The Story She Left Behind

Chapter 59 Wynnie

Esthwaite Water, England

1962

We’ve agreed to scatter the ashes in Esthwaite Water today, but first I must meet the journalist who wants an interview about the Emjie book releasing this month, April of 1962—exactly fifty-three years after the first.

A World of Wonder—Emjie’s Odyssey .

The spring morning is clear as the cut-crystal goblets in Pippa’s cabinet. Sunshine scatters and splits through the newborn leaves all around me. I round the bend on the Grizedale Forest path where I’ve been walking since dawn. The evergreen and spindly spruce, the long-haired willows, and the stately alder surround me. The gnarled hawthorn bushes are covered with white blooms, a proclamation of spring. A kestrel swoops down as if to greet me on my morning walk, and I lift my hand in greeting, his golden wing dipping in turn.

Lus an chromchinn.

A daffodil.

Coinneal oíche.

Evening primrose.

Gráinneog.

Hedgehog.

I practice the words Charlie has been patiently teaching me for ten years now, a language of his father. Even if Charlie isn’t blood, he’s my father now, and I want to know everything of our family.

Mama is in Hawkshead to teach the Saturday-morning art classes at her school, Inside Out. She teaches the young ones of Cumbria that they can express their internal world with outside creations, from invisible friends to stories. Every year there is a display of imaginary friends, large-scale models created by local artists collaborating with children who explain what their imaginary friends look like. It’s the most popular after-school program in the district, and now people are clamoring for it from Manchester to London.

I know every step of this land, and I bend to identify a puffball mushroom and avoid the temptation to break it apart. I pause at the reflection of the fells on the lake’s mirrored surface, and when I turn to the slate house, I think of South Carolina and our old home on the May River. I love this place, but also I love what we left behind. For there is no moving forward or change without loss—that’s what Charlie helps me remember.

Lilia and her husband bought our house from Papa, and they live there with her family, keeping the house full and alive. We visit once a year—it was a promise that Charlie made to Mama a decade ago. A promise he’s kept, as he keeps all promises.

As for Pippa, a friendship with Finneas that bloomed in the greenhouse changed into something more. It began with gardens and then blossomed. Over a field of newly planted narcissus, Finneas told her he’d loved her for decades.

Their love story always makes me feel hopeful—his patience and her ability to reach past her grief to something new.

I wonder how much of our story this journalist will want. Will I tell her how Charlie took us all on an airplane ten years ago to Mama’s Caldecott Award? How they married at the edge of this very lake the next year? I decide these are memories I won’t share, ones that belong to just us.

I reach the lake and shield my eyes with my palm to glance up to where I see a tall woman walking down the swell of pasture to greet me. The journalist, a woman named Dot Bellamy who once wrote a famous magazine series about lost children from World War II, now wants our story of lost words and the new Emjie sequel.

Two weeks ago, Mama sat me down and said, “This interview is yours.”

“No,” I told her. “Grandma and I wrote Emjie’s sequel together, and you illustrated the dictionary. It’s not mine alone to do.”

“You wrote World of Wonder with Grandma, and you helped choose the words for the dictionary. I will come in at the end, but you must talk about the sequel. We trust you.”

I take this with great but heavy pride; I’ve been carrying that word trust around with me since Mama said it.

Tá muinín agam ionat.

I trust you.

Macánta.

Trustworthy.

We decided years ago to never betray the truth of how Grandma survived and where she lived, here with us. She wanted her work to live in the world and yet never the attention it would bring to all of us.

I wave at Dot Bellamy and walk the pathway toward her. My family has confidence I will tell the truth while keeping silent what needs hiding.

In the warm spring afternoon, a breeze off the fells flutters Dot’s straw hat, and she places her hand on top of her head to steady it. She smiles with her red-lipstick mouth, and her eyes are warm. She has no dark edges and I smile in return. After introductions, I invite her into the house for tea.

“If you please,” she says to me in her lovely British accent, “I’d rather walk with you.”

“I prefer it,” I say.

From her pocket she pulls out a small silver recorder. “Do you mind?”

I shake my head, and she clicks a button. She carries the recorder in the palm of her hand. We walk right past Grandma’s cottage, even as Dot asks me her first question. “How did it come to be that you decided to pick up Emjie’s story where your grandmother ended it?”

I tell Dot the bony skeleton of the tale, of how ten years ago Charlie called our house in South Carolina about the pages he had found in his father’s library in London, of our trip to England on the steamship, of London’s poisonous fog and our escape and the arrival to this place. I tell her of Mama and Charlie falling in love, and now, I say, we are here.

“And your dad?”

“He travels all over the world for work; he’s a longshore fisherman now. He visits every year, sometimes twice, depending on where he’s based.” I don’t much want to talk about my dad. He’s safe and he loves us, but the world didn’t conspire to have us all together like other families. Mama and I are now this family. Not all families look exactly alike.

Dot looks down to check on her recorder and flips it over to make sure the microphone is unhindered. “You’re like her, I’ve heard. You’re very much like your grandmother.” Dot stops at the edge of the lake and stares across the water.

I don’t answer this, for what am I meant to say? The words I would tell Dot would come in laughter—I am so much like her and so much not. We have the same best friends, I’d say. Mama and Emjie. But instead, I only smile at Dot because this is the hiding part of the conversation, the sleight of hand, the ability to make her look away from the obvious.

Dot turns to me and away from the view. “A child prodigy, it is said.”

“No, that’s not really true,” I tell her, and straighten my glasses. “My grandma was a child prodigy. Not me. She wrote the first Emjie book when she was eight years old and published it when she was twelve. I wrote World of Wonder , but not alone. It’s not the same.”

“It’s still extraordinary,” Dot says. “A lost grandmother and a lost story, and you took both and published a glorious novel set in America on a southern shore where Emjie finds her way home. It’s beautiful.”

“I had help.” Below this statement was the other truth—Grandma and I did it together. The book was ours. Emjie was ours. But some things are meant to stay private. Not every secret needs to be told. Let her assume I mean my mother.

“Will your mom… will Clara be joining us?”

“In a bit,” I say.

“Do you still believe in Emjie?” she asks so pointedly that I know she’s been holding it like a cork in a bottle of champagne, ready to burst.

“Believe?” I pause and watch the red and white water lilies bob on the surface of the lake, the color intense and the waters serene, each holding the other.

“Yes, do you believe?” she asks without looking at me.

“Do I believe in make-believe, that’s what you want to know, am I right?”

“Possibly,” she says, and now looks to me. “I’m curious about lost things and lost people and what becomes of them, how they are transformed. So yes, the opening epigraph of your novel is ‘Believe in Make-Believe.’ Do you?”

“I know this,” I say. “I know there are stories waiting to be told, and I know Emjie walked by my side when I needed her the most. Do I believe in her? Maybe in the same way I believe in the tales that sustain us and brought my family to the right moment and place. Stories are made of unseen things, of imagination, of old tales and edges of lakes. Maybe Emjie is made of the same.”

She nods as if she understands. “Do you know how your grandmother’s lost and made-up words found their way to the Jameson library?”

“It’s hard to live with unknowing, with not knowing certain things in our life. But we must.”

She cleared her throat and took a deep breath. “What do you think happened to your grandmother? Do you think she’s alive?”

“She’s alive in me and in my mother and in our creative work,” I say with too much precision, as if it is exactly what it is—a rehearsed line. I hope she doesn’t notice.

“What about in the world? She’d be sixty-five years old, if I am calculating correctly.”

“Wouldn’t that be lovely,” I say. “And nearly magical.”

“Yes, it would be. What about the original sequel?” she asks. “Do you know what it told of Emjie’s future?”

“No. We never read it,” I said. “So many words were lost in the journey through the terrible fog that we couldn’t use the dictionary to translate it. So we started over. We began again.”

“Begin again,” she says. “We always must.”

“Yes,” I say.

She laughs. “You aren’t like other eighteen-year-old girls, Wynnie. But I am sure you’ve been told that before.”

“Wynnie!” Mama’s voice falls down the long pathway as she walks toward us; Mopsy, the golden retriever Charlie gave us for Christmas last year, runs alongside her like a loping pony about to trip over itself.

“There’s Mama,” I say. “She can tell you all about the dictionary.”

“Do you have anything else you’d like to say about the sequel? About Emjie?” she asks.

I watch Mama walk down the lane; I glance at Grandmother’s cottage; I close my eyes to find what matters most about Emjie and her sequel and how she found her way home. “I’d like to say that so many people believe the novel is about the invisible world and fairies and fantasy, and in many ways it is. But also, it’s about finding home. It’s about knowing where you belong and then doing something about that truth. It’s about that sometimes awful and sometimes wonderful journey that can take you in wrong directions, but then being willing to begin again and find your way.” I open my eyes.

Dot stares at me and I see hurt in her, a search for something she is always looking for. “Yes” is all she says.

Mama reaches us and all the introductions start over. “Congratulations on your second Caldecott,” Dot says.

“Thank you so much,” Mama tells her. “It never ceases to be a great thrill.”

“Would you mind,” Dot asks, “telling me all about the dictionary, A Word for Everything , and your illustrations for it?”

“I don’t mind at all,” Mama says. “Let’s walk.”

When Mama has explained all about the lost words and how she first saw them when she was a little girl playing hide-and-seek, how Grandma said she “found” them, how Mama organized the best ones and illustrated them, how the dictionary was meant to help others find their own words for the things they could not express, Dot Bellamy nods a lot.

“ A Word for Everything ,” Mama says. “That’s what my mother was looking for and that’s what we’ve called the dictionary.”

Dot clicks off her recorder and glances at the little gold watch on her wrist. “I have a train to catch back to London,” she says. “But this has been the most glorious morning I’ve spent in ages. Thank you for talking with me.”

“Any time,” Mama tells her.

“I have another question that I wasn’t sure I was going to ask, but I’d really like to know—and if you don’t want it in the article, I can say this is off the record.”

“What is it?” Mama asks.

“Do you wish you’d found your mother and not just her words?”

“I always want to find my mother,” Mama says. “Don’t we all?”

“Indeed.” Dot shakes our hands and walks up the flagstone pathway without turning around to say goodbye. Her back is straight, but I swear I can see the tears that fall from her eyes.

Twilight settles on the lake, easy resting on the still waters. We sit on a blanket we laid on the shore next to the large boulders held by the earth. We are barefoot and our pants are rolled up to the knees. The urn is on Mama’s lap. Charlie is on the other side of Mama, his wet hair dripping with the lake’s clear water after his long swim. This isn’t his to do; he is only here for love.

It has been just shy of ten years since Grandma fell to her knees in the dormant garden and cried out, “Clara.”

Now is the right time for this scattering. It feels necessary before the new Emjie book is released.

Mama sets the urn between us and lifts off the top. We both reach inside to grab a handful of the paper’s ash, the burned ruins of the sequel, the book that no one will ever read.

Mama and I stand and walk until the ice-cold water licks our toes. We open our hands and the orange-flower- and rose-scented breeze catches the ash, and it flies like the snowy soot that once sent us here, to Near Sawrey and Lake Esthwaite, and to our new life. The burned remains fly over the waters and lilies, over the rushy edge of the lake, a dark snow.

Then everyone else stands to join us. Grandma is on my other side, and Papa next to her. Then Charlie and Pippa. We are a row of family at the edge of Esthwaite Water. Our reflections waver beneath us, a knot of people who love one another, hurt one another, and then found one another in a land that seems created of deep magic.

The only daughter of an only daughter of an only daughter together at the shore of a lake forged by fire and formed by ice long before we arrived. Mama turns to her own mother and says their secret word, the one she couldn’t say the day they found each other. “ Adorium .”

Then Mama turns the jar upside down and dumps the remainder of the ash, and just as Grandma’s boat did so long ago, the dark flakes float away.

“To new stories,” Grandma says.

“To our stories,” Charlie says.

Mama lifts her hands, palms open in surrender, and the last of the ash falls from between her fingers. “All mystery. All beauty.”