Page 33 of The Last Letter of Rachel Ellsworth

Chapter Twenty-Six

The hotel was tall and narrow, Hotel Altheda, and their three rooms took up most of the top floor. In her room, Mariah flung her body across the bed and fell almost instantly asleep, her belly full, her body tired from travel.

For the first time in nearly a week, it was natural sleep, unassisted or impeded by alcohol or painkillers or antianxiety meds.

Her mind flashed pictures of pleasant things at first, a dream about running when she was a child, faster than all the other kids at the track meet, her hair flying behind her.

Her mom had not been there, but Jill had been, cheering and screaming when she took the blue ribbon.

And then, abruptly, she was at the ER, a small army of people around as she drifted in and out, holding her mom’s hand as the team examined her leg, the wound in her side, her face, which bled buckets. All three wounds hurt so much, so loudly, and she kept telling them It hurts! It hurts! It hurts!

A nurse held her other hand, trying to calm her. “We can’t give you anything yet, sweetheart, but it will get better soon, I promise. Hold on, Mariah, hold on. Keep talking. Squeeze my hand. We need to know you’re still with us.”

She looked at her mother. “What do they mean? Am I going to die?”

“No, baby. You’re going to live. Keep holding on. I’m right here with you.”

In her hotel room in Paris, she bolted upright, straight out of sleep, gasping for breath.

Her heart raced, and she pressed both hands against it, trying to suck in a breath, one two three , out two three four five six , but her brain was racing, touching memories and strange moments all at the same time, and it didn’t work.

After struggling to her feet, she grabbed her water bottle out of her backpack and took a long drink. The action eased the building panic, and she was able to take a breath.

She’d taken three bullets. The worst injury was her leg, a shattered femur, but more drastically, the femoral artery had been nicked.

Not blasted, or she would have died, but she still lost a ton of blood, and at the time the nurse had urged her to keep talking, the team had been all but certain they would lose her before they could get her into surgery.

The bullet in her side had miraculously not touched any of her vital organs and passed straight through her body.

The bullet that skimmed the side of her face had been a horror when she first woke up, but on that, too, she’d been lucky. Only flesh was mangled, not her brain.

When she awakened days later, she cried out for her mother. Jill was there, trying to soothe her, but she wouldn’t be dissuaded. “I need to talk to her,” she cried. “Find her!”

Jill broke the news that Rachel had died instantly.

“No!” Mariah protested. “She was with me, the whole time!”

Jill wept at that. “I’m sure she was, honey, but her physical body was somewhere else.”

Even now, Mariah could remember her mom at her side in that ER, holding her hand, looking into her eyes. “Hang on. You can do it,” she’d said, her clear eyes very direct, like lasers.

But of course, she had not been there. Mariah had actually known that on some level. Hadn’t she seen her mother fall?

In her current state of slight confusion and a growing sense of health—despite the setbacks—the whole thing suddenly struck her as completely bizarre.

That they’d gone shopping for avocados and tomatoes and had in fact been discussing the ways to choose an avocado—the give of the skin, the marker of the stem end—when some random person just came into the produce aisle and shot them like they were targets in a video game.

Like, for no reason. Just because he could.

In her Paris hotel room, she limped to the window, rubbing her thigh more out of habit than pain. Across the way, she could see a bank of apartments and a tricycle on the balcony. People’s voices reached her, speaking not French, but some other language she didn’t know.

Had her mom really been there in the ER, or had it been a hallucination? “Mom,” Mariah said aloud now, “I’d like a sign. Are you out there? Or is it just a big dark space on the other side?”

That was why she kept wanting to talk to Tyler Henry, the psychic. Or the seat belt guy. They’d channel some message from Rachel, some proof that she wasn’t just gone forever, but waiting in some other dimension.

“Stop it,” she said, and shook her shoulders vigorously. She wasn’t that person, some airy-fairy girlie girl who believed in crystals and spells and gods or heaven or past lives. She was the opposite of that.

Or she had been. Stripping off her clothes, she headed for the shower. It wasn’t until she stepped into the tiny stall that she realized she was mulling over the words of the medium in Brick Lane: The bookstore will give you some help.

What did the bookstore lead to? What had her mother hidden all these years? What were all these clues adding up to? What had Rachel been trying to do?

Maybe they’d find some answers here. After a time, she fell back to sleep, and woke up to change into fresh jeans and a T-shirt from the Sochi Olympics.

Today, they’d stop into Angelina. That was an easy stop, a place Rachel and Mariah had visited often when Mariah was small.

She thought about the drinking chocolate and the little boxes of treats, and suddenly couldn’t wait.

The sun was out, she was young, and they were in Paris on a quest.

For the first time in a very long time, she felt not only alive but also glad to be. What came next? She had no idea.

But today, she would drink chocolate at Angelina.