Welcome Home

by Eric Smith

  “Right, so fifteen years later, you’re finally worrying about my feelings?” It’s such an unbelievably low blow, but I find myself anxious—desperate—for her response.

  “Cole, I have never cared more about someone’s feelings than yours. Ever.” The way she says it, earnest but almost laced with anger, strikes me. She keeps talking, and I can practically see her trembling on the other end of the phone. That’s how I sound when I’m pretending not to be upset. “I lost everything when I placed you, but it was the only way I knew to give you the life you deserved.”

  A part of me wants to snap at her again, wants to scream until she screams back. But my anger is cracking, exposing an uncertainty and grief I never realized was there. I open my mouth to say something, but emotion closes my throat. The pain of trying not to cry.

  I’m not sure how Sammie interprets the silence, but after a pause, she speaks again. It sounds like she’s begging. “Your birth father was a drug dealer, and you know all about my history before I cleaned myself up. Is that the life you wanted? Giving you a family forced me to get back on track. I had to prove to your parents that I was good enough for them to let me stay in your life!”

  Tears leak from my eyes. “Don’t lie to me, Sammie,” I plead, a knot in my stomach. I hunch over, shivering like I’m in the middle of a snowstorm. I close my eyes. “If you’d really wanted to stay in my life, you would have kept me.”

  “Don’t say that,” she says. I hear sobs coming from her end. “Don’t even think it. I wanted you more than I wanted my own life. The day you were born, holding you in my arms and just smelling you, I’ve never wanted something more.”

  I don’t know why, but suddenly I can imagine her in the hospital all those years ago, holding me and staring into my eyes. I can imagine her smelling me, just like I did with Lucy. And then the pain of never seeing or smelling or holding Lucy again crashes into me, and I realize Sammie had that exact same pain once.

  The thought breaks me.

  I start sobbing—wracking, heaving sobs that burn my lungs. I can barely breathe, I’m crying so hard. And everything hurts. My eyes, my nose, my throat. My stomach aches from how fast and heavy my sobs are coming. “How . . . how could you give me up, Sammie? Why?”

  “I wasn’t giving you up, Cole. I was trying to give you more.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I felt like a God I didn’t even know I believed in led me to your parents.”

  I hug my legs, rocking and crying. “Sammie. Please.”

  “Because I wasn’t good enough for you.”

  “Sammie—”

  The words rush out of her. “Because I loved you more than I’ve ever loved anything in the world, and even as messed up as I was, I knew if I did something as selfish as keeping you, that it would ruin both of us. I would. So I asked the universe for a sign, and not a minute later, your mom walked into my ob-gyn’s office with those cheesy ‘hoping to adopt’ pass-along cards. She smiled at me across the lobby—a simple smile—but when I looked into her eyes, I just knew. I knew what I needed to do to save you. And it broke my heart.”

  She says everything so fast and fierce, and it’s that fierceness that makes me believe her. It makes me realize where I must get my anger from. And for some reason, that comforts me even as it makes me ache.

  “I wanted you so much,” she says, softly now. “The only thing I wanted more than you was for you to be happy.”

  I don’t know when I dropped to the floor, but the wall presses against my spine as I cry. My voice cracks. “Then why doesn’t Amber love Lucy that much?”

  For a long time, it’s just the sound of us crying on the phone. Finally, Sammie sniffs. “Amber isn’t me, Cole. She’s not on drugs. She has a good support system, and you know how much her parents wanted her to keep the baby.”

  “Lucy,” I correct her.

  “Bella,” she corrects me.

  I laugh, thinking how much Dad would like that exchange. Then I inhale, a shaky, hiccupping thing. “This sucks. I just . . . I really wanted a baby sister. I wanted her. I told everyone I wanted her for my parents, but the truth is, I wanted her for me.”

  “You’ll always have Xander,” she says.

  I know it’s the truth, but as much as I love the little guy, it’s not the same. Xander isn’t mine like Lucy would have been. My sibling, our parents. Such basic things to most people, but the idea of sharing that unique bond, of having inside jokes with someone who couldn’t also ground me, it was everything to me.

  Maybe the reality of Lucy wouldn’t have been all I imagined. I hate that I’ll never know.

  “Yeah.” I clear my throat. “Thanks, Sammie.”

  “I love you, Cole. Nothing could change that.”

  “Yeah, you too. I’m, uh, I’m sorry for yelling. I think I was processing some stuff back there.”

  “You think?” she says, and we both laugh. “I’m here for you, Cole. Always.”

  “I know,” I say, and it hits me that I mean it. “Thanks, Sammie, for everything. For talking to me and wanting to yell at me, even if you didn’t do it.” I tear up again. “But mostly for my parents.”

  “You’re welcome,” she says simply. The words carry so much weight, yet I feel lighter than I have all day. Which is nowhere near light, but still.

  We say goodbye, and I set down my phone before breathing into my hands for a while. Ten minutes, maybe more. Then I wipe my face, push myself to a stand, and leave my room.

  When I get to the end of the hall, my parents are waiting. They open their arms, and I crash into their embrace. It feels so good, I could almost forget that the last time we all hugged each other, there was one more person here. One perfect, tiny, little person. Her absence brings a painful lump to my throat.

  “It’s good to be home,” Dad whispers. We keep hugging, and Dad takes a big, deep breath. “But kid, you need a shower. You smell like you’ve been in a car for, I don’t know, ten hours.”

  “I smelled fine when I left the car,” I say, pulling back. “It was from the shed. It took a lot of work to break all that stupid sh—”

  “Language,” Mom says.

  I smile as Dad teases Mom about something. It’s going to take a long time before we all stop hurting, before this Lucy-shaped hole in our hearts can start to heal. Part of me is afraid it never will. But Dad’s right.

  It’s good to be home.

  Kate Watson is a young adult writer, wife, mother of two, and the tenth of thirteen children. Originally from Canada, she attended college in Utah and holds a BA in Philosophy. A lover of travel, speaking in accents, and experiencing new cultures, she has also lived in Israel, Brazil, South Carolina, and now calls Arizona home. Her first novel, Seeking Mansfield, debuted in Spring 2017, with the companion to follow in 2018.

  “Adoption is the world to me. It is the means by which I grew another heart, and then another still. It created an unbreakable bond between me and the women whose unending love and selfless sacrifice made me a mother. My family would be nothing without adoption. Through adoption, we are everything.”

  Jar of Broken Wishes

  by Tristina Wright

  Daisy collected wishes.

  She kept them in a light blue mason jar with a dented copper lid. She imagined at one time the lid had been hard to get off, so someone tapped it all around the edge with a knife, leaving grooves that looked like minutes on a clock. She wasn’t sure why someone had tossed it out. Tossed it into the grass by the road like trash. Maybe it’d jumped off a moving truck of its own will, not content to rattle around with the other clear jars anymore. The glass was this shade of blue that reminded her of early morning in spring or the eye shadow her foster mom wore on Sundays.

  Everyone else saw an empty jar held tight by a twelve-year-old girl with curly hair that rose in a cloud around her round face. Only Daisy could s
ee the wishes. They were airy and light and different colors. Almost like fireflies all lit up blue and pink and purple and green. She’d shake the jar and the wishes would go fluttering around in a little tornado.

  She’d always seen them. As far back as she could remember, those fluttering little wishes danced on the air like tiny fairies, spiraling up and around until they eventually drifted to the ground. She couldn’t remember how she’d figured out they were wishes. She just seemed to know.

  What she didn’t know was why she couldn’t see her own. She saw everyone else’s. Big wishes. Small wishes. Impossible wishes. Emotional wishes. Saw them blossom out of lips and catch the air before plummeting to the ground and splintering into a million pieces.

  “Is there such a thing as magic?” she asked her foster mom one day.

  “Of course, honey,” her foster mom answered as she bent over Daisy’s finger with the tweezers. “That splinter is in deep. Hold still.”

  “Are wishes magic?” Daisy asked, keeping as still as possible.

  “I like to think so,” she answered. The tweezers pinched the end of the splinter in Daisy’s finger.

  I wish this wouldn’t hurt, Daisy thought desperately.

  No fluffy ball of light fell from her lips.

  The splinter still hurt coming out.

  Maybe she didn’t have wishes. Maybe the things she wanted weren’t good enough for wishes. Maybe there was some cosmic wish fairy who decided she didn’t get wishes of her own.

  Fine, then.

  She’d collect the pieces scattered across the ground and make her own wishes.

  So, she collected and collected and collected, content to pack them in the jar when other kids at the foster home wished for things that they didn’t mean.

  I wish I was a cat.

  I wish you’d never been born.

  I wish I had all the chocolate.

  I wish I never had to go to school again.

  More wishes for the jar. More colors dancing around in the blue glass. More and more and more until they smushed together like layers of colored sand.

  One night, she carefully scooped out enough pieces of wishes to make what looked sort of like a whole one and held it close to her lips. She took a deep breath, not sure how to do this or if it would even work. “I wish for a family.”

  The fractured rainbow wish flickered and winked out, vanishing from her palm.

  A time later, the Stevensons came and took her home with them. It was a nice home in a neighborhood where all the houses looked a lot alike but were different because that one was blue instead of yellow. Or that one had a picket fence instead of a stone fence.

  The Stevensons had a dog named Rose and three of their own kids. Daisy didn’t quite understand why they’d adopted her since they had kids of their own, but she wasn’t going to question the wish. She held her jar tight and smiled shyly and sat on the very edge of her very own bed in her very own bedroom decorated with elephants.

  She didn’t much care for elephants.

  But Daisy was the oldest kid there. The other kids were only in elementary school. Resentful of the fact she disrupted the intended birth order of the home, they made it very clear they didn’t want a new big sister. She was a live-in babysitter. Someone they could blame for things.

  Three months later, after fights and begging and ignoring and being ignored, Daisy and her jar of wishes returned to the little foster home off Market Street. To the same bed with flower-petal sheets and cinnamon air fresheners. To the same breakfast of instant oatmeal made with almond milk and raisins. To the mornings of homeschool and the afternoons of chores.

  One night, curled up in bed in the room she shared with two other girls, she scooped out another handful of broken wishes, mashed them together like clay, and touched the stained-glass wish to her tongue. It tasted a little like cotton candy. A fleeting candy for a fleeting wish. “I wish for a family with kids older than me.”

  After a time, the Blakes took her home, where they had two sons already in high school. She was the new baby of the family and given her own room. Everything was pink.

  She didn’t much care for pink.

  Daisy believed it was an accident the first time the youngest brother walked in on her showering. She even believed it the second time. He blushed too much for it to be on purpose.

  She stopped believing it after the sixth time.

  That same night, with her hair still dripping wet and the towel growing cold around her shoulders, she scooped out a handful of wish pieces and swallowed them. They prickled as they slid down her throat down like a too-big gulp of soda. It made her eyes water. “I wish to go home.”

  She didn’t even know what that meant.

  Two months later, she went back to the home on Market Street, clutching her jar of wishes tight to her chest. She didn’t know what to wish for next. Or ever again.

  All wrong, all wrong. I don’t have wishes after all.

  The wishes dimmed and flickered the longer she went without talking to them. She took them on walks instead, intending to throw the jar in the lake.

  She never did.

  Fall slipped into winter, which gave way to the melting of spring. Daisy left after oatmeal, escaping out the back door and into the first warm day in months. The sun pulled freckles from her starving skin and warmed her to her core as she walked. The breeze kicked off the lake and played with her hair, throwing her curls into a wildness she didn’t quite feel anymore.

  Daisy found a tree next to the lake and plopped down underneath it. She was thirteen now. Officially a teenager. Officially a woman, according to her foster mom. Mrs. Ainsley had spent the morning explaining pads and tampons and cramps, then gave her ibuprofen for the clawing in her tummy.

  She didn’t feel any different, though. Other than maybe her hip bones trying to push through her skin. Cramps were the devil.

  She peered at her jar of wishes and shook them. They fluttered around the glass, bumping into the walls like errant moths.

  “What are those?” A shadow fell across her lap.

  Daisy jumped in surprise and squinted through the mid-morning sun, and her tummy did this swoop thing that had nothing to do with cramps. She didn’t know the new girl’s name yet. Only that she’d lost her parents in a car accident. They’d exchanged quick glances over the past few days before Daisy shied away, nervous and giddy each time. “They’re my wishes.”

  The girl hesitated a minute and then sat next to her, folding her legs up under her dress and patting her head scarf into place.

  “I’m Daisy. I like your scarf,” Daisy said with an attempt at a smile.

  “I’m Farah. I like your wishes,” the girl said as her browned cheeks bloomed with a blush. She had three freckles just under her left eye that formed a triangle.

  “Do you want one?” Daisy asked. “They don’t seem to be working for me.”

  Farah peered at the jar, tapping on the glass with one polished pink fingernail. “What did you wish for?”

  Daisy told her, staring at the jar instead of Farah. She rambled through it all. About the young kids and the older kids. About not being wanted and being wanted for the wrong reasons. About wishing for home and never finding it. About feeling like a boomerang who kept ending up precisely where she started. All the words tumbled out into her lap in a messy heap of failed wishes and splintered emotions.

  “Where do the wishes come from?” Farah asked when Daisy was done. She didn’t ask about the other families. She didn’t ask about the other kids. She didn’t ask for details.

  Daisy pulled one shoulder closer to her ear and rolled the jar between her hands. “Sometimes people make wishes they don’t really mean. And they break into these little tiny pieces when they hit the ground.”

  Farah tapped the jar again. “And these are the pieces?”

  Daisy nod
ded. “I started putting them in this jar a while back. Only the biggest pieces. The ones I could pick up. Some are too small, and they break up more or fly away.”

  “Well, there’s your problem,” Farah said with a smile like she’d solved a puzzle. It made rubber-band balls dance around Daisy’s chest. “You’re wishing on broken wishes. You need a whole one.”

  “I’ve never found a whole one.”

  “Haven’t you ever wished for something without your jar?”

  Daisy shook her head. The wind blew her hair over her face and she smacked it away, tucking the biggest curls behind her ear. “I don’t have any wishes.”

  “Everyone has wishes.”

  “I don’t.” Daisy pulled her knees to her chest and rested her chin on them. “I’ve tried and it never works.”

  “So your wishes break up too?” Farah closed her fingers around the jar and gently pulled it from Daisy’s grasp.

  “I’ve tried, and I don’t have any. Watch.” She licked her lips. “I wish I had an ice cream.”

  Farah giggled and held her hand out, cupping it in the thin air under Daisy’s chin. “Do you see it?”

  Daisy shook her head, her skin prickling. “There’s nothing there.”

  “Sure there is. And it’s whole.”

  “Are you making fun of me?” Daisy’s face scrunched up and she pulled away from Farah an inch, but it may as well have been a mile.

  “I would never,” Farah said quickly. She held out the jar. “Here, open it.”

  Daisy unscrewed the dented lid. She held the open jar out to Farah, who deposited the wish inside. Even though the existing pieces of wishes moved out of the way to accommodate a new wish, Daisy still didn’t see anything. She pursed her lips. “Okay, now you do one.”

  Farah scraped her teeth over her lower lip. “I wish I had a kitten.” A feathery blue ball of light slipped out of her lips and fell toward the grass. Daisy snatched it from the air and held it up. Farah glanced at her palm and back at Daisy’s face and shook her head. “I don’t see it.”