Page 89 of Your Echo
I don’t understand how she’s got it now. The bathroom is clearly still under construction, but it looks like several thousands of dollars have already been poured into it.
“The contractors say it will be finished in just two weeks!”
“Contractors?” I repeat, my voice hoarse with shock. “Maman, how are you paying for this?”
She wheels herself out and motions for me to follow her into the living room.
“I think you should sit down.”
I do as she says, wishing she would just cut out the dramatics and tell me what the hell is going on.
“Ace Turner came to see me,” she announces.
I straighten up on the couch like I’ve just been zapped with an electric shock.
“He told me everything,”Mamancontinues, “and then he gave me a cheque for twenty thousand dollars and a percent of all his future record sales. And you know what, Stéphanie?”
She looks at me expectantly, but all I can do is shake my head as my heartbeat swells in my ears.
“I didn’t want to take it. It didn’t feel right, not after what he told me. His story is...Well, I hope you’ll let him tell it to you himself. That’s why I took the money. I know you always wished I’d gotten something from the Thompsons, and now I have. I just want you to move forward,ma chérie. I just want you to be happy. That’s what every mother wants.”
She moves closer so she can take both my hands in hers.
“That’s why I want you to go around to the back of the apartment building right now. I want you to be happy.”
“Wh—what’s at the back of the apartment building?” I stutter.
Her sneaky grin comes back. “It’s a surprise.”
I expect her to follow me when I take a few uncertain steps towards the door, but she hangs back and tells me to go on by myself. My footsteps echo in the hall that leads to the building’s back entrance. My heart is still hammering against my chest. There’s a weird, dream-like feeling to everything right now, like I’m not quite lucid.
At the end of the hall, I reach for the door’s push bar and find myself in the parking lot. The sun has just set, and there’s no one else around. I take a few steps onto the pavement and swivel my head, trying to spot whatever I’m missing here.
Another few feet into the parking lot and I can see the gazebo off to the side of the building, on the one narrow, balding patch of lawn.Mamanand I have had a few picnics on the table underneath the wooden structure, but other than that it’s usually abandoned.
Not tonight, though.
Tonight it’s lit up with dozens and dozens of paper lanterns. White orbs in all different sizes hang from the rafters, casting a circle of warm light onto the ground. The effect is dazzling, mesmerizing in the same simple and joyous kind of way that makes a rainbow seem like a miracle or turns a sun-speckled spider web into a work of art.
Without even realizing it, a laugh escapes from my throat. It’s a sound of surprise, confusion, and awe all wrapped into one. I don’t realize I’ve been moving closer until I step off the pavement and onto the lawn. I walk toward the gazebo like it’s a lighthouse calling me home.
There’s a book resting right in the middle of the picnic table. I check over both my shoulders, but I can’t spot anyone in the growing shadows outside. When I reach the edge of the table and see the cover of the book, I let out the same kind of laugh as before.
It’s the same volume of Edgar Allan Poe that I showed Ace in the bookstore, the one that matches his tattoo. I trace my fingertip over the raven’s wings and crack the still-fresh spine open before I notice a bookmark poking from one of the pages.
The bookmark is actually a torn sheet of paper with handwriting scrawled across it. The page it marks is for a poem called ‘Alone,’ and there’s a verse underlined in black pen:
Then—in my childhood—in the dawn
Of a most stormy life—was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still
“The mystery which binds me still,” I whisper as I read it.
I turn my attention to the writing on the piece of paper.
