Chapter 11 Clara
CHAPTER 11? CLARA
Bluffton, South Carolina
“I have to tell Nat today.”
Lilia and I walked along the sidewalk of downtown Bluffton, ambling slowly under the shadows of swaying palmettos. It was the warmest November on record, so we carried our light coats over our arms. She’d met me after church with her family. We’d just finished Sunday lunch at Café Harvey and were walking to prolong our afternoon. We were rarely alone anymore—I had Wynnie and she had her five-year-old, Bella.
The air was thick with unshed rain, and a breeze flapped the shop awnings like sails. Live oak trees arched over us, and lampposts stood as sentinels along the sidewalk. The cry of a seagull overhead. Everything was closed on a Sunday, and we paused in front of the bookshop where there was always a copy of The Middle Place for the curious who made a sojourn to Bluffton to see where Bronwyn once lived. Purple and yellow pansies spilled from the window box below the book displays.
“Nat is not going to be happy,” she said before she bent over and picked up a white ibis feather caught in a sweetgrass bush. She handed it to me. “Signs everywhere.”
“It’s a sign, but for what?” I asked. “Don’t go? Go?” I took the feather from her and smiled, feeling loved.
“It means you’re meant to go, silly. A feather. Fly away!”
Lilia and I could, and often did, make signs out of anything. We knew how to confirm whatever we wanted just by saying, “It’s a sign.”
I stared at her and thought again how chic she was, how she’d become a mother and wife with such ease, wearing the cotton dress with a Peter Pan collar, pantyhose, and the pin curls I could never seem to perfect. “Did you sew that dress?” I pulled at her sleeve. “This is something. I really have no idea how you do everything with such ease. You’re my best friend and I can’t even begin to understand your endless abilities.”
She laughed. “I couldn’t draw a potato if I tried, so nothing out of you.” Her face grew serious. “You’re going.”
“Yes. In three weeks. It’s decided. Wynnie’s been with Nat all weekend, so Dad and I worked it out. I’ll use my savings and on November thirtieth we’ll board the ship Charlie suggested. I’ve had our passports rushed and Dad wanted to help, so he booked us a place to stay in Covent Garden. But I’m telling you, Nat will lose his mind. I’m bracing for it.”
We paused as Mr. and Mrs. Hightower walked past us arm in arm, singing out a greeting in unison. She’d been my piano teacher as a child, and he’d been my lawyer in the divorce. This was small-town life. We greeted them, and then Lilia turned back to me.
“So what if he loses his mind?” She wiped her hands in a motion as if dusting them off. “Swish-swish, be done with what he has to say or think or do.”
“I can’t, though. He’s still her father. Wishing him ill feels like wishing it on her, too.”
She placed her hands on my shoulders. “Because of him, you’ve lost everything. I don’t care what he thinks about the first real chance you have to find out about your mother.”
“I didn’t lose everything. I lost money, a house, and a marriage. But I have everything, literally everything in the world that matters.”
She hugged me. “Yes, you do.” She bit her lip. “Must I always be the one to say the crass thing?”
“I guess you must—what is it?” I smiled at her, for she had always been the truth teller in our friendship.
“If you translate this novel, you will finally be financially free. I know, I know—you don’t like to think of it that way, but, Clara, it’s still true. I know you admire that sequel for the art of it or to find out what happened to Emjie, or, more important, what happened to your mother, but it will also save you.”
“I’ve thought the same thing,” I said. “I drove to Savannah on Friday and took it out of the lockbox. I have it at home.”
“Wow. This is happening. All these years…” She hugged me and held on a bit longer than usual. What a thing to be loved the way she loved me, from beginning to now, even with all I’d lost.
“I love you,” I said.
She pulled back and smiled before she snuck a peek at her watch. “I have to go, but you’re coming tonight, aren’t you?”
“Tonight?”
“My Sunday-night dinner party. And you are coming.”
“Not if you’re trying to set me up with Bill’s business partner. Nope. No. Nope.”
“Setting up. Seating you next to him. It’s all semantics.”
I’d told her before but kept it to myself now. Desire burrowed underground the day I discovered Nat’s betrayal. It was now interred beneath layers of time and heartbreak. Sitting next to a good-looking man at a dinner party was not going to dig up what might be buried for good.
I shook my head. “I just can’t, Lilia. Wynnie comes home tonight, and I must tell Nat.”
“You can’t use her forever as an excuse not to fall in love again.”
“Go on, you,” I said. “Get on with your day and tell Bill hello and hug little Bella for her aunt Clara.”
“Good luck,” she said before she turned and made her way to the far parking lot. Another hour before I faced the music, and I wanted to walk down to the town dock and sit at the water’s edge with the London guidebook I’d borrowed from the library.
My legs dangled over the edge of the dock. A young boy wearing a baseball cap too big for his head and his father in overalls stood at the far end with their fishing poles bowed over the dimpled water. A weathered shrimp boat with its nets dangling off the sides and seagulls following in hopes of scraps eased by me.
I opened the guidebook, three years out-of-date, titled London A to Z . The first page displayed a map of the city with the blue snake of the River Thames slicing through its middle. A spark, something born of desire and adventure, lit the tender dried wood of my life.
On the back porch of our home that evening, Nat, Wynnie, Dad, and I sat in the wooden chairs. Nat had finished regaling us with their weekend activities when I told him what I’d decided over the weekend—Wynnie and I would sail to England. We’d be gone for two weeks total—nine days on train and sea, and five days in London. We’d pick up Mother’s papers, see some educational and historical sites, and then sail straight home.
When I finished telling him, a nervous flutter nestled in my chest. I knew what would come next, and I was right.
“No you aren’t,” Nat said. “Hell no.”
Wynnie ignored him and danced around the back deck. “We’re going to museums and art galleries. We’re visiting libraries and Westminster, where the queen will be coronated. We’re going to the Tower of London and Big Ben!”
I laughed, and Nat slammed his hand on his leg and stood up. “Stop! This is irresponsible. You’re in over your head.”
“Nat,” I said calmly, my voice even, “it’s all set. I have a sub for my class. I’ll call Wynnie’s teacher and tell Jim Alexander that it’s an educational trip, which it is. We have tickets on the Silver Meteor train to New York City, I have two second-class tickets on the SS United States , and Dad has rented us a flat in Covent Garden. It’s happening fast, but it’s happening in three weeks.” I know I sounded high-minded, but I needed the false bravado to get through it.
“No,” he said. “How can you afford this?”
Here it was—the part I’d hoped he wouldn’t ask about. But I would not lie. “I took the money from my savings. I’ll be able to pay it back when I have the sequel translated.”
“That’s risky, and you know it,” he said.
I tried not to laugh at him but failed. “Are you serious, Nat?”
He ignored the obvious gibe and went straight for the heart of it all. “The damage your mother has done to you and to most of the people in her life is enough for me to know that the last thing I want is for you and Wynnie to go running into danger to find her. And to spend what you’ve spent years saving.”
“Into danger? The war has been over for nearly six years. London is full of the most beautiful sights and galleries in the world. You and I wanted to go together. Remember? We made plans, so now suddenly it’s not safe?” I kept my voice soft, modulated with effort.
“You and me going is a hell of a lot different than my Wynnie going.”
“ Your Wynnie?”
“Yes, mine too. And none of her doctors are there. What if something happens? What if she needs something and she has an attack?”
“Stop,” I said as I watched Wynnie deflate, fall into a chair.
“I forbid it.”
“Forbid it?” I coughed out the response.
“I think we all need to calm down,” Dad said softly. He took Wynnie’s hand to lead her inside.
When the door shut, Nat’s face formed itself into a mask of anger, which I knew was nothing more than fear. I had so little sympathy for him left in me, and that broke my heart.
What if Mother knew where so many of her royalties had disappeared to? It made me sick even as I reminded myself to see the man I once loved, the man who existed beneath the addiction and compulsions.
When I was sure Wynnie was out of hearing distance, I used words I’d swallowed for so long. “You’re the one who has wanted to translate this sequel for all our marriage. You’re the one who said it might help us, and now that we aren’t married and you can’t spend the money, now you don’t think it’s a good idea?”
“Low blow, Clara. Low and cruel.”
“Maybe, but true. Since when have you been able to forbid me? That is as absurd as it gets, Nat. If you ever had any right, you gave it up when your choices broke us apart.”
He closed his eyes, and beneath that mask of calm, rage brewed, a river that flooded into our life and marriage when his gambling took hold of him.
He took in a slow breath. “What if she needs an injection?”
“I’ll take the medicine with me, just like I always do, anywhere we go.”
He glanced out to the bay as if he could see England. “And what day exactly are you planning to leave?”
“The Silver Meteor train leaves November thirtieth from Savannah, a twenty-four-hour ride to New York. I have our passports. Then the steamship departs on December first and docks on December fifth. We’ll stay for a few days and then turn around and come back.”
“I’m serious, Clara. I have a terrible feeling about this.”
“I’m serious, too, Nat. This man in London has my mother’s papers. All my life I’ve believed they were at the bottom of the ocean, and I just cannot leave them there in a stranger’s library. There is a letter for me in there, and I feel like I’ve waited my whole life to read it.”
He shook his head, and with his lips drawn together, he created a disapproving look that always set me on edge. “I know you have, Clara. You were always so desperate for your mother. I just didn’t think you’d do something foolish like take our daughter across the ocean, all for these crumbs of her.”
I flinched with the sting of those words.
Desperate .
It was such an ugly word, so thick with the truth.