Pieces of Hope (52 page)

“Are you
all right? This is why I didn’t want you to know. The last thing you need is another
shock before you return to your body.” Charlotte
threw an accusatory glare at
Rin
. It wasn’t ferocious
(angry bunnies had meaner expressions than Charlotte), but she meant it to be.
Rin
turned away, dismissing her with a flick of her hand.

I put my
head between my knees and the dots disappeared. After a few breaths, I sat up
again. “Did you say the three of us used to climb together? If that’s true, then
why doesn’t Daniel climb now?” And then I remembered. “Daniel is terrified of
heights, and we’ve never climbed together. Not once.”

“Maybe
not this lifetime,” Charlotte
agreed, still concerned I might pass out on her. “But that’s because there was
a time, not so long ago, when the three of you went out for a climb and only
two of you came back.”

“Daniel
fell?” I gasped.
 

Charlotte eyeballed
Rin
, sending another unmistakable warning to keep her mouth
shut. “Um, Finley,” she corrected. “Finley fell . . . It was touch-and-go for
some time. The doctor didn’t know if he was going to make it. I guess you and
Ethan were almost thirteen then. Finley was eighteen. From that day on, he
never climbed again.”

“Couldn’t
blame the guy, I guess,”
Rin
cut in, not seeming to
care about Daniel in the previous lifetime anymore than she did in this one.
“But it was his own stupid fault. I know for a fact that he was climbing a
different route than you and Ethan. He was always taking unnecessary risks—like
he had something to prove to his younger brother.”
  

“Why
would we let him get away with that?” I demanded, thinking of the almost
religious precautions Brody and I took before every climb. Climbing solo was
never an option.
  

Charlotte’s mouth pinched
as she spoke, as if she were fearful the details would be too much for me to take.
“No one could stop him, Hope. Not then any more than now. He was stubborn, but
he had this way about him. He charmed people and shocked them at the same time.
You . . .” She swallowed hard. “You loved that about him.”

I caught
the delicate pause before she’d said the word “loved.” I caught the way she
looked at me to see if I’d grasped its significance. Unfortunately, I had.
   

“I loved
Daniel
before
?” I felt that fainting
sensation again.

“Yes.” Charlotte held her breath
a few seconds. “And you loved Ethan, too . . .”

Everything
turned into fuzzy, indistinguishable shapes as the world began to whirl faster
and faster, twisting into dirty blackness. Small, cool hands touched my
forehead. I closed my eyes, breathed in hard, fresh gulps of air, and eventually
the spinning stopped.
 

“Hang in
there. It’s going to be all right now.” The voice, surprisingly, was
Rin’s
. But I wasn’t so sure she was right.

I had
loved them both. The two of them. The three of us.

Some
part of me suspected as much. It was an old decision, this new one I was about
to make. I just hadn’t known how old. It was important that I know everything
now . . . everything there was to know.

Moments
later, in an eerily calm tone that seemed totally at odds with the way my
insides were bouncing around, I said to Charlotte,
“Let’s try it again from the beginning, please. And don’t skimp on any details
. . .”

Charlotte began with,
“The year was 1942, June fourteenth, as I recall . . .”

I was
sipping on an icy Coke—Charlotte’s
suggestion—one that
Rin
had gone to get without much
complaint. She seemed to be softening a smidge, like a glacier exposed to
sunlight, melting a little around the edges. But I was grateful for a thawing
of any kind, and to avoid any accidental confrontations, I sipped very quietly.

“World
War II had been going on for a year, and although times were tough, you had
your whole life ahead of you. You were about to graduate from McMinnville
High—Go Grizzlies!” Charlotte’s
face went all soft. “Oh, and you were in love!”

One sentence
in particular stuck.

“I was a
senior at Mac?” It was difficult to hide my disappointment. McMinnville was
nice, safe, normal. But I’d hoped that in my previous life, I’d seen a little
more of the world.

“People have
a tendency to do the same things over and over,” Charlotte reminded me again. “You could say
it’s normal.”

“And I
was in love?” I smiled back at her. “With Ethan?”

“We
didn’t call him Ethan back then,” Charlotte
said, her voice taking on a higher nervous pitch. “His name was Quinn . . .
Quinn Lakin.”

“Quinn,”
I uttered in surprise. “Wasn’t that the same name Cat mentioned once?”

Charlotte frowned. “She
gets her decades mixed up all the time.”

“And what
about Daniel?” I asked, curious now. “What was his name?”

“Charlotte already told
you,”
Rin
broke in rudely. “His name was Finley.”

“I’m
going out on a limb here and say that they were both Irish,” I said,
disregarding
Rin’s
interruption. “Was there a big
Irish population in Mac back then?” Vacantly, I stared at the Ferris wheel,
glowing golden as it spun absent a rider. Its single seat drifted past me once.
Then twice. Then I remembered what we were talking about. “Finley what?” I asked
at last.

When no
one answered, I looked at Charlotte.
The sides of her mouth drooped.

“Did you
hear me, Charlotte? Finley what?”
  

Charlotte’s lips were
moving, but I could barely hear her. “Finley—Finley—”

Rin
looked sideways at me, rolling her eyes. It reminded me
of the way Claire had looked at me right before my accident. Like she thought I
was stupid. My stopped dropped to my feet. I wasn’t sure how I knew the name,
but I did. Maybe I heard her thoughts. Maybe I guessed. In the end, what did it
matter?

“No, it
can’t be!” I reached for my heart. “That’s. Not. Possible!”
  

Charlotte nodded in
misery. “I’m sorry, Hope. It’s true.”

“Finley
Lakin?” I gasped in horror. “I fell in love with brothers?”

Rin
gave me an I-told-you-so look. “I warned you several
times, but it fell on deaf ears. I told you Finley Lakin was nothing but
trouble—too charming, too good to be true. If I said it once, I said it a
gajillion
times, ‘Finley Lakin will break your heart.’ You
never listened to me. And it went straight downhill from there—”

I
couldn’t think clearly. I simply couldn’t think. My mind had all the makings of
a cluttered etch-a-sketch—nothing but scribbled, indecipherable messages. The
best that I could hope for was that someone would pick me up and shake me.
Hard.

Charlotte glared at
Rin
, cautioning her again about something. But in the midst
of the chaos, I cared little about what it might be.

“How
could I—? How did I—? It had to have been such a small town . . . smaller than
it is now.” Heat rose in my face. “Oh, God, did
everyone
know?” And then, without meaning to, I blurted, “Something
must have been wrong with me. Was I brain-damaged?”

“Well,
some people did wonder . . .”
Rin
gave a little shrug.

“You and
Quinn were high school sweethearts,” Charlotte
continued, ignoring
Rin’s
stupid comment with a wave
of her hand. “You dated for four years before he went away to war, and it was a
difficult goodbye. War was different back then. There were more casualties, and
plenty of boys didn’t come home. Oh, but Quinn . . . he was red, white, and
blue on the inside. That’s what he used to say, anyway, and he couldn’t wait to
join. He even gave up his scholarship to Cornell. He was going to be a doctor,
but the war changed all that.”

“He was
going into the medical profession back then, too?” I looked at her face, tried
to put a word to it as she paused. She was nothing short of star-struck.

“Quinn
had just finished basic training with the Army, and his unit was headed off to
the Aleutian Islands to fight the Japanese. But as luck would have it, his
train had a layover in Portland,
and he rushed over for one last night with you.”

Rin
smirked. “Lots of war babies were conceived that way.”

Charlotte ignored her
commentary. “There was a dance at the town hall that night. Well, actually, it
was the high school gym that doubled as the town hall, and Quinn found you
there. I still remember the first moment you saw him—like you thought you were
the luckiest girl in the world. And who could disagree? The Lakin brothers were
the guys that every guy wanted to be, and every girl wanted to be with. And you
and Quinn, you were head-turners. I haven’t seen a more beautiful couple
since.” She gave me a dreamy smile.

I tried
to picture us back then, tried to picture Quinn. Blurry at best.

“Especially
when you danced,” she said, slightly out of breath. “A-ma-zing.”

“Are you
sure that was me?” I asked. “Brody says I have two left feet.”

“Maybe
you haven’t danced with the right partner,” Charlotte mused, then shook her head a little
to snap herself out of her daydream. “Anyway, when Quinn showed up, the two of
you did your thing on the dance floor for a while.” Charlotte looked at me, dazzled. “You were so
pretty, Hope.” She hesitated. “I mean, not that you aren’t now . . . But back
then you were blonde and fair. Just this pretty little thing who loved to climb
and then tell the whole town where to get off if they didn’t like what you did.
I was constantly surprised at what flew out of your mouth!”

Rin
groaned. I must have driven her crazy—the younger sister
who never heeded the good advice given to me. Why was I still doing that?
 

Charlotte seemed to have
missed the exchange and went on, “That night, as the two of you waltzed around
the floor, Quinn got down on one knee . . .”

I
flashed back to a dream Ethan had mentioned—a dream of us from an earlier time
dancing together in some old gym. Me, a red-lipped blonde wearing a sexy dress.
And Ethan, a young man in love in a military uniform. He said he’d had a
terrible feeling that some sort of ending was coming. Or maybe, if the war had
anything to do with it, some sort of ending in the days that followed.
 

Charlotte continued, “And
the band was playing a favorite of Quinn’s, an old song by—”

‘“You Go
To My Head,’” I cut in. I could hear it playing, muffled, in my head. I felt a tear
roll down my cheek.

“Yes,
that was it!” Charlotte
looked astonished. “Are you remembering?”
 

“No,” I
sniffled. “Not really. It just sort of popped into my head.”

“Maybe
we should stop now,” Charlotte
said quietly.

 
“There’s more?” I cried. “Haven’t we gotten
to the part where I’m doing the same thing yet? I loved them both. What could
possibly be worse than that?”

“Tell
her the rest,”
Rin
commanded, arching her eyebrows at
Charlotte.
“Tell her . . . or swear I’ll do it myself.”

Charlotte swallowed and
nodded, evidently not thrilled with
Rin
doing any
telling. A few seconds passed before she faced me, first taking my hands in
hers. “After he left, Quinn tried to write to you regularly,” she began. “But when
several days would pass and there was no letter, you began to imagine the
worst. I kept trying to reassure you. I told you everything would be okay if
you gave it enough time. I told you God had a master plan . . . that the two of
you were meant to be together.”

I
sniffled again. “You said that?”

Charlotte nodded stiffly.
“I did, and I nearly had you convinced of it. But then Finley rushed home from
college announcing that he wasn’t going to let his younger brother have all the
fun, and that as soon as he passed the physical he was going to join Quinn him
in the Aleutians. I think Finley only wanted
to go because he didn’t want Quinn to outshine him. I know he never thought much
of the war. His father tried to discourage him, reminding him of the broken bones
he’d suffered a few years earlier, and the physical limitations that went along
with that. It was obvious that Mr. Lakin was worried he might lose not one, but
both of his sons . . .”

“As if
that mattered to Finley,”
Rin
muttered. “He could
have cared less.”

Charlotte inhaled a
breath, then held it several seconds before letting it escape. She was on the
verge of tears. “This can’t be good for Hope to know! I—I—I can’t tell her!” she
blubbered. “Besides,
Creesie
is going to kill us!”

“She
can’t kill us,”
Rin
disagreed, eyeing Charlotte with
impatience. “Last time I checked, we were already dead.”

“I can
handle it,” I assured Charlotte,
hoping I was right. “Just tell me the rest.”
  

Charlotte started to
speak, but
Rin
slung her arm around the back of the
bench and unexpectedly touched her shoulder. Into Charlotte’s weepy eyes, she said softly, “Let
me tell her. It should be me, anyway. I’m the one who found her.”

It was
like a slap across my face. That didn’t sound good at all.

Rin
was staring down at her hands, fidgeting with them as
she spoke. “When Finley first came home from college after Quinn left for the war,
he was instantly smitten. When he left, you were just thirteen, a little girl. And
when he came back, you were eighteen, and all grown up. I think you took Finn
by complete surprise, but the opposite wasn’t true. All your life, you were
susceptible to Finley
Lakin’s
charms . . . Then
again, who wasn’t?”