“Open the door, Dustin. Don’t be afraid.”
He jumped at hearing the unknown female voice. Then, twisting the knob, Dustin opened the door.
He stepped into the most beautiful place he had ever seen. The leaves and grass were so green they were almost blinding. The sky was so blue you could almost reach out and touch it.
Hesitantly, he walked farther out the door. When he came out, the door closed behind him, and in its place was a small brook with water lapping at stones. Over the brook was an arched wooden bridge. Instinctively, he knew to walk across the bridge.
As he took a step forward, a woman came out from behind a tree on the other side of it. Dustin couldn’t make out her face, but the closer he came to the bridge, the closer she moved toward the other end. He was almost at the beginning of bridge when he recognized her. It was his grandmother.
He started walking faster to the bridge, and as he did, another woman stepped out from behind another tree that was closer to the bridge. Dustin recognized her immediately.
“Ma!” he yelled.
His mother didn’t yell. She just kept walking toward the opposite side of the bridge. When she did, another woman came out from a different tree diagonally from the one his mother had come from. Dustin didn’t recognize her. She was younger than his mother and grandmother. She looked as if she was about eighteen or nineteen. She reminded him of someone, but he couldn’t place who.
Seeing that his mother was crossing the bridge, he started to run toward them.
“No, Dustin! Go back!” his ma yelled.
Dustin moved his foot away from the bridge, stopping, as the young woman stopped on the other side, not stepping onto the bridge.
His ma and grandmother stopped in the middle.
“You have to go back,” his grandmother told him. “It’s not your time.”
“I want to cross.”
“Dustin, I know it hurts, but you can’t give in to the pain. You’re fighting them.”
“No, I’m not,” he argued back to his grandmother
“You are. You’re not opening yourself so that they can reach the part of you that needs to be healed.”
“I don’t …” Dustin thought back to the last thing he could remember. The dark figure had entered his room. He remembered screaming out, and then … and then he had started counting like he always did to control the fear.
“You have to let them inside. It’s the only way. Please, Dustin … Ema and Greer can heal you. You can’t come here now … It’s too soon,” his ma pleaded with him.
He wanted to run to her, but her pleading eyes held him back.
“Greer, Rachel, and Tate need you. Logan needs you. Jessie needs you.”
“I married her.”
“I know. We were there with you … Dustin, you have to go.” His grandmother stared at him as if memorizing his face. “You’re so handsome. I always told your ma that you were going to be the best-looking in the bunch.”
Dustin frowned. “You did?”
“Of course. You look just like me when I was younger. You were the handsomest one … and the most sensitive. Tate and Greer took after their pa, but you … you, Dustin, were the one most like me.
“You always thought I didn’t like you, but I had to hide it. I did it because your ass of a father would have made your life miserable. He hated my guts. He always said our gifts were hogwash, but deep down, he was afraid of them. He called me an old witch.” Her mocking laughter brought a smile to his lips. “That’s why he was afraid of you. It made him stop and think before treating you the way he did Tate and Greer. He wanted no part of something I feared.”
That his grandmother had outsmarted his father, and that he had found out why his grandmother had treated him differently patched a hole in his heart. He had loved her, even when he had believed she had disliked him.
“Where’s Pa?”
The two women looked at each other, remaining silent.
“He’s not here, is he?”
His mother answered his question. “No, he will be here one day, but not now. He has a lot to make up for.”
Dustin nodded. He hadn’t wanted Pa to face the fires of damnation for eternity, but he could deal with it if that earned him a place where his mother and grandmother were.
“Go, Dustin.” His grandmother waved him off.
Dustin paused before leaving. “Who’s she?” He nodded toward the beautiful woman waiting for his ma and grandmother.
His grandmother tilted her head curiously. “Who?”
“The woman behind you.”
His ma and grandmother turned around to stare at the woman, then turned back to him. “There’s no one there. Boy, you gotta go! No wonder Greer was fussing about you jabbering too much.”
Dustin looked at the younger woman again. She gave him a gentle smile before turning around and beginning to walk back to the tree she had come from. Why were they acting like they couldn’t see her? She looked too much like them not to be a relative.