Authors: Sarah Jio

Tags: #General Fiction

The Bungalow (33 page)

BOOK: The Bungalow

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At once, I was twenty-one again, in nurse’s garb, sneaking off to the beach after a long shift in the infirmary, head peeking over my shoulder to make sure I wasn’t being followed, heart pounding in anticipation of seeing
him
.

I trudged along. The sand felt heavier around my soles now. I wiped a bead of sweat from my brow and pulled my hat down lower, protecting my weathered face from the sun’s unrelenting rays. I searched the palm-lined shore.
Where is it? Surely just a few paces farther?

Birds called overhead as I pressed on, scanning the thicket with every step.
It has to be here. Somewhere.

Twenty minutes later, I stopped, out of breath, and sank into a shady spot on the sand, freeing a deep sigh from the depths of my heart.
Of course the bungalow is gone. How could I be so foolish to think it would still be here waiting for me?

“Excuse me, ma’am?”

I looked up when I heard a male voice nearby.

“Ma’am, are you all right?”

A man, perhaps in his sixties, not much older than my eldest son, was approaching, with a woman of about the same age. She wore a blue sundress, and her dark hair was pulled back loosely in a clip.

“Why yes,” I said, collecting myself.

“I’m Greg, and this is my wife Loraine,” he said. “We live right here on the hillside.”

“I’m Anne,” I replied. “Anne Call—” I stopped myself, marveling at the slipup. I’d been Anne Godfrey the majority of my life, and yet here on the island, the name felt wrong.

“Anne Calloway,” I finished.

Loraine looked at her husband, then back at me. “Anne
Calloway
?”

“Yes,” I said, confused by the recognition in her voice. “I’m sorry, have we met before?”

The woman shook her head, and then gave her husband a look of astonishment. “No,” she said, kneeling down next to me. “But we have hoped to meet you for a very long time.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, searching her face.

“Can you believe this?” Loraine marveled, shaking her head at Greg before turning back to me. “You lived on this island during the war, didn’t you?”

I nodded.

“There’s an old beach bungalow near here,” she continued cautiously. “You’ve seen it, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “But how do you know this?”

She turned to her husband and then back to me. “He always said you’d come.”

“He?”

“Mr. Green,” she said.

I shook my head, feeling my heart rate quicken. I folded my hands in my lap. “I don’t understand. You know of the bungalow? And”—I gulped—“Westry?”

The woman nodded, and her husband stood up, pointing to the stretch of shore behind me.

“It’s just back this way, near our home,” he said. “The brush has grown quite a bit since you’ve been here. You must have missed it.”

I rose quickly. The stiffness in my legs reminded me that I wasn’t twenty-one anymore. “Will you take me there?”

“Yes,” he said, smiling.

We walked for a few minutes in silence. Occasionally the couple glanced at me with concern, but I did not return their gaze, instead preferring to let the sound of the surf absorb my thoughts.
Do I want to know the secrets they’ve kept, about the bungalow, about Westry?

Greg stopped suddenly, pointing toward the jungle, thick with palms. “Right through there,” he said.

“Thank you,” I replied, pushing through the brush until I came to a little clearing ahead.

“Wait, Ms. Calloway,” he called out from the beach.

I turned around.

“You should know that it isn’t what it once was.”

I nodded and walked on, pushing past aggressive vines, some reaching out as if they intended to wrap their tendrils around my frail arms. I looked right, then left.
Where is it?
Then, an overgrown hibiscus caught my eye. Not yet in bloom, tiny yellow buds pushed up from its leaves. My heart pounded.
It has to be near.

I pushed another vine out of my way, and there it was—still standing, but barely. The thatched roof had weakened and collapsed in places. The woven walls were thinning, completely gone on one side, and the front door was missing. I took a deep breath, remembering the way Westry and I had discovered the little hut so many years ago. Now look at it.

The front step had eroded, so I had to raise my body up three feet to the entrance, not an easy task at my age. My arms ached as I hoisted myself inside, the sound of which startled a bird that squawked and flew quickly out an open-air window.

I stood up, brushed the dust off my pants, and looked around the room with awe. The bed with its rumpled bedspread, the mahogany desk and chair, the curtains I’d made, though ragged and falling from the hooks—everything was still there, in its place. I looked up at the wall where the painting had once hung.
Will it be under the bed, wrapped in burlap the way Westry and I left it?

I took a deep breath and knelt down, patting my hand under the bed. A lizard ran out, and I jumped back. Moments later I regained my composure and pulled up the bedspread to let more light under the bed. There, a few feet back, lay a lonely scrap of burlap. But the painting was gone.

I stood and collapsed into the chair, feeling the weight of seventy years of emotion. Of course it was gone.
How naive I’ve been to think it might still be here.

When I stood up again, the floors creaked below my feet, and I smiled as I thought of the makeshift mailbox Westry and I had once shared. It would be silly to think there might be a letter waiting inside. And yet I crouched down anyway, fighting back tears as I ceremoniously lifted the old floorboard and peered inside. I pushed my hand into the little dark space below, feeling around until my fingertips hit something soft, solid.

A book. No, a journal of some kind. I pulled out the leather-bound notebook, fanning its pages to release years of dust.

The light was growing dim, and I knew the sun would be setting soon. I squinted as I opened the cover to read the first page:

Letters to Anne, from Westry . . .

My God. He returned. Just like he promised.

I fumbled to the second page, my eyes desperate to read the words and my heart eager to soak them up, when I heard a voice outside.

“Ms. Calloway?”

Greg’s voice echoed through the air outside. I closed the journal reluctantly and tucked it into my bag. “Yes,” I said, rising, “I’m here.”

I stood in the doorway as he and his wife approached. “Oh, good,” he said. “We didn’t want to leave you out here all alone too long. Let me help you down.”

He reached two strong arms up and clasped them gently around my waist, lowering me to the ground.

Loraine looked at the bungalow, and then at me. “Did you find what you were looking for here?”

I glanced back at the little hut. “No,” I said, “but I found something else, something better.”

She smiled cautiously, as if she knew more than I did about this place, about my story. “Would you like to come back to our terrace, for some tea? Our home is just up the beach.”

I nodded. “Thank you. I would like that very much.”

Loraine poured black tea from a blue and white kettle. “Cream and sugar?”

“Yes, thank you,” I said.

The home was quaint. Just a simple two-bedroom structure nestled near the beach with an ample deck outside. It suited them.

“We’ve lived here for thirty-five years,” Greg said. “Loraine and I used to work in New York City, but after a trip here in the late sixties, we knew we couldn’t go back to city life.”

“So we stayed,” Loraine chimed in. “We opened a restaurant a few miles away.”

I envied them, of course. For this was the life that Westry and I might have had, the life I had longed for in my heart.

I took a sip of tea, and then set the white china cup down on its saucer. “You mentioned that you know Westry,” I said quietly, afraid of where the sentence might lead.

Greg looked at Loraine and then back at me. “Yes,” he said. “We knew him for many years.”

My God. They’re speaking in past tense.
“
Knew
him?” I asked.

“Yes,” Loraine continued. “He came here every year. His yearly pilgrimage, he called it.”

“Pilgrimage?”

Greg smiled. “Pilgrimage in hopes of finding you.”

I watched the cream swirl in my tea, spiraling around in confusion, just as I felt. I let Greg’s words sink in for a few moments, then shook my head, remembering Kitty, remembering the way I’d left Westry that day in the hospital in Paris.

“I don’t understand,” I said, trying to reconcile the story I believed to be true with the story they were telling me.

Greg took a sip of his tea. “He told us your story,” he said. “How you’d fallen in love on this island during the war, and how war had separated you.”

I shook my head. “But why didn’t he try to find me in Seattle? Why didn’t he ever write?”

“He didn’t feel it was his place,” Loraine explained. “He knew you had a life, a family there. And yet, somewhere in his heart, he believed that you might return, that one day you might be waiting for him in the bungalow, just the way you did in his memories.”

I reached down to my feet for my bag, pulling out the brown leather notebook. It pulsed with emotion as I held it in my hands. “I found this,” I said. “Letters he wrote me.”

“Yes,” Loraine continued. “Every year he left you a new one. He left it inside the bungalow, hoping you’d find it.” She clasped her hands together and shook her head wistfully. “It was the most romantic thing. Greg and I felt for him, watching him make such a strenuous journey year after year for a man in his condition.” She reached for her husband’s hand and patted it lovingly. “It was moving to see.”

I sat up straighter in my chair. “What do you mean, ‘a man in his condition’?”

Greg’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t know?”

“Know what?”

Loraine gave Greg a disapproving look before leaning in closer to me, as if she was about to reveal something horrifying. “Dear,” she said, “Mr. Green was in a wheelchair. He was paralyzed in the war.”

I held my hand to my heart to muffle the ache inside.
Paralyzed.
I closed my eyes, remembering the scene in the Paris hospital, where he lay gazing up at Kitty. Had he refused to see me not because of a budding relationship with Kitty, but because of his pride?

“I know this all must be very hard to hear,” Loraine said. “I’m sorry if we’ve said too much; it’s just that all these years we’ve watched this dear man’s story unfold, and we hoped that one day we’d see the conclusion. To have you here, Anne, it’s truly amazing. Greg and I had hoped you’d come, for Westry’s sake, but after so many years, we’d given up hope.”

I looked down at the notebook in my hands, trying to make sense of it all. “What about Westry? Where is he now?”

Loraine looked troubled. “We don’t know, exactly,” she said. “He stopped coming about five years ago. We were terribly afraid that he might have—”

Greg put his hand on Loraine’s arm, as if to urge her to be silent. “The notebook you have,” he said, “why don’t you read it? Perhaps you’ll find a clue.”

I stood up. “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you ever so much, for everything. I should be getting back now. My granddaughter is expecting me.”

Loraine stood up beside me. “Let us walk you to your hotel, Ms. Calloway.”

I shook my head. “I’ll be fine. But thank you.” I made my way down the steps to the trail back to the beach. I walked quickly, moving my aching legs along the sand as fast as they’d go, praying I wasn’t too late.

Chapter 17

T
he early morning light shone on the balcony as I made myself comfortable in a wicker chair. Jennifer, out for a jog, would be back in an hour. I opened Westry’s journal, turning past the water-stained first page, and let my eyes take in his familiar handwriting:

August 23, 1959

My dearest Cleo,

This is the first letter I have written you since we last saw each other on the island, that final day as the airplanes roared in the distance, taking you one place and me another. I’ve come back to the bungalow on this day—August 23, the very day we met so long ago—in hopes of finding you, or some memory of you, here, for nearly 20 years have passed and you have not escaped my mind or my heart. You’ll be happy to know that the old place has held up well over the years. Everything is as we left it. The curtains, still swinging in the breeze. The desk and chair. The bed. Everything but you.

How I wish you were here, my love. How I wish I could take you in my arms the way I used to. I know you are out there somewhere, living your life, and I do not want to disturb that life. But my heart yearns for you. It always will. And so I will return each year on this day, in hopes that our paths may cross again. I will leave this journal here in our mailbox. I will eagerly anticipate your letter, and you.

Yours,

Grayson

BOOK: The Bungalow

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