CHAPTER
Twelve
John missed Nora.
He and Allie sat in the stands at Safeco Field, watching the Mariners play. They’d eaten Seattle Dogs. The air was crisp and bright. The home team was winning. Allie was wearing a Mariners ball cap and a tight, V-necked Mariners T-shirt. She was such an obvious knockout that the college guys in the row in front of them kept twisting around to glance at her.
The fun he was supposed to be having only made John’s depression that much more obvious to him.
Back in Blakeville, he’d decided to say good-bye to Nora and focus his attention on Allie. Ever since then, he’d been trying. Thing was, his attention wasn’t listening. He hadn’t seen Nora for five days, and still, he couldn’t seem to focus on anything but her and how incredibly crappy he felt without her.
For the first couple of days, he’d told himself it was just that his guilty conscience was plaguing him. He’d prayed over and over for forgiveness. He’d done the right thing when he’d cut off his friendship with Nora. Admittedly, too late. But he’d done it. And he hadn’t contacted her since. So while there was definitely some guilt there, it had finally occurred to him that he couldn’t get Nora out of his head for a whole separate reason. . . .
He’d missed people before, when he’d been a Navy SEAL. During those years, he’d spent months at a time far from home and family. Far from girlfriends. He’d missed his family and girlfriends in a mild kind of way. The loss had been there, but always low-level and at the back of his mind. He’d been able to deal with it.
Missing Nora, though, was like a cold, heavy ache square in the center of his torso that made him feel hopeless and pointless. He woke up to the ache. Couldn’t get rid of it all day. Went to bed with it. Slept horribly. Then got up and did the whole thing over again. In between, he remembered the tiniest things about her.
The bracelet she wore. The odd way she held a pen. How she sometimes bit her lip in concentration.
He resettled the bill of his cap. His dad and grandfather had brought him to his first Mariners game when he was six. They’d sat in the cheap seats with hot dogs and tall cups of icy soda. John had loved every minute of it. He could still remember the sound of the battery-operated radio his grandfather had brought along. He could picture his dad’s smile when John had decided to wear a ball glove to the game just in case a home run came their way.
The day after he’d returned from Blakeville with Sherry’s address, he’d called his parents and told them about his search for Sherry. He’d explained how they’d found her contact information. And he’d let them know that he planned to send Sherry a letter.
His dad had said little, but what he’d said had been encouraging. His mom had been full of thoughtful, supportive questions.
John had been aware, during the whole conversation, how hard it must have been for them to hear their son tell them he’d been looking for his other mother and father.
Allie offered the open bag of peanuts to him.
He shook his head and squinted, trying to bring the baseball diamond into focus. It was no use. The center of his field of vision was fuzzy because of the deterioration that had already taken place. It would never improve. It would only get worse. In time, there’d be no point in coming to watch his favorite team play his favorite game because he wouldn’t be able to see the field at all. Nor would he be able to view the games on TV or even read about them in the sports section.
A sense of panic expanded inside his body so fast he had to breathe steadily to fight it back.
When Nora had been around, he’d been better able to deal with his condition. But now his condition felt more unbearable than it had before he’d met her.
What was he going to do?
He had two choices. He could tough it out and walk through this valley he’d been in since Blakeville.
Or he could break up with Allie and contact Nora. It scared him, how much he wanted to break up with Allie, because it sounded like something a crazy man would do. Maybe he was cracking up.
Allie was awesome. She’d been one of the best parts of his life since his diagnosis. She’d joked with him when he hadn’t felt like smiling. She’d listened when he’d needed it and baked her famous cheese enchiladas for him when he’d needed those. She’d promised him that whether or not he could see didn’t matter to her and that he could depend on her.
And she’d done all that while looking beautiful and putting no romantic pressure on him. He had a huge flaw. He was going blind and yet Allie was sticking with him. She had no flaws . . . and he was thinking about breaking up with her?
Nora had never even hinted that she wanted to date him. After he told her about his diagnosis, she was even less likely to be interested. So if he broke up with Allie, then he’d be giving up a woman he’d been dating for six months to take a chance on a woman he’d worked with for one month.
It was idiotic even to think about breaking up with Allie for Nora.
He needed to tough it out and walk through this valley. He needed to have faith that he’d come out the other side. Soon, God help him.
One of the college guys sent a stupid, star-struck look in Allie’s direction.
The cold, heavy ache remained stubbornly in the center of John’s torso.
A bustling Saturday afternoon tourist crowd filled Merryweather Historical Village’s green. They’d been drawn by the charming buildings and the great shops, yes. They’d also come for the historical interpreters, a fact that filled Nora with a pleasant dose of smugness. Adding historical interpreters to her village on Saturday and Sunday afternoons had been her brainchild.
Colonial Williamsburg had impeccably trained, thoroughly knowledgeable actors. She had Nikki, a brainy bombshell; Amy, a frazzled mom; and Blake, a male Goth teenager.
So, almost the same thing.
Nora typically stationed Blake at the village’s outdoor fireplace, dressed in homespun clothes and a blacksmith’s leather apron. Nikki and Amy roved across the property, chatting with visitors. Sometimes they gave tours. Sometimes they answered questions about Washington’s history while churning butter, gardening, sewing, or cooking.
She spotted Nikki working in the vegetable garden next to Crownover House and moved in that direction, Randall walking alongside her.
Randall was already dressed in his red-and-white basketball uniform for the game she’d be driving him to in an hour. His basketball shoes had seen better days. Even so, he carried them around in a backpack that also contained a small towel, wristbands, and a sports bottle of water stuck in the outside pocket. He’d patiently explained to Nora that his basketball shoes were for basketball only. He’d ruin them if he wore them on other surfaces. So he wore his regular sneakers to the games, then, like Mr. Rogers, sat down and changed his shoes.
Nora had never been good at any sport, and she’d certainly never cared whether she won or lost the games she’d been forced to play in gym class. She’d classified herself as a noncompetitive, sportsmanlike person. Thus, it had come as a surprise to sit in the bleachers at Randall’s games and find it necessary to battle the urge to chew her fingernails, scream in indignation at the refs, and boo the opposing players. She permitted herself the occasional burst of applause or polite “Woo-hoo.” Keeping it at that required Herculean self-control.
Since they had time to kill before the game, she and Randall were on their way to help the historical interpreters set up the children’s craft scheduled for this afternoon.
Nora had spent the morning doing laundry, buying groceries, making insightful comments on her favorite book blogs, updating her Goodreads status, and promoting the events on Duncan’s upcoming American tour to publicize his independent film. Even after all that, she’d had an overabundance of time, so she’d made a Bundt cake recipe that had been passed down through her family since 1896.
Every single thing she’d spent the morning doing had been tinged with a tang of desperation because she was working very, very hard not to think about John.
Two kids were hanging over the white picket fence that framed the side garden at Crownover House, watching Nikki hoe weeds. An older man, probably the boys’ grandpa, stood behind them, eyes glazed at the sight Nikki presented.
“So here I am hoeing. Here in my vegetable garden. Here at this house I own,” Nikki was saying.
Nora had given Nikki, Amy, and Blake the title of interpreter for a reason. They weren’t reenactors. They were simply charged with the task of introducing details of pioneer life to the people who came through. For her own entertainment, though, Nikki sometimes liked to take a little holiday to nineteenth-century Washington in her imagination.
“It sure is hard to be me.” Nikki sliced at the weeds with her hoe. “My chores are pretty much endless. I’m the gardener, dishwasher, cook, maid, mother to my ten children, seamstress, keeper of the chicken coop, and butcher, which is . . . disgusting, if I do say so myself. I’m not the kind of woman who’s okay with grabbing a chicken by the neck and spinning it around in the air.” She raised her face, a look of tragic determination on it, Scarlett O’Hara style.
Randall giggled. He was a fan of Nikki’s.
Nikki’s beleaguered gingham dress strained to confine her hips and bosom. She’d accessorized the dress with a straw hat, pink Swatch watch, long fake French-manicured fingernails, cubic zirconia earrings, and the Fitbit she’d recently purchased to help motivate her to lose weight. Her silver eye shadow and burgundy lip gloss appeared to have been applied with a trowel.
“Sometimes I wish I could jump into the future.” Nikki wiped her brow dramatically.
“You’re here!” one of the boys called. “You’re here, in the future!”
Nikki started. “I am?”
“You don’t need to work in a garden to grow your food,” the other boy said. “We have grocery stores.”
“What!” Nikki exclaimed.
“And we have microwaves! And nobody has to grab chickens by their necks and spin them around.”
“Well, in that case”—Nikki set her hoe against the side of the house—“I think I’m done gardening for the day.”
“And we have computers!”
“And Wii!”
“Can I have your number?” their grandfather asked.
Nikki released a throaty laugh. “Sir, I’ve just arrived here in the future.” There was no shyness in Nikki Clarkson. She spoke directly to the gentleman with humor and a fair amount of purring fondness for his gender. “Now that I’ve arrived, I’ll need time to figure out grocery stores and computers before I’ll be ready to give out my number. You are mighty handsome, though, I must say.”
Nora caught Nikki’s eye and shook her head. No hitting on the tourists.
The boys looked back and forth between Nikki and their grandpa.
“If you live near here,” Nikki said to the man, “stop by the Library on the Green next week. We’ll talk.”
“I’ll be back,” answered the grandpa. Then he and the boys moved off.
Nikki let herself out of the fence. “Hey, cutie pie,” she said to Randall. “Did you hit anyone up for hot chocolate and marshmallows today?”
He nodded. “Ms. Bradford.”
“And? Did she deliver?”
He nodded.
“That’s because Ms. Bradford is a pushover.”
“I object!” Nora said, but Randall was already running ahead to Golding’s Mill. Nora and Nikki followed at a slower pace. “Collecting hearts as usual, I see,” Nora said.
When in motion, Nikki’s hips undulated more than the Nile River. “If that man has any sense, he’ll drive to the nearest department store and invest in the best cologne money can buy.” A lusty sigh. “I do like a man wearing good cologne. The men I dated before my first marriage all wore Polo and to this day, every time I get a whiff of it, my uterus trembles.”
“Ah.”
“If that man comes back to see me and he’s wearing Polo, I’ll marry him.”
“A bottle of Polo is all it’ll take?” Nora asked.
“I’d marry your Navy SEAL even without Polo. If given half a chance, I’d sop him up with a biscuit.”
“With a biscuit?”
“With a biscuit!”
“He’s not my Navy SEAL, as I believe I’ve mentioned about one hundred times this past week.”
“Then I suggest you move heaven and earth to make him yours, Nora. Take it from me, men like the Navy SEAL are as rare as wealthy gamblers.”
“He’s taken!” And thanks so much, Nikki, for bringing up the one subject I’ve been struggling—a huffing and puffing while I tread water kind of struggle—to avoid.
They’d reached Golding’s Mill, where an outdoor patio offered shady square footage and a fireplace that climbed charmingly up the exterior wall. She’d shut off the fireplace’s inner opening and created an outside opening instead. Weathered old beams held up the tin patio roof, and stone pavers created the patio’s floor. Custom-ordered tables of native timber built with antique tools completed the space.
They used the patio often for village events: pioneer cooking demonstrations, evening wine tastings, talks from visiting authors or historians, al fresco dinners prepared by Merryweather’s best chefs the first weekend of September during the Antique Fair.
Amy and Blake stood at one of the tables, unpacking a box of craft supplies. The kids would be making summer mobiles today out of sticks, yarn, pom-poms, and felt.
Randall, Nikki, and Nora went to work distributing the supplies among the tables while Amy filled them in on the rigorous demands of her three teenagers’ sports schedules. Amy spent the bulk of her time driving them around. She fueled herself with caffeine and reassurance.
“Grace has been invited to play on the touring team for club volleyball,” Amy said, with the tone of a parent whose child had been invited to walk the gallows.
Amy had a softening body, a blandly pretty face, and a blond bob she rarely found the wherewithal to style properly. Though Amy was sixteen years older than Nora, Nora had always felt protective toward the perennially uncertain Amy.
“Do you think I should let her play on the touring team?” Amy asked. “I just . . . I don’t know.”
“Sure,” Randall and Blake said.
“Of course you shouldn’t!” Nikki answered. “You’re not Cinderella. And I’m not talking about when she’s fabulous at the end. I’m talking about when she’s being worked to death by undeserving family members at the beginning.”
“It’s just that, I mean, the touring team is a good opportunity, and Dan thinks—”
“Take that man to a hotel for the weekend and remind him why he’s enslaved by your charms!” Nikki demanded. “Then tell him what you think about the touring team.”
“There’s a minor present!” Blake interjected. He placed his hands over Randall’s ears.
Randall grinned the grin Nora loved, full of gleaming teeth.
“Randall and I aren’t old enough for this conversation,” Blake told Nikki.
“You’re eighteen,” Nikki said to Blake.
“I’m around the same age as Amy’s kids, so it’s grossing me out to hear about moms and dads enslaving each other with their charms.”
“Grow up, Bram Stoker,” Nikki said with a smile.
Amy twittered nervously and glanced at The Pie Emporium, no doubt desperate for another hit of coffee.
Nikki continued to flood Amy with marital and parenting advice, despite the fact that she wasn’t married or a parent.
Blake ushered Randall nearer to Nora.
Each time Blake arrived for his shift, he set out blacksmith tools. Bellows, tongs, hammer. Then he hung wrought-iron items available for sale on pegs around the hearth.
He talked about blacksmithing to everyone who stopped by. He did a great job keeping the fire stoked. And he did a fair business selling iron items. Nora never let him anywhere near red-hot metal, however. Most of Blake’s life experiences to date had been gained from horror movies, horror books, and scary video games.
She watched him carefully set stacks of colored paper at each spot along the table. His dyed, matte black hair swooshed across his pale oval face as he moved. Was he wearing eyeliner today?
Sometimes Nora imagined the muscular, testosterone-laden, real-life blacksmiths of the 1870s scowling at her with accusation from their graves.
“Ms. Bradford?” Blake said. “Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask you . . .”
“Yes?”
“Well, since you’re a librarian, I was wondering if you know anything about the business of publishing.”
“Only a little.”
“I have an idea for a children’s book.”
Blake was interested in a pursuit both educational and productive? Thank God. “That’s wonderful, Blake.”
“I was thinking about doing a graphic novel, you know? But for kids. And it’s going to be about this evil guy named The Beheader, and he’s going to chase after people and behead them. Then this young kid is going to get powers given to him by zombies, and he’s going to confront The Beheader in an epic fight scene.”
“Mmm.”
“And everyone will be rooting for the kid and expecting him to win. But then—here’s the genius part—he doesn’t. The Beheader takes the kid’s severed head and uses it to obliterate the zombies.”
“Sounds cool,” Randall said.
“I see.” Nora had been a fiction lover all her life. She wasn’t about to discourage Blake’s creativity, even if his book sounded to her like the kind of fare that might scar kids for life.
“And then The Beheader will have a zombie feast,” Blake said.
Why, yes, of course, Nora thought.
And on the heels of that, I love my employees.
And on the heels of that, I miss John.
They’d returned from Blakeville a week ago yesterday. Instead of diminishing, her sorrow over him kept multiplying and multiplying.
She could recall exactly how he’d looked striding through the library in Shelton, smiling over two plates of apple cinnamon cake, slipping on his sunglasses in her car, standing on a balcony with heat in his eyes. She went back over everything she could ever remember him saying. She reread every text and email he’d sent and listened to the two voicemails on her phone.
Nora straightened, colorful pieces of felt in her hands, and peered across the green toward the table she and John had shared at their first meeting.
The day after she’d last seen him, she’d compiled the online articles and PDF documents she’d told John she’d email to him. She’d yet to send them, because she knew her email might very well be the final communication between them. She’d been hesitant to send the thing that would screw the lid onto their joint efforts. Plus, she’d been unable to decide whether or not to add an invite to Grandma’s party to her email.
Every day she’d told herself to make a choice and send the email. What if he was waiting to read those papers before formulating a letter to his birth mother? It wasn’t likely he was waiting. But if he was, he’d be wondering what was taking so long. Nora’s name had never, ever been attached to the adjective inefficient. Just the idea that John might think her inefficient gave her hives.
She filled her lungs with air, then gradually exhaled. She’d go straight to her office inside the library. Right now. She’d send that email, and in it, she’d invite John and Allie to the party because she was suddenly positive that she could invite him with the right motives. Not steal-someone’s-boyfriend motives. But I’d-like-us-to-share-a-social-circle motives.
She’d been dumb to think she couldn’t bear to see him with Allie. Of course she could bear it. The awful eight days she’d just endured had brought her to a crystallizing realization.
She’d much, much prefer to see John from time to time in a friendly way than never see him again in her lifetime.
Email from Nora to John:
John,
I hope this note finds you well! I’m sending over the resources I’d told you about. I’ve attached them below.
On another topic entirely . . . Do you remember me mentioning my grandmother to you? She’s turning 80 soon, and my sisters and I are planning a birthday party for her. Willow, Britt, and I would love for you and Allie to attend if you’re available. It will be held at Bradfordwood on the evening of Saturday, July 3rd. If you’re free that night, I’ll mail an invitation.
All the best, Nora
Nora,
Thanks for the attachments you sent.
Unfortunately, Allie and I have other plans on July 3rd and won’t be able to come to the party. I hope your grandmother has a great birthday.
John