She puts her fingers to her lips and shakes her head incredulously.
“So,” I say, because the sun is definitely on its way toward the horizon now, and she’s going to have to go soon, “I don’t want to pressure you or anything, but I think you should marry him.”
She laughs weakly.
“He loves you. Not because of me. Or because God told him to. Because of you.”
“But I don’t know how to be a mother,” she murmurs. “I was raised in an orphanage, you know. I never had a mother. Am I any good at it?”
“You’re the best. Seriously, and I’m not just trying to make my case here, but you are the best mother. All my friends are superjealous of how amazing you are. You put all the other moms to shame.”
Her expression’s still cloudy. “But I’ll die before you grow up.”
“Yes. And that sucks. But I wouldn’t trade you for somebody who’d live to be a thousand.”
“I won’t be there for you.”
I put my hand over hers. “You’re here now.”
She nods her head slightly, swallows. She turns my hand over in hers and examines it.
“Amazing,” she breathes.
“I know, right?”
We sit for a little while. Then she says, “So tell me about your life. Tell me about this journey you’re going on.”
I bite my lip. I worry that if I tell her too much about the future, it will disrupt the space-time continuum or something and destroy the universe. When I tell her this, she laughs.
“I’ve seen the future all my life,” she says. “It tends to work as a paradox, in my experience. You find out something is going to happen, and then you do it because you know that’s what happens. It’s a chicken-or-the-egg scenario.”
Good enough for me. I tell her everything I think I have time for. I tell her about my visions, about Christian and the fire, the cemetery, and the kiss. I tell her about Jeffrey, which shocks her, because she never considered that she might have more than one child.
“A son,” she breathes. “What’s he like?”
“A lot like Dad. Tall and strong and obsessed with sports. And a lot like you. Stubborn. And stubborn.”
She smiles, and I feel a glimmer of happiness in her at the idea of Jeffrey, a son who looks like Dad. I blab on about how Jeffrey’s vision got him all messed up and how he ran away and has been living at our old house, how he’s dating a bad Triplare, how I can’t find him now, and she sobers right up.
And finally, I tell her about Angela and Phen and Web, and what happened in the Garter, and how I’m starting to believe that Angela’s what my purpose is really about.
“So what do you have to do,” she asks, “to save her?”
“I made a deal with the devil, so to speak.”
“What devil?”
“Samjeeza.”
She flinches like I’ve slapped her. “You know Samjeeza?”
“He considers himself a friend of the family.”
“What does he want?” she asks grimly.
“A story. About you. I don’t know why, really. He’s obsessed with you.”
She bites the end of her thumb gently, contemplating. “What kind of story?”
“A memory. Something where he can imagine you alive, like a new charm on your bracelet.” She looks surprised. “Which you gave me, and I gave back to him, the day of your funeral. It’s complicated. I need a story. But I can’t think of anything good enough.”
Her eyes are thoughtful. “I’ll give you a story,” she says. “Something that he’ll want to hear.”
She takes a deep breath and gazes down at the trees below us. “As I said before, I was a nurse once, during the Great War, working at a hospital in France, and one day I met a journalist.”
“At a pond,” I supply. “In your underwear.”
She looks up, startled.
“He’s told me some stories, too.”