There she was again, the beautiful little girl swinging from the low bough of the jasmine tree. Clouds of white petals rained down on her, peppering her hair and her dress. Then she was gone, and the petals that had landed on her fell to the ground with the rest.
I wanted to meet her and ask her name, but each time I got close, she would disappear. I wondered where she went as I looked up and down the row of buildings. All I saw were people walking, shuffling or being wheeled in and out of the many clinics, pharmacies and single hospital.
I hoped she was not sick because she was so young and so full of life. I walked down the paved path, trying not to look into the deep drain alongside it because its depth made me feel dizzy. Yet I couldn’t resist not looking every now and then, because rainbow colored carps swam in it and a gold speckled green tortoise sunned on the square of concrete jutting over it. The water was crystal clear, and it seemed to grow ever brighter the deeper I looked.
I heard the doctor’s voice calling me, so I crossed the narrow street in front of the hospital and rode the elevator to the women’s ward on the second floor. My frail husband and grown-up daughters were there, either wiping their face on their sleeves or sniffling into crumpled knots of tissue paper.
“I’m not dead. Why are you all crying?” I said, but nobody paid me any attention. I climbed back into bed, a little annoyed that I had been called back from my lovely walk just to meet with people who couldn’t be bothered to talk to me.
“I am sorry,” the doctor said, “there is nothing we can do for her now. The cancer has spread to the marrow in her bones. Not even the morphine can give her much relief.”
My younger daughter Julia began to wail. Mary, the elder more sensible one, struggled to maintain her composure as she said, “There must be something we can still do.” The doctor shook his head.
As I got under the blanket, a kind of numbness settled over me and then a flaring pain. Yet none of that mattered as I gazed upon my daughters’ grief. Suddenly it all made sense to me; the little girl, the fish and tortoise. Everything outside was perfect because that was how I had always imagined what life would be like when I grow up. I had wanted them so much when I was a girl I had painted them over and over. The little girl was my doll Baby come to life, the rainbow colored fish were the first Japanese Carps my father had given me and the tortoise was little Peggy, whom I had always imagined I would have one day.
I watched my family’s faces and said, “I know now. It is time for me to go soon. Don’t cry,” I touched each of their cheeks but I could not wipe away their tears, “don’t cry. Mama is going to a perfect place now.”
Slowly the pain left my body. The doctor leaned down and took my pulse. He looked at the time on his watch, and declared my time of death to my family then he covered my face with a blanket.
A child grabbed my hand and pulled me out. It was Baby. “Hello, Mama. I am so glad you are coming home.”
“Where is home?”
“It is under the rainbow. Exactly where you’ve always wanted it to be. There is a beautiful big pond there for Peggy and the Kois. In the middle of the pond is a pink flower so big, we can sleep in it.”
“That sounds beautiful.”
“Oh yes, it is.”
“But it must have been a lot of work to make it home. Who helped you?”
“You did, Mama. Each time you cry and when you are hurt or disappointed, you always wished for us. That was why you could remember us enough to see us.”
“What if I had not recognized you?”
“Then you won’t be able to come home with us. We are your memory of heaven. You can’t go where you can’t remember.”
We step out of the hospital and into a garden filled with cherry blossoms of red, pink and white. Crystal bright butterflies danced between the branches and unicorns rubbed their horns against the boughs to plaster bedewed petals onto their mane. And in between the trees I saw clusters of cabbages and ripening pumpkins. We walked to the middle of the garden, to the edge of a pond filled with lotuses in bloom. Baby led me down a wooden walkway to the center of the pond, towards a giant pink flower.
We climbed a silken rope ladder into it. The petals were powdery soft and the center felt like a mattress filled with the softest cotton. I parted the petals to gaze down to the pond and watched Peggy swim in circles and munch on leaves. The carps came up one after another blowing bubbles and waving their feathery tails. I watched enthralled. Above me, stars began to appear in the clear sky.
“It never rains here,” I said and lay down.
“Everything is as you want it,” Baby said as she cuddled next to me.
I turned to look at her. “But what if I had never imagined of this place?”
“Then you will go to another place.”
“What do you mean?”
“You can’t not imagine another world. Whatever you long for, you will get.”
“That is good to hear. It means everyone goes to heaven.”
Baby sat up and furrowed her brow. “Not everyone longs for beautiful things.”
“That can’t be true.”
She hesitated for a moment then said, “Your mother was obsessed with proving your father wrong in everything, and your father’s only desire was to prove himself successful to her. They don’t share your heaven. That is why they are not here.”
“But why?”
“Because you always get what you desire. If your nature is love, you grow in love, if your nature is hope, you grow in hope and if your nature is hate, you grow in hate.”
“But that means that all the things I’ve learned in life were useless.”
“All you needed to learn, were learned when you had me. Everything else after that was because of what you had learned when you had me.”
I looked up to the stars and smiled. My daughters used to draw cherry blossoms and unicorns and clouds of butterflies, and my husband used to tell me that he had always dreamed of owning a farm where he could grow fat pumpkins and round cabbages.
“Will I ever see my family again?” I asked.
“They know your heaven and you know theirs. You will recognize each other when it is time to meet.
I smiled as I thought of the ripening pumpkins. My husband would be here soon, and I would like so much to be there to see the joy on his face when he sees his little corner in heaven.
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