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“What the hell?” I mumbled.
“What’s wrong?” Poe asked, plucking another fry from the pile with greasy fingers.
“My mom just texted me to come home.”
“What? Why? It’s not even ten,” Poe said, frowning.
I shrugged and then looked down at the text again, feeling resentful. No “How did it go?” or “Congratulations,” just a demand to get home. My heart sank. Did she get home early and notice the letter from Asteria was no longer in the trash? Well, if she did, it wasn’t as though I had anything to apologize for. After all, she was the one stealing other people’s birthday gifts. All I did was take back what belonged to me in the first place.
We just started eating. Is it an emergency?I typed back.
I ate another fry as I watched the three little dots appear and then disappear as my mom evidently struggled with how to respond. Finally her reply popped up.
OK, just be quick and get home as soon as you can.
Everything okay?
Just be quick.
I put my phone away and tried to fall back into the post-show celebration routine, but my mind kept wandering back to the texts. It wasn’t like my mom to be cryptic; in fact, she was usually embarrassingly blunt in that matter-of-fact way that nurses often had. I wanted to know what was going on, but a stubborn part of me refused to rush through our meal. I had earned this night out and so had my friends, and I resented that now I couldn’t even enjoy it.
When Charlie dropped me off forty-five minutes later, I shut the door just a bit harder than was strictly necessary. The kitchen was empty, my mom’s bag dumped unceremoniously on the table, her mostly empty water bottle beside it.
“Mom?” I called out. She didn’t reply, but I thought I could hear her voice; it sounded like she was talking on the phone.
For some reason, this annoyed me. I slammed my bag down into the chair and started down the hallway toward the living room. As I got closer, I heard a snatch of the conversation and stopped, listening.
“…should have told me it was like that.” A pause, and then, “Of course it would have mattered! How can you even say that?”
I couldn’t imagine who my mother would be arguing with like that. I rounded the corner into the living room to see my mom sitting on the couch, her elbows on her knees and her head in her hand. I hesitated, hovering in the doorway.
“Of course we’ll be there. Yes. Fine. Goodbye.” My mother ended her call, lowered the phone to the table and pressed both hands over her face.
All of the anger and resentment drained out of me and I felt suddenly, terribly scared. “Mom?” The question in my voice made me sound like a child, and for a moment I felt like one, all knobbly knees and frizzy hair and a pounding heart.
My mom looked up, her eyes rimmed with red and glistening with tears.
“Mom, what is it? What’s wrong?”
She reached a hand wordlessly out to me and I moved forward to take it. Only when her fingers were tightly closed around mine did she speak at last.
“We have to go to Sedgwick Cove, Wren. Your grandm—Asteria is dead.”
4
My dreams that night were full of Asteria.
It had been almost six years since I’d seen her, and yet she appeared to me with a clarity that took my breath away. We didn’t speak. She was simply there: now sitting on the end of my bed with Freya purring in her lap, now walking past me on a crowded street corner, now sitting in a chair across the room with a book in her hand. Each time I spotted her, she smiled at me and nodded her head, as though I’d done something to meet with her approval.
I lay in the dark when I woke up, staring up at the ceiling, half expecting her to appear there, still smiling enigmatically. If she had, I might have opened my mouth and whispered the shameful truth to her: that I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel about the fact that she was gone. I wonder if she’d still be smiling then if she heard those words out loud.
Yes, she was gone. But she’d been gone for a long time.
I knew it wasn’t Asteria’s fault that I hadn’t seen her since I was ten. It probably also wasn’t her fault that I’d only seen her once a year before that. I’d sort of come to accept that Asteria was no longer a part of my life, and it had seemed like Asteria had accepted it, too. But the letter that had appeared for me yesterday had ripped that old wound open afresh. How many other letters had my mother intercepted? Had Asteria been writing to me for years, hoping for a reply that never came? The moment a relationship with my grandmother had once again become a possibility, it had been snatched away again in the most brutal way I could imagine. I felt like I had mental whiplash; my head spun, and I could hardly breathe. I wrapped my fingers around the charm that hung from my neck and squeezed it. It was now the last thing I’d ever receive from my grandmother.
And then there was my mom. I had absolutely no idea what to say to her. Every impulse to vent my anger about the letter shriveled into nothingness. How could I be mad at her when she’d just lost her own mother? Iwasmad, of course, but that anger didn’t feel very important anymore. I’d lost the idea of Asteria, but my mom had lost the real thing. For all my mother had cut herself off from Asteria, it had never once occurred to me that she hated her. I sensed frustration and anger, but never, ever, hatred. Any time I summoned the courage to ask why we didn’t see Asteria anymore, the answer was always the same; a deep sigh followed by the words, “Because my mother is impossible.”
The words had made sense to me, but not in the way my mother meant them. Asteria had been impossible. Impossibly free. Impossibly unique. Impossibly like a dream. And now it was impossible that I would ever see her again. Impossible used to feel mysterious and intriguing. Now it felt like a door someone had slammed in my face just as I tried to step through it.
