Page 78 of Your Echo
“Stéphanie,ma belle, tu pleure.”
I open my eyes and find Guita crouched down in front of me, watching me with a mix of concern and pity. I raise a hand to touch my cheek and find that she’s right: I’m crying.
“What’s wrong?” Guita asks, in a voice that suggests she’s not letting me avoid giving her an answer. “You can tell me. I promise you no matter what it is, you’ll feel better if you tell me. You can trust me, Stéphanie.”
She reaches out to clasp my shoulder, and it’s that simple gesture that undoes me. I was a teetering wall just waiting for an excuse to collapse. The weight of her tanned, sturdy hand and the concern that moved her to place it on me is what finally sends me toppling over.
“I think...”
My voice is clearer than I thought it would be, but I still have to swallow down a lump before I finish my sentence. “I think I was starting to love him. I really think I was.”
The whole story comes out after that. Guita moves her pillow in front of mine and sits there silently throughout the entire thing, offering me a pat on the knee or my shoulder whenever I falter and feel like I can’t go on. I start at the beginning, with the day I watched my mom fall and saw my life shatter along with her spine.
Speaking the words out loud helps me see patterns I never noticed before. So much about the way I think and feel can be traced back to that accident. I let the way one family saw my mother shape the way I thought the world saw me. I spent years sabotaging my own future because that was easier than accepting how much of it I lost when my mother lost her legs.
I feel something shifting inside me—a tilting axis, a reversal of my north and south poles. It leaves me dizzy and scrabbling, grasping for something to hold onto while the world as I know it lurches beneath my feet.
I’m not ready to let go of the way I’ve been living. I can’t. It’s all I’ve ever known. The boy in the window represents everything that went wrong in my life. He’s the starting point of all that pain. It’s not possible for me to see him as anything else.
“So you see now, don’t you?” I finish. My cheeks feel tight with dried tears. “Why I can’t be with him?”
Guita’s face remained gently sympathetic throughout my story, but now I see a trace of confusion cross her features. She gives a little shake of her head.
“I think you need to explain that part to me.”
“He’s the boy in the window!” I nearly shout. I don’t know who I’m trying hard to convince: her, or me. “He could have saved her. He could have done something.”
Guita just sits there, and I squirm under her gaze.
“Do you believe that?” she finally asks.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “I don’t what might have happened. All I know is that he could have done something, and he didn’t. That’s the kind of person he is.”
Guita’s eyebrows shoot up. “Do you believethat?”
“Well, hewasthat kind of person!” I sound desperate even in my own ears. “Does it matter that he’s changed? It doesn’t change the past. It doesn’t give my mom legs.”
“Have you talked to him about it?” Guita asks me softly. “Have you asked him about that day?”
I shake my head. “What is there to say?”
“If you’d like my honest opinion”—Guita pauses and then continues when I nod—“there’s probably a lot more to say than you think. Stories never have only one side.”
“You’re saying I should let him apologize,” I answer flatly. “What happened isn’t something you can say sorry for.”
Of that I’m sure. The words would be so inadequate they would wound far more than they could ever heal.
“What I’m saying,” Guita urges, taking my hand in hers, “is that you’re facing this situation as if you don’t have a choice, but you know what I taught you, don’t you? The same thing that meditation has taught me: you always have a choice. You don’thaveto keep being angry. You don’thaveto keep feeling hate. You said you might love him. Isn’t that worth more?”
I don’t have a response to that. My brain is spinning so fast I can almost hear it turning.
“Do you know who Edgar Allan Poe is?”
I’m jolted back to reality by the sound of that name.
“Yes,” I answer.
“One of my favourite meditation teachers is a big fan of Poe. She has a whole lesson based on something he wrote in one of his stories. The quote goes, ‘The eye, like a shattered mirror, multiplies the images of its sorrow.’”
