like me, but not like me, a girl who had attended school as I hadn’t, who’d had a true love, as I had.
What had happened to her?
It was so sad that, though I could see her, we would never touch. I would never hear her voice.
I gazed upon the photo again. That’s when I realized she was wearing a coat. But not just any coat—the same coat I’d had on yesterday. I shivered, realizing it. The coat must have been in the closet where Wyatt was staying.
Now, it was here, under my bed!
I checked the clock. It was seven, an hour, still, before I’d planned to speak to Wyatt, longer still before Mama would arrive. I glanced out the window to make sure she was nowhere in sight. No. Nothing but trees. Even Wyatt’s footprints had already been covered by a fresh layer of snow, like they had never existed. He might almost have been a product of my desperate imagination.
I looked at the object he had given me, the telephone. No, I could never have imagined that. He was real, and he loved me. He would take me away with him if I only asked.
But, for now, he had given me this token of my mother’s existence.
I reached under the bed and drew out the coat. It was the first object I had ever owned that Mama had not given me. That made it the most precious as well, even more so because I knew it belonged to my mother, my real mother.
I lifted it to my face, sniffing it, trying to find a scent, a sign of her. I wondered what she had done when she wore this coat. Who had purchased it for her? What had she been like?
But I smelled nothing but the odor of age. Mama’s clothes smelled like this too, as if they were coated with a thin layer of dust.
Perhaps, I detected the slight smell of something else. Cinnamon.
Of course, that might simply be from the house where Wyatt lived, a smell of something baked yesterday, not when my mother was alive. But I preferred to think otherwise, that my mother had smelled of cinnamon, perhaps from a spiced cider she had drunk when wearing this coat, so many years ago.
I shivered at the thought of it, and in that moment, swept the coat around and onto my shoulders.
It fit perfectly. I buttoned it up and tied the belt around my waist. I made my hair into a ponytail and slipped it between the coat and my back, then lifted the hood over my head. I walked to the mirror.
Hair hidden, I looked exactly like the girl in the photograph.
I sort of hugged myself and then slid my hands deep inside my coat pickets, imagining my mother doing the same.
I gasped.
She had certainly done the same thing. I knew that, for when I reached into the pockets, I touched an object.
I drew it out.
It was a letter, a letter addressed to Danielle Greenwood.
The return address said Emily Hill.
39
Wyatt
Mrs. Greenwood went to bed early that night. She knocked on my door at seven thirty to say goodnight, like she always did. I’d been thinking she missed having someone to say goodnight to. She always watched television in bed, usually late-night shows, but tonight was earlier. I heard a situation comedy with lots of canned laughter.
When I was sure she was snug in her bed, I crept downstairs and picked up the kitchen phone. It was the old kind, the kind my grandfather had had, that attached to the wall. Mrs. Greenwood said she had it because it would work even during an electrical outage. Grandpa had said the same thing, but I didn’t believe it. I thought the old people just wanted the old things. Maybe someday, I’d be desperately clinging to my old cell phone or computer, when there was something way cooler.
I checked for the dial tone. I could see the full moon through the sheer kitchen curtains. I imagined Rachel, seeing it too. Could she see it through her tower’s one window? I tried to figure out which way she would be facing. Was I facing that way too?
Then, suddenly, I heard a sigh. I jumped, but the sigh was not beside me. Was it her, sighing over the moon?
I began to dial my phone number.
She answered immediately. “Is it you?”
“Yes. Can you see the moon through your window?”
“I can. I hoped we were seeing it together.”
“Now, we are.”
“Now, we are.