The Story She Left Behind

Chapter 49 Bronwyn

Bronwyn looked around the room at the people she loved, gathered in a miracle of time and space. She desired, more than she’d ever desired anything, to find the way to cross this divide, to make them understand, to have them know the truth of her love for them, the reasons she left, the secrets she had sewn around herself, the self-imposed exile.

She wished to be absolved, and quite possibly that was impossible; she understood she was a coward. She wasn’t afraid of much except windowless rooms, locked doors, and medications, and now she must start to find a way to explain.

And all she must do was start.

Now, finally, her daughter was here as the very beat of Bronwyn’s heart, sitting in her warm cottage kitchen, wanting to hear her story. And the little one, Wynnie, the granddaughter, by her side.

How was Bronwyn to tell all that had happened? How to explain twenty-five years of a story she thought her daughter would discover only when she was gone? They waited, all of them waited. Pippa and Charlie. Wynnie and Clara. They looked at her with expectation.

“Let me begin with Callum,” she said.

“Please do,” Pippa said softly.

Bronwyn met Callum in September of 1915, before Timothy, before Clara, just as the leaves were turning brushed gold, falling slowly in the crisp air that hinted of a colder autumn than usual. It was dark, after eight at night, and Bronwyn sat around a blazing campfire along Lake Sunapee, a tranquil spot where she’d once spent evenings with her dad until he left them for the mistress. Flames of the bonfire reached for the sky. Frogs chirped, and the moon climbed the eastern sky. Bronwyn’s group of friends waited for the stars to appear, one by threes, always marveling how much brighter they were here than in Boston, where they all lived.

Bronwyn and her boyfriend were cross with each other, irritable, their teeth set on edge by whatever the other might say. It was as if they’d become allergic to each other. You see, he was set to move that month because he’d won a prestigious job in New York City as a journalist, and he was begging his Bronny to join him, but she had no desire to go to New York. In fact, she felt near panic when she considered it. Maybe her reaction had something to do with her dad, and how he’d run to New York with his new wife, leaving her mother and her behind. Or it could be that she’d had enough of her boyfriend. Either way, the bitterness between Bronwyn and her guy came to ruin that night. She was angry at him for pressuring her and she was drinking too much whiskey too quickly.

There were six of them, three couples who spent the last year escaping into the woodlands every weekend, all of them with jobs they hated. They’d talk of what else they might do with their lives, including vivid fantasies of living in the woodlands or moving to London or Paris.

At this time, Bronwyn lived with her mother in a dingy apartment while writing copy for the Boston Herald. She was desperately trying to write a second book. She’d been trying for years by then, and they all knew, her mother included, that Bronwyn had quite possibly written her first and last novel at twelve years old.

While they sat around the bonfire, a group of men appeared, lost and cold. They appeared out of the forest like from some fairy tale—four men, Callum included, walked to the campfire, embarrassed to admit their plight. They had misread their map and were miles off their trail, becoming hopelessly lost on a trek through Mount Kearsarge State Forest Park. Bronwyn’s friends took them in, fed them their beans and wieners, and sat up most of the night talking and laughing, enjoying their British and Irish accents.

They’d come from New York, where they’d been at Columbia for a semester to study business. They’d decided to take a hike near Mount Monadnock and find the secret Pumpelly Cave deep in the New Hampshire woods. The whole enterprise had been a disaster.

Somewhere in the middle of the night, Bronwyn’s boyfriend, Brian, accused her of flirting with one of Callum’s mates, William. When everyone retired for the night, Brian threw Bronwyn out of the tent, insisting that she betrayed him and their love by “making eyes” at William. The irony of it being that Bronwyn didn’t know how to make eyes even if she’d wanted to do such a thing. She wasn’t even sure which one of the four was William, to be honest.

That’s where Callum found her, under the stars in a sleeping bag by the dying fire. The next morning, Callum and Bronwyn left before sunrise, and Bronwyn led him out of the woodlands. She never saw Brian again.

Now, with that much of the story told, Bronwyn looked to Pippa and held out her hand. “He was already in love with you and saving for that ring on your hand. He talked of you with such deep tenderness that I realized the love I had with Brian was nothing more than a redo of my parents, that I was imitating patterns that weren’t mine. I wanted what Callum had with you.”

Clara’s eyes widened with understanding. “Mother! Brian. Was it Brian Davis?”

“Yes.”

“So that biography was nothing more than sour grapes!”

“Yes, but sadly, much of it is true. I was mortified that those stories of my past were in print, but maybe that was part of my penance.”

“Oh,” Clara said, “there are plenty of secrets remaining.”

Bronwyn thought they might be tired of sitting still, of listening to her, but everyone sat where they were, leaning forward, wanting more.

“Now I must begin where my life ended,” Bronwyn said.

After the fire trucks, after one ambulance carried away the fireman and another carried Clara to the hospital with burns on her right hand and arm, after Bronwyn sat by Clara’s side and wept for the pain she had inflicted on her daughter, Bronwyn heard voices in the hospital hallway. She clung to Clara’s good hand after the bandages were wrapped and as the IVs dripped, and Bronwyn listened to the police and medical personnel uttering the needling and painful words that pricked at her: Arrest. Negligence. Fugue state. Unsafe mother. Firefighter gravely injured.

Clara came home the next day, and Bronwyn already knew the truth: she must make a plan to spare her husband and daughter all that was coming her way. Whether in jail or an institution, she would find herself in a room without windows.

When Bronwyn was seventeen years old, back in Boston living with her mother and working at the newspaper, she’d had a fierce fight with her mother. Bronwyn’s imagination, once such a point of pride for her parents, was now troublesome. Her mother decided that Bronwyn’s flights of fancy were a symptom of a dangerous disease that kept her from doing the daily activities that Martha saw fit to order. She accused Bronwyn of psychiatric breaks when she spent hours alone writing.

One late winter afternoon there came a knock on the door. The men in white jackets and an ambulance took Bronwyn away at her mother’s behest. She placed Bronwyn, a minor, in the psychiatric ward at Massachusetts General and demanded they “fix her.”

And fix her they tried, in windowless rooms with sedatives and hypnotics that seemed to shatter her brain. With forced bedrest and labeled with words like schizophrenia , Bronwyn was trapped in a living hell until she was released for good behavior.

She left the next day, and Bronwyn never spoke to her mother again, although her mother begged for years and years.

All of that was on record, all of it was something that any policeman in Bluffton might find, and then they could accuse Bronwyn of having had another break. When Bronwyn woke in fear, and often she did, it was about the days of isolation, windowless rooms, and medications that made her body and mind disconnect from reality in a much different way than her stories. Her bones and body remembered, and the fears were irrational but vivid.

So, on the second day after the fire, when the police arrived to question Bronwyn about the fire— What had she been doing? Why wasn’t she watching her daughter? Did she know that a firefighter was critical? —Bronwyn knew what awaited her. None of it was good.

Three days after Clara’s discharge from the hospital, Bronwyn left in the family’s Chris-Craft in the middle of the night.

In the backyard shed she used kitchen shears to cut off her hair, and then her husband’s razor to trim the stubble neatly over her scalp. She carried that long wand of hair and tossed it into the bay off their dock, imagining it becoming transformed as soft nesting material for the pelicans and terns. Wearing her husband’s old dungarees and flannel shirt, she used his surgery gauze to bind her chest flat. Being a lover of mythology and the stories that shaped a life, she chose her new name before she reached the Savannah harbor—Tristan: an Irish hero who was banished because of his great love for a woman he could not have.

Names meant something, they weren’t to be taken lightly, just as creating words wasn’t to be taken lightly, for they conjured and could be transformed into incantations or wishes.

Bronwyn might make others believe that despair caused her to take her life, but it was love that urged her forward. She would kill the woman she’d been but keep her body and spirit. She steered their small boat away from home, the satchel by her side.

She knew exactly what she was doing. This was no escapist imaginary world, and this was no accident. She was freeing her daughter and husband. She was frantic to save herself and told herself she was also saving them.

A purr and a groan of the engine and her mind reached the greatest loss. Into the darkness, she cried out her daughter’s name. Her voice pierced the night.

Clara.

Bronwyn slammed down the throttle and navigated the boat into the inky night.

Clara the heart of her heart, her very own object of wonder, the miraculum of her life, would now grow up with the love of her father at the tidal edge of a land as ancient as time, and the knowledge that her mother loved her enough to leave.

Bronwyn abandoned her daughter to save her daughter, and with each recitation of Clara’s name, Bronwyn sent an intention of love to the only place she’d ever believed understood or heard her—the unseen places where imagination lived and beat a drum for her attention, and her character Emjie waited for a new story.

Fear drove her forward. If she could find her way to England, there was a friend who might help. A man she’d been close to in the years before he returned to England in 1917 to his promised fiancée and a family business. A man who shared her obsession with language and its evolution around the world. A man who’d once said, “If you ever need anything…”

His name and kindness never left her. He might turn her away, but she knew he would answer the door.

The Savannah harbor glowed like the fire that had nearly stolen her daughter, and again she was struck by the truth—she could not be a mother any more than she could be an eagle. Both were impossibilities for her.

Once at safe harbor, she abandoned the boat, thrust the throttle to full horsepower, and pushed it to the outgoing tide from the curl of the Savannah Harbor while the sun burst on the horizon.

She immediately found an iron ocean liner with its plank down, an open mouth waiting for the merchant marines to return from their night at the local pubs. She’d talked her way onto a ship before, and she’d do it again. It wasn’t difficult when they needed free hands, and she knew how to run a galley and clean rooms better than any cabin boy.

Passing as a man named Tristan, she remembered little of those days crossing the Atlantic. Once she arrived at Southampton in the fog of an early morning in 1927, she exchanged and used the little money she carried for a third-class train ticket and made her way to London, where she walked toward the house of an old friend with the power to hand her over to the police, send a telegraph to America, or else help her become someone new.

She passed men in their flat caps and three-piece suits and women in their flowered dresses and headscarves, giggling as if the world was not coming undone. She passed policemen in tall black hats guiding traffic, open-topped red buses, and trams. Flat boats were crammed against the edge of the River Thames, and tugboats with their red stacks chugged along. The tall and wide silver grilles of the cars that moved along the streets glinted in the sunlight and the passengers were oblivious to her, just as she wanted. The white stone and tawny brick buildings loomed over the streets, which had gas lanterns that flickered in the evening light.

She walked and walked through parks and side streets until she knocked on the door of the St. James’s house.

In Callum Jameson’s library, they sat facing each other in large leather chairs. Bronwyn shivered with fear and hunger.

He reached over and rubbed his hand across her bald head. “What have you done, Bronny?” Tears filled his eyes.

“Bronwyn is gone, Callum. She can’t be in the world anymore.”

“Whatever the reason, I am so sorry. I loved Bronwyn and will be sorry to see her go.”

“Me too, Callum.” She swallowed the tears, forced them down, for this was her undoing and she would not burden him with her emotions.

“What can I do?” he finally asked as he tapped his forehead with his fingertips.

“It might be too much to ask for your help, but here I am.”

“It’s not.” He pointed at her satchel by her side. “What do you need?”

“This,” she said, “is my life’s work. The words I’ve been creating for a lifetime.”

“You did it,” he said. “You finally completed your language.”

“I don’t know if it’s complete,” she told him. “But I could not leave it behind.”

“Oh, Bronny.” His voice held so many emotions, none of which she could read. Then he looked up as if he really saw her. “We need to get you some food and tea before we continue this conversation.”

Moments later, they were in the dining room at a large table, a crystal chandelier hung above them. He set a plate of cold beef and carrots in front of her, a slab of bread slathered with thick butter.

“My wife, Philippa,” he told her, “is in the country with our nine-year-old boys for the spring holiday.” He set his rimless glasses down and told her, “Your disappearance was in the New York Times two weeks ago. I read about it.”

“That’s why you didn’t seem surprised,” she told him.

They didn’t talk of what made her leave—that was surely in the article, and more would come later. He sat quietly while she ate greedily and wondered if she might put a loaf of bread in her satchel when she left that night, because it was obvious now that she would need to leave.

Bronwyn ate to full and stood. “Callum, thank you for seeing me. But I’ll have to leave now. It was unreasonable of me to expect you to help me.”

“Don’t leave,” he said. “I won’t turn you in. You must have your reasons to exile yourself from your family. If you are here, then I believe you can’t return, just as in the New Hampshire woods that night.”

“It’s different, Callum. Last time you were saving me from a man, and this time I am saving him from me.”

He stood and motioned for her to follow him. “We can talk more tomorrow after you’ve rested.”

He showed her to the guest bedroom, a turret of comfort and ease where she fell into a dreamless sleep, a blessed absence of fear.

When she woke, she told him the full story and why she could never return—the fire, the death of the fireman, and leaving in The Bronny .

Sometimes, she told him, you must break your own heart. And that was what she’d decided to do.

“But wasn’t this the first time?” he asked. “Surely you would be forgiven.”

“Women like me are never forgiven,” she told him. “And it did happen another time. I was writing, and Clara wandered away. A neighbor brought her home an hour later and said she saw Clara at the edge of their dock, about to fall in. She was five years old. There was already talk, Callum. A fireman died. Mother had me institutionalized when I was a teen. It would add up, Callum.” She dropped her face and let the tears fall. “What they all say is true—I am not made to be a mother if I am putting my child in danger.”

He allowed her to stay, and her grief followed her around the house for a week of recuperating—a dark and enveloping cloud that nearly devoured her. She walked the river of sidewalks in London, breathed the spring air. She found the parks and the pathways; she discovered the benches by ponds, and she stared at the bowl of sky, and again and again imagined being locked in a room where she would see nothing but concrete and tile, just as she had for those endless weeks in juvenile detention and the months in the facility where her mother had sent her. She thought of writing Timothy and Clara a letter, but they would never stop looking for her if they thought she was alive.

She should never have married, but how could she not marry the man who loved her, a man she loved with all her body and soul? And Clara—the gift of her life that she was abandoning.

She’d had them for a while, and she’d ruined it.

She ruined everything; that was also true.

On day five, Callum offered to call the doctor.

“Please don’t. They will do to me what they have always done to me—lock me away, medicate me, offer to attach wires to my skull and send electric shockwaves through my brain to make me normal.”

“But there is nothing wrong with you, Bronwyn. You know that.”

“Timothy never expected me to be anything but who I am. Society is a different story. This time I made the final mistake—negligence that caused a death and injured my child. If you turn me in, I will understand.”

“It wasn’t negligence. It was an accident,” Callum said.

“Not when you have my reputation. All I need,” she told Callum, “is the opposite of what they will do if you call a doctor. I know how to heal from before, and it has everything to do with being outside.”

In the night, she read endless books in his library, slept in a guest bedroom, talked to this kind man about writing stories, creating a language, regaining a strength she’d lost, until he set his hands on hers and with authority said, “Pippa can barely keep her head above water with twin boys. We need help.”