Graceful Read online

  Of course the big six-five spelled out in apples on the ground could have told me that, too!

  I can’t take my eyes away from Leo. He still has his curls, even though they’re mostly white now.

  “Wait till you see your gift,” the same woman says. Our daughter! She has the same soft blond hair as my mom and Kylie have. Had? I look around, but don’t see either of them.

  The woman takes my hand. “The kids worked very hard on it,” she says.

  I look over at the group of kids. The littlest one presses a button on a small device in her hand and a holographic image appears a few feet away from us. I back up, startled, but Leo’s hand is there to steady me. “Watch, Nana Mandy!” the little girl says. She can’t be more than three.

  In midair the word BIRTHDAYS appears. Then images slowly fade in and out. Many of them I recognize — there we are bowling at our sixth birthday party. There we are posing with the hypnotist at our eleventh. For our twelfth, we are standing in almost this exact spot, having just planted our first tree. Most of the images are totally unfamiliar, though. In one we are around fifteen or sixteen at the beach. In another we are a few years older, on a boat. I watch, open-jawed, as we grow up and grow old, together.

  At the end, a short video plays. It’s Leo and me as babies, at our first party. We’re babbling and crawling, then almost at the same moment, stand and walk toward each other on wobbly legs. This moment is family lore in my house. I’ve never seen video of it before, though. They must have tracked it down from someone at the party. Or maybe I found it, sometime over the last few decades!

  My daughter (!!) hands me a tissue. I hadn’t realized tears were pouring down my cheeks. “Are you all right, Mom?” she asks.

  Leo turns away from our first steps and takes my hands in his. I notice his eyes are misty, too. “Amanda Ellerby Fitzpatrick, I will always keep walking toward you,” he says, kissing me on the forehead. He keeps his lips pressed there, and I close my eyes as our family claps and hoots. Relief pours through me. Sometimes your first love does get to be your last.

  “Amanda,” a boy’s voice says. Then more urgently, “Amanda!” Someone is tugging at my arm. I look down, expecting it to be another grandchild. But it’s Leo, and I’m standing in the labyrinth and everyone is gathered around me with concerned looks on their faces.

  “Are you okay?” Leo asks. “You didn’t open your eyes for the longest time.” He slides a leaf out of my hair.

  I reach up to my forehead, feeling the ghost of a touch pressed there. Then I blink, and it’s gone. “Something happened in the circle,” I say. “Right?”

  “Yes,” Grace says. “We did it.” She turns me around to face the center. The tree! Its branches are straight, when moments before they were wound tight around the trunk. The apples that were hanging from its branches have been flung all over the ground.

  “Was there … something else, too?” I ask.

  Grace doesn’t answer.

  “I think I went someplace,” Rory says, stepping up beside me. She’s absently rubbing her left hand.

  “Me, too,” Tara says, a faraway look in her eyes.

  “Me, three,” I say. I turn to Leo and really look at him for the first time in weeks. I reach for his hand. In front of everyone, I tell him the truest thing I know, although I don’t know how I know it.

  “Leo Fitzpatrick, I will always keep walking toward you.”

  When I get back home, exhausted and exhilarated, Connor and David are waiting on the porch steps, a large cardboard box between them. They both stand up as I cross the lawn.

  Seeing them like this — Connor’s eyes twinkling, David healthy and carefree, with their whole futures in front of them — any lingering doubt I had over closing the vortex and giving up my powers drifts away for good.

  Connor opens his mouth to greet me, but before the first words leave his mouth, I get a vision of his future. First come the 3-D glasses, then more gadgets, then he sets his sights on solving bigger problems. One day he’s going to help figure out a way to turn everyday trash into fuel. It will cap a lifetime of making people’s lives easier and better, in both small and large ways. I allow myself to watch him step up to a platform to accept an award. How proud our parents are!

  “I have amazing news,” Connor says, reaching into the box. “I wanted you to be the first person to have these.”

  Hearing his voice snaps me back to the present. I can still have visions! That’s a surprise! Unable to help myself, I giggle. I think the vortex gave me a little gift, too.

  I reach out and hug him. “I’m so proud of you, big brother.” I can’t tell him what I saw of his future, but there’s no need. It will happen either way.

  He untangles himself from my embrace. “I haven’t even shown you yet.” He hands me a pair of pink-framed tinted glasses and says, “I couldn’t have done it without your help.”

  He doesn’t know how true that is, just not in the way he thinks.

  “Try them on,” he urges. “David, give her your regular glasses to put on first.”

  David obliges and I slip them on. I was prepared for everything to look fuzzy, the way it does when I slip on my dad’s glasses for fun. But I can see perfectly! “David! Your eyes must not be that bad at all. Nothing’s even blurry!”

  “Oh, right,” he says. “That’s because the lenses are just plain glass. I only wear them to make me look smarter. I got contacts over the summer.”

  Connor and I stare at him, shocked.

  “Are you SERIOUS, dude?” Connor shouts, then starts cracking up. “This whole idea was because of you! And you didn’t even need them? Man, that’s messed up!”

  I can only stare, my jaw hanging open. Everything we went through today was because Connor was inspired by David and his glasses. And now he won’t even need them?

  “Hey,” David tells Connor, “believing I needed them got you to come up with your first invention, right? And this is just the beginning. One day you’ll be huge.”

  He’s right, of course. And I have to believe this was how it was supposed to happen. Maybe the vortex was ready to move on and it really was my destiny to help it.

  I leave Connor still shaking his head at David and make my way into the house. I don’t have the energy (literally) to tell them the story now. I’m sure David will hear all about it from Tara. I wish there was a way that Connor won’t feel bad when he learns his part in it, but I don’t see a way around it. We’ve never lied to each other, and I won’t start now.

  I flop down on my bed, more tired than I ever remember being. Bone tired. I close my eyes and am instantly in my garden. I didn’t even have to use the elevator this time. As soon as I smell the fruit trees, I’m wide awake. Then I’m laughing. The garden has been busy since my last visit! Every piece of land not taken up by a tree or flower or sand or sea is now home to one of the objects that had disappeared from Angelina’s store. If this were my bedroom, my mom would freak out until I cleaned it. But it’s not my bedroom, and no one else can find this place.

  Well, except Angelina, who seems to have an all-access pass to my brain. I look around, hoping she’s hiding behind a lampshade or a faded watercolor painting of a fruit bowl, but I don’t see any sign of her. I wonder if she knows about shutting down the vortex, and if she does, I hope she understands why I did it.

  A bag of seeds appears on top of a rosebush, or perhaps it was always there and I never noticed it. It’s identical to the one left for me on the counter at the store. I carefully untangle it from the thorny branches and slip it into my pocket. I’m curious to see if it makes it back to the real world. Or the waking world. Or whatever the difference is between here and there.

  Before I find out, though, I take one last look around at all the stuff filling up the garden. Looks like I’ll have a lifetime to make my way through “wonders unimagined.”

  But first I’m kinda in the mood for pizza.

  Thirty years later

  The animals carved in the smoo