A Heartbeat Away. Eleanor Jones

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      My mom arrived home just after my seventh birthday, and my birthday was about the last day I spent at Homewood. Mr. and Mrs. Brown bought me a lovely red bike, so that I could visit them often, they said, which made me feel just a tiny bit better. Then Daniel handed me a card with a pony on the front. Inside it, he had written, “Happy Birthday and I promise to give you 100 riding lessons on Chocolate.” That was my best present of all because it meant that I could come to Homewood Farm a hundred times more and maybe even learn to ride as well as he did, or almost as well.

      On my very last night, Mrs. Brown came to my room to tuck me in. She hugged me and made loud sniffing noises into her hanky.

      “Everything will be all right, lovey, you’ll see,” she told me. I hugged her back and breathed in the scent of violets as hard as I could, right down into my lungs so that her fragrance would become a part of me forever.

      When her gentle footsteps faded down the stairs, I curled up into a tight little ball, wrapping my arms around my pillow and trying to remember about my mom and my dad, and how things used to be before he went away. But I couldn’t get past the memory of my mom’s wild eyes, blazing like coals amid the dead pallor of her face. All I could recall were the bad times, and I quaked in fear of the tomorrows. And then I heard a knock, just the gentlest tap, and a shadow fell across the beam of light from the half-open doorway, Daniel’s shadow.

      “You okay?” he whispered. I uncurled myself and smiled through my tears.

      “I am now,” I told him.

      For a moment he hesitated in the doorway, then he tiptoed over and perched on the side of my bed, saying nothing, not needing words. And when I awoke next morning, he was gone. But it didn’t matter, because I knew that he had been there, and always would be there when I needed him. It made me feel safe again, I suppose.

      CHAPTER 5

      Christmas. It figured higher on my undulating tide of memories than any other time. It was almost Christmas when my mom arrived home, a poor sad shadow of the person who’d gone away, and it was Christmas when my dad returned to haunt her.

      We lived just down the lane from the Browns now, at Box Tree Cottage. My mom had said that we had to move because my dad lost our other house, but that can’t have been true because it was still there; I saw it every morning on my way to school. I liked Box Tree Cottage, though. You could see the fells from my bedroom window.

      I had only one present on our first Christmas there. It was from my mom, and it lay beneath the tree that Mr. Brown had brought us. Mrs. Brown and Daniel had helped decorate it on Christmas Eve. While we two children hung baubles on its spiky branches and breathed in the scent of fresh pine, the excitement that only Christmas can kindle bubbled up inside us, turning the sparkling decorations into something truly magical.

      Mrs. Brown stood on a wooden chair to put tinsel right at the top of the tree, then she jumped down, rummaged in the big box of decorations and withdrew a small figure all dressed in silvery white, with gossamer wings and golden hair.

      “Come on, Mary,” she insisted, holding the decoration out toward my mom. “Why don’t you put the fairy on the top.”

      My mom was sitting in her high-backed chair, staring into the crackling flames of the fire with a distant expression in her eyes. It was nothing, though, compared with the pinched anger they had used to show, and anything was better than the wild desperation that had been so frightening just before she went away. So I didn’t mind a bit—at least she didn’t shout at me anymore—and sometimes I almost felt sorry for her she looked so sad and gray.