The Pieces We Keep(141)
A sprinkling fell through the morning, but by noon more than half the sky shone blue. It seemed to be a good omen, as Isabella’s mother had been warm and forgiving on the phone and agreed to let Audra stop by. Such welcoming acceptance made more sense toward the end of the conversation, when the woman mentioned that Tess had long ago explained the gist of Audra’s loss.
At the family’s house, the mother ushered Audra and Jack inside. “Come in, come in,” she said with the gentle lilt of her accent. She wiped her hands on her apron and yelled up the stairs, “Mija, the doctor is here now!”
The pair of matching Shih Tzus pounced around Jack’s feet, little pink tongues hanging out. In the living room, Isabella’s two younger brothers, maybe six and eight years old, were playing a race-car game on the TV. A waft of hot spices traveled from the kitchen.
When Isabella didn’t appear, the mother shook her head. “I’m sorry. She knows you are coming. I will bring her down.”
Under the circumstances, Audra hated the idea of ejecting the girl from her comfort zone. “Would it be better if I went up to see her?”
The woman considered this and smiled. “Jes. I think so. It is the room on the left.” She turned to Jack. “Would you like to play with the boys?”
Jack’s gaze was already locked on the game, which made the activity an easy sell.
“I’ll just be a few minutes, buddy,” Audra said. “Then we’ll grab some lunch.”
“Can we get a treat?” he asked her.
“We’ll see.”
He nodded and followed the mother toward her sons, who were giggling over deliberately crashing their vehicles.
Audra ventured up the carpeted stairs. She stopped at the partially open door, where a handmade poster spelled out Isabella in glitter glue.
“Isabella?” She gave a knock before poking her head inside. “May I come in?”
Propped against her ruffled pillows, the girl sat on her bed with a sketch pad. She shrugged her indifference without looking up from the picture she was drawing.
Audra perched on the side of the mattress and glimpsed the artwork. It featured a young girl, with a black bob like Isabella’s, on the back of a stallion in a green pasture. “Wow, that’s really pretty.”
Isabella didn’t reply, her eyes on the paper.
“Do you like to ride horses?”
The girl shrugged again, pressing harder with her brown colored pencil. “I can’t till I’m twelve. My mom thinks they’re too big.”
“Yeah, I can understand that.” The same thing had concerned Audra when Tess invited Jack to ride her sister-in-law’s thoroughbred.
Audra considered mentioning the animal now, as a means of conversation, but foresaw a dead end. She would get to the point.
“Isabella, I came here today to tell you that, well ... what I said to you about heaven ...”
Annoyance rolled over Isabella’s face. She had no interest in the stock apology that was surely forthcoming, or a feigned reversal in religious stance.
Audra couldn’t blame her.
“The fact is,” Audra finished, “I meant it.”
Isabella snapped her head up, her attention undivided.
“At least, I did at the time. You see, a few years ago, someone I loved very much died, and it made me doubt a lot of things I used to believe in. I was angry and sad that it happened because it didn’t seem fair. But, after a while, I had to look closely at those beliefs again and decide, for me, what had been true all along.”
Isabella lowered her sketch pad while gnawing on her lip. “So ... you really do think there’s a heaven?”
Audra debated on how to respond. If referring to a holy place in the sky with pearly gates and cherubs and angels soaring on feathery wings, she couldn’t in all honesty say yes. On the other hand, she had learned there was more to our world than what any of us could see or fully comprehend.
That’s when it hit her: Maybe heaven was much like a lake at dawn, offering a different view depending on the person. Maybe heaven entailed more than a soul residing in a single place but instead having pieces of yourself spread among the hearts and memories of people you’ve touched.
With this in mind, Audra reexamined her personal beliefs, and indeed she found her answer.
“To be perfectly honest,” she said, looking Isabella in the eye,
“I really do.”
A slow smile spread across the girl’s lips. “Yeah,” she said softly. “Me too.”
As Audra drove away, an internal radiance filled her from recapturing a sense of certainty. This in itself seemed cause for celebration.
On a whim, skipping a sensible lunch, she steered the car into a parking lot and pulled into an empty spot. The neon sign of the donut shop glowed vibrant red in the window.