That’s where she got it: Margaret. That’s where she got the name.
I can’t even imagine how that must have felt for my mother: Margaret naming her own baby after the one my mother had just lost. Singing that exact same song to her over and over and over again, pushing on a bruise so it could never really heal. It wasn’t intentional, I know, but Margaret was always listening, always remembering. Always mirroring what she saw the rest of us do, rocking her own little Ellie in her arms, silent and still.
“Were you depressed?” I ask now, tears in my eyes. “Mom, of course you would be—”
Looking back, I realize now that my mother was here, with us, but she wasn’t actually with us. Not really. Margaret and I were always on our own: making ourselves breakfast in the morning and wandering around the house at night. Playing near the water and walking to the park alone, hand in hand, crossing busy streets of traffic without a parent in sight.
Always in our nightgowns, even long after morning had passed.
It seemed so idyllic back then, like some kind of fairy tale. There’s no way we could have known what was happening, what was really going on. Like the Lost Boys of Peter Pan, calling out for mother, our freedom was an illusion.
What it really was, was neglect.
“No,” my mother says, shaking her head, a sad little squeak erupting from somewhere deep in her throat. “No, it wasn’t that. It was something more than that.”
Losing Ellie was the moment we lost my mother, too. The moment everything changed. Even then I felt it, though I didn’t understand. That feeling of death that was always there, always present, swollen and bloated and hovering over everything like it was just biding its time, waiting to claim one of us next. The strangeness of it, of her, settling over the house, like we had all morphed into those plush fabric dolls, buttons for eyes, moving through the motions like nothing had happened.
Like none of us were really us anymore.
“I tried to tell your father that something wasn’t right,” she continues. “That I was feeling things, thinking things, that were starting to scare me.”
I suddenly remember the sound of my mother’s voice that night, seeping through my father’s office door as I stood on the other side of it, listening. The little beg that erupted from the back of her throat.
“You don’t know what it’s like. Henry, you don’t understand.”
I always thought she was talking about me walking through the house at night: eyes open, body rigid. It’s dangerous to wake a sleepwalker. I always thought she was saying that he didn’t understand what it was like living with me, dealing with me. That she was afraid of me.
But that wasn’t the case. That wasn’t the case at all.
She was afraid of herself.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
“What did you do?” I whisper, the reality of what my mother is trying to tell me making the blood turn solid in my veins. “Mom, what did you do?”
I can hear the thumping of my own heart in my ears, like holding your nose and plunging underwater; I watch as she hugs herself, those long, thin fingers digging into the skin of her arms, and think back to that final night with Margaret again. It had been so hot, too hot, our bodies sticking together with sweat in my bed. I think about the way she had whined in the bathtub—“How much longer?”—and my mother’s fingers trailing across the cool water, leaving behind little ripples in her wake, like the fin of a shark barely breaching the surface.
“Not much longer,” she said. “We’ll be comfortable soon.”
“By morning?”
And then that smile again: sad and resigned, like someone so far past her breaking point. Someone who knew, deep down, she was about to do something wrong. Something terrible.
“Sure. By morning.”
I stare at my mother from across the room now, finally letting the pieces fall into place. She lets out a little wet choke, lower lip trembling, and something about the way the moonlight is hitting her face through the windows wiggles another memory free. It’s that dream again; that dream that kept repeating itself in the months immediately after Margaret died. But it wasn’t a dream at all, was it? Instead, it was a memory that emerged disjoined and unclear, like a reflection in a shattered mirror, fragments reflecting back to me as I lay in bed, restless and thrashing.
Dr. Harris had told me, after all, that sleepwalkers can sometimes remember: “It’s like recalling a dream.”
It’s of the two of us outside, Margaret and me, the glow of the moon making our nightgowns shine. Standing at the edge of the water, hand in hand, Margaret twisting her neck to stare at me as if asking permission before turning back around and facing the marsh. It always stopped there, the dream, but now I can see the rest of it: Margaret taking a slow step forward and sending a wave of ripples toward my mother, standing before us, water lapping at her calves. That white robe dripping, translucent against her skin, as she stretched out her arms and beckoned us forward.