Songs For Your Mother Gordon MacMillan (good books for 7th graders .txt) 📖

it. It ain’t easy, and it’s as hard for children as it is for anyone else. Some days are going to be tougher than others. You have to get through it. That’s all you have to do. Get through it and don’t look back, she says.

I repeat this advice to myself: all you have to do is get through it and not look back. It’s what Lauren wrote in her notes. It’s the ‘looking back’ part that I am stuck on. Everything about the situation with Lauren and Luke is about looking back. I’m looking back, and he’s looking back and together we are looking back to the same place. We are both looking back to her, looking back to Lauren. I don’t think that I can get through this by not doing that.

‘I’m not sure that I can,’ I say. ‘Not look back.’

Lauren smiles at me, and I remember she had such an easy smile, and it chokes me to think about it.

You have to do it for Luke, and you have to do it for me. I think you probably have to do it for yourself as well. I’m long gone for you. I know that isn’t easy to hear. The past is a nice place to visit – it isn’t somewhere you can live. The past is another country, isn’t that what they say?

I nod, something like that, I’m thinking. I’m pretty sure that is what they say. Right then, I am not thinking about that. I am thinking about what Susan said right at the start of all of this when Luke first arrived on my doorstep.

Susan said that I had ‘to go back’ and that I had to ‘find that girl’. Before her, TSP said it after I came out of the hospital, when she gave me the plane tickets that I never used. I couldn’t go then and when Luke arrived Josie told me not to go looking. For a good reason. There is a chance she might already be gone, but there is still a chance that she is out there somewhere, and if she is I need to act. I need to do it for Luke, and that’s now the most important thing here.

‘I know what I have to do,’ I say.

See? Like I said, get through it and don’t look back.

‘That isn’t what I’m going to do. I’m going to find you, wherever you are,’ I say.

That’s the one thing you shouldn’t do. You shouldn’t try to find me. It won’t help. It will only make things harder. Maybe not right away, but later, and that is what you have to think about as Luke’s father, Lauren says, and then she is gone. Her words have run dry.

I’m alone as I was before, with the words from Lauren’s notes ringing in my ears. I take a bite of my sandwich, and I slowly chew as I stare across the kitchen. I look back up the stairs to where Luke is sitting. He hasn’t moved since he sat down.

I turn on the radio and the afternoon show on BBC 6 Music. I find myself listening to the gentle aching voice of a woman singing. Her voice stirs something in me and, at first, I am not at all sure what it is. Maybe it’s the guitar, a particular chord and the way it’s being played catching me and matching my mood? You know those times when music catches you unawares, moves you, evokes a feeling and takes you somewhere, and you are not entirely sure why?

Before I can examine this thought, Luke springs to life like someone flicked a switch. He comes bounding down the steps into the kitchen, and he is clapping his hands.

‘Josie, Josie,’ he is saying.

I look at him strangely for a moment, unsure why he is shouting her name. Is she going to magically appear? Right now, nothing would surprise me. I’m a slow study; it takes me a few moments to realise what’s happening and to put two and two together. Maths isn’t my strong suit. It isn’t only the chords I recognise on the radio, it’s the voice. It’s sending me hurtling back six years to that bar in Santa Cruz. I have a bite of food in my mouth, and I slowly stop chewing as I listen.

Funny how I remember, the conversations in the flowers, the pauses that were filled,

By the stream, now sometimes I cry,

When I remember happier times, the way that I could laugh without feeling insincere…

I point to the radio. ‘This is Josie singing,’ I say.

Luke nods slowly, I think entirely for my benefit as if he, too, reckons I’m a little slow on the uptake. There is something else. It might be Josie singing, but they are not her words. These are Lauren’s words. It’s the song that Lauren played me that night as we sat on her bed in her apartment. It sends my head spinning and sets my heart racing.

It’s like Lauren is calling to me again. She must have given the song to Josie. We listen to the end of the song, and the DJ says that we have been listening to Josie Hayes singing ‘Fleeting Memories’.

It has to mean something that right when we needed it, out of nowhere and out of the past, came the road sign we needed. It’s another simple twist of fate. It’s how this all started: it began with the music, and we’ve all been playing ever since.

Luke returns to watch TV, a little livelier than before, and I pick up my phone, and I call Susan. She answers on the third ring.

‘You were right,’ I say without any introduction.

‘I was? That does sound like me,’ she says. ‘Remind me what I am right about?’

‘I need to go back,’ I say.

‘You need to go… Oh wait, are you talking about going back to California, or wherever you think this girl might be?’ she says.

‘That’s exactly what I’m talking about,’ I say.

‘That’s what