The Story She Left Behind

Chapter 51 Clara

CHAPTER 51? CLARA

Lake District, England

Wynnie and I left the cottage where my mother had lived her life after me. We returned to the house, gathering trinkets of nature—acorns and feathers, seedpods and moss—in an effort to distract ourselves with beauty. This was all so huge.

I thought about Charlie and how he must have felt the moment he learned that the cousin he adored was my mother. I was very much a part of this family that I’d met just a week ago, and all along they’d been an integral but invisible piece of my life. It would take time to absorb and understand. For now, I needed to call Dad and Nat. I lived in another life, and this was not mine.

The phone rang at home and Dad answered. “Come now,” I said to him. “Please. Mother is here.”

He didn’t ask for an explanation, but a sob escaped, and he hung up with promises to arrive on the first plane out. I called Nat at his house, and again there was no answer. I was tired of tracking him down, but again rang the body shop where he was working part-time until he found something full-time, only to hear: “He isn’t working here anymore, Clara. I’m sorry to say.”

Deep sadness and that bitter taste of disappointment returned to the back of my throat. Again. Again his life of chaos and unpredictability had gotten him fired from another job, even the one at the body shop that was meant to be temporary until he found another one in finance. I’d suspected that without me and Wynnie, he would slide back into the ways that destroyed his life. Maybe if we hadn’t left, if I’d been a better wife… if if if.

“What happened?” I asked Tony.

“I’m really not at liberty to say. I’m sorry.”

“Tony, I’ve known you since second grade. Tell me something. Anything. Is he okay?”

“He seems to be fine. Saw him at the Crab Claw last night.”

“All right,” I said, and hung up.

I downright knew that it wasn’t my place to keep Nat on the straight and narrow; I’d done that for years and I felt sick with the scenarios of what might have happened: stealing money from his place of work to pay gambling debts or disappearing for a few days to hit a poker table. I could only guess.

That night, Wynnie and I took dinner to our room; I was overwhelmed by the knowledge and information. I was relieved and I was ebullient; I was sad, and I was floating with the thought: My mother is here. A hunger, a ravenous hunger for her, was sated, but only for the moment. I would want more and more. I couldn’t face her right now. I needed to be alone with Wynnie, to avoid a false face or smile. There was nothing left in me for polite conversation.

As night descended and fingers of twilight scratched across the Cumbrian fells, I tucked Wynnie under the sheets and stroked her back until she fell asleep. My mind rattled through the unsteady truths:

Mother was alive; she’d come to England to hide. She believed she could never return without damaging Dad and me. She’d quit writing but painted, taught children, and gardened. She made a life by Esthwaite Water and paid penance by hauling a stone every day to build a garden wall. She’d been here all along in another life, in ways that I’d been afraid to imagine.

These sharp facts lined up inside me, swords of truth cutting a space between what I’d once believed and what I now knew.

I had found my mother, but I was unsure she’d ever wanted to be found.

Sleep would not visit me as it had Wynnie, so I listened to her even, clear breathing, grateful. After a while, when the room felt as if it floated above the frosty land, I made my way to the drawing room to find a glass of whiskey, something to help me sleep. The new moon offered no light; the night was dark as black velvet outside the windows.

I heard Charlie’s music before I reached the drawing room. I leaned against the doorway and listened with my eyes closed. The music moved through my chest and opened something in me that had only begun to be pried apart with Mother’s story.

His music ended, and I opened my eyes to see him looking at me. He set down the drum and his stick. “You found her.” He came to me, and I fell into him, let him hold me. His wide chest felt like a place to land. We sat on the couch.

“I can’t really believe it. But what does it mean now?” I looked at his kind face, at those warm eyes that never wavered from mine. “Why didn’t she come back for me? Why did she stay with you instead?” I took a breath for the next truth. “You had my mother.”

“Now I remember, she is the one who taught me the Eliot poem.”

“Yes.” I felt the ballooning of something too much, something that would take me from who I thought I was, toward someone I might be.

“The Irish,” he said. “They have words like your mother’s.”

“How so?”

“One word meaning more than its simple definition.”

“Like?”

“They have a word for ladybug, what I’ve heard you call Wynnie, and it is translated as ‘God’s little cow.’?” He paused and drew closer, closer still.

“A little cow?” I laughed, and he continued.

“They have a word for a choppy sea that is translated as ‘the fisherman’s garden is under a white flower.’?”

“That’s so beautiful.” My voice was a whisper now, and something in me knew what might come next. “Tell me more,” I said.

“When they say thank you, they are saying, ‘May you have a thousand good things.’ The translations are more than the word. They are deeper. This is the kind of language your mother was creating—words that came from within her. It was all she had left to share with you.”

I fell against him. He knit his fingers into my hair, and I wanted more of him. He stood and took my hand, and there was no doubt where we were headed. In fact, I very well might have led us there if I’d allowed myself to be clear-eyed.

Once in his room, he locked the door and looked at me as if he could see right to the knot of loneliness nestled inside, that he could undo this tangled piece of me with his touch. I reached to unbutton his shirt, and when I’d finished and placed my hands on his chest, I lifted my face for the kiss that consumed me. He unzipped my dress.

Desire broke loose from its underground world, and there was nothing else in the room but that, so long buried.

We didn’t speak in anything but touch, and I wanted more than he could give, and yet without my understanding how, everything he gave was enough. I whispered it was okay, that I wanted him. I told him not to worry as he fumbled to try and explain his hesitancy. We made love as he filled the hollowed-out spaces of my questions, the ones that echoed in the night with a need I didn’t understand. Everything that had ever happened to me seemed to bring me here, to the land where my mother lived, where Charlie Jameson waited for me.

The moon pressed itself against the windows, the long call of an owl far-off, and we made love as if this was the night that must last for all the other lonely ones to come, as if this was the first time and the last. As if we must experience what it meant to desire and to be desired, as if it would never happen again.

Pippa sat alone at the glass-top breakfast table. The newspaper was folded unread on the chair where Charlie usually sat.

Pippa smiled sadly at me, and I wondered how she was absorbing the news about Mother, and if she had any idea of how I’d spent part of that night.

“Good morning, Clara.”

“Good morning, Pippa. How was your sleep?”

She laughed in a gentle co-conspirator manner, as if both of us knew there wouldn’t be sleep with such news as we’d received yesterday. “There’s been a call, and your father is on his way,” she told me. “Moira received his message this morning. He’s booked on the Pan Am flight that lands in London at six a.m. in two days’ time, and then he’ll travel here by train. The details are written down on a sheet of paper in the kitchen.”

“I invited him without consulting you,” I told her. “I’m so sorry. I just—”

“I am so pleased he’s coming,” she said. “I would have asked him myself if I could say the words.”

“My dad,” I said, “the man who swore he’d never sit in a metal tube that flies over the ocean, has made an exception, it seems.”

“You found your mother,” Pippa said, as if announcing something I didn’t know. “Isn’t this so strange? I don’t quite know how to… I am… quite beside myself.”

“And confused and upset, I would think. Just like me,” I said as Moira appeared with a plate of eggs and hash, setting it down in front of me.

“How wonderful,” Moira whispered to me as she bent down. It was possible that if she hadn’t taken that satchel from the closet, if she hadn’t broken the rules out of grief for Callum’s loss, we’d never be here now. I wouldn’t know my mother’s arms around me for the first time in twenty-five years.

“Thank you, Moira,” I said.

“For?” she asked, and stood with a smile.

“Everything. All of it. For getting us here, for… all of it.” She nodded with a knowing smile. I asked, “Where’s Wynnie?”

“Miss Isolde… your mother took her for a walk. We thought it best we let you sleep.”

“Charlie?” I asked.

Pippa answered, “He is dragging down more Christmas decorations from the attic. I wanted the box of silver beads for a tree in the drawing room. Having you here, having Wynnie— Oh, Clara, it has just lifted my spirits.”

“Pippa, I am so glad. And the house looks like a wonderland,” I told her. “It’s extraordinary, as if it’s ready for a party any day.”

“I usually do have a Christmas party, but this year it just felt like a step too far. With Callum gone, it’s hard to make big decisions. I feel weighted down. Heavy. A party is…”

“Too much.”

“Yes,” she said, “it is. I’ve never done anything like that without him.”

“I could help,” I said. “If that’s what you want to do.”

She swished her hands through the air as if shooing the thought away, and then folded them in her lap.

“Clara, I need to say something to you about Charlie.”

I nodded, and her gaze darted toward the doorway checking if anyone was within earshot. “Charlie?”

A hot blush made its way up my chest, and she continued. “His heart has already been broken once and terribly. You might not be able to make promises, but I will ask for one anyway.”

“Yes?”

“Just be truthful with him. Always.”

I raised my eyebrows and Pippa leaned forward. “I know what a man falling in love looks like, darling.”

“I…” I set my hand on my chest, where it felt as if it would spill out its contents of desire right there on the table. “I won’t make any promises to him or anyone else that I can’t keep,” I told her.

“Now, Clara, it appears,” Pippa said, setting her monogrammed napkin on top of her finished breakfast, “that you and I are in the same boat, to use a timeworn metaphor. Six and two threes.”

“Six and two threes?”

“Yes, meaning the same.”

“Ha, yes,” I said.

“Your mother.”

I nodded. “It appears she has deceived us both.”

“And that we have both loved her very, very much.”

“Yes.”

“Clara, I have been pacing nearly all night. Charlie gave me Isolde’s… your mother’s biography, and I read much of it in the wee hours.”

“It’s sad, I know,” I told her, and ached with the knowledge that Pippa Jameson knew about Mother’s past lives, the jumble and raw-edged horror of so many of her days.

“It is sad,” Pippa said. “What strikes me the most, what clanged against the din of my selfish anger, is this.” She paused as if finding her words. “My God, the shame and fear your mother has hidden from the world, from us, and from you is almost incomprehensible. It began in childhood and never stopped—this idea put upon her that there is something wrong with her, that she needs to be fixed, that she is different and no good for this world or for love or even for motherhood. I can’t imagine the disgrace and shame she’s carried.”

“Oh, Pippa.” I dropped my head and felt the warm tears fall with the exhale of sobs. My righteous anger was shifting into mercy.

Pippa sat quietly, allowing the tears, until I felt her hand on my shoulder. “I don’t condone her deceit or the leaving, Clara, but I do understand. Can you imagine?”

“No,” I said, and pushed my chair back to stand with Pippa. “I can’t. And she’s carried it alone,” I said with the slow wave of compassionate understanding approaching like a rising sun. “Most of her life she was told there was something broken and wrong with her and she believed it. All that fear. All that shame.”

“Yes, alone,” Pippa said. “She wanted to save us, Clara, but instead she’s hurt us. This must shame her also.”

“I don’t know what to do, Pippa. She’s my mother. She left me.”

“Forgiveness,” she said, “is a mighty strong force against fear.” Pippa came to me and did the most unexpected thing—she kissed each cheek and then hugged me, holding me the way I’d always wanted my mother to do.