Page 120 of The Same Backward as Forward
If you stay…I hear my mother’s voice in my mind.If you refuse to remain a ghost, I will not be able to protect you—or the ones you love.
I pick up the pen that’s sitting near the birth certificate.
“What are you doing?” Hannah asks me.
“Signing.” I scrawl a name on the line where the baby’s father’s name is supposed to go. “For him.” I stare at the name Ricky Grambs, and I realize that if I was going to stay, if I didn’t think the threat was real—I would have signed my own name.
“Stay,” Hannah says, and that one word almost brings me to my knees.
“I can’t, Hannah.” The best and most precious things in life have to be protected at all costs. “My father—he knows I’m alive.” This is me telling Hannah a truth, but notthetruth. “Everywhere I go, he’s never far behind. He wants me or what I took or both.”This is not about my father.“I won’t let him near you.” I look down at the baby on her chest. Tiny fingers curl into a tiny fist. “I won’t let him anywhere nearher.”
It is not my father I am worried about. It’s not just my mother,either. There is clearly more to this. There are clearly other parties involved. That postcard, the one with the Gothic castle and the raven-haired girl in the white cloak, obviously meant something to my mother.
But what does that matter right now? What does anything else matter wheneternityis right here?
“Take her,” Hannah says, handing the baby to me. “Hold her, just this once.”
Just this once.I held the baby before, when I delivered her, but I know what Hannah means.Just this once—as in, we both know thatthisis it.
That threatens to rend my heart in two as I cradle the baby to my chest, and Hannah looks at me in a way that makes me think that she is telling herself our story.
Once upon a time…
“Are there scars?” she asks, nodding to my chest. She leaves the wordstillout of that question, but I hear it all the same.Are there still scars?
“Numerous scars.” I bow my head, nuzzling the baby. She opens her eyes and stares straight at me, and I know: This girl is her mother’s daughter.
“Avery.” I didn’t plan on suggesting a name, but the perfect one is right there, and it fits us—Hannah and me. “Avery Kylie Grambs.” I look from the baby to Hannah. “Rearrange the letters.”
I half expected Hannah to tell me that if I’m not going to stay, I don’t get to suggest a damn thing.
Instead, she smiles one of those understated, heartbreaking Hannah the Same Backward as Forward smiles. “Avery Kylie Grambs, rearranged…”
I hand the baby back to her, and by the time I do, she has it.
“A Very Risky Gamble.”
That is what Hannah and I have always been. It’s what she took when she chose to nurse me back to life, knowing that her family would probably kill her if they found out. It’s what I took, coming here tonight to say good-bye.
I lower myself to my knees beside Hannah’s hospital bed, a deifier to the end.
I wish I could tell her that Idolove her more than I hate myself. I wish that she could know that I would give anything to stay. But in the end, all I can give the love of my life is a stack of postcards—the ones that I wrote to her in invisible ink.
Chapter 44
I pick back up where I left off, leading my father and his many investigators on a not-so-merry chase, but something has changed in me. I don’t even realize it until I’ve run halfway across the world, until I can sleep without dreaming that Istayedand wake up without whispering Hannah’s name, over and over again.
Bali, Indonesia. That’s where I am when it hits me that I don’t hate myself quite so much anymore. Standing in an abandoned, broken-down theme park—rumored haunted, overgrown, partially burned, and anointed with graffiti—I think first of the fire on Hawthorne Island, then of a crumbling lighthouse that once felt likehome.
Call me sentimental, I can hear myself telling Hannah,but there’s something beautiful about anything built for one purpose that refuses to die, even once that purpose is gone.
I was that lighthouse, and I am this place, full of broken glass and wild vines and maybe even an angry spirit or two. But there is beauty here. A certain kind of strength. And if I listen hard enough to the wind, I can almost hear Hannah’s voice telling me that maybe scars are just a body’s way of sayingI survived.
Time is relative. Always, across continents and years. And my father is persistent—also always. But as good as I am at disappearing, I am no longer a ghost.
Waitomo, New Zealand. That’s where I am the first time I save someone who doesn’t deserve it. That’s where I am the first time I give another persontheirsecond chance.
I keep writing to Hannah—postcard after postcard. My missives to her are less focused on grief now, less focused on telling her how very sorry I am. Instead, I write down the story of us—the good parts, the beautiful ones.
