“Sure, I remember.”
“Well, that could be all it was because I really do think Edith had this big, capacious Miss Clavel soul.”
“Who’s Miss Clavel?”
I waved his question off. “But what if it were more than that? What if, for some reason, Edith drove Sarah and the baby to Canada? And on the way or after they got there, Sarah died. I don’t want to believe that Sarah died, but it would help to explain why Edith felt so responsible for Steven, why she would keep up with him for so many years: Edith is the one who gave Steven to Gareth.”
Dev kept walking, lost in thought, his hands in his pockets, his eyes on the sidewalk in front of him. He nodded. “That would explain why she disappeared from Antioch Beach around the same time Sarah and the baby did. She left with them.”
“Right, and, at some point while she was gone, she found out that the neighbor had seen her and John with Sarah and that John had been arrested,” I said. “She knew that if she went back, she would be, too.”
“So she stayed gone,” said Dev. “Forever.”
We walked on, side by side, our strides matching, our two shadows stretching down the sidewalk, preceding us, sometimes getting lost in the clutter of other shadows—trees, lampposts—but always emerging, clear-cut and together. From time to time, our arms brushed each other, our shoulders bumped. Out of the blue, the thought came to me that I had first held Dev’s hand when I was thirteen years old, and that, touching or not touching, together or miles and miles apart, I had never really let go.
I said, “Edith and I talked a lot about having a safe place, a home. Carrying your safe place around with you, like a turtle. I hope that, wherever she went, she brought Blue Sky House with her.”
Remembering something else Edith had said, I stole a glance at Dev.
“She also talked about people,” I said.
“She did?”
“She said the ones who look like home are home. They’re where you go.”
After a while, Dev said, “Did she say you carry the people around with you, too? Even when you’re away from them?”
“I can’t remember if she said it or if I just thought it.”
“Either way, I agree. That happens. I’ve done it.” He didn’t look at me.
“Where did you carry them?” I asked.
“Her,” said Dev, correcting me. “And—everywhere.”
We checked at two churches and at the hospital at the other end of town to see if anyone knew if there had ever been an orphanage in Canterbury Mills, but no one had ever heard of one. The middle-aged woman working at the hospital front desk said that it was possible abandoned babies had been dropped off at the hospital in the 1950s, but that records from that long ago would be in storage somewhere—she didn’t know where—if they still existed at all.
It was when we were coming out of the Canterbury Diner, having sat at the lunch counter and devoured two pizza-slice-sized wedges of sour cherry pie, that Dev said, “Too bad there’s not one of those public parks like in the movies where all the old-timers hang out and play checkers and reminisce so that we could go ask them if they’d ever heard of a safe house for battered women or the story of a mystery man who came to town empty-handed and left carrying a baby.”
I stopped short on the sidewalk in front of the diner, whacked Dev on the shoulder, and said, “Bingo!”
“Okay! Jeez. Or bingo,” said Dev, frowning at me and rubbing his shoulder. “Although people usually play bingo in fire halls or church basements or whatever. Checkers is more of a park thing.”
“No, I mean ‘bingo’ as in ‘you’re right!’”
“You don’t hit people who are right. You high-five them or shake their hand or hug them. You don’t hit. But hell, yeah, I’m right. What else would I be?”
“You have no idea what you’re right about, do you?”
“Nope.”
“Old people,” I said. “We need them, a bunch of them, preferably. A critical mass.”
“A critical mass is the minimum amount of fissile material you need to start a nuclear reaction,” said Dev.
“The fact that you just said that out loud tells me, once again, that you did not get beaten up nearly enough in middle school.”
I seized him by the elbow and U-turned him back into the diner. Our tiny, adorable server, Audra, who had flirted shamelessly with Dev back when we were customers although she could not have been older than sixteen, and who had the phrase “a murmuration of starlings” tattooed on the inside of her right wrist, stood behind the counter reading a hardback biography of Harry S. Truman so thick that I wondered how her scrawny little, bird-boned, bird-loving wrist could hold it.
“Excuse me,” I said.
Without even glancing up, Audra said, “It didn’t stand for anything.”
“What didn’t?” asked Dev.
“The S. That’s why there’s sometimes no period after it,” said Audra.
“His middle name was just the letter S?” said Dev.
She lifted her big, green, kohl-rimmed eyes from the book, aimed them at Dev, raised her eyebrows, and said, “Indeed.” Then she smiled and batted—actually batted—her sooty lashes and said, “Are you back for more—pie?”
Dev laughed.
“No,” I said, giving him a stern look. “We were actually wondering if there’s a retirement community or maybe a nursing home around here.”
“Well, she’s a fun date,” said Audra to Dev.
Dev laughed again, and I elbowed him in the ribs.
Audra sighed and swiveled just her eyes in my direction. “Yes. Greenbriar Community. My grandma lives there.”
She gave us the address, and I typed it into my phone.
“Thanks,” said Dev, and he shot her a grin that almost sliced his face in half.
“Anytime.” Audra leaned a few inches closer to him. “At all.”
As we walked out of the shop, I growled, “Stop grinning like that. You look like a shark. And anyway, she can’t see you anymore.”
“But you can.” Dev’s grin got wider and sharkier. “Maybe we should stop by on our way out of town. Get a piece of pie for the road.”
We found our critical mass of old people sitting out on the sunlit patio in front of the retirement community. Four of them sat in rocking chairs; one woman was on her knees planting pansies in a flower bed; and two of the men were actually playing checkers, which caused Dev to do a (thankfully) abbreviated victory dance, which I ignored. When the rocking-chair people saw us, one of the women—she wore jeans and an Obama hope T-shirt—stood up and said, “Come over here where we can see you.”
Dev and I obeyed. The woman assessed us, head cocked, hands on hips, then turned to her friends and said, “Do these belong to any of you?”
The flower-bed woman squinted up at us. “Not me. They’re cute, though.”
“I’m Dev and this is Clare, and we’re actually not from around here,” said Dev.
“Well, of course, you’re not,” said one of the checkers players, irritably. “We’d know you if you were.”
The Obama woman gestured to a couple of empty chairs. “Pull up a chair and stay awhile.”
We did. The gardening woman tugged off her gloves, slapped the soil from her knees, and pulled up a chair, too.
“I’m Tess,” said the Obama woman. “These people are Mattie, Cleve, Paul, and Kate. The ones who can’t be bothered to get up from their game are Jack and Pete. They’re chronically grumpy.”
“True fact,” said Jack, without turning around.
“So what’s your story?” said Kate, the gardener.
Even though I’d given my spiel three times, at the hospital and both churches, here, with all those avid eyes on me, I was suddenly nervous. I cleared my throat.
“Um. So. I recently found out that my father, who died when I was eleven and who I didn’t really know that well, was adopted. He grew up in New York, but he was adopted here.”
“When was this?” asked
Tess.
“December of 1956.”
I watched all those sharp eyes grow foggy and inward looking for a moment, as all of them traveled back—or tried to travel back—over fifty years. When they seemed to have all returned, I went on.
“Was it a local girl in trouble?” asked Kate.
For a second, I didn’t know what she meant, and then, starting just under her ribs, she drew a downward curve in the air with her hand in a universal symbol for pregnant.
“Not local,” I said. “We think she was, um, just passing through. Her name was Sarah Giles.”
They all exchanged looks, and then Tess shook her head. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“We think she might have come with a friend, Edith Herron. And my grandfather, who came up from New York, the man who adopted Sarah’s baby, his name was Gareth Grace, but people here might have known him as George Graham.”
“An alias? What was he?” called out Jack. “A damned spy?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but Kate called back, “None of our business, Jack Powell, so zip it.”
No one remembered a man named either of those things, and no one knew anyone named Edith Herron. I looked at Dev, my heart sinking.
Seeing my disappointment, Tess said, “Names are the first thing to go. You’ll find that out one day. But I can still place a face. Do you have a picture of any of these people?”
I reached into my bag and took out two photos, one Joseph had taken of Edith walking on the beach and one of Sarah that I’d printed out from Antioch Library’s digitized newspaper articles about the trial.
Everyone passed the photos around. There was a lot of head shaking, and then, just as Tess was handing the photos back to me, Kate said, “Let me see that printed-out one again.”
She held it at arm’s length and narrowed her eyes.
“This one looks a bit like Dr. Farley’s daughter, Gwen. Pretty girl. Similar eyes. But mostly it’s that widow’s peak. You don’t see really defined widow’s peaks like that very often.”
Tess peered at the picture.
“Now that you mention it, that does look like Gwen,” she said. “With that hairline that makes her face look like a valentine.”
A small thrill of hope ran through me. “Does Gwen still live around here?”
“No,” said Kate. “Moved to Boston years ago. I think it was Boston.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Comes up to visit every summer with her family, though,” said Tess. “Or used to.”
Her family. Dev’s eyes met mine.
“Who do they visit?” he asked.
“Well, old Dr. Farley, of course, Tom Farley. And his wife.”
“They’re still alive?” I said.
“Well, who the heck visits dead people?” shouted Jack.
“Alive last I heard, and I would’ve heard if they weren’t, I think. Never knew Tom’s wife very well. They live pretty far out in the country, and she always kind of kept to herself, especially when her kids were growing up. Had five or six of them. I guess they kept her busy because people hardly ever saw her for years. Got out and about a little more after they all moved away. Nice enough to talk to, but private, I guess,” said Tess.
“Didn’t want you poking your big nose in her business, I’ll bet,” said Jack. “Can’t say I blame her!”
“Do you know her name?” said Dev. “Tom Farley’s wife?”
“Why, Sarah. Sarah Farley,” said Tess. Her eyes widened. “Well, I’ll be damned. You don’t suppose . . .”
“He was a doctor,” I said to Dev. “Like Edith was a nurse. A doctor fits.”
“Do you know if Sarah came here from somewhere else?” Dev asked Tess. “Like maybe the United States?”
Tess rubbed her chin, thinking. “I can’t recall. Can you, Kate?”
“I don’t remember going to school with her or anything, but then she’s quite a few years younger than we are.”
“Who isn’t?” said Jack.
Tess slapped her forehead. “Chicago!”
“Really?” I said. “Are you sure?”
“Not positive. But I think so. Tom grew up here but trained with a doctor in Chicago. I think Sarah was his sweetheart down there, and he brought her up one spring to marry her.”
“Oh,” I said, a little glumly. “Spring. Spring doesn’t fit.”
“Might not have been spring,” said Tess, soothingly. “Although that’s what I remember.”
“Your memory’s as full of holes as a leaky boat,” bellowed Jack.
“Hey,” said Dev, touching my wrist with one finger. “It’s worth checking, right?”
“Go inside and get me some paper, Jack Powell,” demanded Tess, “and I’ll write down directions to the Farley house.”
Jack got up with a groan and shambled, mumbling all the way, toward the door of the building.
Kate said, “And what about you two? Are you getting married?” She swished her forefinger back and forth between us.
Dev smiled and rubbed the back of his neck. “Us? Uh, actually—”
“Hey,” I told Kate, cutting Dev off. “You never know.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dev swipe a surprised glance at me.
“Nope,” said Kate, smiling. “You never do.”
* * *
It was a white farmhouse, deeper than it was wide, with black shutters, a front porch, and a single dormer window in the center of the gabled roof. The window reminded me instantly of the eye at the top of the pyramid on a dollar bill, which shows you how whirring and discombobulated my brain was. Don’t be an idiot, I told myself, it looks nothing like that. But even so, as Dev and I sat in the car and looked at the house, I couldn’t help feeling that it was looking back.
“You ready?” said Dev.
“I don’t think so,” I said. In my ears, my voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well.
“Oh. Well, that’s okay. We can sit here for a while or leave or whatever you want.”
“No, I want to go knock on the door. I really do. I want to meet Sarah. It’s just that my lungs seem to have stopped working, and my legs seem to have turned to wood, and I really don’t see how, under these circumstances, I’m going to get out of this car,” I said, my voice bouncing and echoing off the stone sides of the well.
“Hey,” said Dev. “Clare.”
I sat rigid, staring at the house.
“Look at me,” said Dev.
“Okay,” I said but my neck couldn’t remember for the life of it how to do that.
Dev reached over, took my chin in his hand, and gently turned my head so that I faced him. “What are you afraid of?”
“Nothing. I’m not afraid.”
Dev waited.
I sighed. “I don’t know. It just feels weird to have a grandmother. I never expected to have one. And she never expected me. What if she isn’t happy to see me? What if I don’t see any of myself in her? What if she sees me and remembers giving her baby away and gets upset?”
Dev moved his hand so that it was cupping the side of my face, but, of their own accord, my eyes shifted sideways toward the house. “She’ll be happy to see you,” said Dev.
“If I don’t go in, if I just stay here in this car and then leave, she’ll always stay the person who was glad I came. But if I get out and go up to that house, she might become someone else.”
Dev laughed. “Old Schrödinger again. There’s a live cat in this box, Clare. I just know it.”
The dormer window eye regarded me coolly. It gave nothing away.
“You do?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, don’t just sit there. Help me do this,” I said.
“Look at me.”
With effort, I pulled my attention away from the house. There was Dev’s face, his smooth brown skin and his hair falling on his forehead and his eyes, dusky Blue Ridge blue. And maybe because we were in a new place or because my brain was swirling around like a murmuration of star
lings, even though I had seen his face more times than anyone could count, it was new, too.
“Your eyelashes,” I said, marveling. “They go all the way around, like a ruffle.”
Dev smiled. “Did you think maybe they’d stopped?”
I breathed in and my lungs filled all the way up with air.
“You’ll go with me?” I said.
“Where else would I go?”
“Then I’m ready.”
Halfway up the brick walkway, I took Dev’s hand or maybe he took mine, and we walked, our breath making clouds in the cold air.
As I knocked on the door, I realized that I had no idea what I would say.
“Oh no,” I said. “What should I tell her? I haven’t even—”
But there she was, in a light blue sweater that matched her eyes. Sturdy, very wrinkled, her steel-gray hair coming to a point at the top of her forehead like a valentine. Her eyes were light blue. Mine are dark brown. She was short and solid. I am tall and rangy. I searched for myself in her face but didn’t find me.
“Hello,” she said, uncertainly. “Can I help you?”
“My grandfather was a man named George Graham,” I told her.
For a moment, her expression went blank. Then she smiled, dimples appearing, like magic, in her cheeks. “Oh, you,” she said, tears making her eyes shine. “You. After all these years. You beautiful girl. Come in, come in, come in.”
She made us tea with honey. Holding the steaming mug in my hands and drinking the tea made me feel like a child with a sore throat who someone good was taking care of. We told her the story, tag-teaming it, beginning with my nonwedding, and Sarah sat with her shining eyes and didn’t speak, except to murmur, now and then, “Oh, dear Edith, dear, dear Edith.”
I finished up with Tess giving us directions to Sarah and Tom’s house, and when I stopped, Sarah said, “What a journey Edith sent you two off on!”
Dev said, sheepishly, “Well, just Clare, really. She didn’t know I’d be coming, too.”
“Hmm,” sniffed Sarah. “I wouldn’t be so sure. Edith was a person who knew things. Well, I suppose it’s my turn now?”