More Than Words: Stories of Courage Read online

  She heard the rush of the falls below and moved ahead, eager to have a look. It was just beautiful, a small pool formed by the waterfall. The rocks had been smoothed by the water constantly pouring down on them. Miranda felt drawn to the place, mesmerized by the beauty. The water was perfectly clear, its motion throwing rainbows against the backdrop of rock. Thick mosses and ferns fringed the edges, lush from the microclimate created by the ever-present falling water. Taking out her camera, she veered off the path to get some pictures. She hoped the rainbows would show up in the pictures.

  “Come check this out,” she called to Andrew. He probably couldn’t hear her, though, over the sound of the water.

  She took some pictures and then put the camera in the backpack, because a fine mist sprayed everything in the immediate area. There was something almost magical about standing here, on this rock, with a cloud of mist rising up around her. She felt strong and hopeful, and the fine spray on her face felt impossibly soft and gentle.

  I’m so glad to be alive, she thought. So glad to be standing here in this place.

  “…are you?” Andrew’s voice, all but drowned by the roar of the falls, stirred her from the moment.

  “Over here,” she called, heading back toward the main path. “I wanted to get some pictures of—Andrew?”

  He was standing alone in the middle of the trail, his eyes wide with panic as he looked around, yelling, “Mom! Where are you!”

  “Hey!” she called back, hurrying over to him. “Hey, buddy, I’m right here.”

  “Mom!” And then he was hugging her hard, burying his face against her shoulder. “Mom, where did you go? I couldn’t find you.”

  He was crying. Andrew almost never cried; he’d left that behind like the toys of his childhood, but he was crying now, hard.

  “I’m right here,” she said, closing her eyes and holding him.

  “You just…disappeared. Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I’m sorry, Andrew. I thought you were right behind me.”

  “I wasn’t. I left the trail to get some pictures, and then I looked up and you were gone. I thought you’d fallen or that you were lost.”

  “I’m truly sorry,” she repeated. “I’ll be more careful from now on. I promise.”

  He seemed a little embarrassed by his outburst as he stepped back and scrubbed at his face with his sleeves. “Yeah, okay,” he said.

  “Andrew, I know this whole year has been terrible for you—”

  “Mom.”

  “No, listen. I know you hate talking about this, but that’s one of the reason’s we came here.” This was perfect, she realized. Here they were in the middle of nowhere. He couldn’t retreat into his computer world. He had to listen.

  “I don’t see why we have to talk about anything.” His chin jutted out, stoic resentment banishing his tears.

  “Because we have lots to talk about,” she said. “This family has spent a whole year being worried and scared and I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to get over it.” She knew the real reason he was so upset had nothing to do with hiking in the woods. “Andrew, I made a mistake just now,” she said. “I should have made absolutely certain you saw where I went. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, boy. Now you sound like Barbara,” he said. Barbara Mills was the medical family therapist they’d been seeing.

  “I’m trying to sound like your mom, but I’m out of practice. Anyway,” she went on, “here’s the deal. I used to wish I could be exactly like the mom in your story game. The mom with the perfect health and the strength of Hercules and the superpowers. The mom who will never die. That’s who I wanted to be for you.”

  She smiled, took out the water bottles. “I don’t really want that anymore,” she continued. “Not at all. I want to be myself, and I am so not perfect. But I am what I am—your mom, warts and all.”

  “You have warts, too?”

  Laughing, she ruffled his hair. “It’s just an expression. What I mean is, I’ll never be that perfect video mom, and that’s actually a good thing. Sometimes I think it’s the things that aren’t perfect that make a person so easy to love.”

  “So, like, when I bring home a really bad report card, you’ll be okay with that?” There was a teasing note in his voice.

  “I’ll be okay with you no matter what,” she clarified. “That’s the point I’m trying to make. I really would like to guarantee that you’ll never lose me, ever, but that would be wrong of me. What I can guarantee is that I’ll always love you, and I’ll never be perfect, but I’ll never stop trying. How’s that?”

  He was quiet for a while. He leaned down, picked up one of the rounded white quartz pebbles that lined the gorge. He put the rock in his pocket. “Sounds good to me.”

  She studied him for a long moment, seeing a boy who was growing up, a boy who still needed his mother. “I love you, you know,” she reminded him.

  “Yeah,” he said, then flashed her a smile. “Me, too.”

  They started walking slowly down the trail together.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Miranda was on the porch swing, intermittently dozing and reading a book, enjoying the warmth of the Indian summer sun. Jacob had taken Andrew fishing, and though she couldn’t see them, she could hear the sounds of their laughter carrying across the water. Down by the dock, Valerie was checking the rigging of the catboat, singing along with the tunes coming from her iPod.

  It was a moment of supreme contentment for Miranda, something she’d rarely felt this past year, but a feeling that crept up on her frequently here at Willow Lake. She loved the slow, dreamy rhythm of their days, the delicious simplicity of having nothing to do.

  It was their fourth day at Camp Kioga, and things were going better than she’d expected. The shock of being deprived of phone, TV and computers had worn off. In fact, they’d amazed themselves with their own inventiveness. None of them could deny the charm of sitting around the fire in the evening, playing Parcheesi or Scrabble. Yesterday, Andrew had found a book of ghost stories, and Jacob had treated them to a spooky reading of a tale by Edgar Allan Poe. With each passing hour, it seemed, they were acclimating to the place and to each other. It was a magical time, remarkably undisturbed.

  Miranda wasn’t idle, though. Whether she carried it out or not, she had made a plan for herself when she got back to Seattle. She wanted to pursue the partnership with Lucy. The prospect of doing something so risky and entrepreneurial was frightening. But after surviving the past year, she was intimately familiar with risk and fright, and nothing could daunt her anymore. Nothing, she thought, except presenting her idea to Jacob.

  “Ready,” Valerie called out from the dock. “I think I’ve got all the rigging done.”

  Miranda set aside her book and headed down to join her daughter. “I have a confession to make,” she said as they pushed the catboat away from the dock. The little wooden sailboat thumped against the pilings and listed in the water while Miranda pushed at the tiller.

  “What’s that?” Valerie asked. She leaned back to study the single gaff-rigged sail. The boat inched forward, the sail hanging slack.

  “I have no idea what I’m doing,” Miranda said.

  Valerie twisted around to look at her, clumsy in the bulky life jacket. “Now you tell me. You mean you don’t know how to sail this thing?”

  “In theory, I do. I was on the high-school sailing team, but we used Lasers. This is just a bit different. We’ll figure it out, though.” Miranda injected a cheerful note into her voice. “There’s a nice breeze. It should be enough.”

  The catboat was beamy, with a shallow draft and centerboard. The wind was adequate for a sail this size. How hard could it be?

  “Hey, Mom.” Valerie swiveled back around. “It’s working.”

  She was right. The wind took the sail, and Miranda showed her how to control it with the main sheet. “You watch the sail,” she said. “Stay as close to the wind as possible.”

  “Does it matter?”

 
; “It does if we want to get anywhere and back before dark.”

  They were a good team, considering their lack of experience. They got the little boat up into the wind, and Valerie gave a little shriek of delight as they heeled. “Now what?” she cried. “We’re going to go over.”

  “No, we’re not,” Miranda assured her. “Just sit up on the side, there, to counterbalance the weight.”

  “Sit where?” Valerie asked.

  “Wherever the boat sails best.”

  She leaned out over the edge, whooping excitedly as the boat scudded along on a gust. It was thrilling to Miranda to see her daughter so carefree for a change. Caught up in the moment, Valerie dropped her surly persona and yelled with delight. “This is awesome,” she said. “I had no idea you knew how to do this.”

  “I know how to do lots of things,” Miranda pointed out. “Are your arms getting tired?”

  “Totally. I’m about to lose it.”

  “Hang on, and we’ll jibe.”

  They executed the maneuver and practiced some others, scudding back and forth on the lake. Miranda loved the feel of the wind ruffling through her short hair, the golden warmth of the sun on her face, the sound of her daughter’s laughter on the wind. “This,” Miranda declared, “is as close to a perfect afternoon as I’ve ever had.” She grinned at Valerie. “I need more days like this, days when I can forget I was ever sick.”

  “I’m glad, Mom. Really.”

  “So how about you? How are you liking our vacation?” Miranda asked. It was a daring move, she knew. She was giving Valerie an opening to list a whole litany of complaints.

  “It’s all right,” Valerie said, surprising her. “I had no idea Dad was so cutthroat at horseshoes.”

  “Or that Andrew knows words like shirk and that you can add an S to naked and get something totally different,” Miranda added, referring to last night’s game of Scrabble.

  “The important thing is, Dad lost,” Valerie reminded her. “That means he has to fix dinner tonight, start to finish.”

  It wasn’t such a hardship. This past year, Jacob had done more than his share of the cooking, and so had the kids. “We should head back,” Miranda said. “Give ourselves time to clean up.”

  It took some maneuvering, but they managed to bring the boat around to the dock. The afternoon had turned hot, a reminder that it was the height of Indian summer. Once they got the boat tied up, Miranda took off her sandals. “You know what I feel like doing?”

  “What?”

  “Jumping in the water.”

  “But it’s—”

  Miranda didn’t wait to be talked out of it. She peeled off her life jacket and jumped off the end of the dock into the crystal-clear water. It was so cold, it felt as if her body was going into shock. She bobbed to the surface, her legs working like eggbeaters. Because of the cording in her arm, she couldn’t swim, but managed to stay afloat by kicking. “Feels great,” she lied.

  “You’re insane,” Valerie said.

  “Come on in. You know you want to.”

  “Insane,” Valerie repeated, falling forward into the lake, as if she’d been shot. Seconds later, she came straight up out of the water, her mouth working like a fish’s. “Omigod,” she gasped. “This is the coldest water I’ve ever felt.”

  “Swim around a little,” Miranda suggested through chattering teeth. “You’ll get used to it.”

  “Your lips are turning blue,” Valerie pointed out after a while.

  “Your makeup’s all washed off,” Miranda said. Without the thick mascara, blood-colored lipstick and gel-spiked hair, Valerie looked like herself again.

  They lasted maybe five more minutes, then raced for shore. Gasping and shivering, they lay side by side on the dock and waited for the sun to warm them up. Miranda looked up at the sky, seeing pictures in the clouds. “This is what I call a gift moment,” she told Valerie.

  “What’s that?”

  “A really great moment you don’t go looking for but it happens anyway. I just like being here with you, feeling the sun on my face.”

  Valerie was quiet for a minute. Then she said, “I like it too, Mom.”

  “Andrew and I had a good talk the other day, when we hiked up to Meerskill Falls,” Miranda said. “I thought maybe you and I could do the same.”

  “We talk all the time, Mom.”

  “I know, but—”

  “Look, you got sick and now you’re better and I’m good with that, okay? Do we really need to analyze it to death?”

  “That’s why we came here.”

  “Great. Go ahead, then. Analyze me.”

  Miranda hesitated. “You know what? You’re right. We can just enjoy being together.”

  Valerie gave a soft, knowing laugh. “You want to talk about it. You know you do.”

  Miranda chuckled. “Busted.”

  Valerie was quiet for several moments. Finally, she started to speak. “Okay. I never told you this before, but you getting cancer—Mom, I’m sorry, but it made me feel like a freak, okay? And breast cancer. The same thing Grandma died of. God, do you know how many ‘helpful’ people came up to me to say they’re sorry for me, they’re praying for me, because my risk for getting the same disease is now, like, ten times higher than normal?”

  Miranda turned on her side to look at Valerie. “Who said that?”

  “People who called themselves my friends. So I figured, who needs friends, anyway?”

  Oh, God. Miranda’s heart sank as she pictured Valerie suffering at school, turning her back on her friends and hiding her pain. “Baby, I wish you’d told me—”

  “I’m sorry, okay?” Valerie’s anger bubbled up quickly. She sat upright, drew her knees to her chest and glowered out at the lake. “I’m sorry I’m not the kind of daughter you want.”

  “You know the only kind of daughter I want is one who’s happy being who she is. And I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry that it’s true—you are at a higher risk. But that doesn’t mean you have to be miserable, worrying about something that is probably never going to happen. All it means is that you and I both need to take extra care of ourselves. Why do you think I started getting mammograms at thirty-five?”

  “It’s scary, Mom. I can’t be brave like you.”

  Miranda sat up, propped her hands behind her. “Oh, baby. You have been so incredibly brave this whole year. So have Andrew and your dad. I wish you’d think about something, Valerie. This girl, the one you’ve been for the past year—is this who you really are?”

  Valerie pushed a hand through her damp, artificially black hair. “I have no idea. All I know is that, after you got sick, it felt stupid to go to pep rallies and football games.”

  “But having friends isn’t stupid. Your friends are the ones you lean on when the going gets tough. Hey, if it wasn’t for my friend Sophie, we never would have had the chance to come here.” She paused, studying her daughter’s profile, so innocent-looking without the makeup. “Don’t you miss them, Val?”

  Her daughter nodded slowly. “I was horrible to them. To Megan and Lyssa, and especially to Pete. I just didn’t want them around. I hated everyone, hated the world, because they were all normal while my life was falling apart.”

  Miranda winced. “I blame my cancer for a lot of things, and you’re allowed to do that, too. Up to a point. Sweetie, it was your first year of high school. I wanted to be there for you so badly. But this happened, and I wasn’t there for you, and we both have to forgive ourselves and each other and move on.”

  “I have moved on.”

  Miranda brushed a damp lock of hair off Valerie’s forehead. “I think you ran away.”

  Valerie surprised her by nodding in agreement. “I think you’re right.”

  Miranda chuckled. “All right, now I’m speechless. You’re agreeing with me?”

  Valerie dropped her head down into her folded arms. “I miss them,” she said. “I wish we could go back to being friends. But how do I just start over with them?”

  M
iranda slid her arms around her daughter. “Ah, honey. You’d be amazed to see how forgiving people can be. That part is easy.”

  “Sure.”

  “Have you given Pete an answer about the Homecoming dance yet?”

  “I, um, I couldn’t really figure out how to tell him no.”

  “Because you didn’t really want to tell him no,” Miranda said. Valerie looked over at her, grinned. “You think you’re so smart.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “I can’t believe we have to go home tomorrow,” Andrew said, following Jacob out onto the sunny front porch of the cottage. “I bet no one would notice if we stayed an extra week.”

  Miranda and Valerie were sitting on the porch steps, painting a little scene on an oar to commemorate their stay at Willow Lake. It was a long-standing tradition at Camp Kioga to paint an oar, and there was a display of them in the main lodge, some of them dating back to the 1930s. Miranda and Valerie had created a rustic lake scene, depicting themselves in the catboat. Under it, they made a banner that read Thank You from the Sweeney Family.

  Miranda put aside her paintbrush. She sensed that the moment had arrived to tell her family what she’d been thinking about. “All week long,” she said, “I’ve been asking myself who I was before I got cancer. And you know, I was okay, because I have a family I adore. But one thing being that sick taught me was the importance of time. I spent every single weekday at a job I didn’t like. And you know, the way you spend your day is the way you spend your life. I don’t want to do that anymore. Now I wake up each morning, and I tell myself, ‘Don’t waste this day.’ It’s really changed my perspective.”

  “We thought you liked your job, Mom,” Valerie pointed out.

  “It wasn’t like I was being tortured,” Miranda said. “I worked with good people. The job was predictable, secure. Then I got cancer and I figured out that you can surround yourself with all the security in the world, and crazy things still happen to you. Like cancer. When we get home, I want to make a change. Because in all the shuffle and planning, I forgot to do something very crucial. I forgot to follow my dream.” She looked at Jacob. “I sometimes wonder if you did that, too.”