Chapter 29

Between Sheila and I the garden ran riot . . . just like the kids. They are very much their own people. From birth Toby had my talent for frying electronics and Sulamith was so quirky and stubborn that we decided to avoid entirely the whole topic of school. I know that it's screwy logic, but Evan figured that if we just didn't send them to school then he couldn't feel rankled if they dropped out. It worked out for us. Sulamith was a voracious reader from the start and, though her education might have been balanced a little too far towards poetry and art, by the time she was fifteen she had found a goldsmith willing to teach her the trade. She set up a workshop in the garage and was selling her own jewellery designs on her online shop by the time she was seventeen. Toby on the other hand is determined to do his PhD in marine biology. I remember sitting on the beach when he was about nine and commenting to Evan that, between him and my father, Toby had more water flowing through his veins than blood. We can't go on vacation without him somehow managing the situation to ensure that we go someplace with good surfing. He started doing community college courses when he was thirteen because he had already finished the biology twelve curriculum.

And Evan and I? It is true that some things just keep getting better. But I think of Rowan often. You can't love someone and not carry it with you for the rest of your life. In the morning Evan nearly always wakes at some obscene hour to go the the pool and swim. He kisses my sleepy head just before he leaves and as I wake on my own I let myself remember Rowan for a moment or two, and how that moment, just as you realize you are awake, was the moment that he had wanted to share with me for the rest of his life. That moment will always be his.

*

Sulamith didn't come out and ask me about the past until just after her eighteenth birthday. She grew into such a pretty girl. She let her hair grow long in dark glossy spirals. She's petite but not so tiny as me, and she always smiles and she always looks like she's up to something. But at eighteen suddenly she was pensive. Her impulsivity was dimmed. She sighed long complicated sighs an moped for perhaps the first time in her life. Something was bothering her and I couldn't put it down to too much Lana Del Rey. It was raining that day and she wandered, unwilling to settle on a task, read a book, or go hang out with Sophie. I watched her climb the stairs and heard the creak of her feet on the boards as she made her way up to the attic. I finished washing the carrots and green beans that I had brought in from the garden for dinner and then climbed the stairs after her. I knocked on the door to her attic bedroom. She had decorated it with William Morris wallpaper and old carved oak furniture. A face looked out from a pattern of carved oak leaves on her dresser. She was sitting on her bed looking out into the branches of the cherry tree outside her window. She was dressed in short jean shorts and a black spaghetti strap tank-top. She looked so gloomy.

“Hey,” I sat down on the end of her bed and tucked my feet under me.

“Hey,” she said back, without enthusiasm. Then looked at me for a few minutes as if she were seeing me as not 'just Mum', but as a person separate from herself. “Mum, why do you have all of those tattoos?” she asked.

I pressed my lips together and looked down my right arm. There were morning glories blooming over my bicep and shoulder from the day I'd told Evan what had happened to me while we'd been apart, and little strawberry blossoms that had appeared the night I'd conceived Toby. “I guess I have them because they mark me as different.”

“I feel . . . different,” she murmured and a tear dropped down her cheek. “How is it that you've managed to be different and yet, have a life and fall in love and all that?”

“It hasn't always been easy,” I admitted.

“Tell me about it?” She looked at me. “Why did you leave Dad and get knocked up with me?”

“I didn't leave him. He left me,” I told her. I hadn't realized that all that time she'd interpreted things that way. “I left Vancouver after he was already gone. He was afraid of doing the wrong thing with me. He though that I was too young. He was afraid to admit that he was in love with me. We were young and foolish. But I don't regret meeting Rowan, your father, and . . . he loved me because I'm different.” I took a deep breath, “I haven't shared this with you, and I'll be honest and tell you that I don't have a concrete reason for having held it back. I've just been going on instinct and I just want you to be happy . . . except that I can see that lately, you aren't happy. I don't know if this will make you happy, but you are certainly old enough to know. I was eighteen when I found out.”

“Found out what?” Sulamith looked at me with interest.

“Hold out your hand,” I told her, and I reached out and let my magic flare so that the rainbow flickers travelled along my skin and called to the amber and gold magic that I'd been able to sense building in Sulamith over the last year.

Her fingers shook and her lip quivered as the amber lights sparked and leapt from her skin and little golden stars glowed in her hair.

“Look,” I motioned and turned my head to look at her in the mirror of her dresser. She turned to look at the reflection, her dark eyes opening wide, then looked back at me, watching the flickers of magic that I was drawing out of her. I knew that she could feel it. I knew exactly what she was feeling.

“What the hell Mum?” she whispered, incredulous.

“When I was seventeen your Dad kissed me, and then worried that he had made a mistake. He left and I was angry and hurt and depressed. I left Vancouver. I left this world and went back to the one I came from. The world that you came from. I'm not human in the way that the people of this world think of it. Neither is Evan's father. I think, when I look back, that might have been a part of why we had such a hard time making it work in this world. I didn't plan on leaving . . .” I reached out my hand and wrapped my fingers around hers and let her see my memory of meeting her biological father for the first time. Of waking up in his arms on horseback. Just a flash . . . a taste. “Do . . . do you want to know everything?” I asked her.

“Will knowing change me? Will it, you know . . . be a 'life altering experience'?” she asked with a 'jaded teenager' roll of her eyes.

“Probably. Maybe not. I don't know . . .” I shrugged. “I think that . . . I might be ready for you to know and, in any case,” I smiled at her, “I think that you can handle it. But I'll warn you, it's sad.”

“I always knew it would be sad. But . . . I'm not a kid anymore. Would you tell me?”

I nodded. “Yeah.” I reached out and caught her fingers again. “Words aren't always enough. This is the only way I know how to tell you now. Close your eyes,” I told her, and I let the memories flow.

I realized, as I relived my life through my daughter's eyes, that I had managed to hold on to the beauty of what I had experienced, and let go of so much of the ugliness. The hard, dark, feelings were still there, woven into the tapestry of my story, but they only served to make the brilliant moments that much more brilliant. All of those beautiful moments were gathered in one place, like the shards of my heart, until they made a perfect whole.

It took only moments, that wild magic. Only moments to share a lifetime, and Sulamith looked back at me stunned when I withdrew my hand from hers. She took a long shuddering breath and wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands. She was quiet for a long time and I sat with her and we watched the rain fall on the top of the cherry tree. “When I was nine I woke in the night and I thought that I heard something. I assumed that it was you or Dad so I went downstairs. There was an angel in the dining room looking at our photographs. He was wearing jeans and a leather vest . . . and sneakers. He smiled and said, 'Hey Sulamith. This is just a dream. Go back to bed okay sweetie?' So I just went back to bed. I've thought that it was a dream all these years. But it wasn't, was it?”

“No. It wasn't a dream. Raph has been sneaking in here to steal pictures for your grandmother for years now. I catch him sometimes too.”

“You had sex with him?” she gave me a look.

I chuckled but didn't blush, “Yes, but he's married to your aunt now so we can leave that in the past.”

She nodded and then another batch of tears spilled over her cheeks, “You really loved my . . . Rowan . . . my other dad. You guys were like . . . Epic.”

“Love is epic. And I've been lucky. I've gotten to love some pretty amazing people . . . like you.”

“I always thought that you were just a runaway teenaged mom.”

“Nobody is ever only and entirely one thing.”

She nodded and looked down at her hands, gave a little half sob, half laugh of surprise at the little forget-me-nots scattered around the wrist of the hand I had been holding.

“Why have you stayed away from the other world? It looked so beautiful there,” she looked back up at me.

“I know. It is beautiful, but without Rowan it just seemed so pale.”

“But this world is terrible. I mean, have you watched the news lately?” she asked me in anguished confusion.

“I know. I know what your getting at, but somehow in this world, where I have to struggle to see the beauty in life, it seems so much more important to try. Do you want to see it? The other world?”

Sulamith shook her head, “I don't know. I think that I need some time to . . . let this sink in properly. This is too huge for my head.” She placed her hands on her head and then began to cry in earnest. I put my arms around her and held her until she stopped and she was, for just a few minutes and for perhaps the last time in her life, my little girl.

“Mum?” she said eventually. “I love you.”

“I love you too. Are you going to be okay?”

“Yeah.” She sat up and stretched. “Yeah, but you have to take me outside and teach me how to use magic properly, 'cause if I'm different . . . I'm just gonna run with it.”

She smiled a small smile and I knew that she would be okay.

“Sure. Lets go now. And you have lots of time to think it over, but if you want to see where you were born I can take you on the winter solstice.”

She nodded, “I'll think it over. Let's go outside.”