“She pressed my hand,” a young woman says.
My view twirls as if my head were on a swivel mount.Click.Oh, there’s my granddaughter, Hope, sitting on my right, holding my hand. Such a lovely girl... So beautiful, with her wavy light brown hair and eyes the color of iced tea—so much like my late daughter, Rebecca.
The thought sends a stab of pain through me. “Is Becky with you?” I ask Mother.
“She’s on this side, but they wouldn’t let her come with me. Said you don’t get to see her until you clean up the mess you’ve made down there.”
“You mean... I’m going to get well?”
“Well, now, Adelaide, that’s like everything else in life. It’s entirely up to you.”
Was it? Was it really? I wasn’t sure that anything in my life had really been my doing—except for the mistakes, of course.
Mother levels me with a steely frown. “If you know what’s good for you, missy, you’ll get back down there and unleash the truth.”
Unleash—as if it were a dangerous animal. Well, that is about right. “I was trying to when I ended up here.”
“You were going about it all wrong. You need Hope’s help.”
I look back at my granddaughter. She looks so sad—sadder than she should look at the prospect of an old woman passing. She’d been sad when I’d last seen her, too—which was when? I was fuzzy about the recent past. All I knew was that when that cad of her ex-husband cheated on her, he’d stolen something from her—something more than her inheritance and her art gallery and her home, all of which he’d purloined right out from under her. That lowlife had robbed her of her view of herself as lovely and lovable.
We females are so vulnerable to that. Most of the women I’d photographed over the years didn’t have a clue how lovely they really were. They’d look in the mirror and just see flaws—then, years later, when they looked back through their old pictures, they always exclaimed, “I was so thin back then!” or “I had such nice skin!” In the present moment, so many beautiful things go unseen, eclipsed by some over-imagined imperfection.
Men don’t have that problem with their physical appearance—at least, not the straight ones. They all think they’re irresistible just the way they are. Most of them, of course, are completely deluded. But other men, like Joe...
Oh, why was I thinking of Joe now? I did not—not—want him to be my dying thought, not after spending so much of my life trying to forget about him.
“You get back down there and tell Hope everything,” Mother says.
Everything?
“Yes,everything.”
My soul flushes scarlet. Oh Lord—was this a foretaste of hell, having my mother read my thoughts? Mother shot me her most reproving look.
“I—I don’t see how that will make a difference,” I mentally stammer.
“Yours is not to wonder why; yours is but to do or die. Now get to it, and no dillydallying.” Mother turns her neat bun toward me, as if she were about to leave, then whips back around. “And be sure to dig up what Charlie buried.”
The beeping machine attached to the old woman in the bed stops for a moment, then rat-a-tat-tats like a high-speed shutter. “What? What did he bury?”
She lifts her eyebrows in that I’ll-brook-no-nonsense way of hers. “That’s what you need to find out, isn’t it?”
My soul flutters. “Do you know? My memory isn’t very...”
“You didn’t forget.” Mother’s voice is cold steel. “You never hadthe nerve to find out, and this is your last chance to rectify the situation.”
“But...”
But Mother is gone. Not so much as a vapor trail remains.
Click.
A feeling of suction, as if I were being vacuumed downward from the ceiling, followed by heaviness, and then... Oh, my head! Oh, how it hurt. And my chest! Heavens to Betsy! Mother hadn’t said anything about my chest.
“She’s awake!” my granddaughter says. “Gran’s eyes are open.”
I stare at her. She looks a little like Becky, but she isn’t. Becky is gone. Hope is alive.
