How I Came to Sparkle Again (2 page)

Still, over the din of all these thoughts, one thought dominated:
Run
.

Run.

“Ma’am?” the man at the counter asked.

Jill looked up.

He was Hispanic, with soulful eyes, and he wore a crucifix around his neck. Jill noticed his wedding ring and wondered if he had ever cheated on his wife. Sure, he looked like an unlikely candidate, but she’d thought David was an unlikely candidate, too. How could anyone tell?

“You need a new alternator and I can’t get one today. I’ll have to do it first thing tomorrow morning. Can you call someone to pick you up?”

Run,
she thought,
run.
But she just nodded and walked out.

So that is the verdict,
she thought—salvageable, but not immediately.

When she reached the road, she looked both ways and wondered what to do. She was not going to call David, so she decided to walk west because it was late in the day and that’s where the sun was. But she had no idea where she was going.

A quarter mile down the road, she walked by a used-car lot. A Mitsubishi Montero for two thousand dollars caught her eye. She could sleep in that car. She could drive away from here. She could just put it on her credit card.
Do it,
the voice inside her said.
Run.

Figuring that she had twenty-four hours before David could report her as a missing person, she thought about where she could go. She could drive from Austin to the Gulf. She could go to Mexico. She ruled out visiting family right away. Even if her parents weren’t on a Mormon mission in Africa, their home in Midland, Texas, would be the last place she would want to go.

Oh, her parents. Their response to her miscarriage had been an e-mail that read:

Dear Jill,

Your father and I are so sorry for your loss. Our hearts go out to you. The pain of losing a child is unbearable. We know, because it’s what we felt when you told us you were leaving the Church. We lost you to the world, lost you from our eternal family, and that is a spiritual death. We hope you see this as an opportunity to return to the Lord’s fold, and that you find comfort and hope in God’s Plan of Salvation that will so graciously allow you to reunite with your child in the afterlife if only you live the Gospel principles. We pray for you to find your way back now that you know the pain of being separated from your child, now that you know the pain we feel being spiritually separated from you, much like the pain of damnation. Please don’t inflict this pain on us or on yourself. We want to be with you and your child as a complete family for all eternity in the Celestial Kingdom. I cry myself to sleep every night just thinking about the possibility that your choices will prevent that when faith could have saved you. I know with every fiber of my being that the teachings of Joseph Smith are true. Please read the Book of Mormon again and meditate on it. You too will know it in your heart to be true. Please soften your heart and return to Heavenly Father.

Love, Mom

They meant well. They did. But they never failed to make a bad situation worse.

Jill glanced down at her Chanel bag, a gift from David last Christmas, at the envelope from Lisa sticking out of it. She took it out and read it.

Hey Girl—

How goes it? I had a supremely delightful summer doing the Ranger thing at Glacier N.P. Made some nice turns on my birthday. Gotta figure any August first I’m making turns is pretty much better than any other August first. I met a tasty little morsel I call Ranger Mark. Of course it’s doomed but it was a fun ride—literally. Great to be back in my own house—that is, if you can call it that with this crazy never-ending renovation going on and all the riffraff coming and going all the time. So what’s the deal with you staying away so long? I miss you! Come back and visit! My guest room has no walls, but I’ve got a couch and a steady supply of carpenters that don’t work on powder days. Level five eye candy. Just sayin’. I still can’t believe that you, regional skiing medalist, moved back to freakin’ Texas. What in the blue flaming hell? And by hell, of course I do mean Texas. Put down the butter-based foods and the hairspray and come home, girl. Sparkle misses you. You’ve got to miss it too. I mean, seriously, I know those hospital elevators are fast and everything, and sure, that might be fun for a while, but come on, it’s no Southback or Horseshoe Bowl. You know you want to make some sweet turns with your old friend Lisa. You know you do. I know it’s hard for you to get time off, and I know your husband hates the cold and snow (how does anyone hate snow?), but ditch your job and your husband and just come home.

Love, Lisa

If there were signs, surely this was one.

Sparkle, Colorado

Cassie Jones sat up in bed to flip her pillow. Her tears had drenched the side she’d been lying on. The end of one of her long blond braids stuck to her cheek. She didn’t cry during the day, but her tears often slipped out during sad dreams. Between her brows, worry lines furrowed much too deep for a ten-year-old’s face. Instead of lying back down, she petted Socks, her gray cat, and then reached for her mom’s fuzzy white bathrobe at the foot of her bed. She had given it to her mom for Christmas the year before. She wrapped it around herself and walked to her windowsill. The robe was much too large and dragged on the floor behind her.

On the windowsill sat a couple dozen heart-shaped rocks that she and her mother had found together throughout the years. She picked up the big blue one and held it close to her heart and closed her eyes for a moment. Then she exchanged the blue one for a white one with shiny black flecks. She turned it around and around, looking for the side that had looked like a heart when her mother had spotted it. It was the last one they found together. They had been sitting next to the river last spring, watching the high water rush by.

“Look at that,” her mother had said. “Look at how bright the sparkles are today.”

They’d watched the sunlight glisten on the tumbling water. Her mother was right. The sparkles did seem brighter than usual. Cassie had watched for a moment longer and then asked the question that she hadn’t been able to get out of her head since March: “Mom, are you going to die?”

Her mother had taken a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Oh, Cassie, everyone dies.”

Cassie had swallowed hard and blinked a few times when she’d looked in her mother’s eyes and seen something that looked like an apology.
Maybe this is the answer mothers give when they simply don’t know,
she had thought.

“Look,” her mother had said, and leaned forward to pick up the white heart-shaped rock with the shiny black flecks. Cassie had smiled and put it in her pocket.

Now, back in her dark bedroom, Cassie put the rock on the windowsill. She returned to her bedside table and picked up her small flashlight, turned it on, and pointed it to three more heart-shaped rocks on her bureau. Each one she had found along the river as she’d walked near the low and lazy water of summer, talking to her mother as if she’d been right next to her, telling her how she missed her and trying to think of something to say that would make her mother feel okay about being in heaven. She didn’t want her mother to worry in heaven.

In her own mind, Cassie had heard her mother say,
Look down,
each time. She was unsure if she was simply remembering her mother say it. But each time, she had squatted down, surprised and then not so surprised to find a heart shape among so many rocks. Each time, she’d closed her eyes and said, “Thanks, Mom.”

She put down the flashlight, scooped up all three rocks just to feel their weight in her hands, and then decided to take them back to bed with her. Outside, snow fell, covering up all the heart-shaped rocks until at least April or May. She took off the robe and spread it with the outside facing up over her bottom sheet and pillow. Then, with the rocks still cupped in her hands, she crawled into bed on top of the robe, where she could almost imagine she was snuggled up on her mother’s lap.

“Sometimes you just endure,” she had heard her father say on the phone a couple of months ago. She guessed he was talking to her grandmother, his mother. It had become Cassie’s mantra.
Sometimes you just wait for the night to be over and endure.

*   *   *

Heartbreak settled in Jill’s chest. It felt like so many things. Panic. Heaviness. A giant hole. Constriction. It felt like all of these things at once. It felt like being shot, like lying on the ground while life leaked out of her. She could hardly breathe.

Her wheels hummed on the highway. The heater cranked full blast, but still her car seemed cold. A dusting of powder snow blew across the pavement in waves.

Above her, the stars shone much more brightly than they did in the lower elevations. The heavens seemed so much vaster.

She tried breathing in for four counts, breathing in all the stars, all the expansiveness, all the possibilities, and then breathing out for four counts. In and out, in and out, mile after mile. It took all her concentration just to breathe.

Sometimes she cried. Sometimes she was simply in shock.

She wanted to pull over, lie down in the frigid prairie, and die.

In the hospital, every day she saw people whose lives seemed to have taken an irreparable turn. Some, against all odds, bounced back, slowly rebuilding. And she saw others whose prognosis was hopeless, who somehow kept fighting anyway. What was it, she wondered, that made some people give up and others fight harder? Where was her fight? She was out. She was out of will.

Still, she had the good sense to stall a little longer before deciding to lie in a cold field and wait for her ruined life to be over. She turned her thoughts to Uncle Howard and Lisa, instead, and kept on driving. They loved her, and they had saved her before. Surely they could again—as long as she could get herself to Sparkle. She kept telling herself that—that if she could only get to Sparkle before this heartbreak killed her, she would be okay. Uncle Howard and Lisa would make sure she was okay.

chapter one

SNOW REPORT FOR NOVEMBER 17

Current temperature: 29F, high of 33F at 3
P.M.,
low of 22F at 4
A.M.

Clear skies, winds out of the southwest at 10 mph.

25" mid-mountain, 33" at the summit. 1" new in the last 24 hours. 6" of new in the last 48.

Cassie and her babysitter, Nancy, sat silently at the table eating Lean Cuisine cheese cannelloni frozen dinners. Nancy’s breathing bothered Cassie, even though she knew Nancy couldn’t help having sinus problems. Cassie just didn’t want to listen to it. It reminded her of her mother’s last two weeks, when her breathing had become so difficult. To make it worse, Nancy was sitting at her mother’s place at the table.

Cassie looked up at Nancy, wishing she weren’t there—not in her mother’s place at the table or in her mother’s place as her caregiver.

“Do you need something, Cassie?” Nancy asked.

“Don’t sit there anymore,” Cassie said.

Nancy looked startled and slowly stood. “Where would you like me to sit?” she asked gently.

Cassie looked at her father’s place at the table. “There,” she said. “He’s the one you’re replacing.”

She looked back down at her cheese cannelloni while Nancy moved. The mere smell of it made her stomach turn. Of all the frozen dinners, it was the least offensive, but it was offensive nonetheless. She’d never eaten out of cardboard during the ten years of her life that her mother was alive, and she feared that if she kept eating Lean Cuisine, she would become as weak and fat as Nancy. She stared at her food and wondered if any of it really mattered.

All of her Olympic dreams were going down the tubes anyway. She hadn’t even joined ski team this year. When she skied, she felt sad now, so deeply sad that she just wanted lie down in the snow and fall asleep.

She looked down at her dinner again and wanted to throw it, but she couldn’t rally enough will even for that. She simply said, “I hate this crap,” got up, walked up the stairs to her room, and locked herself inside.

From her room, Cassie could hear the sound of Nancy’s regular evening routine—the lid of the stainless-steel garbage can opening and closing as she threw away the cardboard trays, the spring in the dishwasher door creaking as she opened it to put in the forks, the sound of running water and the microwave beeping two and a half minutes later. Finally, Cassie heard the questions and buzzers on
Jeopardy!
and occasionally Nancy’s voice when she shouted out the few answers that she knew. As usual, the TV stayed on for the duration of the night, and the noise, combined with Nancy’s snoring, drowned out the sound of Cassie’s sobs during or after her nightmares.

*   *   *

Mike Jones wanted to believe that Kate’s soul was eternal, but he wasn’t sure if a person could believe in that without believing in God. Believing in God wasn’t so easy. Five hours ago, he was on a call for a woman who drove off a steep embankment and miraculously was okay. She gave full credit to God. And now he was here, at this accident, a head-on collision between a semitruck and a family in a minivan. Both parents and one child were dead. The other child appeared to have a punctured lung and probably internal bleeding. She was barely hanging on. With a dying little girl in the back of his aid car who would wake up without her family if she made it at all, he couldn’t help wondering where God was this time.