Pieces of Hope by Carolyn Carter Page B

like we have—you know, 911, organized fire departments and
all that— ”
    I
gasped. This definitely wasn’t going to end well.
    “Anyway,” Rin plowed on, ignoring my distress. “One night in
early spring while the family slept, a fire broke out in a first floor chimney
and by the time they realized what was happening, they found themselves trapped
on the fourth—”
    “Oh,
no!” I shrieked, reaching for my heart. “They all died in a fire?”
    “Not
quite,” they replied. They both wore a strange, almost gleeful expression on
their faces. It troubled me to see it, given the circumstances.
    “You go,
Charlotte ,” Rin said.
    “No, you
go,” Charlotte
urged, twirling a single red strand. “You always tell it so much better than I
do. It’s one of Rin’s talents,” she said to me.
“She’s very eloquent, always has been.”
    Physical
differences aside, the two of them could have been twins, finishing each
other’s sentences the way that twins often do. Then again, if there were such a
thing as best friends for eternity—how many years had they been doing this?
    “Well,
somebody tell me!” I pleaded. “The anticipation is killing me!” They both
giggled, and I groaned. Certain clichés didn’t have the same effect around
here.  
    “There’s
more to the story,” Rin said, her velvet eyes darting
my way. “There was a third child—an infant, and though neither of the older
children could possibly survive a fall from a fourth story window, they prayed
that their smallest child could.”
    I stared
into her dark eyes, willing it not to be true. “They threw their baby out of
the fourth-floor window? How could they have done such a thing?”  
    Rin shushed me, looking around as if everyone had heard. “I
don’t think you quite get their level of desperation! When they were forced to
make that decision, flames were shooting out of the first three stories, thick
black smoke was making it impossible to breathe, and they had only moments to
live!”
    Following
a dramatic pause, during which I couldn’t stop staring at the family, a
heaviness in my heart, Rin finally went on. “They
wrapped the baby in several blankets, leaving only his tiny face uncovered.
Then they ran to the northeast corner of the house where the gardener had just
turned up the soil for a vegetable garden, and praying that this was the
softest place to land, they— ”
    “They threw
the baby out of the window!” I refused to believe a mother could do that to her
infant child. My heart broke for all of them.
    “Don’t
look so sad, Hope.” Charlotte
placed an arm around my waist and leaned her head against my shoulder. “The
baby survived. That’s why the family’s here today.”
    “He . .
. survived?” I choked.  
    “Yes,
Jon-Paul Chartrand celebrated his ninetieth birthday
this year, but his time on earth is coming to a close, and the family is
travelling to bring him back.” Charlotte’s
eyes rimmed with tears. “They visited him every year, watched him grow up and
become a successful lawyer, just like his father, and now it’s time for them to
be together again.”   Charlotte passed a secret smile to Rin . “No one’s ever really forgotten, Hope. We all get our
families back again, sooner or later.” I felt certain she was trying to tell me
something about my mother, but I said nothing back.  
    We
watched as the Chartrand family approached the bus,
watched their heads rise as they bounded up the three steps, pausing beside the
empty driver’s seat to deposit their coins. And as they advanced hand-in-hand a
few steps down the aisle, we exhaled a long, mutual sigh as they instantly,
suddenly, vanished .
    I wished
them a lovely return trip, wherever they
were going .
    Rin and Charlotte had broad smiles covering their faces. I
was beginning to see the Station through their eyes, and I kind of liked it.
“Thanks for the story,” I sniffled, wiping my eyes. “It had a happier ending
than I imagined it