Page 88 of The Seven Miracles of Beatrix Holland
K is here with me. We are together. At the same time, I’ve never left your side, nor has he. He knows his blue handkerchief will always catch your tears. He still loves salt and vinegar chips dipped in Nutella, and he says you never have to let him go. I’m sorry I said you did. L.
The woman’s eyes overflowed with tears. “I need to know if you—no, I will do anything. I will give you all the money I have in the world—”
“Oh, hey.” This couldn’t be good.
“Anything.” Mrs. Jumai fumbled with a chunky golden bracelet at her wrist, but it appeared to be stubbornly resisting her efforts, so she grasped the diamond-encrusted ring on her wedding finger. The woman tried to slide it off, but it looked as if it hadn’t moved over her rheumatic knuckles in years. Meanwhile, her movements got jerkier and more frantic. “My ring? You’ll take my ring?”
“I will absolutelynottake your ring.” Maybe a distraction would work. “Mrs. Jumai, can you tell me what this note means to you?”
Mrs. Jumai stopped pulling at the ring and touched the paper again. “Kis for my Kumail. Leukemia. He was thirteen. Two years after he died, my husband said I had to let Kumail go or he would leave me, too.” A sob broke through. “I tried. I really did. And then my husband died last winter, and I can’t let either of them go, and this says… does this mean I don’t have to?”
Beatrice reread the words.You never have to let him go.“I’m so sorry, but I don’t know. I don’t know how those words came to me. I wish I did.”
“Do it again. Please. Do it again?” Mrs. Jumai tugged at her ring again.
The thought of that howling dark wind rose in Beatrice’s mind. “I can’t.”
“You must. I have to apologize to my husband.”
“It doesn’t work that way. Look. Let’s be logical about this.” Even with the panic flopping around in her stomach like a hooked carp, Beatrice was pleased to hear her accountant’s voice emerge. “If we look at this paper, we can extrapolate several things. Shall we go through them point by point?”
A hiccupped sob sounded like agreement. Hopefully.
Reading upside down, Beatrice touched the words on the paper. “This says they’re together. That by itself means something incredible. Life after death. A continuation of the soul.”
“I already believed in that.”
It must be nice to be so unsurprised. “Okay then, it also says that not only are they together, which is amazing, but they’re with you. That chip and Nutella thing—”
“Why didn’t the message talk about my white chocolate chip cookies? He loved those. The Nutella thing was always so disgusting,” said Mrs. Jumai.
“No matter what, it’s confirmation for you, that this is your message.”
A nod. “And the handkerchief. I cry into it every day—it was the one I made him take to his T-ball practice before he got sick. He always laughed and stuffed it in his back pocket.”
“Wow. Okay.” Chills spread over Beatrice’s arms. “Here it says you don’t have to let your son go. By extension, if they’re together, you don’t have to let your husband go, either.”
Impatiently, Mrs. Jumai said, “I see that. I get that. But I wantmore.”
Suddenly, Cordelia and Astrid’s rule about not reaching to close ones made sense. When did the desperate craving for more leave? Did it? Could it?
“I lost my stepmother two years ago,” Beatrice said. “I know it’s not losing a son—no loss in the world can compare to yours—but I miss her every day. Before she passed, she told me grief is unexpressed love.”
Touching her ring again, Mrs. Jumai sniffed. “What does that mean?”
“I think she meant we only grieve the people we still want to show our love to but can’t, because they’re gone. And when that love we still carry around can’t be used, can’t be given to them, it hurts.”
Winnie, who’d been standing motionless behind Mrs. Jumai, made a soft noise in the back of her throat.
Beatrice leaned forward. “I get a lot from thinking about her saying that. I’m so sad that I can’t tell her I love her every day, like I used to. But if I didn’t feel sad about that, it would mean I’d spent all my love and didn’t miss her anymore. Would we want that?”
The woman wiped her tears from her face with the back of her sleeve. “Never,” she whispered.
“I don’t need to do another reading for you. They don’t need me to.” She recalled an Evie Oxby technique she’d thought was particularly smart. The bereaved, she said, would know exactlywhat their loved one would say. Possibly, they’d be able to tune to the right “radio station” and hear them. And if they didn’t, if it came from their own mind, that was okay, too, if it brought comfort. “Ask yourself what they would tell you. Right now.”
“Me?”
“What would they say?”
