by Holly Jacobs
I’d spent most of my day on the porch working. But the words had dried up a while ago. I’d been just going through the motions.
I glanced at the journal that was on the table next to me. I knew what I was going to write today.
Dear Amanda,
It’s another first day of school here. This morning I sat on the front porch and watched all the students across the street arrive, ready to start the school year. It was such a hot summer, and summer wasn’t ready to release its grip on Erie just because it was the first day of school.
There were some familiar faces in the swarm of children. They waved and called out “good-mornings,” or “hey-Ms.-Pips.” And as always there are new ones—kindergarteners and older transfer students.
As I write to you, it’s almost time for the dismissal bell. I know the children will all rush out, their first day over.
Only one hundred and seventy-nine more to go.
You’re a sophomore this year. You’ll hopefully be returning to the same school as last year. You’ll be greeting old friends and going to those first classes and discovering what they will be like this year.
I always loved the first day of school. There’s such a sense of possibility about it. Anything can happen.
I adored when the teachers handed out textbooks. When I was lucky, it was a brand-new one. I loved the creeeeek sound the binding made when you opened it for the first time. I loved the smell. I loved writing my name in the box—the first one to proclaim I used that particular book and the years I used it.
Years.
I sat the journal on my lap and looked at the school across the street. Amanda had had ten first days of school.
No, eleven if you counted kindergarten.
More if she’d gone to preschool.
I wondered if she liked school. I hoped so.
I felt a wave of nostalgia for the moments that I’d never experienced with her and for all the talks we’d never had.
I picked up the journal again. It was my opportunity to talk to Amanda. Maybe it was a one-way conversation, but that made it easier in a way.
So many have passed since I held you. I knew you for only nine months, held you for one short hour, and yet I’ve built my life around you.
So what story should I start the school year off with?
I haven’t told you about what I do.
I don’t do what I thought I’d do. Maybe that’s a lesson for you. Choose a path, but don’t be afraid to change directions.
You see, I went to college to be a nurse.
And at first, I thought I’d work L&D . . . labor and delivery. But I did an externship on the pediatric floor and loved it. That’s where I worked after I graduated. For a while, I thought I’d spend my life working there.
My mother believed I was punishing myself for giving you up by working with children on a daily basis. But that wasn’t it at all. I never felt I needed to be punished for giving you a better life. I truly believed then—and now—that giving you to a family who was better equipped to care of you was an act of love. Like Grandmother Rose—it was my gift to you. I gave you a family who could give you the life I wanted for you but couldn’t have given you myself.
No, working with children wasn’t me punishing myself. It was my solace. Every time I comforted a crying baby, I comforted you. Every time I held a sick, lonely child, I held you.
You led me to nursing, and nursing led me to my real passion—telling stories.
How? I’d been working on the pediatric floor for about two years, and I had a five-year-old patient who visited our unit frequently. I can’t tell you her name or why she was a regular because of patient confidentiality, but she was precocious and most days she meandered somewhere between a delight and a holy terror.
One night she asked me, “Miss Piper, do you have a little girl?”
I felt as if the earth had stopped spinning for a moment. Everything seemed to come to a screeching halt. Everything around me was perfectly still. I was immobile. I thought my heart had stopped beating at the reminder of what I’d lost.
No, not lost. What I’d willingly given away.
Then slowly, I felt my heart begin to beat again. Its first thump filled my ears to the point of being almost deafening.
But slowly, I reacquainted myself with the sound of my heartbeats, and the earth started spinning as well. Still, I didn’t know how to answer this simplest of questions. So I asked her a question instead. “Why, honey?”
“’Cause you’d be a good mom.”
This time I was ready for the pain. I was braced. The world and my heart continued their rhythms as I let that innocent comment rip through me.
“Thank you.” She’d wounded me, tearing loose the scab on my heart. No matter how many times I thought I’d thoroughly healed, the scab always ended up ripped away by sometimes the smallest actions or words.
Still, her compliment helped staunch the bleeding from the now-open wound. Like I said, I believed giving you up was indeed the mark of a good mom, but that never stopped me from missing you. From hurting.
“Can you tell me a story?” she asked, not noticing my pain.
My shift was almost over, so I nodded. “Let me go find Nurse Abbey and then I’ll come back and bring a book.”
She shook her head. “No, not a book story. One from your head.”
I came back ten minutes later with a book in hand, despite her decree. “This is a very good story—” I started.
She shook her head again and reiterated, “No, from your head. Those are the best kinds of stories,” she added, as if anyone with any sense should know that.
She gave me a look that said only the best would be good enough for her.
Bowing to the inevitable, I said, “There was a—”
“No. Stories start with Once Upon a Time.”
“Once Upon a Time there was a girl named,” I tried to think of a name, and from nowhere, I found one. “Belinda Mae Abernathy.”
“That’s a very long name,” she said, all sympathetic.
“Yes, yes it is. And you see, that was the problem . . .”
That’s how Belinda Mae was born. I’m not sure where the name came from, but suddenly it was there, and I could see the little girl I was inventing. Over the next year, I made up stories for a lot of patients about Belinda Mae’s very long name, about her learning to tie her shoes, and about her frenemy, Sophia Tanya.
And one day, I was telling the story to a new patient, when her mother came in. I didn’t know then that her mother was the sister of an editor for a children’s book publisher. The mother called her sister and told her the story, and then the editor asked the mother to have me call her.
After all the times I’d told those stories, it should have been easy to capture them on paper, but it wasn’t. But a couple months later, I sent that editor the first two Belinda Mae stories, and after that . . .
That first editor took me under her wing and taught me a lot about the craft of writing.
I still volunteer as a nurse at a local clinic when they need me, but I’m a full-time writer now.
Thanks to you.
And tonight . . . that will be thanks to you, too.
Love,
Piper
I set the journal aside. I started it the day Ned moved in next door. Was that only a year ago?
Coop was teaching across the street this year. She swore I was going to get sick of her, but I knew I wouldn’t. She’d already asked me about helping her with a creative writing class.
The end-of-day bell rang, signaling that the first day of the new school year had officially ended. The front doors of the school burst open and students of every size flew down the steps. Screaming, laughing, running, shouting. As if a day of sitting in their classrooms had taxed them beyond all endurance and that pent-up en
ergy needed some immediate release.
I wondered if that was how it was for Amanda at the end of the school day. Did she walk out of her high school with a group of friends, laughing and talking about their day?
She was a sophomore this year, so the school wouldn’t be so strange and foreign . . . unless they’d moved.
Oh, I hope her family didn’t move around a lot. I hope she lived in the same house her parents had brought her home to from the hospital and that she had friends from grade school who were still friends in high school.
I could picture a doorway where her mother dutifully marked her height each year on her birthday. And there would be dings and dents throughout the house that would become family stories.
“Do you remember . . . ?” they’d ask each other, and then laugh at the retelling.
I hoped . . .
Those two words pretty much summed it up. I hoped.
I rubbed the soft leather cover of the journal I’d been filling for the last year. It was full of my hopes for Amanda as well as stories.
I didn’t write in it daily. No, writing in it was too painful for that. But every few weeks, or sometimes months, I put something down in it. Someday I hoped Amanda would read it and some of these stories would become family stories. “Do you remember . . . ?” she’d ask.
Today, I really didn’t have time for writing in it, but still that story about my first sale insisted it go in the book.
To a non-writer a sentence like that would sound insane, but I’d been writing since I was twenty-five. Granted, that was only six years ago. Still, I understood the siren call of a certain story or scene. When that call came, there was no putting it off, or waiting until later. I had a notebook on my nightstand for scenes that came to me in the wee hours. I—
“Hey, Pip,” Ned called as he walked across the driveway to my front porch, interrupting my musings.
In the year since he’d moved in, I’d had to admit defeat when it came to getting him to call me by my full first name. I’d been Pip to him from the first.
But though I couldn’t sway him, the last year had taught me how to tease him appropriately in return.
“Catch any bank robbers?” I asked.
He sighed. “So it’s one of those days?” He glanced at the notebook that was still in my hand.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Whenever you’re working on your laptop, you’re all smiles and happiness. Sometimes, I swear butterflies are going to start sliding down rainbows from your keyboard. But on the days you sit here scribbling in that, you’re . . . not.” Before I could protest, he held up his hand. “Whenever you write in there, it reminds me of a man who’s stuck in a bear trap.”
That was an analogy I’d never heard before. And frankly, I had no idea how bear traps and journals could connect. “Pardon?”
He looked as if he’d won our sparring match as he explained, “Pulling that trap off hurts, but in the end, he’s better for it. Whatever you write in that notebook hurts, but when you’re done, you’re better . . . until the next time.”
I couldn’t think of a response to that because the truth of the matter was, he was right.
We’d become friendly, Ned and I. He was the kind of neighbor I could run to for a cup of sugar. If he had it, he’d share with me. But odds are he’d be more apt to run over to my house for sugar, like that first time, or any other pantry item.
That’s not to say our neighborliness was one-sided. Ned had been the one who figured out how to open my car door after I accidentally locked my keys in it a few months ago. And when the snow was very heavy and high last winter, he’d sometimes surprise me by snowblowing my sidewalk and driveway, as well as Mrs. W.’s, my elderly neighbor on the other side.
I’d been right that first day . . . he was a good neighbor.
But it was these little front-porch chats—which had morphed into on-the-couch chats when it had become too cold for the porch over winter—that had moved him beyond just a regular wave-at-him neighbor. I might shovel for Mrs. W., but we rarely visited. I’m not even sure if she knew I was a writer. No, it was different with Ned than with the rest of my neighbors.
Soon after the car incident, I’d had a spare set of keys made and kept them at his place, and he gave me his spares, just in case. But we both knew the odds of Ned forgetting his keys or anything else were slim. He was an organized, by-the-book kind of guy.
“Okay, so let’s move away from talks of books and bear traps,” I said. “You’ll be there tonight?”
He nodded. “I will. My boss bought a table for the firm.”
Over the last year and our chats, I’d learned that Ned was a retired cop. Not that he was old. He wasn’t. But he’d left the police force in Detroit, gotten his private investigator’s license here in Pennsylvania, and gone to work for a local Erie law firm. I occasionally teased him by comparing him to Colombo or Magnum, P.I., and he habitually tried to convince me his job was nothing like those television detectives. He did all the investigative legwork for the attorneys at the firm. He located and interviewed witnesses and made sure they were at court. He photographed scenes—accident scenes and crime scenes.
He was no Fox Mulder.
We watched a bunch of X-Files over the winter, and sometimes I called him Fox. He pretended to find it annoying, but I thought he kind of liked it.
I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t do his job, either when he was a cop, or now.
Really, I wouldn’t know where to begin.
Maybe that’s why I wrote YA books—young adult—rather than hard-core mysteries.
Or romance.
Yeah, romance was definitely not a genre I should pursue.
I laughed at the thought.
“There you go again, Pip.” Ned looked amused.
“Sorry. I don’t mean to.” Things occurred to me at the oddest times—thoughts tumbled over thoughts. Inspiration collided with facts.
“So, what did I say that amused you this time?” Ned asked.
I shook my head. “Nothing. I was just thinking that if I ever decided to change the type of books I write, I probably shouldn’t look at romance because, after all, they say writers should write what they know.”
His amusement cleared and gave way to his serious look. “There’s someone out there for you. Maybe you’ll meet him tonight. Mela and I could help you look for him.”
Save me from that kind of help from Ned Chesterfield. The only thing worse would be Mela helping. She still didn’t like me, but I think she’d finally realized I wasn’t a threat to her relationship with Ned.
“Oh, there was someone for me. Once.” I shrugged, not wanting to explain that someone was an infant. “You know, the one that got away.”
It was very close to a lie. After all, Amanda didn’t get away. I gave her away. But puh-TAY-toe, puh-TAH-toe.
“There are other fish in the sea,” he said.
I shook my head. “Not for me. I’m a goldfish, happily swimming in my own bowl.”
Like my patient who asked me for that first story, I now knew that all good stories started with once upon a time. And once upon a time, I’d thought that someday I might marry and have more children, but that was just a story I told myself because the truth of it was, I wouldn’t. I mean, what if Amanda came and found me? She’d see the children I kept after giving her away. That was a kind of pain I wouldn’t give to anyone, especially not to the child I loved.
Ned smiled indulgently. “Just wait until you meet him. That guy who’s meant for you. As soon as he comes along, you’ll change your tune.”
He gave a wave and started toward his house, then turned around. “I’m going to get changed for your shindig. Maybe it’s time for you to put away your work and get ready, too?”
“Was that a subtle way of saying my hair needs taming?” I often thought
that if my hair was well behaved, being a redhead wouldn’t have been too bad, but to have wild hair that had a mind of its own added insult to red-haired injury.
“No,” Ned said with a chuckle. “It was a subtle way of reminding you that you can’t go to a gala event—especially when you’re the host—wearing holey jeans and a T-shirt that says, ‘Abernathy’s Rules.’”
I looked down and realized I’d thrown on one of Belinda Mae Abernathy’s promotional T-shirts. “You’re probably right.”
“I always am,” he assured me.
I snorted my response. Still, I did get up and head inside. Two hours later, I was primped and polished, as my mother liked to say.
To be honest, my version of primped and polished was very different than her version. I knew she’d be at the fund-raiser tonight and she’d be dressed to the nines. I was satisfied with my current six or maybe even seven.
After all, when you lived your life dressed barely above a two, dressing to the sixes or sevens makes for a perfectly acceptable score.
It took me all of ten minutes to drive from my eastside home to Erie’s bay. Erie, Pennsylvania is a small, big town. Or a big, small town. I’d used both descriptions in my middle-grade books. And though either way was contradictory, I thought both described Erie to a T. The city on the shore of Lake Erie had somewhere around a hundred thousand residents, but I could drive from my eastside home to the west side of town in fifteen minutes.
So, it only took me and my dressed-to-the-sevens self ten minutes to get to Bayfront Convention Center. And that was with after-work traffic.
Amanda’s Pantry’s fund-raiser was in the ballroom. The first year, it had been in the convention center’s smallest ballroom. This year, the biggest.
I walked in an hour before the big event began. We’d done Amanda’s annual fund-raiser here since the first one, and the staff had the setup down to a science.
The large tables were set with ten chairs and place settings. The centerpieces were gorgeous. They were mainly silk forget-me-nots with white roses. The forget-me-not was the flower I’d chosen to use on the Amanda’s Closet logo.
I’d always thought that forget-me-nots were not only beautiful, but also resilient. They grew in a well-tended garden as well as in the wild.