Pieces of Hope (38 page)

“MOM!” I
wailed, bursting into sobs.

Suddenly
Ethan was beside me, holding me. For how long he rocked me as the tears fell, I
don’t know. Gathering myself together some time later, I made a random wish for
one of Mac’s hankies. And when I opened my hand, it was there.
 

Despite
the awkwardness of it, I choked out a laugh.

“Something
I should know about?” Ethan’s voice sounded muffled. His chin, resting on the
top of my head, stayed right where it was.
 

“Nothing
important,” I answered. I breathed in the scent of his shirt. Fabric softener
and Ethan made for a soothing combo. If it were possible, I would have bottled
it and made my fortune.

“Ready
to hear the rest?” His voice was soft and deep. A caress. I stifled a sigh.

Leaning into
him, gaining strength in the solidness of Ethan, all I did was nod. But it was
easier to block out negative thoughts when I buried my face in his shoulder. It
kept me from wondering about terrible girlfriends who kissed their former
boyfriends and enjoyed it. Ethan’s black mood and mysterious lead-up wasn’t
helping.
Two days ago
? Was that when
I’d first kissed Daniel? For all I knew, that could have occurred moments, or
even seconds ago. Had something unforeseen occurred—something to do with the
choice I kept ignoring? I closed my eyes, buried my face deeper into his chest,
and waited for him to speak.

“You
were in the ICU for only three days. Once you were stable, they moved you to
another ward in the hospital. You were still in a coma, but everyone believed
you were going to wake up at any moment. Medically speaking, there was no
reason you
shouldn’t
have.” I
couldn’t see his face, but his voice sounded strange. Clinical. “The swelling
on your brain subsided almost immediately. Your vitals were good. It was pretty
much a sure thing—at least, that’s what I told your family. My insider
information led me to believe that you were coming back soon.” As he said this,
I giggled and cried at the same time. “You could say I was overly confident . .
.

“But that
didn’t prepare me for the change that was about to happen. For five days, I
waited for you to wake up. When my twelve-hour shift ended in the ICU, I was
right back at your side.” He groaned a laugh. “Like I said, no one could have
convinced me otherwise. I knew at any moment you were going to wake up and give
me of your beautiful smiles.”

I
couldn’t think of anything to say. It sounded like nothing but mush in my head
so I just let Ethan keep talking. He was doing a far better job of it than I
ever could. I did pull my face out of his chest. Reaching for one of his hands
that had been lying on the grass, I held it tenderly to my cheek.

“You
know, Brody thinks I’m crazy. I mentioned once that I’d been having dreams
about you and must have implied that they seemed real to me. Imagine my
surprise when he began telling me about a recent dream that he’d had . . . one
where the three of us had gone climbing.” I gasped, thinking of repercussions
for the future. Had Claire shared details of our visit with Brody? Had Brody
also told Claire? “Tell me about it,” Ethan said. “Brody can’t remember what he
ate for lunch yesterday, yet he recalled details from that so-called dream that
I’d completely forgotten.”
      

Sounding
more exhausted as the story dragged on, he said, “Those five days were the
longest five days of my life. It didn’t help that my dreams of you were so
sporadic. Several days—nothing. Not even a glimpse. I thought it couldn’t get
any worse.” Ethan paused for an excruciating moment. “And then on the sixth
day, I was at your bedside when you started to convulse. It was the most
difficult thing I’ve ever had to do. To watch the girl I love die—all the while
knowing there wasn’t anything I could do to stop it.

“I’ve
never seen anything like it. At first, I thought you were having a heart
attack, but your body wasn’t quite behaving like someone in the throes of one. My
second thought was that your heart was being strangled from the inside out . .
. Strange, I know, but that’s what came to mind. The horror-show ended nearly
as quickly as it began, but I didn’t feel a sense of true relief. I still
believed that I had lost you . . .” Ethan sounded half-dead himself, and
terribly sad. “That was the most difficult part—believing that I had lost you a
second time.”

I lifted
my eyes to his. When he looked back, I flinched. In the space of that instant,
I’d felt his pain. “Ethan, you haven’t—”
 

“Tell me
what really happened that day, Hope.”

When
he’d said the strangling part, I knew. But I couldn’t just launch into the
whole seduction scene. I considered it, imagined Ethan’s stricken and/or
violent reaction, and then discarded that idea in a hurry.

“There
was a . . . um, complication when we went to rescue Daniel.”

He
groaned. “I told you he was trouble. Is he the reason you haven’t
returned?”
  

His tone
bothered me. I was suddenly uncomfortable and irritated. I pulled out of his
embrace. When I spoke, my voice was angrier than I had intended. “You have no
idea how hard this has been! You haven’t the faintest idea what it’s like to
lose your mother—to want to see her and talk to her one last time. You’ve lived
a charmed life, ridiculously perfect. There’s no way you could understand!”

I
slapped a hand across my mouth. Where had those awful words come from?

The moon
disappeared, and now the sun suddenly made an inexplicable appearance on the
horizon. I stole a glance in every direction, quickly spotting his lanky,
loping form on the hillside beyond the valley. My heart rate went up so fast I
thought that Ethan could hear it. Though Daniel was too far away for anyone’s
eyes (other than mine), I aimed imaginary laser beams at him, hoping he would
feel them and leave. Was he trying to make me hate him?

Ethan’s
voice interrupted my glaring. “Not so ridiculously perfect, Hope . . .”
 

My
attention, split in two directions, strained to focus on Ethan.

Looking
into his eyes, I heard the words he hadn’t yet spoken. It was both amazing and
terrible to hear him in that moment—this uncanny ability that I’d wished for
back at the Station now realized. His voice was just as beautiful (though
sadder) in my head. Knowing what he was about to tell me—my mind skipped ahead
to the very end, then worked its way backwards—I struggled to keep my face
blank. When someone was about to disclose their most guarded secret, the last
thing they needed to know was that the person they were about to tell had already
heard every detail, had already experienced their pain—and all because they had
intruded into a very private place that they didn’t belong.
   

“There
were two questions I didn’t answer on our first date,” Ethan began. I watched
him as he spoke, but he was staring over my head at the shades of cinnamon
illuminating the morning sky. It didn’t seem to bother him that in fewer
seconds than it took to brew a cup of coffee, we had gone from midnight to
dawn. But it bothered me. It bothered me immensely! It made me leery of what
else Daniel might be capable of doing. Ethan looked back at me as he continued,
“The first had to do with who I looked like. The second had to do with why I’d
moved from Boston to Eugene, Oregon
. . .”

Of
course! I’d assumed he skipped past those due to our limited time. Or maybe he’d
pictured me—back at the hospital, ill and broken—and it was too much to deal
with at that moment. I’d been wrong on both counts. At last, mind reading served
a useful purpose.

“Do you
remember my tenth birthday, the one I told you about?” A yacht, sleek and
white, came to mind. It didn’t look that small to me. “That day proved to be
memorable for several reasons.” Ethan explained that later that evening, as he
ran into his father’s study to find his first edition copy of
Moby Dick—
a gift from his beloved Aunt
Elisa—he’d tripped over a corner of his mother’s silk carpet as he made his way
out. The book in his hand went flying across the room and a stack of papers on his
father’s desk sailed onto the floor.

“
Patric
must have forgotten the papers were there.” He was
running his hand across his forehead in nerve wracking fashion. His voice
cracked, and pain resonated in my chest. “Maybe it was an accident and he’d
meant to put them away earlier,” he rambled on. “Then again, I don’t believe in
accidents. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t looked when I picked up those papers,
hadn’t stopped to read what they said. When I was younger, I never understood
why I didn’t look like anyone in the family. After that day, it finally made sense
. . .”

I
couldn’t say anything. The pain, expanding in my chest, was exquisite. I’d
tuned in a little too closely to Ethan. It was almost unendurable.

“I know why
they didn’t tell me about the adoption. I’m certain
Patric
and Madeline believe I couldn’t have been more loved—and they’re probably right.
But discovering that big of a secret about yourself, at any age, without being
able to talk to someone, put me in a difficult spot.”

“You found
out you were adopted, but didn’t talk to your parents about it?”

He
shrugged. “It might have hurt them to think that they had accidentally hurt me.
I couldn’t bear the thought of that. Most days it didn’t affect me. But then, sometimes
I dreamt about them. About her, mostly. Sometimes I dream that she still misses
me.”

I
pretended to guess, but my tears were real—“And the adoption agency listed on
the documents was in Eugene?
Is that why you’re here? To find her?”

He
nodded. “The agency’s name was
Happy
Endings
. Ironic, isn’t it? But I checked. It’s no longer in business. For
the first few months I was here, I’d walk around town thinking that someone
might recognize me. Might cross me on the street and say, ‘Hey, you look like
so-and-so.’ Or maybe, ‘You look like so-and-so’s son.’”

“So you
came to Oregon
because you want to know your history, and you wonder if your mother is alive.”
Ethan nodded again, marveling at the depth of my understanding.

“Don’t misunderstand
me,” he said. “I’m not comparing what I feel for my mother to what you feel for
yours. I miss mine, but it’s because I never knew her. It’s because I may
never
know her. That’s not the same as
losing her.” He stroked my face with the back of his hand. His eyes were
glistening again. I breathed more easily, thankful the truth was out in the
open and that Ethan looked relieved. “Not knowing is the hardest part . . . I
get it. I know what that’s like—the not knowing. I live with it every single
day.”

When he
kissed me, something in the distance caught my attention. I stole a sideways
glance at the early dawn. Streaks of something other than the sun’s rays
painted the heavens in huge, sweeping bursts of color. I suppressed a gasp. It
was my face! And it was big.
Five-story
building big
. Daniel was delicately holding a paintbrush in his right hand,
pointing it towards the sky, and making long strokes in mid-air. Sometimes he
dabbed in the direction of a grapevine or at the darkened earth or nearer to
the sun’s rays for the colors in my hair. The painting looked more beautiful
than I could ever be in real life. I both despised and adored the artist in
that instant.
 
 
   

“Ethan!”
I was breathing too hard. I took his face in my hands, hoping to shield him
from my lies for an instant longer. “There’s something I need to . . . Something
I should have told you about
 
. . . About
Daniel!” I couldn’t finish my thought. I watched confusion cross his face.
“This isn’t easy to tell you, but I—I—”

“Well,
if it isn’t the lovely couple.” The voice came out of nowhere and everywhere.
My stomach dropped. Daniel was only fifty feet away, strolling languidly toward
us, wearing a bemused expression on his innocent-looking face. Reaching Erratic
Rock, just yards from where we sat, he reclined back and propped his head on
his hand—watching us all the while. I cringed as I imagined him blabbing the horrible
truth to Ethan without giving me a chance to explain. Purposely causing him
pain—which is what I believed Daniel intended to do—would only happen over my
dead body!
  

And yet,
as Ethan caught sight of Daniel, he seemed the essence of calm. It scared me
more than a little—mostly because it seemed so out of place. Well, there was
that and I’d seen this movie one time, where just before the main character
killed someone, he wore that exact expression.

“
Danielle
. . .” Ethan began, and I nearly
lost it when he called Daniel by the female version of his name. “Your
over-the-top attempts to glean Hope’s affection seem desperate at best. There’s
no need for grandiose gestures.” His voice was low, not abrasive. And pleasant,
like he was chastising a child. “And speaking of grandiose, what were you
thinking when you painted her nose?”

Daniel
shot up, jerking his head toward his portrait in the sky. I could see no flaws.
It was the sort of painting that could have hung in a museum—if it were a lot
smaller. In it, my hair was a dark chestnut with bold streaks of purple and
gold. My features were perfect. My lips dewy. My nose well-proportioned . . .

Daniel
burst into malicious laughter.

“All the
world loves a critic!” Dramatically pausing, he flashed dark, moody glances
Ethan’s way. “And what is it you do,
Ian
?
What talents do you possess?” Rubbing his chin in his hand, Daniel’s eyes
flashed wickedly. “
Ahh
, that’s right. You’re a nurse.
I’ve got a bet going. I say they
make
you wear dresses . . . but maybe you do that all on your own?”