Towards Yesterday

EPILOGUE

Her toes made tiny waves that rippled out from the wooden dock toward the setting sun. The early evening light flickered and glinted off the water as bats wove spectral blurs over the lake’s surface, chasing their supper. From the far bank, the musical trill of a bird hidden deep in the green of a summer lilac floated ghostlike across the water, carried by a cool breeze that rustled through the crisp fall leaves.

Daddy said the bird was called a Willow Lark, and when mommy and he had first found out that they were pregnant with her, they had sat on the old wooden dock and dangled their feet in the water just like she was doing now. Daddy said Mommy loved the sound of the bird and they had decided that was what they would call their baby girl. Good thing Mommy didn’t like Hedgehogs, her Daddy had teased.

Daddy cried when he talked about her and mommy. He had told her lots of things that first night, as he tucked her into bed in the cabin at Shadow Lake. He told her how sorry he was he had hurt her with his car, how he never meant to do it. He said he had been angry, that he and mommy were having a fight, and that he had been mad. He told her how very much he had missed her.

Her daddy’s face had been damp with tears, so she had sat up in her bed, thrown her arms around his neck and told him it was okay. After a little while, she told daddy about the warm place. She explained about the time after the accident, before she found herself standing on the street with Mummy. Lark told him about the pretty man who had found her in the darkness and who had scooped her up in his arms and carried her to the place with the shining people. The place where a single stream ran through a green field that stretched far up into distant mountains, and where butterflies and birds chased each other through a cobalt blue sky and the clouds spoke to her as though they had known her forever.

Her daddy had said nothing to her. He had listened with an odd look on his face. But when she was finished explaining, he had paused for a moment, then kissed her lightly on her head. “I love you, little bird,” he said as he left the room. Her memories of that other place were further away now, and the more Lark tried to hunt them down the more elusive they became.

But she did remember one thing, the pretty man’s name was Benjamin, and he could fly.

From the cabin, Lark heard the voice of Rebecca calling for her to come on in for dinner, and she released the thought, allowing it to float away from her like a leaf caught on a gentle summer breeze.