“No, it’s against the rules and I don’t want to get you in trouble.” Mira puts her arm around me and draws me to her, hugging me tightly. “I know how important it is for you to be here. This is your journey; I can’t take it for you.”
When she lets me go, she holds my gaze for a moment and then turns away. I’m surprised. I had thought she was going to try to get me to leave, warn me off Bosco, beg me to come home . . . but instead she’s already walking away toward the hedge that surrounds the giardino segreto. She turns at an opening in the hedge and raises an arm in farewell. I wave back, stifling an urge to call her back. When she disappears into the hedge, I have the uncomfortable feeling that the opening in the hedge has closed up behind her. I feel not so much that my mother has been swallowed up, as that I have been sealed in.
My mother’s visit was so brief that I begin, in the next few days, to wonder if it happened at all. The image of my mother standing at the bottom of the garden, white-robed and loose-haired, merges with half a dozen other images that haunt my dreams: various girls in flowing white drapery who wander the gardens of Bosco as if lost. The dreams always end the same way, with me following one of these figures through a grove of ilex so dense that all I can see of the fleeing girl are wisps of her white dress that catch on the branches and leave diaphanous shreds on the thorns. The thorns tear at my own skin, but I know that if I let the girl out of my sight, I’ll lose my way and be trapped in the thicket forever. I follow her down a path sloping toward the center of the maze, a green tunnel that grows darker and narrower until I realize that it’s not leading into the center of the maze, but into the center of the earth. I catch up with the girl just as she begins her descent into the underworld, and she turns, there on the brink between light and dark, her face pale and smooth and featureless as a river stone. Only it’s not time and water and wind that have wiped her face clean, but thorns that have flayed her flesh as she ran through the groves. The white-blazed trail I’ve been following is a trail of flesh.
Any doubt, though, that my mother’s visit was imaginary is put to rest when, after three nights of these dreams, Diana Tate calls me to her office in the gatehouse. I walk over after breakfast, clutching my thin cardigan across my chest in the cold wind, fearing the worst. The Board has realized they made a terrible mistake letting me in; my professors have retracted their recommendations; I’ve been unmasked as a fraud. The Tudor gatehouse, at the end of a long, winding path through tall pine trees, looms in their shadows like the witch’s house in “Hansel and Gretel.” I have to struggle against the wind to get the door open, and when I do the wind follows me in, stirring the pamphlets about Bosco on the shelves in the reception alcove. Each one is decorated with a drawing of a Greek goddess pouring an amphora into a spring beneath a pine tree, and each of these girls seems to look up at me as if challenging me to defend my right to stay here at Bosco. The only live girl in the alcove, Daria, is behind the reception desk, slumped in her chair with her eyes closed and legs sprawled on her desk, listening to a voice that drones from the speakerphone.
“And what I ask you is, if it wasn’t a real spaceship, then why did I begin to have dreams about Nefertiti afterwards . . . ? Do you want me to spell Nefertiti?”
“No,” Daria says, “I’ve got it.” She cracks open her eyes as I walk by and twirls her finger in a circle by her ear and mouths the word kooks.
I roll my eyes in agreement even though Mira once spent an entire summer channeling the fourteenth-century-BC Egyptian queen’s memoirs. I suddenly have the queasy feeling that the forces of New Age mysticism have followed me to Bosco—a feeling that’s confirmed when I enter Diana Tate’s elegantly appointed office and spy on the quartersawn oak surface of the director’s vintage Stickley writing desk one of Mira’s crystal necklaces coiled between the base of a Tiffany lamp and a white stone paperweight.