Before I Wake Read Online Free PDF Page A

into the Dream Realm after her, and I’d rather eat broken glass than do that. That would mean acknowledging what she had done. Acknowledging her.
    “I can’t come home,” I told her. “I don’t have enough vacation time yet.” And Mom can rot.

    “Can’t you come for a weekend?”
    And do what, watch Mom sleep? “That’s an expensive weekend, Ivy.”
    “You’re a doctor now, you can afford it.”
    The sound that came out of me was a cross between a laugh and a yelp. Fudge jumped off my lap. “I live in New York City.”
    A sigh—a gusty, long-suffering one—blew not so gently in my ear. “It wouldn’t be an issue if you moved home.”
    Not this again. “I have to go now.”
    I was just about to hang up when I heard her, “Dawnie! Dawn, wait.”
    I pressed the top lip of the phone back to my ear. “What?”
    “I’m sorry. I just…you’re the only one of us who might be able to help her.”
    That melted my heart more than it probably should have. “I can’t, Ivy.” I didn’t like admitting it, but it was true. Even if I did go into the Dream Realm and talk to Mom, there was no guarantee I could bring her back with me. If she wanted to wake up, then she would. Unfortunately, it was obvious to no one but me that she didn’t want to.
    “Sometimes I think she doesn’t want to wake up.” Ivy’s voice was hoarse, as though she was saying something she thought she shouldn’t.
    Okay, so maybe I wasn’t the only one it was obvious to. I didn’t like the hurt in Ivy’s voice. It was so much easier to justify not being there at home when I could be angry.
    “She was so different before it happened,” Ivy continued. “You know that. It was like she would rather be asleep than with any of us—except for you, of course.”
    I heard my sister’s bitterness as surely as if she had been able to pour it through the phone lines and into my ear. Yes, Mom had seemed to have more tolerance for my company during the later stages of her “illness,” and I spent as much of that summer as I could with her before heading back to class in September.
    “Only because she knew I had to go back to school.” Only because she wanted to talk me into visiting Morpheus and the rest of my “family” before leaving her own.
    “Mm.” Ivy didn’t believe it.
    “Look, don’t go getting all pissy with me for something I have no control over, okay?” Defensive much? I shouldn’t give in to the guilt. It wasn’t my fault Mom was gone, and it wasn’t like my sisters would believe me if I told them where she was.
    “I’m just saying you’re her favorite. I’m all right with that, especially if hearing your voice will wake her up.”
    “It didn’t work the last two times I was home.”
    “This time might be different.”
    I sighed. “It won’t. Look, Ivy, I love you, but I have to go.”
    “Do you think she’ll ever come back to us?”
    Once more I was ambushed from hanging up by another familiar phrase in my sister’s anxious tone. We never used to be at odds like this. I have pictures of the two of us taken when I was a baby and Ivy treated me like her own big, amusing doll.
    Ivy was just worried about Mom, and she was there, dealing with it every day. That wasn’t to say that I didn’t think of my mother every day—I just wasn’t as charitable with my thoughts as Ivy probably was. And I didn’t have to deal with the proximity of it.
    And I didn’t have to look at Dad. Which meant he didn’t have to look at me. I think he liked that.
    “I don’t know,” I replied honestly. “She’d better.”
    Ivy’s laughter eased the tension from my shoulders. “That’s what I love about you, Dawnie. You face life like it would be stupid to deny you anything.”
    “Maybe I can convince life it’s true, what do you think?” This was my job in the family. I was the brat, the steamroller. I was also the one who tried to make everyone smile with a cocky attitude that was no more authentic than the Kate