by Kay Bratt
ALSO BY KAY BRATT
Wish Me Home
Silent Tears: A Journey of Hope in a Chinese Orphanage
Chasing China: A Daughter’s Quest for Truth
Mei Li and the Wise Laoshi
The Bridge
A Thread Unbroken
Train to Nowhere
The Palest Ink
The Scavenger’s Daughters
Tangled Vines
Bitter Winds
Red Skies
The Life of Willow
The Sworn Sisters
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2018 by Kay Bratt
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503904811
ISBN-10: 1503904814
Cover design by Rachel Adam Rogers
To mothers everywhere, for they are the real superheroes
CONTENTS
START READING
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
EPILOGUE
FROM THE AUTHOR THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS DANCING WITH THE SUN
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadows. It’s what the sunflowers do.
—Helen Keller
PROLOGUE
“I’m trying here, Lauren. That’s all I can do. I’m sure you wish that it was your dad here instead of me,” Sadie said, finally putting words to the thought that had plagued her since they’d gotten lost.
“Well, at least he’d know which way to go to get us out of here,” Lauren said.
The silence between them turned icy. Awkward. There wasn’t time for this.
“I don’t know what to say,” Sadie said. Lauren was right. Tom would’ve led them straight out, his uncanny sense of direction kicking in even before they’d felt the first tremor of panic.
“Me either,” Lauren said. After a long pause she sighed loudly. “Listen, I didn’t mean that. I really am glad you came, Mom. You’re trying your best, and I know this is all my fault.”
Sadie leaned toward her and took one of her hands, rubbing it to try to bring some warmth back. “Don’t even talk like that. It’s nobody’s fault except for that wicked pain in the butt Mother Nature’s. We’ll be out of here soon, and later tonight we’ll laugh about this. Okay?”
Lauren nodded, her eyes downcast. Sadie could see the trembling in her chin and knew tears were being restrained, her cue to divert Lauren’s attention before an all-out meltdown took hold.
“Come on—let’s do this.”
Lauren swallowed hard, then began walking again.
Crisis averted, and Sadie breathed a sigh of relief.
They continued on, conversation nonexistent as they both processed the small argument they’d had and what deeper meaning it held. Sadie still felt an immense sadness that perhaps she hadn’t been the kind of mother that Lauren needed. Lately her days were full of revelations, and Lauren had just handed her one more ingredient for the large pot of failure that was her life.
Surprisingly, Sadie wasn’t out of breath. Her body was stiff and in pain, yes, but her lungs seemed to be taking it quite well. When they’d crossed the clearing, Sadie hesitated.
“Do you think we should keep going this direction?” she asked, putting her hands on her hips and rotating to look back from where they’d come. She wished so badly that they’d see another hiker. Even Nature Boy would be welcome at this point. But there was no one.
And Lauren didn’t answer.
“Lauren? I said, Do you think we should keep going this way?” Sadie was unable to hide her irritation. If Lauren was going to act like a brat and give her the silent treatment—
She turned to look back, a reprimand on the tip of her tongue.
But she was stopped by the look on Lauren’s face.
Eyes wide. Mouth open. Nothing but fear.
Sadie turned a fraction of an inch to see what it was that had her daughter frozen in place, and she felt her own flash of terror.
CHAPTER ONE
A Day Earlier
It was springtime in upstate South Carolina, an obviously welcome discovery to the little hummingbird that danced with uncontained glee outside Sadie’s kitchen window. With its brilliant ruby neck and emerald-green head, the contrast it made against the stark grass was mesmerizing. It flitted around, up and down, shifting high and low around the budding rosebushes, inquisitive in its search, fluid in its movements.
Unencumbered. Free from burdens, it seemed.
It peeked in at her, as though asking why the feeder hadn’t been filled in months.
She wasn’t sure why Tom hadn’t taken care of it. He was the bird-watcher.
And she was too tired to deal with it. Or maybe tired wasn’t the right word. Her fatigue wasn’t of the physical kind. It was that dark fog that slipped in and robbed you of the desire to do anything. It made getting out of bed a major chore in the morning and getting back into it her most frequent thought during the day.
She felt sure that if she’d stuck with her therapist, Lacey—and what kind of name was that for a mental health professional, anyway?—she would’ve told her she was having a midlife identity crisis. Sadie thought herself a fairly smart woman, and from the day they’d moved Lauren into the freshman hall and left her standing at the curb waving, she’d known it was a possibility that the empty-nest phenomenon could happen to her. Yet she’d successfully navigated through the first year Lauren had been gone, keeping herself busy with more shifts at work and less time at home. Now they were on year two, and since Sadie had skimmed through year one without too much emotional havoc, she’d thought she was good to go.
Sighing so hard it sounded like a hurricane breaking the silence, she squirmed on the hard chair and tapped her nails on the table, her eyes straying to the back door that led to the garage, where usually at this time, she could hear some sort of puttering going on. But it was quiet.
Too quiet.
Tom was gone again.
Camping. Or at least, that was what he’d said he was doing, but then, these days it felt like he always had something to do to take him away from home. On one hand, she would’ve appreciated an invitation to join him, but on the other hand, he knew her disdain for the outdoors, so why would he even ask?
So here she was, sitting in a kitchen so aggressively cleaned it was nearly hospital-like. She stared at her laptop, bored and trying to figure out what to do for the weekend. Without even realizing it, she had narrowed her world, whittled it down into such a small circle there was no one to call. No one t
o make plans with. It was out of the question to call her mother, unless she wanted to engage in a conversation that said nothing meaningful as they both harbored unspoken thoughts, and besides, she’d talked to her only a week ago. She thought of Keith, the older brother she’d once idolized who had left his job as a university professor and was living off the grid with some woman he’d met in an online preppers’ group. Sadie hadn’t talked to him in two years, not since he’d tried to convince her that the end of the world was near and she needed to withdraw her savings from the bank and hide it in jars in the yard. She’d asked him if the end of the world was coming, what would she need the money for anyway? Her doubting his prophecies put her smack-dab in the enemy zone, she supposed.
Sadie had a few friends, but the emotional distance she’d put between her and all of them in the past decade was so vast that it would alarm them if her number popped up on their screens. She thought of her coworkers at Greenville Memorial, where she was an admissions clerk. Marilyn with her three boys at home, never having a moment to herself with all the sports and school events they were involved in. That was a woman who surely didn’t have time for friends, but even if she did, Sadie couldn’t get past the resentment she felt when Marilyn complained about all the things that made boys into boys. Too much laundry. Or her going through a mound of groceries each week. Or how much unbridled energy they carried.
Sadie wanted to tell her to appreciate each tiny thing about them. But she couldn’t. Her criticism froze on her tongue every single time. So she avoided Marilyn every chance she could.
Then there was a young woman named Joy, an apt description for her as all she did in the break room was gush about her fiancé and the wedding they were planning for the next spring and how she was going to have eleven bridesmaids, each dressed in a different color. Sadie couldn’t even imagine having eleven friends close enough to ask. The details of the wedding were so prominent in her memory now, just from hearing them at coffee breaks, that she couldn’t deal with Joy outside of work.
And of course she couldn’t forget Janet, a woman working well past retirement age because she liked to keep busy but who brought her knitting to work to do when they were slow on intakes. She spoke incessantly of her grandchildren and the many church activities she was a part of when she wasn’t working, slipping irritating but well-meaning invitations in to Sadie that made each interaction uncomfortable.
They were all in different phases of life than Sadie and couldn’t possibly relate.
She cringed when she realized that the most conversation she had with anyone these days was probably with the woman who did her highlights, and Sadie didn’t even know her last name or, for that matter, whether she even had kids. After the initial niceties, Sadie used her time in the chair to zone out and think of nothing but putting her nose in a magazine.
It was sad, really.
When she noticed the time on her computer and saw it was after five, she tried to remember Lauren’s schedule. She could text her but was afraid of coming off as too clingy. Lauren might still be working and wouldn’t appreciate a text that said basically nothing except, Where are you, and what are you doing? She hated to be checked up on, and Sadie was running out of lame questions that were a front for just needing to know her daughter was okay.
The cursor on the screen blinked back at her, reminding Sadie it was waiting on a command. She punched a few buttons and hit search.
A feeling of loneliness or sadness that occurs among parents after children grow up and leave home.
“Really? Is that all you’ve got, Google?”
Feeling ridiculous now that she was actually talking out loud to a computer, she closed her laptop. She was restless. Nothing held her interest, not even skimming—or silently stalking—the pages on social networks that cataloged the always-cheerful and perfect lives of people who in some unremembered way had a connection to her or reading through the latest political nonsense splashed across every news page. She refused to turn on the television, despite the guilt she felt about not having the courage to watch any survivor accounts from the last horrifying mass shooting, knowing that they’d lived through it and the least she could do was acknowledge their anguish. But she couldn’t. Not today.
So now what?
Tom never came home earlier than Sunday nights when he went camping, so she had the entire weekend free. No cooking or tending to anything was required. Just her, four walls, and the engulfing silence that surrounded her.
Something else was bothering her too. Like a persistent gnat it circled her thoughts, coming back even when she swatted it away. She was going to have to address it, or it was going to drive her insane for the rest of the weekend. She stood, then went to the guest room, where Tom kept his clothes. Something had clicked that morning when she was doing laundry. As she’d put a stack of jeans away, she’d noticed that his closet looked more bare than it usually did. It got her thinking, the thoughts percolating in her mind, simmering into a crescendo of suspicion until they exploded into a boil, and now, hours later, she wanted to know more.
She stood motionless in front of his closet as she stared at the rod holding his clothes. She could smell his cologne, a comforting blend of something spicy and outdoorsy. She hated that it was still pleasant to her, a reminder of the way things used to be when a hint of it would bring her closer in, his arms soon wrapped around her. She reached out and touched a hanger holding his red-and-black-plaid jacket, pushing it to the side as she looked at the shirts hanging beside it. She remembered how not too long ago the rack had been nearly too full to get another hanger in, and she’d told him he needed to get rid of some of it—maybe give away the shirts he no longer wore. Tom had always been resistant to giving anything up. He still had clothes he’d worn in college, claiming each piece held sentimental value, holes and all. But had he finally listened and taken some to the local Goodwill? Or were they somewhere else?
Somewhere they shouldn’t be?
The thought was like a knife in her heart.
She looked at the shoes lined neatly on the floor. There were a few spaces. She tried to think of all the shoes he wore. Of course his hiking shoes would be gone, but where were the sheepskin house slippers he’d gotten last Christmas? He loved them, and Sadie knew he would never have given them away.
She turned and kneeled down, then peered under the bed. All she saw were dust bunnies and the carcass of an abandoned exercise rowing machine that had been there for far too long. She grimaced when she saw it, remembering her resolution only three months ago to start taking better care of her body and begin an exercise regime. The fifteen pounds she’d planned to lose still hugged her body, glad for the reprieve.
Feeling somewhat detached now, she got up and wandered around the house, checking the mudroom and the garage for the slippers. They weren’t there. She noticed other weird things too. In the bathroom, the beard suds brush and cup that Lauren had bought him for Father’s Day were gone. That wasn’t something he would’ve taken camping, was it? Who cared about a five-o’clock shadow when you were being one with nature?
At Lauren’s room she turned the knob and peeked in. She didn’t go in there much. Without her daughter’s big personality to fill it, the room was too still, making the absence of its former inhabitant feel bigger, longer, and harder to face.
She didn’t even want to think about whose room it had been before Lauren’s. Quietly, as though someone might catch her, she pulled the door closed before the memories could catch up.
In the hall she stopped in front of the large mirror and peered into it, barely recognizing the face that grimaced back. She looked all of her years and then some. Makeup would help, but no one would see her, so why bother? She reached up and touched her hair, frowning at the brittleness of it. When had she let herself go so much?
Her eyes wandered down to the bookshelf beneath the mirror. The top of it was loaded down with framed family photos, though many were missing. Sadie had packed up the ones that hu
rt too much to look at. But there were others in their place, strategically positioned with even amounts of space between each one, new ones added every year. Her way to try to overcome the longing for what used to be there.
In one photo, Tom and Lauren stood arm in arm, she in her high school graduation gown and he with a wide, proud grin spread across his face, as though he alone had guided her through the tumultuous years it had taken to get to that moment.
Sadie remembered the day perfectly. She had been behind the camera, swallowing her own pride and trying to convince herself she didn’t feel left out as she’d cataloged yet another milestone with a photo that she wouldn’t be in.
Despite that, the day of Lauren’s graduation had been special, her memories of her daughter’s elementary years, then junior high and high school all fanning before her in a succession of triumphs and tribulations, challenges and accolades, all the sentimental and difficult moments culminating into one montage of motherhood that she’d never forget.
Tom couldn’t possibly understand what it had taken to get their daughter to that stage—happy, healthy, and with a minimum of emotional scars to show for it. As a man, he’d never realize the myriad of details she’d orchestrated and organized, most unseen and unappreciated, to keep their lives running smoothly. But Sadie—she knew. And one day when Lauren became a mother, she might even acknowledge it too.
In another photo Tom stared back at her from his stance in front of his new Jeep. She picked up the frame and looked closer. He had been so happy that day, finally trading in his dependable but scholarly Volvo for a vehicle that he said fit his personality better. By then she’d stopped worrying about what he did with their money. At least he’d found something to bring him a small bit of pleasure. Had he been searching then, trying to find something to fill his needs?
But now Sadie didn’t really think he’d been all that happy. She knew her husband, and something behind that smile told a different tale. She knew what it was too. It was the ghost of the memory that followed them everywhere, reminding them never to be too joyful or feel too safe, because tragedy could be waiting around the corner, had already hit them once and would never let them forget it.