Mine to Tell (26 page)

Alex’s face was dark, but he said nothing. He stopped staring at the photo and stared into his tea instead.

“He changed on us,” Alex said, all of a sudden. “My father got funny when we were older. Something was bothering him, I don’t know what, but he became edgy and distant. More distant than usual. They argued, the two of them, my parents. Soft fights we weren’t supposed to hear, but they made my mother tense.”

Everything inside me clenched. I glanced across the table and met Kyle’s eyes. I wished he were nearer, where I could wrap my hand around his and either yank him away from this house or hold on for what we were about to hear.

“Scared her, he did,” Alex continued. He looked up, and something ancient was in his gaze. Something familiar. I’d seen it before. Somewhere. “We boys were older, so we suffered his behavior better than she did. But then things got worse.” He stopped and scratched his chin, drew his hand down his face. “Something happened, but I don’t know what. Mother had been clingy, hanging onto him, driving all of us crazy, but then she stopped. Whatever it was that happened, it brought everything to a halt. She stopped her erratic behavior and asked him to take a room in town, away from the rest of us.”

No!
I screamed inside, as a long, trembling finger reached out and tapped Julianne’s picture, tapped her face as if a verdict was being read.

“Mother sold the house,” Alex continued. He withdrew his finger and he looked up at me. “She thought it would shake my father up and straighten him out.”

Alex may have been older when all of this happened, but it still showed on him, old pain carving crevices into his features, mapping out his sorrow. I knew then where I’d seen that look before. It was on my grandfather—his face, his eyes, his unresolved hurt.

Mildred chimed in, relieving Alex. “It didn’t work. He didn’t stop her. He just stayed in his place while she sold the house, and afterwards she went to live with their older son. Neither one of them profited from the sale, and neither one cared.” She looked at Alex. “We always thought…we wondered if…”

We all looked down at Julianne, my skin turning cold, my heart not wanting to pump blood anymore. I knew of John and Julianne’s love, but mentioning it now seemed tantamount to convicting my great-grandmother as a harlot and making her responsible for everyone’s pain. I knew John’s letters, I knew his wife’s letter, I thought I knew Julianne’s heart. I didn’t say anything.

“They did move back in together eventually,” Alex said after a long silence. “Got their own apartment and tried. He tried. She tried. They tried to make things right, from what it seemed.”

“He was different those last years,” Mildred said. “Made peace with himself, with her, with all of us, and maybe with God. Until she passed on.”

My eyes found Kyle’s, and we both remained speechless.

“He really was a fine man.” Alex stared at me. “He did what was right. Even if his heart wasn’t in it, he still did what was right.”

I looked back at Alex. I thought he was daring me to confess it was Julianne’s fault he had suffered. I saw the impact those years had left on them. I felt guilty for asking them to dredge up all of this, guilty because Alex’s father’s love of my great-grandmother may have been at the root of his youthful sorrows.

“Mine to tell,” Kyle said suddenly. It was a jolt. I was yanked from my mental tumble into a pit of unredemption. Alex looked up too, a quizzical expression on his face. “Julianne left a story behind,” Kyle continued. “Some of it speculation and rumors by people who don’t know, and the rest of it by her own hand. It was a love story. One that was countered with suffering.”

We were all quiet. I looked at him, my heart melting as I heard his masculine voice speak of love and suffering. I wanted to lean across the table and hug him, but I was too afraid.

Alex leaned back in his chair. “What my father went through didn’t feel like love when we were little.”

“But maybe it was,” Kyle persisted, his tone smooth and even. “Does love always turn out the way we want it to?” Then he looked at me. “Julianne Crouse was a fine woman. We haven’t finished her story, but she suffered, and she was fine indeed.”

Tears came to my eyes. “Thank you,” I squeaked. Kyle stood and walked around the table to me. He helped me stand as he thanked them for their time. He retrieved Julianne’s picture, took my hand, and together we went to the door, Alex and his wife following us.

“I hope you’re right,” Alex said, running his hand through his thin, brittle hair as we stepped outside. “My father had some things to come to terms with, but he was a good man. A better man later in life, when he told us he was sorry. I never knew for what.”

I started to cry. Maybe because none of us understood forgiveness and the right to live without kite strings and circles. My family, Trevor, and maybe John’s family were a little like Isaac, drawing circles, drawing lines, wanting everyone else to stay where we put them and behave the way we believed they should without letting them come to terms with who they were and their own pain. I hurried to the car and closed the door. Kyle slid in beside me and held my hand as he drove us back to the hotel.

Chapter 47

“For perhaps he was for this reason parted from you for awhile, that you should have him back forever.”

Kyle and I drove home in near silence. Hours on the road in deep thought, two minds working like one over the unconnected fragments of Julianne’s and John’s lives we’d uncovered.

“Thank you for coming with me,” I said as he pulled to my house. We both sat in the car and stared at the prison Isaac had built for Julianne. “It’s like an awful sandwich, if you can forgive the comparison. Something really awful in between two very good slices of bread.”

Kyle nodded. He didn’t laugh and he didn’t insult my childish analogy of Julianne’s suffering meshed between happy youthful years and hopefully happy older ones. I liked Kyle. Really liked him.

“There’s something on your door,” he said, still looking at the house. I looked and, sure enough, something was dangling from my doorknob. I sighed.

“Guess I’ll go see what awaits me.” I groaned silently, knowing it was probably tantamount to some tribal death threat from my family, like maybe all of my childhood pictures with my head cut out of them.

Kyle helped me carry my luggage to the house. I stepped to my door and lifted the handles of a small bag from the doorknob. I peered inside and saw a flower with a note attached. I lifted the flower from the bag, wondering if it was poisoned.

I’m sorry.
I recognized the handwriting on the card. My gut went cold as the flower trembled in my hand.

“You okay?” Kyle asked. I nodded, but I wasn’t. I dropped my hand to my side and felt I would vomit.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said, unlocking the door and moving quickly inside. “Just set my bags right there by the door.” I covered my mouth and raced for the kitchen. Just as I threw my head forward over the wash pan, I heard my front door close. I vomited, Trevor’s flower on the floor by my feet.

~*~

I thought I could make things right. John’s wife’s letter and Isaac’s vehemence taught me I needed to. I had to fix things, had to work them out. So when John wrote again and explained what he’d needed to tell me, I left. Left Isaac a note and said I had to go. I intended to come back. I just didn’t know when. I would be away however long it would take to fix things.

I went to Chicago on money I took from Isaac. If I’d gone when I’d asked the first time, I would have let him give me money. But now that I was going without his knowledge, without his consent, without forethought on my own part, I took it. This was a trip Isaac needed, one he should be grateful I was taking, even though I knew he wouldn’t be.

I found John. It wasn’t difficult. He worked the same job in the same place. I found it and waited for him outside, even though he had no idea I was coming. I stood in the shadows, watching until the lamps went out inside and he locked up for the day. It was when he had his back to me that I stepped from the darkness behind him, listening to the final turn of the key in the lock as his hands twisted it just like they’d been doing for years.

“Julianne?” he asked without turning.

“How did you know?” I whispered.

“How could I not?” He turned slowly as if he was afraid reality wouldn’t bear up with what he sensed. But I was there, in the dim light where the pain and wear of the years was invisible. We’d borne pain as we’d borne a love. And this we understood without seeing each other.

My soul melted into him as he gazed at me, years vanishing as I drank in everything about this one man I had truly loved. He moved toward me, but he didn’t try to touch me. I wished he would, yet wished he wouldn’t. We stood on the walkway and looked at each other, time without beginning and without end.

“I’ve come to make things right,” I whispered.

“You just did,” he said, a happy sigh in his voice.

“No.” I laughed a little. “I mean really right. For both of us. For our families.”

“Let’s not,” he said, sounding a little desperate. “Let’s just leave things the way they are.”

“No, we can’t.” I couldn’t tell him of his wife’s letter, and I wouldn’t tell him of Isaac and his anger.

“But I won’t give you up,” he said. “Not any more than I already have. All these years without you, when you were really mine. If only we’d known, if only Arthur had told me he filed our little pretend ceremony under his legal credentials and made it official. The sin isn’t us being together, it’s being apart. We’re bigamists, you realize. We were married to each other and then defrauded ourselves and our supposed spouses by marrying them. I’ve made poor Ellen miserable, I’m not myself, my boys have suffered. Damn Arthur for not telling me!”

“It couldn’t have been real,” I said, tears in my eyes and my voice. “Surely Arthur’s joke is nothing more than that.”

“He meant it as a gift, actually. His wife explained it in the letter I got from her when he passed away. He’d married us for real that day of our pretend ceremony, and filed it behind our backs, thinking he’d surprise us when you returned for our actual wedding. Then when you didn’t return and I failed to bring you back, he was ashamed. He went to the courthouse and took our file. Hid it away with him all these years so the record wasn’t visible. I have it in my office. She sent it along with the letter. We were married the day you set foot on that train, years ago.”

We didn’t see her nearby as we spoke. I didn’t know until later when she wrote me again that she’d come there too, his wife, wanting to surprise him, do something kind to win him back any way she could. John and I talked, discussed meeting the next day to talk more about what we should do, and then we tried to part. It was impossible, more impossible than I’d ever imagined. Our hands lifted as if by magnetic force, drawn to each other and our fingertips touched, a bolt traveling between them.

“Tomorrow,” we said and we parted. I went to my room and vomited. Sick and weak with physical suffering that continued on through the night.

~*~

I’d read on without Kyle. After a restless night of little sleep, I needed to distract myself from Trevor’s attempt to repent. My doors were locked so no one could just walk in. So Trevor couldn’t walk in. Anyone else was welcome.

I wasn’t able to eat, so I consumed large amounts of hot tea and sat on the sofa with Julianne on my lap. It was all beginning to come together now—their love, circumstances that tore them apart, fortuitous circumstances that gave them the right to come back together, and the decisions they faced. And not only them but Ellen, the blow she suffered at seeing them, hearing them, and the decision she must have made soon after, to try to force his hand.

As I sat and pondered what I would have done in Julianne’s situation, a knock came at my door. I didn’t move. There were people I wouldn’t mind seeing, some I dreaded seeing, and one I didn’t want to see at all. The knock came again. Soft, not forceful. Either my mother or Kyle. “Please let it be Kyle.” I said a prayer as I stood to answer it.

“Hi, Anna,” Trevor said as I cracked the door open. My mind did a photographic snapshot of his face before I closed my eyes, a face full of repentance and clouded by a faint hope, his anger having melted down into a lava he wanted to be rid of. I opened my eyes again. His look hadn’t changed, his eyes were large and frightened, pouty if I dared to describe them that way.

“I’m busy,” I said, and I pushed the door closed. I didn’t move away from it. I stood there, waiting for the inevitable knock, and it came, within seconds.

“Anna, I want to talk. Please open up.”

No,
I said in my mind. Otherwise I said nothing.

“Just for a minute, that’s all.”

“No.” It came out of my mouth this time. “No, Trevor.” I waited, wondering how he’d react. The old Trevor would have teased me, the frightened Trevor would have pleaded, the hurt Trevor would have hit the door with his fist and stalked away. I listened. Nothing. After several minutes I slid to a nearby window and looked at the road in front of my house. Trevor’s back was to me as he slumped toward his car, a handful of flowers dangling from one hand. I didn’t know this Trevor. He was new. I watched him and wondered, wondered if both of us had changed so much.

Chapter 48

“Her sins, which are many, have been forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little.”

My illness did not relent. Even as I rode the train back home I could barely contain my stomach, my head, my nerves. John had been so concerned, he’d stayed by my side, not pressuring me for a decision about us, but letting me rest, encouraging me to try to eat or drink something, but I couldn’t. I reeled at the thought of food.

I’d agreed meagerly, as he unwillingly put me on the train, that I’d return if possible. At what point, I made no promises, but I wanted to talk to Isaac, be honest with him, offer him an escape from his misery if he so chose. There were children involved, though, his and John’s, and they wouldn’t understand legalities, only faithfulness and security. I hoped John would do the same with his wife, but I didn’t ask him to. I looked to heaven as the train pulled away. “We need help,” I said, and I laid my head against the window and tried to sleep away my angst.