Page 80 of Before I Forget
My mother puts her hand to her chest. “You’re not thinking of staying here…”
“Why not?” I ask. “Where else would I go?”
“I thought you didn’t really like Locust anymore,” says Nina, surprised. Anders raises his tiny fist skyward, like an activist with an unknown cause.
“Things evolve,” I say. I point in the direction of the clearing where my imaginary animal hospital once stood. “Do you remember what I used to do over there? Near the stumps?”
“Of course,” says Nina. “You dragged all your stuffed animals out there and operated on them. It was bizarre.”
“Well, I think that’s what I want to do,” I say.
Nina looks at me with concern. “What do you mean? Like another prophecy thing?”
I laugh. “No. I want to open up my own animal hospital—but for real this time. I want to go to vet school. But first, I need to finish my degree.”
“Now there’s an idea,” says my mother, lighting up. “Where? Maybe in London?”
“Here,” I say. “For now, at least. I can finish my credits at the community college, and then apply to vet schools.”
“Okay,” my mother says gingerly, liking the concept if not the details. “And do you have enough money to pay for this?”
“Not yet,” I say. “But I’ll figure it out.”
My mother waves her hand. “Enough with the pride, Cricket. I will pay for it. Just get going already.”
“Really?” I look at her skeptically.
“Of course. You have a goal, finally. Let’s make it happen.” My instinct is to resist her offer, but she cuts me off before I can speak. “Don’t fight me on this. I regret that I couldn’t pay for your undergrad, but the timing was tough with the divorce. Things are different now. Frankly, I have more money than I know what to do with.” Nina and I look at each other, happy to hear this, before my mother adds: “I may not have always been the mother you needed, Cricket, but all I ever wanted was for you to find a passion and pursue it.”
I am moved by her generosity, but before I can thank her, she adds, “I can’t imagine why you would want to finish your studieshere, but we’re different, you and I.”
A more obvious statement has never been uttered, and yet this is the point I’ve been trying (and failing) to convey to my mother for my entire life. After twenty-seven years, we seem to finally be speaking the same language.
She turns her attention back to the photograph, and I see her eyes glaze with tears for the first time since she arrived. “He might not have been the right husband for me, but Arthur was, without a doubt, the right father for you.”
Chapter 54
On the night before my father’s funeral, I have the dream again: my heart, coughed up, beating in my hand. Again, I turn to the faceless passersby to ask if I need it, if I can survive without it.
This time, there is no sign of Seth, but after a few minutes, my father ambles through the crowd. He is young and vibrant and confident. “Give me that thing,” he says, holding out his hand. I put my heart into it, and he puts it in his pocket. “Be patient, Cricket. Your new one is almost ready.”
I wake up to darkness and grab my chest. Everything seems intact. I can feel my pulse; my organs are all accounted for, as far as I can tell. Though it’s only 5:00A.M., I decide to get up and work on the remarks I plan to give at today’s ceremony.
As I head downstairs and make coffee, the dream keeps tapping me on the shoulder, asking for attention.
It’s an interesting idea: the regenerating heart. After all, we do go on, no matter how much we shudder with grief. And maybe our hearts don’t ache because they’re scarred or broken or because something is wrong. Maybe they ache because they are shape-shifting. Like the growth spurts of our youth, they make us quake with change; but once weathered, they leave us stronger and even more ourselves. Not our final selves, or our best selves, or even our improved selves, but just ournextselves. As I now know, we are always between selves. It doesn’t mean we are lost—it means we are growing.
Throughout our project, I never asked my father to give me a prophecy of my own. At first, it was because I was scared of what hecould reveal about me. I didn’t want to know what the future might hold. But over time, as I listened to him carve meaning out of other people’s lives, I gained an insight here, heard a whisper there. Fear was replaced by curiosity. Even now, I remember the specific prophecies that stirred something within me: the career change, the great romance, the man who finally bought a horse, the woman who felt most alive just before she died. Each of those supplicants went away with a single jewel to polish; but I received the whole trove.
In the end, I never needed my father to tell me what my futurewouldhold—I simply needed him to show me what itcouldhold. And now, as his premonitions echo through my memory, I can use those threads to weave my own prophecy.
When I was younger and living in the city, I distracted myself with activity; busyness was a balm. But up here, in the quiet, the truth has infinite patience. It waits until we have run ourselves ragged and are finally ready to come home, to remember who we have always been.
As the sun starts to rise, I make my way into the great room and light a fire. The flames begin to hiss, and I get an idea: one final brush with bibliomancy for old times’ sake.
I walk over to the bookshelf and say, “Dad, give me something good.”
Closing my eyes, I run my hand along the spines, feeling the paperbacks, the hardcovers, the ones that are so old that pieces of them come off on my fingertips. Finally, my hand stops on a smallish book, and I pull it off the shelf.
I look down and see that it is an original copy of James Herriot’sAll Creatures Great and Small.I remember reading it, somewhere, sometime, but I didn’t realize we owned a copy, let alone a first edition. I must have forgotten—we can’t remember everything, after all. I open the cover, and inside is an inscription from my father, back when his handwriting was replete with confident swoops and playful flourishes.
For Cricket, on her tenth birthday:
The truth is yours to divine; the future is yours to design.
With love from your many animal friends—and of course, your adoring father.
I snap the book shut as my body floods with a feeling so overwhelming that it can only be love. Though I have said it many times, only now do I fully believe it to be true: a good oracle shows you what you already know.
