Heather Anne

It sounded so foolish the first time it came out of my mouth that I never, ever said it aloud again. My fourth grade teacher heard it and snorted. You’d think the sound of dream-crushing laughter would be cackley, but hers wasn’t. It was full-bellied and hearty; she was genuinely amused. I wanted the words to fade, to disappear. I wanted to bat them from the air and stomp them into the ground, mangling them beyond recognition. But they wouldn’t go away; they hung there, recklessly suspended in the air, while Mrs. Ellis chortled on. It had seemed so possible in my mind: I want to be a writer.

Harvey was six-years-old when I met him in an orphanage just outside Montego Bay, Jamaica. His smile was vivid against his perfect, dark skin — a counterpoint of innocence to eyes that were much too wise for a boy so young. He was the first person to make the proud ‘H’ in my name superfluous. “Edah” he called me, and I matched him grin-for-grin.

When he was a toddler he’d been the victim of a terrible car accident, but it took me an entire day in his classroom to realize that his left leg stopped just above his knee. I wonder how he felt when I didn’t notice, a few glorious hours without a label. When he watched me watch his leg, his smile lost its tinder. His eyes offered reprieve, should I, like so many before me, choose to walk away from him in that moment.

The bell rang for recess, and as the other kids piled out of the classroom, I lagged behind.

“What would you like to do?” I asked Harvey.

“You want to stay with me, Edah?” he asked, pulling himself to to a standing position and propping his half-leg on a chair.

I nodded.

“Maybe we could…swing?” he asked.

I said, “Of course.”

Harvey had never used the swings before. I sat him in my lap, instructed him to hang on tight, and propelled us back-and-forth and back-and-forth through the sticky summer air, laughing and gasping and squealing right along with him. For several days we did nothing but color pictures on construction paper and swing.

My hands were blistered from the chains by the second day, but I didn’t stop; I only had a week to love him. His chances of adoption were slim, and the cold truth was that he would probably stay in the system until he was eighteen, and then be set loose in the world with nothing more than a set of clothes and a pat on the back. I couldn’t stop it from happening, and I couldn’t do anything to save him, so I pushed us again and again on the swing, up and down, over and over, day after day after day.

I was in my early twenties the day I left the Montego Bay orphanage. Harvey crawled out onto the sidewalk and clutched the bars of the fence as I drove away sobbing. And I knew in that moment, no matter how foolish it was, I had to learn to write. There were people in the world without a voice; they needed someone to tell their stories.

The deepest desire of my heart is to one day call myself a writer, though the thought of hearing those words come out of my mouth again nauseates me beyond belief.

There is a children’s shelter near my home where I recently met a little boy named Jeremiah. Jeremiah wouldn’t interact with anyone when he first came to the shelter, so several weeks ago they asked me to try to chat with him. They call me The Story Lady there, because my bag is always full of picture books and chapter books and comic books and who knows what all. So when I introduced myself to Jeremiah I told him I was going to tell him his story, if he’d just help me out a little.

I made a little booklet out of construction paper and wrote some sentences at the top of each page, leaving the ending blank for Jeremiah. “In the summer, I…” “In the rain, I…” In the morning, I…”

I made a book for myself, too, and began coloring it. After a few minutes, Jeremiah peaked over to see what I was doing, and reached for a crayon. We colored in silence until he was finished. Quite proudly he handed me his book. I opened it up and marveled at his work. Then I began telling him his story. In the autumn he stomps on leaves. Crunch, crunch, crunch go the leaves under his big, brown boots. In the winter he rides his sled, whizzing, fizzing through the snow.

At the top of the last page, I’d written the words “In the dark, I…” And Jeremiah had colored the whole page black.

“What do you do in the dark?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “What do you do in the dark?”

“In the dark,” I said, “I hope.”

He titled his head to the side, meeting my eyes for the first time. “How do you draw hope?”

I told him maybe you can’t. But in the dark you can decide to not think of untrue things like monsters and ghosts. You can think of things that are true, like how you have a friend named Heather who thinks you’re awesome! And teachers who really, really love you! Then you think about other things you want to be true, too. And those things, well, those things are hope.

The next time I saw him, he was playing with some friends. He waved his book at me and shouted over the noise, “Hoping in the dark, Miss Heather!”

Every time I saw him after that he promised to hope.

One of the shelter workers called me Tuesday morning and said Jeremiah had a message for me. His chirpy little voice followed. “I’ve been hoping in the dark for a mom,” he said. “And Friday I am getting adopted! I won’t see you again, Miss Heather, but I’ve still got your book.”

I think Harvey liked to swing for the same reason we all like to swing. It’s not the flying backwards through the air without seeing where you’re going. It’s not the way your stomach flops around like a fish on the way back down. It’s not the push-and-pull of your legs, or the feel of the ropes against your hands. It’s that one second, at the apex of your ascent, when you’re not going forward and you’re not going backwards — when you’re just hanging in mid-air like a foolish declaration, and even gravity has no say. If you close your eyes in that moment, anything, anything is possible. You can fly. You can hope. And maybe, just maybe, if you shut your ears to drown out the laughter, you can even be a writer.