by Linda Bleser
A few days ago I might not have understood the extent of my mother’s feelings of pain and loss, but now that I’d spent the last few days in a world where Cassie was missing, I had a better understanding. I would have done anything to find my way back to her. How much more would my mother have grieved over the loss of a child she’d given birth to, nursed, and loved? Add to that the guilt of choosing her husband over her child and it was a toxic brew, poisoning her slowly and painfully day by day until the only escape was death.
We drove past the cemetery, and I glanced automatically in the direction of my mother’s grave, barely visible from the road. There was a figure standing in the shadows. As if feeling my gaze on her, the figure turned. Even from a distance I recognized that profile. Maya?
My pulse racing, I grabbed Cassie’s arm. “Stop the car!”
“What? Why?”
“There’s someone at Mom’s grave. Pull over.”
“There’s always someone there,” she said. But she pulled over just the same. “You’d think after all these years the death groupies would stop haunting Mom’s grave.”
I jumped out of the car and ran through the cemetery. When I reached the spot where my mother’s headstone was, however, there was no sign of Maya.
The sight of my mother’s grave hit me hard. Before it was just a plot of earth littered with the sorrow of others, a place where I could feed my anger and resentment. Now, however, I had two mothers to mourn—the one I’d lost years ago and the new and improved version I’d lost only yesterday.
I wished I’d taken advantage of my time with her. There were things I should have said, words that could never be spoken now. I wished I’d encouraged her to take up writing again, because her talent deserved a voice. I should have gotten to know Parker better, too, before he was lost to me.
And what about this new life I found myself in? Would I ever find my way back, or was I destined to spend the rest of my life wandering, a constant visitor haunting alternate versions of myself? And if I did find my way home, would I return with a newfound contentment or fall back into the same self-defeating behavior?
Maya would know. Had I simply imagined seeing her? Or was it wishful thinking? Then I noticed the open book lying face down on my mother’s grave. I saw the title and knew I hadn’t been mistaken.
Doorway to Everwhen. I picked it up and found a sheet of paper beneath it. Another of my mother’s poems, torn from the pages of a book and left by some hopeless soul at my mother’s grave.
grief is like a feather
drifting slowly to the
deepest
blackest
bottomless
depths of my heart
strangling
choking
chipping away at my soul
and not even the hottest tears
can wash away the sorrow
Tears fell freely from my eyes. I wanted to go back and hold the woman I’d only now gotten to know. I wanted to somehow ease the pain and tell her there were worlds where the sorrow couldn’t reach her, worlds where she remained unbroken.
I thought of the birthday cake we’d shared just days ago, the night when we’d watched movies and laughed together, the photographs that had sent her memory back over the years of a lifetime spent doing exactly what she loved most.
I reached out and brushed my fingers over the cool marble stone. “It’s okay, Mom. I understand. I love you and I forgive you.” The words were like a balm, healing a wound deep inside me.
I leaned back on my heels and turned my attention to the book. I riffled through the pages, seeing the notes Maya had scribbled inside when we had sat together in the library. She had been here. I’d have loved to sit down and talk to Maya about the ideas that were starting to come together in my mind, but I had a feeling I’d have to make do with this book for the time being.
14
A gentle hand brushed my shoulder. “Are you okay?”
Cassie. A feeling of déjà vu rushed over me. Had it only been a few days ago when my sister found me standing in this very same spot? It seemed so close and yet so far away, as if I’d lived a lifetime of experiences since we’d left this cemetery and first entered the House of Cry.
I couldn’t help but reflect on my state of mind that morning. I’d been teetering on the razor’s edge, ready to give up the life I had. Now I’d give anything to have it back, especially knowing what I knew now.
All my life I’d worried about inheriting my mother’s suicidal tendencies, but my fears were unfounded. It wasn’t genetic. There was no faulty suicide gene lurking inside me and waiting to seal my fate. And to think that one morning I’d almost surrendered to that dark cloud of depression.
“Yeah, I’m okay,” I said. And I was. A weight had lifted from my shoulders. I no longer felt doomed to carry on in my mother’s footsteps. There was a reason my mother couldn’t break out of her own depression. Suicide was her choice, not my legacy.
Cassie knelt down at the foot of our mother’s grave. “You want to know how stupid I was?” she asked. “All these years I blamed myself. I thought maybe if I’d been more polite or kept my room cleaner, said please and thank you.” She took a deep, trembling breath. “I thought maybe I wasn’t good enough or smart enough or pretty enough. I thought maybe if I were, she wouldn’t have …” Her voice broke. “Wouldn’t have left us.”
“Oh, Cassie.” I knelt beside her and wrapped my arms around her shoulders. A chill breeze sent a shiver through my body. For a moment I wondered if my mother’s ghost had passed by us. “I thought that way myself sometimes.”
“But it wasn’t true,” she said bitterly. “She didn’t think about me at all one way or the other. I was just an attempt to replace the son she’d lost. When that failed, she didn’t give me another thought. I certainly wasn’t important enough to be a reason to live.”
“You can’t blame yourself, Cassie.”
“Oh, I don’t.” she said, and there was a new steel in her voice. “I don’t blame myself at all. Not anymore.”
Her eyes narrowed, and what I saw in them sent a shiver down my spine.
“I blame him,” she said, obviously referring to our father.
I fully understood her anger, but if there was one thing I’d learned over these last few days, it was the futility of placing blame on anyone. “It was her choice,” I said with a longing glance at my mother’s headstone. “She could have stood up to him and chosen to keep the baby.”
And if she had, Cassie wouldn’t be here. I knew the truth. In another reality our mother had made that choice. Dad had tried to live with her decision, at least up until my birth. Ultimately he’d given up on their marriage and moved on long before Cassie would have been conceived. I couldn’t tell her that, however.
We swayed side by side for a long time, each of us trapped in our own thoughts. I couldn’t believe that one woman’s choice had impacted so many lives.
Cassie leaned over and picked up some of the scattered bits and pieces of paper littering the grave. “Secrets and lies,” she murmured, rising to her feet. “My whole life was made up of secrets and lies.”
Looking around, I caught snippets of my mother’s poetry. I recognized familiar lines, seeing them with a new understanding. I could feel her guilt exposed on the page, the raw pain and emotion in every line. No wonder women still made the pilgrimage to her grave after all these years. She spoke to them. She spoke for them. Her voice was their own, crying out in pain and suffering. She turned their anguish into words and shouted them to the world.
No matter how much she railed on paper, however, my mother couldn’t silence the demons in her own mind. Those demons are what ultimately took her from us.
I stood and reached for Cassie’s hand. “There are no more secrets now. We can let go.” I felt so much love for my sister. I couldn’t believe I’d almost thrown it all away. Never again would I take this precious life for granted.
We walked back to the car, our fingers l
inked together. An errant breeze sent a swirl of leaves skittering along the path, teasing the air with a hint of spring. For the first time I noticed the colors around us: a riot of wildflowers bloomed among grass so green it seemed to glow from within. Earthen vases filled with lush floral arrangements adorned many headstones. The gray shades of winter were replaced with the new birth of spring.
I saw the world with fresh eyes. How could I have been so blinded by despair? I’d carried those black crayons from my past into adulthood, seeing the world in shades of gray. Now that I’d left the shadows behind, the world was beautiful in a way I’d never appreciated before.
*
Cassie dropped me off at the house. I tried to convince her to stay for dinner, but she begged off, saying she had some research to do. I had a feeling she was going to try to find our brother. I could have told her I’d already found him, but that would have raised questions I had no way of answering.
I remembered the doctor I’d seen at the hospital. He hadn’t responded when I’d called him Parker, but I knew he was my brother just the same. Except in this lifetime he’d been raised by someone other than my mother. He had no idea she’d gone to her grave thinking he was dead, or that he had two sisters determined to find him.
I wondered what his life had been like growing up. Had he wondered about his birth family? Would he welcome us with open arms? Maybe he was content with the life he had and couldn’t make room for two sisters who were strangers to him.
I had to think that we were meant to find each other in this life as well as the last. From my experience, even though we moved in separate directions, the people who matter are meant to cross paths at some point. I believed that Parker was one of those people. Whether I engineered this meeting or it came farther down the road, it was meant to be. Perhaps the reason I’d been sent to this timeline was to reunite Parker with the family he’d never known.
With that thought in mind, I made my way through the empty house. Bob was still at work. He’d left right behind us this morning to show houses to some clients. I’d been strangely relieved to discover he was back in real estate. It meant I was getting closer to my own timeline, the one where I’d first met Bob at the House of Cry.
I brewed a cup of tea, then settled down with the book Maya had left on my mother’s grave. I recognized some of the markings in the margins. I’d seen her making them when I sat across from her at the library. It didn’t surprise me to realize that some physical objects could travel across the timelines as well. After all, hadn’t I carried my mother’s poem and the Dorothy figurine with me the first time I’d crossed over? The second time I’d brought the tree pin Parker had given me. Obviously anything I was wearing or carrying made the voyage with me. Otherwise I’d arrive naked in my new reality—and wouldn’t that raise a few eyebrows? I opened the page to the drawing Maya had made of a tree. Was it a coincidence that it mirrored the pin Parker had given me? Obviously Maya wanted me to see the connection. The tree was a symbolic representation of the ideas that had started to coalesce in my mind.
Choices. What if every choice one made split reality into two separate paths, like the branches of a tree? What if all those choices coexisted on some level? That would explain these diverse realities.
Most of the little day-to-day choices made no difference to the quality of life. Green beans or asparagus? Comedy or drama? Tiny branches that weave in and intersect but do nothing to change the overall structure.
But the big decisions, the ones that split a life into two diverse directions, those are the ones that change everything. That’s where one becomes the me-who-did and the me-who-did-not. It was all about choices—not necessarily making the right choices, which is something we’ve been taught to believe, but making the most of all possible choices.
I touched the juncture where the trunk split into two separate limbs. If this represented my father’s ultimatum, then on one side my mother chose Parker. Although my father tried to live with it, he eventually left, and Cassie was never born. On the other side, my mother chose her husband over her child and never forgave herself, ultimately taking her own life.
While I’d briefly had a taste of the world where my mother had made a choice she could live with, I also understood that within that world there were as many alternate possibilities as there were branches on a tree. But those were worlds I had no desire to return to. The world I wanted was on this branch, where my mother had made a different choice. This branch was where Cassie existed. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the reality I knew best and the one I could take steps to improve day by day.
I ran my finger along the limb that represented the timeline I was currently on until I reached the next major fork. I already knew that Diane’s wedding was an important turning point. After choosing to go to Diane’s wedding, I’d met and ultimately married Bob, which led me to where I was right now. I needed to get back to the branch where I’d stayed home with Cassie that day. That would bring me closer to the path I’d slipped off when I’d fallen into the secret room. As much as I would have loved to stay here with a loving husband, a charming home, and a future bright with possibility, this wasn’t my world.
If I followed my own path back to the beginning, would I find a choice I’d regret? An opportunity passed? Would I give up those years of raising my sister? No. Not for either of us, because looking back I had learned more than I was able to teach.
The only regret I had was letting someone else’s decisions color the rest of my life. I couldn’t control my mother’s choices, only my reaction to their effect on my own life. Whatever I did from then on was my path, my branch.
And yet, all these alternate lives belonged to me. Looking back, I could see each path going back to the beginning. I understood on a certain level that my consciousness split and lived each and every alternate life fully. But the memory for each parallel universe was linear, moving back from each limb to the beginning, not able to see all the other branches in between.
I didn’t need Maya to tell me I was right. Tracing the branches of the tree, it made perfect sense to me. If every possibility existed, then there was no right or wrong. In the end we’d be able to look back and see a life lived fully, see every single outcome and each lesson learned. Even our failures were important. At the end, there’s a life path where every wrong decision was made, a path where every right decision was made, and every variation in between.
My tea had grown cold. I got up and made a fresh cup. The worst part was that I had no one to talk to about my theory. There was no one to convince me, even half-heartedly, that I wasn’t crazy. But I didn’t feel crazy. If anything, I felt saner than I’d ever felt. I felt sane and optimistic and incredibly free of guilt. I wasn’t a failure. I was simply living one of an infinite number of realities. Maybe not the best one, but that didn’t have to stop me from making it the best it could be.
Present lifeline included. I had a feeling that since I’d learned the lesson of this life, my time here would soon be coming to an end. But even if I had to go, could I leave without telling Cassie what I knew about our brother? I ripped a page from the book and scribbled his name in the margin—Daniel Cody, M.D. I folded the paper and tucked it into an envelope, wrote Cassie’s name on the outside, then tucked it between the pages of my journal. I wasn’t ready to reveal it yet, but if something happened to me Cassie would find his name here. I knew that when the time was right she’d find Parker and begin to heal some of our old family wounds, whether I was here to experience it or not.
Telling Cassie the truth right now could be a risk. She already felt vulnerable, as if everyone in her life had lied to her. Would she feel even more betrayed to find out I knew our brother’s name? There was no way I could tell her I recognized him from another lifetime—not without a lengthy explanation at least. But I couldn’t take a chance on her not being able to find him if I wasn’t here to lead her in the right direction. I knew Cassie, and I knew she wouldn’t rest until she’d found Parker
and claimed him as family. With just one bold stroke I could save her years of fruitless searching.
It was a risk. The question was, should I take it?
I wished there was someone I could talk to about my decisions. I felt so alone. When I thought about sharing my burden, the first person I thought of was my friend Diane. She’d humored me once before. Would she do it again? After all, we had a lifetime of friendship to fall back on … at least in this timeline.
I picked up the phone before I could change my mind.
On the other end the phone rang three, four, five times. My heart sank when her voice mail picked up and I heard Diane’s cheery voice: “Leave a message, I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”
“Hi, Diane. It’s Jenna. I, um, I just wanted to say thank you. We had a great time at dinner.”
While I didn’t want to do this on a recorded message, I felt that my time here was running out and there was so much more I needed to say. “I just want to tell you that I love you and how much I value our friendship. I promise I’ll never do anything to let you down.”
That wasn’t enough, but it was a beginning. The real apology lay ahead of me, one I’d have to make to a friend I’d hurt deeply when I found my way back home. I only hoped Diane would be willing to accept it and welcome me back into her life.
*
When Bob came home, I had a casserole bubbling away in the oven, along with a tray of homemade biscuits and a crisp green salad. The table was set with our best china, which sparkled in the glow of flickering candlelight.
“Special occasion?” he asked.
“I’ve decided that every day deserves to be a special occasion.”
He tipped his head and smiled. “That’s the Jenna I know and love.”
I couldn’t help myself. I had to ask, “What is it you love about me?”
He chuckled, then stopped and stared at me for a long moment. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”