Pieces of Hope (20 page)

I looked
anxiously at
Creesie
, dreading the question I was
about to ask. If they all knew how Ethan felt about me, then it reasoned that
they also knew how I felt about him. My nightmares of showing up at school
naked didn’t begin to compare to this.

“Does
everyone know?” My voice was shrill. Even at a rough count, there had to be six
hundred visitors milling about. “Please tell me that I’m not in all of these
people’s thoughts!”
Creesie
almost chuckled. My
exasperated glare stopped her cold.

“I said
they
could
read your mind if they
tried. It does require quite a bit of effort and a lot of concentration,
though. The connection is what makes it easier—not easy.”

“Then
why can’t I feel Ethan’s emotions?” I fretted aloud, not understanding what
they were telling me. “Does that mean we aren’t . . . we aren’t connected
enough?”

The
three of them exchanged silent words. Though I couldn’t hear their thoughts, I
could see it in their eyes, and there was something they didn’t want to say.

Then Charlotte sighed.
“Sometimes people put up walls around their heart, Hope. You’ve heard of that,
right?” I nodded, wondering where she was going with this. It was, after all,
just an expression. “Here, they’re more real than you can possibly imagine.”

“Old
sayings,”
Creesie
reminded me, “take on new meaning
here.”

“But why
would he—” I began.

“A
tragic event usually precedes it,” Charlotte
said. “Like with my mother.”

I
couldn’t imagine it. A tragic event in Ethan’s life? It seemed—or rather, he
seemed—too perfect.
  

“Love is
a funny thing.”
Creesie
scooped up her last bite of
pie. “The bigger it is, the more it can get in the way. Ethan probably isn’t
even aware of what he’s doing.”

“But if
he doesn’t know he’s doing it”—I swallowed a lump in my throat—“how will we
ever get past it?”

“The
same way anyone does. You’ll just have to love him with all your heart, and
then love him a little bit more.”
Creesie’s
returning
smile was almost motherly.

I shook
my head, trying not to smile back. “Well, I guess somebody’s
gotta
do it.”
   

I had
just lifted my fork when Cat arrived to check on us. She vanished again after
refilling our drinks. As I chewed, I mulled over the latest information
spinning around in my mind. Something about Ethan and tragedy and walls around
his heart. And Charlotte
had mentioned her mother. Was it because someone he loved had died? Maybe
Poppy? Or, could it be from our lifetime before? A time that neither of us
could recall in much detail. Was it actually me? Or rather, the previous
incarnation of me, causing his pain?

Of
nearly equal concern was this business of connections. It was both comforting
and appalling to realize that the more people I got to know here, the more, in
turn, they would know about me and everyone around me.

Did I
want to connect with everyone I met?

Definitely
not.

But
aside from returning to my body—an unpleasant task which I planned to put off
as long as humanly possible—there was little that I could do about it.

When
only crumbs remained on our plates, and all of us had sugar-high glazes in our
eyes, Gus cleared his throat as if he were about to make a grand announcement.

“Speaking
of shortcuts, would you care to hear a favorite of mine?” he asked.

“Sure.”
I glanced once at the faceless clock. “I think I’ve got a little time.”
   

“It was
with my wife, Ellen.”
Creesie
gave his arm a gentle
squeeze, and he patted it where it rested. They seemed to be the best of friends,
their exchange reminding me of something Brody and I might have done—except
ours would have been more of a punch than a pat.

“So it
was wonderful?” It was a relief to let Gus take the spotlight and get all of
those prying eyes (or
whatevers
) out of my thoughts.

“Not
exactly.” Gus’s eyes disappeared in an ear-to-ear grin. I liked his touch of a
German accent and the way he talked with his whole body. In some weird way, he
made me think of Brody. Gus oozed genuine happiness. Maybe that was it.

In one invisibly
swift movement, Cat returned to our table. She stacked the plates and refilled
our sodas with a pitcher she pulled out of nowhere. I distinctly heard a voice
say the word “blueberry” in my head. Cat popped a pink bubble, gave a curt nod.
It was an easy guess that
Creesie’s
sudden craving
had something to do with me.

“Anything
special I can get for you, sweetie?” Cat was talking to me. Shaking my head, I
glanced down at the checkered cloth to avoid her intense gaze, and when I
looked up again, Cat was smiling blissfully at me. To my astonishment, I began
to see pictures in my mind . . . cloudy images of two old people. The woman had
brown eyes like hers and, at her side, there was a shorter, pudgy man with a
shock of thick, white hair.
   

Then Gus
spoke, diverting my attention. “As far as visits go, it wasn’t memorable
because it was pleasant. It was memorable because of its significance. . .”
When I looked back to where she’d stood, Cat was gone, and so were the images.
But for some reason, I thought I’d seen those faces somewhere before. “Though
we were married for over fifty years, my bride refused to believe it was really
me.” He scratched his head as if this were still a mystery to him. “She shouted
and screamed at me as though she’d taken leave of all her senses!”

           
“She freaked out on you?” Either I was paying very close
attention, or I was reading Gus’s mind, because I thought I could see Ellen in
my head. She was sitting in a recliner, holding knitting needles, a
silver-haired woman with a sweet face.

           
“Is that what the kids call it these days?” Gus repeated
the expression, his German accent causing us to giggle. “Freak out? I’m going
to remember that.”

           
We leaned away from the table as Cat returned.
Efficiently, she laid out five slices of blueberry pie, asked if we needed
anything else, then exited in a blur. But this time she didn’t give me any
lingering looks or leave any images in my mind. Her actions were puzzling,
though not nearly as much as my ever-growling stomach. How could I still be
hungry after all that I’d eaten? At least I didn’t have to worry about cavities,
or calories, for that matter.

“
Mmm
. Smells like you, Hope.” Charlotte took a huge bite that included a
chunk of the now melting vanilla ice cream on top. I laughed, scooping up an
equally large bite.

“For our
first encounter, I didn’t arrive mid-dream,” Gus continued, forcing me to
focus. Just as
Creesie
had predicted, my thoughts
were becoming as scattered as stars that littered the night sky. “I wanted more
of a surprise for my love, you see, so I showed up in the middle of the day!”

I
suspected that a dead person showing up at any time was a fairly shocking
event. But during the day? It made me wonder about Ethan. Surely, my visit was
less terrifying for him. I may have been in a different form, yes. But I was
still very much alive.

“She
looked at me like she’d seen a ghost!” Gus was choking on laughter. I was
thinking that Ellen was dead right, but I refrained from saying it aloud.

“And she
could see you?” I marveled. “How did you pull that off?”

Gus
shrugged. “Ellen always saw others around her when we were married.”

“Others?
You mean others like . . . ?”
 

“My
Ellen is a lot like your Ethan,” he replied. His smile was effervescent, but I
grinned back at the casual way he’d said,
Your
Ethan
.

“I
thought a daylight visit would make it seem like more of an occasion. So, as my
lovely bride lounged in her favorite chair, the unmistakable sound of her
knitting needles clicking and clacking, her thoughts wholly absorbed in her task,
I ever so quietly walked up behind her.” Gus gave a low chuckle. “In hindsight,
that might not have been the best idea. In a soft whisper, I said to her, ‘
Guten
tag
, darling. What are you knitting
today?’”

“Let me
go out on a limb here. That’s when she freaked out.”

“I’ve
never seen her jump so fast,” he said, laughing. “She was out of that chair in
a flash, jabbing her knitting needles in the air as if she were trying to stab
me, shrieking and screaming, ‘Why are you here? Are you haunting me?’”

I could
totally see Ellen’s side of it. If my dead husband suddenly materialized in our
living room, acting as though everything was peachy—and assuming I knew nothing
about the Station—I might have made an exit out of the nearest one-story
window.

“You
were surprised by her reaction?” I said. “You did show up out of nowhere.”

“Yes,
well, you need to understand that Ellen used to see her dead cousin, Molly, in
the kitchen all the time. They shared such a love of baking that it didn’t
surprise me when Ellen would start talking aloud in what looked to me like an
empty kitchen . . .”

“So what
did you do?” I had leaned so far over the table, I had ice cream in my hair. I pushed
my hair back and ignored it.

“My
silence seemed to make it worse,” Gus went on shortly. “She was staring at me
as if she thought I was about to start performing circus tricks. And then
without any warning, she began throwing things at me—anything she could get her
hands on. Her knitting needles, several skeins of yarn, cushions from the couch,
our wedding photo . . .”
       

I shook
my head, feeling a bit sorry for Ellen and Gus. And truth be told, grateful for
Ethan’s brief bout of drama. Our visit could have been a complete disaster.

“But
eventually,” he said with a crooked grin, “she calmed down when I promised I’d
do something the next day, the day that would have been our fifty-third
anniversary. It would be, I told her, irrefutable proof of how much I still
loved her.”

“Irrefutable.”
I enunciated every syllable. “That’s very romantic.”
 

Charlotte’s heart-shaped
face was beaming. “That’s nothing. Wait till you hear what happened next!”

Evidently,
the dead repeated stories as often as the living. And as slowly. Maybe after
all this practice, I could listen to Uncle Donald’s jokes without yawning
through the punch line.

Creesie
must have been listening.

“Gus,”
she said sweetly “do you mind if I pick it up from here? You talk too slow for
the dead.” Then she chuckled, avoiding looking directly at me. “ . . . Almost
too slow for the living.”

Gus
waved her off with a grin. “Be my guest. You know it as well as I do.”
 

Creesie
squeezed his arm again, picking up where he left
off. “The best part was yet to come, Hope, because Gus told Ellen that very soon
a random dove would—Oh, how do I put this delicately?”
 

An image
appeared in my mind. I grimaced.

“Bird
poop? That’s your irrefutable proof?” You could have knocked me over with a
feather. Dead people were wackier than I’d thought.
  

“
Creesie
, you skipped too far ahead,”
Rin
groaned.

“I can
see you don’t fully comprehend the significance of the, um, bird doo. Let me
take you back. On the morning of Ellen and Gus’s wedding, as she was about to
slide into her father’s gleaming 1945
DeSoto
wearing
a white lace gown that once belonged to her mother, a pearl grey dove flew over
her head and—well, I think you can see the rest.”

“That’s
sort of gross,” I admitted, waiting as the four of them wiped tears of laughter
from their eyes.

Finally,
Gus said, “Ellen felt the same way . . . at first. Actually, she viewed it as a
bad omen and almost didn’t marry me, but I told her it was widely know that
it’s a sign of good luck in Germany.
It will bring you unending happiness for the rest of your days.”

“It
will?” I asked. This brought another round of guffawing. Sometimes I could be
so gullible.
Rin
arched her eyebrows, but thankfully
swallowed any sarcastic replies.

 
“Gus,”
Creesie
continued, “was obviously trying to make Ellen feel better about this
unforeseen event, but that little white lie worked for decades. You see, Hope,
Ellen was my dearest friend. We met shortly after the birth of my first
daughter, Edie, when I was looking for work, and she and Gus were looking for
help with their new business. We had no secrets. We told each other
everything.” She smiled briefly at Charlotte and
Rin
.
“And honestly, for more years than I could count, Ellen like to tell me how
perfect her life was . . . chalking it all up to the morning of her wedding
when a misguided bird dropped a gloppy mess on her head.”

“That’s why,”
Charlotte broke
in, unable to keep the excitement from trickling out of her, “when Gus
mentioned his irrefutable proof, Ellen paid attention. Only Gus could pull off
a crazy stunt like that.”

“But why
that?” In my limited experience, this didn’t seem the straightest route to Ellen’s
heart.
 

“It was
the only thing that would have made Ellen believe that Gus—her Gus—was really okay
‘wherever he was.’” I carefully avoided
Creesie’s
gaze, but in my mind I told her it wasn’t nice to yank other people’s words out
of their heads. Mine, in particular.

“It was
the only thing that would let her move on with her life.” Gus agreed. “And
that’s all I ever wanted for her.”