The We-We Promise — Cozy End Pages
THE WE-WE WOODS AND THE RAINY HEART
A Wiwi and Friends Story
Featuring Rebecca Lau
The mud on Rebecca's goalkeeper gloves had dried into cracked brown continents by the time Mum pulled into the driveway.
Rebecca didn't move.
She sat in the passenger seat staring at the gloves in her lap, at the number one written in silver marker on the back of each finger — Molly's handwriting, careful and round, done the night before the season started with a glittery gel pen and a great deal of ceremony.
Number one goalkeeper, Molly had said, very seriously. Official.
Rebecca pulled at a loose thread on the left glove.
"You saved four shots," Mum said quietly.
"We still lost."
"You saved four shots," Mum said again, because sometimes the only thing to do is say the true thing twice.
Rebecca said nothing. Her nose was running again. Her throat felt like someone had sandpapered the inside of it, and her head had the particular heavy underwater quality it had possessed for the entire week — that thick, cotton-wool feeling that made everything too loud and too bright and too much.
She had not said goodbye to Molly.
Molly had not said goodbye to her.
Rebecca pulled harder at the thread.
"Molly's mum was taking her for school shoes," Mum said. "She had to rush. It wasn't—"
"I know," Rebecca said. "I know."
She didn't entirely know. She knew the fact of it but not the feeling of it, and those were two completely different things.
Inside, the house smelled of the week — of cold medicine and steam from the humidifier, of the particular staleness of a house that had been closed up against October. Mum opened the kitchen window two inches anyway, letting in a thread of cold air and the smell of wet leaves.
Rebecca sat at the kitchen table in her mud-stiff kit and watched Mum move around the kitchen with the quiet efficiency of someone who has fed a sick, sad child before and knows exactly what is required.
The chicken noodle soup appeared from nowhere, it seemed. Rich and golden, with thin noodles that moved softly in the broth and small pieces of chicken that broke apart at the touch of a spoon. Steam rose from the bowl in slow curls. Beside it, a plate of bread — the real kind, home-baked, with a crust that made a hollow sound when you tapped it and a soft interior that pulled apart in long, warm strings.
Rebecca ate slowly.
She didn't say it was good. She didn't need to. Mum knew.
Outside the kitchen window, the oak tree in the yard was losing its last leaves, sending them spinning one by one onto the wet grass in small, individual surrenders. The afternoon light was the particular grey-gold of late October, the kind that makes everything look simultaneously beautiful and slightly melancholy, like a photograph of something you're about to miss.
Rebecca tore a piece of bread and dipped it.
The tightness in her chest loosened, very slightly.
"Wait here," Mum said, once the bowls were empty.
She disappeared down the hallway. Rebecca heard the soft sounds of the house — the tick of the heating, the distant murmur of the neighbour's television, the oak tree brushing its remaining fingers against the kitchen window.
Mum returned carrying a book and a long, flat box with a blue lid.
"This came this morning," Mum said, setting them on the table. "I was saving it."
The book had a cover the colour of a summer meadow — deep green with a circle of golden light at its centre, and in that light, a small white bunny with the largest, most expressive ears Rebecca had ever seen. The bunny was mid-leap, caught in the air with both ears flying, surrounded by floating bubbles of every colour. Beneath the image, in letters that seemed to be made of woven grass and flower stems: We-We and the Colour Meadow.
Rebecca looked at it for a moment.
"The pen set too," Mum said, opening the long blue box.
Inside, in neat rows like a small sleeping army, were the most beautiful markers Rebecca had ever seen. Each one a different colour, each cap matching its ink, arranged in a spectrum that ran from the deepest midnight blue at one end to the brightest, most impossible yellow at the other. And at the top of the box, in its own special holder, a small cordless airbrush the size of a hairbrush, white and clean and somehow suggesting magic.
"Can I—" Rebecca started.
"That's what it's for," Mum said.
Mum opened to the first page.
It was a double spread — the meadow in outline, waiting. The grass suggested in long curving lines, the great oak at the centre with its branches reaching, the bubbles floating above in empty circles ready to be filled.
Mum picked up the airbrush.
She looked at Rebecca with an expression Rebecca recognised as her mother deciding to be silly on purpose, which was one of Rebecca's favourite things even when she was determined not to admit it.
Mum aimed the airbrush at the sky section of the page.
And sprayed a perfect, fluffy cloud directly onto We-We's head.
We-We now appeared to be wearing a cloud as a hat.
It was extremely dignified.
Rebecca made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. It was more of a laugh's smaller cousin — a sudden exhale through the nose, quickly suppressed.
Mum sprayed another cloud. Slightly lower. We-We now had a cloud hat and a cloud scarf.
The sound Rebecca made this time was definitely a laugh. Short, surprised, slightly unwilling, but entirely genuine.
Mum began to read.
Her voice settled into the particular rhythm of the story — warm and unhurried, rising at the funny parts, quieting at the gentle ones. We-We's ears moved on every page, telling their own story alongside the words — drooping when she was uncertain, shooting upright when she was curious, folding softly when she was content.
By page four, Rebecca's head was resting on her arms on the table.
By page six, her eyes were at half mast.
"Why don't you," Mum said softly, "take We-We to the sofa."
The living room held the best fire in the house.
It was a real one, with real logs, in a stone fireplace that had been in the house longer than anyone currently living in it. The stone was the colour of old honey, and in firelight it glowed amber and deep gold, and the heat it put out was the serious, substantial kind that settles into your bones and tells them to stop worrying.
Rebecca pulled the blanket from the back of the sofa and wrapped it around herself, the We-We book open on her knees, the pen set on the cushion beside her.
Above the fireplace, the photographs.
She knew them all by heart but looked at them anyway, the way you do with things that matter.
Great-great-grandfather Lau, in a photograph so old it had gone the colour of weak tea. He was standing beside a section of railway track somewhere that was all sky and distance and hard flat land, wearing the funny, wide hat slightly too large for him and an expression of complete seriousness, as though he understood that this photograph needed to last a very long time and was conducting himself accordingly. He had come from a village in the old country with two other men from his street, and between them they had helped build seventeen miles of track across the flattest, widest country he had ever seen, and had stayed, because by the time the track was finished, the flat wide country had become his.
Grandfather Lau in his police uniform, straight-backed, proud, the badge catching the light.
Dad's baseball in its glass case, game ball from the regional finals, the leather worn smooth in the place where his hand had gripped it ten thousand times.
Rebecca looked at them until the fire blurred them softly at the edges.
She looked back at the book.
We-We's ears were drooping on the page, just slightly. Rebecca picked up a marker — the softest purple, the colour of the sky just before it decides to be night — and carefully, slowly, coloured the first bubble.
Her eyes grew heavy.
The fire talked quietly to itself.
Rebecca's eyes slipped from the page.
And then she was somewhere else entirely.
The meadow was exactly as it had been in the book, except that everything was real — the grass genuinely that green, the oak genuinely that large, the bubbles genuinely floating and genuinely glowing and genuinely smelling of warm honey and something that had no name but felt like the first morning of a holiday.
We-We was sitting on a root of the great oak, her ears at full attention, and she looked at Rebecca with the particular expression of someone who has been expecting you and is very glad you finally arrived.
"Rebecca Lau," We-We said, as though the name itself was something to be pleased about.
"How do you know my name?" Rebecca said.
"Your mum wrote it on the inside cover," We-We said practically. "Come and sit down. I need your help."
Rebecca sat.
We-We's ears performed a complicated movement that somehow communicated both relief and continued worry. "My two friends," she said, "Dollar and Fenn. They had a silly argument three days ago about the best way to stack acorns — which doesn't matter at all, but they've both decided it matters enormously, and now they won't speak to each other, and they're both sitting on opposite sides of the meadow being separately miserable, and everyone else is miserable watching them be miserable, and I've tried everything I can think of."
Rebecca was quiet for a moment.
"What kind of everything?" she asked.
"I brought Dollar a flower. I brought Fenn a particularly nice stick. I told them both separately that the other one felt bad. I organised a group acorn-collecting activity which they both attended and spent entirely ignoring each other in a pointed way."
"Did you tell them," Rebecca said carefully, "that you missed them? Both of them? Together, I mean. That it's not actually about the acorns and that when people you love won't talk to each other it makes you feel like something is broken that you can't fix yourself?"
We-We's ears went completely still.
"No," she said quietly. "I didn't say that."
"Sometimes," Rebecca said, and she was surprised to find that she knew this, that it had been sitting in her chest all afternoon waiting to be said, "people don't need someone to fix it. They need someone to say out loud that it hurts."
They found Dollar on the east side of the meadow, sitting with her silver tail wrapped around her paws, staring at nothing in particular. They found Fenn on the west side, his amber fur caught in a shaft of late light, doing the same.
We-We stood between them, in the centre of the meadow, under the great oak, and said:
"I miss both of you. At the same time. And this is the worst week."
There was a silence that lasted exactly as long as it needed to.
Then Dollar's tail unwrapped. Then Fenn stood up, slowly, and walked toward the oak. They didn't hug — they weren't quite there yet — but they stood close enough that their shoulders nearly touched, which was close enough for now.
We-We looked at Rebecca with an expression of such pure gratitude that Rebecca felt something unlock in her own chest — some small, stuck thing that had been there since the final whistle, since the empty space where Molly had been standing, since Tuesday when her voice had gone and she had been short with everyone and hated herself for it.
"Thank you," We-We said.
"Tell Molly," Dollar said quietly, to nobody and everybody, "that the number one is still on the gloves."
Rebecca woke to the sound of the fire settling.
The book was open on her chest, the purple bubble half-coloured, the marker still loosely in her fingers. The photographs above the fireplace glowed in the firelight — Great-great-grandfather Lau in his funny wide hat, Grandfather in his uniform, Dad's baseball in its case.
"Mum?" Rebecca called, her voice still rough at the edges.
Mum appeared in the doorway, tea towel over her shoulder, eyebrows raised.
"Can I use your phone? I want to ring Molly."
Mum's expression did something quiet and pleased that she didn't make a fuss about. She simply handed the phone over and went back to the kitchen.
Molly answered on the second ring.
"Did you get good shoes?" Rebecca said.
"YES — purple stripe — are you feeling better?"
"A bit," Rebecca said. "Sorry for being weird this week."
"You had a cold," Molly said firmly. "You were allowed. Also — you saved FOUR shots."
Rebecca looked at the We-We book. At the half-coloured bubble, the soft purple bleeding into the white of the page like a small, quiet sunrise.
She picked up the marker.
She finished the bubble.
The We-We Promise — Cozy End Pages:
What would YOUR We-We bubble colour be today? Can you colour it in and tell someone what's inside it? Who could you say "I miss you" to this week? Draw the photographs above YOUR fireplace. Who would be in them?
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