Pieces of Hope

by Carter, Carolyn

  Something in her warm brown eyes made me stare a little longer. Her mannerisms seemed a little too familiar—the way her body moved, the way she held her head, straight up and confident, and there was something in the way she smiled . . .

  25 Wishes and then Some

  My heart refused to believe it. Maybe some things really were too good to be true. Then again, maybe my whole world was about to crash in on me, swallow me up in one enormous, smothering wave and I just didn’t know it yet.

  “Katydid,” she finally said. “Don’t you recognize me?”

  It was her voice . . . the one that used to bring me such comfort, the one I’d nearly killed myself to hear one last time.

  The word almost wouldn’t form on my lips. “Mom?”

  I was already sobbing by the time she reached me. She wrapped me in her arms and suddenly I was smelling her, and she was speaking soothingly into my ear as I held on tightly—ever so tightly, fearing she might disappear in a puff of smoke, or that I might wake up to discover this had all been a very good and terrible dream, and I decided right then that I was never going to let her go. It would take God himself to tear us apart. Because I would never, never let her go again.

  I held onto her as she rocked me gently back and forth, and I heard her cooing in my ear, telling me everything was all going to be all right, and still I kept on crying. At some point, she ushered me over to the grizzly bear bench, and I sat down nearly on top of her, terrified that she might go away again.

  “I’ll stay as long as you want me to,” she promised, brushing the wet hair off my face. “I won’t leave until you say it’s okay.”

  I tried to speak, but I couldn’t. I sobbed and nodded. Some time later, I lay my head on her shoulder as we looked absently into the crowd. In some unknown moment, Creesie and the others had left us alone, but I knew they weren’t far. I planned to give a boatload of thank-you hugs the minute they returned.

  “Katydid,” she said at last, “I’ve been worried about you.”

  I thought she sounded so normal. So mom-like.

  “You’ve been worried about me?” I tried to chuckle, but my throat was doing that I’ve-been-crying-too-hard-and-now-I-sound-like-an-idiot. “Mom, you’re the one who’s dead. I believe Brody would refer to this as ironical.”

  Mom got it—Brody and his made-up words. When she was alive, she loved to laugh, and as the sound tickled my ears, I remembered what a great laugh she had.

  “You’ll always be my funny girl.” With both arms, she gave me a tighter squeeze. “But I have, Katydid . . . I’ve been worried about you.”

  “You have?” I straightened up so I could look into her eyes. I couldn’t believe how much she looked like me . . . well, I looked like her. I’d never seen her at my age except in old photos, and those didn’t really do her justice. She had zero wrinkles.

  “Of course, I was worried. Did you think I’d abandoned you?”

  I thought about that for a long, sad moment.

  “I did, at first,” I admitted. “I didn’t understand the dream where you showed up. I thought I was making you up, missing you too much. It wasn’t easy to be left behind . . . to wonder where you were.”

  “I was right beside you,” she said softly. “Even at your accident, I was there.”

  “I know. Ethan figured it out.”

  Mom smiled again. I was sure I was imagining it, but the flash off her teeth left me a little speechless. “Yes, Ethan. He’s something, isn’t he?” She kept smiling at me.

  I was intrigued. “You know Ethan?”

  “I know of him. I know how much you love him.”

  “I love them both,” I reminded her.

  “Yes, I know that, too.” She stood and took my hand. “Walk with me a little. I’d like some fresh air and a little peace and quiet.”

  We left the noisy fairgrounds, finding a quiet path through the woods. Without the sparkling lights of the fair, the path was dark, but with every step the sun rose higher in the sky. Fewer than a dozen steps down the path, the sky was a blaze of fire. The end of the path opened onto a wide grassy meadow. There was a fair-sized lake in the distance where several swans, their graceful necks arched, paddled about in wide circles.

  “I know this place,” I said, a little surprised. “This was where Grandpa George and Gigi used to keep their horses.” A dim light bulb went off in my head. It as also the lake I’d seen in Ethan’s mind, the one Quinn and Lucy swam across. I shook my head. What a small world it was. Back in the moment, I watched the swans on the lake turn a glow-in-the-dark shade of pink. As they morphed to midnight blue, I pointed and laughed, “But those, I don’t remember!” She laughed in that way that tickled my ears. “Nice touch, Mom. You’re pretty good at this stuff.”

  “This is also where I first realized your father was the one—my one.” We continued walking toward the lake as she reminisced. “This is where he kissed me for the first time. We were young and idealistic and”—she faked a stern look—“we weren’t married yet so we only kissed—”

  “Very funny, Mom. We both know you’re no Angel.”

  “Well, now you know!” She looked behind her as if searching for her wings.

  “Seriously, you knew dad was the right one from a kiss? Must have been some kiss.”

  “That kiss touched my heart. Difficult to explain, but I could feel how much he loved me. That’s how I knew he was the one . . .” When she made the swans change colors again, I imagined her reaching into her personal stash of crayons, coloring and re-coloring them at will.

  I studied her for a long moment. She was, of course, beautiful—so like and unlike my mother at the same time. “Mom, could I ask a huge favor?”

  “Anything, Katydid.”

  I didn’t have her full attention (Mom was distracted by the swans), but I pressed on. “It’s not that I can’t appreciate how beautiful you were . . . um, are . . . at my age.” I was unsure of the timeline, unsure of how things worked here. “But you’re really sort of freaking me out. It’s weird to see my mother the same age as me.”

  “Oh!” she giggled, instantly transforming into her just as beautiful forty-two year old self, and morphing into a yellow sundress. Her feet were bare. “Better?”

  It took a few seconds to answer. Too many words. Too many thoughts.

  “Much,” I finally said.

  We fed the swans from a bag of bread Mom conveniently acquired. I couldn’t take my eyes off the little ones—imagining their tiny webbed feet paddling like mad beneath the water, desperately clinging to their mothers—doing everything in their power to delay that painful moment of separation as long as they possibly could. I knew how they felt. Ever so subtly, I squeezed her hand. And ever so tightly, she squeezed back.

  After we ran out of bread, we watched them do their water dance for a while. The swans were now an assortment of colors, but they had finally stopped changing. It seemed that Mom had used up every crayon in her sixty-four color crayon box.

  “Mom, can I ask another question?”

  “Anything,” she repeated patiently.

  “Why are you here? I mean, why are you really here?”

  “You needed to know I was all right, didn’t you?” She was still looking out at the lake. “You asked me many times and I wanted you to know. There’s no need to worry about me. In fact, there’s no need to worry about anything. I’m well-loved and well taken care of.” Her eyes rested on my face. I heard the gentleness in her tone. “You needed to hear that from me, didn’t you?”

  I was on the verge of tears again. Mom pulled me down onto a green plaid blanket that appeared out of nowhere, and laid my head in her lap. She stroked my hair the way she used to do when I was a child too tired or too cranky to sleep. The memory was so vivid that it stilled my swiftly-beating heart and dissolved the lump in my throat. Here was my moment to tell her everything I wanted her to know. There might never be another.

  The words came out in a jumbled rush. It was the only way I’d e
ver get them said.

  “It’s all my fault! I never should have left you alone that day. If only I’d been there. If only I’d done what I was supposed to do—I’d—I’d still have you with me!” I broke off into another round of sobs.

  She cradled me in her arms. “Shhh . . . it’s all right. Don’t cry. Don’t cry, Katydid. It isn’t true. You have to stop blaming yourself. What you did or didn’t do wouldn’t have made any difference. I promise you that.”

  “Yes, it would have!” I said fiercely between the sobs. “I could have saved you! At the very least, you wouldn’t have been alone!”

  “Oh, but I wasn’t alone,” she said as she rocked me. “I wasn’t.”

  My breath caught in my throat. “What?”

  “I wasn’t alone.” Mom leaned back, gently raised my chin. “Someone was with me.” I scrambled to sit up, feeling wet tears drip onto my collar.

  “You’re speaking metaphorically, right? God or something?”

  The sound of her laughter teased my ears. She thought this was genuinely funny.

  “Well, yes, that too,” she said, seeming to appreciate my perspective of it. “But I meant it literally . . . as in, a living human being was there beside me.”

  I was so taken aback that my mouth froze open. I imagined the giant Mola-Mola with their mouths in a perfectly shaped O. Finally, I said, “Living—Hu—What the heck are you talking about?”

  “He wasn’t easy to find,” she admitted, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear that had fallen across my eye. “That’s why I was late getting here. Late,” she laughed. “Takes on a whole new meaning now, doesn’t it?”

  I frowned. Evidently, dead jokes were limited in number.

  “He needed to know he did the right thing that day—despite appearances—after all, what happened to me wasn’t his fault . . . Had it not been for Gavriel, I might never have found him. Who would have thought to look in a wild African elephant? But that’s where the boy was!” She looked astonished.

  It was Daniel. That was an easy guess. And the elephant part—not so surprising. But Gavriel intefering? And what else was she talking about?

  “Doesn’t that break the rules or something?” We cannot intercede played in my head, the words Camael uttered when Ethan was tumbling over the side of the cliff. So the black-winged Angels would help Daniel, but not Ethan? What the—?

  Mom jumped in. “Camael said you’d say that. He said to tell you there are always exceptions. Something to do with the ‘greater good.’”

  “Exceptions?” I frowned. “Camael used that ordinary three-syllable word?”

  “He had a fancier way of saying it, but that’s what he meant.” She giggled a youthful giggle. “But getting back to Daniel . . . Promise me that when you see him again you won’t be too hard on him. He loves you, you know.”

  He loved me. What an understatement that was—followed me through two lifetimes, told me I was dead when I wasn’t, planned to spend his eternity with me even after I told him I loved someone else—yeah, I guess he loved me . . .

  “I admit he wasn’t there with the best of intentions . . .” Mom had that ‘forgive him’ tone in her voice, the one I’d often heard after an argument with my father. “Robbing us—imagine that!” She laughed as though this were hysterical. But I scowled, thinking that my final act wouldn’t be one of forgiveness. “But I guess he changed his mind once he got there, and then he couldn’t get out!” she rambled. “He had no idea, you see, that anyone was home, that I was home, and terribly ill that day—”

  “No, you were fine!” I insisted, furiously pushing away all the bad memories of the chemo and the cancer and the hair loss and the nausea. It hadn’t been that long ago. I was jumping to conclusions, but she’d made it sound like this was something new. “You were cured!” I reminded her in a rush. “Your cancer was gone!”

  “That was true.” She touched my cheek the way she used to do when I was little and couldn’t understand grown-up things. “But the cancer returned with a vengeance. We ought to have told you sooner. Your father and Claire kept telling me that I—”

  “Claire knew?” I was angry, but trying to hide it. I was doing a lousy job. “I’m the responsible one, not Claire. You should have told me.”

  She brushed my cheek again, willing me to understand. It took a moment before she could speak. “Katydid, you worry so much when it comes to me. I watched what you went through the first time and, right or wrong, I never wanted that for you.” Tears filled her eyes. I felt like the worst daughter on the planet. How could I make my own mother cry?

  “Mom, don’t . . . please don’t . . .” And then I was crying, too.

  “But it was wrong, I see that now. Secrets are a terrible thing even if they’re kept for the best of reasons. Because you didn’t know the truth, you blamed yourself for my death, didn’t you?”

  “I’m okay now.” It was true, mostly, but she looked unconvinced. “I am, really.” But I still had too many questions left unanswered. Too many troubling ones. “Tell me more about that last day, Mom. You said Daniel was there?”

  She let out a small laugh, and suddenly I had the clearest memory from another time when he used to crack her up this same way. “Daniel’s a lousy, terrible thief—the worst you can imagine! That day, I heard him rummaging in my jewelry chest while I was in the bathroom across the hall—throwing up for the fourth time that morning, worried that at any moment you’d walk in the back door to meet me for lunch, and praying like a mad woman that I didn’t look sick when you arrived . . .”

  I didn’t want to believe it, but it was starting to sink in. On the last day my mother was alive, Daniel Hartlein—the thief, the rat, the dirty lying ex-boyfriend—planned to rob us! The whole spectacle was appalling to me. Mom ill, but not wanting to seem so for my sake? And Daniel? What would ever make him think that stealing was a good idea? In the history of his very bad ideas, this was a top contender for worst ever.

  “Were you scared?” I asked, thinking she had no idea that Daniel was the thief.

  “No.” She thought a second, then said, “I could smell him.”

  “You smelled him?” I couldn’t hide my shock.

  “He always smelled like Patchouli to me,” she explained with a shrug.

  “I never noticed,” I admitted, sniffing around in my memories of him.

  “I think it’s his soul. He’s got a hippie’s soul.”

  She laughed once again, and I wondered if my mother hadn’t lost it a little in the afterlife. Then again, it was entirely possible I was looking at this thing too seriously. It was evident that Mom didn’t think it was serious. Not even slightly so.

  Just an afternoon robbery . . . with my ex-boyfriend as the thief . . . and my mother nauseous and sick and trying not to disturb my limited scope of reality by letting on that her cancer had returned . . .

  Nope. Nothing serious going on here.

  “You should have seen him.” Mom chuckled at the memory. “He nearly jumped right out of his skin. I wondered at the time how he could have missed hearing me in the bathroom, but I guess he was so nervous and caught up in his escape that wasn’t paying much of anything else. I was already standing on the top step when I said, ‘Hello, Daniel Hartlein. How the heck have you been?’”

  “You didn’t!” I suddenly saw the hilarity in this and roared with my mother.

  “I did.”

  “And what did he say to you?” I asked.

  “Oh, he was very cool. You know Daniel.”

  Either I snatched it from her thoughts or I was simply able to picture his face in that exact moment. The skulking—yet very chill—ex-boyfriend/robber.

  “He replied, cool as a cucumber . . . ‘To tell you the truth, Vivienne, I’ve had better days.’ And I laughed as he said it, but I must have been slightly disoriented, though at that moment I thought I was fine. Like I said, I felt woozy all morning so maybe my perception was off slightly more than I knew—”

  The chuckle that ha
d been in my throat died soundlessly. I tried hard not to listen, imagining my hands covering my ears like I did when I was little.

  “But when the ball of my foot touched that top step and I felt it slip, I knew I was in real trouble. I’d slipped on that same step before, but this one was a real doozy.”

  It was too easy to imagine the terror she must have felt—my heart pounding as if I were sharing that fall with her. But my mother didn’t look scared or sad as she thought back on the moment of her death. In fact, she didn’t even sound put out by it. I got the impression that, had she been telling this story to a random stranger—rather than her own daughter—she would have laughed at her clumsiness.

  “And Daniel . . . Oh, poor kid! He was so scared, but he’s got fabulous reflexes. I somehow twisted my left foot and started to fall down the stairs backwards when he grabbed the front of my shirt. My shirt ripped as he struggled to hold me—I’m sure this is why the police suspected foul play, but really there was no such thing—”

  “Daniel tried to . . .” My sentence broke apart. Mom waited for me to finish, but I don’t think I even reacted. I felt too numb to continue.

  At last, she went on, “He looked horrified as I fell, though there was nothing else he could have done, and I wanted him to know that. That’s why I went to find him first. Anyway,” she said, shrugging as she finished her retelling, “the moment my head hit that third step, I heard a loud snap—

  To my everlasting gratitude, she didn’t picture it. I had no desire to yank that image from her mind and have it permanently etched in mine. But it did cause something else to click into place. “Mom, I think I felt that during my climb with Brody. It was instantaneous and sharp—and then it was gone. Is it possible that some part of me knew you were gone?”

  “We have a close connection. Always have, haven’t we?” Her voice was reassuring. I nodded back, grasping how very connected we had been, even in her final moments.

  But one last question burned a hole in my conscience.

  “Um, Mom . . .” I gnawed intently on my bottom lip.