The Story She Left Behind

Chapter 56 Clara

I flopped on the bed in the sanctuary that had been mine and Wynnie’s for almost two weeks. But it wasn’t mine at all, really. This was not my family or my life, and I would not and could not abandon myself again as I’d done with Nat, turning a blind eye to all that was wrong so that I could revel in what looked and felt so good. But isn’t that what love was and is? Abandonment of self? Possibly. But not to the detriment of wisdom. Not to the detriment of my daughter.

That’s when Nat’s letter my dad gave me caught my eye on the desk. I’d nearly forgotten about it with my parents’ reunion. I made my way slowly to the desk, as if the letter needed to be approached with care. I picked it up and ripped open the envelope, pulling out a letter in Nat’s handwriting. There was once a time when I’d loved seeing his script, when it sent a thrill to my body—a note of love or even just an XO.

A sense of dread washed over me. He would have called me with good news. Nat had passed this to my dad, and it was taped shut. Wynnie’s name was notably absent.

I pulled out the paper and walked to the window to read it. It was short and to the point, written in block letters as if to make sure I never doubted a word.

Clara,

I must leave Bluffton. I am sorry. I am a coward and refuse to tell you on the phone while you are in England with our daughter.

I took a job with a fishing fleet out of Nova Scotia. I will never be able to start over here, Clara. I fell back into my old habits while you were away. Now no one will give me a job. I have ruined myself and I know that.

I must leave. I am not running away but protecting you and Wynnie. I will return. I promise. When I am done with this and I have money to help the family, I will return.

There was more, but I didn’t want to read it. There would be words of love and regret and promises he’d never keep.

I dropped the letter on the pale green carpet.

These people who claimed to love me but left me for my own good, who abandoned me to protect me—what a farce. The man who was meant to love and care for Wynnie was now leaving her for her own good?

Charlie. I wanted him with such desperate desire at that moment that I felt weak with it, my legs wobbly. I also doubted the desire because so very often it was attached to abandonment.

I walked to the window and leaned my forehead against the cold glass to ease the press of a headache. Outside, I spied Charlie at the lake’s shore. I wanted to run from the room, to him, to his arms. But that I would not do. First, I must understand what Mother’s return and Nat’s leaving meant for our life.

A few minutes later and a knock echoed through the room. I opened the door expecting Wynnie and Moira, but instead Charlie stood there with something in his hands.

“Yes?” I asked, wanting him to come to me, to smooth over this rattling that had come between us when I hadn’t agreed to stay.

“I have your passports,” he said, and held out two dark squares.

My throat tightened with the telltale sign of tears I would not let him see. I had my way to get home, but did I even want it?

I took the passports and closed the door without a word.

“Clara?” he asked from outside. “Are you all right?”

I wasn’t.

Eventually his footsteps retreated, and I slid down the door, sat on the carpet. Nat’s letter echoed with familiar abandonment—another person leaving for my own protection, but also, I realized, it whispered of freedom. I didn’t know if I wanted that freedom, for therein were choices. My choices. It was almost easier when I had none. Nat had been part of my excuse for returning to South Carolina, my anchor even when I’d cut him loose.

A moment returned to me clear as the crystalline lake outside, a day with Mother in the backyard as we pressed flowers between sheets of tissue paper to preserve the petals and stems, the leaves and pistils, the pollen, and the calyx before they faded to brown death.

“This,” Mother said. “Art comes from the same place as this flower.” She’d pressed the flower into my hand. “It is all mystery and beauty and all of this, including us, including that flower, comes from the same place.”

All mystery and beauty.

I stood with that memory as clear as a cloudless sky and thought of T. S. Eliot’s poem, the one that Charlie and I had recited together with laughter because we’d both memorized it and now, I knew: Mother had taught it to us both. My mother was the knot between us, the one who brought us together.

In my beginning is my end. / In my end is my beginning.

I stood before the easel and opened a tube of azure blue.

The sky was splitting open. Two paths before me opened, and I needed to decide which one to take.