The Thorn and the Blossom: A Two-Sided Love Story (8 page)

“I have to write something,” he told her. “Here I am, a tenured professor with a translation, an article, and a bunch of reviews to my name. Michael told me they were expecting more of me. But
what am I going to do, write articles to appease the department chair? Edit a special issue? The problem, Evie, is that I seem to care more about literature than about scholarship.
Medieval Studies
asked me to write about the chivalric code in
The Tale of the Green Knight
. What do I care about the chivalric code? As far as I’m concerned, the poem is about chopping the heads off giants.”

“And eternal love,” she had said, smiling. “Don’t forget the eternal love.”

“Like in
Green Thoughts
. You know, underneath that practical exterior, I think you’re an incurable romantic.”

But she looked practical tonight, sitting in her office with a stack of papers in front of her.

She looked up and said, “Why didn’t you tell me about your wife?”

For a moment, he stood silent. What could he say? “All right, come on. Let’s go.”

“Where?” she asked.

“Just come on, all right?”

He turned and walked down the hallway and to the parking lot. He could hear her footsteps behind him. Without a word, they got into the car. He drove along the roads he knew so well, toward the Henrico County Medical Center. Whenever he looked over at her, she was staring out the window. About halfway there, she said, “Where are we going?”

“To see my wife,” he said. He knew, had known as soon as she had asked about his wife, that he was going to lose her. He had lied to her, not directly but by omission. How much he wished he could go back, even to yesterday, so he could tell her. But that possibility was gone. Time worked that way—time was linear; it didn’t circle back. Once you lost something, you couldn’t regain it. That was life.
He drove faster than he should, angry with himself.

At the front desk, the nurse said, “It’s past visiting hours, Dr. Thorne.”

“Please,” he said. “Can I go in just for a minute?”

The nurse nodded, and he walked down the obnoxiously pink hallway to the long-term care facility, with Evelyn following behind him. He did not look at her, could not look at her.

He opened the door, walked up to one of the two beds, and said, “There she is. There’s Isabel.”

Evelyn stood, staring. He knew he ought to say something, ought to explain. Slowly, haltingly, he told her about the accident. “The stable called an ambulance, but by the time it reached the hospital, she was in a coma. She’s been like this ever since. The doctors say there’s no hope, that she’ll never recover. But I can’t bring myself to disconnect her.”

He took her hand. “I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you. I thought—” He’d thought that he would lose her again, and he hadn’t been able to bear it. “I wanted to be with you so badly. I thought if you knew, you’d never give me a chance. Evelyn, say something.”

She reached out and touched Isabel’s hand. He glanced at her face. She didn’t look angry. No, she looked sad, and for a moment he thought,
It’s going to be all right
. “Evelyn,” he said.

Suddenly, she put her hand on her chest. Her eyes opened wide and she stared at Isabel lying on the bed with the tangle of tubes around her. Then, she turned and ran. He ran after her, down the pink hallway to the reception area and then out the hospital’s swinging front doors. She was standing beside a taxi that had just dropped off a patient in a wheelchair. He stopped, out of breath, and watched as she climbed in.

She looked back at him once as the taxi drove away. He stared after her, not knowing what to do except stand there.

“Dr. Thorne!” He turned. The nurse was standing just outside the swinging doors, calling to him.

He walked back to her.

“Dr. Thorne, your wife has stopped breathing. We think it may be her heart, some sort of heart failure. The doctors are working on her now.”

He followed the nurse into the reception area.

“Just wait here, all right?”

“All right,” he said. And sat, waiting, head in his hands. When the doctors came to tell him there was nothing more they could do, he nodded, stood up, and walked out of the building. The next morning, he called the department to tell Michael Fitch he was leaving, left a note for the landlady, and packed a suitcase.

In one night, he had lost them both. There was nothing to keep him anymore.

B
rendan had never sold his father’s house, and now he was glad. He reopened it, hung his clothes in the closet, sat down at the kitchen table, and wondered what he was going to do with the rest of his life. He had given up the job he’d spent so long working for. And now here he was, right back where he had started. In the house where his father had told him stories about Gawan and the giants.

Had he made the wrong choices? Should he have worked at the bookstore, carried on his father’s business, instead of going to graduate school and studying literature? He didn’t know.

His stomach grumbled, reminding him that he’d had nothing to eat since lunch on the airplane. He walked into town and then down to the harbor to watch the fishing boats. As he stood leaning on the harbor wall, his cell phone rang. He looked at it. The English department, again. He cursed at it under his breath, then threw it as far as he could into the sea.

Clews had changed since the last time he had been there. The barbershop where he’d gotten his first haircut was now a hair salon, and what had once been a tobacco shop now sold computers. But Mrs. Ross still greeted him when he walked into the pub, and some of the boys he had known from school were there, sitting around the tables, drinking their pints.

They were talking about how difficult it was to find men willing to go out on the boats.

“All the boys want to go to university now, like you did, Brendan,” one of them said. What had his name been? Jory Hammett. He’d been a year behind Brendan, and on all the sports teams.

Although Brendan hadn’t ordered, Mrs. Ross put a large bowl
of fish soup in front of him. “Eat up, dearie,” she said. “You look as though you need it.”

“So, you’re needing men on the boats,” he said. “What about me?”

Jory looked at him for a moment. “Aye, you’ll do. Think you can wake up early enough?”

He laughed for the first time in days. “I think so.”

As soon as he could, he got a haircut—not at the hair salon, none of the fishermen went there. Instead, Jory’s wife Gwenna ran a clipper over his head. Afterward, he stared at himself in the bathroom mirror, running his hand over what felt like a bristle brush. He no longer looked like Dr. Brendan Thorne. For the first time since he’d left for Oxford, he looked like he belonged in Clews, on one of the fishing boats or sitting in the pub. It gave him a sense of belonging that he had not felt for a long time.

Fishing kept him occupied, gave him an income. When he wasn’t out in the boat, he worked on his father’s house, patching the holes he found in the roof, clearing the brush that had grown up around it. It was some ways out of town, at the edge of the forest, and he grew to like the silence. He could hear birds, squirrels. And sometimes, if he sat still long enough, a fox would come out of the forest and stare at him, its red fur vivid against the tree trunks.

When winter came, he chopped firewood for the stove and started reading the books he had read as a child. He’d forgotten how much they had meant to him. Whenever he thought of Evelyn, he chopped more firewood or went for a walk through the forest, hoping the physical exertion would help. It did, at least for a while, although he could never banish her from his thoughts for long.

One morning, as he sat at the kitchen table eating a breakfast of fried liver and onions, it came to him. He would write a book. Not an academic book. No. There were already too many of those. It would be a book about knights, and giants, and love:
The Tale of the Green Knight
, but for children. He had to write these ideas down. He’d left his laptop in his office at Bartlett; it had been given to him by the college anyway, and for months now he hadn’t missed it. But he needed some paper and a pen. There would be paper and pens in his father’s desk. He went into the study and opened the desk drawer.

After his father’s death, he hadn’t gone through the desk, hadn’t wanted to disturb anything. He had simply left. It felt strange now, looking through the remnants of his father’s life. There were only scraps, receipts for books his father had bought, bills he must have been intending to pay, grocery lists. In one corner was a photograph of his mother on top of a stack of letters she’d written, probably sent before they were married. He would look at those, but not now. On top of what looked like a sales ledger was another letter, with a note scribbled in pencil:
Forward to Brendan
. It was from Evelyn.

He felt a sudden sense of vertigo, as though he were looking down from a great height. How could she have sent this to him? How could it have gotten into the desk? But the postmark—it had been mailed years ago, a month before his father had died. Carefully, he opened the envelope and pulled out a sheet of heavy cream-colored paper with
ERM
monogrammed on the top. On it she had written, not very neatly:

His hand was trembling. What did it mean, this letter from the past? It felt as though she were speaking to him across the years. But of course she wasn’t, really. This was the letter she had mentioned sending, and it was only a coincidence that he was just finding it now. He wondered what she was referring to, what she meant by “seeing things.” But the letter had nothing to do with what had happened in Virginia. That had been about Isabel, about not telling Evelyn when he should have. About concealing the truth from the woman he loved and wanted to spend the rest of his life with. He set it down again.

The drawer held a couple pens that looked as though they might still work, but nothing to write on. He would have to go into town to buy some paper. On his way out, he tidied up, washing the dishes in the sink and drying them with a tea towel, deliberately not thinking about the letter. Concentrate on the book he wanted to write. Yes, that was what he would do.

As he walked into town, he realized that it felt good, having something to work on again.

W
hen the first draft was finished, he bought a secondhand laptop at the computer store. Every night, after a long day out in the boat, he would sit at the kitchen table typing, trying to tell the story the way his father had told it to him. Trying to make it a story that children would want to read.

Yes, that was it. That was the voice, the pacing he was looking for.

The day he finished the manuscript, he celebrated with a glass of his father’s Glenlivet. Tomorrow he would go into town, e-mail
it to Peter Cargill at Arundell Press. He knew they published a line of children’s books, and Peter might help him get the manuscript to the right editor.

That night he dreamed again, for the first time since returning to Cornwall. He dreamed that he was standing on the hilltop, among the standing stones. There, between him and the sea, stood Elowen. No, it was Evelyn, in faded jeans and a gray cardigan.
Evelyn
, he called.
Evelyn!
But she couldn’t hear him and turned away.
Evelyn!
he cried, desperately.

He woke before dawn. Had leaving Bartlett been the biggest mistake of his life? If he had waited, tried to contact her the next day, or the next week, or even the next month—if he had just given her time—would she have come back to him? Would she have told him that she understood? He didn’t know. But, he thought,
I have to try
. After breakfast and a shower that left him feeling more like himself, he walked into town.

Although he hated to do it, he went into the new bookstore, which had a coffee shop and free wi-fi. First, he e-mailed the manuscript to Peter. Then, he e-mailed Evelyn. He could still type her address automatically, without thinking.
My dearest Evelyn
, he wrote.
I’m so sorry. Please say you can forgive me. Or, if you can’t, please write anyway to tell me why not, and feel free to call me any names you like. The more the better, just so I hear from you. Love always, Brendan
.

He hit Send, finished his coffee, and thought,
I’ll go up the hill. I haven’t been up there since I came back to Clews
. It was a sunny day, the first truly warm day of summer. He would stand among the stones, looking toward the sea, and remember her, with her hair whipping in the wind, just as he had dreamed it.
She would write back; he knew she would. She had to. And then … would he go back to Virginia? Would he persuade her to come to Cornwall? He didn’t know, but for the first time since he had come back, he felt hopeful.