Mitch can’t picture the decoration, but he knows what it is not. He walks slowly around the tree, trailing his hand against the very edge of the needles as he disregards reindeers made out of pipe cleaners and exquisite Russian antiques. Just as his throat begins to tighten in defeat, he catches a glimpse of iridescence a bit above his head. He reaches for the source of the soft glow and plucks it from between the branches.
“You found it,” Cooper says softly. “I knew you would.”
The ornament is light as air and almost as delicate. It is a single, hand-cut snowflake made from silver paper and glazed with thick shards of white glitter that sparkle like glass. It must have taken hours to plan each careful snip of the scissors, and even longer to carefully coat the slender spires in such delicate strands of glue. Mitch turns it over in his fingers, and as he does a few flakes of glitter whisper free and fall to the floor like snow.
“I’m ruining it,” he says, and is surprised to feel panic clutch at his chest.
“No, you’re not.” Cooper comes to stand beside him. “It’s well-worn and well-loved. You’ve had it for over twenty years.”
“Twenty years? Has it been that long?”
“She’s a grown woman now.”
Mitch twirls the snowflake by the silver string attached to the tip as he spins this information around in his mind. Twenty years? She’s grown up without him. He’s lost so much time … Suddenly, he has a thought. He looks up at Cooper almost hungrily. “Will she come? For Christmas, I mean?”
Cooper’s eyes shift to the tree. “I don’t know, Mitch. Maybe.”
“Does she visit me?” Mitch is too confused to be wary. For all he knows she comes every week and he exhausts her with his constant questions. Maybe his own faulty memory is driving a wedge between them that he doesn’t even know about. “Have I just forgotten her?”
“You haven’t forgotten her,” Cooper says, ignoring Mitch’s first question. “You mix things up sometimes, but I guarantee you: You have not forgotten your daughter. Not for a single day.”
“Can I call her?” Raw hope is written across Mitch’s face. “Maybe if I call and invite her, she’ll come.”
Cooper seems to consider this for a moment, but before Mitch can get too excited, Cooper puts a steadying hand on his arm. “Why don’t you write her a letter? Sometimes the best way to express how we feel is to put our thoughts down on paper.”
“But …” Mitch fumbles, disappointed.
“I’ll help you.” Cooper smiles encouragingly. “You can dictate and I’ll write. I have very nice handwriting. It’s almost legible.”
Mitch sighs. “Mine isn’t?”
“Not really.”
“What will I say?”
“I’m sure you’ll come up with something.”
Feeling like a bit of a thief, Mitch takes the paper snowflake with him as he follows Cooper into the atrium. The open space has cleared out a bit; many of the residents are taking a much-needed rest after lunch. But Mitch isn’t tired. In fact, his fingers vibrate with energy, and it’s all he can do not to race over to the table where Cooper is obviously headed. For the first time in a long time, he feels like he has a purpose. Something he must do. A letter is a brilliant idea. He wonders why he never thought of it before.
“Make yourself comfortable,” Cooper says, indicating a table near the window. “I’ll go get some paper and a pen. Would you like a cup of tea?”
For once, Mitch doesn’t have to wonder at his own preferences. “Coffee,” he says definitively. “Black.”
Cooper grins. It was a trick question. “Of course. Be back in a few.”
The chairs at the table are plush, but Mitch doesn’t feel like sitting. Instead, he wanders the length of the atrium, watching the snow fall just outside the glass. It’s been accumulating for hours now, and the world is blurred with white. Mitch is surprised by a sudden longing to play in it, to run outside and throw himself against the snow and watch as the flakes dance like stars around him. He’d like to lie in it, facing the sky, and let the muted light settle around him like a blanket.
But of course he can’t do that. They would think he was even crazier than they already do. Maybe they would lock him in his room, or fit him with one of those strait-jackets that he can, for some unfathomable reason, see so clearly. How can he know what a straitjacket is, but not be able to recall his grown-up daughter’s face? Life is cruel, Mitch decides.
And yet, it’s beautiful, too.
He knows that life is beautiful because he holds the evidence in his hand. In spite of the indistinct haze of guilt that he feels whenever he thinks of his past, Mitch knows he must have done something right. Something good. Nothing else could merit the priceless gift he holds in his hand. When he looks at the snowflake, the care with which it was constructed, he knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that for a while at least the girl who wielded the scissors loved him.
“Did I fail you completely?” he asks the little snowflake. It seems like a tiny piece of his daughter, a glimmering extension of the child she once was. But the paper doesn’t answer. It merely sheds a few more flakes of glitter.
Mitch presses the snowflake against the cool pane of glass before him and lets his gaze drift to his own watermark reflection. He still has a full head of hair, but it’s so white it disappears in the fringe of snow. His eyes are milky, too, soft and lined like overripe fruit. I’ve gone to seed, he thinks. I don’t know how to be old.
It’s an excuse, and Mitch knows it. Just like all the other ones. I didn’t know how to be a father. I didn’t know how to raise a daughter. I didn’t know how to make it better, how to stand between my wife and the little girl that she terrorized for all those fragile years.
And yet, even as Mitch thinks these things, as he comes to grips with the fact that he failed, he is shaken by the fierce realization that he’s not gone yet. Maybe it’s not too late.
“I’m going to tell you everything I felt. Everything I should have said,” Mitch says. He cradles the snowflake in his hands, touching each fragile tip with the soft pad of his fingers. “I just pray it’s not too late.”
As he turns the ornament over and over, Mitch notices something for the very first time. It’s a smudge of dark along one narrow spire on the back side of the decoration. Even before he squints at the mark, he knows that the streak of ink is a message of sorts, something she left behind. Maybe it’s her name scrawled in a childish hand. Or maybe a Bible verse, something that will jog his memory.
Mitch has to bring the snowflake almost to his nose to make out the minuscule inscription. And then he has to read it four times before it sinks in. It feels like a cipher, a secret code that was written just for him. Just for this moment.
I remember.
“I remember, too,” Mitch whispers.
CHAPTER 10
RACHEL
October 16
The Kempers family lived in a picture-perfect little house situated in what most people in Everton referred to as the “old” part of town. In some places, the original brick roads peeked through concrete that had been poured over top, and ancient trees created a canopy that intertwined above lazy streets. I loved the collection of storybook houses with dormer windows and dizzyingly steep roofs. Every home boasted a unique characteristic, from wrought-iron shutters that were a century old to picket fences painted a bright and cheery white.
Sarah’s home was distinct because of the exquisite garden that filled the entire front yard. Her flowers started at the overflowing window boxes beneath her dining room window, and extended all the way to the edge of the sidewalk. And beyond, I noticed, as I stepped over a browning black-eyed Susan that had sprouted from a crack in the cement. It was too late in the season for her, and yet she clung to life. Apparently Sarah’s green thumb could not be contained by something as silly as a slab of poured concrete.
Even though I was on a mission, I couldn’t help but smile as I mounted the steps to Sarah’s front door. Her fall mums
were bursts of brilliant color that seemed to match her personality: bold, vibrant, and unapologetic. But when Sarah swung the door open before I could ring the bell, I had to rethink my final assessment of her. She didn’t look unapologetic. She looked absolutely heartsick.
“Sarah!” I was shocked to see her so distraught. She was normally so effervescent it was almost maddening. “Is something wrong?”
She stepped outside into the mild fall day and let the screen door slam behind her. “I didn’t sleep at all last night. I just feel so terrible about what happened at the coffee shop! Can you ever forgive me? Sometimes I let my mouth get ahead of me, but I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s okay,” I said, putting my hand on her arm to stop the barrage of words. “I came over here to apologize to you. I shouldn’t have reacted the way that I did.”
“Oh, you had every right to react that way. I absolutely blitzed you with my half-baked assumptions … and in a public place! What was I thinking? I am without a doubt the world’s worst pastor’s wife.”
I grinned in spite of myself. “Is there a handbook? Do they hand out awards for pastors’ wives?”
“I’m sure they do. Somewhere there’s a committee that’s divided into seventeen subcommittees that undoubtedly monitor our every move. The good pastors’ wives—the ones who play the piano and have perfected the art of baking bread for communion—get a gold star for every good deed. And when they add up all those gold stars …” Sarah twisted her lips and gave a wry shrug as if to say, “You know what happens then.”
“You’ve given this a lot of thought,” I said, laughing.
“You have no idea. When I married David I told him that I would make a terrible pastor’s wife. He didn’t listen to me.”
“He thinks you’re perfect,” I assured her, although that was probably an understatement. Anyone who had ever seen the two of them together knew that David Kempers had eyes only for his remarkable wife. And who could blame him? Even when she came rushing down the center aisle at church, five minutes late for the Sunday morning service and clutching her ten-year-old twins by the hand, she wore a smile that lit up the room. She was magnetic, a force to be reckoned with. And no one knew that better than her husband.
I was surprised by a twinge of jealousy. Was there ever a time that Cyrus adored me the way David would forever adore Sarah? I doubted it. In fact, I doubted that anyone had ever loved me with that sort of abandon.
“Well,” I said, suppressing a sigh, “I guess we both screwed up. Anyway, I really am sorry. You’re one of …” I was about to say my only friends, but that sounded so pathetic I couldn’t make myself finish. Besides, I had the rest of the women in our Bible study. I had Max. And Lily.
But Sarah finished the sentence for me. Only she tweaked it in the most wonderful way. “You’re one of my best friends,” she said, giving me a quick, fierce hug. “I’m sorry I hurt you.”
“Best friends?” I repeated before I could censor myself.
“Of course.” Sarah backed away and met my eye almost gravely. “You’re not like everyone else, Rachel. Don’t get me wrong, the ladies we hang out with are nice and all, but don’t you sometimes feel like they’re … fake?” A horrified look seized her pretty features. “Did I just say that out loud? I told you I’m a terrible pastor’s wife.”
“I won’t tell a soul,” I reassured her. “But if you want to talk about fake, you’re in the presence of the queen. My entire life is one big fraud. How can you imply that I’m anything other than the absolute worst kind of liar?”
“That’s different.” Sarah shook her head, her mouth puckered in disapproval. “You don’t try to pretend that everything is perfect, you just keep to yourself. The reason I finally brought up Cyrus is that I thought that’s what you were waiting for: I thought you wanted someone to notice.”
I had to consider that for a moment. Was I really hoping for someone to reach out to me? To look closer and realize that my shiny life had nearly rusted through? “I guess you’re right,” I finally said. “I don’t know why, but I feel like I can’t go on pretending anymore. That’s why I came clean with Lily, and why I’m working for Max …”
Sarah’s eyes went wide at the exact moment that I realized my mistake. No one knew that I was working for Max. No one was supposed to know that I was working at all.
“You can’t tell anyone,” I said desperately. “Cyrus doesn’t know, and if he found out—”
“I promise,” Sarah cut in. “Not even David. But who’s Max?”
The question pulled me up short. “Who’s Max?” I repeated, wondering how in the world I could begin to describe the man who had saved me once and was in the process of doing it again. I couldn’t. It was too hard. “I guess you’re just going to have to meet him,” I said.
Sarah linked her arm with mine. “How’s now for you?”
I looked at the knot of our elbows, the soft pink floral of her sleeve over the clean navy of my sweater. They complemented each other beautifully. I smiled. “Now is perfect.”
Max and Sarah hit it off immediately. Within minutes of walking through the back door, Sarah had Max laughing at one of her jokes. And by the time Lily dropped in after school, Sarah was fully committed to our project and had learned to wield a fabric steamer with admirable flourish.
“I can’t sew to save my life, but I sure know how to blow steam!” she said, laughing at her own terrible pun.
As for Lily, she had always liked Sarah, and she greeted my friend with a warm hug and a barrage of questions about the upcoming Christmas play. Our church was doing a live Nativity with a horse-drawn sleigh and hot cider, and Lily was angling for the part of the angel. Rumor had it David had worked out a way to float an angel from the haymow of the barn where the Nativity would be staged to the double-wide door of the stable. Lily wanted to fly.
“I don’t know,” Sarah teased. “Are you angel material?”
“Definitely not.” I pulled the end of Lily’s ponytail and gave her a wink.
“Oh, I don’t know about that.” Max gave me a knowing look over Lily’s head. “Her mother is pretty good at making angels.”
“Who? Me?” I touched my fingers to my chest. “To the best of my recollection, I’ve never made an angel in my life. Though I will concede that my daughter is angelic.”
“You’re right about Lily,” Max said. “But you’re wrong about making angels. You used to do it all the time. In fact, Elena once snapped a photo of one of your angels. I think I have it around here somewhere …” Max turned from the sewing table and began to search among the papers of the cluttered bulletin board that hung above the desk. There were pages from magazines, pizza coupons, and orders, but in between the bright rectangles of paper there hung a few random photographs. I could make out a black and white copy of the Wevers’ wedding portrait, and another taken on some mountain vacation. Elena looked young and pretty standing in a meadow with her arms stretched toward the horizon.
Max finally found what he was searching for half-hidden behind a restaurant napkin that had been scribbled with a man’s measurements. He took out the thumbtack and studied the photograph for a short time before he smiled to himself and held it out to me. “See? You used to make angels.”
At first, all I could see was white. It seemed Elena had taken a picture of light itself. But in a second my eyes adjusted, and I realized I was looking at bright whorls of snow. The sun was shining furiously, casting each snowflake into vivid relief so that I could almost see every unique design. And someone had mounded up all that snow with the sweep of arms and legs. It was carefully shaped into the perfect outline of a feather-winged angel.
“A snow angel,” I said, and was surprised to realize that I had spoken aloud.
“You made lovely snow angels,” Max confirmed. All over your front yard, and sometimes over ours, too. Elena took that picture one morning after a particularly big storm. You must have been out there in the middle of the night, because when the sun broke
through the clouds the next day there was a company of heavenly hosts all over the neighborhood.”
“What a gorgeous thought!” Sarah came to look over my shoulder. “Oh, I just love it. Lily, I think you have to be the angel. It runs in your family.”
Lily pulled on my forearm and brought the picture down so that she could see it, too. “You made snow angels?” she asked, wonder in her voice.
“Don’t sound so shocked,” I said.
“Well, it’s just that after hearing some of your stories, I didn’t think you …” Lily fished around for just the right wording, then gave up with an apologetic shrug. “I didn’t think you had much fun as a kid. I didn’t think you did stuff like that.”
“Like play in the snow?”
She wrinkled her nose. “I guess not.”
I stalled for a minute, going through a mental list of the childhood memories I had shared with my daughter. Max had told her about the first time we met—when I had hid in the cherry tree for hours to escape my mom. And I had recalled the blue dress incident, my first batch of failed cookies, and a few other doomed affairs that chronicled my mother’s verbal and emotional abuse and my father’s busy schedule that left little time for me. But had I told her about anything positive? Anything that would cause her to believe that my younger years held even a glimmer of grace?
The truth was, there wasn’t much to tell. I had friends, but I could hardly remember their names. And I’m sure that there were times that transcended the stark reality of my days, but they were overshadowed by my own broken heart. What could I say to Lily?
“I thought that night was a dream,” I admitted quietly. “I remember making snow angels, but I thought that I had dreamed it.”