Aiden, still living with his grandmother while his mother is in a psychiatric hospital, believes that his late grandfather’s ghost visits him at night. With his brother, Martin, and his grandmother’s friends Rita and Margie, he tries to help his mother escape from the hospital, and the attempt fails. When Aiden tells his grandmother what the ghost has said about the night his grandfather died, she is shaken, and an old family photograph seems to confirm a vision his mother once had. On the next visit, the grandmother signs her daughter out of the hospital herself.
In a few minutes we heard loud voices in the hall. “I’m taking her home, Nancy Nurse. I’m her mother, and I was appointed guardian by the court. Haven’t you got a bedpan to empty?”
They entered the room.
“Let me get in touch with the psychiatrist on call.”
“That won’t be necessary. Nothing he says will change my mind. . . . Laura, get up, dear. We’re going now. You’re free.”
“Please give me a few moments to collect the paperwork, Mrs. Mulroy. You need to sign her out A.M.A. That means against medical advice.”
“I know what it means. I’m a nurse, too. Do what you must.”
My mother and I were already packing her suitcases.
“I’m sorry for bringing you here,” my grandmother said to Mom. “You should be home with Aiden and Martin.”
Nanna signed the necessary forms, and we left. Before getting into the car, both my mother and I saw him. My grandfather was sitting on the grass beneath a tree. He smiled and waved to us. A star shone in the twilit sky.
“Hurry up, slowpokes,” my grandmother said, then turned towards the tree. “What are you looking at?” She followed our gaze.
“Hope,” my mother said, laying her arm over my shoulder and guiding me into the backseat before closing my door.
When they were inside, I said, “How can you see hope?”
My grandmother started the car and looked at my mother. “Hope is sitting right beside me.”
Mom touched the back of my grandmother’s neck. The car moved forward.
I opened my mother’s sketchbook. An image of a painting fell out. She had begun copying it, using different shades of pencil. A blindfolded woman wearing a green gown sat atop a light brown globe, her head bent to the left. She played a lyre with a single string. In the background, one star sparkled in the gray-blue sky. Printed underneath the reproduction was “Hope, 1886, George Frederic Watts.”
From The Weight of Small Mercies.
I opened my mother’s sketchbook. An image of a painting fell out. She had begun copying it, using different shades of pencil. A blindfolded woman in a green gown sat atop a light brown globe, her head bent to the left. She played a lyre with a single string. In the background, one star sparkled in the gray-blue sky. Printed underneath the reproduction was “Hope, 1886, George Frederic Watts.”
[The story continues for several paragraphs, including a stop on the way home, and closes:]
In my mind, I saw the picture of my grandmother as a panicked young girl in the tree. A brother rescued her, Martin would always rescue me, and we had just rescued my mother. At this very instant, people throughout the world were helping one another. I reclined, listening to the low sound of wheels on the pavement. My mother was free. In a sense, my grandmother was also free. In my “deep heart’s core,” I knew everything would be alright. Soon we would all be home.
I opened my mother’s sketchbook. An image of a painting fell out. She had begun copying it, using different shades of pencil. A blindfolded woman wearing a green gown sat atop a light brown globe, her head bent to the left. She played a lyre with a single string. In the background, one star sparkled in the gray-blue sky. Printed underneath the reproduction was “Hope, 1886, George Frederic Watts.”
In the 2018 printing, the story goes on past the painting: a stop on the way home, then a closing paragraph in which the boy tells the reader what the day meant, that everyone was rescued, that everything would be all right, that they would soon be home. In The Weight of Small Mercies, the story ends with the painting. (The stop on the way home was an apology for harsh words spoken earlier; the revision softens that earlier scene, so the apology is no longer needed.)
The ending now asks the reader to make the connection. A few lines earlier, the mother has answered the boy’s question with one word, “Hope,” and a star has shone in the twilit sky. The painting arrives with its own star and its own title, and the story stops. This is the same change seen in “Copacetic” and “The Crosswalk” above: the closing explanation gives way to an object.
A suggestion. If a story ends with a paragraph about what everything meant, you might try stopping one paragraph sooner, at the last image, and ask a reader whether anything is missing.
Read the story whole in its 2018 printing.