Winter Garden

Winter Garden Page 61

There are so many things to say, but I can say nothing except his name. “Sasha . . .”

“We’ve waited,” he says, and at the sound of his voice, a shadow peels away from the blackness of his coat and takes its own shape. A smaller version of the man.

“Leo,” I say, unable to say more. My arms ache to reach out for my baby boy, to hold him. He looks so healthy and robust, his cheeks pink with life. Then I see that same cheek slack and gray-blue, sheened in frost. I hear him say, I’m hungry, Mama . . . don’t leave me. . . .

At that, pain uncoils in my chest, making me gasp out loud, but Sasha is there, taking my hand, saying, “Come, my love. To the Summer Garden . . .”

The pain is gone.

I look up into my Sasha’s green, green eyes and remember the grass in which we knelt so long ago. It was there that I fell in love. Leo clings to me as he always did, and I scoop him up, laughing, forgetting how I’d once been unable to hold him in my arms.

“Come,” Sasha says again, kissing me, and I follow.

I know that if I look back, I will see my body, old and withered, slumped on that bench in the snow, that if I wait, I will hear my daughters discover what has happened and begin to cry.

So I do not look back. I hold on to my Sasha and kiss my lion’s throat.

I have waited so, so long for this, to see them again. To feel like this, and I know my girls will be okay now. They are sisters; a family. This is the gift from their father. This is what my story gave them, and in the past ten years, we have loved enough for a lifetime.

I think, Good-bye, my girls. I love you. I have always loved you.

And I go.