A Heartbeat Away. Eleanor Jones

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      It was on the day that I found my mom sitting on the bottom stair in the hallway, a letter in her hand, that my dreams began to fade. Her thin face was all crumpled and tears ran in tiny rivers down the lines at the sides of her mouth.

      She waved the letter at me, then threw it across the dark hall. It fluttered onto the floor and her head dropped forward into her hands.

      I watched the tears run through her fingers and drip onto the floor, making small pools on the worn carpet, and I knew that something very bad must have happened. Fear washed over me in great big waves and I clasped my arms around myself, moving from foot to foot, wondering if I should go get Mrs. Brown—she always knew what to do. Then suddenly my mom looked up at me and her eyes were all glassy and red.

      “Now see what your precious father has done,” she yelled, pointing at the letter.

      I just stood and stared at her, my mouth wide-open and a lump inside my chest. She picked the letter up and screwed the paper into a tiny ball, twisting and twisting and twisting her fingers.

      “They’re going to take our house away,” she shrieked. “And it’s all your stupid, useless father’s fault.”

      “Is he coming home, then?” I cried. “Will we see him?”

      “Lucy.”

      My mother stood very tall, and her face was so white that it shone in the murky light of the hallway.

      “I think it’s time you faced up to the fact that your father is never going to come back. He has deserted us, and now he’s lost our home.”

      I felt a tide of disappointment well up inside me and overflow into a flood of emotion that took over my small body, emotion just too great for a six-year-old to bear. So I threw myself on the floor, rolling and screaming and hurling abuse at my poor sad mother, who had all of a sudden gone so quiet. She looked down at me, arms crossed over her chest.

      “Well, you’d better get used to it,” she eventually said in a dull, flat voice. “I’ve had to.” Then her arms dropped to her sides, and she turned her back on me and started to leave. I felt a really bad pain deep inside my heart, and I sat up and stretched my hands out toward her.

      “Mom,” I called. “Mom.”

      She hesitated, and I scrambled to my feet, pleading with her not to go. She glanced at me with sad eyes.

      “Mom,” I whispered.

      The gloomy hallway felt as though it was closing in all around me. She held out her arms, and suddenly I was being squeezed so tightly that I couldn’t breathe and we were crying together.

      We sat like that for ages, my mom and me, on the bottom step in the murky hallway, until I had my good idea.

      “I know,” I said, feeling happy and sad at the same time. “My dad can sell his horse and then we’ll have some money.”

      My mom sucked in a great gasping breath, and she began to laugh louder than I’d ever heard her before, even when my dad was here and they used to be happy. She laughed so loudly that it started to frighten me because her eyes were wild. When her laughter turned to sobs again and her arms fell away from me, I went out of the front door and began to walk toward Homewood Farm. Daniel would know what to do.

      The farm seemed a long way down the lane. I stopped to watch a big fat bumblebee inside a purple flower, buzzing and buzzing so that the flower shook and wobbled. After the bee flew off, I picked the flower and tried to stick it into my hair, but it kept falling out, and in the end I just left it lying on the ground and carried on walking along the hot, dusty lane.

      The farm was a lot farther than I had thought it would be, and after a while I sat on the grass beside a wooden gate because my legs felt very tired. I wasn’t frightened, though—at least, only for my mom. And then I remembered the wild scary look in her tired eyes—the look that had made her appear like someone else—and I clambered to my feet. I had to get Daniel and Mrs. Brown. My aching muscles brought fat tears to my eyes, but I forced my feet into a jog and set off again along the lane, sobbing quietly in rhythm with my shambling strides, until at last I saw the high gray roofs of Homewood Farm, nestling between two softly rolling green hills.

      Relief overwhelmed me, and I stopped to stare at the familiar sign above the gate—as I always did when I visited with my mom. From below an arc of ornate writing, the painted black-and-white cow gazed down at me with big kind eyes. Sometimes the sign swung and creaked so much in the wind that I thought it might make the poor cow feel sick, but today it stayed motionless, as still as the air itself. In fact, the only thing that seemed to be moving anywhere at all today was the red tractor in the field they called the far meadow, just in front of the square stone farmhouse. The tractor was going up and down, up and down, and every time it drove across the field, green grass turned to brown. I watched for a while, just until my legs ceased to ache, and then the red tractor pulled up and Mr. Brown climbed out. I knew it was Mr. Brown because he was the only person with hair so red that it shone like flame in the sunshine, a bit like his tractor.

      He strode toward me with a worried smile on his big, kind face.

      “Whatever are you doing out on your own, Miss Lucy?” he asked.

      I liked the way he always called me Miss Lucy, and I rolled the word around inside my mouth, feeling special.

      “Where’s your mom, lass?”

      I remembered, and my bottom lip started to tremble.

      “She’s…she’s…”

      He took my small plump hand in his large, calloused palm and lifted me high into the air.

      “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go and find Mother Brown.”

      I felt so safe riding high on Mr. Brown’s shoulders that I began to feel better. I clung to his forehead as he marched us across the lane and through the orchard toward the house.

      “My mom’s very sad,” I told him, and I felt him nod.