As Calla grasps it, she's enveloped by the scent of lilies of the valley.

"Welcome home,"a voice says-but it isn't her own.

And it isn't her sister's.

Looking up, Calla sees her mother. Their mother.

She smiles, and then she's gone.

But not really, Calla reminds herself. She's never really gone, and neither is the love.

If you look hard enough, you can always find it.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.

My widowed father still lives in the big old Victorian house where I grew up, though he's lonely there without my mom. Everything is exactly as she left it, right down to the book she was reading- an advance copy of my latest, at the time-her place saved with a bookmark and set on the table next to her living room chair, where she always sat at night and read. She not only lived in the house but died there, too, four years ago this spring. It was on her birthday that April that the doctors told us there was nothing more that could be done to treat her breast cancer. She pa.s.sed away a few weeks later, two days after Mother's Day.

This past April, my father returned home after a few weeks away to a very strange phenomenon. After it had gone on for a few days, he called me and told me about it.

"Do you have any idea what it means when a bird flies into your window?"he asked.

"It means the bird probably needs gla.s.ses,"I joked.

He gave an obligatory laugh, then said, "I was serious. Do you know what it means?"

"Um . . . well . . . did it die?"

"No, no, it's not like that. It didn't happen just once. It's been happening over and over again, for days now. I hear it tapping at the window on the stairway landing, and when I go to look, there's this bird. It backs off with its wings flapping and it flies headfirst straight into the window. Then it does it again. And again. What do you think it means?"

I told him I had no idea. Frankly, I figured that either the bird was losing it- or maybe my father was.

A few days later we spoke again, and he told me it was still going on. "It starts in the morning,"he said, uncharacteristically unsettled, "and it goes on all day. The same bird. Over and over."

I'll admit I thought he had to be exaggerating. Still, I did a bit of research online. I found out that, once in a while, a bird will mistake its reflection in a window as another bird in its territory and fly into the gla.s.s, usually injuring or even killing itself in the process. But for it to happen repeatedly, over a series of days? That was definitely far- fetched.

"Do you think it means anything?"my father asked me, and I knew what he was getting at.

He wanted to know if I thought there was anything paranormal about it. He tends to view me as the expert on that sort of thing, because I write books about it. And I tend to view him as a skeptic- though he's slowly coming around.

"I have no idea what it means,"I told him, and we dropped the subject.

A few weeks later, I made the trip home with my family to celebrate my grandma's birthday. The first morning, I woke up in my childhood bedroom to a tapping sound. I got up and crept over to the top of the stairs . . . and sure enough, there at the window on the landing was a bird. It backed up, flapped its wings, and dive-bombed the window. Then it did it again. And again.

It went on all day.

"See?"my father said. "I told you. It's trying to tell me something."

We were all fascinated- my husband, my kids, my father, and I. But not my grandmother-my mom's mother. When she heard about it, she pretty much freaked. She's Sicilian, and superst.i.tious, and apparently a bird hitting the window is not a happy omen.

I decided to call my friend Donna Riegel, who is a medium at Lily Dale. I told her I was in town and that something odd had been happening at my childhood home, but I didn't tell her what it was. She agreed to make a house call.

My sister, brother, and sister- in-law all wanted to be a part of Donna's visit, so six of us were there, including my father, my husband, and me. The bird had been doing its thing all day but was nowhere to be seen when Donna arrived. It was just as well, I decided. I wanted to see if she picked up on anything without such a blatant clue.

Donna felt my mother's energy the moment she walked in- a happy, positive energy. She spent the next few hours relaying messages from my mom. My husband, Mark, and I had seen Donna in action before, but even we were awed by how specific- and dead on- she was.

"You're going to be visiting the southwest,"she informed my sister. "Not California . . . someplace closer. Texas? Are you going to Texas?"

My sister was, indeed, going to Texas. She and her family and my father had tickets to fly to Houston two days later.

Over and over, Donna told us things she couldn't have known- things my mother, however, would certainly have known. She mentioned an obscure song that was incredibly meaningful to my father, a letter hidden in the bottom of a drawer, and the fact that my brother-who is tall and lanky like the basketball player he once was- also played quarterback for the high school football team. Mom gave us- her three children-much-needed, specific advice. And she had loving words for my husband and my sister-in-law, both of whom she had adored.

Donna told my father that my mother strongly felt it was time for him to make some changes. She wanted him to move on and look ahead. She would always be with him, but he had a lot of living left to do. We were all comforted to hear that, knowing he had had a difficult road through the grieving pro-cess and that there were times he wished he didn't have to go on without her.

Though we had said something strange was going on, Donna didn't feel that it was negative energy, whatever it was. My father told her about the bird and asked what she thought it meant.

Donna was very honest. Basically she said, "It might just be a dumb bird . . . or it might be a message. I really couldn't tell you. Just pay attention, and if it's a message, you'll eventually find the meaning."

All of us were comforted by our mother's communications, regardless of whether we'd solved the mystery of the bird. We concluded that if the bird was my mother trying to tell my father something, then she was really, really frustrated that he wasn't getting it!

A strange thing happened after that day: the bird disappeared entirely.

Once Donna had come and gone, the bird stopped banging the window. No sign of it anywhere. We left town the next morning, and a couple days later, my father left to visit Texas with my sister. When he came home, late in April, he said the bird was still missing in action.

But by then, something was very wrong. My father wasn't feeling well. He thought he had the flu. When I visited him at the beginning of May, he was still very ill. My pop's an active guy in his sixties who loves to golf and travel and socialize. It takes a lot to get him even to call it a night. But there he was, lying down under a blanket in the middle of the afternoon with fever and chills.

We had planned for him to accompany me to Ohio on my book tour, and he insisted on going, as we'd planned. But when we got there, he was too sick to get out of bed at the hotel. I was alarmed.

I dragged him to a doctor, who told him he had a bacterial infection. "A few weeks on antibiotics,"Pop told me as I flew home to my own life, "and I'll be good as new."

He wasn't. He didn't let on to any of us, but his health was declining rapidly. Finally, one morning, he couldn't get out of bed. My siblings called 911 and my father was rushed to the hospital with-it turned out- ma.s.sive internal bleeding.

We were told he probably wouldn't have made it through another night in the house alone. As it was, he spent almost a week in the ICU. Now, weeks later, he's on the road to recovery.

After he was released from the hospital, he told me that, when he had lost consciousness, he had seen my mother. That's unusual because, unlike the rest of us, my father never, ever sees her in his dreams.

"I was in the living room, sitting in my chair,"he said, "and she was there, too. She was sitting cross-legged in the air up over the couch. I asked her what she was doing there, and she just smiled and said she was with me, reading her book."

I have no doubt it meant that my mother was with him in the house through his long, frightening decline-and with him, too, in the terrifying touch- and-go days in the hospital.

It wasn't until much later that I remembered the bird. I reminded my father.

"I know,"he said. "I've been thinking about it, too. I think it was a sign."

If the bird hadn't been there, we wouldn't have had Donna come over. My mother wouldn't have let my father know he still had a lot of living left to do. And maybe he wouldn't have fought so hard, and made it through.

The bird never did come back. And my father is doing just fine.

ALSO BY WENDY CORSI STAUB.

Lily Dale: Awakening.

Lily Dale: Believing.

Lily Dale: Connecting.

end.