The Story She Left Behind

Chapter 55 Clara

The rain stopped, leaving puddles on the planks of the Windermere station platform. Charlie and I stood quietly, waiting for the world to shift with Dad’s arrival. Then the earth trembled with an arriving train, and Charlie and I stepped back a few feet as the gray train screeched to a stop and the doors split open with a hiss. Men and women in traveling coats and hats, bowing their heads to the cold breeze, stepped off the train. Women held children by the hand and men jostled suitcases off the cars.

I scanned the faces for my dad.

“Ladybug!” His voice rang out and I spun around.

Charlie nudged me and softly said, “Little cow?” He was reminding me of the Gaelic definition.

I rolled my eyes at Charlie, and Dad rushed to me. He set his suitcase on the platform, and we hugged for a long while, quiet with the words that no one could create. I didn’t know how to start a conversation with all that was between us now.

He stepped back and kissed my cheek. “You look so beautiful.” He smiled at me and then turned to Charlie. “Isn’t she just beautiful?”

“Yes, sir, she is.”

“Oh, stop,” I spoke. “Dad, please meet Charlie Jameson.”

They shook hands like proper gentlemen, and we made our way to the car. “Welcome to Cumbria,” Charlie said. “We are so pleased you’ve made your way here. Everyone is waiting.”

“How was your flight, Dad?”

“Bumpy and awful, and I needed to stay awake all night to make sure I kept the contraption in the air by worrying.”

Charlie laughed and I kissed my dad’s cheek, rough with stubble. “Soon you can have yourself a long hot shower and something to eat,” Charlie said.

“No. Take me to Bronwyn, please.” Dad climbed into the back seat and patted the headrest where I sat up front. “First things first.”

“You must have a million questions buzzing inside you,” I told him, twisting around in my seat.

“I do. But questions come later. I just want to see her.”

Charlie drove us along the twisting road, between hedgerows and past sweeping fields. Dad asked, “Where’s Wynnie?”

“Mother took her to walk through the woodlands.”

“Well, isn’t that something.”

“Yes,” I said, “it is. Was the hospital okay with you leaving so abruptly?”

“It’s about time I took a long-overdue sabbatical,” he said.

“Sabbatical?” I asked as Charlie drove through the stone pillars that led to the house. “You’re taking time off?” I felt something approaching that I didn’t understand.

“Yes.”

Charlie drove up the snaking driveway and parked. The stone and granite house loomed in front of us.

“Is this an inn?” Dad asked, rubbing his hand down the length of his stubbled cheeks. He appeared greatly weary, as if he hadn’t slept since the moment when I’d called him and said, “Come now. Please. Mother is here.”

“No, sir. It’s our home.”

“Bronwyn lives here?” He opened the car door and set his feet on the pebbled driveway.

“No,” I told him, and stood next to him, pointing toward the lake. “She lives in one of those cottages. The one in the middle.”

He placed his palm above his eyes and began to walk in that direction.

“Dad, wait. Don’t you want to drop off your things and clean up? Get something to eat?”

He stopped and turned to me. “I haven’t seen your mother in over twenty-five years. I’m not adding one more minute to that time.”

I searched his face, sunken with exhaustion. Was he angry? Expectant? “Dad, are you all right?”

“I don’t know, ladybug. I just don’t know. Will you take me to her, please?”

Charlie shut the car door. “I’ll take the bags inside. You two head on.”

“This way,” I told Dad, and we set off through the frostbitten grass and then on to her cottage.

We didn’t speak as we walked. I knew Mother waited for him, as a feather of smoke rose from the chimney while pale flickering light sparked in the windowpanes. We approached the small gate, and I had just opened it when he set his hand on mine. “I know this has been shocking. I should have asked the minute I saw you. Are you all right?”

“Sometimes,” I said, and walked toward the door. We heard Wynnie’s laughter and a soft voice, and we both stopped to listen.

“My God,” he said. “Here we are.”

“Yes, here we are.”

He exhaled before reaching into his coat pocket. “I have a letter from Nat. Before I forget.” He held it out to me.

“Does he know I’ve been calling him over and over?”

Dad nodded. “Yes. He said he’d call you but sent this letter first. I told him everything that happened to both of you and that you were safe.”

Then the blue door with the brass knocker opened, and Wynnie ran out and threw herself into Dad’s arms. “Papa!” He bent to hug her. I stuffed the letter in my coat pocket.

Mother stood in the doorway. In her blue woolen dress with her hair pulled into a loose bun at her neck, she stood as firmly as the ash tree in her yard, as solid as the stones of the wall she’d built for us, day by day, stone by stone.

Wynnie came to me, and Dad walked toward his wife. They stood facing each other until Mother’s sob broke his name in half. “Tim-othy.”

Wynnie and I watched my mother and dad hold each other in the barren garden. My dad’s shoulders shook with emotion, and Mother’s face was buried in his shoulder as he stroked her hair.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“Me too,” he replied.

“I have so much to tell you.” Her voice fell over us. “I am so sorry—”

He cut across her words and placed his finger under her chin, brought her gaze to his. She collapsed against him, and he drew her inside, shutting the door gently.

Later that day, the drawing room fireplace at the Jameson house blazed, and the room glowed as we gathered. We were all there—Mother, Dad, Wynnie, Charlie, Pippa, and me—in a room that had held so many conversations and heartbreaks and revelations in the past week.

Dad and Mother had been alone for a long time while the rest of us had waited. Now, observing my father across the coffee table, I saw no anger, only the quiet dignity and ease that he always carried.

Forgiveness sat curled and waiting like a sleeping lion, and I wondered who would wake it first.

Moira brought the tea and then lingered in the back of the room. I didn’t blame her. Even I wanted to know what would happen next, who would speak and what they would say. For there were twenty-five years of unsaid words in that room of damask curtains, frosted windows, and a crackling fire. There were twenty-five years of mystery and anger and love and rage.

“Forgive me,” Mother said. “All of you in this room, though I don’t deserve even one of you to understand.”

“None of us deserve anything,” Dad said. “That’s the damned truth of it.”

“Papa!” Wynnie said. “No cursing.”

Dad smiled sadly and tapped his fingers on his temples. “I haven’t asked, Bronny.” He used her old nickname, and my childhood felt nearby, close enough to touch. “Did you stop writing altogether?”

“Yes. After I left, I wouldn’t allow myself that pleasure beyond creating words I’d never use again. Words I’d leave for Clara. I have painted, but not written.”

“The painting in the study,” I said. “Of our house.”

“Yes, I painted it for Pippa.” She looked at Pippa. “Although I could not tell her, I wanted her to have some part of me, here. I gave her The Middle Place also. Pieces of me. Some truth, but not enough, I know.”

“Your language,” I told her. “What’s left of it is upstairs.”

She closed her eyes for a moment. Her hands gripped the edge of the chair, her knuckles whitened, and then her palms turned up as if letting go. “I haven’t seen those pages since I gave them to Callum all those years ago. I swore I was done.”

“Would you like me to go and retrieve them?” I spoke so formally, hearing my voice as another’s. I swung wildly from formality to familiarity, for she was both to me now—intimate and foreign.

“Not right now,” she said. “You don’t have that biography, do you?”

“We do,” I acknowledged.

She cringed. “I hate that it exists. So much of it is true, but it is the ugly past, a part of me I never wanted you to know about.”

“Brian Davis,” I said with a roll of my eyes. “He still shows up occasionally, wanting to know what happened to you. Now we know why he wrote it. He was obsessed with you. Is obsessed.”

“He is a vengeful one, to be sure. But without him, I wouldn’t have met Callum and then been free to be with Timothy. I don’t believe everything happens for a reason, but we can make meaning of the things that come to pass. And without that awful love story I wouldn’t have found Timothy and then had you.” She looked at Dad with such love that I knew my assumptions were right—that she’d never stop loving him or me, and that only her own demons had kept her from us. Pippa was right—fear and shame were mighty powerful forces that kept us from those we loved.

Mother believed that in creating Isolde, she’d protected us.

Pippa looked to Dad. “Did you know my Callum?”

“No, I never met him. I met Bronny after that infamous hike.”

“You would have loved him,” Pippa said. “A dear and fine man.”

And the lion of forgiveness stretched and yawned in the far corner of the room.