60. The Voice of the Wind
The Voice of the Wind
In a small city by the sea, the wind curled around the eaves of a home filled with love, rustling the glossy leaves and crimson berries of the holly bush outside the kitchen window.
The wind had stories to tell, but few wanted to listen. It spoke, but most people dismissed its cries. Once, long ago, there had been a girl who was different, but she had grown angry with the wind, and then she had grown up and away. The wind had mourned her loss, as it had the loss of few others.
Though the girl had forsaken the wind, the wind had not done the same.
It had raced alongside the train that had taken her from Chicago to New York City’s Grand Central Station.
It lingered outside her apartment building, watching her grow and change as her city did the same.
Up went the Empire State Building, the Waldorf Astoria, the High Line.
Down came the Twin Towers. The girl lost friends when they fell, and the wind cried along with her, raining ashes on the city she loved.
When the grown girl left New York City, an old woman now, the wind came with her, content to fill the sails of the boats that drifted through the Intracoastal Waterway and shape the dunes that hemmed North Carolina’s beaches.
It knew when the grown girl remembered her real, true name.
When she understood the truth the wind had been trying to tell her so long ago.
The wind knew, too, when Lily’s son bared his secrets at long last. Now it gazed through the leaves of the holly outside her granddaughter’s window, witnessing the homey scene within: three people clustered around the table, eating brunch and laughing together.
Curious, the wind curled closer, slipping into the gap between the window and the sill as the woman’s granddaughter, Liv, smiled at the dark-haired man she loved.
Long ago, the wind had foreseen this moment, guiding Liv and the man named Theo together on its inexorable currents.
There is no such thing as chance, the wind thought as it crept toward the table to glimpse what it had wrought, nudging the napkins so that the small, red-headed girl grabbed for hers with a giggle. There is no such thing as time.
The wind knew Liv’s heart. It knew how long she had dreamed of this—a family sitting around the table, happy and content.
Three days from now, three weeks, three months, the man named Theo would ask Liv to marry him.
Time was but an illusion to a force as old as the wind.
She would say yes, of course. For Theo belonged here, the way the man named Gray had not.
Gray had been a placeholder, a way station on the winding path of Liv’s life.
The wind had paid him little attention, before fate had blown him off and away.
The one gift Gray had given Liv was the small girl who sat beside her, slipping forkfuls of scrambled eggs to the brown-and-white dog that sat, eager, beneath the table.
The wind had listened, intrigued, as the man named Theo had convinced Liv to pick out the saddest, loneliest dog at the shelter, the one that had been there the longest, the one no one wanted.
If anyone had asked, the wind would have told them Theo chose the dog that reminded him of himself—the one who had been invisible until the right person came along.
The one who never believed he would truly find a home.
But no one asked, of course. No one paid the wind any mind as it traipsed home alongside the car that carried Liv, Theo, and the dog that would become Chloe’s perfect Christmas present.
No one noticed it billowing the curtains now, as Chloe fed the dog Theo’s terrible eggs—the wind could not blame her—and Liv bent her head over a pad of paper, drafting a message for the third time.
She read it aloud to Theo, who smiled, shrugged, and sipped his coffee.
The wind was pleased. Theo would listen as many times as Liv needed him to.
He would be here today, as she worked through what she meant to say.
He would be here tomorrow, when his brother Will came to visit, bringing the grown girl’s sister.
The wind would rejoice at Lily and Susi’s second reunion.
It would bring a blizzard to celebrate, just as it had carried snow on its wings the day the sisters had been torn apart nearly a century before.
For months afterward, people would speculate about the blanket of white that covered the beaches and bobbed on the ocean’s waves.
They would have all sorts of explanations, from science to happenstance to Christmas miracles.
No one would know the truth—that the snowfall was the wind’s gift to the girls it could not save, who had, at last, found peace.
It was time to go. The wind’s next host awaited, but it lingered as Theo brushed a curl from Liv’s cheek, his fingers drifting for an instant to the pendant that she never took off.
It ruffled the dog’s fur and fluttered the pages of Liv’s notepad in approval, then swirled through the gap in the window and went on its way.
For old times’ sake, the wind followed the path it had taken nearly a hundred years ago, when the train stole the girl away from New York City to Chicago.
The trains still ran, though not with such pomp and circumstance as they once had.
Still, from the sky, it was easy to imagine nothing had changed.
The wind snaked along, invisible above the spine of the train, imagining the girl was beneath it, that her story had just begun.
Such things were easy to do. The wind had existed forever. It lived in all times and none.
It slowed as it passed through a small town in America’s heartland, watching as a woman tended her garden, alone.
Rippling through the lilies and ruffling the silken petals of the roses, it watched as the woman sank her hands into the earth, burying seeds for the next season.
It crept through the grass as she trimmed and clipped and shaped, speaking softly to the flowers, telling them how the sunlight would make them grow.
It came to the wind: The woman was lonely, as the wind was lonely. As the girl had been lonely so long ago.
The wind knew a secret about this woman, one it had never been able to tell. But now, the secret had been spoken aloud, and the wind’s time had come.
Instead of passing through, the wind stayed.
It danced through the reeds at the edge of the pond in her backyard, murmuring to her as she sipped her morning coffee; it swirled around her feet as she went to get the mail, sending leaves scattering down her driveway.
It listened through the crack in the window’s seal when she settled in the kitchen to eat breakfast.
As the woman spooned Cheerios from the bowl, she thought about the dream she’d had the night before. She had been having the same dream for weeks, a haunting.
In it, she was all people, and none. Sometimes, she stood outside an iron fence coated with snow, a man’s black trench coat flapping in the wind like wings as he surged toward her, a raven intent on its prey.
Sometimes, she huddled in a room that smelled of lemons and disinfectant as ghost-people milled around her, a small girl with no voice and no name.
Sometimes, the tinkling notes of a piano played; sometimes, people wailed in a language she didn’t understand.
But always, always, her mother stood in the shadows, calling her name.
The wind is coming, her mother said. It is calling us home.
The dreams would have frightened the woman, had it not been for the pure joy with which her mother spoke. The happiness.
On her deathbed, her mother had spoken of secrets, of promises made and kept. Delirious, she had slipped into the past, reciting the stories that she had told the woman long ago.
As a toddler in the 1920s, the woman’s mother had been abandoned on a westbound, cross-country train.
Some of the passengers claimed they’d seen a man in a long trench coat with her, who’d fled and never returned.
In any case, by the time the train arrived in Kansas, her mother was alone and terrified.
When the conductor asked her name, all she could do was sob.
Her mother had wound up in an orphanage, the only relic of her old life a mysterious key from which she refused to be parted. A few weeks later, a couple had fallen in love with the little girl with the blond ringlets and huge dark eyes. They’d adopted her and named her Mabel Beth.
Since Mabel cried whenever the key was out of reach, the couple made a necklace of it, hanging it on a silver chain that had been in their family for a century.
Theirs was a happy home, defined by the hard work of running a farm, but filled with love.
Mabel grew up breathing the fresh country air, waking early in the morning to collect eggs from the chicken coop and milk the cows.
She helped with the harvest and baked pies made with apples from the family’s orchard.
A year after Mabel’s adoption, a friend of the family came to her parents, a newspaper in hand.
Mabel’s parents were barely literate, so the friend read the story to them.
It told of a little girl lost in a fancy neighborhood in New York City, a girl who matched Mabel’s description.
Most peculiar of all, the little girl had vanished from a locked park...
one that could only be opened from inside or out with a custom-made key.
The girl’s parents were offering a substantial reward for her recovery.
Mabel’s parents could see that the picture of the little girl that ran with the article looked suspiciously like their daughter.
They needed the money, desperately; the farm was often on the verge of dissolution.
But that was of no consequence. To them Mabel was, as they would tell her often in years to come, “a pearl of great price, and one we wouldn’t part with at any cost.” Still, they were fiercely moral.
If the child they loved so much belonged to a grieving set of parents, it was their responsibility to give her back.
It couldn’t be their Mabel, they told themselves. She’d been found in Kansas, hundreds of miles from New York City. How could she possibly have come so far?
But she’d been found on a train. Abandoned. She could have come from anywhere.
The decision tortured them. They talked about it behind closed doors. They searched their hearts. They prayed. And finally they resolved that they had no choice but to come forward.
But that very day—Mabel’s mother would always emphasize this part, believing it to be evidence of a miracle—another story ran in the paper.
This one proclaimed the miraculous return of Ella Carter, the little girl who’d been lost. She’d been found in Chicago.
She was home again, right where she belonged.
Mabel’s parents had breathed a sigh of relief so huge, it seemed as if the old farmhouse sighed with them. Their daughter was theirs, after all. It had just been a dreadful coincidence.
Except, Mabel’s mother would tell her, she didn’t believe there were such things as coincidences when it came to matters of the heart.
It had been a test—of their faith, of how far they would go to stay true to the Lord.
And when they’d proved themselves worthy, willing to sacrifice the child they loved more than anything, He had relented.
Ella Carter had been found close to Christmas, and Mabel’s mother always told her she was their Christmas miracle.
When Mabel told her own daughter the story, she would tell most of it just as her own mother had told it to her.
And then she would add what she’d imagined: growing up, she’d envisioned another life for herself.
A life where, instead of churning butter and bringing the horses out to pasture, she sat in tea rooms and nibbled on tiny sandwiches with the crusts cut off.
Where she wore coats made of fur and silk dresses with flowers embroidered on the hem.
She imagined herself sitting at the window of a fancy apartment, watching the sparkling lights of New York City unfold before her instead of the rolling, impenetrable darkness of a cornfield.
It was a fairytale, she’d tell her daughter. A way to pass the time.
But the girl wasn’t so sure. She thought of her mother, abandoned on the train that had borne her to Kansas from who-knew-where, the key hung around her neck. Of the similarity between her mother’s appearance and the picture that ran in the newspaper so long ago.
And as she grew up, she wondered.
When Mabel died, leaving the farmhouse to her grown daughter, the woman grieved.
They had almost lost the house—would have, had it not been for her mother’s inheritance from a far-flung relative the woman had never met.
The inheritance had paid for her mother’s care at the end, paid off the house’s mortgage, and even given the woman funds to live on.
After that, the woman had raised her own children here, in the wake of an unhappy marriage, but those children were grown and gone.
Her father had died years before. Now she was alone, in the drafty farmhouse, with only her memories, her imagination, and her mother’s key to keep her company.
She thought of her mother’s bedtime stories, of the fairytale that Mabel’s rightful place was in a luxurious apartment, with Persian rugs on the floor and splendid paintings on the walls. And she wondered if it might be true.
If the wind was coming, perhaps she should let it in.
Giving way to her fancies, she walked to the window and raised the sash an inch to invite the breeze inside. It curled around her ankles, a chilly companion, as the old-fashioned house phone in the kitchen rang.
The call came from an unknown number. The woman almost didn’t answer. But she thought of her mother’s face, of the dreams. And she lifted the receiver.
“Hello?” she said, the single word echoing in the empty house.
“Bonnie Greene?” It was a woman’s voice, tentative but clear. In the background, a dog barked and a child laughed in response. Normal, everyday sounds, but something told the woman that this call was anything but. That it would change everything.
“This is Bonnie,” the woman said, her hand tightening on the receiver. The breeze blew again, its touch gentle now, almost reassuring. Was it strange to take comfort in the wind?
There was a pause on the other end of the line. A deep voice rumbled. And then the caller spoke again, more confidently this time.
“My name is Liv Carter-Brentwood. You don’t know me, but I’m part of your story.”
Thank you for reading Liv and Theo’s story!