Wishful Thinking (3 page)

Hazel sat down on the toilet seat lid. She heard a strange noise, like a gasping, or a breathy cackle, and it took her a few seconds to realize she was laughing.

Posey had given her the wrong dress! Of course she had. Of
course
Hazel would have nothing to wear. Of course she wasn’t going to meet her mother tonight.

A wave of relief rolled up and over Hazel. She’d been given the gift of an excuse. An actual excuse, something that was totally and completely beyond her control.

But quickly, the wave crashed, and Hazel was left shaking her head.

Really?
Her mother, her birth mother, was in the room next
door, and she wasn’t going to meet her? Because of somebody else’s stupid mistake?

She ripped the gown from the hanger and stepped out of her jeans, leaving them in a pile on the checkered floor. She pulled the dress up to her shoulders, wriggled her arms through the sleeves, slipped her feet into the boring black flats she’d found at Goodwill the week before, and pushed her way out of the stall.

The bathroom was empty and there were mirrors on all three walls, sending Hazel’s reflection back and forth, deep into layers of glass. Hazel stood in front of a row of porcelain sinks, her breath trapped in her lungs.

She turned around.

Because, although she knew it defied the law of optics, she had no choice but to assume that the reflection she was seeing, over and over again, belonged to somebody else.

The dress was stunning. She could see that now. It was a shimmery, teal green, and short, just like the other dress had been. But instead of abruptly ending at her knees, it sort of billowed out from her hips, giving her pale, slightly knock-kneed legs a shape. The neck was an easy, swooping cowl, and the delicate cap sleeves gave her usually sticklike arms the illusion of sleek contour.

But more than the way it looked, Hazel couldn’t believe the way the dress felt. Usually, her clothes hung on her body uncomfortably. This dress felt like it was made especially for her, barely even touching her skin in some places and resting like a material mist in others.

Hazel twirled and watched as the skirt spun behind her. She could feel her lips cinching up in a smile, and was about to
take a second spin around when she heard low voices from the other side of the bathroom door.

Hazel scooted toward the sink and turned on a faucet, just as the door swung open. A petite woman with thick, blond hair passed behind her, dressed in head-to-toe black and bouncing a little girl on her hip. The girl was maybe two or three years old, her fine hair pulled back with rhinestone daisy clips.

“Wash our hands! Wash our hands!” the little girl was shouting gleefully, clapping her fingers together and holding her chubby arms out toward the sink.

“I know, I know, Bub,” the woman cooed as she flipped on the faucet with her elbow.

Hazel rubbed her own hands together under the water, trying not to stare. In the mirror, her eyes fell on the woman’s necklace, a simple chain with a purple stone or shell at the center.

“She’s in this water phase,” the woman said without looking up, and Hazel realized she was talking to her. “I don’t know what her deal is.”

“My deal, my deal,” the little girl sang, splashing in the running water. The woman rolled her eyes and smiled at the mirror, just as Hazel quickly turned, waving her hands beneath the automated paper towel dispenser.

Hazel collected her bag from the stall and made her way toward the door. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the woman kneeling low to the ground, whispering sweetly as she patted the little girl’s hands dry.

Normally, a scene like this made Hazel want to hit something. Without warning, her mind would instantly drift back to everything she’d lived without. All of the times she’d dried
her own hands, all of the nicknames she’d never had. Her blood would burn; the veins in her forehead would start to twitch. Why should somebody else get all of the things that she never had?

But not tonight. Tonight, as the woman in black straightened the hem of her little girl’s skirt, Hazel smiled.

At last, she was going to meet her mother.

H
azel stood outside the sleek, windowed dining room of The Slanted Door, waiting for some kind of sign.

She wasn’t exactly sure what
kind
of a sign she was expecting. Maybe a Moses-like parting of the seas, where the crowd of well-heeled guests would split down the middle, creating a clear path from one side of the room to the other. A beam of light, perhaps, shining down on one woman, standing alone with arms outstretched, waiting to embrace her daughter—the daughter she’d given up but never forgotten.

What Hazel saw, instead, was a roomful of strangers gathered in a four-star restaurant. In fact, if it hadn’t been for a framed announcement propped on a wooden easel by the door, it could have been any group of sophisticated diners, out for a meal on any weekend night.

Hazel caught another glimpse of her reflection in the glass, the shimmering shadow of her face staring back at her. Her hair, though still growing out, looked straight and silky, and even her choppy bangs were behaving for once. Her blue eyes,
which she’d always thought were too close together, sparkled and popped against the creamy white of her skin, and her nose, which was normally too long, looked, all of a sudden, elegant. She didn’t understand it, but somehow even her features had shifted. She was almost pretty.

Hazel steadied her trembling hands by clasping them together at her waist, blinked back a burning in her eyes, and took a step inside.

A low buzz of conversation filled the room, and people hovered in small groups around the sleek, brown leather booths. A buffet of fancy finger foods was set up against one wall, tiers of dumplings and tempura on shiny silver trays.

Hazel tucked her hair behind her ears and approached the unmanned hostess stand. The announcement listed the name of the foundation in a big, bold font:
ARTS FOR ALL
. And beneath it, a color photograph of the founder and director: Rosanna Scott.

It was a portrait-style headshot of a woman with long, thick gray hair, the kind of gray that was mostly silver. Her skin was smooth and her green eyes sparkled, her smile symmetrically perfect and bright.

For the first time in her life, Hazel was seeing a picture of her birth mother, and the first thought she had was:
Nice teeth.

Hazel reached out and steadied her hands on the bottom of the black metal frame. She was starting to feel dizzy, and took a few deep breaths as she glanced around the room.

Where was she? What would she be doing when Hazel saw her first?

A dense crowd had gathered at the bar. Hazel took a few steps closer, and noticed that at the center of the group was an
older man. He was by far the most casually dressed person in the room, wearing jeans and a navy blue button-down shirt. His salt-and-pepper hair looked uncombed and he leaned with one elbow on the bar, twirling a straw in circles against his glass.

Hazel stood with her arms stiff at her sides next to a centerpiece of tall, white lilies. At the other end of the buffet, an older woman with a short black bob was nodding as a tall, dark-skinned man with a speckled gray beard spoke.

“It’s just so terrible,” the man was saying. “I knew she’d been sick, but I didn’t realize how sick.”

Hazel folded her arms and turned away, uncomfortable eavesdropping on such an intimate exchange. But the couple was making their way down the table toward her, and the woman’s voice was high-pitched and impossible to ignore.

“It all happened so fast,” the woman sighed. “You know, I saw her just last month. She looked beautiful, as ever. Rosanna was so strong.”

Hazel’s breath caught in her throat, her heart squished against her ribs.

What
all had happened so fast? And did she say
was
?

“Excuse me, dear.” The woman was touching her shoulder now. “Could you pass me a plate?”

Hazel looked from the woman to the stack of plates at her elbow, white porcelain with gold stripes around the edges. With robotic movements she picked one from the top and passed it over.

“Sorry,” Hazel heard herself saying. “Were you, did you just say …?”

The woman stared at Hazel, her eyes warm and understanding as she touched Hazel’s elbow. “Were you a friend
of Rosanna’s?” she asked. Behind her, the man was tilting a miniature ceramic pitcher over his plate, pouring a stream of thick, dark soy sauce onto a pile of sticky white rice.

“Um, no.” Hazel’s vision blurred. “Rosanna?”

The woman continued to nod like a slow-motion bobblehead.

“Yes,” the woman said, selecting two pairs of chopsticks wrapped in red linen napkins. “It’s wonderful that they decided to go ahead with the event. Rosanna worked so hard on it every year. And I know she would’ve wanted us to remember her together.”

Hazel felt her eyes widening, her pulse raging in her ears. She looked around the room. Everyone was dressed in black. The somber man at the bar, receiving condolences. It wasn’t a party. It was a wake.

The man dropped a heavy hand on the woman’s shoulder and leaned in, whispering something about finding a table by the window. The woman smiled at Hazel and gave her elbow a final squeeze before following her companion across the room.

The ferry was just about to leave when Hazel scurried on board.

She had scrambled out of the restaurant in a haze, pushing open the double doors and shoving her way through the crowds of tourists arranging themselves into photographable poses as the sun slipped behind them and into the bay. Without thinking, she’d walked across the dock toward the boat to Marin, only remembering to buy a ticket when prompted by the indifferent attendant at the booth.

Her face was already wet with tears by the time she found a seat outside. The night air was cold and the wind whipped loose strands of hair into her stinging eyes.

Rosanna Scott was dead.

All of this time, they had been living so close, at times maybe even neighbors. For all Hazel knew, they could have ridden the same trolley. Or been stopped at the same crosswalk. Her whole life, the one person she was searching for was literally around the corner.

And now she was gone forever.

It was unfair, Hazel knew. But she was over
fair.
She didn’t even know what fair was anymore. When every day finds new and exciting ways to let you down, you start to expect disappointment. But she hadn’t expected it to hurt so much.

She’d never even met Rosanna. But now that she knew she never would, she felt an emptiness, sharper and deeper than anything she’d ever felt before. When Wendy had died, Hazel had been so little. Her entire relationship with her adoptive mother was a tapestry of holes, woven out of foggy memories, a handful of Roy’s stories, and the knowledge that Wendy was already dead.

Even though Hazel had only known Rosanna’s name for a few short months, she’d spent a lifetime imagining that her birth mother was out there, waiting to be found. Just the idea of her was a distant comfort, like the shadows of a mountain range, hugging the desert horizon. The idea that somewhere, just on the other side of those peaks, there had to be more than this.

And now that idea was dead, too.

Hazel leaned against the boat’s metal railing. There was
nobody else on the deck; everyone had already found a spot inside, protected from the brisk ocean chill. Hazel couldn’t feel the cold. She dropped her head in her hands and sobbed, tears tripping down the front of her hand-sewn dress.

First Wendy, then a life of being barely remembered, tossed around like an afterthought. Now this? How much more was she supposed to take?

“It isn’t fair,” Hazel whispered into the crook of her elbow. “I just wish I’d gotten to know her first.” Hazel exhaled, a choppy hiccup, and folded her arms behind her knees. Her pulse beat like a metronome in her ears, marking time between each sniffle and sob.

At first, it felt like a tickle. An itch, just above her cheekbone.

Thinking it was a tear caught between her lashes, Hazel lifted her head and brought a hand to her face. But the tickling had stopped.

Instead, she felt a flutter on her knee, near the pattern of fallen tears where her cheek had been pressed against her dress.

Then, she spotted a little golden patch, like a tag, at the hem of her skirt, just above her knees. She lifted the material off of her skin and realized that the patch was a tiny embroidered butterfly.

Funny, she thought. She hadn’t noticed anything there before.

And then something happened. She was sure she was dreaming, because it looked—and it felt—like the butterfly was moving.

Hazel brought the green-blue fabric closer to her eyes, and
sure enough, the little golden wings were flapping, the butterfly freeing itself from the silky material of her dress.

Hazel scrambled to her feet. It must be shock, she thought. This must be what people mean when they talk about grief making you crazy.

But just as she was beginning to breathe again, she felt one last flutter against her kneecap, and watched with wide, clear eyes as the glowing butterfly detached from her dress. It flapped its delicate wings, hovering for a moment at eye level, and then zipped out over the water, disappearing against the sinking sun.