“This is hot cocoa,” Beth says, then hesitates. “And, don’t judge me, a little vodka.”
“Okay.”
“Yeah?” Beth smiles and darts into the kitchen.
Olivia removes Beth’s manuscript from the box and holds the pages on her lap, trying to contain what she feels for just a bit longer, imagining that she might actually explode into a million bloody pieces of flesh and bone if she doesn’t soon say what she came here to say. She listens to the sounds of a microwave cooking and Beth opening and closing cabinets in her kitchen. Any minute now. Her head buzzes, and her stomach is dizzy, like what an actor must feel before going onstage on opening night, or maybe like what a death row prisoner must feel on the day of execution, but like neither of these really. She hears the microwave beep. Beth returns with another blue mug and an eager smile.
“I can’t believe you’re here with my book. I’m so nervous.”
She places the mug on the coffee table in front of Olivia, then sits, attentive and leaning forward, like a good student.
“Your book.” Olivia’s voice catches. Her heart is slamming against her chest like a fist pounding on a locked door, demanding to be let out. “Your book,” she tries again. “How did you write this?”
“What do you mean?”
“This story. This is my son’s story.”
“Oh?” Beth raises her eyebrows and tilts her head, not understanding but not yet alarmed.
“My son’s name is Anthony, and he had autism.”
“Oh my God.” Beth lowers her mug, floored. “That’s unbelievable.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s an amazing coincidence. I had no idea.”
“No. Not a coincidence. You didn’t just write a story about an autistic boy named Anthony. You wrote about my Anthony.”
Beth knots her eyebrows and says nothing.
“The details. You knew everything. Barney, his rocks, the Three Little Pigs. He died when he was eight, almost two years ago.”
“Oh my God, Olivia, I’m so sorry.”
“Do you hear the sound of his voice?”
“Sorry?”
“Does he speak to you in words?” Olivia clears her throat and blinks back tears. What she wouldn’t give to hear the sound of Anthony talking.
“I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking me.”
“I don’t know how else to say this. Your book isn’t fiction. This is my son’s voice,” Olivia says, lifting the pages.
Beth tentatively explores Olivia’s face, like she’s waiting for her to explain the punch line to a joke she doesn’t quite get.
Olivia stares at her, waiting for her response. Olivia tunes in to the refrigerator humming in the kitchen, the wood popping and hissing in the fireplace. She’s aware of her own eyelashes each time she blinks and water from her wet hair dripping down her neck and back.
“Look, I’m really so sorry about your son, but I didn’t—”
“How did you write this?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“How do you know about autism? Do you know anyone else who has it?”
“No. But I’ve read about it—”
“You couldn’t know this from just reading what’s out there.”
“And I’ve observed kids who have it. Even before I ever read anything, I think I’ve always been tuned in to the kids who have it.”
“This is my son,” Olivia says, raising the pages up off her lap.
“I’m sorry, Olivia. I didn’t realize you had an autistic son named Anthony. I had no idea I’d be asking you to read something that’s so personal. It’s amazing that he reminds you so much of your own boy.”
“This is my son’s voice. I know I sound like I’m some desperate, grief-stricken mother who wants to believe someone is in contact with my dead son. But I’m not crazy. This is my Anthony,” Olivia says, flipping the pages.
Beth’s eyes widen as she notices all the red and pink ink on the sheets of paper.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say,” says Beth.
“I know. I know I’ve freaked you out. Believe me, I’m freaked out, too. But there’s no other way to explain this.”
“It’s a coincidence.”
“It’s not. This is my son,” says Olivia, rubbing the top page with the palm of her hand. Her hand is shaking.
“Look, I’m sorry, I really am. But I didn’t hear any voices. The book was inspired by a short story I’d written years ago about a boy I’d once seen creating a line of rocks at the beach. And then recently I read some books on autism that somehow seemed to fit the boy in my short story and the boy on the beach, and I combined them all into this character. Honestly.”
A boy creating a line of rocks at the beach. Olivia used to take Anthony here, to Nantucket, to Fat Ladies and Miacomet Beaches, when he was little. The boy Beth remembers is Anthony. Olivia’s sure of it. An electric chill runs through her.
“I don’t know how or why, but my son gave you his story. It didn’t come from you. It came through you.”
Beth stares at Olivia in disbelief and says nothing. Olivia holds on tight to the pages on her lap. She can’t leave this living-room couch without somehow convincing Beth. She exhales and regroups.
“Let me start over. I love your book. I do. It’s beautiful and compelling and so real.”
A smile breaks through Beth’s guard, a small ray of light peeking through a pinhole in a concrete wall.
“But you didn’t quite finish it. Where you ended the story, that’s not the ending.”
Beth’s smile vanishes, but she’s listening.
“We need to know what Anthony thinks about his time here, about his life and his autism. What does he believe was his life’s purpose? This is the big, unanswered question in your novel. What did his life mean to him?”
Olivia’s voice leaves her. She feels as if she needs the answer to this question more than she needs the air in this room. She’s been asking this question, praying for an answer, for so long, and sitting in front of her is an ordinary but now completely spooked woman, a neighbor she barely knows, who somehow, for some reason, has access to the answer. Access to Anthony.
“Even if you think I’m completely nuts, please listen to me here. Go back to your story and write a little bit more. Trust me. You haven’t gotten the right ending yet.”
Beth still looks a little freaked, but she’s listening. She nods.
“I’ll think about it.”
Olivia searches Beth’s eyes. This is as far as she can push.
“Thank you. I can’t thank you enough. And trust me, you’ll see. You’ll know you have the real ending once you write it.”
Beth chews the nail of her index finger and stares at her book on Olivia’s lap. “You really believe what I wrote came from your son?”
“I know it did.”
Olivia’s eyes are brown. This book is Anthony. It’s not similar to him or based on him. It doesn’t remind her of him. It is him.
As Olivia stands up to leave, she notices Beth aiming with her eyes to pry the pages of her manuscript from Olivia’s hands. Oh my God, she can’t leave Anthony’s words here. She can’t.
“Can I please take this copy with me?”
Beth hesitates. She looks bewildered and exhausted.
“Okay.”
“Thank you. I can’t thank you enough for writing this. You’ve let me know my son in ways I was never able to know him.”
Olivia slides the manuscript back into the box, and Beth walks her to the front door. Olivia looks Beth in the eye, making sure Beth really sees her, then embraces her in a hug.
“Thank you.”
Beth nods and whispers, “You’re welcome.”
Olivia retrieves her still-soaked shoes and coat, says a reluctant good-bye, and leaves. As soon as she steps outside, the wind whips her hood off her head. She runs across the lawn to her Jeep but pauses before opening the door. She tips her head back, giving her face to the
enormous gray sky, to the wind and the rain, and prays.
Anthony, I know it’s you. Please, tell her more. Give me just a little bit more.
She stands in the road, exposed to the wind, vulnerable to the rain, to heaven, to God. She can’t imagine why Anthony would choose to communicate through Beth and not her. But he did. She believes. She more than believes. She knows. This is Anthony, and the unwritten ending to Beth’s novel is the answer to Olivia’s prayers.
CHAPTER 35
It’s early Sunday morning, and Beth is sitting on Petra’s living-room couch, waiting for her to return from the kitchen with herbal tea. She pulls a speck of black fuzz off the couch cushion and flicks it to the floor. Petra’s couch is white and many years old, but it still looks brand-new without a single stain, only one of many signs in the room of a woman who lives without a husband or children.
Opposite the couch sits Petra’s meditation chair, a low, espresso-colored rattan seat with a high back and a white cushion (again, no stains). A beautiful, handwoven pink-and-gray blanket is curled around the seat, revealing the shape of where Petra was sitting only moments before. A lavender candle burns on the low, round coffee table next to a copy of Cook’s magazine and a deck of tarot cards. The room is sparsely decorated—a black-and-white photograph of Petra with her siblings and parents, a painting of a sunrise over the ocean, a wooden carving of a sperm whale, a jade plant in a large, blue ceramic pot on the floor, its branches decorated with tiny gold-ball Christmas ornaments, a glass bowl filled with colored sea glass. There is no TV.
Petra walks into the room, still in pajamas, barefoot, toenails painted bright pink, and hands Beth a steaming-hot mug. She sits cross-legged on her chair, wraps the blanket around her, sips her tea, and leans forward, directing herself toward Beth.
“So this is incredibly cool,” Petra says.
“This is crazy, not cool.”
“Well, it’s kind of mind-bending cool, but I think it’s cool.”
“Petra, this is unbelievable, impossible.”
“It’s a lot to process,” Petra says.
“It’s pure coincidence.”
“Or not.”
“It has to be.”
“Why does it have to be?”
“So you believe in this kind of stuff?”
“What stuff is that?” asks Petra, knowing full well what Beth is referring to.
“You know, channeling dead people. Talking to ghosts.”
Petra laughs and tucks her hair behind her ear.
“I believe in divine beings and spirituality.”
“But what does that mean?”
“I believe that we’re more than flesh and bone, that we are all spirits living here on Earth for a spiritual purpose.”
Beth sighs and sips her tea. Her own experience with religion, with concepts and beliefs about spirituality and life after death, is extremely limited. Her mother wasn’t a churchgoer. Beth’s not even sure what denomination her mother might have belonged to. For a while when Beth was a teenager, she and her mother went to different churches on the weekends, sometimes even to other towns, with the purpose of at least exposing Beth to organized religion.
She remembers little about any of them. There were strange choral songs that she didn’t know the words to and statues of Jesus nailed to the cross that gave her nightmares. That’s about all. They usually went for jelly doughnuts after. She remembers the doughnuts. Then one weekend the church field trips stopped, and her mother left it up to Beth to choose. She was about sixteen. She chose to sleep in on Sundays.
When her mother died, Beth wished she hadn’t made that choice. She assumed her mother was in heaven, but she had no religion to help her believe in heaven as a real place. She could only imagine heaven as a part of the sky filled with puffy, white clouds and chubby, naked babies with wings. And it was hard to include her mother in that image. It still is.
“Okay, what about what Olivia believes?” asks Beth. “Do you believe that’s even possible?”
“Yeah, I do. I sometimes experience the presence of spiritual energy when I meditate.”
“So do you hear actual voices?”
“No, but some people do, and some people see images, visual flashes. For me, it’s not like hearing or seeing, it’s more a sudden knowing, but the knowledge doesn’t come from me.”
“That’s what we call thinking, Petra.”
“It’s not. It’s different, it’s information I wouldn’t normally think, or it’s communicated to me in a style that’s not mine. It doesn’t come from me, it comes to me or through me. It’s hard to explain.”
“Okay, but even if I believed in this, why would this boy’s spirit choose me? I mean, why not communicate directly with his mother?”
“I don’t know. Maybe his mother wasn’t open to receiving him. Too much grief blocking the channel.”
Beth looks around Petra’s living room—the tarot cards, the rose quartz crystal in the shape of a heart hanging from a string, sparkling in one of the windows, the meditation chair. If the spirit of a boy named Anthony was looking to channel his story through a woman on Nantucket, why not use Petra? Why not choose someone who believes in this stuff?
“Yeah, but why me? Before writing this book, I had no connection to him or autism.”
“We’re all connected, even if we don’t know how. Maybe his communicating through you gives you something that you need in this lifetime.”
“Me? Like what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the chance at a new life, a creative life. Maybe it’s a lesson, something in the story you’ve written that you need to learn.”
Writing this book has given Beth access to a part of herself that she’d forgotten about, the creative dreamer she stored away in the attic so many years ago. But a lesson for her? Her book is about autism. It’s not about her. She shakes her head.
“Did you ever feel like you were tapping into something or someone else while you were writing?” asks Petra.
“Not exactly.”
Hearing the obvious uncertainty in her own voice surprises Beth. She never heard any voices. She didn’t. But at times when she’d write, hours would go by, a whole morning and afternoon, and it’d feel like only a few minutes. And sometimes she’d read back what she wrote and think, How did I come up with this? How did I know how to write this? And there were the dreams. Those full and vivid dreams about Anthony.
“But, Petra, I wrote this book.”
“I know you did, but maybe his spirit provided you with inspiration, guidance toward an intended path, some necessary truth.”
Beth chews on her thumbnail and concentrates hard on what Petra just said. “Okay, but if I was going to be a conduit for someone’s spiritual message, why would it be for this boy and not my own mother or my grandmother or my grandfather? Why this boy?”
“I don’t know. Again, maybe there’s a reason you’re connected. Maybe there’s something in what he’s saying for you to learn. Or maybe Olivia’s just a mother who really loves and misses her son, and there’s something unresolved with him.”
Beth sips her tea and thinks for a minute.
“She wants to know what purpose his life served.”
“There it is. And your book reminds her so much of him, she sees the story you’ve written as her chance to understand why he was here and heal. What about that?”
Beth nods.
“I can live with that.”
“Okay, then what do you think about her feedback? Do you think you have the right ending?”
There it is again, just like when Olivia was in Beth’s living room, that electric, sick, sinking feeling.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure of anything right now.”
“I would go back to the library and try to write a little more. See if Anthony has anything more to say. It can’t hurt.”
“There’s something else,” Beth admits.
Petra raises her eyebrows and waits.
“Every time she s
aid, ‘You don’t have the right ending yet,’ I swear I felt a zap and my stomach dropped to my knees. I’d just ended things with Jimmy.”
“Interesting.” Petra taps her mug with her index finger. “Are you having second thoughts?”
“I don’t know, but every time she said, ‘You’re not done,’ it was like a lightning bolt. She was talking about me and Jimmy, not the book.”
“So maybe you and Jimmy aren’t done.”
“Petra, she was talking about the book. She doesn’t know anything about me and Jimmy.”
“Yeah, she was talking about the book, but what you heard was Jimmy.”
Beth sighs. She thought her book was done. She thought she and Jimmy were done. Now this woman she barely knows walks into her house and suddenly she’s questioning everything.
“You can believe the spiritual stuff or not,” says Petra. “Call it a wild coincidence if you want. I believe in it, and I believe in you. Go write. You don’t have the right ending yet.”
There it is again. Lightning bolt. Woozy stomach. Jimmy.
“I don’t know, I’ll think about it.” Beth checks her watch. “I need to get going.”
“Come here.”
Both women stand and hug close, heart up against heart.
“Thanks for the talk,” says Beth.
“Anytime.”
Beth pulls on her coat, grabs her bag, and waves as she walks out the front door, still uncertain of everything, including the smooth, round moonstone necklace in her pocket.
CHAPTER 36
Olivia is sitting at her kitchen table, reading. She had planned to sit and read from one of her journals, but she opened the mail first, and she unintentionally got sucked into reading an advance reader copy sent to her from Louise, a book called Believing in Bliss: Twelve Steps to Finding Happiness from Within. She finishes the first short chapter, closes the book, and studies the cover, surprised by her interest in it. She sets the book aside for now.