A New Life for Hope

A strong hand suddenly grabbed my arm, keeping me from falling into the icy grip of the water.
“Wha-?” I gasped, waking as if from hypnosis.
“Hope!” An anxious voice called me, brought me back from the edge.
I looked back at the cool, calm water. I shouldn’t have let it take hold of me, I realised - it was cruel and cold, not kind.
Countless mad thoughts rushed through my head in a single second, as I fell helplessly away from the brink of death.
I looked at my rescuer, to find I was staring into the concerned face of a stranger - no, not a complete stranger - I knew him; I had to know him, from somewhere – how did he know me?
“Hope, thank god you’re okay, Gerard’s been going crazy looking for you!” the man cried, the direct words offset by a kindly, though worried, smile.
“Uhh, who are you?” I tried to say, but the words came out as a weak whisper, and I slumped to the ground against the side of the bridge.
“I’m Frank…” the man frowned, still holding onto my arm as if I might fly away if he let me go.
“What were you doing out here? ….actually, I can see what you were doing,” he paused, and the intense look he gave me was not critical, but concerned.
“Why?”
The stress of the last hour or so finally caught up with me then, and in the presence of someone who didn’t know anything about me, yet somehow cared if I lived or died, I found myself crying for what must have been the hundredth time that week.
“Shh, it’s okay, you don’t have to tell me if you can’t.”
Frank sat down next to me while I sobbed, somehow comforting me in his companionable silence more than Maria and Gerard, for all their well-meaning, could; because they were involved, and he wasn’t.
Eventually my sobs abated, and all that it seemed was left of me was damp, icy bones and rasping breaths that were testament to a half hour or more just crying.
Frank had obviously noticed I had calmed, for it was then that he looked over, and offered me his hand.
“Come on, if you think you can handle it, I’d better take you back. And if you’re worried,” he went on, “I won’t tell anyone what happened here, until you’re ready to tell them yourself.”
I nodded, too exhausted to bother arguing, and let Frank walk me back in the direction of the house.
We walked in silence for a few minutes, while I concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, until I looked across at Frank’s innocent looking face and made up my mind.
“It was all just too much…” I said abruptly, my thoughts forming word before I realised what I was saying.
“What? Oh, you mean why you…” Frank said, taking a second to work out what I was saying.
I was going to be quiet again after that, but somehow once the words had started coming out, I couldn’t stop them, and found myself telling Frank about my mother, and all the things I had been through before she died, and after – all the way to finally finding out who my dad was, and deciding that I couldn’t deal with everything, all at once.
By the time I had finished, Frank was nodding understandingly, before he stopped on the street and looked at me with his head tilted to one side.
“You know what, Hope?” he said. “I think you’re one of the bravest people I know.”
“Right,” I said sarcastically, too tired to muster up any real energy to dispute it. “You just pulled me off the edge of a bridge, and you say I’m brave. The whole reason I was up there was because I couldn’t take it anymore.”
By then I was close to tears, but Frank had a half-smile on his face.
“That’s exactly it, though. You got this far, without giving up until just now, and I don’t think anyone else I know could have made it to here. You’ve just got to keep going a little further, and then you’ll see why you’ve kept fighting for so long already.”
And just knowing that someone else believed in me brought a small, tired smile to my face, while the tiny flame of hope that had been all but dead inside me started to flicker to life.