They Granted Her 100 Wishes And Forgot I Was Dying Too novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Letter

Deborah has an answer ready, Winifred takes Seren in, and Daniel says Cora sent him to the ocean.

My mother was kneeling in the vegetable bed with a trowel when I found her.

She had her phone on the grass beside her, and the screen was dark.

I held the envelope out where she could see the seal.

"It was in the recycling," I said. "It's dated March."

She looked at it for a while.

Then she set the trowel down, wiped her hands on her knees, and stood up.

"Yes," she said. "I knew in March."

I had been ready for a lie, and that threw me.

"Sit with me," she said, and sat down on the stone edge of the bed. "Please. Let me say it properly."

I stayed standing.

"The Bureau wrote that the Other Side had found something wrong with your heart. They said to prepare. I read it forty times." Her voice shook. "Cora's number had already started. I couldn't tell you on the phone, and I couldn't tell her. I wanted one clean hundred days for her, Seren. Only that. I thought I'd have you home by then and we could sit down and plan the rest."

"You read my chart out loud this morning and cried like it was news."

"It was news. The letter said 'a condition.' It didn't say a hundred days." She pressed her hand over her mouth. "A hundred days. I'm your mother. Do you think I wanted to hear it said?"

She was crying again.

It was real, I thought. Everything she said sounded real.

"Did you call Boston?"

"I called the minute you left the table." She picked up her phone and found a message and held it out. "The cardiologist's office. The first opening is the ninth of December."

I read the date, and then I counted it on my fingers.

It was three days after the end of the hundred.

"That's after," I said.

"It's the first one they had. I'll keep calling. I'll call every day." She stood and put both hands on my face. "I am not going to lose you, Seren."

Behind her, at the end of the garden, the door of the carriage house stood open.

A white-haired woman in a knitted vest was leaning on the frame with her arms crossed, and she had clearly been there a while.

"Winifred," my mother said, without turning. "I didn't see you."

"No," said the old woman. "I expect not."

She looked at me.

"You're the other one. Come and have a cup of something. The kettle is awful but the walls are thick."

My mother's hands fell away from my face.

"Winifred, she's got a room in the house."

"She's got a room with a teacup on the sill and a mother who needs her to say yes to things." Winifred pushed herself off the frame. "I've got a cot and a stove. Choose."

I looked at my mother.

She smiled at me, very gently.

"Go, if you want. Just come back for dinner. Cora will want you next to her."

Cora's first wish meant I would eat at that table every night whether I liked it or not.

I went to the carriage house.

Winifred didn't ask me anything for an hour.

She gave me a blanket and a mug and a view of the pier, and she knitted something gray without looking at her hands.

"I'm Daniel's mother," she finally said. "Seventy-four. I don't do sentiment."

"I'm Seren."

"I know who you are. You've got your grandfather's jaw." She counted a row under her breath. "You have a hundred wishes, I hear. Use them. Nobody in this house gives a thing away unless there's a clerk standing in the room."

"Is that a warning?"

"It's an observation."

I wrote my second wish on the Bureau pad that afternoon, with Tiernan in the doorway of the carriage house pretending not to read over my shoulder.

My father drives me to the ocean, and he leaves his phone in the truck.

When I read it aloud in the kitchen, my father's face went soft and ashamed and glad all at once.

"I'd like that, kiddo," he said. "God, I'd like that."

"Granted," my mother said, and her eyes were on my father, not on me.

We drove to the end of Pier Road without the radio.

The tide was out, and the water was flat and gray, and the boards of the old pier were wet and loud under our boots.

He didn't say anything for a long time.

I let him.

At the very end, he put both hands on the rail.

"I keep saying 'after,'" he said. "You noticed. At breakfast."

"I noticed."

"It's the only word I've got. Whenever it's too big to hold, I say after, and it gets lighter for a while." He rubbed his face. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Seren."

It was the first thing anyone in that house had said to me that wasn't tomorrow.

I put my hand over his on the rail.

"You didn't come up with this trip yourself, did you?" I asked. "You looked relieved when I said it."

He turned and looked at me.

"No," he said. "Cora asked me three days ago. Before you got here. She said you'd want to see the water first, and that I should take you if you ever asked."

I stared at the gray water.

"She didn't know me three days ago."

"No," my father said. "But she knew you'd come."

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