Sister of My Heart

We bonded over ponies and stable boys. Balancing on the line between little girls and young women, we spent every single free moment riding or giggling in the haystacks behind the stables. My memory colors those four years with soft sunlight. It must have rained, we were in England after all, the horses must have been bad-tempered, there must have been days when we were angry or out of sorts, we were pre-teens after all. We must have fought. But, I don’t remember it.

She was my very first best friend. The first sister of my heart. I’ve been lucky enough to have others. At different times in my life, different women have walked beside me and been my confidante, my soul mate, my safe place. I hold them all tightly in that place in my chest that constricts when I remember sunlit moments, but she was the very first and I hold her tightest of all.

We talked every day on the phone. She laughed at me, the silly American girl, when I said ‘call me.’ I laughed at her, my beautiful British friend with the wide, infectious smile, when she said ‘ring me.’ Her whole family mocked my speech patterns and accent.

“Waaaah-ter,” they’d drawl. “It’s woh-ter, you heathen,” her father would tease me, “use the Queen’s English.”

When we met, we were ten. Immature and endearing in that skinny, little girl way. When my family packed up and left England for my Dad’s next assignment, we were thirteen. We crossed over together from dolls to ponies to boys. We whispered our first crushes and our first kisses in the hay with our packed lunches, smelling of sun and sweat and horses. We galloped bareback, with only halters on our lathered ponies, laughing hilariously at risk, mocking fate.

We sobbed our goodbyes and swore to stay in touch forever. For a while, we fulfilled our promises with puffy letters with heart-dotted ‘i’s and glittery pony stickers on the outside. She flew to America and spent a summer with my family. We struggled to connect, to know each other as teenagers. Our friendship might have faded after that, become brittle and tinged with yellow the way old mementos do, but just as the knot began to fray, email arrived. We both caught a hold of the rope ends and held tight.

After college, kindred, globe-hopping souls, we traveled, but separately, always writing, always sharing. Just missing each other in Thailand. Maybe next year in Australia. I might come to London in the fall. I’ve always wanted to ride in New Mexico. It never worked. Life marched on. Married, moving home from Matt and I’s last overseas fling, warm with the knowledge that we were on the verge of something different, a break with our footloose past, I passed through London, but she’d moved to Africa, met a man who would become her husband.

And then we were women, wives. Still emailing. Still joined at the heart somehow. She lived in Uganda with her husband. She lived my dream, while I gave it up a little at a time for other smaller dreams. My heart took blows I know she felt with me. I lost a baby, my first taste of mother pain. I became a mother of four in three short years. Then, watched one of them leave me too.

I see her as my other half, the wild, adventurous soul I still long to be in quiet moments. Twenty-five years after the haystack secrets, my heart still flutters to see one of her notes in my inbox. “Dearest Stacey….Uganda is brilliant (such a British expression, brilliant)…We’ve purchased land overlooking the Nile…Your darlings are beautiful…We’re having a baby.”

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Do you ever have a super hero complex? I do. In my fantasies, I can’t fly or lift trains or intercept missiles. I can manipulate time and molecules. Maybe it’s a God complex.

I swim through the bloodstream of a five year old boy, entering his bone morrow at the exact moment that one of his cells mutates off-kilter. I catch it. Eat it. And leave. No leukemia, just a healthy, happy child.

I sit in the SUV beside the driver moments before it slams into the back of a car carrying a two- year-old, a longed-for, tried-eight-years-for, miracle baby girl, and snaps her neck. I touch the phone the driver holds with invisible fingers and the connection is lost. He looks up. Slams on the brakes in time.

I am inside her uterus. I touch fingers oh so gently with a tiny baby girl. I whisper in her miniature seashell ear, “Wait. Not yet. Lie quiet. Sleep. Grow.” My fingers trace over the powerful muscle, quietening the contractions. On the way out, I touch her cervix, draw it closed, make it strong and firm. She grows, uninterrupted for fourteen more glorious weeks, padded and sheltered and safe.

I am a powerful man, two-hundred pounds of muscle. I round a corner of a dark street. I slow and smile at the nervous, dark-haired girl walking to her car. She hurries. Undoes the lock with fumbling fingers and climbs in, locking the doors quickly behind her, watching me. As she drives away, I turn briefly and watch the predator slink back into the shadows.

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The email last week was from her mother. My own heart is broken for you, heart-sister. I know the barest echo of your pain and it is too much. If I could take some of it from you, for even a moment, give you a moment of respite, I would. If I had such powers, I would use them for you, even if I got one and only one chance. Even if I had the power to change only one thing in the entire universe. I hope you know that three thousand miles is not too far away to feel the rending and tearing in my own beating muscle as yours gives way. As it is, I can only send you what I have, sunlit giggles behind the haystacks, wild gallops across the meadows, a little warmth and light in the dark. And love. I love you, always.