June 2031
Molly
Adie skips past the Survivor Tree, right to the spot where my mother’s name is engraved on one of the bronze panels surrounding the South Pool. She is only four, but she knows her letters. “E,” she announces. “For Eloise!”
Jesse and I walk hand in hand behind her. “No,” I say, looking at where her little palm is splayed over a name. “That’s Edward. Do you see another E?”
This time, her finger points at the right place. I wrap her in my arms and cover her face with kisses. “What a smart girl.”
“Now?” Adie asks.
“Now.”
This is her favorite part. On the count of three, we both pull free the elastics at the bottoms of our braids. Adie likes unraveling her ribbon by herself. She’s done it since she was two.
Jesse lifts her so that she is suspended high enough to push the ribbon into the grooves of Eloise’s name. “Like this?” she asks.
“Just like that.”
Jesse puts her down as she starts wriggling. She spies a pigeon six feet away and hops closer to terrorize it. I take my own ribbon and tack it into the ambrose, securing both strips of satin with dimes.
“You okay?” Jesse asks quietly.
I dredge up a smile for him. This is not an easy place to be—-so many ghosts—-but I still make the annual pilgrimage.
The memorial pools are busy today. Some people are taking photos, some are placating cranky children. Across from me, a woman presses her hand to a bronze panel and prays. People in business suits walk by, buried in their phones.
I remind myself what a privilege it is to grieve someone. It means that you loved them thoroughly. It means that through time and space, you refuse to let them go.
Jesse frowns at Adie, who is getting uncomfortably close to that pigeon. “Should I get her before we have to worry about bird flu?”
“You laugh, but that’s more prevalent than you—-”
He silences me with a kiss. “I know, baby. You keep telling me.”
“Well, someone’s gotta keep you alive,” I mutter.
I worry about him, and I worry about Adie, and I worry about everyone in the state of Rhode Island.
I worry about Evie, who survived a bout of breast cancer last year, retired early, and moved to California to start fresh.
But I don’t let myself worry so much about what might befall them that I forget to remind them to live.
I know better than most people that something surprisingly beautiful might be born from the bones of a disaster.
It may be the juxtaposition of horror and art, but it is always striking: a crocus after a blizzard; a rainbow in the eye of the hurricane; a vaccine in the throes of a pandemic. A survivor, when everyone else is lost.
A relationship, when you never expected to have one at all.
The rip cord to tragedy is hope. It’s what makes humans different from computer simulations and training exercises.
Even when the odds are impossible, we keep searching for that flower, that rainbow, that cure, that battered soul.
It’s what parachutes us out of sorrow, and into the belief that maybe, next time, things will be different.
Before Jesse can reach Adie, my mother steps in. She lifts Adie into her arms, their matching silhouettes carved against that beautiful blue field of sky.
She’s been at the Survivor Tree. It’s always her first stop on our pilgrimage.
Every year she brings flowers, which she lays at the base of the tree.
I imagine it is still hard for her to see a memorial to the woman she used to be, engraved in metal.
But I also imagine it is more important for her to celebrate the fact that she is here to tell that story.
My phone buzzes, and I answer it. “Hi, Toby. What’s up?”
He doesn’t joke, just dives in, and immediately I am on high alert. “Passenger truck crashed into a tractor trailer. Fire department gets there and finds people on the ground twitching and vomiting. Turns out the tractor trailer was carrying a mixture of compressed gas and parathion.”
“Oh, shit,” I murmur. Parathion is an organophosphate pesticide for agriculture—-and if inhaled or absorbed through the skin, it blocks the enzymes that allow your nerves to function. Without treatment, it means respiratory failure or death.
“The incident commander called for a CHEMPACK,” Toby says, referring to the nerve agent antidote, hidden in eight undisclosed locations in the state. “I don’t need you to cut your vacation short, but if you happened to want to—-”
“On my way,” I say.
As I tuck my phone into my back pocket, I approach my mother and Jesse, who now has Adie balanced on his shoulders. “I need to go home,” I tell them. “Don’t hate me.”
Jesse rolls his eyes. “As if that’s ever a remote possibility.”
I squeeze his waist. “I love you.”
He grins. “I know,” he says.
My mother, though, keeps her eyes on my face. She is able to read me in a way that nobody else in this world can. “Everything all right?” she asks.
“It will be,” I reply.
On the way home, I’m going to tell them.
By this time next year, Adie will have a sister. I already know what I want to name her.
I dreamed it: Adie and Eloise, this time inseparable, still searching for magic in the world.
Call it reinvention, reincarnation, resurrection. Or call it science: Love, I think, is like any other energy. It can’t be destroyed.
It can only come back to you, when you least expect it.