What the Heart Wants, page 29
Madlove!
About Audrey Carlan
Audrey Carlan is a No. 1 New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal best-selling author. She writes stories that help the reader find themselves while falling in love. Some of her works include the worldwide phenomenon Calendar Girl serial, Trinity series and the International Guy series. Her books have been translated into over thirty languages across the globe.
She lives in the California Valley, where she enjoys her two children and the love of her life. When she’s not writing, you can find her teaching yoga, sipping wine with her “soul sisters,” or with her nose stuck in a sexy romance novel.
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Hello New Ends,
I wanted to connect with you personally to share how much joy and excitement I have that you’ve read What the Heart Wants. I developed the idea for this story after my dear friend and longtime personal assistant Jeananna told me her family history. Her mother is the real-life Suda Kaye Ross. Although she has left this world, she left her mark deeply. Through Jeananna’s account of her mother’s rich history, and her family line extending through the Comanche and Wichita Native American lines, I couldn’t help but come up with my own story of what life could be like for a woman who grew up on and off a Native American reservation.
Much of what I’ve included here is the result of hours of research, including a great deal of focus on the Comanche and Navajo language in order to be as accurate as possible with the few words I’ve used. Jeananna also shared some of her mother’s personal experiences, which allowed me to spin a fictional tale I’m very proud of.
Still, as a fiction writer I took a lot of liberties and would never wish to offend anyone. I know how rich and diverse the Native American culture and tribes are, and I’m thrilled to have been able to shed a little bit of light on such beautiful people.
Like Suda Kaye, I’m very much a traveler and adore getting lost wherever my travels take me. Because of the success of my stories internationally, I have traveled to many of the places that Suda Kaye has mentioned in her journey and am constantly fascinated by different places, cultures, food, clothing, customs and everything in between. I hope in my fictional world you find a little bit of wanderlust and seek out an adventure of your own.
As for sisters, well, I have three biological sisters and a couple soul sisters. I come from a very large Italian family where your sisters are always a part of every facet of your life, very similar to the way that Suda Kaye and Evie are with one another.
My goal with this book was to show that not all who wander are lost. Reading should be a beautiful escape. It should give you something to think about long after you see the words The End. My greatest hope is that a small piece of Suda Kaye’s, Camden’s, Evie’s, Milo’s or any of the characters’ experiences resonate with you, and you finish this story having taken something away with you. Maybe it’s the lesson that you can always go home. Which I wholeheartedly believe. Or perhaps it’s realizing that you’ve been so grounded in the day-to-day you haven’t given yourself a chance to really live for you. Maybe it’s that you need to reach out to your sister, cousin or friend and rekindle that relationship—as those connections can often fall away as life takes over. Whatever it is, my heart wants your heart to find what it wants.
Madlove,
Audrey
To Catch a Dream
by Audrey Carlan
Prologue
Ten years ago...
Tears track down my face as Tahsuda, my Toko, which is the Comanche word for “grandfather,” hands me a large stack of pink envelopes tied with a ribbon, my mother’s beautiful handwriting on the top. He hands another stack to my eighteen-year-old sister, Suda Kaye.
“From my Catori, for her taabe and huutsuu,” he begins, using the Comanche nicknames my mother gave us. “To have a piece of her on their birthdays. One for today, one for each birthday and important moment in your life to come. I shall leave you to your peace, but know I am here for you, forevermore.” Tahsuda puts his hands together under his worn red-and-black poncho and dips his head forward. His long, black, silky hair gleams a dark midnight blue in the rays of the sun’s light streaking through our bedroom window. His hair is so much like my mother’s I have to swallow down the sob that aches to come out in a flood of misery and grief.
Misery because I’m so angry at her for all the time we could have had together. Grief because she left this world six months ago, and today, on my twentieth birthday and Suda Kaye’s eighteenth, we are facing a full life without her. This isn’t one of her many adventures where she’d skip around the house, packing her battered suitcase and telling us all about what she hoped to see and do on her travels, while we stayed behind and went to school. Dropped off at the reservation where our grandfather lived as she fluttered around the globe for an undetermined amount of time only to reenter our lives months later with a smile on her face and a song in her heart as though she’d never even left.
At least she’d come back.
As much as I hated the fact that our mother left us for her adventures, I always knew eventually she’d find her way home. Her weary feet would be tired, and she’d come dancing into Toko’s home with grand tales about a world I didn’t ever care to see. Not if it was so great it kept taking her away. I didn’t want to go anywhere that made me up and leave my family for months on end. Them always wondering where I was, who I was with and whether or not I was okay.
No way. That was not me. And it never would be.
I finger the ribbon on the stack of envelopes and take mine to the papasan chair in the corner of our shared room. Suda goes to her twin bed and stretches out.
We live in a two-bedroom apartment in Pueblo, where Suda Kaye has just graduated high school. I’d started at the local community college in order to be close to my dying mother and sister still in high school.
The one thing Catori Ross never imagined could happen to her was illness. In all her grand plans to travel the globe, to experience absolutely everything she could, she didn’t factor in the time to get regular checkups. Since she didn’t tend to get sick, Mom hadn’t been to a doctor in a solid decade before she started to feel unwell. Her first round of tests after three solid months of lethargy and depression, two things our mother never had, gave us the first blow.
Cancer.
Stage four.
She believed with her whole heart that she could beat it, but as Toko says, cancer took his wife and his daughter. He says it was written in the stars. The same reason he never gave Mom hell about her traveling and leaving us with him. He’d always said a person must do what their heart wants. Dreams are not only for the sleeping. They are meant to be chased and caught.
Our mother lived. Chased every dream with a hunger that could never be quenched. I feared my sister would do the same.
Suda Kaye sits against her headboard as I cuddle into the chair. I untie the ribbon and then set all but the top letter to the side. The first envelope has today’s date on it and her nickname for me. Taabe, which means “sun” in Comanche.
Mom called me her sun because I was light everywhere she and my sister were dark. Mom was full-blooded Native American like Toko. Suda Kaye and I are half, with different fathers. I got a lot of my coloring from my father, Adam Ross. Like Dad, my hair is a golden blond and I have his icy-blue eyes. Though the structure of my high cheekbones, eye shape and full lips are my mother. Suda Kaye has dark, espresso-colored hair, amber eyes, and will one day have a knockout figure. She’s already growing into the womanly hourglass shape with the full bosom, long legs and rounded hips. Me, I have the tall, lengthy, athletic build. Still, there is no denying our heritage even with the play on light and dark in our coloring.
We are Catori’s daughters, a vibrant mix of her and our different biological fathers. Though Suda Kaye and I don’t know much about her real dad. We just know what Mom told us much later in life—that she had made a mistake. She and her husband, my father, Adam, were going through a rough time and separated for a year. In that year she’d gone on an adventure and come back pregnant with my sister. I was only two when she was born, so it never mattered to me one way or the other. My father treated Suda Kaye mostly the same, which also didn’t matter because he wasn’t around much either, always being on deployment.
I thumb the envelope and run my fingers across her pretty handwriting.
I miss you, Mom.
Taking a full deep breath, I ease back in the chair and open the first letter.
Evie, my golden taabe,
Never in a million years did I think I’d be in this situation. Gone from you and your sister’s lives in a way that I cannot come back from. I know you’ve always hated my need to wander, as it took me away from you and Suda Kaye, but you were never far from my mind or my heart. Never unloved.
I had to chase my dreams, taabe. One day, you’ll understand.
My greatest hope is that you know my love for you transcends any reality, location or final destination. It is as the sun, shining brightly each day. Never ending, always warm, forever shedding light onto you and your sister.
With me gone, without the burden of having to take care of me and Suda Kaye, I want you to think long and hard about what it is you want in life. Just you. Think big. Live out loud.
What is still out there to explore?
Where in the world do you see yourself visiting?
What new journey have you wished to undertake?
Think of all the beauty I’ve shared through my stories and photos over the years. Those experiences are a huge part of me. And I’m so grateful I had them. It gave me the ability to open your eyes to the fact that anything in life is possible.
My only regret was having to leave you and your sister behind. Though I hope now you will take time out for yourself.
Evie, you are so grounded. Your feet firmly rooted to God’s green Earth. Pull those roots, my lovely girl. Break away from all that keeps you still and give yourself an experience unlike any other. Perhaps then you will understand my need to go, to feel the wind in my hair, the sand between my toes, the gravel under my boots. I lived every moment to the fullest and I want that for you so deeply.
Please take the inheritance I left you and use it to live.
See the world, my precious girl.
With all my love,
Mom
I grind down on my teeth and wipe my nose with the back of my hand. I fold my letter into thirds and stuff it back into the envelope. Clearing my throat, I flatten my hand along the front before lifting it to my nose and inhaling the familiar scent of citrus and a hint of patchouli.
“Smells like her.” I clear my throat as a traitorous tear slides down my cheek.
Suda Kaye sniffs her letter and smiles sadly. “Mom always said if you’re going to smell like anything, let it be natural. Fruit and spice.”
“And everything nice!” I chuckle, then sigh as the weight of everything in my letter festers in my heart and soul, mixing with the layer of intense sorrow I haven’t removed in the six months since she passed.
“I miss her. Sometimes I pretend she’s just gone off on another one of her adventures, you know? Then I can be pissed off and plan out all the catty things I’m going to say to her when she finally returns with a suitcase full of dirty clothes and presents to smooth over the hurt of her absence.”
My sister gasps and her stunning amber eyes fill with more tears. “Evie, she didn’t want to leave...”
I grind down on my teeth, rekindling the anger that never seems to disappear when I think of all the years we lost with her. “Not this time, Kaye, but what about all the other times? Years and years of time lost. And for what?” I huff and stand, pacing our small room with mom’s letters plastered to my chest like a well-loved teddy bear. “Fun. Wild experiences. Adventures! It killed her. This need to see the greener grass on the other side.”
Scowling, I point at myself. “Well, that won’t be me. No way. No how. I’ve got my feet firmly planted on terra firma. I’m going to finish school, get my bachelor’s in finance, then my master’s, and make something of myself. And I’m going to be happy!”
How I’m going to be happy without my mother in my life, I don’t know. I never knew how to fill the hole she left with each adventure she took. It just seemed that the void got bigger and bigger, but my mother, she was such a glorious woman, an incredible presence when she was there, she could easily fill up that gaping wound that I call my heart each and every time she came back.
Finding that the pacing isn’t doing much, I toss my stack of letters onto the chair and drop onto the bed next to Kaye, face planted dramatically in the crook of my arms, my nose touching the mattress as I breathe deeply and try my best not to break down in front of my baby sister.
Slowly, she strokes my hair in long soothing sweeps of her hand. Once I’ve gotten myself under control emotionally, for now that is, I turn over.
“What did your letter say?” I ask.
Kaye licks her lips and glances to the side. We don’t have any secrets from one another, but I can tell this is one she’d rather keep from me. Eventually she caves and hands me her letter. Pulling myself up, I sit cross-legged and read out loud.
“‘Suda Kaye, my little huutsuu.’” I cover my mouth and close my eyes. Mom called Suda Kaye huutsuu, which in Comanche meant “little bird,” to my taabe. My sister has always been the one up for a grand adventure. She could make going grocery shopping the highlight of anyone’s week with her dramatic flair and interest in all things. Same goes for a laundromat, a car wash, a walk around the neighborhood. Always something to experience, to see, hear, sense. My sister soaks up life like a sponge until she’s wrung out, and then starts all over again. That apple did not fall far from the tree, much to my dismay.
She smiles wide. “Always and forever, taabe,” she responds.
Not wanting to make Suda Kaye get more emotional, I quickly read her letter. With every sentence my heart sinks. Basically, Mom tells my sister to leave home. To get in her car and travel the world, starting with the States. To leave me in order to allow me to find my own calling, without the worry of my baby sister there to hold me back. My stomach churns and acid creeps up my throat as I read the last couple sentences that tell her that if Camden, her longtime boyfriend, truly loves her, he will set her free.
My hands shake as I pass it back to her, my entire body stiff as a board. I feel as though I’ve been staked through the heart and left for dead.
My mother wants my sister, my best friend, to leave me.
To go away for as long as it takes to find herself.
“You’re not going to do it, are you?” I ask, the fear clear in my tone.
She bites down on the side of her cheek and nods.
“Kaye...you can’t do that. What about Camden? He won’t understand. A guy like that...the life he wants to give you. No way. You just...” I let out a breath, grab my sister’s hands and squeeze, trying to transfer all the worry and fear I’ll experience with her leaving me behind. And yet I don’t say a word. In this moment she has to make the choice that’s right for her.
I swallow down the lump of emotion swelling in my throat and whisper, “What are you going to do?”
She stares into my eyes, right through to my soul, and says the five words I never wanted to hear from her.
“I’m going to fly free.”
I close my eyes, lean forward and kiss her forehead. “I love you, Suda Kaye.” It’s the only thing I can say. It’s raw, honest and life changing.
“You know, you could come with me.” Her voice fills with hope, but the last thing she needs is me tying her down, trying to run her life for her. Mom made that very clear in her letter. Heck, she made it clear in mine.
Shaking my head, I cup her soft cheek. “You have to make your own choices.”
She nods, folds up her letter and puts it back in the envelope, then ties up the stack together once more.
My sister, not being one to let grass grow under her feet, pulls out a big suitcase from under her bed that Mom had ordered for her graduation and sets it on the comforter. Methodically, without saying a word, I help my sister pack up her things. The last item she puts on top of her clothes is a picture of me, Mom and her last year before Mom became too sick. It had been a good day and we’d taken a picnic to the park. Laughing, snacking, and listening to our mother share one story after another.
I knew then that those good days would be few and far between, so I encouraged her storytelling, while Suda Kaye ate up every ounce as though it were her very favorite dish.
Holding hands, I walk my sister to her car and put her suitcase in the trunk.
“Do you know where you’ll go after you see Camden?” I ask, knowing she wouldn’t leave without seeing him first.
