Free Missing Rose (9781101603864) by Serdar Ozkan Page B

overgrown with roses and from behind them came the singing of nightingales.
    You spoke to me once more:
    â€œIf you want to hear my voice, walk the path in the garden. Hold the gardener’s hand and listen to the roses.”
    â€œOh, Mom, it’s so far away. There’s a whole ocean between us and I don’t know how to swim!”
    â€œDon’t be afraid, just walk. If you leave your baggage, the water will bear you.”
    â€œBut I don’t have any baggage.”
    â€œBelieving that the water won’t bear you is heavy baggage. So put it down and walk.”
    â€œBut, Mom, where will this path lead me?”
    â€œTo me.”
    â€œSo I can really be reunited with you in
this
world?”
    â€œYes, in this world.”
    I could never get this dream out of my mind and lived with the hope of it coming true. Three years later, when I was traveling with a friend and her family, I noticed a rose garden hidden at the back of the guesthouse where we were staying. A little further on I could see Topkapı Palace, which seemed very much like the palace I’d seen in my dream. As soon as I saw that garden and the palace, I felt this was the place you’d wanted me to visit. I wasn’t mistaken.
    Zeynep Hanim, the lady who owned the guesthouse, was an extraordinary person; she was a “non-Other.” She was the Someone Who Knows I’d been waiting for all along—the one who would help me hear your voice. She took me for magical walks in the rose garden and, before long, she taught me what I needed to know in order to hear roses. The seeds she sowed in my heart enabled me to hear a rose speak to me years later in my own home.
    Hopefully, in my next letter, I will tell you about this third phase of my journey to you.
    With all my love,
    Mary
    It wasn’t the first time Diana had read this letter. But this time she felt a little different. She thought about how her twin had devoted her life to finding her mother. The intensity of the feelings she had for her mother, the never diminishing longing, her determination to find her . . .
    Well, perhaps Mary was fantasizing too much; perhaps in her letters she was talking about the things she wished to experience, rather than the ones she’d actually experienced. Maybe she was crazy, or maybe just a lover of fantasy. But one thing was for sure, Mary loved her mother deeply. More important, Mary had managed to keep her mother alive in her heart for so many years; something Diana now found impossible to do.
    And now, at a time when Mary thought she was about to meet her mother, she’d lost her forever. Perhaps Mary didn’t even know this. Or perhaps it was because she’d learned her mother was going to die that she’d decided to take her own life, just so she could be with her as quickly as possible.
    In her dream, her mother had said Mary would see her in
this
world. But the imagined world Mary had built for herself came crashing down as this promise turned out to be a lie. Mary would never be able to see her mother again in this world.
    â€œJust like me,” whispered Diana.

20
    M ATHIAS HAD FINISHED his painting at midnight. Yet he was still in the park as dawn broke, wrestling with the question he’d been unable to answer throughout the night: should he change the name of his exhibition to “The Changing Seas of Rio de Janeiro” or not?
    The sea along this coast was also constantly changing, so he could rent a small bungalow nearby for the summer and paint all his pictures in the park. It would certainly be interesting. But he was having a hard time making up his mind. Just for the sake of a summer full of inspiration, he didn’t want to begin a relationship which he knew wouldn’t last.
    Walking to his jeep, he grabbed two bottles of Coke from the cooler, an action that didn’t go unnoticed by the beggar who hadn’t yet switched to the sitting position he adopted during