Cora Dreams of Me

September 17: I was sitting on the front porch watching the man across the street walking his dog when Mom's car turned in the driveway. There was someone sitting beside her, a little girl. She was so short that she could barely see over the dashboard, and she kept bouncing up and down in her seat. Mom reached out with her right hand to make her sit still, and I did not see her again until the car stopped in front of the house and the passenger door opened and the little girl got out.

Since I spent the summer with Grandma, I did not go with Mom to the orphanage when she decided to become a foster parent, and I never saw Cora before today, except in a fuzzy black and white snapshot. The little girl who got out of the car did not look anything like the little girl in the picture. Cora has yellow hair and blue eyes like Caitlin, and though she is supposed to be eight, she is no taller than Caitlin was when she died last year, just before her sixth birthday. Looking at Cora, I knew why Mom chose her out of all the other kids at the orphanage.

As the little girl stood in the driveway staring up at the house, the sun caught on something bright, and I saw that she had a shiny metal brace on her right leg. Then I noticed that she held her right arm crooked at her side as if she could not use it. And the wide, blue eyes were not really like Caitlin's at all, because the left one kept crossing, and I knew then that the new girl was not like my sister, because Caitlin was smart, like me, and this new girl was some kind of retard.

I turned and ran into the house. Mom was shouting something at me, but I pretended not to hear. I ran upstairs into my room, slamming the door behind me.

Downstairs I could hear high pitched giggling. Cora was running from room to room exclaiming over the furniture. Though I covered my head with my pillow, I could hear her voice, and she sounded just like Caitlin. She stopped at the room right below mine, Caitlin's room. There was a long pause, then she shrieked with delight. I ground my teeth, trying to block out the sound of this interloper, this not Caitlin, who is going to live with us.

September 19: Mom explained to me that Cora has been living in the orphanage since she was five months old. When she was two months old, her daddy got tired of hearing her cry so he slammed her head against a wall and cracked her skull. Her parents were afraid to tell anyone, so they did not take her to the hospital until days later when she stopped breathing. Mom said that by then there was so much blood inside her skull that the pressure damaged her brain, and even though the surgeons cleaned out the blood and put in a shunt, by then Cora only had about a tenth of her brain left.

Mom said that it is a miracle that Cora is not a vegetable. She said that except for the leg brace and her weak right arm, she is almost an ordinary girl, and it is only because her family will not sign the papers to let the state put her up for adoption that she has been in foster care so long. And then, in an off hand way that did not fool me for a minute, Mom mentioned that Cora has convulsions.

"But the nurse at the clinic said the seizures are nothing to be alarmed about. They don't hurt her, and after fiteen minutes or so she wakes up. If she has one, just make sure she doesn't fall down or hit her head." She smiled, trying to get me to smile back. "It's going to work out, you'll see."

"Sure," I muttered. I wish she had not told me about Cora's daddy. I wanted to hate her for trying to take Caitlin's place, but I can not hate a girl whose daddy slammed her head against a wall.

December 17: Three months have passed. Next week is Christmas and I am painting a picture for my new sister. All that stuff I wrote before about hating her or feeling sorry for her is so stupid. Cora is just like any other kid. I wish I had written it in pencil, so I could erase it, but when I started keeping this diary I said I would never erase because that would be cheating.

The picture I am painting is of a forest. Cora likes animals, so in the picture I have painted lots of animals. There is a squirrel, a rabbit, an owl, a mockingbird, a porcupine, a turkey, a snake, a deer and a wolf with silver hair. The wolf has a glow around him to show that he is not an ordinary wolf, he is a spirit wolf, and that is why the animals are not afraid of him.

Since Cora has lived near the Gulf all her life, I figure she has never seen snow, so I painted snow on the ground. My art teacher says that it is the best thing I have ever painted and she wants me to exhibit it in the talent fair next spring, but I told her it was for Cora. I hope she likes it.

December 25: I finally have something worth writing in my diary, and I do not know where to begin.

It started this morning. Cora loved her picture. She stared at it all day. At dinner she tried to prop it on the table in front of her so that she could look at it while she ate, but Mom told her to put it in her room until after we were finished eating.

Cora is usually a slow eater, but today she shovelled her food down. As soon as I was done she tugged at my sleeve and whispered "Come to my room. I want to show you something."

My picture was propped up on her dresser. She made me stand in front of it and she stood beside me. In the mirror I could see the two of us, me looking the way I always do and her looking backwards, with the picture between us. She put her hand in mine and whispered "Now I have a present for you." Then she started to breathe real hard, the way she does right before she has a seizure, and I felt something like electricity jump from her hand to mine, then I lost control of my body and I was floating through darkness with Cora beside me, her hand still in mine.

When I woke up again, we were in the forest. There was snow on the ground and animals all around us. Standing right in front of me was the silver haired wolf from my painting. There was a glow around him, brighter than the glow in my picture, because that was just paint and this was real light. The wolf looked at me and though he was just a wolf and could not speak, I felt as if he was speaking to me with his eyes.

I figured it was some kind of dream, and I did not feel worried or scared. I was getting cold and my feet were going to sleep, but the dream was so beautiful I did not want to wake up. The forest was completely silent except for the sound of our breathing. As I exhaled, I could see my breath.

I looked around to see if there were any animals hiding behind the trees. About twenty feet away from us the forest went blurry and then disappeared as if it was covered with fog, but it could not have been fog because it was a perfectly clear night. Overhead, I could see the moon and the stars.

It took me a while to figure out that what I was seeing was what was in my picture and nothing else and the reason I could not see any forest farther than twenty feet away was because that was all I painted. I remembered a story I read in school about how before Columbus people thought that if they sailed west they would fall off the edge of the earth. Standing in that little piece of forest was like standing next to the edge of the earth. I was not afraid, but I was not about to go wandering into that foggy place where nothing was.

Nothing like this had ever happened to me in a dream before, and I was still trying to figure it out when Cora tugged at my hand. "I'm cold," she said. "My fingers and toes are turning blue. We have to go back."

I started to tell her that you can not get frostbite in a dream, but Cora started breathing fast and then there was that spark of electricity from her hand to mine and then we fell through darkness again. This time when I woke, we were lying on the floor of her room.

"What happened?" I asked, rubbing my head. I felt groggy, the way I do when I sleep too much.

"You had a seizure with me," Cora said.

I just stared at her. I must have looked funny with my mouth hanging open, because she started to laugh.

"That's the first time I have ever taken anybody with me on purpose," she said after she stopped giggling.

"What do you mean, I had a seizure with you? Where did you take me?"

"Into the picture." She looked at me in a disgusted kind of way, as if she could not believe I was being so stupid. "Don't you remember? We were standing in the forest. It was snowing and there were animals all around us."

"But how did we__?"

"I told you. You had a seizure with me."

And then she explained to me that for as long as she could remember, whenever she had a seizure, whatever it was that she was looking at when she started convulsing was what she saw when she woke up. Usually, that meant that she woke up exactly where she was. But when she was four she was reading a storybook and she had a seizure, and the next thing she knew she was in a Dr. Suess story. It took her hours to find her way home. It was only by accident that she got scared and started to breathe fast and had a seizure and when she woke up she was back in the orphanage at the exact moment she had left.

She was five before she realized that there was a connection between her breathing and her seizures. By breathing so fast that she became dizzy she could make herself have a convulsion whenever she wanted. And by staring at a drawing or photograph while she was having a convulsion, she could go any place she wanted.

Once she figured out how to do it, she did it all the time. The nuns at the orphanage got worried about her seizures, and they took her to the doctor, who prescribed medicine, but Cora said she never took it. Instead, she made sure that there was no one around when she had her seizures so that people would think the medicine was doing what it was supposed to do.

When she was seven she got careless, and she had a seizure at the same moment someone touched her. It was the child of the people who were Cora's foster parents back then, and it was lucky for her that the little girl was only three and so no one believed her when she said that she and Cora had gone to the moon together.

I was wrong when I wrote that Cora had never seen snow. She told me that she has been to both the north and south pole as well as to almost every country in the world. She has also been to countries that do not exist any more and to some that never existed except in people's imaginations.

I did not really believe her at first. A long time ago, I saw a TV show where people time travelled but it turned out to be hypnosis, and I figured that this was what happened to Cora and me. But even if it was hypnosis it was fun and I wanted to try it again, so I got out some of my books and looked for pictures. We went to Narnia and then we went to Paris and then we went back in time to prehistoric days. And each time I could hear people and smell things, and when I put food in my mouth I tasted it. And I know the people could see us, because a Frenchman started chasing us after I took a pastry from his shop, and a couple of cavemen pointed at us and shouted something before Cora started to breathe fast and we disappeared back into our own time

Even if it was not real, it was fun, better than the movies. I am glad that this is Christmas vacation. Cora said she will take me any place I want to go. I had better stop writing and go pick out some more pictures.

December 26: More adventures today. I would write them all down, but I am too tired. We went to at least twenty different places, and then after all that we spent almost a whole day at the beach. It turns out that if the picture is a drawing or a painting of an imaginary place, Cora is pretty much stuck with what is in the picture, but if it is a real place, she can go anywhere.

The picture we used of Galveston was one Mom took last summer when we were there on vacation. When Cora and I arrived in Galveston, it was Memorial Day, the same day Mom and I were there last year.

I was worried that I might meet myself, but Cora said it does not happen. She said that once she went back in time to a picture of herself as a baby lying in a crib. She was going to rescue her baby self from her father, but when she got there she was the one lying in the crib, and her baby self was gone. She said as soon as she saw where she was, she started to breathe fast, because being a baby was no fun the first time and she did not want to live through it again.

I did not meet myself in Galveston, but Mom was there, and I had to keep Cora away from her so that Mom would not see her and remember her later when she met her at the orphanage.

I am still not sure if these trips we are taking are real or imaginary. If they are imaginary, I guess it would not have made any difference if Mom met Cora, but I did not want to take the chance.

I will know for sure next summer when Mom takes us back to Galveston, because while I was there today I carved my initials in some wet cement. If I find my initials in the sidewalk the next time we go to the beach, then I will know that it was real.

December 27: We had to go visit my aunt and uncle, so Cora and I could not go any place today. I usually like visiting Janey and Rick, but today I was in a bad mood. Aunt Janey took a picture of me sitting on the front porch, with Mom and Cora standing beside me. She kept trying to get me to smile, but I would not, so finally she took a picture of me frowning. I look twice as ugly as usual in that photograph. I swiped it and put in my diary, and when I get home I will hide it so no one ever sees it.

I am writing this in the bathroom at Aunt Janey's. I have started carrying my diary everywhere I go, because I am afraid that if Mom finds it and reads it she will freak and make Cora start taking her medicine, and there are still lots of places I want to go. I suppose I should stop writing about our adventures, but I can not help it. It is the first time anything exciting has ever happened to me.

December 28: More adventures. We went to the museum today, and when no one was looking, Cora made us pop into an absract painting. It was all blue, with no people or animals or real things, just green triangles and squares floating by. It made me feel seasick.

I wondered if the people in the museum would see us in the picture and wonder how we got there, but when we came out again there was a tour group looking at the painting and no one acted as if they had seen anything strange, so I guess no one saw us in the picture.

A guard noticed that Cora was having a convulsion. She did not jerk or shake or anything, but she got kind of stiff and her eyes rolled back, and the guard happened to look at her right then, and he figured out what was happening. He wanted to call Mom, but I gave him a wrong number, and as soon as Cora woke up, we ran away.

December 29: I am too busy to write anything, but we are having lots of fun!

December 31: Dad came to visit. I am never thrilled to see him, but this year I was even less excited than usual. I think he knows that I do not like him very much, and it makes me feel bad, because he tries to be nice, but I can not help how I feel. He and Mom got divorced when I was a little baby, and he is away in Europe so much I only see him once or twice a year. I know the mailman better than I know Dad.

He said that he had bought tickets to the Cotton Bowl game and that the two of us are going to drive to Dallas tomorrow. I tried to make him think that I was looking forward to it, but he could tell that I was not.

January 1: Dad is driving us to Dallas. Cora said she wanted to go, too and he managed to get an extra ticket. I am glad she is coming.

Cora and I are riding in the back seat. I thought about bringing some pictures so we could have more adventures, but what if Dad looked in his rear view mirror and saw her having a seizure? He would probably take her to a hospital, and they would do tests and find out that she has not been taking her medicine.

I am using this opportunity to catch up on my diary. I have so much to write about. Cora and I have visited King Arthur's England. Before we left, I put another copy of the book in my back pack, hoping that when we got tired of one scene we could pull out another drawing and Cora could take us somewhere else, but it does not work that way. The second seizure always brings us home.

We had better luck when we used a drawing of sixteenth century England. It was like going to a real place. We wandered all over London. The people had a wierd way of talking, but after a while I got used to it. The smell was really bad at first. I do not think those people ever take baths. But I got used to that after a while, too. I tried to bring back a coin, thinking that it might be worth something in my own time, but Cora said that she has never been able to bring things back, except for the things she has brought with her, and sure enough when we got home and I opened my back pack, the coin was go_______

My pen slipped. That was a close one. For a moment, I thought the car going to slide right off the highway into the ditch. There was an ice storm last night, and today the road is slippery. We have passed lots of cars stranded on the side of the road. Some of them have crushed fenders and bumpers, and one car has a shattered windshield and there is blood on the glass. I wonder what happened to the driver.

Cora is holding a photograph. It is that awful picture Aunt Janey took of me. It must have slipped out of my diary when the car slid across the road. I have to remember to get rid of that pictur___

December 27: Who has been writing in my diary? I took it to Aunt Janey's with me today, and I never took it out of my pocket the whole time we were there. But when I got home and opened it, I found that someone had written in it. Whoever it was made up stuff for today and for four more days.

It must have been my cousin. He must have swiped the book and read the stuff I wrote about Cora and me, and then he wrote in the diary as a joke. Some joke.

He probably thinks I made it all up. I hope that is what he thinks. If he figures out the truth, he will try to blackmail us into taking him with us, and I do not want to go anywhere with Paul. He is such a jerk.

December 28: Cora would not take me anywhere today. She has been real quiet, and when I tried to get her alone, she said she had to help Mom in the kitchen.

December 29: What is wrong with Cora? I finally got her alone today, but when I tried to show her a picture of King Arthur's England, she shook her head and closed her eyes.

Later, I walked into the bathroom and found her taking her phenobarbitol. Usually, she throws her pills down the toilet. At first, I thought maybe she had a doctor's appointment coming up, and she wanted to make sure that her blood tests came back all right. But when I asked Mom, she said that Cora is not supposed to see her doctor for three more months. So now I do not know what is going on.

December 30: Maybe Cora found out that my cousin read my diary. Maybe she is afraid that if she takes me anywhere, Paul will get her into trouble.

I tried to talk to her, but she locked herself in her room and started crying. Mom heard, and she asked me what I did to upset my sister and I said "Nothing!" and Mom got mad and sent me to my room.

December 31: Dad came today. He had Cotton Bowl tickets. It is funny that in the stuff Paul wrote, Dad also had football tickets, but maybe Dad told Janey and Janey told Paul.

Cora pitched a fit when she found out I was going to go with Dad. He offered to take her along, but that just made her more upset. She started screaming and her face turned blue and it was a wonder she did not have a convulsion. I guess her medicine must be working.

To calm her down, I told her that I would not go to Dallas. Dad was dissapointed, but I did not really want to go. I would rather stay with Cora. I am still hoping that she will change her mind and take me on another adventure before school starts.

January 1: Dad was killed today. An eighteen wheeler slid on some ice and ran into his car as he was driving to Dallas.

I feel like I ought to write more, but I do not know what to say.

January 4: We have been so busy getting ready for the funeral and everything that I have not had a chance to think about what has happened. But today, after we came back from the cemetery, I finally understood what it means to be dead. Dad is lying in a box underground where it is dark and cold and wet, and he will lie there forever. He will never read another newspaper or eat a cheeseburger or go to a movie. He will never do anything again.

When we got home, I started crying. Mom thought it was because I missed Dad, but it was not that. He was hardly ever here, so I can not miss him. I cried because I felt sorry for him.

January 5: Today while I was eating breakfast, it occured to me all of a sudden that if I had been in that car with Dad, I would have died, too. I thought about what it would be like to be dead, lying in a dark, damp box underground. I thought about what it would be like never to eat corn flakes or listen to the radio. And then I started shivering. I shook so hard that I could not hold my spoon. It fell to the table and bounced onto the floor.

Mom was in the other room, so she did not see, but Cora was sitting across the table from me. She leaned over and picked up the spoon. As she straightened up, her eyes met mine, and suddenly I remembered something else which I had forgotten. The only reason I did not go to Dallas on New Year's Day was because Cora did not want me to go.

Now I understand why Mom keeps looking at Cora in that funny way. She thinks that Cora had a premonition that something bad was going to happen and that was why she had a tantrum when Dad said he was going to take me to Dallas and that is why I am still alive.

This reminds me of something strange Mom said a few days ago. I can not remember the exact words, but these are pretty close. "Maybe our brain is not just there to make us see or hear or sense things. Maybe it also keeps us from seeing or hearing or sensing things. Maybe there are things all around us, other times, other places, that we do not see or hear, because our brain filters them out."

I had to think about it for a while before I understood what she was trying to say. Maybe she is right. Maybe the reason Cora can go to all those places is because those places are here around us all the time. Maybe when Cora's daddy smashed her head against the wall, he smashed the part of her brain that keeps her from seeing, and now she can see things that we can not, like the past and the future.

March 21: Today, I found my old blue diary in my mother's attic. It has been fifty years since I last wrote in it. As I held the volume in my hands, I experienced a brief moment of alarm for I realized that something I had created was half a century old, an antique, an artifact which meant that I was old, too. But almost at once my fear gave way to amazement. Something I had created was half a century old! In our restless modern age, this is closer than many people ever come to immortality, for how many people still have a family attic in which to store their childhood possessions? How many people can reach out to the past and touch it and turn its pages and read it now as fresh as the day it was written?

I did not read everything, just the parts that had to do with Cora and the New Year's Day when Dad died. It is strange how the mind works. I was stunned by what I read, and yet I could not focus my thoughts on Cora. Instead I found myself thinking about an impressionist painting at the Houston Museum of Fine Art. The first time I walked past it I was only three feet away, and from that close perspective it looked like a picture of confetti, random splotches of color. But later I saw it from across the room and suddenly I recognized that it was a painting of a bridge.

When I wrote in the blue diary I was too close to the events to see them clearly, but now, fifty years later, it all seems so clear. Paul did not write the extra entries in my diary, I wrote them. I lived four extra days I do not remember. Why? What happened on New Year's Day when Cora and Dad and I drove to Dallas? Was I hurt? Did Cora take me back in time to save me? Did I die? Did Cora go back alone to a time when I was still alive? Am I real or just a character in a little girl's dream?

I looked at my hands. Were they my hands? For a moment I did not recognize them. When did I get those age spots and wrinkles? What happened to the child I used to be?

And what about Cora? If what I suspected was true, how could she bear it? She had the power to go anywhere, do anything, and she gave it up for me__

It was summer, but suddenly I was cold. I hugged myself, trying to get warm, but it was a cold that comes from within. I looked around me. Everything more than six feet away was blurry. My doctor says I am getting cataracts, but this was something more than cataracts. I remembered the day Cora and I stepped into my painting and I looked around and realized that except for the small spot of ground on which we stood there was nothing, and I was suddenly paralyzed, afraid to move for fear that I would step over the edge of the earth and fall.

I counted my breaths until I was calm again, then I picked up the diary which fell open to the entry for December 26. Why did not I look for my initials in the sidewalk the next time we went to Galveston? Did I forget? Was I afraid that I would not find them? Was I afraid that I would find them? It is hard to remember what I thought or felt so many years ago. All I can be sure of is what is written in this diary and it could mean anything.

Did I really write "it all seems so clear"? Nothing is clear. The only thing I know is that something happened that I may never understand.

As I write these words, I hear voices. My daughter, my nephew and Cora, my sister are waiting for me downstairs. We are burying my mother today. Should I take the diary? No. When I am finished writing, I will put it back where I found it. Maybe my grandchildren will find it fifty years from now. Maybe half a century was not long enough, maybe it will take a hundred years for someone to read this and say "It all makes sense. Now I understand everything."

Copyright © 1998 by McCamy Taylor (Originally published in Dragon's Lair). McCamy writes speculative fiction with elements of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Her long fiction can be read on her web site at http://www.nationwide.net/~taylorjh. E-mail: taylorjh@nationwide.net

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