“Not that I want to get married,” Maureen said hurriedly. “I’m not saying that! God, Danny! You didn’t think…” She began to laugh. “I might meet a millionaire! You might meet a senorita in Colorado. It’s just that I’ll miss you so much, honey. Eight weeks of summer term and then just two weeks and back at school.”
“I’ll have to really train, anyhow,” Danny said. “I’m not exactly the top guy in my weight class in America. They’re giving me a chance, not a promise.”
“But we’ll have holidays. We’ll…I wish we could just promise to meet right here after graduation.”
“I wish that, too, but you have to take your chances,” Danny told her.
They drove downtown to the new café that had replaced the bacon-and-eggs joint where Danny had bought Maureen her grilled cheese sandwich. The lunch lady, Miss Bliss, was the manager of the new place. She enfolded Maureen in a huge hug and asked, “So, how’s this new school? I heard from one of the ladies at church that it’s all set up for kids like you.”
“It’s not just for kids who sing. It’s a regular high school, just with dorms and that….”
“I meant with special helpers and such,” Miss Bliss said. “Kathy said it was the kind of place where a kid could get an education without having to compete so much.”
Danny watched Maureen’s face crumple and saw her chin begin to quiver. But she stood up straight and smiled at Miss Bliss. She said, “It’s not a school for brain-injured kids. I’m the only one there who’s brain injured. There are some kids who are disabled in different ways, and I have tutors to help me. And when I go to college…”
“College?” Miss Bliss asked.
“I’ll always have to have special help…and adapting…adaptions…and…”
“I think that’s wonderful!” Miss Bliss said. “Colleges are sure different now!”
“They have to be,” Maureen said. “It’s a law.”
“We want to have lunch,” Danny said.
But both of them only played with the club sandwiches they ordered, and finally they had them wrapped. Without speaking, they drove out County G and turned on Bellwether Road. Danny spread out the blanket.
“It’s not exactly a white tablecloth and candles,” he said.
Maureen looked down on Bridget’s grave. The grass had grown in thickly, and someone had planted two pink rosebushes—at the head and foot of where Bridget lay.
“One for her and one for me,” Maureen said. “Does Kitt still come every day?”
“I don’t know,” Danny told her. “I don’t see them anymore. Sarah’s fine. She’s really grown up a lot. She actually told me to tell you that she was sorry.”
“You know, I believe that. And I was scared to death of Kitt, but I don’t really even blame her. Losing your child, especially that way…You’d lose your mind.” She sat down awkwardly on the blanket. “I’m never going to be able to sit down right. And I’m never going to be able to live in my hometown, Danny.”
“You mean Miss Bliss.”
“It’s going to shock people that I can have a job. It’s going to shock people that I can have a baby.”
Danny shrugged. He knew she was right.
“It’s not the only town on Earth,” he said.
“But it was mine,” Maury answered.
He dropped her off early, planning to have dinner with his folks—who were tight-lipped about the whole Maureen matter—before he drove Maureen back to school. It was ten hours round trip, and he had school Monday. He would pick her up at nine the next morning and be home by nine Sunday night.
Just before he left, Danny opened his folder of college mail and extracted an envelope. He sat down at his desk and read the letter. Then he dialed a number.
In his home office, Ryan Ebberly, who coached varsity wrestling at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, just under a two-hour drive from Dubuque, sat back in his chair. He pushed up the brim of his cap with satisfaction. He called his assistant.
“Dan Carmody,” he said. “The kid from Minnesota. Changed his mind. Got a full ride to Colorado, but he didn’t sign yet.”
“We knew he was going to Colorado. We filled that space,” his assistant said.
“He’s a good kid. A good student. He can wrestle for it. He’s a tough kid. I want him here. Let’s give him money.”
“Dan Carmody. That’s the kid…Remember that, Coach? The little girl who was supposed to be alive except she really died? A few years ago? That was his girlfriend.”
“Huh. So you’re saying he might be screwed up,” Ebberly said. “Well, I know Bill O’Malley coached him. I’ll call Bill.”
“That was the other girl,” his assistant went on. “I remember it now. Bill O’Malley’s daughter. She was mistaken for her friend. It was all over the TV. You remember that.”
“Well, yeah, I do. How long ago was that?”
“Got me. Years.”
Ebberly dialed Bill O’Malley. Was Bill at home? It was Sunday. Was it too early?
The phone rang just as Danny pressed the doorbell and beckoned Maureen out onto the porch. Bill watched them through the porch window. Yes, he told Ebberly. He couldn’t recommend a boy more. Maureen threw her arms around Danny’s neck. He lifted her off her feet. Yes, a solid wrestler, even-tempered, a team player, never a whine out of him.
“Congratulations,” Bill told Ebberly. “He’ll make you proud.”
Bill shook his head. Well, there were worse things than finding the one you loved before you knew who you were. There were worse things than losing that love, too. All of it went into the folder labeled EXPERIENCE. They had raised Maury under their wing, but it was under their wing that she’d almost slipped away. If this was time for Maureen to find her true love, or her first heartbreak, Bill was fine in either case with that being Danny. Bill had lost her, and gotten her back.
Now he had to let her go.
Sarah Flannery waited on the steps for Shane Baker to pick her up. Shane was going to drive her to the cemetery. They’d just starting dating—even though she just turned fifteen. It was a special privilege because her parents knew the Bakers so well. When she saw Danny and Maury on the porch, she glanced away and then back.
She thought of how many times Maury talked Bridget into playing just one game of Monopoly Junior with her before they went out.
On an impulse, she waved.
Danny waved back. And after a moment, so did Maureen.
At the grave, Sarah tended the rosebushes she had planted this spring—an act of contrition—one for Bridget, one for Maureen. She snapped the blown blooms off above the three-leaf as her mother had taught her, then checked to see if the little scrap of silver wire was still tied around the branch of one of the bushes. It was.
Sarah had never removed it. As she had since the day that she’d planted the roses, she wondered what it was and who had put it there.
acknowledgments
This is a work of fiction. Although at least two separate and heart-wrenching cases of mistaken identity after a motor vehicle accident have really happened over the past decade, there is no intentional similarity to the experiences of any actual family or individual.
Understanding the recovery process after brain injury is difficult even for researchers and clinicians. Although I know personally of only three cases in which individual progress after a significant brain injury was as rapid as it is for the survivor in this story, accounts similar to this one are uncommon in the literature of brain injury but by no means unknown. The way the brain responds to trauma and rehabilitation is intensely individual.
For their generous help in giving me the information that would help me even generally re-create the heroic efforts of men and women to save lives in a single hour, I must thank the physicians, social workers, chaplains, and rehabilitation specialists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Hospital and Clinics in Madison and the Riley Hospital for Children and Methodist Hospital of Indianapolis—especially my friends and superl
ative physicians Dr. Bob Collins and Dr. Ann Collins. Thank you to my pals Holly, Maureen, Jane, Karen, Pamela, Sara, Joyce, and Mary, and to my husband and children, especially Martin and Dan, for their valuable suggestions. Lastly, but very importantly, I thank “my” cheerleaders, the cheerleaders of Oregon High School, who give their absolute best, always, as the status of their difficult sport changes over the generations. They and their supervisor shared openly with me their triumphs and sadnesses, making Maureen and Bridget real. As always, I am indebted to the staff and friends of the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois, where this book was written in November 2006 and January 2007.
About the Author
Jacquelyn Mitchard is the New York Times bestselling author of THE BREAKDOWN LANE, TWELVE TIMES BLESSED, and THE DEEP END OF THE OCEAN, which was the very first book picked by Oprah for her book club. NOW YOU SEE HER was Jackie’s debut young adult novel, and she also has several children’s books to her credit: BABY BAT’S LULLABY; STARRING PRIMA!; READY, SET, SCHOOL!; and ROSALIE, MY ROSALIE. Jackie lives outside Madison, Wisconsin, with her husband and eight children. You can visit her online at www.jacquelynmitchard.com.
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Copyright
ALL WE KNOW OF HEAVEN. Text copyright © 2008 by Jacquelyn Mitchard. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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