Read Goldengrove for Free Online

smiled and touched her lips, entrusting me with another secret.
    That was when I awoke, seasick, drenched, and shipwrecked, as if the knotted sheets were a sail on which I’d washed ashore. I longed to slip back into the dream in which I might catch up with Margaret.
    I counted the hours till morning, then the minutes and seconds, until I got dizzy and lay there thinking of how Margaret and I used to play those little-kid games of pain and endurance, twisting one another’s arm until the loser cried out. Now I was playing against myself, but even so, I gave in. I got out of bed and wandered through the house, tripping over the books and shoes no one bothered to pick up, as if there was no particular spot where anything belonged.
    Our house had always been neat before, but now our possessions had taken advantage of our moment of weakness. In the dark, the house grew more corridors and corners, and blackness scrambled the map of how one room led to the next. Margaret had told me that the woman who owned the house before Mom’s parents saw a ghost that warned her she would die if she stopped building on additions, which eventually she did.
    I used to be scared of the house at night, not of killers or ghosts, but of my own power to imagine something watching me from the shadows. Those fears were gone completely. What could the shadows be hiding? Now I wished I could meet a ghost with a message from my sister. I loved the mysterious creaks and groans. I hurried toward them on the chance that the mouse in the wall might be Margaret’s spirit. Margaret had always loved ghost stories, and now our lives had become one. But it was a ghost story in reverse, a ghost story in which the living were praying to be haunted.
    It didn’t matter how much noise I made. I knew that no one was sleeping. Insomnia was our language. We’d worked out a kind of system—an etiquette, you might say. When one of my parents roamed the house, the others would stay in bed and let my mother sit at the silent piano or leave my father to open and shut the refrigerator door. But if I was awake, alone, one of them would get up and find me in the dark.
    The only semi-comforting part was that we didn’t have to talk. They’d been dreaming about her, too. The mystery of death, the riddle of how you could speak to someone and see them every day and then never again, was so impossible to fathom that of course we kept trying to figure it out, even when we were unconscious.
    Eventually we’d go back to our rooms and lie in the dark and pretend, for the others’ sake, to sleep. Which, I vaguely remembered, was how you fell asleep. First you pretended, then you were. The tricky part was that thinking about pretending to sleep meant you were still awake.
    One night, I heard Margaret knock on the wall between our rooms. I got up, as I always had, to see what my sister wanted. I was halfway out the door before I realized that a whole new dream had found a way to torment me.
    I waited for dawn, but only because I had forgotten how hard mornings were. For a second, I’d feel normal. Then came the dim awareness of something off, out of place. Then the truth came crashing in, and that was it for the rest of the day. Sunlight was a reproof. Shouldn’t I feel better than I had in the dead of night?
    I couldn’t remember simple words, the purpose of household objects. I used to like helping my father cook, but now I’d stare into a drawer and wonder which one was the garlic press and which one was the corkscrew. I’d go to the living room, only to find myself pointing the mobile phone at the TV and pressing and pressing and pressing.
    Violet and Samantha phoned to ask if I wanted to go somewhere. It took me forever to recognize their voices. I’d forgotten why I’d liked them and what we used to do. They’d mention movies, a party. Violet’s parents were going away. Samantha’s mom had offered to drive us to the mall. I’d think, Their mothers told them to call.