Aunt Ari's kitchen always smells of burnt sage and cinnamon. I wasn't sure it was a normal combination, but I found it calming though even the normal calm it usually gave me couldn't get me out of the ravine of my mind. I sat at the table, unconsciously playing with my oatmeal, while everyone which were my aunt and grandmother did their own thing. Aunt checking her e-mails, and grandmother doing her tea ritual. She's into tea making; it's the only time she isn't hovering over me.
"You are quiet this morning," grandmother comments out of the blue, breaking whatever semblance of quiet was in the room.
"I am always quiet."
"Not like this, you are a different quiet since you went to town," she states. I almost lose my cool at the dread that climbs up my spine.
I knew what she was doing, she was fishing, she needed facts to prove she was right. I didn't answer, there wasn't an answer to give for what was happening to me. I didn't tell her about the shadow. I wasn't sure why.
I wasn't sure what I would have even said, and let's not talk about the nightmares, before there were just that, nightmares. But now they seem so real, the monsters in them never fully making an appearance, but when it does I can feel a suffocating fear, and the worst part, it's just like me, it's doing what I can with the shadows. I tell myself it's my imagination, the novelty of whatever this power is, but even I can tell that's a feeble attempt on my part.
"Nothing is wrong grandmother, I just didn't sleep well," I reply.
She doesn't say anything right away. She just watches me over the rim of her teacup, the way she does when she's deciding whether to let something go for the moment or press for details, and I knew she wasn't going to drop this without a satisfactory answer. I braced for her to ask about the nightmares. Or worse about last night, about the noise, about the moment my own shadow stretched across the doorframe and, for half a breath, it wasn't my shadow anymore. It was two girls, young, maybe ten or eleven, doubled over laughing at something just out of view. One of them was unmistakably Aunt Ari, younger than I'd ever seen her, gap-toothed and shrieking with laughter. The other girl turned, just slightly, just enough for me to catch her profile.
My mother.
Gone before I could even be sure I'd seen it. I'd stumbled back so fast I nearly knocked the lamp off the side table, and in trying to catch it, I'd nearly gone down the stairs instead. I wasn't exactly quiet about it. And I'm sure grandmother smells my fear this morning and is enjoying my squirming.
"Mm," is all she says instead, setting the cup down. "You've been saying that a lot lately."
"Saying what?"
"That you didn't sleep well." She doesn't look at me when she says it she's looking at the tea, like the answer's in there somewhere. "You said it yesterday too."
I don't have anything to say to that, because she's right, and there's no version of the truth I can hand her that doesn't end with her never letting me out of her sight again. Especially not this, not the fact that for one impossible second I'd gotten to watch my mother laugh, young and easy and alive, in a house I didn't even know she'd grown up in.
"I'm just adjusting," I say instead. "New town, new house. It's a lot."
"Mm," she says again, the same sound, but it means something different this time, something closer to I don't believe you, but I'll let you keep it for now. She goes back to her tea. Aunt Ari doesn't look up from her phone, but I catch the small line between her eyebrows that means she heard every word of it too.