The Truth Against the World (5 page)

Ar lan y môr mae rhosus cochion
.

I sat bolt upright and looked around. Of course, nobody was there. My room was dark and empty; the house was silent. It had sounded like … well, it had sounded like Gee Gee, singing me to sleep the way she had when I was little. I touched my face and felt tears on my cheeks.

When I lay down to go back to sleep, I couldn't help hearing the haunting, soft melody as I slipped into dreams, a woman's soft voice singing low and sweet.

Ar lan y môr mae rhosus cochion
Ar lan y môr mae lilis gwynion
Ar lan y môr mae ‘nghariad inne
Yn cysgu'r nos a chodi'r bore.

Beside the sea there are red roses
Beside the sea there are white lilies
Beside the sea my sweetheart lives
Asleep at night, awake at morning.

This dream was different; new. I was walking by the sea. A field of white flowers. My footsteps made no sound, but waves crashed and wind whistled.

The smell of salt air; the faint tang of nearby farmlands. Real enough to touch.

On a clifftop stood a man and a woman. The man, tall and rangy with short brown hair riffled by the breeze. The woman with long black hair and a homespun dress.

Nearer now. The man and woman were Gee Gee and Great-Grandpa John, but younger, like in old photos. The woman held a baby in her arms, and both their heads were bent toward him.

Then somehow there was a little girl standing there, too, but the couple still did not look up. The little girl was thin, frail, and her face was contorted with anguish. She opened her mouth but I couldn't hear what she said. The girl reached out to the couple, but suddenly they receded into the distance. Farther and farther. She turned and looked directly at me, pleadingly. Her eyes were dark little caves of sorrow.

I jerked away in fear. Suddenly the little girl, the couple, the seashore were all gone. The woman with white hair stood before me, but not blurry this time. No, her features were clear, and it was Gee Gee, white hair hanging down long and brittle. The skin-crawling sensation of dread returned, all too familiar, and a black cancerous patch of mold spread over her dress, her limbs, her face, until she was no longer recognizable.

I kicked away the covers, opening my eyes to bright morning light. It was Monday morning, and the sun was streaming through my flimsy curtains onto my bed, making me sweaty. The clock read 7:05 a.m., but I felt as though I'd hardly slept.

I hurried out of bed and into the shower, letting the hot spray rinse the sweat off my body. Drying off afterward, I noticed Gee Gee's lily-scented powder in a small cylindrical container on the edge of the sink. I pulled off the lid and a small cloud of powder drifted into the air. The flowery fragrance was sweet, almost cloying. That had been the smell of her house. Sweet and strong.

Gee Gee was alone in the kitchen, and I slipped quietly into one of the blocky wooden chairs at the kitchen table.

“Good morning, my dear.” She smiled, moving with slow and measured steps across the kitchen with a plate of hot muffins.

“
Bore da
,” I answered, yawning.

Gee Gee set down the muffins and sat down across the table from me, her eyes lingering on my face. “Didn't you sleep well,
cariad
?”

Was it that obvious, again? “It was just a nightmare. A really vivid one,” I said. I couldn't meet her gaze. “There was a little girl, and you and Great-Grandpa John were there with a baby, by the sea, and … ” I realized I didn't want to tell her about the image in the mirror, the spreading darkness. I didn't want her to think I couldn't handle her illness. I didn't want her worrying about me on top of everything. “I guess I still feel weird. I know it's stupid.”

Gee Gee sighed, her expression pensive. “Well, no. It isn't stupid. You're a Davies, through and through, and we Davies women … ” She paused, as if choosing her words carefully. “We've always been sensitive dreamers, you might say.”

A sudden chill sent goose bumps up and down my arms. “It could just be stress,” I pointed out. I didn't want to think about it being anything else.

“Maybe,” Gee Gee said. She lowered her voice, speaking almost too quietly to hear. “But every single Davies woman has been … intuitive, somehow. Our dreams sometimes tell us things that our waking mind won't. That's true for everyone, you know. We're just a little more in tune with it than most people.”

There was a long pause. I took a muffin and turned it around and around in my hands, but suddenly I wasn't hungry.

“It's a blessing and a curse,” she finally said.

I nodded, but I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure I could believe what she was telling me—about my dream, about “Davies women.” It seemed too out there. What if the cancer was affecting her mind now? How would I know?

Then I thought of the dream again, the girl, all alone, and shivered. The baby had to be Grandpa William, but was the girl supposed to be me? I wanted to ask what it meant, but I felt paralyzed.

Gee Gee reached across the table and gripped my hand tightly. “You listen to me, Olwen
fach
. It will be all right. When you feel afraid, remember … ” She trailed off, looking lost for a moment. “Remember this moment. That I'm here with you, holding your hand. You aren't alone.”

I wasn't sure whether she was talking about my dream now or the whole situation. Cancer. Death. So many questions were clamoring in the back of my mind, but all that came out was a tiny voice I hardly recognized, asking, “What will I do?”

“You'll understand one day. Some things … can't be explained in words.” Not for the first time, I got the strangest feeling that she meant something more than she was saying outright. “But it does get easier. Maybe not right away, and there are always hard times in everybody's lives.” She gave me a long look. “It'll be all right, I promise.”

I could hear the conviction in her voice. But I still felt lost.

7

Cof a lithr, llythr a geidw.

Memory slips, letters remain.

Welsh proverb

Gareth was in the schoolyard with Anita Kessler. She was tossing her hair around the way she always did, telling him she was breaking up with him, which struck him as funny because he hadn't remembered going out with her in the first place. That was when he realized he was dreaming.

He laughed, and was about to let her in on the joke, when the scene shifted to something else entirely. Everything went dark, and he felt like he was falling, his stomach flipping with vertigo. A wind from nowhere whirled around him, buffeting him from all sides. Something that looked like white fabric whipped past his face. The smell of the sea was all around him. Then he was moving more and more quickly while a dizzy whirl of images zipped past like a movie on fast-forward: a cairn, his parents standing together in the distance, an inscribed piece of slate, the huge slabs of the cromlech, a hole yawning darkly into the ground and growing ever closer.

“Slow down,” Gareth found himself saying, fear making his voice break. “Stop.”

The blurring around him began to resolve into discernible images. The fact that the dream seemed to be obeying him was somehow even more frightening.

When the whirling stopped, he was standing over the dark gray slate plaque. He felt sad, but it was a distant sadness, like the memory of a feeling rather than the feeling itself. Then abruptly he was falling again, for a timeless instant, the cromlech a deep dark pit in front of him, surrounding him with walls of stone he couldn't see. More images flashed past him: the small, frail girl in the white dress; his dad's worried face, seeming tiny and far away. A whispery voice, a song on the wind. Who? Who was it? But everything was slipping through his fingers now, the images disintegrating.

Whispers echoing in his ears, he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

He woke up the following morning when the family cat, Fortran, jumped on the bed and meowed loudly, right in his face, five minutes before his alarm was set to beep.

“Okay, okay.” Gareth sat up, then dragged himself to his feet. “Seriously rude awakening.” It was unfair that Fortran picked on him just because everyone else had left for the day.

The ginger cat kept meowing frantically at his heels the entire way downstairs to the kitchen. He scooped her some dry cat food and then poured a bowl of cereal for himself. Just to be contrary, he scarfed it down while standing at the counter, since nobody was around to cajole him to sit like a civilized human.

He still had a few minutes left, so he went straight to the computer. It had been nearly five days; maybe the other Olwen—Wyn—had finally answered his message. Or maybe she'd decided to ignore it. Perhaps she hadn't even seen it. Or …

His inbox loaded. A shiver traveled up his spine when he saw
Olwen Nia Evans
at the top of the list of new messages.

“Ridiculous,” he said aloud, but he couldn't help the image that flashed into his mind at that moment: Slate plaque. Dead girl. Had he dreamed about it last night, again? He gave his head a shake and clicked on the email. “Real world, Gareth,” he muttered to himself.

The email was real, at least.

Dear Gareth,

I'm sorry I was a little slow to answer your email. I just have a lot going on right now. You might have some idea, if you've seen my blog.

I'm still shocked there's anyone reading it, let alone someone in London.

It's kind of a cool coincidence, though, because my dad's side of the family is British. Welsh, actually. I know Gareth is a Welsh name, too, so I'm wondering about YOUR story. You've been reading some of my story … So tell me about yourself.

—Wyn

Welsh. Wales. Olwen. It was uncanny.

Just in case, Gareth refreshed the page. Yes, it was as real as his hand in front of his face. And now it was his turn to reply.

The question was, how much of
his
story did he want to tell?

Gareth stared unseeingly out the window of the bus as it pulled away from the stop near his school. All day he'd been trying to figure out how to word his reply to Wyn. He didn't want to sound like a stalker, but he'd read through several of her blog posts and he felt so strangely as if he knew her. Her love of writing. Her great-grandmother's cancer. Her uncanny dreams, with their scenes that sounded so familiar. The fact that she was actually coming to Wales.
Wales
. Of all places. That was the biggest coincidence of all, next to the name thing. But how did you bring that up when you hardly knew someone? He wanted to seem friendly, not pervy, but the messages he composed in his head never looked quite as good onscreen. They all made him sound desperate somehow. And he wasn't trying to flirt, not really.

Anyway, she probably had a boyfriend already. No doubt a tall, tanned California surfer with bleached-blond hair and huge Arnold Schwarzenegger pecs. The diametrical opposite of what he saw in the bus window reflection: a lanky, pale boy with glasses and an unruly mop of curls. He looked down at his hands gripping the top of his rucksack.

None of that mattered, he told himself. They'd established a connection. Now he had to keep up his end. It was only polite.

It had nothing, of course, to do with the coincidences. Nothing to do with the eerie familiarity that washed over him every time he looked at the tiny picture of her on
Born to Wyn
, her long dark hair framing anxious eyes that stared off into the distance
.

Nothing to do with the strong tug he felt from somewhere deep inside his brain, like the pull of a magnet.

He jiggled his leg, annoyed at himself. That was irrational, woo-woo stuff, just like the impulse that had led him to find her website in the first place. He didn't understand it, but that didn't mean anything. He didn't understand a lot of things, and it didn't mean there wasn't a reasonable explanation.

The bus rolled to a halt near the Underground station. Gareth stared out, watching the people climbing on and off the bus and milling around the junk shops, antique stores, pubs, and coffeehouses that lined the streets near the Camden flea market. He saw it every day, but now, he couldn't help imagining it through Wyn's eyes, the throngs of shoppers and buskers and loiterers, the dirty sidewalks he no longer noticed.

He was definitely getting ahead of himself, picturing the two of them wandering the streets together as if they already knew each other, him showing her around like a tour guide as she rushed excitedly from place to place. Her family was probably going straight to Wales, anyway. If so, he'd never even get to meet her.

He was surprised at how disappointed that made him feel.

Of course, that was one place he could start his reply: asking her about her trip. Offering some travel advice. Then he'd just have to see what happened.

The bus cruised past a long block of old-fashioned-looking storefronts: tailors, chip shops, a barber. Gareth's stop was coming up, at the corner next to the Harp and Lion, and he rang the bell before getting to his feet. Slinging his bag over one shoulder, he thudded down the narrow aisle and reached the doors just as they opened into the crisp air and patchy sunlight.

He felt lighter, stepping off the bus.
That's right; shake it off, Gareth
, he told himself.
The weather was nice, and it was Friday, and school was over for the day. And, most importantly, he'd figured out what to put in his email to Wyn.

He walked faster, turning off the main road and into his neighborhood—street after crisscrossing street of brick houses that were nearly identical except for the front gardens and the occasional yard gnome. At St. John's Road, he took a brief detour past the park, checking for Amit.

At the other end of the grassy square, a crowd of his school mates were shouting gleefully. Gareth watched from the sidewalk as Dan Dobbs dribbled the ball toward Amit, the goalkeeper, who was standing in front of two trees that served as the goal. Dobbs fired the ball right at Amit's head.

“Oi!” Amit ducked and the ball went right between the trees, bouncing off the fence behind him. He laughed sheepishly as the others snickered.

“You fell for it again,” Gareth said, walking over to the group.

“Hey, Lewis,” said Dobbs. “We should substitute you in for Patel over here.”

“No way. I'm not giving up my post.” Amit was sweat-drenched and still grinning. “I have the perfect job for you, Gareth. Highly important. It's called Ball Boy. Let me explain it to you.”

“Thanks, but no thanks,” Gareth said. “I've got something to do.”

“Eh? It's an honor to fetch my balls,” Amit said. “I'm offended.”

The rest of the players hooted and Gareth smirked. “I was just on my way home,” he explained. “I have to … get some work done on the computer.”

“No problem, man.” Amit grinned and clapped him on the shoulder. “Say no more. Alone in front of the computer. I know what that's all about.”

“You don't know anything about anything.” Gareth rolled his eyes. He waved at Amit and crossed the street, the players' yells fading with distance. They were funny, but he wasn't in the mood to hang around and joke. His steps quickened. He might have been heading back to the computer, but he suspected he wouldn't be alone. Not quite.

Dear Wyn,
Gareth typed, and stopped. This was harder than he'd thought. He just wasn't good at this kind of thing. And Wyn obviously was, which made him even more nervous. She was the writer. He was just …

You asked about me. Well, okay, but my life is not that exciting, haha! I'm not a writer like you, but here goes. I take the bus to school every day. I like playing football (or as you call it, soccer) and computer games.

You're right about Gareth being a Welsh name. We moved here four years ago from Swansea. That's right, we used to live in Wales, so if you have any questions or need travel advice, just ask. We could Skype sometime if that's easier.

What else? … I want to be a programmer, maybe for computer animation. I live in Camden, which is in North London. Me, my dad, my mum, and my little brother Tommy. My best mate Amit lives a few blocks away. What's your family like? Do you still have family here? (Sorry if that's a nosy question.)

—Your friend, Gareth

He leaned back in the swivel chair. That seemed okay. He'd offered to be helpful. And he'd asked about her family. It was kind of indirect, but he was still wondering about Olwen Nia Evans, about whether maybe Wyn had some family connection to her. That would make the most sense.

He didn't know what else to put. He didn't want to sound too eager.

The front door opened with a rattle of keys and his parents' voices filtered in, Tommy shouting over them about wanting roast chicken for dinner.

Gareth sighed. He should probably just hit
Send
, right now.

No, he should wait and re-read it later, when he'd had some time away from the computer.

This was ridiculous. He reached for the mouse just as Tommy came running in and put cold hands on his stomach.

“Aaagh! Get away.” Gareth elbowed his brother in the ribs.

“What're you doing?” Tommy peered at the message. “Who's Wyn? Do you know her at school? Do you fancy her?” The boy snickered. “I bet you do! You like her!”

“You're jumping to conclusions,” Gareth said, annoyed. “She's just this girl. You don't know her.” He quickly clicked the
Send
button before he could second-guess himself anymore—and before Tommy read any further.

“Eww, are you going to kiss her?” Tommy danced around Gareth's chair. Gareth aimed a kick at his brother's shins but missed.

“Why do you even care?”

“I hear arguing,” their dad shouted from the front hall.

“It's nothing, Dad,” Gareth said loudly. He glared at Tommy, who just laughed again and ran out of the room. The door to the garden slammed a moment later.

It was probably just as well that he'd sent the email. There really wasn't any reason to dither, not if Wyn was going to be coming in just a few weeks, or whenever their summer hols started. The sooner they made plans, the better.

Plans! There he went again. Gareth shook his head, a bit surprised at himself.
Moving a bit quickly, are we, Lewis?
Amit would no doubt approve, but to Amit, girls were a serious pastime. Gareth usually stayed on the sidelines, watching. Amit tried to fix him up with girls from school every once in a while, but it always ended awkwardly, with Gareth realizing that he and the girl had nothing in common.

At least that wasn't the case with Wyn. He already knew they had
something
in common: being Welsh. Partly Welsh, anyway.

A sudden thought struck him, then, and he sat up straight, the springs of the office chair squeaking in protest.

He knew he'd have to wait to find out whether Wyn had any connection with the other Olwen Nia Evans, but what if
he
was connected? What if that was the reason his parents had chosen that hiking spot in the first place? To visit that gravesite? And they didn't tell him for some reason? He felt stupid for not thinking of it before.

Gareth could hear his mum in the kitchen, rattling dishes around. He got up and walked in, his steps purposeful.

“Mum, I've got a question.”

“Yes, my love.” Her blond hair was flying out of its bun as she bustled around the room, setting a package of chicken on the counter and pulling things out of the fridge.