Kepler’s Dream (26 page)

I can't tell you how weird it was to walk in through the hospital doors in Seattle with my dad, going up to see my mom. I was nervous. I would have liked to have Lou with me, or more likely Auntie Irene, but this first reunion was a Mackenzie-only affair. Just the three of us. But if that combination had never made sense in the past, why should it start now? Some constellations of people just aren't meant to happen.

Still, at least Dad had been to the hospital before, so he knew his way around.

When the elevator stopped at the right floor, my heart started pounding. Nurse Faye came up to us, a small, round henlike woman with an encouraging smile and a soothing voice I recognized from the telephone. She smiled at my dad and said to me, “Hello, Ella! I'm so glad to meet you at last,” and gave me a warm hug, which was unexpected but made me feel a bit better. “Your mom is very excited to see you,” she added. “Come on, her
room is along here. You've sanitized your hands, right? The good news is you don't have to wear a mask anymore to go in.” And she ushered us toward one of the many gleaming, huge silver doors along a bright corridor. “I want you to know your mom is an incredible fighter, Ella. She's inspired everyone here.”

Swish,
the door went as it opened, and in I walked to the place where my mom had spent six weeks in (mostly) Solitary Confinement while I had been falling off horses and getting back on them, eating cake and chasing imaginary thieves.

“Ella, sweetie!” Mom said. She was sitting up in bed wearing a thin toothpaste-colored gown I didn't recognize.

It was her.

I went over on shaky legs and put my arms around her for as long as either of us could stand it, and until I had finally stopped crying and laughing into her soft, familiar neck. In a way, that was easier at first than seeing her. She looked different from the picture I had in my head—worn out, like she had come back from a long, long journey—but as soon as I caught a glimpse of her face, or heard a snatch of her voice, I knew it would be all right. She wasn't an alien at all but still, in spite of the high-tech room, the disease and Aunt Miranda's blood, my mom.

She hadn't left me.

“Uh—” Dad said from the doorway after a few moments. “Amy? Ella? I'm going to leave you ladies together to catch up. I'll wait in the nurses' area, out front.”

Mom thanked him with a wave and a tired smile.

If we were in a Disney movie, this would be the point where
the music would swell, the mom and dad might exchange sappy looks over the kid's head, and you would realize the parents might get back together after all, and the Mackenzies would re-form as one happy family again. After Making It Through a Tough Time. I think one or two of the nurses had that kind of scene in mind. And sometimes things do go that way in real life, even. Look at Rosie's parents.

My life wasn't a Disney movie. But that was OK, because it did have a happy ending.

The happy ending was that Mom got better.

“Look at you!” she said to me when we finally stopped holding each other and I stood by her bed where she could take in the whole picture of me, up and down. She was skinny as a rail, but her face was alive and full of light. “You've grown up so much, Ellerby! Horseback rider … Peacock feeder … Good grammarian. All these new skills you've acquired this summer while I've just been flat on my back here, doin' nothin'.”

“Jewel Quest champion,” I added. “Boggle pro. And detective—don't forget.”

“I won't forget detective,” she promised. “You have to tell me all about that. Oh! You're wearing the bracelet I gave you.” She fingered the charms gently: star, heart, bunny. It had been around my wrist for the past six weeks, solid. She seemed pleased to see it.

“I have something for you, too, Mom,” I told her.

And it was at this point that I gave her the present I had, all wrapped up in my favorite Hawks sweatshirt to protect it. I
hadn't worn that sweatshirt all summer, once the GM told me how she felt about hawks, but this had seemed like a good use for it.

I helped her open it. Mom's hands were weak still—the treatment, she told me later, “wasn't just like getting run over by a truck, Ella, it was like getting run over by a jumbo jet—filled with overweight passengers”—and mine were clumsy with excitement, so it took a minute for us, together, to unravel the shirtsleeves and get at what was inside.

“OH!”

I don't know what she was expecting, but I doubt it was what she found herself holding: Grandmother's rare, Morris edition of Kepler's
Dream
. She stared at the beautiful, royal-blue cover, imprinted with the deep, golden globe of the moon.

“I remember this,” she said softly in a low but happy croak, brushing her fingers over the blue. “I remember this amazing book.”

She opened it slowly and leafed through the pages of artful script and vivid illustration. The diagrams of the planets. The descriptions of lunar life.

“It's for you, Mom,” I told her. “It's yours now.”

“What—?” Mom looked at me, her thin face pale with amazement. “But—how did you find it? And how—how could Violet ever give it up?”

“It's from all of us,” I clarified. “Grandmother. And—Dad. And—
me.
”

This information made her speechless: not from weakness,
but from shock. Finally, my mom put the book down on her bed for a moment and held my hand tightly. She looked into my face and around my half-grown hair with serious eyes, like she had an announcement to make. Then she said in a cracked voice, “I should have kept up with Violet over these years, Ella. I'm sorry. She's your grandmother. It shouldn't have had to come to—this”—she gestured around at her room—“for you to meet her.”

I held my mom's hand. “It's OK,” I said. I didn't want her to feel bad, and anyway, I was thinking, if I'd had to hang out with Violet Von Stern before I was eleven years old, she might have scared me so much, I'd have had to hide under the bed.

“Now, tell me. Tell me what happened to Kepler's
Dream
.”

So I told her how it all happened. How Dad took the book, and then how Jackson found it, and how Rosie and I had figured that out finally … as well as what Abercrombie had been up to, scheming with his nephew.

“But—” My mom gazed at a jeweled blue page that held images of bright stars against deep, black space. “Why is it coming … to me?”

This part was harder to explain, in a paragraph or two, with complete sentence structure and correct punctuation. You really had to be there, at the House of Mud, on the day I left, in a cluttered, dog-loud kitchen that had three generations of Mackenzie in it, even if one of them had turned herself back, after her husband's death, into a Von Stern.

All I could say was that the look on my grandmother's face that morning, when I came into the kitchen, was from another
world. It seemed as though she and Dad had already been up for hours together. They were both early birds. It was one of the things they had in common.

“Walter and I have been talking for some time, Ella,” she began. “About many things—but also about this book, and what it has meant to me over the years. How it represented your grandfather. As I explained to you, it felt in some way like a token of Edward.”

I nodded.

“And your father said something that I think was—
correct
.” She and my dad traded some sort of eyebrow moment together. I bet he hadn't heard
that
sentence very often. Not from his mother, anyway. “He said that there are other, less material ways I can remember Edward that may be more important. Why, every time I look up at those cottonwoods planted in the star pattern, I think of him.”

I wasn't sure where she was going with this. But I tried to look awake.

“And so, your father had the idea”—she
ahemmed,
for good measure—“that by all rights Kepler's
Dream
should be—yours.”

Mine?

“Mine?” I squeaked.

Lou barked, Hildy yapped and the GM said, “Hush, Brunhilda!” sternly.

Dad just said, “Yup, Belle, old girl. This book properly belongs to you.”

“But—” I couldn't help hearing Abercrombie Books's voice in
my ear.
Good heavens, Violet—you don't let the child handle it, do you?
I was only eleven! I wasn't a grown-up yet. The thing was worth a lot of money! (Expletive deleted)!

The idea made my head pound. I thought of everything I had heard about this book: what it meant to Grandmother, how rare it was, my dad holding it in the middle of the night and feeling the spirit of his own dad, and the scene my grandmother had described to me from years before, when she had shown the book to her son's soon-to-be ex-wife, Amy Mackenzie.

And there was only thing I could think of to say.

“Can I—can I take it to my mom?”

Grandmother looked at me with eyes I recognized: eyes that reminded me, strangely, of that very person—my mother. It was pride in there, I was pretty sure. A bright blue pride.

She stood up, gave me one of her stiff, tall lady hugs, and said, “Of course you can, Ella. That seems entirely the right thing to do. Of course.”

And then, before all the emotion in the air made everyone too uncomfortable, my dad started making noises about getting to the airport, and the GM reminded me that I had to sign the wall before I left. So I went back there and did it, with glitter pen so no one could miss it:

ELLA MACKENZIE. And then, because it wasn't the whole story without him, I added AND LOU.

After that, the morning turned into a blur of departure. My dad and I said a final good-bye to Grandmother, who by that point was holding Hildy close to her again, for company. I
thought I saw a tiny sparkle in the corner of her eyes—it might have been diamonds, or then again it might have been something else—but then the GM started scolding me for how sloppy I looked, and how she really hoped I'd brush my hair before I went in to visit my mother after all this time, even if the hair itself hadn't yet declared its allegiance to the side of the short or the long, and before I knew it, we were bouncing out of the driveway in Miguel's truck, dust and feathers flying, as he drove us to the Albuquerque Sunport so we could get to Seattle.

“And so,” I concluded, as I told this whole story to my mother, in her super-clean hospital room the day of our reunion, “this book is what you get for completing your mission. It's like the presidential Medal of Honor they gave to Michael Collins. And the other guys, too, of course—Neil and Buzz.” I felt weirdly shy now. Around my own mom! So I kept up my patter. “In a perfect world I would have liked to organize you a ticker-tape parade, but that was a little hard to plan, staying at Grandmother's.”

“I can see that.” Mom nodded. “The logistics would be difficult. Especially if you couldn't get online—you'd really need the Internet for that kind of thing.”

That was her kind of joke. Yup—she was definitely still Amy Mackenzie. She might be thin and faded, like a mom who has been through the washing machine too many cycles, but every day she became a little better and a little stronger. Her colors got more vivid. After we were settled back in Santa Rosa, remaking life at home again, her hair started to grow back. It wasn't the same as before—the blond had turned a sort of ash gray, and it
was weirdly frizzy—but, as she said to me, “Hair is hair, Ella. I'll take it.”

She has had the host disease problem from time to time, the one Auntie Irene warned me about. Random outbreaks of illness, when the new blood fights back against the old stuff, or maybe it's vice versa, but Dr. Lanner has been able to calm down the worst of their arguments and get Mom better again when it happens. And with Ella Mackenzie as head chef, whipping up gourmet meals of roast chicken and lasagna, the patient improved rapidly. Eventually Mom was even able to pet the dog again, and Lou was good enough not to hold the long hands-free, high-hygiene period against her.

I hardly ever talk to my dad about the House of Mud, or what happened that summer. When he and I get together, which still isn't all that often, we talk about other stuff …
Ahem!
I mean, things. The ups and downs of river life, or middle school. How incredible it was when the Giants won the World Series. He did give me an astronomy book that describes the constellations, and I tell him that in between soccer and homework and everything else, I sometimes curl up in a corner and read parts of it. I doubt I'll ever be an expert, like Edward was, but I'd like to get as good as Rosie in knowing who's who up in the heavens.

It goes the other way, too: the GM and I, when we're on the phone, don't talk much about Walter. She has other people to gossip to me about, like Miguel and Adela (and their new baby!), or Joan (who got engaged to someone at the bookstore), or even George the UPS guy. Every now and then the GM throws in a
sly line about Darling Christopher—and it is
not
usually complimentary. Grandmother was grateful to me for getting her to go to Peru. She told me that Machu Picchu was “extraordinary” and that my mother and I will have to go. One day we will.

Mom takes very good care of her copy of Kepler's
Dream
. Sometimes we'll look at it together when my hands are nice and clean, leafing carefully through the stories and diagrams, the pictures of the planets. Mom and I agree that we don't know what the (expletive deleted) Kepler was talking about exactly in his wild
Dream,
but we like how bold he was back then in imagining travel to the moon one day. How the guy tried to see hundreds of years ahead of his own time to other improbable things that would happen, too. “That takes vision, Ella, to imagine the future,” Mom told me once. “It takes genius.”

And when we're finished looking at it, she puts the book back in its safe, sheltered place on a high shelf in her bedroom. My mother agrees with something Violet Von Stern once said, that an object so treasured shouldn't be locked away completely where people can't enjoy it. But she wants to keep it protected, too: to remind her of everything that happened that summer, to both of us, and to have something gold and beautiful near her while she dreams.