CHAPTER 52
March 20, 1960
The blue door to the stone cottage was open and Bridie stood on the front stoop watching Hazel and Dot walk up the path. Hazel opened the gate as Bridie stepped down onto the pathway. Her silver-and-chestnut hair hung free over her shoulders.
“Hallo there!” she called out as she walked from flagstone to flagstone, as if crossing a river rock by rock, meeting them halfway. “Hazel, what a lovely surprise!”
Then Bridie stopped short, stared at Dot Bellamy, and placed both her hands over her chest, took in a breath. When she exhaled it was with a cry, her face shining with recognition and relief. And instead of throwing her arms around Dot, as Hazel had thought she might do, she took Dot’s hands, kissing the palm of each one. “Flora, of course you would arrive today, for today is the first day of spring.”
Dot’s face quivered, but she stood still and straight.
“I’ve dreamed of this twice in the past week,” Bridie said, and she looked to Hazel. “I thought it was because Hazel had visited, but no, it was because you were on the way. I should have known. How are you here?”
“Now that’s a story,” Dot said, haltingly. “I was trying to write an article, an ongoing series about the lost children of Pied Piper,” she said, never taking her gaze from Bridie. “I didn’t know the truth of who I was, who I might be, until yesterday.”
Bridie didn’t try to cover her tears, just looked straight at Dot. “You found yourself,” she said.
“I’m not sure yet,” Dot said. “My memories are so muddled. I am confused but yes, I know I was once Flora. But I’m also not Flora because I am Dorothy May Bellamy.” She laughed uncomfortably. “And actually I am Dorothy McCallister as I’m married, but I use my maiden name for my byline.”
“It seems,” Hazel said to Bridie, “that Imogene Wright kidnapped Flora that afternoon on the Feast of St. Frideswide.”
Bridie closed her eyes and spread her arms wide, lifted her face to the sun. “Thank you for bringing her home. Now,” she said to them all. “Come in. Let’s all have a cuppa. Let the memories simmer for a bit.”
The crunch of gravel, the low growl of a motor, and they all turned to see Harry’s faded red VW van grinding too fast down the drive, dust and gravel rising like smoke. He slammed on the brakes with a loud squeal. Flying out of the driver’s side door, he left it open as he bounded toward them.
“Harry,” Dot said quietly, nodding at the man running toward them. “Yes, that’s Harry.”
In paint-splattered denim pants and a black T-shirt, a gray flat cap over his curls, he reached their sides and glanced at them with interest. He kissed his mum’s cheek and then Hazel’s. She felt the singular thrill of his touch, even fleeting. He looked to Dot. “Hello, I’m Harry Aberdeen.” He held out his hand.
Dot smiled. “I know.” She shook his hand. “I’m—” She hesitated and then forcefully said, “I’m Dorothy Bellamy with Vanity Fair magazine.”
“Ah, the woman who’s writing the articles.” Harry looked to Hazel for answers.
“Yes,” Dot said.
“Do you mean to interview us?” he asked.
Hazel smiled at Harry, lifted her chin toward Dot. “Harry, look. Really look.”
Harry again glanced at Dot, and Hazel observed the recognition lighting his face, filling his mind, like watching a sunrise. “Flora.”
“Yes,” Dot said with a smile, the first real and full one Hazel had seen. Hope rose with it.
“You’ve returned,” Harry said, his voice cracking. He took Dot in his arms. She stood rigid as a rod and then relaxed, hugged him in return with an uncomfortable laugh. “Well, you sure are the exuberant one.”
She’s funny, Hazel thought. So much to learn about a woman who was once a child whom Hazel knew as intimately as herself.
Harry stepped back. “It’s the miracle we’ve all hoped and prayed for these twenty years. How?”
Hazel looked at Harry quizzically. “And why exactly are you here?”
“Mum phoned this morning, told me that she needed me.”
Bridie shrugged. “I just didn’t know why I needed him, not until now.”
Harry shook his head, took off his cap, and held it. “I thought I was supposed to move the broken mower into the barn.”
“Yes. I’d appreciate that, I did feel that there was something else coming.” She kissed her son’s cheek.
Dot Bellamy listened and watched as these people she was supposed to know spoke to one another with such joy about her return. She gazed at a stone cottage; a green pasture, a red barn, and a broken-down mower rusted on the lawn. She saw the ash tree and common gorse bush bursting with small yellow flowers at the edge of the flagstone path. There stood Hazel with the brown curls pulled back into a low bun, and golden brown eyes that at some level Dot recognized. Bridie was there with her warm smile and soft voice. And yes, she knew Harry; she felt it the minute he’d jumped out of the battered van with his bounce and his grin. What did that mean?
Last night she hadn’t been able to tell Russel what she’d learned about her past or about her identity; not yet. With their four-year-old son, Connor, bouncing around them both, begging one of them to put together the dinosaur puzzle with him, Russel had absently asked Dot about the River Child interview with the woman from London. She’d told him she had a blistering headache and needed to go to bed early. It wasn’t a lie.
She’d feigned sleep when Russel came to bed later that night, but she hadn’t slept at all. Before dawn, she rose and snuck out of the house to travel to Henley-on-Thames to confront Aunt Imogene. How could Dot tell her husband and son she was someone else when she hadn’t figured out how to understand it herself?
Yes, Aunt Imogene had always been a bit odd, gathering the wounded and the lost in her garden and home, from plants to animals, her husband often giving things away when her back was turned. But she’d never been actually mad, never insane. Or had she? Aunt Imogene had never screamed about saving children or rivers or churches. Dot had never seen, even out of the corner of her eye, anything like what happened yesterday with Aunt Imogene. Never had Dot imagined that the one secret thing Imogene had saved had been her. That she, Dot Bellamy, was the saved thing that kept Imogene from true insanity.
Now at Bridie’s, she stepped back and placed her hand on the fence post. Yes, the place was familiar in the same fashion as the fragmented images that had come to her at The Perch yesterday, but her mind was disorganized. Her beloved Imogene had been arrested, her childhood stolen or saved—how was she to know?
Harry smiled at her. “Are you all right?”
“No.” Dot looked for a place to sit and found one on a hay bale. Hazel sat next to her. But Dot needed air and space. She needed to try to remember the past without all of these people staring at her, these people who claimed they loved her and knew her. She stood again and paced. “I need… I don’t know.”
“Take your time,” Bridie said. “Let me bring you something to drink?”
“Yes,” Dot said. “Please.”
Far off, or maybe it was close by, an owl uttered a long hoot, a mournful and seeking song. Bridie stopped and spun around. “A daytime call,” she said. “How lovely.”
Bridie’s voice settled somewhere deep inside Dot and she stared across the pasture where the onyx burnt-wood remains of a spent bonfire glistened under the midday sun.
A bonfire.
Harry spoke into her confusion. “The river, it is just beyond, over that hill. We ran there nearly every day.”
Dot nodded, but didn’t look at him. The rolling, falling, heady sensation of sliding into another life was overwhelming her. Then the owl again, the call cracking the bedrock of lies, memories rising like smoke from the crevices.
Now she is six years old on a red blanket and someone is calling her name. Not the name she carries now but her first name: Flora.
“Flora!”
She is asleep in the afternoon sunlight, a plaid wool blanket over her and Berry tucked under her arm, his fur resting on her cheek, when the familiar voice wakes her from a deep nap.
Waking, rising to her feet, she moves toward the voice. But there is her starry river, the river her sister does not ever let her get too near. The river in her magical land of Whisperwood. She inches closer when she slips and Berry falls near the water.
That voice, it calls for her again, and she stumbles, her green wellies not catching the ground.
Cold! The splash of her body, the shock of October waters, the slap of the river against her chest. She is tumbling, rocks over rocks, smooth and rounded, underwater. She holds her breath until it burns and she thinks she just might take a breath, knowing that the water is made of stars.
Instead, she lifts her hand and another hand drags her up and out. She gulps the air, coughs and sputters, confused and so cold. She is on her back, staring at the sky.
Dot Bellamy gasped at the memory and spun to face Harry and Hazel, her hands clasped together so tightly it hurt. “She called me. She called my name. Imogene’s voice startled me into the river.”
Bridie was there now, offering Dot a cold glass of water with a sprig of rosemary in it. Dot took a long swallow.
They all watched, silent, allowing her to find her way. “I didn’t just fall in. Aunt Imogene called me.” Dot closed her eyes, swayed under the fevered dream of drowning. “Oh my God, the dreams I have of being trapped in a small room. Those images are not from fairy tales, those dreams are not from Blackbeard legends or nightmares or mythology like my mother and aunt told me, those dreams are from my life. My very real life.”
“Let’s go inside?” Harry asked with concern.
“No,” Dot said. “The truth is out here, in the landscape, in the geography of this place.”
“Yes,” Bridie said.
Dot again sat on the hay bale. “My life has been a lie.”
Hazel stood very still as Dot spoke, as all she’d believed was now upended.
She and Harry did not lose Flora. Their kiss had not made Flora disappear. Whisperwood had not taken Flora away in the river’s current. The magical land Hazel had kept hidden away for all these years—the one she’d feared had destroyed her life, her mum’s life, the Aberdeens’ life—had all along been working its magic, bringing them ever closer, until this day when they stood in the pasture land of Bridie and Harry Aberdeen.
A heaviness Hazel had been carrying well over half her life lifted from between her shoulder blades, from the crevices of her heart.
Dot looked directly at Hazel, and as if she knew these were the words Hazel needed to hear she spoke slowly, carefully articulating every word: “She stole me. She woke me and called me toward the river. I know I was only six, but that memory is clear. Nothing else around it makes sense yet, but that night… I’ve always thought it was a recurring nightmare and now I see it was true.”
Bridie sat next to Dot on the bale. “Back then, all the nurses carried codeine, aspirin, and Nembutal in their capes at all times. I believe you were…”
“You don’t have to say it,” Dot said. “Yes, she gave me the white pill that tastes bitter and biting. Yes.”
Hazel and Harry looked at each other and in their secret language both knew: They did not lose her. Instead, Flora had been lured away as if Imogene Wright had played the flute and worn a red piper’s hat. They looked at each other with compassion.
“She must have been stalking you,” Harry said while still gazing at Hazel. “Following us.”
Dot looked to Hazel. “Why did this American woman write about Whisperwood? Why not… you?”
“I’d turned away from the story,” Hazel said. “I’d written much of it down, but the night Flora—the night you disappeared—I threw my pages into the river, asking the waters to take the story far from me and to bring you home.”
“Home,” Dot said as if trying the word on her tongue for the first time. A breeze through the air and a low cloud shifted; the sun was exposed, sending warmth and light to the pasture.
Bridie smiled at Hazel. “The invisible right here has become visible.”
Hazel gazed at Bridie, needing her to understand. “I thought my imagination was what doomed us.”
“It wasn’t,” Harry said.
Hazel felt the tears rising. “I see that now. It wasn’t my love that lost her, and it wasn’t my Whisperwood story that sent her away. All this time I’d believed both of those things to be at the bedrock of her disappearance.”
“Love?” Harry asked.
“For you, for Whisperwood. For both,” she said, and turned to Dot. “But it wasn’t my love for Harry that had lost you, instead you were quite literally kidnapped by a nurse damaged from war, out of her mind, stalking and stealing a little girl.”
“How?” Dot asked. “How could love and imagination lose me?”
“They didn’t,” Hazel said. “I only believed they had.”
Dot stood and took a few steps closer to Hazel and gazed at her, eye to eye, face-to-face, and then did exactly what Hazel had desired, longed for, and dreamed of for over twenty years—Flora Lea Linden threw her arms around her sister and held her close.
Later, after Dot had walked through the cottage with tears pouring down her face, she stood in the entryway to their little bedroom off the kitchen and said, “There are other images, too, but I’m not sure how to piece them together. Honestly, after the river, there is nothing but Newcastle, and university and Russel and Connor, and then searching for the lost children of Pied Piper.” Dot entered their childhood bedroom and ran her hand across the pine dresser. “She stole me, hid me in a church’s dark room alone, then took me to Newcastle. I could not have imagined this narrative, despite all the stories I’ve written of lost children. My God, I am one. I’d been so secure in the knowledge of my family. Four brothers. A mum and pa now gone, but who loved me.”
She turned to face Harry, Hazel, and Bridie. “I have a wide extended family, including Aunt Imogene. I am a Bellamy, so proud of my family that I wrote under my maiden name. What kind of insanity is this?” Dot asked, her voice rising and cracking. “I was not a gift from God. I was… what was I?”
“You were Flora Lea Linden,” Hazel said.
“You never gave up. You kept your promise.”
With the whistle of the kettle from the kitchen they all followed Bridie, taking seats around the table, the hearth flecked with the ash of a spent fire. The windows were open, birdsong filling the kitchen. They were crowded together, knees touching knees, leaning in closer at the arrival of cups of tea with rising steam and round sugar cakes with icing drizzled across the tops, just as when they were children.
Hazel was sitting next to Harry, dazed with the knowledge that her sister now sat across from her. All those years, Flora had been only a few hours away from London in a remote village with a different mum.
Dot looked around. “Part of me understands why she did what she did—but I don’t excuse it. She was traumatized. I feel so sad for her. She lost so much, and she truly, and wrongly, believes she saved me. My poor aunt has been trying to save things for all her life.”
“She didn’t save you.” Hazel gripped the edge of the table.
“I know, but she has convinced herself that she did. Now tell me more about our imaginary land,” Dot said. “Whisperwood.”
“Yes,” Hazel said.
Dot closed her eyes. “Whisperwood. Whisperwood. Whisperwood.” She opened her eyes. “You realize what the story did, don’t you?” Dot paused. “The story brought me here, back to all of you.”
“Yes,” Hazel said, something in her moving around as if trying to find a new place to settle.
“All these years,” said Dot, leaning forward, “I have been writing about the lost children of Pied Piper. A boy run over by a car during the evacuation. Others who ran away…”
“Like Kelty,” Hazel interrupted. “She ran away.”
“Kelty…” Dot shook her head. “I know her, right? At least the name?”
“You do,” Hazel said. “You will.”
“I wrote about the poor children on the ship that was torpedoed going to America. I wanted to write about Flora next. About—”
“Your own life,” Bridie said. “About a lost child—now found.”
Dot twisted in her chair to Bridie. “I dreamed about lost children. I was obsessed with writing about them. My husband, Russel, he says I care too much. He says it takes me away from him and our four-year-old son, Connor. Maybe he’s right, I don’t know. But something inside of me would not let me stop writing and looking for them.”
“Deep down, you knew,” said Hazel.
“You have a son?” Bridie asked.
“Yes. He’s quite amazing.”
“Your mum has a grandson,” Bridie said to Hazel. “What wonder.”
Dot lifted her tea, cradled it in her hand without taking a sip. “When Hazel started telling the opening to Whisperwood yesterday at The Perch, I recalled torn scraps of that day. I still don’t understand it all, but I promise to get to the bottom of it.” Dot turned to Hazel. “How did the story end up in America?”
“Do you remember a woman named Maria? Someone who helped your mum and other mums during the war? A woman who helped to babysit and teach?”
“There were a few American volunteers, yes, but I don’t remember one named Maria.”
“Well it seems that there was one, and you told her the story and used it to calm yourself, to settle yourself. That woman, Maria, took the story back to America and told her sister, Linda, about it to help calm her little girl, Peggy, who had also lost her father in the war.”
“What a wonder,” Dot said. “What an absolute wonder. A story you told me helped me when I was sad and confused, and then it traveled across the sea to bring us back together.”
“Hazel, love,” Bridie said. “You might have turned away from Whisperwood, but it found you—it was relentless in its pursuit of you, bringing us all home again.”
Hazel nodded; no matter her love for stories, there were some things beyond words. They sat quietly as Bridie’s kitchen glowed with afternoon light and outside spring burst from the ground, born again. All things made new.
After Dot left to take the train home, Harry and Hazel stood outside Bridie’s home. The night was crisp and clear, the sky indigo with flecks of stars in their set patterns. A breeze floated, aromatic with Bridie’s roses blooming on the climbing fence line.
Hazel sensed Harry’s body next to her, the longing for him as strong as that afternoon of the October 19 Feast of St. Frideswide when his kiss had made her forget all reason and responsibility. And yet, this longing, as strong, was also different. For it had been forged through time and other men, through mistakes and grief and loss.
While Hazel searched in her heart for what to say, or how to say goodbye, Harry spoke first. “Today. It’s a miracle, isn’t it?”
“I think so,” she said. “Although I’m not quite sure how to define a miracle. A young girl tells a story to an American volunteer. That woman carries the story across the sea for her niece, another child who has lost her father. That child grows to write the story and embellish it, to grow it to become more than it ever was before.”
“And then,” Harry said. “That story lands on a table in the very store you were leaving that day.”
“Yes. Today is possibly a miracle. You’re right.”
“You didn’t give up, Hazel. You never surrendered to anyone else’s idea of who and what you should believe and do.”
Hazel allowed the blessing of those words to fall over her. “Harry, I have given up on so much in my life. I really have. I have lost myself in many things that weren’t good for me, but in this belief—that Flora could be found—I never gave up.”
“And us?” he asked.
“Us?”
“Did you give up on us? Did you stop believing in us?”
She wasn’t very sure what he meant. “How so?” she asked, and turned to him. “Believe? What is there to believe? We lost each other.”
“We thought we didn’t have a choice,” he said. “We presumed we could never have each other, but we were wrong.” His voice faltered. His gaze was so intent on hers as if searching for something he couldn’t find. She wanted to give it to him; whatever he was looking for she desperately wanted to give it to him, but she didn’t know yet what it was.
“A choice,” she said, feeling the possibilities of them finally drawing near enough to be real.
“What do you want, Hazel? What is true for you?”
“I don’t know, but I do know this—I believe I’ve always searched for the feeling I had with us.” She would be honest, there was nothing left but that now.
“Yes,” he said.
She met his gaze. “But you can’t get something like we had back, Harry. We have Dot now, but she’s not six-year-old Flora; we can’t get her back.”
“I’m not so sure it’s about getting anything back.” He looked to the sky and then back at Hazel. “It’s about having what is right here, right now, and not squandering what remains.”
Hazel heard the words like a song, the very essence of a truth she hadn’t seen. Bridie came outside then, handing Hazel her coat. “Are you ready, dear? I’ll take you to the station.”
“Yes.” She smiled at Bridie. “I’m ready to go.”
Harry kissed Hazel on the cheek and she walked away with his mum.
A choice to make? Therein was freedom, she thought, the ability to make a choice she never thought she’d have the opportunity to make. But she had to be careful. Freedom, for all its claims of wonder, also had its price.