The Cure for Dreaming(19)

I buttoned up for the outside chill. “How did my father look when you saw him, Carl?”

Carl smiled. “Bloody.”

“Bloody?” I asked with a gasp.

“He was leeching some woman, and he had her head locked into a metal contraption to keep her still.” Carl tilted his head back to demonstrate, his hands clamped around his temples beneath his curly brown hair. “The leech had wiggled out of the tube wrong and bloodied up the woman’s lip, so your father was trying to get the little bugger to travel down to her gums. His hands were smeared in bright red blood.”

I lowered my shoulders and steadied my breathing. The fact that the blood was leech related and had nothing to do with fangs and lacerated throats was the best news I’d heard all day.


“I STILL CAN’T BELIEVE HOW MANY TIMES YOU’VE READ Dracula,” said Frannie from beneath a hissing gas lamp in the dim hallway of my house. “One too many times, that’s for sure.”

The soles of Father’s house slippers whispered their way from his office in the back. I kept my face turned toward the tan rug by the front door as long as I could, but then Frannie gave my back a gentle pat, and I gained the courage to raise my chin.

Father—regular Father, not the cadaverous fiend with the rat-fur beard—frowned at me in the hallway.

“You’re not reading that ghastly novel again, are you, Olivia?” he asked. “Haven’t you had enough of Dracula by now?”

“Yes.” I gulped down a nasty taste of bile. “Quite enough.”

Carl stuffed his hands into his coat pockets. “You should come to supper again on Sunday, Livie,” he said. “Our parents are celebrating—what is it, Frannie?—their hundredth anniversary now?”

“Their twentieth,” said Frannie with a roll of her eyes at Carl’s exaggeration. “Yes, come. We’re planning to sit down at five o’clock. We’d love to have you join us.”

“I’d love to be there. Thank you.”

Carl opened the door to take his leave, but before following him, Frannie grabbed my hand and leaned in close with a whisper: “Come back to my house if you need anything else. At any time.”

I mustered a weak smile. “Thank you.”

They closed the door and went on their way.

I stood with my back to Father, facing the exit through which my friends had just vanished while the cool taste of the outside air lingered on my tongue.

“I was so worried about you this afternoon,” said Father in a voice cozy and warm with paternal concern.

Despite his tone, I didn’t dare turn around.

“Why did you run away like that?” he asked. “You just left me standing there.”

“What did you expect me to do? Thank you?”

“No—but you made me worry something had gone terribly wrong. Mr. Reverie assured me he found you. He said you had simply been spooked by your new view of the world. But still . . . I was troubled.”

I stared at the door.

“Why won’t you turn around and look at me, Olivia? Do I look different to you?”

I squeezed my eyes shut and swallowed. “I . . . um . . .”

“What?”

“I . . . I see the world . . . the way it truly is. The roles of men and women are clearer than they have ever been before.” I slipped my hands inside my warm coat sleeves and clung to the woolen lining. “I saw a storefront—women, suffrage—a cage.”

“What?”

“I saw a cage.”

“Suffrage is like a restrictive cage, you mean?”

I pursed my lips. “All is well.”

“You understand your place in the world, then?”

I opened my eyes and again peered at the door to the world beyond. “Yes. I understand precisely where I do and don’t belong.”

Father breathed a sigh. “Thank heavens. It worked.” Another deep sigh, this one accompanied by a small belch. “Well, in light of this new outlook on life, I’ll be more than happy to allow you to accompany Percy Acklen to the party tomorrow evening. As long as you promise to be well behaved—and to represent our family with utmost care in front of both Percy and the Eiderlings—I’ll have Gerda take a note to the Acklen household tomorrow morning.”

“Thank you.”

Silence wedged between us again. I assumed he was waiting for me to turn around and face him, perhaps even to fling my arms around his shoulders and tell him, You were right, Father. My life is so much better now that I hallucinate and can no longer articulate my anger.

When I showed no signs of moving, he retreated down the hall, his house slippers swishing across the floorboards.

“Time to ready yourself for bed, Olivia,” he said as he went. “I’ll be finishing my nightcap in my office if you need me.”

My stomach clenched into a knot. I steadied myself against the little marble-topped side table we used for collecting mail, and my palm crinkled the copy of the newspaper that featured the illustration of Henri and me. Farther down on the page, a headline I had failed to see that morning jumped out at me in boldfaced letters:

WHY THE WOMEN OF THIS STATE

SHOULD BE SILENCED

The author: Judge Percival R. Acklen.

Percy’s father.

I grabbed the paper off the table and tore up the staircase.