How I Came to Sparkle Again Read Free

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