Secrets of a charmed lif.., p.26
Secrets of a Charmed Life, page 26
Rose’s accident was my fault, Emmy. At least that is how I saw it. I was angry with her the day she went swimming alone. She liked the same boy I liked, and she knew I liked him. Rose was pretty and graceful and could have had the affection of any boy in our neighborhood. She chose Martin because I liked him. It was petty sibling rivalry, nothing more, but I let it get the best of me, in every sense of the word.
She asked me to come swimming with her the day of her accident. Begged me to. It was a sweltering-hot day and there was a lake near this summer place that we went to for holiday every August. I said no, just because I was mad at her. I was fourteen; she, thirteen. Since I was the older, my parents had always looked to me to watch out for her, a charge I had begun to detest. Rose was clearly the more confident, the more engaging, the more capable. And we were not little children anymore.
Our parents, schoolteachers on term break, had gone to the city that afternoon to pick up the post, get some groceries, pay bills. They had left me in charge. Rose and I weren’t supposed to swim at the lake alone; that had been the rule since we were young. But she went anyway and told me if she drowned, it would be all my fault.
She didn’t drown when she hit her head diving into the lake, but to nearly drown can be just as life changing. And for her, of course, it was. If the two boys who had been fishing had not walked by at just that moment, she would have died. As it was, she lived, but her brain had been deprived of oxygen for too long. She was different when she finally came home to us. And so was I.
And while I knew she should not have gone swimming alone, and that what she did was not my fault, I had wanted something bad to happen to her, Emmy. It was this fleeting but ferocious desire for harm to come to her that haunted me for years afterward. She did not remember begging me to come with her. I could not forget that she did.
In my more desperate times I let myself believe God kept me from having children to punish me for what I did to Rose. But in the end I came to see that we all make choices, Emmy. I made mine; Rose made hers. Our parents decided to leave us alone that day. Those boys decided to go fishing. I am not such a significant creature in God’s universe that it is my decisions alone that can change the destiny of another.
We make our choices—you and I—in a world that isn’t perfect. And while I wish I had made different choices, as I know you do, which one of us can say that if we had, nothing bad would have ever happened to the people we loved?
You are not to blame for what happened to Julia, any more that I am to blame for what happened to Rose. I have wanted to tell you this for many years, but I did not want you to think that I see my loss as comparable to yours. I know yours is the greater.
It has been a joy to know you and to love you, Emmeline. I am thankful every day that God brought you and Julia into my life.
I leave to you the only treasure I have in hope that it will bring you peace.
Yours always,
Charlotte
I look up from the letter. Isabel is staring out the window again, her eyes shimmering with unshed tears.
When she speaks, her voice is hushed. “Mac was sitting next to me at the kitchen table as I was reading that letter because it had not occurred to me when I opened it that I would need to hide it from him. He kept saying, ‘Isabel, what is it? What’s wrong?’ I knew I could no longer keep the truth from him. I told him everything. It was a very complicated day after that. He was not happy with me. I had not trusted him with the truth about who I was and that hurt him to his core. We barely spoke to each other for the next few days. Weeks, really. Gwen could see that we’d had an argument and asked me repeatedly what it was about. I finally told her that a distant aunt had left me a one-hundred-year-old cottage in England and that we were at odds about what to do with it.”
She pauses for a moment and then continues.
“By May, things were no better between Mac and me. We both decided it might be best if I came to Thistle House for the summer, assessed the future of both it and our marriage. Mac had a manuscript due, so it made sense to our friends and family that I would take Gwen for a three-month stay in England to check out an inheritance and that Mac would stay and work on his book. So that was what we did. Gwen and I arrived in June of that year.”
“But . . . you stayed,” I say, when she pauses. “Your husband joined you, right?”
“Yes. We stayed.”
“Did you stay because of that other letter that Charlotte mentioned? The one in her bedside table?”
Isabel tips her head. “Oh, I suppose that had something to do with it. But it’s not the primary reason we decided to stay.”
I wait.
“You recall that I told you that once you play your hand, you can’t live as though you still hold all the cards?”
“Yes,” I said.
And she hands me the leather-bound notebook in her lap.
Part Three
Thirty-four
JULIA
June 8, 1958
Dear Emmy,
It’s been so long since I’ve imagined you being alive that I don’t really know where to begin.
My therapist, Dr. Diamant, said that I should pretend that I am writing you a letter. Think of you as alive and just start writing. It doesn’t matter how I start, she said; it only matters that I do. She feels that writing to you like this will allow me to move on with my life, put you to rest, so to speak, so that I will not be haunted by your memory anymore. Actually, Dr. Diamant says you do not haunt me, Emmy. I haunt myself with everything that is left undone between us. This journal will allow me to say what I need to, she says. It will allow me to move on.
I think that’s a very strange way of putting it. To move on. As if I were frozen in one place and therefore I must do something drastic to start moving again. When are we ever able to stop moving? You and I know better than anyone that the earth continues to turn, no matter what happens to you, and it takes you with it whether you want to go or not. You keep breathing, your heart keeps beating, the sun keeps traveling the sky, and the world just keeps spinning. When one day ends, you crawl into bed, and when you wake up, another day is there waiting for you. You really have no choice. If I truly had the power to stop things from moving, I would have exercised it a long time ago.
Dr. Diamant is not my first doctor, but she is my favorite. Simon likes her, too, and that’s good. I think you’d like Simon. He’s smart and kind and reminds me of Neville, except that he’s dependable and honest and alive. He has curly brown hair, eyes like chocolate, and he looks like he’s in a perpetual state of surprise. I think that’s the feature I like best about him. He seems always on the verge of discovering something amazing. He’s the one who found Dr. Diamant, actually. There was a long stretch of time when I didn’t have a therapist. I guess I thought I had outgrown the need for one. When I finally decided I was ready to move back to London a few years ago, I figured that was proof enough I was done with needing one. It had been eighteen years, after all. Good Lord, you’d think I would have a handle on it, wouldn’t you? But then I met Simon and fell in love with him, and the very prospect of being deliriously happy for the first time in my life just about drove me crazy. I nearly quit my job and moved back home to Granny’s. But Simon, God love him, convinced me to stay. He found Dr. Diamant for me. Simon knows everything that happened to me. Well, pretty much everything. I don’t think anyone knows everything. But Simon loves me despite my being a wreck and he says he will wait for me to be able to say that I’ll marry him. Quite the fellow, right?
That’s pretty much why he wanted to find someone like Dr. Diamant. He has also had a couple of appointments with Dr. Diamant himself, just so he can know what to say to me—and I guess what not to.
Dr. Diamant is probably forty, maybe older, smokes these skinny brown cigarettes, and wears wild prints that make me think of Morocco or Zanzibar. She’s not like any of the psychiatrists I had when I was little. The first one was a dreadful pug-faced troll named Dr. Nielsen. He was supposed to have been this brilliant doctor who knew exactly how to cure a child chained to fear and anxiety. There were times when I wanted to throw that man off a bridge, Emmy. All he ever wanted to do was talk about that day, the last day I saw you, over and over and over. That was the last thing I wanted to talk about with him. I didn’t want to talk about it with anyone. That was why I stopped talking, for heaven’s sake. You know, I look back on it now and I think, what in the world was he doing, wanting me to relive that day in his office every time I was dragged in to see him. How did he think I got to be the way I was? It was from having to live that day the first time.
Granny eventually decided Dr. Nielsen wasn’t helping me. She said it was because he was American and what did we expect? She didn’t say this to me. She said it to her fellow British expats when she assumed that because I wasn’t talking, I wasn’t listening.
The next doctor was just okay. The third one, Dr. Hunt, I liked very much, but he got married and moved away after only two years. I saw him from my tenth birthday to just before my twelfth. He had been able to get me to utter a few sentences the last few months we were together, and he told me before he left for Texas that I honestly didn’t have to worry about talking or not talking. It wasn’t a big deal. When I was ready to resume communicating verbally, I would know it. He had never met a person like me, who didn’t start talking again when she was ready. There wasn’t a magic formula for it. When I was ready, I would just start talking again.
I’ll never forget how I felt when he said he had met others like me. I even managed to ask him about it.
Yes, he said. There are many, many people like me. In fact, everyone is like me. We’re all susceptible to loss and the effects of trauma. There isn’t a one of us who could experience what I did and not struggle to find some way of coping with it.
I was so glad to hear that. I hated feeling like I was different. Weird. That’s what kids call you when you don’t talk, Emmy. They didn’t call me weird to my face. But I knew what they whispered about me.
That’s the English girl who doesn’t talk. Except when she counts things.
How come she doesn’t talk?
The Nazis killed her family and she’s not even Jewish.
How’d she get away?
No one knows. No one will ever know.
Why does she count things?
Because she’s cuckoo.
There were a lot of times I wanted to tell stupid kids like that the Nazis did not kill my family, but if I had, they might have asked, Well then, who did? I didn’t have an answer for that.
After Dr. Hunt, I didn’t want to see another doctor and I wasn’t made to right away. The war ended just a few months later anyway and Granny wanted to go back to England.
I didn’t want to come back initially.
In fact, the first time I had yelled anything in five years was when I told Granny I didn’t want to go back to England. She was happy to have me yelling, but after she got over her joy, we had our first argument.
But it’s where your home is, Julia, she said.
I don’t have a home, I yelled.
Your home is with me.
I don’t have a home!
Your home, Julia, is with me. I’m your family. Me and Gramps.
In the end, we went back. Of course we went back. We’re not Americans. Granny and Gramps have a nice house in Woodstock near Oxford where Gramps, whom I had seen only twice in five years, taught literature. He had missed us. He wanted us to come home.
As we packed our things to leave Connecticut, I flat-out refused to go anywhere near London.
Granny said there would be no reason to. It was a wreck, anyway.
Ever, I said.
And she said if I never wanted to see London again, I didn’t have to.
We sailed on a ship as big as a city, or so it seemed to me. And when we docked in Southampton, Gramps was there to meet us with his car.
He asked me how the crossing was. I told him it was fine compared to our departure when U-boats were trying to bomb us. He started to tear up when I said this and I worried that Granny hadn’t told him how scary our first crossing had been. That wasn’t it. He knew how terrible it was. He just had never heard my voice before.
I actually didn’t like the way my voice sounded when I started to talk again. I had been going to school with American kids and hearing them talk, and even though I hadn’t been doing much talking myself, their funny way of speaking had slithered into my head and mixed itself in with the way I talked five years before. What came out of my mouth when I started communicating verbally again was a weird half-British, half-American mush that made me sound like a psycho.
It does not make you sound like a psycho, Granny had said. Where did you hear that word?
I sound strange.
You just sound like all the other British children who were evacuated to America, Julia. That’s what happens when you’re immersed in another culture.
You don’t sound like them, I said.
That’s because I am fifty years older than you. You are young. It will come back, Julia. The way you talked before will come back.
And I guess it did. Mostly.
Granny was so happy to be back in England in her pretty house and with Gramps and all the friends she left behind when she evacuated with me to Connecticut.
And I guess I liked the house, too. You would like it, Em. There’s a big garden in the back and rows and rows of raspberry bushes. I had my own room, the one that had been my father’s. Granny still had a few of his toys in there and loads of pictures of him from when he was a baby and a schoolboy and when he started to do plays.
It made Granny sad to talk about Neville but she did it anyway. I think she has always been afraid that I would forget him because I was so young when he left Mum. But there are things you don’t forget even if you are young.
She doesn’t know I only ever called him Neville. Even all these years later, she doesn’t know. She thinks I called him Daddy.
Do you know why I called him Neville?
Because you did.
I was afraid if I started calling him Daddy, then you would call him Daddy. And I didn’t want to share him with you, Emmy.
I would now, of course. I would share anything I have with you.
Julia
June 11, 1958
Dear Emmy,
Today Simon and I tried to find the street where you and I and Mum lived in Whitechapel. It all looks so different now. I couldn’t find it. I can’t remember what the actual street was named and nothing looks familiar. Nothing at all. I know we lived close to Saint Paul’s and that we were also near a Tube station. But even though we walked down street after street, I couldn’t find it.
Part of me was relieved because I’m not completely sure I’m ready to see our flat again. And part of me was annoyed because what if seeing it would’ve brought me one step closer to being at peace with everything? You know?
Simon had done some checking and he knew the area east of Saint Paul’s had been heavily bombed, not just the day I last saw you, but many other times after that. He said it might be that I couldn’t find our flat because it had been destroyed and something new had been built in its place. There are so many new buildings in the East End. It’s as if everything that made it ours is gone, Emmy. Saint Paul’s is there, of course, but nothing else that I can remember.
When that search proved useless, we went looking for Mum’s grave. She was buried in a plot of earth with a hundred other paupers on September 12, 1940. They didn’t know what date to put for her date of birth, Emmy. It just says her name and the date she died. The day after you and I came back to London.
Do you know she’s dead, Emmy? If I were to see you again, this would be hard for me to say, to tell you she’s dead. She was in the basement of a hotel on that night. A bomb obliterated the building and sent it in pieces hurtling onto the basement, crushing the twenty or so other people who were sheltered there when the air raids started. I don’t know why she was there. The tiny headstone doesn’t say that. Granny said maybe she had been outside on the sidewalk and ran into the shelter when the sirens began to wail.
Granny didn’t tell me right away that Mum had been killed because she was afraid I would disappear into myself and never emerge again. Neither did she tell me that Neville had died before Mum did, even before you and I were evacuated. It’s true. He was gone before we left London for Aunt Charlotte’s. Mum didn’t tell me, though. And Mum didn’t tell me I had grandparents, either, which I still don’t understand. Granny had offered to take us, Emmy. Before we went to Charlotte’s. She wrote to Mum after Neville died and told her she would take us away from the war. We could have come together to America, you and I. Well, she didn’t exactly offer to take you in that letter she wrote because she didn’t know about you. But a long time later, she told me if she had known I had an older sister, she would have offered to take us both to America.
But Mum didn’t tell me Granny had written to her. I was at Aunt Charlotte’s, thinking Neville was still in India when he was already dead. And we spent all those weeks away and I never knew I had grandparents who wanted to see me.
When I asked Granny why Mum did that, she said I shouldn’t ponder things I could only guess about. She said maybe Mum needed time to get used to the idea that I even had grandparents and that Neville was dead, and that before she got used to either one, the Germans started bombing London.
Why didn’t Neville tell me I had grandparents?
Granny said she had to do the same thing as me: not ponder too hard things she could only guess about. She told me my grandfather and Neville didn’t see eye to eye on anything. Gramps wanted Neville to go to Oxford and get a proper education, settle down, and have a respectable career. Neville didn’t want any of that. He wanted to be in theater. So maybe he didn’t tell them he had a daughter because he knew he hadn’t become a father in the proper way, and he figured that would matter to Gramps.
