Daniel left Holly sleeping in their shared room. The Tender House was quiet as he walked down the stairs. He didn’t know where he was going, or what he was looking for. He just knew he needed to be alone for a little while.
He was trying to process what he had been told, even though some small part of him had always suspected it; had felt it as a dislocation, and glimpsed it in the way his mom looked at him sometimes when she thought he would not notice. She was his mother, yet there was also another. She had lied to him, she and Grandpa Owen both, but Daniel was not angry. Confused, yes, and sad, but not angry. He could not have said why, but it was so.
He found the toy room and sat down amid dolls, and board games, and jigsaw puzzles. Before him was a large painting of mountains against a blue sky, the landscape rendered in big bright colors, the kind that existed only in cartoons.
Cartoons, not fairy tales.
Daniel heard a noise from one of the toy boxes. It was almost as though he had been hoping for it, and his hope had made it happen.
It was the sound of a toy phone ringing.
He rummaged among wood and plastic until he found the source: a plastic phone on wheels, not entirely dissimilar to the one he had owned, the one on which Karis would call him.
But she was no longer just Karis. She was something more.
Daniel put the phone on his lap, lifted the plastic receiver, and held it to his ear.
“Mommy?”
JENNIFER WATCHED THE GRAY form kneeling amid the trees, speaking in a voice that sounded like the rustling of dead leaves.
Jennifer had been mistaken. She believed it would be for her father to name the woman, and thus bring her peace, but she was wrong. In these final moments, she was no longer a vestige of Karis Lamb. Karis Lamb was Before, but with the crying of a child she had been transformed. What came After was another.
What came after was Mommy.
And as she listened to the voice of her child acknowledge her at last, the gray being began to slip away, disintegrating into splinters, dirt, and dust, carried off into the darkness until all that was left was the memory of her, held in the heart of a boy.
DANIEL HUNG UP THE phone. He was tired. He wanted to sleep now.
Candy stood at the door. Daniel did not know how long she had been there.
“Come,” said Candy. “I’ll bring you back to your mother.”
And after only the slightest of hesitations, Daniel took her hand.