Catching the Wind(48)

He leaned into the table, searching her face. “If you could erase anything from your past, what would you expunge?”

“I’m pretty sure that’s none of your business.”

“Said in the nicest way possible,” he said, shifting back again at her rebuke.

She took a sip of her Coke. “What would you erase?”

His eyebrows climbed. “And that’s your business?”

“You’re right.” Both hands rose like a shield in front of her. “You don’t have to answer that.”

“I actually don’t mind answering,” he said. “I’d erase years eighteen to twenty-two.”

She lowered her hands. “Not pretty?”

“Downright ugly.” He glanced at the lights along the moorings again, at the white forest of sailboat masts. “Fortunately, I’m learning that God’s grace covers even the worst of my sins.”

“You believe in a God who forgives and forgets?”

“I believe in a God who forgives when I ask. I’m not convinced that He forgets.”

She crossed her arms over her chest. “An almighty being should be able to forget if He chooses.”

“It almost makes the grace cheap if He forgets it all. I like thinking, at least in my limited understanding, that in His great love, He remembers and still forgives. Just like we remember when people hurt us, but we can forgive them too.”

She’d tried to forget what happened with her mother, many times, but the memories kept flooding back. Was it really possible to forgive even if she couldn’t forget?

“Forgiveness is the only thing that truly frees us,” he said. “A supernatural power.”

That’s what she wanted more than anything. To be free of her anger. Wounds.

But she couldn’t forgive Jocelyn Vaughn, not after what she had done.



The nightmare woke Quenby and she bolted upright from the lumpy mattress, covered in sweat. In the darkness, all she could see was the blonde-haired girl from her dream, standing by herself. Hungry. Scared.

People had been moving around—even through—the girl, hundreds of them, but not one of them stopped. The girl cried out but no one heard. She was like a ghost. An apparition. And the invisibility hurt to her core.

Quenby turned on the sconce light beside her bed.

She’d had nightmares about this girl before, but she’d never seen her face. This time she saw her eyes, lonely and afraid.

Was it her as a child? Or was this girl Brigitte, lost and alone?

In her mind, their stories were bleeding together.

If only she did have the power to expunge her past, at least part of it, from her mental record. The files in her brain that stuffed things away in a most unorderly fashion, then spilled them out late at night, when she was trying to sleep.

Perhaps finding Brigitte would help put to rest these dreams that plagued her.

She pulled the pillow to her chest, memories that she wanted to forget flooding back to her again.

Twenty-one years ago, when her mother disappeared, the police had searched Orlando. Or so Grammy Vaughn had said. They probably didn’t search for long. After her husband died, Jocelyn had a sad history of walking away, leaving Quenby home alone, until child welfare stepped in. When Quenby was six, she and Jocelyn both went to live with Grammy in Tennessee so an adult would be present on those days her mother didn’t feel like mothering anymore.

Jocelyn had tried repeatedly to get a job at the Magic Kingdom. She’d wanted to be Snow White, as if she could snap her fingers and become a princess. In hindsight, she was probably wanting to hide behind a costume and makeup, but when Quenby was a little girl, she thought it magical that her mother wanted to be someone else.

On that fateful day, Quenby’s seventh birthday, Jocelyn had awakened her after midnight and made a game out of their escape. They’d snuck down the steps, Jocelyn’s hand over her mouth, trying not to laugh. Even as a child, Quenby hadn’t thought her mother’s games were funny, but she’d tried to play along. Anything she could do to please the woman she wanted to love her. The woman who didn’t seem to know how to love.

Grammy had done the best she could after Jocelyn left, trying to help Quenby heal. She’d taken Quenby to church and spent a chunk of her retirement fund on a counselor who threw around words like abandonment and attachment disorder. Words that made Quenby feel as if she could never break free of the cage that adults around her called circumstances. At times, it seemed Quenby and the counselor were playing dodgeball. She tried to duck when these words were thrown her way, but sometimes they hit. When they did, they stung.

She rose from her bed and opened the patio door, overlooking the bay.

Did Mr. Knight know where her mother was? Perhaps when he had researched Quenby, he’d found Jocelyn Vaughn as well. Perhaps he would give her the information if she asked.

She had spent much of her life searching for people, but she’d never even searched Google for Jocelyn. Part of her still wanted to find her mother and ask why. Why hadn’t she left her in the safety of her grandmother’s care instead of leaving her alone at Disney? Why hadn’t she even said good-bye?

But she’d been too scared to inquire, afraid perhaps that this incident that rocked her world hadn’t affected her mother at all. That after the Dumbo ride, Jocelyn had gone on with her life freely, relieved she no longer had to care for her daughter. Grateful, even, that Quenby was gone as she started a new family, birthing new children to replace the old one who’d never been able to make her happy.