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Arousing from the most profound of slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some dream. Yet, in a second afterward, (so frail may that web have been) we remember not that we have dreamed.
—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Pit and the Pendulum”
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I’d zoned out while cooking the eggs again.
The smoke alarm blared as Mom yelled down the stairs. “Aubrey? Everything okay?”
“Everything but the eggs,” I yelled back. I shut off the burner, waved a dish towel in front of the smoke detector until it stopped blaring, then salvaged what I could of my fried eggs onto my plate and scraped the rest into the trash.
Mom trudged down the stairs. She was dressed in her pants and blouse for work, hair and makeup already done, but her eyes betrayed her exhaustion. Had she even slept?
She gave me a weary smile and headed for the coffeepot I’d set brewing. “I heard from your dad. He should be home tomorrow night.”
“Great.” I smiled back. He’d been gone a week this time—some trip to Europe. These days, his tech sales job took him all over the place. He’d freelanced so much the past few years, I wasn’t even sure what tech he was selling now. Probably computer chips or something.
Mom’s gaze caught on the notebook I had spread open on the counter. She glanced over at me as she grabbed a travel mug from the cabinet. “I haven’t seen you with that in a while.” Her words were guarded—worried.
I couldn’t blame her. When my older sister Emery first went missing two years ago, I’d found this half-used notebook of hers lying out on her desk and obsessed over it, convinced something in there would help us find her, that she’d left it out as a clue.
A few days later, they determined she’d drowned in a late-night swim at the beach. Several people had seen her go into the water alone, but she never came out. Her notebook didn't hold clues for me to puzzle out, no mystery to solve—she was gone, her death just a senseless accident.
I did my best to smile back. “Nightmare again. Got me thinking about her. I thought maybe flipping through her notes might help settle me.”
Not that I wasn’t always thinking about her. We all were. We just didn’t say it anymore.
Mom set down her steaming mug of coffee and moved toward me. “The nightmare with the whirlpool? I thought those had stopped.”
Now she really was worried.
I shrugged. “They had.”
For a while after Emery died, I had the same nightmare several times a week… Emery on the shore with waves lapping at her feet, right before a whirlpool sucked her in. Sometimes she even whispered lines from a Poe story—specific lines, from “The Pit and the Pendulum.” At first, like with the journal, I’d obsessed over that dream, convinced it was Emery trying to tell me something. But eventually, my therapist helped me realize that it was part of my grieving, a denial that she was gone. People had seen Emery at the beach, had seen her go into the water. They didn’t find her body, but the gulf was big, with lots of currents… and creatures, though I hated to think about that. Nothing mystical had happened here—just a stupid, sucky tragedy we had to live with. She wasn’t coming back.
Once I accepted that, the nightmares stopped. It had been months since the last one, until last night.
Mom pulled me close and kissed my forehead. “I’ll call Dr. Lansing and see if she can fit us in this afternoon.”
I pulled away. “No, I’m okay, Mom. Really.”
Mom looked me right in the eyes. “Your dad and I miss her too, Aubs. So much. If you don’t want to see Dr. Lansing today, that’s okay… but please talk to us when you’re struggling. Healing is a together thing, remember?” She brushed my hair back from my face.
I stared at her for a moment, feeling grateful again for the amazing parents I’d been born to. I’d seen tragedies like this destroy families, but as broken as we’d been by this, my parents had never once failed to be there for me, even though they were grieving, too.
I nodded. “You know that goes both ways, right? You haven’t been sleeping well.” Staring at Mom brought those dark circles under her eyes into focus. Not that she wasn’t still pretty, but… she looked even more sleep deprived than usual. Mom’s hours at her part-time job as a dental receptionist hadn’t changed, and Mom and Dad’s interactions with each other (and with me) were as loving as they’d always been, but I could see they were both hiding extra stress—more than just the grief we’d all come to know. We were no strangers to stress in this family, but this seemed like something new. Maybe finances were tight or something? It would explain the stress and Dad’s extra traveling, but I’d been hesitant to ask.
Mom studied me for a moment, then sighed. “You’re right, but you’re not the parent. Some things aren’t yours to carry. Please believe me, your dad and I are fine—we are fine—and this is nothing for you to worry about, okay?” She kissed my forehead again and turned to put the lid on her coffee, then grabbed her purse from the kitchen table before crossing back and pulling me into a hug. “I’m glad you told me about the nightmare. I’m here if you want to talk. You know that, right?”
I hugged her back. “Yes, I know.”
Mom pulled away and slid her purse onto her shoulder, her eyes still locked on mine. “If you change your mind about the appointment, text me. I love you.”
I nodded. “Thanks, Mom. Love you, too.”
She headed out the door.
I cut off a bite of half-burnt egg with my fork and shoved it in my mouth, then set my plate on the table and turned back to Emery’s notebook.
It was just a purple composition book she’d used for math notes—Algebra 2, given the handwritten label on the front and the pages of scrawled math notes inside. But this notebook was one she’d handpicked from the store, with a raven on the front and little birds decorating the corners of the pages. It was also filled with her bored-in-class doodles, along with many still-blank pages and a few torn remnants where it looked like she’d ripped a few pages out at some point. It was just so Emery, all of it, and sometimes I still flipped through it just to see her handwriting and fill some of the ache. Some of her doodles made me laugh, like her quickly sketched dachshund that looked more like a bobble-headed sausage, and others were actually really good. Emery had always had a knack for sketching when she took time on it.
There was one page of the notebook I came back to, over and over—-the one I’d obsessed over in the beginning, because it was written for me. Literally. On the top of the page, she’d written in cursive: Tell Aubrey. The rest of the page was full of quotes from books—from Poe, from Bronte, from Shakespeare, and more. I assumed they were little clippings of her favorites that she’d planned to share with me for use in the radio show I did at school. I’d just started doing the show back then, my freshman year—a thirty-minute broadcast every Monday afternoon, where I analyzed literature and talked about what deeper concepts could be learned from some of my favorite books and poems. It was absolutely nerdy, but I had a small collection of listeners—-or so Mr. Pierce, the librarian, said.
Emery had been the one to suggest the show’s concept to Mr. Pierce, who also ran the media center and AV rooms. He’d needed a show to fill one of the local edutainment broadcast spots the school had set up. Literature had always been a love Emery and I shared—especially Poe and Shakespeare, favorites she’d introduced to me well before they came up in school—but since she was busy with cheer practice after school, she put my name forward instead. She insisted I’d be great at it.
Turned out, I was great at it. Emery had been so excited that I’d landed a gig like that my first year of high school, and so thrilled to see me do well at it. She was certain it would build up my resume and open me to future opportunities. It also officially branded me the LitNerd of the school from ninth grade on, but I didn’t care. It was better than the other thing I came to be known for by the end of that first year of high school—the girl whose older sister had drowned.
I opened to that page of Emery’s notebook again, letting my eyes linger on each of the quotes and sketches.
I'd recognized the Shakespeare quotes right away when I found this page—the quote written around the bird was from Julius Caesar, and the one in the broken heart was from Hamlet.
The Poe quote at the bottom, I’d also known immediately—a segment from his poem “A Dream within a Dream.”
I wouldn’t have known the Jane Eyre quotes at first, because I hadn’t yet read the book when Emery wrote this page of notes, which was probably why she had labeled those for me.
I’d since read Jane Eyre twice over, and loved it. She must’ve known I would.
It ached that she wasn’t around to talk about it.
The quote she’d written in the left margin had taken me longer to identify. I’d eventually given up on trying to figure it out on my own, and looked it up online. It was Cassius Hueffer’s section from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters… another one I hadn’t read but instantly loved when I did. Emery had known me so well.
Emery was the one who originally got me hooked on Poe and Shakespeare, and with the show, it made sense why she’d been collecting quotes for me. But sometimes when I looked—really looked—at this page, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was some other reason Emery had written these for me, some deeper meaning. Something on the page niggled at me.
There had been a glimpse in one of my dreams, once, of the notebook open to this page on Emery’s desk, with a breeze coming in her open window, fluttering the page to where her sketched birds looked like they were gently moving, the page making a rustling sound almost like whispered words…
I slammed the notebook shut and shook my head. I didn’t do that anymore, the wild conjectures, the looking for patterns or meanings that didn't exist. I’d finally faced the fact that there were no hidden messages, nothing that would help us find Emery or bring her back. She’d been on the beach alone that night, and we might never know why she’d gone out to the gulf so late, but her death itself was no mystery. It was a senseless accident—not a disappearance. There were no clues to solve, because she wasn’t missing. She was gone, and she wasn’t coming back.
It was a painful truth, but it was the truth, and I couldn’t afford to slide back into questioning it. I didn’t know why I was even so worked up today, even with the nightmare. I knew it didn’t mean anything—just my brain processing grief again, like it had many times before. It came in cycles. I knew that. I was just in a weird mood today.
Maybe that bite of burnt egg was getting to me.
My phone dinged from where it was plugged in on the counter. A text from Mom.
I texted her back.
She replied.
I put the phone down, then closed Emery’s notebook and left it on the counter. My ride to school would be there soon, and I still wasn’t dressed.
I crossed to the table and scraped the remainder of my egg into the trash, then washed the plate and put it away. I hadn’t eaten much, but I didn’t have much of an appetite today, anyway.
I headed upstairs to get ready.
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AUTHOR NOTE:
Welcome to Aubrey Lance, S.S.—Season 1: The Vanishings! I’m so excited to share this story with all of you!
This entire season of Aubrey Lance will be posting right here on my forum, free to read to anyone who wants to!
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Happy reading!
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