
“That isn’t all she says.”
“Something besides Mama?”
“I don’t know whether or not she says more the longer the dreams go on or whether I understand more each time. Most of it is just…sounds. Screams. No words. But at the very beginning…Before she gets so hysterical…There are words.”
“What does she say?”
“Help me. Mama, help me. Daddy. No. Daddy.”
“If she’s calling for her daddy, then maybe—I mean didn’t that psychologist tell you this was connected to John’s death?”
“Not exactly. She said the stress of his death combined with the stress of the move. But…a four-year-old? How she can be stressed?” Blythe asked. “Does she seem stressed to you?”
“She’s just having a nightmare, baby. Everybody has them.”
“But what does she see that terrifies her so much she can’t get her breath?”
“And she’s crying when she says all that?”
As she asked the question, Delores set a glass dessert plate down in front of Blythe. A thick slice of pound cake, the promised sad streak bisecting its perfection, rested in the center on a paper doily. Despite the presentation, Blythe felt a wave of nausea at the thought of trying to eat it.
“Is she crying? A little. At first. Then she starts begging for somebody to help her. Then…‘Please, Jesus, help me,’” Blythe whispered, her eyes holding on the black ones of her grandmother’s housekeeper.
“That pure don’t sound like it’s got nothing to do with Mr. John, whatever that doctor told you. That baby’s afraid of something.”
Blythe nodded, relieved to have her own conclusion put into words. To find someone who understood the fear she felt as the episodes escalated. “She’s terrified. After a while the words become screams. Shrieks. As if someone is—”
“Hurting her,” Delores finished softly when she couldn’t go on.
“Nobody’s ever hurt that child in her life,” her grandmother said dismissively. “Why in the world would she have a dream about somebody doing it?”
“Dreams ain’t always because of something that’s happened to us. Dreams are sometimes more than what we know in our heads.”
“Don’t you start that nonsense, Delores. Not in this house. We’re Christians here.”
“I’m just as good a Christian as you, Miz Ruth. That doesn’t mean I don’t know things they don’t talk about in Sunday school. Mine or yours.”
Maybe if she hadn’t already crossed this line in her own imagination, Blythe might have ignored the housekeeper’s theory. Some indefinable something about the words and phrases the little girl uttered—something Blythe couldn’t explain to anyone who hadn’t heard them night after night—had already led her