INDEED IT WAS OVER, AND INDEED IT HAD JUST BEGUN.
During one of our frequent walks on the beach when I was a little girl, Mommy and I once came upon a dead fish in the sand. It frightened me to see it so still with its eye so glassy. I began to cry. Mommy picked me up and held me as the tide came in and washed around the fish, slowly pulling it back into the sea.
"Will it swim again, Mommy?" I asked her.
"In a way," she said. "It will change into something else, be born again."
"I want to see," I demanded. I was still a child and thought I could command the sun in the morning and the stars at night simply by closing my eyes and wishing hard enough.
"We can't see that," she told me. "Some things are too magical for us to see. Instead, we have to believe in them without seeing. Can you believe in the fish?" she asked me, smiling. "Can you believe in the magic?"
I nodded, even though I wasn't sure what she meant. But I watched the fish float and bob on the waves, and it seemed to me that it did turn and dive and go off. I wanted to believe. I still had a child's faith that anything good and beautiful would never end.
As I grew older, I came to realize that we couldn't command the sun and the stars to appear, but we could feel the sun's warmth and be dazzled by the night sky and that was magic enough. I also under-stood that each day of our lives, some new part of us was born and some old part of us died.
There was so much I wanted to die, to bury forever in the deepest regions of my memory. How painful those days and weeks after my parents' deaths were. It seemed the agony and the turmoil would never end, but Bronson's promise came true.
Bronson handled the aftermath of my episode with Uncle Philip on the beach as discreetly as possible. Whatever had shattered in Uncle Philip's mind that night, it remained shattered for some time afterward. He couldn't handle his routine responsibilities and had to remain in professional care. Aunt Bet was overwhelmed by the rapid turn of events. In the end she couldn't face people in the community and she decided to move herself and the twins to her parents' estate.
Jefferson made a complete recovery from his illness and when he heard that we were going to move into Buella Woods and live with Bronson, he was full of joy. I'm sure it made him recuperate that much faster. Mrs. Berme quickly became like a grandmother to us and Bronson became a wise and loving grandfather. In his house I began to play the piano as I never had. On summer nights, he would throw open the patio doors so that my music could tr
avel down the hill and "all the people in Cutler's Cove could hear and appreciate it."
I made up my mind that music would be my life and no matter how important the hotel was and how much money the hotel made, it would always take second place. Bronson took over the trusteeship of the hotel. He was always after me to take more interest in the day-to-day management. I tried to be interested, tried for the sake of Mommy and Daddy, but in my secret heart, I hoped it would be Jefferson who developed a love for it and someday would be the real owner of the new Cutler's Cove Hotel.
My dreams led me elsewhere ... to the school for performing arts, to European tours, to the great concert halls. And of course, there was Gavin.
We spent as much time together as we could and whenever we did, our conversations always wove their way back to our days at The Meadows. One summer we even went back to visit Charlotte and Luther and Homer. We took Jefferson with us and when Homer set eyes on him and he saw Homer, it was as if they had never parted, never missed a beat. Homer took him off to show him where a fox had given birth.
"What ever happened to that Fern?" Luther asked me when we all sat down to dinner.
"She eloped with someone after I put an end to her allowance. But it wasn't the man she was with here," I said. After a pause I added, "I don't miss her."
"Neither do we," Charlotte said and we all had a good laugh. We had a wonderful time. I played the piano for them and when we left, we promised to return as many times as we could.
In the summer of my nineteenth year, I was enrolled in a three-week program that would take me to Paris and then to Vienna. It was a concert tour and I was looking forward to it very much. Gavin came to see me off and we took a walk on the beach.
"I'm going to miss you, Christie," he told me.
"Every time I leave you or you leave me, something in me dies, and every time I see you again, something new in me is reborn."
"It's the same for me, Gavin," I told him.
"I'm jealous of your music," he confessed. "It possesses you the way I wish I could."
"Don't be jealous," I said, smiling. "It does fill me with great joy, but I will share it only with you."
"Promise?"
"For ever and ever," I said, but I stopped walking and stopped smiling.
"What is it, Christie?" Gavin asked. He followed my gaze. There was a fish lying still in the water. My heart felt so heavy and sad, but suddenly . . . its tail fluttered and then it fluttered once more and the fish turned over as if it had been faking death. It dove into the next wave and disappeared.
And as clearly as the day she had stood beside me on the beach, I heard Mommy ask:
"Can you believe in the fish, Christie? Can you believe in the magic?"
I could believe; I could believe for ever and ever. Thank you, Mommy, I thought. Thank you for your gift of faith.