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I freeze in the doorway. Although the music is playing and the wheelchair is right where I left it, Virginia herself is gone. I scan the room, stupidly, as if she’s merely been misplaced and not completely missing from the room.
By the front door is a table normally used for mail and car keys. On it sits a single sheet of paper bearing six typed lines.
Holding my breath, I pick it up and begin to read.
At sixty-nine, Virginia Hope
Wrote her nurse this little note
Thank you, dear, for saving me
Now it’s time to let you be
I take my leave, walking tall
Knowing that I fooled them all
My dearest Kit,
I hope you’re not surprised to receive this letter. I hope you knew, deep down in your heart, that I would contact you again. Leaving you the way I did was for the best, you see, even though I hated doing it. But I was afraid of how you’d react once you learned the truth.
Then again, you always suspected I was capable of more than I let on. To most people, my silence and stillness rendered me almost invisible.
But you, Kit, saw me.
And now you know the truth. I can walk, talk, and use my whole body. Right now, I bet you’re wondering why I spent such a long time pretending I couldn’t. The reasons are many, beginning with the simple fact that at first I had no desire to move.
I was as surprised as anyone when I survived my suicide attempt. And disappointed as well. Despite a miracle occurring, I still wished I were dead. I longed for it. I wanted the sweet relief of death so badly that I pretended I truly had died. I simply lay there, not moving, trying not to breathe.
Stupid as he was, Dr. Walden might not have been entirely off base with his diagnosis. For something was indeed wrong with me,although I’m still unsure if it was physical, mental, or emotional. Perhaps it was a combination of all three, which rendered me paralyzed even though I technically wasn’t. All I know is that I felt lifeless, mute, and immobile. And so that’s how I stayed.
I might have remained that way forever if it hadn’t been for Archie, who refused to leave my side. “You’ll get better one day, Ginny,” he often whispered. “I’m sure of it. And when you do, we’ll find your son.”
That got me wondering if he was right and that it was possible to one day find my little boy. The more I thought about it, the more I felt a spark of the old me still burning inside.
Without letting Archie know, I began the drawn-out task of forcing my body to start working again. It began with a wiggle of the fingers on my left hand and ended many, many years later with me walking around my room in secret.
I suspect the first question you have is: Why didn’t I leave Hope’s End then?
I wanted to. I wanted so many things. To travel. To run and dance and sing. To raise the child who was so cruelly stolen from me.
But I was frightened of what was beyond Hope’s End. I knew the world had changed greatly since my youth. I feared that if I were to leave, I wouldn’t recognize it. But Hope’s End was familiar, and I took solace in that familiarity. Even a prison becomes comforting if it’s the only thing you know.
The second question I bet you’re asking yourself right now is: Why didn’t I tell at least Archie that I could move, walk, talk?
The answer to that is slightly more selfish. I didn’t tell him because I feared my sister would find out if anyone else knew. And after she’d returned from Europe, where she lived the kind of life I had long dreamed of, I wanted to punish her. That’s the brutal truth of the matter.
At first, I simply considered killing her. A murder for which I would have happily taken the blame.
But death is quick.
And I wanted her punishment to last a long, long time.
So I made myself the burden she thought me to be. She assumed she was punishing me by keeping us both here. In truth, she was only punishing herself, and I enjoyed watching it. Think of it as a variation on the game my father forced us to play. I finally won. And the amount of time I chose to keep Lenora in her room was more than fifty years.
But it wasn’t just about animosity toward my sister. The main reason I stayed was because I wanted to be there in case my son ever decided to come looking for me. I feared that if I left, he’d never know where I was and therefore would never be able to find me.
The idea that we might one day be reunited was, to me, worth the wait.