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“This morning, I told you I was going to check on some of the things I’d not done yet with my mom’s things. I found a notebook about your family. I told you that she said that she had to work with nature to get us mated, right?” He said that she had. “Well, I didn’t realize how extensive her notes on your family were. Like I know that your father fell over a fall and that several days later, your mom jumped into the same waterway. She even has notes on when her babies were left in the house alone when she left to follow your father.”
“Yes, Grandda told us about that a week or so ago.” While he was sure that we didn’t want to know, he thought that it couldn’t do him much harm in asking. So he did. “What else have you found? I’m sure for as many years we’ve been on this mountain that there has been a few things that had to be hidden away.”
“Not really. At one point, there were ten families living on the land. But as the city life called to them, most of them left. Your grandparents have stayed the longest here because they were born right here on this mountain and have lived out their lives here too.” He asked about deaths. “Now, there have been quite a few of those over the years. Unexplained deaths that your grannie might have known about that I can now tell her about. Several people wandered onto the property. Three, as a matter of fact, were killed by the wildlife, and they were left where they lay. Two men and one woman were killed by crashing their getaway vehicle into a tree while evading the police. You and I might go find that one. It’s still an open case. Two suicides from cliff jumping—not related to each other. Also, this one isn’t deaths, but there was about ten years ago a missing family that has never been found that are still squatting on the land nearest the entrance to the park.”
“Grandda knows about them. A family of four, parents and their two kids. They’re evading some kind of family trouble. We kept up with it in the newspaper, and that was all it was about that we could find.” She said that they could go home now, everything that they were hiding from was now resolved. “I’ll tell Grandda. He’ll be able to go there and run them off now. I think he’s been talking about it for a while now. None of that sounds too serious, does it?”
“Other than the bank robbery, no, not really. There are also things like hunters coming on the land that were shot at to get going. A couple of fishermen, too, that met with some buckshot in their asses. But all in all, not too much going on around with strangers on the land.” He asked about other things, such as family. “Nothing there either. Not much, anyway. Your parents would go deep into the woods to fight. My mom came upon them a couple of times when they did that. So you children wouldn’t hear. Other marriages, throughout the line, weren’t very faithful to each other and met people out in the wooded area as well. I’ve taken precautions to keep people from coming onto the land to hunt mushrooms. Also, to keep people from using metal detectors as well. Not that big of a deal, but if they were hurt, they might think about suing your family.”
“Thank you for that.” She said it was her pleasure. “Now that you’ve helped me out a great deal, what is it I can do for you to help you out? I’ve been messing around with the magic that you gave me. I can now make a cup of tea and bring it to me mostly without losing any of the hot liquid. I think I’ve mastered snapping my fingers, but it doesn’t seem to work on anything I want to do with it.”
They both laughed, and Frazier thought it was a wonderful sound coming from her. As they talked about other things that he’d been working on as well as the paperwork that he’d been filing, he thought he’d had a very productive day.
Occasionally he’d field a call from some of the people visiting the park. Direct some of the people that worked in the park to them if it came to that. He’d also been able to pinpoint a lost child by using the magic he had as well. It ended well for all of them.
“I’m out of here in about an hour. If you want, we can grab dinner on the way home or order something to eat when we get there. I’ve not had a lot of time to look into getting groceries for the house. Also, getting food delivered isn’t possible, sadly. We would have to go and pick up whatever we wanted.” She said she was all right with eating before going home. “Good. No clean up.”
As they left the park building after his replacement showed up, they held hands. Or better yet, Amelia reached for his hand, and he held onto her tightly. Once they were in the truck on their way to a restaurant, he realized he’d fallen in love with Amelia. In just the five days they’d been getting to know one another.
~*~
David had never chopped wood in his entire life. If asked a couple of days ago, he thought it was a job he never wanted to do again. But now that he’d been at it for a few days, he was beginning to feel like he wasn’t making too many mistakes. Not to mention, he was sleeping much better than he had even before his wife had died. Pausing to have a little look around, he thought about his wife.
Lily had been gone for a month now. It sometimes felt like it was longer. Other times it didn’t seem as if anytime had passed. The pain in his heart would hurt so much. But that was getting better too. He wasn’t so emotional all the time. While she had committed suicide and he understood some of why she did it, he still missed her more than he had his own parents when they passed away.
She’d been in remission from breast cancer for three years when this latest test had come back that it had spread again. Not only in her lymph nodes but also in her lungs and spine this time. While he did hope that the test would come back negative, he knew deep in his heart that there were signs that it was back to take more of her from him. Then, she’d done the unthinkable. His Lily had killed herself.
“How’s it going?” David smiled at Amelia. She frightened him just a little. “You do know that I’d never do anything to harm you, David. You’re as much my family as the rest of the Cross family is. Want me to fix your hands? Or I can take away the pain if you’d like.”
“Take my pain away? I don’t understand.” Amelia put out both her hands, palms up. Staring at them for some moments, he finally looked at her. “Could you have? For me, could you have taken her cancer away?”
“Yes. But I wouldn’t have been able to keep you both from harm had I done that.” David sat down, barely missing the axe in his hand when he did. He put it beside him so he’d not hurt either of them with it. “The way that things went is the way they must be, David. Her dying, even the way that she did, it is a timeline that all creatures of the earth must follow. Had I known her, or you for that matter, keeping her from having cancer would have had a horrific tumble-down effect that would have been much worse than her dying the way she had.”
“I don’t understand. You mean that even if you had known her and had been able to make her cancer free, she still would have died. In some other way?” Amelia only nodded. “You said both of us. We both would have died. I think that I would have much preferred that than having to see her with her wrists slit in our bathtub, Amelia. She was all I had.”
“No, she wasn’t. Otherwise, you’d not be here with your friends.” She put out her hands again, and he could see the day that he’d called for Mark and Sunny. His voice was so full of sorrow that he thought that he could die right then. “I can see a bit in the future. My mom could as well. Shall I show you, and this is just one of the many things that could have happened had she not died that morning? And trust me when I tell you, David, this is the least harsh one that I’ve seen. Remember this, nature needs to have a balance. You cannot take something away from a line without it having to readjust itself to make things happen the way that it was intended.”
He watched as the people on her palm began to change, going back to the time the two of them got up that sad morning. When he was in bed, his alarm went off, and he got up.
“The doctor was supposed to call that morning before I left for work.” Amelia told him the doctor had been violently ill all night and had to go to the hospital. He’d only got up long enough from his hospital bed to call Lily and tell her what he’d found. “I didn’t know that. I never thought of him having to do anything but ruin our lives.”
The changes this time were the good news. He could see it on his wife’s face. When she put down the phone, she sat on the side of the bed sobbing. David asked Amelia if the news had come back to her wrong.
“No. She was told that her cancer was completely gone at this time. She doesn’t believe the doctor. Thinks perhaps he’s giving her false hope. Lily thinks you’ve convinced him somehow to tell her that it’s in remission so that she’ll be happy on her last days.” She finally joins him in the dining room. Telling him about the test. “Lily goes on to believe that she’s been lied to. No amount of more tests, no letting her see the paperwork will convince her otherwise that she was cancer free. Even me telling her that, proving that I’m strong enough to do it, will change her mind.”
The view changed to him and Lily at the doctor’s office. Time and time again, if their change of clothing is any indication. It seemed like they were going every day for a month before the narrative stopped. Amelia looked at him.
“You couldn’t take it any longer. Your heart was hurting you. The stress of telling her she was fine, taking her to the doctor when she begged you to. Just simply worrying about her endlessly took a toll on you. Then there was your work. You went there no matter the day you’d had with your Lily because it was the only place you could be free of all the things going on at home.” The image showed him now, lying in bed with the police over him. “You had a massive stroke in the middle of the night one month after Lily was declared cancer free. Had she been with you, instead of looking things up on the computer that she thought were signs of cancer, she would have seen the pain and agony that you suffered with it.”
“You’re not blaming her, are you?” Amelia told him that she was only showing him what one of his futures might well have been. “She was afraid. I should have…I don’t know what I could have done, but I should have taken better care of myself. I think she might well have been a better person to leave behind. Lily was always so much stronger than I am.”
The next thing that he saw was her driving her car. The car, a birthday gift from him the month before she died, was bright red. It seemed to glow in the night with the moon shining on it. The black interior had been embroidered with roses and lilies, her favorite flowers.
Nothing could have prepared him for what happened next. Lily was driving along, listening to music that he could hear when she plowed through a red light, the reflection of it bouncing off the car as trucks and cars slammed into the little red car, tossing it to and fro like it were nothing more than a ball on a pool table.
“Christ, no.” He looked at Amelia when the accident suddenly disappeared. “No. She’d didn’t do that. She wouldn’t have ended her life, not like that. Please tell me, Amelia, it didn’t happen to my lovely Lily.”
“I told you, David. Nature needs a way to balance. When she didn’t die in the timeline that had been set up for her, she had to die in a different way. A more violent way. You didn’t die in the first place, but you did in the second. There are so many more ways that the balance worked through that have you dying in a much worse and painful way.” He asked her why she’d shown him that. “Because of this.”
