Most of All You: A Love Story(86)

The feeling of the dream clung to me so that I couldn’t fall back to sleep. I got out of bed, shivering, and turned up the heat slightly. It started to rain softly and I stood at the window for a few minutes, looking out into the darkness, the streetlights reflecting on the water puddles in the parking lot below.

Turning, I spotted the bag I still hadn’t unpacked from Gabriel’s and sighed. It seemed I could only let go in very small steps and this, too, I supposed was one of them.

As I emptied the contents, throwing the clothes into the hamper, my hand hit upon plastic and I startled, pulling out the plastic bag I’d completely forgotten about in all my misery. I lifted it out and held it to my chest. Lady Eloise of the Daffodil Fields. Seemingly broken beyond repair. But maybe … maybe … I set it down on the small desk I had by the window and switched on the light sitting on the corner. I grabbed a hand towel from the bathroom and then carefully, so carefully, I emptied the contents onto the towel, spreading the pieces out to determine if anything was recognizable. Yes, a small foot, and a bouquet of flowers, and two halves of her pretty face. Hope.

I sat down at the desk, rooting through the drawers until I located a tiny vial of superglue I’d bought for some reason I couldn’t even remember now.

I felt completely overwhelmed, but I figured the best place to start was at the beginning, and so I picked up the little piece of foot and started from there. I couldn’t help picturing that tiny shattered girl as a thousand pieces of me, and as I worked, fitting together small shards, I wondered if the work I was doing with my hands was a representation of the work I needed to do on myself. And so I hunched over that table until the light of dawn seeped through the curtains, and I thought about all the things in my life that had crushed and shattered me as well.

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.