Page 43

Now

gets Amber’s bike from the back of the garage where her father had hidden it. Is it a bike? Has it really been hidden? These distinctions never mattered much to . Seeing something is not the same as believing, and believing something does not always require seeing.

Her mom has sent Aunt Pauline inside with her boyfriend, both of them delirious with exhaustion, to rest. It’s just the immediate family as wheels the bike out front.

“Is she gone?”

her mother asks .

“Am I gone?”

Amber asks .

Amber is standing next to her. But Amber has always been next to her.

“I still see her,”

says.

“Will you tell her that I’m going to be okay?”

Mom says. “I didn’t think I could stand losing her again but I’m not, not really losing her this time. I’ll keep her close, like you’ve done, .”

“Tell her I heard that,”

Amber says. “That I love her. I’ll always love her.”

“She heard that,”

says. “She loves you. She’ll always love you.”

Her mom starts to sob but it’s a different tenor than it has been all these years, not choked in grief but laced in joy, because love and loss are the flip sides of the same coin. She’s grieving Amber because she lost her, but she’s not entirely losing her because she loves her.

“Did you always know I wasn’t going to stay?”

Amber asks.

wasn’t sure until Amber told her that she’d seen Dina. Then she knew. It was why she didn’t break up with Lenny. Well, part of it. She really didn’t believe in goodbyes. People stayed around so long as you kept them close.

“I guess I wasn’t really a miracle,”

Amber says.

disagrees. If you pay attention, you see that miracles are everywhere. In a sunrise. In a bicycle accidentally locked to another. In the way that memory and love and belief can keep a person around long after they’re gone.

She hands her sister the bicycle. Amber takes it.

“I’ll see you soon,”

tells her, because she will, as she always has.

And then she takes her mother and father by the hand and walks them back into the house.