Heartsong (Logan 2)

I left him standing there, smiling at me, his shoulders gleaming in the late-afternoon sun, the sea, roaring behind him, and my heart . . .

My heart crying with the terns.

Epilogue

.

I was outside the house waiting when Holly

returned. Taking one last visual gulp of the house and the beach, I got into her car and we puttered away. I didn't look back.

"You all right?" she asked.

"Yes."

"This is for you," she said, reaching beneath her

seat to come up with a small bag. "Kenneth sent it along."

"What is it?"

I opened the bag and dipped my fingers in to pull out a silver heart locket on a silver chain.

"He made it himself, years and years ago," she told me.

I found the tiny lever and flipped it open to look at a picture of Mommy when she couldn't have been much older than I was now. The picture on the other side had been removed. I imagined it had been a picture of Kenneth.

"He told me to tell you he gave that to your mother and before she left with your step-father, she gave it back. I think it meant a great deal to him and it wasn't easy for him to give it away."

"Yes," I said, nodding and staring at the picture of Mommy. She was, as they say, so photogenic.

"Maybe, if she's suffering from some form of amnesia, that," Holly said, nodding toward the locket, "will help revive memories."

"You don't think just looking at me would?" I asked.

"I don't know. I've heard of strange cases where people face people they've lived with all their lives and look at them as strangers: children, parents, husbands, and wives. When the mind wants to shut something out, it slams a door of steel and it takes fingers of steel to open it again."

She laughed.

"A friend of mine," she continued, "thinks amnesia proves we have other lives. She thinks it occurs when something puts us on the border between two existences, and we can't recall either one." She shrugged. "Who knows?"

"Yes," I said as the Cape Cod scenery rushed by, "who knows?"

I looked out the window at the ocean and the tourists on the beaches. In the distance I saw the lighthouse.

"How was Kenneth when you left him?" I asked.

"Back to work." She turned, a soft smile on her face. "Did you expect less? If ever he had to escape reality, he has to now," she added.

"Mommy was always trying to do that, especially when we lived in Sewell. Actually, I shouldn't be surprised by all this," I said and then I sighed. "I forgot to call Alice Morgan to thank her."

"You can call from the motel tonight."

"I want to share all the expenses, Holly. I insist." "No problem. I saw your grandmother give you that pile of loot." She laughed.

Provincetown fell farther and farther behind us.

Mommy had brought me here under false pretenses. Supposedly, we were just visiting Daddy's relatives after his death. She made it seem like the right thing to do, and then she surprised me by telling me arrangements had been made for me to live here until she could send for me.