Awake and Dreaming Read online

  Praise for Kit Pearson

  “Kit Pearson is a great talent in Canadian children’s literature.”

  —The Guardian (Charlottetown)

  “One of Canada’s best junior fiction writers.”

  —The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon)

  “Pearson is a strong writer whose work puts to shame most of the books that kids spend so much time reading these days.”

  —Ottawa Citizen

  “Kit Pearson gives young readers a strong testament of the interlocking nature and power of reading, writing and living.”

  —The Vancouver Sun

  “Another magical tale from the master.”

  —Toronto Star

  “Dazzle. It’s not the right word for what Kit Pearson manages to do … but it’s close. Closer would be a word that catches the irregular glint of light reflected on water, street lights suspended in fog, an opalescent fracturing of time and genre to create something with its own unique glow.”

  —Edmonton Journal

  “Through the vivid observation of two summers, Pearson weaves a summer out of time and weaves as well a spell over her readers.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “The very best in fiction for young adults. Kit Pearson does herself proud.”

  —The Windsor Star

  “Kit Pearson’s careful and exact research brings the period vividly before us.”

  —The London Free Press

  “The woman is a brilliant writer.”

  —Kingston This Week

  “Pearson superbly and gently captures the welter of emotions that beset a young teen who is experiencing the onset of adolescence and having to cope with its physical and emotional demands.”

  —CM

  “This is a writer at the top of her craft.”

  —Quill & Quire

  “Pearson’s real strength … lies in her ability to convey the texture of a specific time and place…. So vividly and lovingly evoked that it is almost possible to smell the pine trees.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  PUFFIN CANADA

  AWAKE AND DREAMING

  KIT PEARSON was born in Edmonton and grew up there and in Vancouver. Her previous seven novels (six of which have been published by Penguin) have been published in Canada, in English and French, and in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany, Great Britain, China, and Korea. She has received fourteen awards for her writing, including the Vicky Metcalf Award for her body of work. She presently lives in Victoria.

  Visit her website: www.kitpearson.com.

  Also by Kit Pearson

  The Daring Game

  A Handful of Time

  The Sky Is Falling

  Looking at the Moon

  The Lights Go On Again

  This Land: An Anthology of Canadian Stories for Young Readers

  (as editor)

  Whispers of War:

  The War of 1812 Diary of Susanna Merritt

  A Perfect Gentle Knight

  Awake and Dreaming

  KIT PEARSON

  PUFFIN CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, Auckland, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196,

  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),

  a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1996

  Published in Puffin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada),

  a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1998

  Published in this edition, 2007

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (OPM)

  Copyright © Kathleen Pearson, 1996

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Manufactured in the U.S.A.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-14-305637-9

  ISBN-10: 0-14-305637-9

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data available upon request.

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

  Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see

  www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 477 or 474

  For

  Marit and Charlotte Mitchell,

  Anne Barringer

  and

  Will Pearson,

  who all contributed

  Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

  Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

  JOHN KEATS

  PROLOGUE

  T he ghost was restless.

  All day she’d watched the visitors to the cemetery—joggers, bundled-up families pushing strollers, couples having earnest conversations. Many of the visitors were on Sunday walks but others had come to visit the graves of relatives. Beside the ghost a family stood around a grassy plot, shivering in the chilly air. They spoke in solemn voices and left some flowers in a tin.

  “They’ll be wilted in a day,” muttered the ghost.

  She watched a young man trim a holly bush in front of a marble tablet. He came every Sunday to visit his mother’s grave. A growing shrub lasts, the ghost thought approvingly.

  No one had ever left anything on her grave—not a single flower. On this dank January day her plot looked especially dreary, blanketed with the dead leaves that had lain there all winter.

  The ghost strode along the path overlooking the sea, then sat on a step of the war memorial to watch the sun set. All the Sunday visitors had left. Crows circled the empty cemetery, reclaiming it with jeering cries. The wind rose and bare tree branches scraped against one another. Below the ghost, across the road, tumultuous waves flung pebbles on the shore. The full moon seemed to sway in the sky like a lantern.

  The ghost smiled. It’s a spooky night, she thought. A good setting for a ghost story … She always felt less lonely when she was by herself, away from people who reminded her that she was no longer one of them.

  Finally it was late enough
to go into the house.

  SHE NEVER VISITED her former home until its inhabitants were asleep. She’d never had any evidence that people could see her; but maybe they’d hear her or somehow sense her presence if she were there in the daytime. And she didn’t want to frighten anyone; she knew she hadn’t been left here for that.

  Her house wasn’t far away—just across the street. The ghost melted into the wood of the door and passed through to the other side. Pausing in the hall, she listened to the hum of the refrigerator and the gurgle of the aquarium. Everyone—all the children and their parents—seemed to be asleep.

  Then the family dog ambled out from the kitchen. But he was used to her nightly visits; he thumped his tail and went sleepily back to his cushion.

  The ghost went into a room lined with books. The familiar space comforted her—she’d known it all her life. Of course this house didn’t belong to her any more. It hadn’t for forty years. But she had been born here; this was where she had suffered and triumphed and dreamed.

  She scanned the bookshelves and picked out a Trollope novel she’d never got around to reading. Settling into an armchair, she sighed with relief as the book drew her in.

  She didn’t look up until just before dawn. For the past few hours she’d managed to forget her frustration and loneliness, or even if she were alive or dead. She had been sealed in the story, as caught in the author’s spell as she’d been as a child.

  She leaned back and closed her eyes. Another chair had once stood in this same spot—a chair with a tall back and winged sides, where a child could curl herself small and be almost invisible …

  SHE IS NINE YEARS OLD, sitting in that chair—her favourite chair, where she escapes to read. It’s Saturday afternoon. Father is at his club. Mother has Mrs. Currie and Mrs. Roberts over for lunch. The child can hear the clink of cups and spoons in the dining-room.

  She is supposed to be having a rest after her own lunch in the kitchen. But she came downstairs to look for a new book and retreated to the wing chair after she’d found one on her special shelf.

  The book is called The Princess and the Goblin. The child sniffs its leather cover and reverently unfolds it. She carefully turns the crackly pages to the first enticing words: “There was once a little princess whose father was king over a great country full of mountains and valleys.”

  Unfastening the tight straps on her shoes, she lifts her feet onto the chair and props the book on her knees. With a happy sigh she falls into Princess Irene’s world.

  The child is reading so intently she barely hears the hum of voices near her. At first they seem like voices on the other side of a wall—the wall of the story she’s engrossed in. But suddenly she realizes the voices are right in the room. She freezes.

  Mother will be angry that she’s in the study instead of upstairs. But the chair faces the window, its high back a barricade to the three women chatting near the door. If she is extremely still they might not detect her.

  “Here it is,” Mother says. “I knew I’d put it in this drawer. There you are, Muriel. I think you’ll agree it’s the best seed catalogue.”

  “Thank you for lending it to me, Philippa,” she hears Mrs. Currie say.

  “That was a delicious lunch,” says Mrs. Roberts. “We got a lot planned for the next garden meeting, didn’t we? Next month it’s my turn.”

  They go on with thank-yous and goodbyes, but no one moves from the study. The child squirms, trying not to let a leg show. Mother’s friends always take so long to say goodbye—why can’t they just leave?

  “What a gloomy room this is,” sighs Mother. She walks over and pulls one of the heavy curtains open a little farther. The child’s heart thuds so strongly she’s sure Mother can hear it; but nothing happens.

  “I think it’s a pleasant room,” says Mrs. Roberts politely. “All these books! What a reader Giles must be.”

  “He treats this room like his private kingdom,” says Mother. “He won’t let me decorate it and he complains if the maid moves anything.” She sighs again. “And now my only child is becoming just like him. Every time I complain that she reads too much, Giles tells me to let her be. He’s filled a special shelf with books for her and he’s always adding to them.”

  “How is the dear child?” asks Mrs. Currie. “I haven’t seen her since our Wendy’s birthday party.” She suppresses a giggle. “I’m sorry, Philippa, I didn’t mean to laugh.”

  “It’s quite all right,” says Mother. “It was rather funny, wasn’t it?” But her voice is not amused. “Walking right into a pond in her best clothes! Daydreaming, as usual. Now she refuses to go to any parties.”

  The child blushes as hotly as she did when they fished her out of the garden pond, strings of green slime hanging from her hair and her white dress.

  She had been daydreaming. She’d been pretending she was a queen, to keep from crying when the girls called her “Horseface,” as they did every day in school. When she’d followed the other children into the house for birthday cake, she had been leading an imaginary royal procession—and fallen into the pond without seeing it. She could still hear the girls’ jeering laughter as she’d splashed and spluttered.

  Mother’s voice sounds desperate. “I’m at my wit’s end about her. All she wants to do is read—or she wanders in the cemetery for hours and comes back looking more like a rough little boy than a girl. Sometimes she just stares into space, as if she’s in a trance. I’ve tried to ask other children over, but she seems to want to be alone. And it doesn’t help that she’s as plain as a boot on top of it. I really don’t know what to do with her. And Giles is no help. Apart from encouraging her to read, he seems to barely notice her.”

  “She’ll get over it,” says Mrs. Currie.

  “It’s just a phase,” adds Mrs. Roberts. “My niece was a loner too—until she turned fifteen. Then she noticed young men and now she’s happily married with two babies. Don’t worry about her, Philippa.”

  “I try not to,” says Mother.

  “We really must be going,” says Mrs. Roberts. The voices fade into the hall.

  The child stays in her frozen position until the goodbyes are finally over and Mother’s footsteps go back to the dining-room. Then she releases a huge breath, as if she’s expelling all the words she’s heard. She looks down and lets the book take her away.

  THE BRIGHTENING DAWN roused the ghost from her memories. She stood up, her book sliding to the floor. It was time to go.

  After she left the house, she paused at the entrance to the cemetery, watching the early sun glint on the wet grass.

  Reading had been a welcome escape from her restlessness, but now she paced in despair. When was she going to find what she’d spent the last forty years searching for?

  The ghost turned away from the cemetery. What she yearned for—the reason she was compelled to linger in this world—wasn’t in there. It was time to do some more travelling.

  PART 1

  Theo

  1

  Across the strait, in a larger city on the same sea, another child sat as still as the long-ago child in the study.

  The grade-four classroom thrummed with activity. Chairs screeched against the floor and high voices bossed and giggled. Pens and scissors clattered on desktops as the students drew and cut out and scribbled for their coastal forest projects.

  Theo was as fixed in the middle as a rock. Waves of chatter rose and fell around her. The other three in her group—Robert and Yogita and Jason—made no attempt to involve her. When Mr. Barker had told her to push over her desk and join them, Yogita had held her nose and smirked. Now she and the others reached in front of Theo and argued over who would write about spotted owls as if she were invisible.

  Theo held a book about trees open on her lap. But her eyes stared blankly as she retreated into her daydream.

  She was thinking about magic. Last night she’d finished a wonderful book called Five Children and It. The story was about some kids who found a strange creature calle
d a Psammead that granted wishes. There were four older children—Cyril, Anthea, Robert and Jane—and a baby brother. Theo liked Anthea the best. She seemed about eleven; Jane was probably nine, like Theo. Most of the wishes had backfired. They had wished to be beautiful—but then no one had recognized them.

  I wouldn’t wish for that, thought Theo, I’d wish for—

  “Hey, Licehead!” Robert jabbed her side with his ruler. “Didn’t you hear the bell?”

  Theo blinked. The other kids were thundering out of the classroom for recess. She stood up slowly, forcing herself to come back.

  Robert was hunting for something in his desk. He looked up. “Why do you always stare into space like that? What are you thinking about?”

  Now he sounded more curious than mean. But Theo rubbed the place his ruler had poked. The Robert in the book wouldn’t have hurt her.

  She noticed how Robert’s red hair stood up on his forehead. You look like a rooster, she decided. A stupid, show-offy rooster.

  Robert backed away as Theo kept staring at him. “So don’t answer,” he said from the doorway. “Who cares? Nobody cares about you, Licehead.”

  “HOW ARE YOU getting along, Theo?” Mr. Barker asked her after recess. Theo had already learned to linger by the outside door and come up to the classroom first, before she got trapped in a jeering group.

  The teacher’s voice was kind, but Theo shrank from the hand he put on her shoulder. “Fine,” she whispered.

  “It’s hard to start at a new school, especially in January,” said Mr. Barker. Loud voices and footsteps advanced down the hall. “Are you making friends?”

  Theo couldn’t answer such a dumb question. Hadn’t he noticed that she was always alone?

  “I know it takes time. But you’ll soon feel at home.” Chubby Mr. Barker was as relentlessly positive as a bouncing ball. The other kids called him a pushover. They often persuaded him to have a video instead of arithmetic.