Graceful Read online

  Of course the big six-five spelled out in apples on the ground could have told me that, too!

  I can’t take my eyes away from Leo. He still has his curls, even though they’re mostly white now.

  “Wait till you see your gift,” the same woman says. Our daughter! She has the same soft blond hair as my mom and Kylie have. Had? I look around, but don’t see either of them.

  The woman takes my hand. “The kids worked very hard on it,” she says.

  I look over at the group of kids. The littlest one presses a button on a small device in her hand and a holographic image appears a few feet away from us. I back up, startled, but Leo’s hand is there to steady me. “Watch, Nana Mandy!” the little girl says. She can’t be more than three.

  In midair the word BIRTHDAYS appears. Then images slowly fade in and out. Many of them I recognize — there we are bowling at our sixth birthday party. There we are posing with the hypnotist at our eleventh. For our twelfth, we are standing in almost this exact spot, having just planted our first tree. Most of the images are totally unfamiliar, though. In one we are around fifteen or sixteen at the beach. In another we are a few years older, on a boat. I watch, open-jawed, as we grow up and grow old, together.

  At the end, a short video plays. It’s Leo and me as babies, at our first party. We’re babbling and crawling, then almost at the same moment, stand and walk toward each other on wobbly legs. This moment is family lore in my house. I’ve never seen video of it before, though. They must have tracked it down from someone at the party. Or maybe I found it, sometime over the last few decades!

  My daughter (!!) hands me a tissue. I hadn’t realized tears were pouring down my cheeks. “Are you all right, Mom?” she asks.

  Leo turns away from our first steps and takes my hands in his. I notice his eyes are misty, too. “Amanda Ellerby Fitzpatrick, I will always keep walking toward you,” he says, kissing me on the forehead. He keeps his lips pressed there, and I close my eyes as our family claps and hoots. Relief pours through me. Sometimes your first love does get to be your last.

  “Amanda,” a boy’s voice says. Then more urgently, “Amanda!” Someone is tugging at my arm. I look down, expecting it to be another grandchild. But it’s Leo, and I’m standing in the labyrinth and everyone is gathered around me with concerned looks on their faces.

  “Are you okay?” Leo asks. “You didn’t open your eyes for the longest time.” He slides a leaf out of my hair.

  I reach up to my forehead, feeling the ghost of a touch pressed there. Then I blink, and it’s gone. “Something happened in the circle,” I say. “Right?”

  “Yes,” Grace says. “We did it.” She turns me around to face the center. The tree! Its branches are straight, when moments before they were wound tight around the trunk. The apples that were hanging from its branches have been flung all over the ground.

  “Was there … something else, too?” I ask.

  Grace doesn’t answer.

  “I think I went someplace,” Rory says, stepping up beside me. She’s absently rubbing her left hand.

  “Me, too,” Tara says, a faraway look in her eyes.

  “Me, three,” I say. I turn to Leo and really look at him for the first time in weeks. I reach for his hand. In front of everyone, I tell him the truest thing I know, although I don’t know how I know it.

  “Leo Fitzpatrick, I will always keep walking toward you.”

  When I get back home, exhausted and exhilarated, Connor and David are waiting on the porch steps, a large cardboard box between them. They both stand up as I cross the lawn.

  Seeing them like this — Connor’s eyes twinkling, David healthy and carefree, with their whole futures in front of them — any lingering doubt I had over closing the vortex and giving up my powers drifts away for good.

  Connor opens his mouth to greet me, but before the first words leave his mouth, I get a vision of his future. First come the 3-D glasses, then more gadgets, then he sets his sights on solving bigger problems. One day he’s going to help figure out a way to turn everyday trash into fuel. It will cap a lifetime of making people’s lives easier and better, in both small and large ways. I allow myself to watch him step up to a platform to accept an award. How proud our parents are!

  “I have amazing news,” Connor says, reaching into the box. “I wanted you to be the first person to have these.”

  Hearing his voice snaps me back to the present. I can still have visions! That’s a surprise! Unable to help myself, I giggle. I think the vortex gave me a little gift, too.

  I reach out and hug him. “I’m so proud of you, big brother.” I can’t tell him what I saw of his future, but there’s no need. It will happen either way.

  He untangles himself from my embrace. “I haven’t even shown you yet.” He hands me a pair of pink-framed tinted glasses and says, “I couldn’t have done it without your help.”

  He doesn’t know how true that is, just not in the way he thinks.

  “Try them on,” he urges. “David, give her your regular glasses to put on first.”

  David obliges and I slip them on. I was prepared for everything to look fuzzy, the way it does when I slip on my dad’s glasses for fun. But I can see perfectly! “David! Your eyes must not be that bad at all. Nothing’s even blurry!”

  “Oh, right,” he says. “That’s because the lenses are just plain glass. I only wear them to make me look smarter. I got contacts over the summer.”

  Connor and I stare at him, shocked.

  “Are you SERIOUS, dude?” Connor shouts, then starts cracking up. “This whole idea was because of you! And you didn’t even need them? Man, that’s messed up!”

  I can only stare, my jaw hanging open. Everything we went through today was because Connor was inspired by David and his glasses. And now he won’t even need them?

  “Hey,” David tells Connor, “believing I needed them got you to come up with your first invention, right? And this is just the beginning. One day you’ll be huge.”

  He’s right, of course. And I have to believe this was how it was supposed to happen. Maybe the vortex was ready to move on and it really was my destiny to help it.

  I leave Connor still shaking his head at David and make my way into the house. I don’t have the energy (literally) to tell them the story now. I’m sure David will hear all about it from Tara. I wish there was a way that Connor won’t feel bad when he learns his part in it, but I don’t see a way around it. We’ve never lied to each other, and I won’t start now.

  I flop down on my bed, more tired than I ever remember being. Bone tired. I close my eyes and am instantly in my garden. I didn’t even have to use the elevator this time. As soon as I smell the fruit trees, I’m wide awake. Then I’m laughing. The garden has been busy since my last visit! Every piece of land not taken up by a tree or flower or sand or sea is now home to one of the objects that had disappeared from Angelina’s store. If this were my bedroom, my mom would freak out until I cleaned it. But it’s not my bedroom, and no one else can find this place.

  Well, except Angelina, who seems to have an all-access pass to my brain. I look around, hoping she’s hiding behind a lampshade or a faded watercolor painting of a fruit bowl, but I don’t see any sign of her. I wonder if she knows about shutting down the vortex, and if she does, I hope she understands why I did it.

  A bag of seeds appears on top of a rosebush, or perhaps it was always there and I never noticed it. It’s identical to the one left for me on the counter at the store. I carefully untangle it from the thorny branches and slip it into my pocket. I’m curious to see if it makes it back to the real world. Or the waking world. Or whatever the difference is between here and there.

  Before I find out, though, I take one last look around at all the stuff filling up the garden. Looks like I’ll have a lifetime to make my way through “wonders unimagined.”

  But first I’m kinda in the mood for pizza.

  Thirty years later

  The animals carved in the smoo
th bark are still visible, their shapes blurred from decades of weather. How young we were the day that I drew mine. How much responsibility we had. How lucky we were to have one another.

  I reach out and run my finger over the lion. How lucky we still are.

  “I like what you’ve done with the place,” a voice says from behind me.

  I whirl around, the last of the seeds in my hands falling to the earth. Not ten feet away, Angelina D’Angelo sits on the stone bench beside the labyrinth, a wooden cane at her side. I have not seen her in nearly thirty years.

  “Is it really you?” I ask, afraid to even move. Can she possibly still be alive?

  “You’ve gotten taller,” is her only response.

  “I’ve grown up.”

  “So you have. You all have.”

  I gesture down the hill, to the big tent beside the apple trees. “Have you seen the others? Tara and David’s son is having his bar mitzvah in a few minutes. Can you believe it? We all came back for it. Amanda and Leo are down there, Rory and her family. Connor. I know they would all love to see you.”

  She smiles, and her duck-shaped birthmark wiggles. I can still spot it hidden in the folds of her many wrinkles. She looks old. She looked old when I was a child of course, but now she looks truly old. Ancient, even. And tired.

  “I saw them,” she says. “They didn’t see me. That’s the way it should be.” She uses the cane to stand up from the bench. I am struck by how small she is.

  “That was very brave what you did,” she says, “shutting down the vortex, giving up the long life that was your due, and of course relinquishing your powers. Well, most of them, right?” She says that last part with a wink.

  My suspicions were correct all those years ago. She had kept some, too. “Yes, most of them,” I reply with my own sly grin. “But really, I had to shut it down. I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t let it undo everything you’d done. Everything we’d done.”

  “We always have a choice,” she says firmly. “I doubt I would have been brave enough to choose as you did.”

  “You were braver than anyone,” I assure her.

  She tilts her head at me. “You are a scientist now?”

  “Yes, a physicist. I research quantum theory. That’s the study of how subatomic particles —”

  She cuts me off. “You study the nature of reality.”

  I smile. “Yes.”

  “How sneaky,” she says, but I can tell she’s pleased.

  I laugh. “Yes. I may have a little more insight into it than most people in my field. Where have you been all these years, Angelina?”

  “Oh, I got around,” she says. “Mostly I visited other vortexes. I was drawn to them, quite truthfully. Sometimes there were people there — kids like yourself — who needed guidance.”

  “Did you put them all in comas on their tenth birthday, too?”

  She laughs at my teasing. “If necessary!” Then she adds, “Not all of them accepted their destiny and rose to meet it, like you did. And sometimes, there was no one there at all.”

  “And Bucky?” I look around, hoping against hope that he is here, too.

  She shakes her head. “He was a wonderful companion. The most charming fiddler I ever did see. But he got tired. He was ready to go.”

  I feel my heart swell for Bucky. Or as I knew him best, my great-uncle Bill who protected me when I was a child and gave the best birthday presents. “And you? How are you feeling?”

  She smiles. “I’ve still got a little magic in these old bones.”

  Laughter and music wafts up on the wind from below. “Come down the hill with me, Angelina. The ceremony hasn’t started yet.”

  She shakes her head. “I’ll just sit up here and enjoy the shade.”

  I step closer and reach out my arms for her. She lets me hug her, as she had on the train platform decades ago. She feels both incredibly frail and incredibly powerful. She changed the world, and so few people know it. There will never be another like her.

  “Send me a postcard every now and again, okay?” I ask.

  She smiles, pats me on the arm, and waits. That’s my signal to leave.

  “You’re sure I can’t convince you to come?” I ask one more time. “David and his son are going to sing together.”

  She nods. I look around for a car but don’t see any. “Well, can I take you some place afterward, then?”

  “I’ll be fine,” she insists. “Go enjoy the party, and your friends. Give them … give them my love.” At that, she turns away, and I know it’s really time to go. I lean over and kiss her on top of her head. Then I hurry back toward the party.

  I make it as far as the edge of the clearing before turning back around. Angelina is standing beside the apple tree in the center of the labyrinth, its branches straight and proud. I can still remember how it looked before, when it was hugging itself. I dare not breathe as I watch Angelina reach out and touch the smooth bark with both hands. I blink, and she’s gone.

  I blink again. She’s really gone. Like, gone gone!

  I hear a rustling behind me, and for a second I think, Oh, it’s going to be Angelina, she was just playing a trick on me. But even before I turn around, I know it’s not her. Although decades have passed since I placed the protective bubbles around them, I can still sense the distinctive energies of Amanda, Rory, and Tara. They didn’t see what I saw. I don’t need to be able to read their minds to know they’ve come to get me.

  We stand side by side, grown-ups with our grown-up party dresses and our busy lives, and together we gaze out at the labyrinth we built three decades ago. I’m sure I’m not the only one picturing our younger selves racing in circles through the trees, finding the perfect stones, feeling the surge of energy when we connected with the vortex. They don’t remember what they experienced in those final moments, those glimpses of their futures, but I do. I’ve kept that secret all these years. Everyone should get to live into their own futures, making things happen and letting things happen in equal measure, as one wise old woman once told me. Where’s the fun if you already know how it will work out?

  “A lot of old ghosts up here,” Amanda says, breaking the silence.

  I nod. “And some new ones.”

  “What do you mean?” Rory asks.

  “Tell us on the way down,” Tara says, linking her arm in mine. “It’s about to start.”

  A minute later, David and his son begin to sing.

  Wendy Mass is the author of award-winning books for young readers, including 11 Birthdays, Finally, 13 Gifts, The Last Present, and the Twice Upon a Time series: Rapunzel, The One with All the Hair; Sleeping Beauty, The One Who Took the Really Long Nap; and Beauty and the Beast, The Only One Who Didn’t Run Away; as well as A Mango-Shaped Space, Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life, Every Soul a Star, The Candymakers, and Pi in the Sky. She lives with her family in New Jersey.

  You can visit her online at www.wendymass.com.

  Don’t miss any of these spellbinding stories from Wendy Mass!

  The Willow Falls series

  11 Birthdays

  Finally

  13 Gifts

  The Last Present

  Twice Upon a Time

  Rapunzel: The One with All the Hair

  Sleeping Beauty: The One Who Took the Really Long Nap

  Beauty and the Beast: The Only One Who Didn’t Run Away

  Copyright © 2015 by Wendy Mass

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

  First edition, May 2015

  Cover photograph © 2015 by Michael Frost

  Cover design by Yaffa Jaskoll

  e-ISBN 978-0-545-77315-7

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reprod
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