New Story

Prologue
    When I look back on those days, the days where I thought myself crazy until after They came along, I dread to think of my conduct and all that I was hiding. Not only what I was hiding from others, but from myself also.
    Mara & Mica are my daughters, my identical twin daughters. But they have far from the same personalities. They are as different as Night and Day, the Moon and the Sun. They are what brought me back from what I thought was insanity, when, in reality, I was just seeing the truth of the world and some of its mysteries.
       
Chapter 1
    Maybe I should start at the Very beginning, though it will be hard to identify Exactly when the beginning of all of this was.
    I think it all began in our home in Newport, Oregon. We had an old Victorian style house. It was white with a robins egg blue trim. It was three stories high and I remember thinking as a little girl that it was the biggest house in the world. When I was younger I was constantly on the tire swing that my father hung up for me on our old oak tree out front. The summer was probably the most magical time for me out there, because if I swung high enough and fast enough I could see the Pacific Ocean between all the other houses. I always loved the ocean and was enchanted by it.
    The day that I remember the most vividly about Before all the actual craziness I had just turned five and it was a beautiful summer for living at the beach. That was the first time I remember any of the craziness beginning.
    It was one of the most beautiful days you could imagine for Newport: cloudless blue sky, the perfect temperature, and the sound of the ocean in the background. I was playing in the front yard, and a little girl about my age walked up to me and asked if she could play with me. And the way she said it was really polite, not at all like me as a child. And she was dressed in a fancy white dress, with a white lace trim. I remember thinking she was slightly strange, and then saying to her that she could play with me if she wanted to.
    My mother came out about an hour later, to call me in for lunch. I told the girl that I would come back outside after lunch if she still wanted to play, but she said that I was rude, and walked through my swing and into the creek that bordered our yard, and stood there. At lunch mother wanted to know who the little girl was that she had seen me playing with. I told her that she was five just like me and had drowned in the creek by our house in 1915 and that she missed her mommy and wanted to know if I could find her mommy for her. And what was 1915?
    “Will you help me find her mommy?” I asked. my mother just looked at me with the most horrified look that I quickly became confused.
    “What’s wrong mama? Did you see a spider? Mother?” I kept asking my mother as she looked at me. Finally, she seemed to almost visibly shake herself out of it.
    “Amberly! How could you make up such stories?!” my mother angrily whispered to me. “You must never speak of such things! They are not real! If I ever hear you talking about such nonsense you will seriously regret it!”
    “But mama! She is real! You even said you saw her! What’s wrong?” I had asked, confused and hurt, but not really knowing why.
    “Just don’t you worry about that! Just do as I tell you!” mother said fumingly at me.
    “Yes mama.” I replied, dejectedly.
    That was my first dose of what my mother forevermore called “Reality.” That first conversation left me confused and inserted the first seeds of doubt about what I was really seeing.

Chapter 2
    As I was growing up I learned, either by snooping through my mothers old diaries, eavesdropping on people, and by what my grandmother later told me herself, that the women in our family see spirits, ghosts, and the fair folk. But most of the time the women in our family did not accept that as the truth, they just thought they were crazy. And that’s how it was with my mother. But not my grandmother. Let me explain: My mother was the only child of my grandmother, Dalores, who was one of the few who actually believed in what they were seeing, and not that they were going crazy. Dalores was an extraordinary lady, who taught her daughter to be like her and helped her see the truth in what she saw. But when my mother met my father she told him that she could see spirits and the like on the second date, and he accepted it, or so it appeared. When mother married daddy all that changed. He started to say that she was crazy, that she was going insane, that he wouldn’t tolerate it, and by that time she was pregnant with me, so daddy decided that he didn’t want Dalores to have anything to do with me, so he told mother that it was Dalores that was poisoning her mind with all the lies and that she would end up poisoning the baby too so he said that she had to cut all ties to Dalores, and we were never to see, hear, or speak of her again. I saw Dalores for the first time when I was 13, and then I never actually met her until after I had Mica & Mara. They were only babies, and when I first talked to Dalores I couldn’t believe half the stuff she told me, but it was all true.
    My father mentally and physically abused my mother my whole life. But he never once laid a finger on me, even though a lot of what I did warranted punishment. And I know that mother resented me for it, because father thought I was perfect, even though I knew I wasn’t and I tried to show him.                                               
    When I was  young, mother and I were very close, but the closer we got, the more my father told mother that she was going crazy, and turned mother against me. I think that’s why I resented daddy so much, and was in such awe of him. Because he held so much power. Because he could manipulate people to do whatever he wanted, and I wanted to learn how to do that too. So I hid my resentment as best I could and learned from one of the best how to get what I wanted.