The Story She Left Behind

Chapter 54 Clara

“The sequel,” Mother repeated as if the words tasted bitter.

“Yes,” I said. “Do you want to wait until Dad arrives to talk about this?”

“I will have much to say to your dad, but Emjie has come to Wynnie.”

“You know,” I told her. “We can’t translate it now. I’ve lost most of your words and—”

“I can translate it if it’s what you wish. And then you can read it in its entirety. But what happened to Emjie in that book is an old version of how I saw the world and everyone in it.”

“Tell us anyway!” Wynnie begged.

“The version I wrote is not what I would write today. I’d prefer to let it be for now. I was in a much different time when I wrote that sequel; it was before I met Timothy. I was in a terrible state. I did not give Emjie what she needed in that version. That’s why I kept it hidden until I might rewrite it.” She pressed her lips together and her face twitched. She cleared her throat.

“You can change all of it, Mother.”

“Is it all right if we leave that version alone? Let it stay where it lies, untranslated?”

“Yes,” I said. “We can do that if you’d like.” I imagined that pile of papers, all those untranslatable words, that entire story of Emjie on Dad’s desk at home where I’d left it.

Mother looked to Wynnie. “Together we can give Emjie new adventures,” she said.

“Yes.” Wynnie slipped her hand into mine as if to tell me I was part of this. “And Mama can draw the illustrations. After all”—Wynnie sat up straight—“she’s a Caldecott winner.”

Mother spun her smile toward me. “You are? This is so wonderful, so grand. Why didn’t you tell me right away?”

“We had some other things to talk about, I think.”

She laughed. “Does Eliza know?”

“Of course,” I told her.

“We must celebrate.” She beamed, her smile wide and tears in her eyes. “Oh, Clara, I am so proud, even if I have no right to be, I am.”

The room shimmered with light. If this was the land described in those Harriet the Hedgehog stories, maybe more would be revealed.

“Mother,” I asked, a question that had been brewing and nearly forgotten, “did you tell Callum to suggest me for Harriet the Hedgehog ?”

“I knew he did so, as I was there when he suggested it, but I didn’t tell him to do it. I was stunned to silence when he did. I didn’t know about your Golden Books or your illustrations until then.”

“How did he know?”

“He kept up with you. He had someone check in on you occasionally, but he didn’t tell me until then. I didn’t know until that day, and from then on, I asked so many questions that he told me what little he knew—you’d married, you had a little girl, and your work was stunning. That your father was doing well.” She closed her eyes. “But that’s all. Even that was too painful, and he never mentioned it again. I didn’t know you’d left your husband until you told me.”

Silence pressed down until Pippa piped up. “Isolde… Should I still call you that?”

Mother nodded. “Yes.”

“Did you know Callum was writing his family stories?”

“He was?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t know. He never spoke of it. Not once. We weren’t confidants like that, Pippa. I want you to know that. His respect and love for you was beyond reproach. You had each other for thirty-five years, and you have each other still. The only secret we kept was my origin, how I arrived, and who I was. From there, he never spoke of it again except the day I told him I would leave, that I could not ask him to keep this secret any longer. He told me that my running days were over. He was firm. But kind as always.”

“But,” I said, “you knew about me and about Harriet.”

“I did. I keep those books on my bedside table, darling. You are always with me in this way.”

Wynnie clapped with childlike glee. “I knew it. I saw it. Your stories are right here. All your drawings, Mama. They are here. The lake and mountains and trees and bunnies. All here.” She stood and threw her arms around my waist. “We’ve been here with Grandma all along.”

The rain arrived the same day as Dad’s expected train. In a low-ceilinged pub in Windermere, Charlie and I seated ourselves across from each other at a scarred wooden table. We shook off damp rain slickers and folded our umbrellas by our side.

The thirty-minute drive on windy roads, sideways rain clouding our vision while being squeezed by stone walls, all conspired to make me slightly nauseous. Charlie pushed the basket of thick-crusted bread the server had provided across to me. “Slather it with butter and eat up. You’ll be better in no time.”

Two men hollered greetings, and one asked Charlie: “When ya gonna bring that band up here? Too big in the britches for us now?”

“Soon, Freddy, soon!” Charlie called out. He returned his attention to me. “You’re being awful quiet and… you didn’t come to me last night. I missed you.”

“I missed you, too.” I cast my eyes down. “But…”

“But you’re angry at me?”

“No! Why would you think that?”

“You said it the first night we found her—I had the mother you lost.”

“I’m not angry. I don’t know exactly what I am.” I lifted my eyes to his again. “You grew up with my mother. You and I have been living across an ocean from each other, and our lives were… are such a complicated labyrinth, each of us circling the other without knowing the other existed. It is already too much. I can’t figure out how tangled we really are, and have we made it worse by—”

“These have been overwhelming days, to be sure, and I am going to ask you something.”

“What is it?” My stomach was jittery, buzzing with all the unknowns and Dad on his way, when Charlie said only one word.

“Stay?”

A simple request, and I leaned over and kissed him, settled my lips on his lovely mouth, and lingered. Then I put my forehead to his. “Oh, Charlie, I just can’t.”

He took my face in his warm hands. “I don’t know what I think about all this talk of the unseen world, or tangled lives or even meant-to-be, but I do know this: I want you to stay. Whatever brought you here—whether your mother’s language or the fog of London or sins of the past—whatever it was, it matters little to me. I want you to stay. Wynnie loves it. You love it.”

“But it’s not where my life is. Wynnie has a father. How could I take her away from him when I know what it’s like to live without one of my parents? Not to mention the legalities and a divorce agreement that says I won’t take her from South Carolina.”

“Those can be overcome. Whatever it is you want to do, you can do all those things here, in Sawrey, in London, wherever you want.”

“You can’t know you want me here. Not after knowing me for a week, Charlie.” I hesitated before speaking the truth that might send him from me. “And I can never have children. You have no future with me.”

“You think my future with you depends on children? I don’t want you to stay so I can have children.”

“But someday you will want them, Charlie. It’s natural, and you have a close-knit family; it seems impossible for you to think about never having any of your own.”

“There are other ways to have kids, Clara. You know that.”

“It’s such a huge decision for you to make in only a week’s time.”

“More than a week.” He smiled. “Ten days that have been nearly the best in my life. No, not nearly, the best. I can know I want you here. Isn’t that enough for now?”

“I don’t know if that’s enough for now, and I can’t take Wynnie from her father, and… even if this sounds silly, I don’t want to miss the Caldecott Awards ceremony in two weeks.”

“It’s important to you.”

“More than that—it’s something all my own. It’s about me and my work, not about Mother or Nat or—”

“I don’t mean for you to stay and miss your award! You must go to that, but come back and truly stay. With me.” He lifted his eyebrows. “I am not above begging.”

I laughed and kissed him again. “I’d like to see what begging looks like for you, but I think I’m meant to find my own destiny instead of obsessing about my mother’s or believing it rests with someone else.”

“But she’s here, too. You could come to know her more. Or just stay through holiday and the new year. I’ll take what you can give.”

“I know I’ll come back. I know I’ll find my way to her; she’s only fifty-five years old. If I’m lucky, we have decades. But now, right now, I have classes to teach. I’ve thought much of what I want to do when I get home, how I want to take everything lovely from here and bring it home. I want to show children that it’s okay to be imaginative, to have invisible friends, to make up stories, to draw creatures and fairies and dragons, to… dwell in your imagination while also living here in the very real world.”

“I had that…” He hesitated, and I held up my hand.

Jealousy flared in my chest, a flash that singed the moment. “I want to be what I wish I’d had—someone to show me that I am not alone. Even though Mother ran, she left that indelible knowing in me and I want to leave it in others. I have Wynnie and we have a home.”

“And you, if you’d like to know, you also have me. You have me in the palm of your hand. You have me wrapped around your little finger. You have… me.” He sat back in his chair. “Clara, I wake up wanting you. I go to sleep wanting you. Not just that way,” he said, running his fingers along the inside of my wrist, sending the heat of desire through me. “But to have you nearby. To talk to you about every word and lyric and thought. To hear your curiosity and wonder. To know you’re in the next room. But, Clara, if this is what you need to do, if this is your path, if you need to go home, I am not going anywhere. I am here .”

His want for me sent such a great thrill through me, a song I’d wanted to hear and didn’t even know I’d longed for. But I would not abandon myself or Wynnie again: not for a lost mother, not for a gambling husband, not for a satchel in a river, and not for a man I had met only ten days ago.

“Charlie,” I said, “I didn’t come here to find love.”

He shook his head. “But yes, you did.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“You did indeed. You came to find your mother’s love and found even more than that. Much more.”

He was telling a truth that needed some time to settle over me. I had come for love, and that was true.

“What about you coming with me?” I asked.

He hesitated and I felt the unsaid words that were the same as mine. He had a life here. A band. A family. A world. But that wasn’t what he said.

“That’s possible, Clara. It is. If you mean it, after I settle Father’s affairs as I promised, it’s possible.” When I didn’t answer, he took my hand. “There is an Irish saying that I feel is all I want to say right now to make you understand.”

“What is that?”

“You’re the place that I stand when my feet are sore.”

“Oh, Charlie.” I kissed him, and what I didn’t say, what I didn’t tell him, was that he, too, had me in all the same ways.