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Sarah comes to visit in late May, when the heat hasn’t quite started drowning the world. She has a backpack with her, and a packet of drawings that she says are from Kira. She moves quieter. She moves like she’s settled into her bones.
They all move like that, these days.
Helena takes her out deep, past the paths, past the small pools of still water and past the houses made of sticks and branches that people wander deep into the forest to make. She takes her to the edge of things, where they can sit with their legs over the drop and consider the world spread out below them like a picture book.
“How are your dreams,” Helena says. She splits a grass stem between her fingers. When Cosima came to the woods she said Helena could make the grass into a whistle, but Helena still doesn’t know how. She rips it into threads.
“I’m always running,” Sarah says, leaning back onto her hands.
“Tiring.”
“Yeah.” Sarah gives up on leaning on her hands, lets her back fall onto the grass. “Yeah,” she says again, watching the sharp unreal blue of the sky. “But it’s better. Haven’t had to run from anything in…”
The birds chirp, somewhere in the distance. The trees rustle. Helena sometimes dreams about blood, but mostly she doesn’t. Her dreams are soft bright shapes and when she wakes up she doesn’t remember them at all.
“We miss you back home,” Sarah says, watching the sky. “Alison’s threatenin’ to drag a bloody washing machine out here herself.”
“I like it here,” Helena says, which is true.
Sarah rolls her head to the side. “You coming back?”
Listen to the birds, Helena wants to say. They’re all alive, I see them flying, they have wings and they’re alive and they just keep singing. “Maybe,” she says. “Not now. How is Kira?”
Sarah raises her eyebrows at the obvious change in conversational topic, but lets it happen – she swings her leg over the cliff-edge a bit, seemingly unconcerned by the drop. Helena would catch her. So she doesn’t have to worry. Helena wonders if that’s why she’s not worrying.
“She’s getting bigger,” Sarah says, which is what she always says – like she’s always surprised by it, that children grow. “She’s so bloody smart, Helena. Keeps comin’ home from school sayin’ things I don’t even understand.”
“How are her dreams.”
“I don’t know,” Sarah says. “She doesn’t like talkin’ about ‘em.”
These things matter, which Sarah probably understands. Dreams are the soft sweet center of you, like a fruit when you twist it open; Helena wants to know, Helena wants to know what Kira sees when she lies down at night. Even if she can’t be there, in the city, bending down to ask Kira: how was your day, what did you learn, how do you sleep, what do you want for dinner.
“This is nice,” Sarah says, to the silence where Helena is thinking about dreams. “You come out here a lot?”
“Yes,” Helena says. “It’s quiet. But also it is not quiet. This I like.”
“A whole week of this,” Sarah says, stretching her arms back. Helena considers, and then flops back in the grass next to her. Above them the clouds are making shapes that last until they don’t. Sarah is staying here for a week. Everything is growing, and they are too.
“Sestra,” Helena says.
“Yeah?”
“I’m glad you’re here.”
“Me too,” Sarah says, turning her head to the side so she can smile at Helena. “Nice to get out of the city sometimes.” Her voice gets a little softer. “I do get it, y’know. I can hold off Alison for you.”
“I will come back,” Helena says. “But it’s quiet here.”
Sarah watches her, eyes darting back and forth between both of Helena’s, and then tilts her head back so she’s watching the sky again. “Yeah,” she says. “That’s for sure.” She pulls up a blade of grass and ties it into a knot. “Helena?”
“Yes, sestra?”
“How are your dreams?”
Above them the sky is blue, and the heat is drowsy and soft. Helena opens her mouth and tells her.