“Avila,” Gigi asked, “do you know who created Blueberry Trail?”
“Of course,” Avi responded. “Your mom.”
“Yes, when she was little, she’d spend her summers hunting blueberries. Of course, back then the trail started at the beach.”
“Then she grew up and moved away, and the birds ate all the blueberries,” Avi said, ending the story the same way Gigi always ended it for her.
Gigi believed in talking about the dead to keep their memories alive, but just the happy memories. She said there was no point in discussing the unhappy moments in the lives of those who had gone before us, because life had plenty of unhappy moments still to come for each of us. My great-grandmother’s life was no exception. Gigi never discussed with Avi or Lisieux exactly how young her mom was when she left this place. Even with me, she never discussed why she left so young.
“Have you found any berries yet?” Gigi asked Avi.
“Not yet,” she said.
“You might have more luck when we get to the slope,” Gigi said, referring to what we called our side of the mountain. Nature had the other side.
Gigi winked at me as Avi lost interest in our great-grandmother’s life and focused on her hunt for the elusive late-season blueberries.
I smiled to myself. My grandmother, the devout, novena-praying Catholic—raised by her bohemian, psychic-visiting mother—was the sanity and balance we so deeply needed in our lives. What Avi didn’t realize was that Gigi’s mother, Dorothy, had run away from home when she was fourteen—the same age Lisieux was now.
I couldn’t imagine Lisieux setting out on her own. I was three years older and couldn’t imagine myself leaving, either, especially not without my dad’s encouragement and support.
Maybe that was the difference. My dad was a good man, respected and liked by everyone, especially by us. Gigi’s grandparents, from the little bit I had been told, were not respected or liked by anyone, especially not by their daughter.
An image of the decrepit inn entered my mind, along with Luca’s strange questions about it and what seemed like fear. I replayed the conversation. Now I understood that Luca had been afraid of the inn. Why, I didn’t know. An awareness came to me. Perhaps he was right to fear it. Dorothy didn’t leave at fourteen because she was running to somewhere; she had nowhere to go. She left because she was running away from somewhere. That somewhere was the inn.
I knew very little of her story. Dorothy left this place and eventually wound up in New York City. How she got there, I had no idea. She found a job working for a wealthy family, caring for their children. That position lasted for three years, until it became clear Dorothy was pregnant. They threw her out. A young, unmarried, pregnant nanny brought with it scandal, and the family chose not to have that.
Dorothy couldn’t find work as an unmarried mother-to-be and was quickly going through her miniscule savings. So she created a husband who had died, leaving her expecting their first child. The lie didn’t get her much, yet it did allow her to find a job as a housekeeper at a hotel, along with a small room to live in with her newborn daughter.
Gigi’s mom never married. She had some acquaintances, but no true friends. Her life was hard, too hard to live for long, and she didn’t.
Before she died, Dorothy returned to this place with her twelve-year-old daughter. Dorothy hoped her parents would allow her daughter, my Gigi, to live here. Dorothy must have decided her parents were a better option than leaving Gigi alone on the streets of New York. Dorothy died a few weeks after she and Gigi returned to this place.
When Gigi came to live here, business was booming and her grandparents were clearing the land to build a hotel. The hotel would never actually be a hotel; instead, it became our house.
A few months after her mother’s death, Gigi found her mother’s journal and learned the truth about her father. He was the wealthy man who had employed a young girl to care for his even younger children. Instead of staying here with her grandparents, Gigi decided to go to the man who got her mother pregnant.
I never questioned before why she’d do such a thing. Her mother hadn’t viewed him as an option for assistance. She had chosen the parents who she’d run from over asking him for help. Or perhaps she had sought help from him but never received it. Either way, Dorothy didn’t perceive her former employer, the father of her only child, as someone who could help that child. For some reason, Gigi did. I wondered if Gigi might have been running to him instead of running away from this place. She was strong-willed, independent, and lived for adventure; she was a great deal like Avi. Whatever the reason for her leaving this place, she did. She was twelve when she came here and thirteen when she left.
Many weeks later, when she finally knocked on his door, she learned he was dead and so was his wife. Seeing his children, Gigi said, was like looking in a mirror. She never told them who she was. She simply turned and left the grand house where she had been conceived.
She was sitting by the gate to the New York estate, feeling lost and hopeless—a feeling she said was worse than any other. It was there, in utter hopelessness, that she met my grandfather, or as she called him, the greatest gift God ever gave her.
His family took her in, allowing her to stay with them until she found a job and a place to live. This was the first true family she had ever known. She and my grandfather became friends—best friends. As the years passed, their friendship blossomed into something even more beautiful.
They were married when she was seventeen and he was eighteen. She said their life together was a fairytale come true. They loved deeply, laughed often, and together had unending hope.
He was the one who led her to God and the church. She joked that she followed Grandpa to church and he followed her to Maine.
“I found some,” Avi yelled from above us.
I blinked. I hadn’t realized she’d climbed part of the slope.
“Bleeck,” she said, spitting them out. “They’re rotten.”
Gigi laughed and so did I.
“You seemed lost in thought,” Gigi said as we waited for Avi to climb down.
“I was thinking of you,” I said.
“Me?” Gigi said with surprise.
“Of your mom and your life with her,” I said.
She looped an arm through mine. “It was a life very different from yours, and I’m glad of that.”
“Glad your life wasn’t so boring,” I said.
She squeezed my arm. “That’s not what I meant. Your life is far from boring, and it would’ve been good if mine was a little more … predictable.”
“Then you wouldn’t be you,” Avi said from behind us as she jumped the last few feet onto the trail.
Gigi released my arm and bent forward to kiss Avi on the forehead. “It’s true I’d be different, but I’m not sure it’s true I wouldn’t be me. The more we do God’s will for us, the more we are who we were created to be. So, perhaps if I had known him earlier in my life, I would be even more me.”
Avi slipped a hand into Gigi’s as she skipped beside her. “No, I don’t think so,” Avi said. “I think you are who you are supposed to be, wrinkles and all.”
Gigi always told Avi her wrinkles came from misbehaving as a child. It was her way of trying to convince Avi to behave.