Page 16 of My Heart Will Find You

To the side was a young woman. She had on a ruffled dress of light blue, the square neck quite low. Her dark hair was piled prettily on top of her head. She was bent over a wooden embroidery frame and sewing on a sampler.I need not sell my soul to buy bliss, it read. Below that was the author’s nameCharlotte Brontë, but the finalëhadn’t yet been sewn.

She looked up and saw Etta. “You’ve come at last.” She stood up. She was Alicia. It was Etta’s sister’s face, body, voice.

The young woman took a step and Etta saw her limp. She picked up a silver-topped cane and took a few more steps.

“Alicia,” Etta whispered, and her eyes filled with tears. Her sister was always ready to listen to people’s problems, always had a solution. “I’ve had the most awful dream. I got married, but he says I’m old and ugly and your parasol was cut and—”

The woman let her cane fall to the floor, and she opened her arms. “Come talk to me.” Gratefully, Etta took a step forward, then...

She woke up.

3

When Etta woke, she wasn’t sure where she was.This is becoming a habit, she thought. Sunlight was peeping around the curtains. The fabric was a print of Western American animals: buffalo, prairie dogs, eagles.Teddy Roosevelt’s delight, she thought. The name made her think of Martha’s deceased husband, Theodore.

But wait, no, that wasn’t real. All that had been a dream. By noon, she knew she’d have forgotten the whole thing. It was just that right now, this minute, her long dream was very clear. Sights, smells, voices, people. There was Alice who was Alicia, and Sophie and Freddy, two women she hardly knew but who had seemed like long-lost friends.

And her father was there. As a preacher! She’d have to call him and tell him. Her introverted, crowd-hating father as a pastor! It was a funny idea. His loves were numbers (“something a person candependon”) and the Old West (“where men were Men”). So what kind of sermons did Reverend Tobias give? How to balance accounts? Or did he give history lectures on what really happened at the O.K. Corral? Maybe he’d do a show-and-tell about his favorite, Wyatt Earp. He’d tell how he was six feet tall and that he never drank but ate a lot of ice cream.

The thoughts were making her smile. She heard a clatter downstairs and realized she had to quit reminiscing and get up. She had to earn her keep.Just like Freddy does, she thought, then laughed.

It was when she threw back the covers and put her feet on the floor that she felt pain. “What in the world?” When she moved, she hurt. From head to toe, she ached. “What did I do last night?” she muttered. She twisted her upper body. Everything was sore.

When she stood up, she closed her eyes in pain. She felt like that time she and Lester had loaded three dozen fifty-pound boxes into his pickup. She’d lifted, pulled, pushed, and dragged those boxes. The next morning, she could hardly move. Worse was that she’d had to listen to one of Lester’s lectures of “You kids today are too soft.”

Etta limped across the room. There was a tall mirror, the old-fashioned kind on a stand, in the corner. She had on a long T-shirt she’d found in a drawer, and she saw a bruise on her leg. When she lifted the shirt, she saw huge dark bruises on her backside. “Damned wagon!” she said.

But that couldn’t be. She hadn’t really been on a wagon. She was sore because... She took a moment to come up with a reason. Obviously, during the night she’d been sleepwalking. That made sense. Scary lockdown, surrounded by strangers, separated from the people she loved. It had all upset her more than she thought it would. The stress, the uncertainly, had caused her to have a dream so vivid that she’d left the bed and enacted it.

She started to turn away but then looked back at the mirror. The man in her dream—her husband!—had injured her ego badly. No, she wasn’t flamboyantly beautiful like Caroline-Cornelia, but Etta had always been called pretty. Not “plain” at all. Good skin, bright blue eyes, thick, dark hair. One time a boy told her she had the most beautiful lips he’d ever seen. Of course a boy making a pass couldn’t be trusted, but still...

She looked about the room. There didn’t appear to be anything that would give her bruises and muscle aches, but that didn’t erase the fact that she had them.

Her eyes lit on the trunk at the foot of the bed. It was the one she’d seen in the back of Max’s wagon.

She corrected herself. She had seen the trunk earlier, so she’d incorporated it into her dream. Wincing from pain, she knelt in front of the trunk and opened it. It was full of children’s things: books about dangerous adventures, a pocketknife, a few X-men figures, and a lot of animals made by Scheich. She could imagine birthday and Christmas gifts. All in all, it was a time capsule of when Ben was a boy.

As she moved things around, she saw an old package at the bottom. It was in brown paper tied with jute string. It wasn’t hers so she wasn’t going to open it, but then she saw that a corner was torn. A piece of lace was sticking out.

Etta pulled out the package. The paper was so old it was disintegrating. As it cracked and fell away in her hands, the lace cascaded out. It was the little shrug she’d worn at her wedding. The one her husband had so carefully placed inside the trunk.

She sat back on her heels and ran her hand over her eyes. There had to be a rational explanation for this. Her body was sore and bruised, so it was clear that during the night she’d not stayed in bed. She’d moved about. In her sleepwalking, had she opened Ben’s old trunk, seen the lace jacket, and incorporated it in her dream?

Yes, of course. That had to be what happened.

She got up, took a shower in the hottest water she could bear, put on light makeup so she was less “plain,” then straightened the room. She told herself that she’d buy some acid free, archival paper, rewrap the lace jacket, and put it back in the trunk. How odd that the package seemed to have never been opened.

By the time she got down the stairs, groaning at every step, it was almost 9:00 a.m, late for her.

She found Henry in his library on his big leather couch, half a dozen books around him, bamboo lap desk and pens nearby. He had on reading glasses that he removed as soon as he saw her.

“Good morning. Sleep well?”

As she sat down on the chair across from him, she gave a groan. “Sorry. I seem to have done some sleepwalking last night.”

He was concerned. “Is that usual?”

“Never happened before that I know of. I’ll call Dad today and ask. Maybe I did it as a child. But anyway, I want to ask him how he’d like being a preacher.”

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