The Girl Who Would Be King(125)

It’s the other piece of the broken stone. I reach for it and realize it, not the book, was what was calling to me. I take the smaller broken piece and match it up with the larger stone in my pocket.

It fuses together instantly and the power of the whole stone nearly knocks me backward. The energy surging from it is intoxicating.

“Unbelievable,” I breathe, marveling at the impossible happening before my eyes and in my own hand. I clutch the stone tightly and put it in my pocket, turning my attention back to the book. While the stone is obviously what calls to me, the rational part of my brain still knows that the book will hold the answers I need.

The thick leather cover creaks as I pull it open. The first page is delicate and feels like dried butterfly wings. Across the top in large and elaborate calligraphy is only the word BRAVERMAN. The pages are brittle and I pull them forward with all the gentleness I can find in myself. There are pages and pages of text, filled top to bottom, in dozens of different hands – I assume dozens of my ancestors. I flip forward and am taken aback when I see my mother’s handwriting – lovely and looping cursive, beautiful but concise. She used to write me notes on the napkin that she put in my lunches, I had forgotten all about them. I shake myself out of the memory and stare at the pages – I’ll be able to learn so much about her – all the things I’m supposed to know. I want to hunker down and drown myself in the whole book from beginning to end, but I don’t have that kind of time. Not now. I thumb toward the back, to where my pages should be, and I find an envelope with my name on it. It’s my mother’s handwriting again. I open the envelope and pull out the delicate sheets of paper. It’s dated the day she died. Her words flow over me like water breaking on stones.



Bonnie

I’m so sorry I had to leave you so early. I had hoped we’d have more time together. Here are the things I would have told you, had we had the chance.

As you’ve probably figured out by now, you’re a little bit different, like I was, and like your grandmother and great-grandmothers before you. We come from a very long line of powerful Braverman women. And there are others – women we call our Others – they are from the LeFever line and have been around as long as we have. They’re like us, connected to us somehow, almost like the opposite of us. It’s hard to explain, and I don’t understand it all. Most of the written history has been lost over the years. and much of it destroyed when we emigrated to America, as I understand it. But your Other, if you don’t already know, is Lola LeFever, the daughter of Delia LeFever, and I’m sorry to say that from what I know of Delia…and even from what I know of you, she’s probably a very strong one. We’re always a little different, but always much the same, and our strength always seems pretty proportionate to our Other’s strength. And you, you’re something special and if you are, so must Lola be. You see I wasn’t much, I was pretty quiet and my other, Delia, who you may know about by now, she was pretty quiet too. We almost even became friends in a way. I was selfish. I wasn’t good at being who I was supposed to be. I led a quiet life, even before I fell in love with your father, but after that, well, I was just selfish. I couldn’t give him up. We had Jasper almost right away and I felt guilty for years, sure that I was not doing what I was supposed to be doing, not being who I was supposed to be. Out of guilt I attempted to make things better by reaching out to Delia, seeing if we could come to some agreement. We did, and as far as I know she’s kept her end of the deal, she did for the first seven years at least, I’ll have to trust her that she honors it when I’m gone.

But you see, I didn’t feel guilty anymore once I was pregnant with you. Because – I knew that you were what I was supposed to do with my life. That you were going to be better and stronger and more important than I had ever been, and that made my selfishness really its own kind of destiny. I was merely a vessel – a way for you to come into the world. I knew what you were going to be was important from the first time I felt you inside of me. And you were everything I had imagined.

Destiny doesn’t always come when it’s convenient or when you think it should. It comes when you’re ready, whether you know it or not.

I know you’ve struggled, but that’s how it is when you have exceptional power…the road is harder I think. I’m sure you won’t even remember the little things you did when you were young. You were the strength and power and goodness I didn’t know that a child, even a Braverman child, could be. You were beyond me before you even took breath.