by R. K. Ryals
He’s so tall, his feet hang off of the bed, and he spends a good deal of the night kicking my sheets off, but he’s there, and he fought to be here. With me.
“Hey, Moretti,” I whisper into the darkness.
“Yeah?”
“Confession: I used to lay on my floor and pretend you were here, and it was a good and bad feeling all at once. Because I wanted you here, and yet with Mom …” I pause, and then rush to say, “I like you a lot. More than like actually. A bit of advice: Never stop being you.”
He kisses my brow. “Confession: I like you more. A bit of advice: You should wear my jersey more often. It looks good on you. It feels right.”
He kisses me, and yeah, some kisses just can’t be put into words. This kiss, the feel of it and him, is so big it’s like holding the world. I don’t ever want to let that go.
EPILOGUE
P.S.
THE DAY WE drop off my mother, I don’t cry.
My heart bleeds, my entire body being gutted from the inside out, but I don’t cry.
I don’t cry because I know she doesn’t need to see me cry, but honestly, this is the worst pain I’ve ever felt. I have no idea what I’m going to do without her.
Most of my life has been spent seeing the world with my mom. Spent sitting next to her bed saying prayers to a mother I want back so much it hurts, and I guess I’m afraid she won’t come back now. That with her gone, away from me, she has no chance of remembering who I am.
We live in a big, big world, and she’s taken me on a journey no one else has ever taken. No one, and I mean no one, can take that away from me.
The car pulls up to the building, and I stare at it.
The institution is white stone with a mountain of stairs leading up to a columned porch. Rocking chairs creak back and forth in the wind, and I see ghosts in them.
“Are you okay?” Matthew whispers next to me. He takes my hand, squeezing it.
I continue to stare at the building. It’s a giant, white dragon waiting to burn me alive.
“I don’t know,” I tell him honestly.
And that is the crux of our relationship, my favorite part of being with Matthew. He’s just there. He lets me feel the pain rather than stifling it. He rides it with me.
Mom isn’t smiling when Aunt Trish helps her out of the car. Her head is down, and she doesn’t look at any of us.
I have to swallow a giant ocean of sobs.
“My heart is breaking,” I mouth to Matthew.
“I know,” he mouths back. His eyes cry with me.
I swallow over and over again, choking back bile, tears, and screams while trying to breathe past the massive sea threatening to tsunami me.
The institute’s director meets us at the door. She’s a cheerful, young woman with red wire-rimmed glasses and hot pink high heels. She doesn’t match, and for some reason, that helps. Because smiling, bubbly people who don’t take the time to match are okay, right?
We’re shown to Mom’s room. It’s small, but efficient. There’s a full size bed with a blue comforter. It matches the wall. Robin’s egg blue. Gracie would love it.
There’s a wallpaper border near the ceiling with tiny birds on it, and I think they are singing. I imagine they’re singing, that they’re here to help set Mom free.
Mom sniffles, head down.
I sneak in next to her, slipping my hand into hers.
“My jewel?” she asks. The way she says it flays the skin from my body, like I’m betraying her.
“You’re going to see so much more of the world now,” I promise. I sell my soul to say those words.
Mom has been inside hospitals before. They didn’t help, but we’ve done a lot of research on the institute, and they have capable doctors who believe they can break through her cycle of delusions.
Truth is, I don’t mind her fantasies. It’s never been the fantasies. It’s always been this wish I have where we could live her fantasies. For real. She and I traveling the world together with actual passports.
The thing that helps me walk away, the thing that keeps my heart from completely dying when I leave her, is the promise that one day, maybe, she’ll wake up, look at me, and say, “I love you, Reagan.”
I make it to the stairs outside before I break down, my body falling to the white stone, shoulders shaking. I am falling apart. I am a stick of dynamite exploding.
“Mama!” I cry out, because holding it in hurts too much.
I’ve never felt so broken.
Aunt Trish kneels in front of me, mascara running in lines down her cheeks, her chest heaving, and I know this has been just as hard on her.
“She’ll remember me one day, right?” I choke out. “Me? Reagan?”
The sun is shining, and it shouldn’t be. Today, it should rain.
Aunt Trish wipes her eyes. “The shattered mind doesn’t always understand selfish.” She looks at me, sympathy an elephant on the stairs with us. “The shattered mind sees two worlds, one where Reagan is alive and safe, and another, darker place that swallowed Julia whole. A place where she wasn’t able to protect her baby. Maybe taking Reagan there, to this dark place, is her way of coping. She needed to pretend you were both of her children, that you are Julia and Reagan.”
Pain pierces my heart. “I don’t know how to be both.”
“Then don’t.” She takes my hand, clasping it between her palms. “Be Reagan.”
I sniffle, looking up to find Matthew behind Trish, his eyes as wet as ours. “Okay,” I say, nodding. “I can do that.” I’m shaking as I say it, my hands trembling so bad I have to fist them.
My gaze locks with Trish’s. “Can I come and talk to you at night?”
There will be no more late nights kneeling at Mom’s bed. Her bed is still there, but she isn’t, and it’s just not the same.
“Oh, Reagan!” Aunt Trish chokes, tears coming hard. “I’ve been waiting a long time for you to ask me that.”
She helps me up, tugging me into her embrace.
Uncle Bobby and Matthew wait, crying. Bobby tries hiding it. Matthew doesn’t.
“Okay,” I swipe at my eyes. “Let’s go home.”
When the car pulls away, I look back, my eyes drawn to the windows. On the second floor, a woman stands framed behind blue curtains, and I know, even though she’s too far away to tell, that it’s my mother.
One day, I’m going to hold her, she’s going to hold me, and we’re going to see the world again. Reagan and Mom.
WE MAKE ONE more video. Matthew films while I walk through my mother’s empty bedroom taking it all in—the pictures, the globes, the maps, the cardboard passports, and her television. It’s off now. Black and silent.
Kneeling, I touch the hieroglyphics she drew on the wall the first night Matthew came. The night we visited Egypt.
“Beware,” Matthew warns, humor tinging his voice. “It’s death to those who wake the dead.”
I peer up at him. “The sky is bright and blue. No rain. No clouds. Nothing except sun and wind kissing our skin. It smells clean. The way the earth does right after it rains. As if the world just stepped out of the shower. It’s quiet, the only sound the wind blowing and bugs buzzing. Birds call to each other. Fields stretch out before us, full of tall grass. Wheat maybe? Or corn? It sways in the wind, like it’s dancing. There are mountains or foothills. I’m not sure which, but they’re there, and we stand in their shadow.”
Matthew steps toward me, fascinated. “Where are we?”
I used to ask my mother that, the same look on my face.
My lips curve, a smile breaking free. “I don’t know.” A crazy laugh escapes. “I have absolutely no idea where we are.”
He gets it. I see it in his face, and I know by the way he gets it that I am definitely in love with him. I’ve fallen for the first time, and it feels good. I hope it lasts.
“It’s kind of nice, isn’t it?” he asks. “Not knowing where you are.”
“Yeah,” I answer, spinning to look at the room.
“No destination. Just a promise.”
I’m a butterfly. I like those best because they’re magic. They break free of a cocoon, beautiful and uninhibited. Most butterflies don’t live very long. Two days at the shortest, a year at most.
I think that’s part of their charm. They’re so fragile with so little time to make the most of their lives. They spend what time they have in color, hopping from flower to air to objects. Flying and breathing and being.
I am a butterfly, and while I hope to live way longer than a year, I plan to do it like they do. In color.
Maybe I’m more like my mother than I think.
Looking at Matthew, I open my arms. “Fly with me?”
Grinning, he sets his phone down, and we fly. Together.
He gets it.
P.P.S.
Keep it real
The videos play, flashing light over a room full of faces, the glow holding a thousand memories. The people watching are quiet, enthralled. The videos aren’t professional. They’re choppy, crazy, blurred in places, but they’re honest. Brutally honest.
When I turned in my video project, Mrs. Powell insisted I didn’t have to play it for the class. Especially after she watched it. But I wanted them to see it. I needed them to.
I even went a step further.
The entire senior class gathers to watch it per my request—with permission from Mr. Winks.
The auditorium is full, and I’m nervous.
Before playing them, I took the stage saying very little, leaving it to the footage to tell the story, the footage to give my classmates a bird’s eye view of my mother’s world.
The screen flashes memories. Me on my bed, crying, talking about my mother and her story. Me begging her to understand me. To know me beyond Julia.
Mom in her room with me, traveling.
Her voice fills the auditorium, hypnotic and captivating.
My eyes brim with tears.
Matthew is in the videos. He traveled to Italy with us, after all, and the senior class laughs when Mom has him speak Italian, but then corrects his pronunciation.
In the dim space, I find Matthew’s face where he waits for me at the back of the room. He’s so incredibly handsome it makes my heart hurt. In a good way. He towers above the others, his black hair short but curly in places. He’s clean shaven. He wears a Mustangs hoodie pulled over a white T-shirt. There are several scouts coming to check out the school’s games soon, and all of them are interested in him. He’ll get his pick of colleges, but he’s hoping for LSU. I am, too, because that’s where I’m applying.
The videos end, and I walk up to the stage.
“That’s my mother. Her name is Georgia LeAnne Lawson, and she lost a child and a husband. To cope, she traveled the world with me, and I’d like to think we were looking for them together, that she called me her jewel because she needed to remember her child’s name, needed to memorialize it, and not because she forgot me.
“I am my mother’s daughter, a seventeen-year-old seasoned traveler with a cardboard passport full of stickers.
“There will never be another woman like my mother. I never want there to be. Despite her illness, she taught me things. She taught me how small we are in this world, how insignificant we are in the bigger scheme of things, and yet how important it is to hold onto the little moments.
“My mother has a mental illness, and I am proud of her.”
The auditorium explodes in applause, and even though I know I haven’t changed everyone’s minds, that the rumors will still circulate, I feel good because, not only did I prove to myself how proud I am of my mother, I now have something to watch at night, travels I can hold onto, places I can go to with her over and over again.
I finally opened the box my aunt gave me. It was full of pictures, most of them from before. My dad smiling down at me, my small hand in his big one. The three of us, hugging. My sister, all wrinkled and red the day she was born while I stared at her scowling despite my “I’m proud to be a big sister” T-shirt. Pictures of me as a baby, my mother holding me so tight it was as if the idea of letting me go would destroy her.
Aunt Trish is right. Memories can be painful. I want that again. To be held by my mother the way she held me as a baby. Afraid to let me go.
It will happen.
One day, she will call me Reagan.
One day we’ll travel the world for real.
How do I know this? Because, even if it doesn’t happen, I have hope and that matters.
The world, the entire world is built on hope.
Hope is our way of capturing the world. Our way of holding onto every day to get to the next.
I am hope.
About the Author
R.K. Ryals is the author of emotional and gripping young adult and new adult paranormal romance, contemporary romance, and fantasy. With a strong passion for charity and literacy, she works as a full time writer encouraging people to “share the love of reading one book at a time.” An avid animal lover and self-proclaimed coffee-holic, R.K. Ryals was born in Jackson, Mississippi and makes her home in the Southern U.S. with her husband, her three daughters, a rescue dog named Oscar the Grouch, a playful cat named Delphi, and a coffee pot she honestly couldn't live without. Should she ever become the owner of a fire-breathing dragon (tame of course), her life would be complete. Visit her at www.authorrkryals.com.
Other works available:
Paranormal Romance Books:
The Redemption Series
Redemption
Ransom
Retribution
Revelation
The Acropolis Series
The Acropolis
The Labyrinth
Deliverance
The Thorne Trilogy
Cursed
Possessed
Dancing with the Devil
In the Land of Tea and Ravens (Standalone book)
Fantasy Books:
The Scribes of Medeisia Series
Mark of the Mage
Tempest
Fist of the Furor
City in Ruins
The Standalone Embrace Yourself Series
The Story of Awkward
An Introvert’s Tale
Contemporary Romance Reads:
The Singing River
Hawthorne & Heathcliff
The Best I Could
Sex & Such
Capture the World