On Friday afternoon, I walk stiffly through the door, take off my backpack and Hope's harness, and collapse on the floor. I'm so sore from a week of intense practice I can barely move. No pain can compare to the agony of alternating 400-meter sprints and runs up what must be the biggest hill in the state.
I hear Grandmother enter the room as Hope jumps on me and starts energetically licking my face. "Practice can't have been that hard," she teases. "Hope still seems to have plenty of energy!"
"Hope didn't run up the hill with me," I tell her as I push the overenthusiastic dog off my face. "Since the hill Coach made us sprint is in the middle of a field, as long as there was no one too close there was no danger of me running into anything."
"You ran up a hill alone?" Grandmother asks.
"Yeah, but Hope came with me on the sprints. I just had to start twenty seconds behind everyone else so they didn't trample her."
We sit quietly together for a little while. It's just the two of us (three if you count Hope), since my father is at work and Angelina has figure skating practice. After a few minutes, Grandmother quietly gets up, then returns a few moments later. "I've had these around for a while," she says, and I hear the sound of something being set down on the table. I reach out and run my hand over it, realizing it's Grandmother's laptop.
"These are videos from when you were a baby," she tells me. "I thought you might like to listen to them."
She begins playing the first video. I hear a baby– me– giggling happily, and a deep, joyful laugh that sounds vaguely familiar.
It takes me a moment to realize that laugh belongs to my father.
Then I hear footsteps and a new voice says lovingly, "How's my bright little Autumn leaf today?" It is a voice I haven't heard in seven years, but I remember it like I heard it yesterday. The sound of that voice forces a memory to the front of my mind, the memory of a day seven years ago that I have tried my best to forget.
"Your baby sister is in there," my mother tells me in her soft, melodic voice as I touch her swollen belly.
"Mommy?" I ask.
"Yes, darling?"
"If the baby can see, not like me, will you still love me as much as you love her?"
"Oh, Autumn," my mother says, hugging me tight. "I will always love you. I love you to the moon and back a hundred thousand times. You are perfect just the way you are, and I will love you forever and ever."
I hug her back, burying my face in her shoulder and breathing in her scent, like lilacs and cinnamon. "I love you too, Mommy."
"Be good for your grandmother while Daddy and I are at the hospital," she says, smoothing my hair. "And when we come back, you'll be a big sister!"
She never came back. She died giving birth to Angelina, and my father has hardly spoken a word since.
YOU ARE READING
Puzzle Pieces (formerly Reach for the Sky)
פרוזהAutumn Fletcher's life is a mess. Her mother is gone, her father locks himself in his room when he's not at work and refuses to speak to anyone, and no one but her grandmother believes she can amount to anything. When Autumn's family moves to the sm...
