When I woke up the next morning, Embry and Gabriel were gone, but Angela made toast with eggs, bacon and hash browns.
“They left that,” Terrence said as I came and sat beside him at the table.
“The Chronicles?” I recognized the leather-bound book my grandmother used to find my bedtime stories in.
“Thought you should know where you come from.” He gave me a smile before we ate.
After breakfast, I set myself up in the living room and read some of Annabelle’s entries. The first was from 1671, when a seven-year-old Annabelle took the Arabella to America with her parents. You could tell it was a child writing from the way she mentioned dolls and her pet cat, but I knew I was going to like her. She mentioned her fears, and all of the unknowns she was facing, but she carried on as if she didn’t have any.
“Are you sure they wanted me to read this?” I asked Terrence when he came and sat in his armchair the following day. Annabelle was quite the writer. So far, the book was her diary, recounting her school, her family, her friendship with Embry and her love for Gabriel. He had just proposed to her in her father’s garden.
“It’s your history, isn’t it?” he pointed out, but I got the feeling he was purposely ignoring my question.
“I don’t think Gabriel would want me to see him like this,” I argued, coming to sit on the end of the loveseat beside him.
“How is that?” he asked.
“Sweet and romantic.”
“It doesn’t show anymore, but back in the day, I believe Embry was a player and Gabriel was the hopeless romantic.”
“Player?” I asked.
“My great-granddaughter teaches me the lingo,” he explained.
“That’s nice.” I could picture Mr. Boyd using a phrase Clara taught him in the same way, had he still been around. “It’s hard to picture either of them like that.”
“You should have known them when they were younger,” he told me with a winking smile.
“Did you know them back then?” I wondered if Angela didn’t know the whole story about her father’s origins.
“No, I met Gabriel on the battlefields of the Second World War. But I have heard stories. From both of them, about themselves and about the other. It’s a shame they haven’t figured out that they’ve forgiven each other yet.”
“You mean it’s a shame that they haven’t forgiven each other.”
“No, I meant what I said,” he assured me. “They think it’s easier to pretend to hate each other. Old habits die hard.”
“They’re both still in love with the same woman. That they think is coming back to them. If she does, them being friends would make it awkward all over again,” I pointed out.
“Nonsense. People don’t come back to life after being burnt at the stake centuries before. And if she did, she would be with Gabriel.”
“How do you know if you’ve never met her?” I was intrigued by his convictions.
“They talk a lot when they’re drunk,” he said simply before deciding I needed more information. “If she comes back, hypothetically speaking, Gabriel will let her go with whomever she chooses. He loves her in that way where he wants her to be happy above all, even if it isn’t with him,” he shared, letting me know he did not see this ever happening. “Embry, on the other hand, will tell her to go with Gabriel. He knows that she loved him first, and was only ever with him because she thought Gabriel was dead. If she hadn’t left town, he would have told her it was okay.”
“You’re all assuming she would choose Gabriel.”
“They both say he’s the one she’s in love with. Majority rules,” he told me.
“Have you tried explaining this to them?” I asked.
“They’re stubborn as mules.” He shook his head at what he saw as their stupidity, before changing the subject. “You just graduated from high school, right? Valedictorian?” he asked.
“Second in class,” I corrected him. “My best friend was valedictorian.” I thought of Keisha in her dorm room, completely oblivious to all the madness going on in my once semi-normal world. She always told me the others were crazy to think I was weird. How wrong she was.
“What are your plans now that school’s done?” he asked.
“Not dying?” I shrugged.
“Not dying doesn’t matter if you’re not living,” he told me. “My granddaughter went to art school. She paints like Van Gogh.” He said it proudly, but I cocked my head, wondering… “Way before my time,” he answered.
“I’ll leave the painting to her and Embry,” I turned down his art school suggestion. “Are you all artistic?”
They’d mentioned Da Vinci and Hitler as examples, and I knew Embry painted. I was also pretty sure Gabriel drew the portraits he had of Annabelle in the East Wing…it explained calling them Gifted.
“I can play the fiddle if need be,” he smiled. “My granddaughter says it’s amazing what you can see in the most mundane objects when you try to paint them.”
“I’ll take her word for it.”
“Before all hell broke loose, what were you going to study in the fall?”
“I was going into pre-med,” I admitted.
“After my own heart.” He brought his hand to his chest. “I was miserable at it. Hated the sight of blood, but couldn’t stand the thought of carrying a weapon,” he shuddered.
“Still?” I asked.
“Nah, I got better,” he assured me. “At both.”
I lost him for a moment before he shook it off. “Gabriel was better. He took me under his wing. Even talked me through stitching him up once. When I said I had no idea what I was doing, he said it was fine as long as it lasted until he found a better place to die.”
“Was that when you already knew?” I asked.
“That he was going to come back to life and give me a heart attack?” he answered my question. “No, that’s when I found out. Saw him die half a dozen times before I found out I was like him, then I understood that the stitching doesn’t matter.”
“Wounds disappear when you come back?”
“From the outside, yes,” he agreed.
“What did you study outside of the army?” I asked.
“I wasn’t one for books. I’ve taken a few classes here and there if I find them interesting. Lots of history ones, to hear all the facts they get wrong.” He smiled, and I could picture him sitting in the back of the class, getting into debates with teachers who couldn’t compete with someone who lived through it. “I’m not one for the college experience.”
“Me neither,” I smiled, knowing there was little chance I would be going to parties and drinking kegs if ever I made it to college.
“So doctor is your dream? Saving lives or prestige?” he asked.
“Saving lives,” I answered like the question should have been rhetorical, but he caught on to my slight hesitation.
“But doctor isn’t your dream.” He saw right through me.
“It’s my dream career,” I amended.
“Is it something embarrassing or are you afraid talking about it will stop it from coming true?” He wasn’t letting me off easy.
“It’s just silly,” I tried to dismiss him, but he kept his eyes on me, knowing me better than he should for a stranger. “I love school. And learning. I am so excited for all the classes I’ll take and things I will learn in med school…”
“But…” he pressed.
“But more than anything, what I want when I finish school, all of it, is to fall in love with an amazing guy, get married and have a bunch of kids. I want them to go to school and make friends and be confident and never be afraid and not lose everyone they care about,” I said it quickly, like he wouldn’t understand as long as I spoke fast enough.
“You want to give your children the childhood you never had,” he finished for me.
“It’s terrible, and I hate myself for it, but I am so jealous of Clara. She’s like a sister to me, because her dad is my guardian, but she has her mom and her dad and a grandfather on her mom’s side and she goes to the park and makes friends with complete strangers and…I want that,” I admitted.
“Someday you’ll have it,” he told me.
“I’m hiding out at your ranch in the middle of God-knows-where because there’s a guy, who basically can’t be killed, who is hell-bent on killing me,” I reminded him.
“You also have two men who will fight to their last breaths to make sure you get your happy ending. And many more of us who will do everything in our power to help.”
“I wasn’t complaining. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, I just…”
“You don’t want to get your hopes up because the most likely scenario is that it never happens,” he understood. “You should try knitting.”
“To defeat the Big Bad?” I asked, confused. He said it so seamlessly with the rest of our conversation.
“You’re nervous and you’re picking at your nail polish because you need something to do with your hands. Knitting gives you something to do and you get something cozy out of it.”
“Is that what your wife did whenever Gabriel brought you into something?” I asked, looking around at all the knit blankets and pillows.
“She did,” he agreed. “But I did as well. She made socks and sweaters, but all the pillows and blankets are my handiwork,” he shared.
“You’re full of surprises, Mr. Terrence.”
“Most people spend their time showing you who they are, we’re just too busy to pay attention.”
The next morning when I came down for breakfast, Angela was knitting on the couch, what looked like a sweater dress in beautiful rust color. A pair of knitting needles and a ball of yarn sat on top of the Chronicles, waiting for me.
“I can teach you if you’d like,” Angela offered without looking up.
“He likes solving problems,” I said of her father, coming to sit beside her.
“He likes helping people,” she corrected.
“He’s good at it.”
“My dad and Uncle Gabe stayed close for a reason,” she told me with a smile, that I returned, but I couldn’t wrap my head around her calling him ‘Uncle Gabe’, or how smiley he was with her.
“What’s your dad’s…um…gift?” I asked, not finding a better way to say it.
“You tell him the truth,” she said simply.
“Like a lie detector?”
“No, it just comes spewing out, which was not cool when I was a teenager and didn’t know it was basically magic,” she said like she could name many instances where it got her in trouble and she shared way more than she wanted to with him. “He’ll tell you he was bad at the medicine, but he was an incredible medic. People tell their secrets on their death bed, and he went from soldier to soldier, listening to their biggest confessions, aspirations and regrets. He listened and gave them peace.”
“Like a priest,” I ventured.
“No, my family stopped believing in God a long time ago,” she said like she had no interest in a false savior.
“Was your mom like them?” I pried.
“Nothing like it,” she shook her head with a smile. “She made the rule that us kids were not to know. I think she only agreed to tell us the truth because my brother had no tact and pointed out that she was getting old while dad looked as good as ever.”
“Do you have a lot of siblings?” I asked, fascinated with the idea of someone like them having kids. It either had to be a family secret or you would have to keep abandoning them.
“My parents adopted twins when I was ten. My sister died when she was little…”
“I’m so sorry,” I gave her my sympathy, but she waved it off, like old wounds you don’t want to think about.
“And my brother was in Africa last I checked, taking pictures of lions or giraffes or something.”
“That sounds like an incredible adventure.” Africa was high on my list of places to visit. Everywhere was, but I wanted to work for Doctors Without Borders and take safaris on my days off.
“He bought into all of my father’s adventures and still hasn’t figured out that dad spread his experiences over multiple lifetimes with the knowledge that he wasn’t going to die if his parachute didn’t open when it was supposed to.”
“He’s given you a lot of heart attacks,” I understood.
“Don’t be the oldest,” she told me.
“How come?” I asked, thinking how Clara basically made me an older sister, though I was the younger sister to Sam.
“You worry. So much. And you put this burden on yourself, like you’re responsible for anything that goes wrong. All the pain, all the tears, as if you could prevent it.” I got the feeling it was her sister’s pain that kept her up at night.
“Isn’t that where you try your best and that has to be good enough?” I said it more because it was what I was told than because I believed I would be able to tell myself that if something happened to Clara.
“But how much of yourself can you lose before your best becomes more than you had to begin with?”