The Charm Bracelet (17 page)

Arden had followed. She not only began to run, she began to want clothes and shoes that Lolly and Les just couldn't afford. Arden began to yearn for a life in the city she had never known.

“They aren't real. You can't live your life wanting to be a projection of someone else,” Lolly would repeatedly say to her shy daughter. “You have to be you, Arden. And they wear
tennis
bracelets, not charm bracelets. They don't know who they are or where they came from anymore.”

Lolly had fought to preserve the original seven cabins along Lost Lake and had come out victorious. She knew these women didn't like her, but she hadn't expected her daughter to envy them.

“They aren't happy, Arden,” Lolly told her daughter. “They are never content enough to enjoy their lives.”

Arden picked up her pace, trying to outrun her thoughts, and sprinted along the trail, shadowed and cool under a canopy of birch and sugar maples. She breathed deeply as she ran, her lungs filling with an ease she rarely experienced in the city.

Arden approached a tiny stream—a “crick” as her mother called it—that ran into Lost Land, and decided to jump it like a show horse. She picked up steam and …

Whap! Splash!

Arden's left foot caught on a tree root, and she yelped, her glasses flying from her face, her body falling hard and coming to land directly in the water. Arden's heart raced, and she scrambled up to assess the damage.

Face?

Palms?

Back?

Knees?

Arden exhaled and looked up toward the sky.

No damage,
she thought, relieved.

Arden reached for her glasses and found them sitting on the edge of the bank she'd never reached. She rubbed the dirt off her lenses with her shirt and, as she placed the glasses on her face, the world came back into focus. Arden gasped.

In front of her stood a tiny forest of gnarled sassafras, their trunks dark, knotted and bent, like witches' fingers. The weight of the scene forced Arden to take a seat on the damp embankment, her feet resting on a stone in the stream.

This is it! Our “secret spot,”
she realized, amazed.

Arden tried to catch her breath, but memories came rushing back.

“Meet me by the sassafras grove,”
read the notes that Clem used to shove into her locker, Arden recalled.

Clem Watkins, a quiet farm boy who raised cattle and showed goats, had appeared as suddenly into Arden's life as her father had left it.

Clem and Arden had never talked much in school, outside of the occasional hello in the hall, but he came to the cabin after her father's sudden death from a heart attack, with a casserole from his mother and a rose for Arden. No other classmates had come to visit, so when Clem asked Arden to go for a walk, she agreed. She had no one else, it seemed. They ended up sitting for hours in this sassafras grove, Arden crying until she could cry no longer, Clem patiently holding her until her tears subsided.

“How will I move on?” Arden had gasped. “What will my mother do? I can't imagine living alone with her. She's already crazy enough.”

“Your mother is not crazy. She's unique. That's a wonderful trait. Can you imagine what she is going through, too? Arden, you need to take all the time you need to mourn the death of your father,” Clem had said in the quiet of the woods.

His words had stunned Arden. They were not only more mature than anything she expected a boy his age to utter and more heartfelt than any she had ever read in any of her beloved books, but they also echoed her mother's.

She began to tell Clem about her father's and grandfather's work as fishing guides, their love of the lake, the land, Lolly and Arden, Fred and Ethel.

“They mate forever,” Arden said to him of the loons. “And they always return home. Forever. Do you think my dad will ever come back to visit?”

“He never left you,” Clem had whispered. “He's right here … in every leaf and in every wave of the lake.”

For the first time since her father had died, Arden felt a sense of peace.

From that moment on, they met whenever they could.

The farm boy who Arden would have never previously talked to had suddenly touched her broken heart and made her consider a life that wasn't part of the elite set or the city.

To a girl who had lived with her head in books, Clem was real. Too real. Six foot four inches of tall Dutch ancestry, a body chiseled by farm labor, tousled hair made blonder by the summer sun, pine green eyes with chips of gold, and a deep voice that sounded like the engine of the family Woodie. When they talked about their futures, Clem's always included Arden. When they kissed, Arden could actually picture their futures.

One October afternoon, as they lay in the grove of sassafras, angling their faces just so between the red-leafed branches to catch the last of the Michigan sunlight before winter returned, Clem said, “Marry me?”

Arden's first thought—as she lay on her back, still too stunned to move—was that Clem's words sounded more like a plea than a question.

When she sat up, Clem was on his knees in front of her, holding a little box.

“No,” Arden said. “No, Clem.”

“It's not a ring,” he said. “Just a promise that I'll be with you forever.”

Arden opened the box: A charm of a loon sat nestled on top.

“Have you been talking with my mother?” Arden said.

“Maybe,” Clem said. “Can I add it to your bracelet?”

Arden held out her wrist, and Clem added the charm to her bracelet and then kissed her hand, as if she were a princess.

Arden stared at the charm. It was just like the one her mother had on her bracelet.

Arden looked into Clem's green eyes, the breathtaking fall background of the woods, filled with sugar maples exploding in gold, red, yellow, and orange behind him.

And that's when Clem leaned in and kissed Arden. She hadn't expected the proposal. She hadn't expected her heart to leap from her chest. She hadn't expected her head to began to twirl, like the Tilt-A-Whirl that came to town with the traveling carnival every year. She hadn't expected, at the young age of eighteen, to want to say yes.

But when her lips left Clem's and she began to speak, a pack of Chicago women visiting for the fall color tour suddenly ran by, talking about “that crazy charm bracelet widow” in the old log cabin who had lost her husband. “Probably faked his own death to get away from her,” one cackled.

“That daughter has just as many charms,” another one laughed. “She's going to be just like her.”

“Ignore them,” Clem replied.

But Arden couldn't. These women were everywhere: They descended on auctions of foreclosed homes and farms like vultures, picking and plucking possessions, while tired families watched from behind curtains.

“Could you ever see yourself in a city?” Arden asked Clem one day. “What does our future look like?”

“God, no,” Clem scoffed. “A city? I can't live like that. I'm a farm boy. I love this town. I want a simple life with a big family. Don't you?”

Farm boy. Simple life. Big family.

For weeks, Arden was panicked, haunted by Clem's dreams. She avoided him at school, hid out on weekends, made up excuses.

But when Arden was without him, she was haunted even more.

At a school assembly, Clem was honored by his chapter of the Future Farmers of America for service, and in his acceptance speech, Arden could hear his joy when he talked about farming. When he showed her his medal after the assembly, his face beamed.

Arden shut her eyes, but no longer saw Clem: She saw the tired faces of broken families. She saw her mother.

“Meet me after school,” she told him. “In our spot.”

“I can't marry you,” Arden said when they met, bursting into tears. “I love you, but I just can't live here. I will die here, just like you'd die in the city.”

And so, like the city women, Arden ran—from Clem, from Scoops, from her mother, from her past—toward the city.

The next summer, Arden left for college. She thought of Clem every day for years as she finished school, started as a journalist, worked on her book, and became a part of Chicago.

Arden was working at the
Chicago Reader
when her mother sent a letter that included a clip from the local paper,
The Scoop
, that read, “Local Boy Killed in Farming Accident.”

Even after so many years, Arden's heart shattered.

She sat in her cube and wept, thinking of the boy she had left, of the most vulnerable time in her life, when Clem had made her feel so safe.

Clem had married a local girl and had three children, two boys and a girl. The paper ran a picture of the family: The kids looked like Clem. The family looked happy.

In the bottom of the envelope was the charm of the loon, dangling on the bracelet Arden had left at home, her past hidden in an old shoebox in the closet.

“My heart breaks for you, my angel,” Lolly had written in her looping script. “He loved you so much, didn't he?”

Arden took the next day off work. She held her bracelet for hours, before removing the loon charm. Then she wrapped her bracelet in a
Pennysaver
ad that was shoved into her mailbox and hid it away in a shoebox in the back of her closet.

Arden went to the Lincoln Park Zoo to visit the animals in Clem's memory. She walked the park and buried the posting of Clem's death under a stand of sassafras, using her hands to dig a shallow grave. When she had finished, she walked to the bridge overlooking the zoo's pond—the Chicago skyline framed in the distance—and sat, her legs swinging over the side.

Arden thought of Tom, the man she had just begun to date. He was the exact opposite of Clem: A businessman, urban and polished, driven by a desire for money and success.

The two are as different as, well, Chicago and Scoops,
Arden thought, staring at the skyline.

That's when Arden heard the familiar sound. At first, she thought she was hearing a siren. But, no, running across the pond, calling, crying, singing their soulful song, were two loons, right in the middle of Chicago.

It's a sign!
Arden thought.
I made the wrong decision! I should have married him and had his children. No man could love me like he did.

Arden watched the loons take flight, wondering if they were already beginning to migrate south for the winter.

Clem will always be with me, but I have to let him go. I have to move on somehow, too, even if it will never be the same.

Suddenly, she stood and, without thinking, began to catapult the loon charm her mother had sent from her bracelet into the lake. But just as she was about to let go, the loons circled overhead and wailed. Arden stopped, retracted her arm, fell to the earth sobbing, and clutched the tiny charm to her chest.

*   *   *

Whooo-dooo-ooooh-ooooh!

Loons sounded their mournful wail as Arden realized she was still sitting on the embankment of the creek. She rubbed her knees, now shivering as she remembered falling, remembered all of this. Her tears made the sassafras trees appear to move, wiggle in front of her, like ghosts.

Yes, Mom, you were right: I loved him. And I never allowed myself to feel that again after that pain.

“Mom! Are you okay?”

Arden jumped and turned to find Lauren behind her.

“I fell,” she mumbled. “I don't know if I'm okay … I don't know.”

Lauren took a seat on the damp ground beside her mom, checked her mother's knees and head, before laying an arm around her mother's shoulder. The two listened to the burble of the creek.

“Wow,” Lauren finally said, “those sassafras are magical, aren't they, Mom?”

Arden smiled, clenched her jaw, and turned away, trying to hide her tears, but it was too late.

“Mom? What's going on?”

Arden thought of her mother's words earlier, and suddenly the story of Clem tumbled out of her mouth, along with more tears.

When she was done, Lauren hugged her mother.

“Mom, I never knew. I'm so sorry.”

The two sat in the quiet of the woods, before Lauren spoke again. She started and then stopped before finally getting the words out. She started tentatively, “I want to change my major, Mom.”

Lauren took a deep breath and continued. “I want to be a painter. I mean, life is too short for us to turn our backs on our unhappiness. You and Grandma are finally teaching me that.”

Arden listened closely, before lifting her head and looking into her daughter's eyes. “Business
will
allow you to be in control of your own life, though, Lauren. You will make more money than I did. And you won't be reliant on anyone, like I was. You can always just paint on the side, can't you?”

Arden watched her daughter's eyes fade into a distant place. She nodded and turned her head, but she wasn't able to hide her tears from her mother.

“Life is filled with difficult decisions,” Arden said.

Arden wanted Lauren to be happy, but most of all she wanted to protect her. She didn't want Lauren to worry about money or supporting herself.

“I know,” Lauren said, standing up. “I know.”

 

Twenty

Beep! Beep!

Lolly honked the horn of the Woodie to sound her arrival at the supper club, something she did every time she pulled into the small gravel lot.

“The Rendezvous?” Arden asked, suddenly remembering where they would be having dinner. Arden had eaten at the Rendezvous nearly every week growing up, considering her mother loved it and—in the winter—it was often the only place around that was still open. “Really? Everything here is fried.”

“Except the beer!” Lolly chirped. “Best brew and perch in Michigan!”