He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment. "Maybe she needs a day or two first. Get reacquainted with everything and everyone."
I looked up sharply. I knew whom he was speaking about, and it made my heart pitter-patter.
"She's reasonably well, you know. I can arrange for you to go see her when you're ready. You'd like that, I'm sure," he added, and raised his eyebrows in anticipation.
"When I'm ready," I said.
"Yes." He glanced at Pru. "Well, then, you'll just let me know."
"I'll run her home and come right back," Pm said.
"Take your time. Take your time," he said. He looked at me again. "Remarkable. When I look at you, I see a young Sarah Atwell. She was a beautiful woman. Just as you are, and as your mother is," he added.
I stood and shook his hand.
"Thank you," I said.
"My pleasure. I know you're going to be all right, my dear."
"Yes," I said, my eyes so tight and hard on him, he raised his eyebrows. "I'll be just fine."
We walked out and got into Pru's car.
"I'm sorry you had to find it all out like that. It just seems there should have been a different way, little by little or something?'
I smiled at her.
"I always knew it, Pru. In my heart of hearts, I always knew it."
She smiled.
"When do you want to go see her?" she asked. I didn't answer.
She didn't ask again.
It wasn't something I knew myself.
Epilogue
Home Again
.
I didn't attend school immediately. Mr.
Nokleby-Cook was right; I needed time to acclimate myself. Although I had never read the novel, my English teacher at the school I attended when I lived at the second orphanage liked to quote Thomas Wolfe and say. "You can't go home again." He meant that so much had changed there and in you that nothing would look or seem the same.
Nothing sounded more irrelevant to an orphan who had never had a home, of course, but I was so different from most of the others. I had had a home once, and I impressed everyone with my remarkable memory. I could recall such detail from my first six years of life, most of it from the sixth year, but vivid enough to astound anyone who listened to me describe my home, our land, and of course, Noble, my grandmother, and eventually, Celeste, my mother Celeste.
Pru and Brice were very patient and
understanding.
Neither pressured me to do anything or go anywhere. I spent the next two days wandering about the farm, sometimes just sitting and staring out at the thick forest. Eventually, I wandered into it and made my way to the brook. It wasn't as full and powerful as I remembered it to be. The water still polished rocks and bubbled about, but it wasn't as wide and didn't look anywhere near as deep. Once it had an almost religious significance for us. It was here that Noble had died, and now I knew that the boy who drowned here had been my father.
The land, the water, all of nature, gives birth to so much within us and then absorbs it all, takes it back in one way or another, I thought. It isn't just dust unto dust. Something of our souls, our spirits, surely finds a place in all this, and that was what my grandmother felt and saw, and what she had passed on to my mother and to me. I had lost it along the way, and now I wanted to regain it.
Would I?