Like Gravity(56)

Mommy had flown away, after all – but she hadn’t taken me with her.

The boy started to tell me a story about the time the hero Perseus killed a monster named Medusa – a woman so ugly her hair was made from snakes and her gaze turned people into stone. I liked to listen to the sound of his voice. He was still a boy, but his voice was deeper than the other foster kids voices – slightly raspy and so different from Mommy’s. Her voice had sounded like music all the time, whether she was singing or talking or shouting.

I waited until he’d finished his story, watching the fireflies as they weaved between the tall grasses. When he fell silent, I looked up at him expectantly.

“What?” he asked me, as if he didn’t know exactly what I wanted.

He knew, he just wanted me to ask for it. I stared at him, waiting – just like I had every other time he forgot to say the ending.

“Oh, all right,” he sighed. “‘And so, after Perseus beheaded Medusa, there was celebration throughout the land and everyone lived happily ever after.’ Happy now?” The boy rolled his eyes at me.

I was happy. Stories weren’t finished without the happily ever after, everyone knew that. Mommy had always said it was the most important part of any fairytale.

I smiled.

“Real life isn’t like the stories, Brooklyn,” the boy said, the sad look back in his eyes. Sometimes when he was telling me a story, his eyes would lose that look – but it always came back eventually. “There aren’t any white knights or glass slippers or second chances,” he whispered into the night, not looking at me. “People don’t wake up after eating poisoned apples. They don’t live again after an evil a witch curses them. They just die.”

I looked at the boy with the sad blue eyes, and I saw it – he wasn’t a kid anymore. Whatever had happened to him, whatever brought him here to live in the foster home, had made him stop believing in happily ever afters.

I wanted to tell him that I understood. I recognized the sad look in his eyes – I’d seen it in my own every time I looked in the mirror. I knew why he thought this way; he was protecting himself.

Sometimes, it was easy to feel sad or angry about what had happened to Mommy, but then I’d think about all the fairytales she’d told me. In all of those stories, the princesses had moments when they’d thought they would never get their happy endings, or that the bad guys would win. But eventually the dragons got slayed, the princes came to the rescue, and the princesses did get their happily ever afters.

I wanted to tell him that Cinderella hadn’t believed either, until her fairy godmother showed up the night of the ball. And of course Snow White would’ve stayed dead, if Prince Charming hadn’t believed in the power of true love’s kiss.

I wanted to make him believe we could have happy endings again, even in a world without mommies or daddies to take care of us.

Mommy used to tell me, “Bee, a very smart man named John Lennon once said, ‘Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.’ Remember that, sweetheart. Tuck it away and keep it with you when you’re having a bad day.” Then she’d kiss my forehead and hug me, her long fingers lightly tickling my sides and coaxing a laugh.

I slipped one hand back into his and squeezed.

“You can call me Bee,” I whispered, my voice trembling as I used it for the first time in months.

It wasn’t what I’d wanted to say, but it was a start.

His head whipped around at the sound of my voice and when he looked down at me there was surprise, not sadness, in his eyes.

“Bee,” he whispered back, smiling.

***

“Bee,” Finn whispered, shaking me awake. “Come on, love, wake up. You’re trembling. I think you’re having a nightmare.”

I peeled open my eyes and looked up at him. He was leaning over me, beautiful in the faint moonlight trickling through the window at the end of my bed. His hair was tousled, his voice was rough with sleep, and his tired eyes were slowly clearing and coming alert. Our limbs were still entwined; in sleep I’d turned over to rest my head on his chest, with one arm thrown across his abdomen and my right leg hooked up over his thigh. He had one hand looped around my back, holding me tightly against his side, and the other resting on my hip.

I was typically an active sleeper. My nightmares were always vivid and I’d toss and turn while caught in their throes, waking up with my sheets a tangled mess around my legs. It seemed that tonight with Finn, though, I’d been happily immobile, pressed against his warmth until he’d woken me.

When my gaze met his, a soft look replaced the anxiety that filled his eyes and the lines of tension started to ease from his face.

“Hey,” he whispered, bringing a hand up to touch my cheek. “You okay?”

I thought back to my dream – it hadn’t been frightening, just confusing. I wasn’t sure where these memories were coming from, or why they had started to reemerge now, so many years later. Maybe between my therapy sessions with Dr. Angelini and playing music again, I’d stirred things that I’d been repressing for over a decade. While I was happy to be regaining some memories from that fuzzy time of my life, it was still an unsettling experience; it felt like my mind was unraveling like a spool of yarn, revealing long-buried people and events I hadn’t even known existed. Finn had been right – I was trembling.