it was beating. Either way, I could hear the familiar sounds of my house, coming from down in the kitchen. Floorboards creaked as someone moved back and forth in front of the cupboards and the burners and the old kitchen table. Same old footsteps, going about the same old business as usual in the morning.
If it was morning.
The smell of our old frying pan on the burner came wafting up from downstairs.
“Amma? That’s not bacon, is it?”
The voice was clear and calm. “Sweetheart, I think you know what I’m cooking. There’s only one thing I know how to cook. If you can call it that.”
That voice.
It was so familiar.
“Ethan? How much longer are you going to make me wait to give you a hug? Been down here a long time, darling.”
I couldn’t understand the words. I couldn’t hear anything except the voice. I’d heard it before, not that long ago, but never like this. As loud and clear and full of life as if she was downstairs.
Which she was.
The words were like music. They chased all the misery and confusion away.
“Mom? Mom!”
I raced down the stairs, three at a time, before she could answer.
CHAPTER 2
Fried Green Tomatoes
There she was, standing in the kitchen in her bare feet, her hair the same as I remembered—half up, half down. A crisp white button-down shirt—what my dad used to call her “uniform”—was still covered with paint or ink from her last project. Her jeans were rolled at her ankles like always, whether or not it was in style. My mom never cared about stuff like that. She was holding our old, black iron frying pan filled with green tomatoes in one hand and a book in the other. She had probably been cooking while she read, without looking up. Humming some part of a song she didn’t even realize she was humming and probably couldn’t hear.
That was my mom. She seemed exactly the same.
Maybe I was the only one who had changed.
I took a step closer, and she turned toward me, dropping the book. “There you are, my sweet boy.”
I felt my heart turning inside out. Nobody else called me that; they wouldn’t want to and I wouldn’t let them. Just my mom. Then her arms caught me, and the world folded around us as I buried my face in her hug. I breathed in the warm smell and the warm feeling and the warm everything that was my mom to me.
“Mom. You’re back.”
“One of us is.” She sighed.
That’s when it hit me. She was standing in my kitchen, and I was standing in my kitchen, which meant one of two things: Either she had come back to life, or…
I hadn’t.
Her eyes filled with something—tears, love, sympathy—and before I knew it, her arms were around me again.
My mom always understood everything.
“I know, sweet boy. I know.”
My face found its old hiding place in the crook of her shoulder.
She kissed the top of my head. “What happened to you? It wasn’t supposed to be like this.” She pulled back so she could see me. “None of it was supposed to end this way.”
“I know.”
“Then again, it’s not like there’s a right way to end a person’s life, is there?” She pinched my chin, smiling down into my eyes.
I had memorized it. The smile, her face. Everything. It was all I had left during the time she was gone.
I’d always known she was alive somewhere, in some way. She had saved Macon and sent me the songs that shepherded me through every strange chapter of my life with the Casters. She’d been there the whole time, just like she had when she was alive.
It was only one moment, but I wanted to keep it that way as long as I could.
I don’t know how we got to the kitchen table. I don’t remember anything except the solid warmth of her arms. But there I sat, in my regular chair, as if the past few years had never even happened. There were books everywhere—and from the looks of it, my mom was partway through most of them, as usual. A sock, probably fresh from the laundry, was stuck in The Divine Comedy. A napkin poked halfway out of The Iliad, and on top of that a fork marked her place in a volume of Greek mythology. The kitchen table was full of her beloved books, one pile of paperbacks higher than the next. I felt like I was back in the library with Marian.