Recap: Hope enjoys dancing in the production. At the end, she is shocked to see that her mother is there. Hope is so thrilled to be reunited with her parents. They take her back with them to Maine. She feels torn, as she will miss the Jacobsons and the Beth Jacob School.
I thought of Rivkah and her sisters preparing for Shabbos. I thought of the Beth Jacob School and the teachers, and I thought with a pang that I was missing all of that.
That night, I dreamed of Alyson again. She was stepping out of the photograph and pointing at her heart. “Follow your heart,” she said very clearly, and then she stepped back into the photograph and disappeared.
I woke with a start.
It was one in the morning. I went to the kitchen to get a drink and found Father sitting at the table reading a book.
“Father, I’ve had strange dreams that I have to ask you about.”
“What do you mean, Hope?”
“Father, this is the second time I dreamed of Alyson.”
“Alyson!”
I told him about the dream when I was kidnapped, and how the police said that a young woman with blonde hair pointed them in the right direction.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” Father said.
Then I told him about the dream tonight with Alyson telling me to follow my heart.
Father froze. “I want to tell you about Alyson. Tomorrow morning, Mommy and I will tell you.”
I fell back asleep in a dreamless sleep.
The next morning, Father and Mommy were seated at the breakfast table. Mommy brought me a plate of pancakes with maple syrup and a mug of hot cocoa.
She kissed my head. “I think it’s time we told you about Alyson,” Mommy said. She had a sad faraway look in her eye.
I didn’t want her to be sad.
“Please, if it will make you too sad...”
“No, you need to know the truth.”
Father cleared his throat. “Alyson was our first child. She was a beautiful little girl and she grew into a lovely young woman. When she was 15, she wanted to go on a teen tour out West. We could never say no to Alyson. She was very headstrong, though Mommy was worried about the safety of the tour. It turned out that Mommy had good reason to be worried, but we let her go.
“She sent postcards that summer from Arizona and Nevada. She was having so much fun. Then one night we got a call from the head of the tour. Alyson and another girl were missing. We flew out to Arizona. They went missing by the Grand Canyon. We stayed there a week. Police searched.”
Tears streamed down Mommy’s cheeks. “It was so awful, Hope.”
I put my arms around Mommy.
Father shook his head. “The other girl, Lily, was found, and she told us what happened. Alyson and Lily wanted to do the hike down the canyon, and they went without enough food and water. Alyson always loved a challenge. Lily led the police to Alyson’s remains.”
Father stopped. He was crying.
I didn’t know what to say. My hope all this time that Alyson was still alive was gone. Yet, Alyson had come to me in a dream not once, but two times, and Alyson had led the police to rescue me. I was sure of it.
“Do you think a dead person can somehow come back and help us?”
Father shrugged.
I thought about the message Alyson had given me: Follow your heart.
What was my heart telling me to do? I knew the answer. I wanted to go back to the Jacobson house and to the Beth Jacob School, but how could I leave my parents, especially now when I knew what happened to Alyson?
To be continued…
Susie Garber is the author of the newly released historical fiction novel, Flight of the Doves (Menucha Publishers, 2023), Please Be Polite (Menucha Publishers, 2022), A Bridge in Time (Menucha Publishers, 2021), Secrets in Disguise (Menucha Publishers, 2020), Denver Dreams, a novel (Jerusalem Publications, 2009), Memorable Characters…Magnificent Stories (Scholastic, 2002), Befriend (Menucha Publishers, 2013), The Road Less Traveled (Feldheim, 2015), fiction serials and features in Binah Magazine and Binyan Magazine, and “Moon Song” in Binyan (2021-2022).
