CHAPTER 28 

March 1960

Light rained down on Harry, surrounding him. He stood in front of an easel near the high iron-mullioned window, his left hand in midair, holding a paintbrush, his head tilted to the right, his right hand tapping a rhythm on lion-colored pants. His hair was long enough to touch his shoulders, tucked behind the shells of his ears.

Hazel and Kelty stood at the open door. Three other artists were at work; two men, one at a pottery wheel and another staring blankly at a block of marble with only a few chips gone, and a woman wearing slim black pants and a gray T-shirt stained with splashes of red paint in front of another easel, a cigarette dripping lazily from her left hand.

From the radio came Bobby Darin singing “Dream Lover.” The back door, Hazel now realized, was open, and a fresh sea breeze blew through.

The woman was the first to notice Kelty and Hazel, offering them a slow smile that felt both lazy and seductive. She sauntered over to a cardboard table where the wireless sat peppered in paint and dried clay and turned down the music. “Hallo! Sorry to be so rude. Welcome to 6123.”

Hazel’s throat closed, full of so many words that they seemed clogged and useless. But not Kelty; she burst out with “Harry!”

He turned so suddenly that he dropped the brush, orange paint splattering his already-stained pants and the tarp below. His recognition came slowly, wave upon wave on his face, then his eyes.

It was only a second, maybe two, but time elongated in the room, stretched out with Hazel noticing Harry’s each twitch and move. The spark in his brown eyes, the raised eyebrows, and Hazel having enough time to wonder if he would smile or frown, if he would nod in dismissal or…

Then he rushed toward them, taking them both in his arms, one on each side, pulling them close. “Hazel! And am I right, this is Kelty?”

Kelty laughed gloriously and said, “I can’t breathe.” Hazel felt his arms around her and marveled how he’d become a man, this man.

Time swooped back in, turning itself right side up and moving along its regular rhythms. Harry stepped back, yet kept one hand on each of their shoulders. Damn, he was handsome. Probably always had been but it had been hidden beneath the puppy-ness of an adolescent, nothing quite matching yet, each part waiting to grow into the other parts.

“What are you doing here?” He shook his head and his curly hair fell from behind his ears. “No, let me start again. I am so glad you’re here! How did you find me?”

“Your mum,” Hazel said.

“Well, good on her. You saw Mum?” He directed the question to Hazel with a familiar eagerness.

“I did,” Hazel said.

“She’s well, isn’t she.” It wasn’t a question at all.

“She most certainly is. And Mr. Nolan?” she asked. “I didn’t see that coming.”

“Seems I was blind, too.” Harry shook his head. “Love is strange.”

“Indeed,” Kelty said, and took in the room. “This is amazing. What a life.”

Harry seemed to realize they weren’t the only ones in the room. “Oh, Ethan! Look who is here. Marvin and Dawn, meet my childhood friends Hazel and Kelty.”

The man at the marble sculpture stood, his stork-like legs surprisingly long. He walked a few steps toward them, but that’s all it took before both Ethan’s name, the young twin boy from Binsey and his grin full of shenanigans, and the shy blue eyes registered with Hazel.

Ethan Baldwin.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, if it isn’t the beauty and grace of Hazel Linden come to visit upon us?” he declared.

Everyone in the room burst out laughing. Voices overlapped and there were hugs and cheek kisses before Harry suggested they settle in and reminisce at the pub a block away—the same one Hazel and Kelty had just left.

But that wasn’t the purpose of their visit, Hazel wanted to tell him. And it wasn’t to see his art or drink pints. She was there to ask a single question, but the surge of their energy had them winding through the secreted cobblestone alleys and back to the Sloop Inn pub within minutes, leaving Marvin and Dawn behind, with pints all around. Hazel sat next to Harry and on her other side was Ethan. Crowded four at a table for two, their knees touched. The table was soon filled with fish and chips, with grease soaking into its parchment paper. Awkwardness replaced the initial unfettered happiness at the studio.

Kelty, as she did, filled the silence with a warm burst of energy. “An artist colony,” she said to the men. “I guess we should have known all along.”

Harry shrugged and set his elbows on the table. “I didn’t know all along. I tried a few other things.”

“Like?” Hazel was immediately and shockingly ravenous, starving for information about his last years. For all the times and days she’d looked away from her curiosity, now she was leaning into it. Was he married? Kids. His art? His other jobs?

He draped his arm on the back of her metal café chair. He looked up. “Banking, financial advising, newspaper printing…” He met Hazel’s gaze. “None of it interesting to me at all. I’ve been here for ten years, painting in all kinds of mediums and waiting, like everyone else, for my big break, for the right person to notice my genius.” He laughed.

“If there’s a place to wait out a big break, I can’t think of a better one,” Hazel said, her palm up as she swept her hand across the table to the sea.

“It is an extraordinary place,” Harry said. “The light here is sometimes otherworldly. You can spend your whole life trying to capture it, to find it, to take the miraculous air of Cornwall and put it on a canvas. I might never achieve it, but I will damn sure not stop trying.”

Hazel smiled at the boy and the man whose exuberance was still pup-like and free, even if tempered.

Kelty pointed at both men. “Kids? Wife?”

They both shook their heads. Ethan companionably slapped Harry’s shoulder. “Although Dawn back at the studio is most likely waiting for a proposal from this one.” Ethan pointed back at Kelty. “And you?”

“Married to a wild man, Fergus, with an astounding girl named Midge.”

“That’s mighty fine,” Ethan said. “At the moment, this lug and I don’t make the best prospects for husbands and fathers—what with living in a house with four people and trying to bust out in the art world.” He nodded at Hazel. “You?”

“Yes, there’s a man. Barnaby. He’s a professor.” She stopped; it seemed the wrong place to talk about him. She glanced between Harry and Ethan. “You made a choice,” Hazel said, knowing she’d made a choice, too, but a different one. “Art over safety and—”

“Over what some might call normalcy,” Ethan said, and took a swallow of his pint, wiping foam from his beard. “But if you aren’t living your life, whose life are you living?”

“Damn fine question,” said Kelty.

“You know,” Harry said. “If you’d waited two days, we have an art show in London, in Hampstead Heath, and we’d have come to you.”

Hazel and Kelty looked at each other and laughed.

“Where’s your twin…?” Hazel blanked on the name of Ethan’s brother, another thing lost in the dingy basement of those days.

“Adam is living in America. Met a girl who came to Oxford for a semester. Then he up and moved to New York.” Ethan rolled his eyes. “And now he works at her parents’ garment warehouse. Or should I say, runs it. He’s becoming the garment king of Manhattan’s Lower East Side.”

Adam moved to America.

The information hummed across the table like Ethan had plucked a guitar string. This was it—this, right here—possibly all the answers in a single moment. Harry had told Ethan of Whisperwood, Ethan told Adam, Adam told a girl, now his wife… in America.

“When did Adam move to America?” Hazel asked casually, her hands clasped together.

“Oh, ten years or so ago. He has two monsters I adore, a boy and a girl. But I don’t get to see them often, as you’d imagine.”

Kelty narrowed her eyes at Hazel, and Hazel knew what she was saying with that one glance.

Ask now.

But she couldn’t, not in front of Ethan. “Harry, can you walk down to the water with me for just a minute?” They all heard the tremble in her voice.

“I’m all yours,” he said, and stood, brushed his palms on his paint-stained pants, and pushed back his chair. “Low tide. Good time for it.”

Getting to her feet, Hazel felt the leftover winter hiding in the spring breeze, a chill that had her grab her cream wool jersey and slip it on as they silently walked across the street and toward a wide stretch of tawny beach. She thought of their long walks in Port Meadow toward the river, of quiet mornings and of sketches slipped under the door, of the way the soft edges of the pathway went from brown to green to bursting with color, and how she’d seen it all with Harry at her side.

They climbed down concrete stairs and reached the wet strip of sand, darker brown and soft. A bright blue rowboat rested on its side, a red buoy dangling from a barnacle-covered rope, which was tied to a metal ring on the beach’s stone wall. Harry sat on the edge of the boat and crossed one foot over the other, tilted his head in his mother’s move, and smiled. “Damn good to see you, Hazel. I’ve wondered about you for so long. I’ve asked around… so to be honest, I know you work at Hogan’s. I’ve thought about stopping in, but I knew you didn’t want to see me.”

She shifted her feet in the sand, feeling it give way beneath her. She couldn’t find a word to say now that they were alone.

He looked down and switched one foot for the other; the boat rocked back a bit, then settled again. “You never answered my last letter.”

“I know. I can explain,” she said. But could she? Could she truly tell him of the blood vow she’d made in a cold stone church with her sister gone? Even now she felt as if she were betraying her sister, breaking a promise, even now with her adult eyes and mind, the child within her screamed “betrayal.”

He interrupted her thoughts. “You don’t have to explain. I know you blame me. There’s nothing I can do about it and although I hate it, it’s true.”

“Why ever would I blame you?”

He tilted his head. “For losing her… for losing Flora.”

“Losing her?” An electric shock shot through Hazel’s chest.

“When I went to find you, I thought Flora was sound asleep. I left her alone by the river—for five minutes? Ten? I think back and back and try to remember how many seconds or minutes it took to find you and then—”

“Stop. It was never your fault. Never. I’m not here to fish for an apology.”

“Then why are you here?”

As she stood there on a wet strip of Cornwall sand, as the seagulls squawked, and a dog ran past covered in a fine crust of sand, she knew there was more than one reason for being there: She missed him. She wanted to see him again and know he was well. She wanted absolution. She wanted to touch him. She wanted… so much.

His hair was burnished with the evening sun, hay-flecked, his eyes so fixed on her she thought it possible that he had missed her just as she had missed him.

“Harry, I need to ask you something.”

“Anything.”

“Did you know the name of our land? Of the made-up land that I told Flora about?”

“Isn’t that why you got so mad at me that day? Because I asked?”

“Yes.”

“Then how could I know?”

“Did you ever hear me speak it or did you tell our story to anyone? To Ethan, who maybe told it to Adam or…”

Harry stood. He came so close to her that Hazel smelled his warm breath of beer. “Hazel Mersey Linden, I have never repeated your story. I wouldn’t know it to tell it, to be honest. And I never told anyone what we fought about that day at the edge of the river. What is this about?”

“Whisperwood,” she said.

“Wytham Woods? Above Binsey?”

“No.”

Then in what felt like one long exhale, Hazel told Harry the entire story, from the day less than a week ago when she’d found the book Whisperwood to this moment on the beach.

He listened without moving, barely blinking. She made herself stand fast, not run from his gaze. When she finished, he pulled her into him, held her against his chest without a word. She felt his heart through his T-shirt, the rolling of it with hers. She lifted her arms and wound them around him, holding fast.

She’d wanted him to hold her like this when she was fifteen years old, yet she’d done everything to push him away. Now silence until he loosened his hold, and she stepped back. He was crying without regard for how he looked or who would see him on a wide-open beach in Cornwall.

“Harry.”

“So if I didn’t know the story, and Mum didn’t know, that means Flora might have lived? She didn’t die or drown that day; she lived to tell your story?”

“You see,” she said. “I thought she disappeared looking for Whisperwood.”

“No.” Harry shook his head. “I left her alone.”

My God, they’d been carrying the same burden. The same bloody weight of guilt. They could have, she realized, been carrying it together all this time.