The Story She Left Behind

Chapter 8 Clara

CHAPTER 8? CLARA

Bluffton, South Carolina

I suspected I wouldn’t fall into sleep with the news from Charlie’s phone call buzzing inside me like a plucked guitar string. With the first hint in twenty-five years that my mother might be alive or that she wasn’t at the bottom of the sea with her created language, I was animated with a desire I thought long quieted.

We learned to live with certain things we never thought we could, and these two mysteries—what happened to Mother and what her sequel told me about her and her fictional character Emjie—would never be solved. I’d accepted this with resolute calm.

If I truly didn’t care anymore, as I’d told everyone for years, then why was my heart rolling over, my skin prickling, my throat clogging with tears? Why did hope rise like some disquieted bird from its nest?

I picked up the phone receiver from my bedside table and dialed Lilia with the same phone I once called her from when we were kids, tiny hearts painted on the receiver with Magic Marker, a remnant of high school years.

This was not the proper order of things: me in my childhood bedroom with my eight-year-old daughter sleeping in the spare room that was once Mother’s studio, sharing the two-sink Jack and Jill bathroom.

I leaned back on the pillows of my bed while I waited for Lilia to answer.

“Hello?”

“Lilia,” I whispered.

She knew me so well that with a single utterance of her name, she asked, “What’s wrong? What happened? Is Wynnie okay?”

“Yes. Yes.” I covered the phone with my hand in an imitation of the days when we’d talked into the night, when I was trying to hide from my dad that I was up late. This time I was trying to keep from waking my daughter. “Wynnie is completely fine. A phone call came today.”

“Oh?”

“From a man in England.” I swung my legs off the bed and sat up, wound the coiled cord between my fingers, and stared at the bulletin board across the room, on which my high school graduation photo still hung crooked.

“Well, that’s very mysterious.”

“He says he has Mother’s papers.”

“Old stories of hers?” she asked.

“No.” I took a breath. “Her lost papers. Her words. Her language.”

“ Clara! ” I pulled the phone away from my ear. “Tell me everything.”

I did. I told her everything about Charlie’s call, just as I had told her everything about my life since second grade, when we first met on the playground. “I thought I was past this, Lilia. I thought I’d accepted it all, and now here I am ready to dash to England on the word of a stranger.”

“Listen to me,” Lilia said. “I’ve watched you suffer about your mom, and I’ve wanted to fix this for you for the past twenty-five years. Now you have a real chance to find something out, maybe even learn what happened.”

“But do I really want to know?”

“Yes, of course you do.” In the background a deep voice called Lilia’s name. “Hold on, I’m talking to Clara.” Then back to me. “Yes, you want to know. You’ve always wanted to know, even when you proclaim that you do not.”

“Yes.”

“Do you think she’s… alive?” Lilia asked so quietly it was only because I knew the cadence of her voice so well that I understood what she asked.

“Do I dare hope?”

“Yes, you always hope. Clara, this is what you’ve been waiting for.”

With I love you , with goodbye , we hung up. Lilia, as always, was right.

Without my own mother and lacking aunts and female cousins, I relied on Lilia and her mom as the women in my life. Who was I supposed to go to when my monthly started, when I felt the stirrings of adolescence, when I needed my first bra? Lilia and her mom, Lynn, were there, just as they’d always been, with open arms and open door. No questions asked, even as I heard the whispered phone calls between Dad and Lynn, an odd dual parenting with my best friend’s family.

I slid off the bed, knelt on the braided rug, and pulled a faded blue suitcase out from beneath my bed. Once full of things that belonged to my mother, it was now a repository for all things about her. Before I opened it, my fingers absently ran over the burn scars on my arm, a habit when I was nervous or lost in thoughts about Mother.

I clicked the scratched metal latches, and the top popped open. The aroma of paper and dust rose from the interior—a sensory memory that vaulted me to childhood.

Years had passed since I last sifted through these things looking for my mother. I fanned out the photos. She was called handsome and elegant, stunning and striking . As an adult, I looked more like my dad, but if I stared hard enough, I found pieces of her in my cheekbones, chin, and wavy hair.

My memories of her were hazy at best. But that night, I remembered something new—a simple moment unadulterated by photos, articles, or analysis.

I was seven years old and rounding the corner to eight. It was the year I ran home from school every day, not to play with my friends, but to be with my mother.

This was the year she taught me to plant a garden in the square plot of dark soil, elaborating on how the wild violets would show up every year, a capsule unto themselves, and that they were Shakespeare’s favorite flower. She taught me how to float under the bay’s waters while grasping the dock’s pillar, holding our breath and listening for the scratch and snuffle of sea life. The year we ran through a neighbor’s fields under every full moon to create a fairy circle of cotton pods and make wishes that never came true: to fly with eagles’ wings, to see an elf, to breathe underwater. It was the year she taught me how to boil indigo and make paint for my little drawings, how to plait my own hair, and how to dig into the dark mud for oysters and slurp them from the shell while they were still warm with life.

That seventh year of my life I lost two teeth, and I knew the tooth fairy was my mother when she left pressed flowers instead of coins.

She would spring to life with “I have an idea.”

The ideas ranged from rowing the canoe to the far side of the river to search for sand dollars on the sandbar, to painting shells for a wind chime, to sewing pom-poms on the bottom of the curtains to brighten the house, to pressing flowers between thin pieces of paper to salvage their fading beauty.

That brightest year ended abruptly just before my eighth birthday, when she’d taken to bed with something Dad called melancholy , something I didn’t understand and hoped would be cured.

After weeks of coming home from school and standing at her bedside, bereft, believing that possibly my real mother had died and another had replaced her, I needed to lure her out of bed.

“Mama.” I danced around her bed in a fairy costume she’d made for me with scraps of filmy silk. I’d hoped to draw her to me, to the garden, to life.

She held out her hand, the simple gesture that made me fall madly in love with her every time she did it. I knit my fingers in hers, and she rose from the bed in her white cotton nightgown. “Take me somewhere, sweet fairy,” she said.

I pulled her along until we were outside and lifting our faces to the river’s breeze with its comforting aroma. At the end of that spring, she’d left the garden unattended, the flowers and vines tangling together with a wildness that had us both pretending we’d found a secret hideaway.

She plucked ferns from the earth until she carried a pile of them in her arms. “You choose the flowers, ladybug, and we’ll make a dress of ferns and flowers.”

I have no memory of making the dress, but somehow the day was spent, and evening light transformed the sky.

We wore those dresses over our nightgowns. If Dad was angry about the infestation of baby spiders or the small red ant bites all over my arms that he treated with a thick pink paste, I don’t remember.

Mom hung our dresses on hooks outside the house, where towels and bathing suits were left to air-dry. The next morning, and this I’d never forgotten, those fern dresses were gone as surely as if they never existed. Sometimes I wondered if we just dreamed the same dream.

This was how the memories were for me: a piece here, a tear there, a shadow across the room, and I reconstructed a mother who loved me, a mother who made fern dresses and told stories of sleeping in sea caves.

Inside the suitcase rested books, articles, papers, and the six pages I’d xeroxed of her sequel when I’d visited the lockbox in Savannah years ago. The contents were a hodgepodge: one hardcover of The Middle Place illustrated in the margins with my childhood scribbling, an unauthorized biography by Brian Davis, psychiatric studies of her published in medical journals, newspaper articles, and magazine pieces.

There was also the scrapbook I’d made with every picture I’d found of her, and a manila folder stuffed with papers with the name Bronwyn written on the cover in my handwriting. I’d drawn vines, flowers, and butterflies around each letter of her name, fairies and nymphs at the edges. I’d illustrated her name with the only kind of love I’d known how to give an absent mother.

Then, finally, there was one other scrapbook.

I leaned against the bed frame and pulled out the book with the dark green cloth cover faded to a misty emerald, splotches of mossy color seeping through, and a tear on the top left where the fabric peeled away from the cardboard.

I paused before I opened it. It had been years since I’d touched this, and now one phone call from across the sea and my obsession returned.

Inside this album weren’t photos of my mother, but of every kind of mother I could find: the ones in the ads for Electrolux and in picture books, ones I drew from the wicked stepmother in “Cinderella” to Marmee in Little Women. Inside were clips of mothers from illustrated fairy tales and photos of my friends’ mothers that they never knew I took from their houses. This green cloth scrapbook held all the possibilities of what could have been instead of what was.

“What do you want from this?” my dad had asked when he found it. “She isn’t in here,” he’d said with a choked voice.

“But what if she is?” I’d told him. “I just have to keep looking.”

I didn’t need this scrapbook anymore, and before I opened it and spiraled down the abyss of wishing and wanting, I dropped it to the carpet and instead lifted the manila folder with the illustrated name Bronwyn on the front.

The articles written about her were clipped together: pieces from newspapers, police reports, the syllabus for classes on her fantasy work and what it might be trying to say. All these documents were an amalgam of who and what the world deemed Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham to be: a missing genius, a literary mystery, or a cocktail party anecdote.

But for me, she was one thing only: my mother.

What the world knew about her were facts lined up in articles.

These facts were repeated: Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham’s first (and only) book, The Middle Place , was published in 1909, when Bronwyn was twelve years old, a child prodigy author, and for that anomaly, she was still studied by fans and scholars. At the end of her famous novel, she’d left her character, Emjie, in limbo, caught in another world and unable to reach home.

Days after a house fire, in the middle of the night in 1927, Bronwyn fled her half-burned house in the family boat. She took with her a hundred dollars and a change of clothes (tweed trousers and a cream-colored fisherman’s sweater).

To add to the allure of the literary mystery, for those who cared and followed the story, the most intriguing part was how she took the dictionary of her created words with her, stashed inside a leather satchel, leaving her sequel unable to be translated.

The day after she left us, our Chris-Craft was found floating in the ocean and out of gas off Tybee Island. Mother and her leather satchel were never found.

I dumped out the file of these inane articles looking for only one with a photo of the missing satchel she took with her, the case stuffed full of her created language.

The article was from the Bluffton Gazette , 1927—“Death in Local House Fire”—slumped yellowed and crumbling on the top of the pile.

Twenty-five-year-old Alex Prescott, a Bluffton firefighter, has lost his battle for life after a week in the Savannah hospital. During a local fire in the Harrington home in Bluffton, he plummeted through the floor to a sub-basement below and became trapped, the crawl-space doors locked from the outside.

Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham disappeared from her family home. Bronwyn’s daughter, eight-year-old Clara Harrington, suffered from burns on her arms and chest, and she recuperates at home.

After police discovered the family boat off Tybee Island, the search has been called off, and Bronwyn’s disappearance leaves another family in mourning.

I turned back to the remaining papers to search for a specific photo. The aroma of musty disintegrated paper sifted through the air. And there it was—a photo of the satchel that held my mother’s language. A close-up of the eagle latch, just as Charlie Jameson had described.