Page 11 of Silver Linings

“Happy” didn’t seem like a state I’d be able to attain anytime soon. However, saying such a thing out loud felt way too self-pitying…and might possibly be construed as an invitation for some commiseration, which I definitely didn’t want right then…so I summoned a crooked smile from somewhere and put it on.

“Working on it,” I told her. “But thanks for the heads-up that someone’s asking questions.”

“A cute someone,” Eliza reminded me. Then she got her sunglasses out of her purse and put them on, adding, “Well, I need to run by the market before Bethany gets home from school. You have a good rest of your day, Sidney.”

“You, too,” I said.

She headed out, and I looked around the shop and allowed myself a small head shake.

Well, at least I probably wouldn’t have to worry about the stranger coming into my store…unless he was traveling with his dog or something.

I thought that highly unlikely, though.

But everyone else who came in after Eliza was people I knew, and I was able to close the shop at five-thirty without incident. Because my house — I’d been doing my best to think of it that way, even though it always felt like “Grandma’s house” to me — was located only a quarter-mile away, I walked to and from work whenever the weather allowed, and I had to admit that those moments of breathing in the fresh air and feeling the breeze tug at the ends of my loose hair helped me get in a place where I could think a little more clearly.

Well, most of the time, anyway.

Even though nothing particularly momentous had happened at work, I knew I was way too on edge, wandering from room to room, picking up a vase that had belonged to my grandmother or trailing my fingers across a Murano glass paperweight that my mother had bought on a trip to San Francisco when I was around ten. Somehow, feeling those objects made me feel a little more grounded, rather than some strange being who only drifted across the face of this earth rather than being truly connected to it.

Neither of them had ever said that they were able to communicate with any of the creatures who appeared in the forest, but despite that, I couldn’t help thinking I’d fallen down on the job somehow. For all I knew, I was lacking some essential component that had been present in all the other women who were my ancestors, an intangible quality that was the entire reason why the first unicorn had gone and laid his head in Mary Welling’s lap back in the 1850s.

Or, as with so many other things, the unicorn’s appearance yesterday could have been completely random.

Although I’d been living alone in the big Craftsman house for the greater part of three months, I still hadn’t poked into all its nooks and crannies. Partly that was because doing so would have felt way too much like snooping, and I’d already made one unpleasant discovery when I’d found all those canceled checks from my mother to my father to ensure he kept quiet.

Also, our sweet Cocker mix, Trilby, had passed while I was off at college, and even though she’d lived to the ripe old age of sixteen and had had a very good life, I still felt guilty about not being there for her at the end. She’d been gone for almost three years now, and the house felt way too empty without her. I’d been thinking lately about rescuing a dog from one of the shelters in Arcata or Eureka, but I wasn’t sure whether that was the best idea, not with so many elements of my life so utterly up in the air.

Maybe my avoidance of making a decision about getting another dog was my way of refusing to accept that my mother and grandmother truly were gone. At the moment, it was easy to tell myself that they still might come back, and therefore adding a dog to the household without their input just didn’t feel right.

My feet somehow found their way up the stairs, taking me past the bedrooms and over to a second, much narrower staircase, the one that led to the attic.

I hadn’t gone up there even once since my return to Silver Hollow. If anyone had asked, I probably would have said that the place always gave me the creeps and there was no need for me to explore the space, not really.

Deep down, though, I knew I’d been avoiding the attic because that was where my grandmother stored her journals.

She’d told me once that her mother had given her that very first diary on her twelfth birthday, saying it was always good to write things down so they wouldn’t be forgotten. My grandmother had stuck with the practice throughout her life, purchasing a new one whenever the previous journal’s pages had been filled. When I’d asked her about it when I was a child, she’d told me that even if Silver Hollow didn’t seem like the most exciting place in the world, that didn’t mean there wasn’t still plenty in our little town to keep her occupied.

Now I found myself praying that she’d clearly documented any of her encounters with the mystical beasts in our local woods, just so I might be able to discover some words of wisdom to guide me through my current situation.

Unlike a lot of attics, ours had always been very tidy. Sure, it had the usual collection of old steamer trunks and unused furniture and boxes of holiday decorations that seemed to inhabit attic spaces the world over, but ours were stacked in neat piles or placed up against the walls, ensuring there would always be a clear path to follow.

That was why I could walk directly to an old rolltop desk and lift the lid, and find the stacks of journals hidden within. And those truly were stacks, at least forty in all, maybe more. My grandmother would write in a journal until it was filled, which meant many of them covered more than one year at a time. Good thing, I supposed, since otherwise I would have had more like seventy of the things to wrangle.

I found an empty box and put all of the journals inside, thinking I’d take them downstairs where I could peruse them someplace a little more comfortable. Yes, there were a couple of cast-off chairs up in the attic, but none of them looked like very good places to sit for an extended period of time.

The box was heavier than I’d thought it would be. Still, I managed to get it down the first flight of stairs and then down the next, where I staggered the last few feet into the dining room and dumped it on the table there. Since I was all by myself in the house, I hadn’t sat down to eat at the long walnut table since I’d come back from college, instead taking my solitary meals in front of the TV in the family room off the kitchen.

It took me a while to organize all the journals in chronological order, but in a way, that was all right. Doing so allowed me to focus on something that felt almost mindless…and postponed the moment when I’d actually need to start paging through the things.

Eventually, they were arranged from oldest to newest, though, which meant I needed to get down to the real work.

This was nothing like searching on the internet. No, I had to skim each entry, doing my best to keep an eye out for any descriptions of encounters with legendary beasts in the woods. I found one from a day less than a week after her fourteenth birthday, and in that instance, the unicorn had come to her and laid its head in her lap, just like it had happened for me and my mother.

Not for the first time, I wondered why the creature seemed to do that with all of us, even though it had approached Mary Welling when she was long past being a young teen. Was it only that it had found someone who resonated with it, and once the connection had been made, the unicorn had known it would be easier to reestablish that bond with succeeding generations?

I had no idea. Trying to figure out the motivations of an animal that wasn’t even supposed to exist wasn’t the easiest thing in the world.

The next encounter after the initial one was with a manticore, a meeting that had frightened my grandmother’s seventeen-year-old self. I could see why; seeing a creature with the face of a man, the body of a lion, and a scorpion’s stinger blocking your path through the dark woods wasn’t the sort of thing most people would calmly handle. Luckily, it had seemed friendly enough before it disappeared back into the forest.

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