I thought about my mother, and that was the hardest of all. I thought about the day she’d left me with Brad—the hollow, aching grief that still clung to me like a second skin, the pain and the anger of being deserted, left scared and alone.
As my hands moved, finding pieces and trying to fit them, setting the ones back down that didn’t work, and picking up a new one until the lines and ridges worked just right, my mind wandered. Something about the constant movement of my hands and the way my mind was half-focused on the task made me feel safe. I couldn’t ignore thoughts of Gabriel, and wondered if he’d found a similar solace in his work when he’d first come home.
I didn’t attempt to stop or control the wanderings of my mind. I didn’t attempt to shut anything out. I thought about it all and I let it hurt. Tears rolled down my cheeks and into my ears, and I blotted them with my sleeve when my eyes grew too blurry to work, but I didn’t move from my desk that night, not even once.
I thought about how my mother had looked that day, how ill—how panicked—and a lump formed in my throat so large I thought it might suffocate me. But it didn’t. I continued to work and continued to hurt.
What had it felt like to be her? What desperation was she feeling to know she was dying and her last option was to drop her only child off with a stranger? She couldn’t have known Brad would treat me the way he did. From what it sounded like, she’d barely known Brad at all. She’d taken a chance and I paid the price. But she hadn’t known. She’d relied on hope alone. It was all she had.
Lord, please give me strength. I have no choice, I have no choice.
“Oh, Mama,” I gasped, my voice small like the abandoned little girl I’d once been. “I forgive you. And I’m so sorry for what you suffered, too.”
A week after I’d been left at Brad’s house, he’d told me that they’d found my mama dead under someone’s porch. She’d curled up there to die like a lost animal. He’d delivered the news in a monotone voice, and then he’d taken a sip of beer as if it hardly mattered at all. And inside, a whole section of my heart had come loose and crumbled.
I’d learned to encase myself in a seemingly hard exterior so no one could ever hurt me again the way my mother had by leaving me without saying goodbye. But the shell was so thin, so thin and so easily broken.
And then there was my father’s friend Cory who had taken and used—raped me, though I’d never said the word before, not even to myself. I had thought I loved him because he was the first person in so long who had seemed to want me at all, who had even noticed me.
My feelings for Cory had been a different sort of desperate, clawing love, but I didn’t want that to be the way I gave my heart. I wanted to offer something whole—pieced back together maybe, but whole nonetheless.
Just as dawn arrived, I surveyed my work and realized I had put back together two little bare feet. I laughed in wonder. There were still small slivers of missing pieces, parts that must have crumbled to dust, but each tiny toe was completely recognizable. Something in me loved those missing parts, too. To me they spoke of the things that were necessary to let go of—the pain I’d held on to for too long, the anger, the misery, the self-blame. And those empty spaces were just as important as the parts that made me whole. I smiled in triumph, wiping the remaining tears away and stretching my aching neck and back.
Opening the window shade, I took in the distant glow coming over the horizon. I thought back to Gabriel’s story about seeing the tiny portion of light through the tinted window of that long-ago basement and remembered my own thought that sometimes that’s all hope is—just a thin sliver of distant light. And for me that morning, that’s exactly what it was.
* * *
My life became a steady schedule of work at the nail salon and work on the stone figurine. I spent most weekends up until dawn piecing the girl together, going over my life, my hurts, all the places my own heart had crumbled away to dust.
It was exhausting and it was hard, but I kept at it, buoyed by the representation of my work: the art that had been Gabriel’s hope so many years ago. And in this way, it was as if he were there with me. I wasn’t completely alone. In fact, despite how much it hurt, in some ways the nights I spent bent over my desk provided my greatest comfort.
You can’t fix me, I’d told Gabriel once. And I’d been right. I needed to fix myself. And he had loved me enough to make me believe it was possible. That I was worth fixing.
Fall turned to winter and the days grew shorter; the trees outside my window, bare skeletons.
I celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas with Lien Mai and her family, bringing Kayla as my date. The gatherings were filled with the same Vietnamese chatter that kept a smile on my face, and I felt both a pained yearning as I wondered what Gabriel was doing, and a warm togetherness and affection for my new friends.
A few days after Christmas, I checked my mailbox after having neglected doing so for about a week, and I was surprised to find what looked like a Christmas card with George’s return address in the corner. With shaking fingers, I ripped it open and read the short note he’d included.
Dear Ellie,
I hope you’re spending Christmas in a way that brings peace to your heart. We miss you around here. Chloe came for Christmas and is spending two weeks with us—she misses you, too. I think about you a lot, Ellie girl, and hope you’re doing well.
Love, George
I’d read the card as I climbed my steps from the mailbox and grasped it to my chest, squeezing my eyes shut against the tears, then sitting down on the top step to catch my breath. God, I missed them all so much in that moment, I didn’t know if I’d survive it. Chloe came for Christmas. A knife sliced through my heart. Surely she was there for Gabriel. Her work on the paper must be done, or if it wasn’t, she wouldn’t need two weeks of Gabriel providing more information. No, her visit must be of a personal nature.
I let the tears flow, hurting so badly inside it felt like a piercing of my soul. But I had to accept that Gabriel and Chloe might be together now. I’d wished it for him. I’d given him the room to explore his own heart.
Will you come back?
I need you to go on as if I won’t.
I sat there for a moment as my tears dried in the frigid wind, looking down at the parking lot. There were still a few spots of snow that hadn’t melted from the mild storm we’d had the week before. I caught sight of something purple and tilted my head in wonderment, squinting to try and make out what it was, but it was too far away.
I walked down the steps and squatted in the snow, sucking in a breath at what I saw. It was a purple flower growing through the frost. “How in the world?” I murmured, running a finger over one soft petal.
Gratitude isn’t a Band-Aid, Ellie. You still have to experience your feelings to work through them. Gratitude is meant to make it bearable. Sometimes gratitude gets you through the day, and sometimes it just gets you from one moment to the next.
I heard his words as if they were being whispered in my mind and closed my eyes to stop more tears from coming. After a moment I looked back at the flower, taking comfort in the moment, finding thankfulness and hope in one delicate flower that had somehow found a way to bloom, even through the dark, icy cold.