by Londyn Skye
“I know I’ve dishonored you in a way that can neva’ truly be reversed. If God damns me to hell for my cruelty, it still wouldn’t be punishment enough for what I did to you and Lily. I deserve to be hated by you for it. Hell, I hate me for it. But still, I wanna at least attempt to atone for my major failure as a man to you, and as a fatha’ to our daughta’. So, I promise to do all I can to bring Lily back to you, so you can both live out the rest ‘a your days togetha’ … even if I’m neva’ allowed to be a part ‘a that. I just want you two back togetha’, where you both belong.”
Maya’s eyes fluttered closed, pushing another swell of tears down her cheeks.
“But there is one thing I beg God you’ll bestow upon me,” Levi added.
Maya finally opened her eyes, waiting on his request.
“I’m b-beggin’ you for your f-forgiveness,” he tearfully pleaded. “’Cause even afta’ all these years, I still can’t f-find the strength to f-forgive myself.”
Maya briefly closed her tear-filled eyes again as she searched her mind for a response. She then opened them, wiped her tears away, and exhaled. “Many times, I’ve wondered if you sold your heart and soul to the Devil the day you sold your own daughta’. ‘Cause the man that came back here afta’ that ain’t the same one that claimed to love me and Lily. A coward returned in his place! A coward that I can’t even look at without gettin’ sick to my stomach! Just as sick as the thought of eva’ forgivin’ you!” She pursed her lips tight and squinted her eyes. “I hate you for what you did! You could deliva’ Lily back here on a silva’ platta’, and I’d still hate you until the day I ceased to exist!” She snatched her hand out of Levi’s, turned her back, and callously walked away, leaving him completely alone in his most shattered vulnerable moment … just as he had done with their daughter.
Maya’s words and actions were the equivalent to a scorching dagger through Levi’s already broken heart. Still on his knees, he shamefully lowered his head in defeat and let her walk away without another word.
Maya briskly made her way out of the barn to escape Levi. The earlier sprinkle was now a torrential downpour. In Maya’s mind, the storm seemed to be the perfect metaphor for all that had just escalated between her and Levi. Finally saying things to him that she had held onto, since the dark day he took Lily, had completely blown open the floodgates of her emotions. Instead of running to get out of the storm, she tilted her head back, attempting to let the sheets of water wash away her gushing tears. However, the powerful weather system had no effect on the emotional storm inside her body. It had all caused a resurgence of bitter pain that began to weaken her. Before her legs gave out, she quickly made her way across the muddy field into her cottage. Shivering and soaked, she collapsed in a heap on her bed. The booming sound of earthmoving thunder drowned out the sounds of her heavy sobs, as she lay curled up in the fetal position. She wept with body-convulsing force, feeling as though her tears would never cease this time.
Maya eventually cried herself into a deep sleep. She woke up at dawn with swollen eyes, a raw throat, and a stomach that hurt from hours of crying. After hearing a low rumble of thunder, she glanced out the window at the slow-moving storm system that was still lingering above the farm. She felt that the gloom of the storm precisely matched how she was feeling internally. She was lying there feeling blanketed in heavy guilt. After purging her anger the evening before, she now realized just how disgusting the things were that she had said to Levi. It was not like her to be so cruel. She had unleashed the monster inside her that had fed off years of anger, a monster that grew to want to viciously hurt Levi as badly as he had hurt her. Just like Levi too, though, Maya now regretted her actions. However, she did not want to wait fourteen years to make amends for her mistake.
As Maya summoned the strength to get out of bed, she searched her mind for the right words to apologize to Levi. Just as she sat up, the dim light of the sun broke through the storm clouds. It lit up her room enough for her to suddenly notice two things laying on a table near the door. She was certain they were not there the morning before when she left to start her workday. Curiosity immediately gave her the strength to stand and walk over to the table. Her emotions began to surge again when she realized what she was looking at. The telescope she had destroyed was now laying there in pristine, refurbished condition. The handmade music box that she had thrown at Levi and broken was now back in one piece too. Levi had restored it to pristine condition as well. Maya opened the lid and was warmed by the sight of the tiny figurines of her and Levi, once again, dancing gracefully to the beautiful song that he had written for her. Maya could have gazed at their toy replicas for hours, but her focus suddenly shifted to a new sentimental detail that Levi had affixed inside the lid: a miniature copy of his favorite picture of Lily, smiling at birds while on her mother’s lap. After mercilessly crying for hours, Maya thought her body had not a drop of tears left. But the gifts in her hands quickly proved her wrong. The return of her sentimental treasures further proved the authenticity of Levi’s regret and guilt, as well as his love. As moving as the gifts were, though, none of them would mean as much to Maya as what she truly wanted. The only sacred, sentimental gift that could mend the hole in her soul sat smiling at birds in the picture she could not stop staring at. Tears of joy continued to carene down Maya’s cheeks when she thought about the fact that Levi was now promising to bring that very miracle back into her life.
The gifts in her hands made Maya’s regret for her nasty words elevate tenfold. She could now see with clarity that Levi was sincere in his desire to finally atone for his dastardly act. She now wanted to atone for hers. She gazed at the picture of her and Lily for a final time and carefully set it back down. She then hastily stepped out into the pouring rain to look for Levi. On his most emotionally draining days, she always knew just where to find him. Just before she reached the barn door, though, Maya once again tilted her head back and let the sheets of rain cleanse her, much like her tears just had. For the first time in years, she looked forward to the moment the storm passed and the skies cleared. Just the thought of seeing Lily again already made her want to smile as broad as the rainbow she was convinced would soon stretch across the clear blue sky. With the way it was pouring outside, it seemed that moment would never come quickly enough, nor could the moment she saw her daughter again.
When a booming rumble of thunder rocked the earth beneath Maya’s feet, her eyes suddenly shot wide open and her head quickly swiveled toward the barn door. However, it was not the sky’s wrath that had jolted her from being cleansed by the earth’s tears. The sound she thought she heard, intertwined with the rain and thunder, had triggered her heart to thump with force, her breathing to quicken, and her skin to go even colder than it already was. For a moment, she stood there frozen, trying to force herself to believe that the sound was nothing more than the powerful rumblings of lightning’s aftermath. But her pounding heart knew better.
Breathing heavily, Maya approached and opened the barn door. She barely peeked her head inside. “Levi?” she called out softly, her voice quivering. Trembling, she hesitantly took a step inside. She saw and heard nothing other than spooked horse’s neighing. “Levi?” she called out again, as she cautiously began searching the barn. Left and right, she turned her head as she walked by each horse stall. She turned to her right as she passed by the fifth. When she looked down, both her knees instantly gave out. Maya swore she was falling in slow motion. As she collapsed to the ground, the world went completely silent in her mind. However, the animals around her could attest differently; the sound of Levi’s name escaping Maya’s mouth in a high-pitched shrill nearly shattered all their eardrums.
The evening before, it was Levi on his knees begging Maya for forgiveness. Now, it was Maya who was suddenly collapsed on her knees begging him in return. She begged him to get up, despite knowing full well he was incapable of even hearing her. The piercing green eyes that had watched her and worshipped her for years were now fixed on her
in an eternal gaze, without an ounce of life left in them.
Maya scooped Levi up into her arms, brought him close to her chest, and began rocking back and forth with him. “What’ve I done?!” she shrieked repeatedly. For minutes, Maya wept uncontrollably, wailing, and bathing Levi in her tears. While violently weeping, she gazed back into the lifeless eyes of the man who had miraculously blessed her with a child. While thinking of the special place he held in her heart for such a miracle, Maya slowed her rocking motions and placed a kiss on Levi’s forehead. “I l-love y-you,” she whispered, confessing when it was far too late for Levi to appreciate words he had longed to hear for over twenty years. “I f-forgive y-you,” she then whispered repeatedly, sincerely stating a phrase that she was convinced would have prevented the massive hole that Levi Collins had just blown into his own skull.
Despite hearing a noise behind her, Maya refused to stop gazing at Levi. She did not even budge when she saw a set of shoes in front of her. As it turned out, Maya was not the only one who had realized the error of their ways. Much like Maya, it had only taken Wyatt a few hours to admit to himself how wrong he was to speak to his father the way he had. The shock of his father’s revelations had led him to say things that he quickly regretted. He was sick to his stomach over how disrespectful he had been to a man who had made such a major sacrifice for him and his brothers. After a sleepless night, he had headed to his father’s plantation, wanting to offer a sincere apology and his assistance in finding Lily … two things that he was now seeing he would never be able to do.
Embedded with the sound of thunder and rain, Wyatt had heard wailing coming from the barn as he approached it. He mistook it for a slave giving birth, one on the verge of dying in the process. He went to offer his assistance, hoping to help a life enter the world. Instead, he found that his beloved father had just left it, in the most tragic of ways. Wyatt now towered above Maya, staring down at his father in a wide-eyed trance, feeling as though a bullet had just pierced him too. He was instantly in shock, so much so that he was unable to cry. His mouth agape, he just stood there paralyzed, inhaling and exhaling in short bursts, like his body was fighting to remember how to breathe.
“Get out,” Wyatt whispered to Maya when he finally got his brain to remember how to conjure up words.
Maya finally managed to pull her eyes away from Levi and raised her head. “W-Wyatt. Please, I…”
“I SAID GET OUT!”
“Please, I didn’t…”
“NOOOW!”
Despite feeling completely numb, Maya got her legs to comply and she quickly scrambled away. Wyatt’s legs, in turn, gave out from beneath him. He momentarily remained on his knees, trying to convince himself that he was trapped in a gruesome dream. When he finally accepted that there was no waking from this nightmare, he collapsed onto his father’s body and began weeping uncontrollably.
****
Unable to come to terms with his epic failure as a son, Wyatt was virtually crippled in the days after his father’s funeral. He felt it would be impossible to forgive himself for the fact that the last words to his father were some of the most God-awful venomous statements any son could ever make to a father whose expressions of love were always unrelenting. Wyatt was so devastated, he remained confined to his room for days. He would not bathe, work, or speak to anyone. He lay in bed all day with alcohol as his only sustenance, having constant thoughts of ending it all himself. When he was not chugging whiskey, he laid there looking like an asylum patient trapped in a catatonic state. He simply could not bring himself to get out of bed, until his wife came into the room one afternoon. She sat down beside him, handed him a glass of water, and a piece of mail that had been buried amongst piles of sympathy letters from friends and family. Wyatt was content to ignore the letter until his wife showed him who it was from. The name in the return address section made him immediately sit up and open the letter. After reading the contents inside, he quickly got out of bed, got dressed, and left the house for the first time in days.
With letter in hand, Wyatt hesitantly entered the rundown building where his father had taken his last breath. Flashbacks of his father’s dead body brought forth an immediate surge of tears the moment he opened the barn doors. He could hardly bring himself to step inside, but he forced himself to endure the torture because of the contents in his hands. Following the instructions on the letter, he shoveled away the hay in the fifth horse stall and unburied the secret compartment underneath. With one of two keys that came with the letter, he unlocked the padlock on the compartment door and opened it. He dragged out the trunk inside of it and unlocked the padlock on it with the second key. He opened the lid and his eyes were greeted by a tiny pink baby blanket that covered an array of items underneath.
Levi was drinking heavily before his suicide. His body was surrounded by empty liquor bottles. The liquor in his veins made it far easier for him to give in to the urge to instantly halt years of internal pain. Before taking his life, though, he had spent hours preparing and mailing the keys and detailed letter that had guided Wyatt to the very spot he was now. The keys literally unlocked two decades of secrets, containing a plethora of important documents, pictures of Lily and Maya, Lily’s baby blanket, and other various memorabilia. Recently added to the stockpile were brief letters to each of his sons, expressing his love, apologies, and begging once again for their forgiveness and understanding. Also included were the manumission papers for all his slaves, another copy of his divorce papers, and a freshly scripted will for Wyatt to execute.
For countless hours, Wyatt sat against the horse stall wall going through the trunk and reading contents that had him bawling like a baby all over again. But it was not the divorce papers, the will, or even the letter his father had written for him that had him so overwhelmed with emotion.
… Over several days, Lily sat in James’s arms near William’s lake, completely riveted by all the journals that had her eldest brother in such a debilitated state five years prior. To learn of the incredible love story between her mother and father was indeed the wild emotional ride that James had warned. In more moments than she had anticipated, Lily paused reading, laid her head on James’s chest, and wept uncontrollably over the astounding revelations in her father’s journals. She cried tears of joy as she read the beautiful words her father scripted about her birth. She lit up with a smile as she learned why Griff’s nickname for her triggered the memory of her and her father at the apple tree. Four times, Lily read the passage about the song her birth had inspired her father to compose. In fact, she had to read all the passages about her father’s musical abilities again and over again. Her eyes, her heart, and her soul had to absorb it several times before she could truly believe that she had inherited her incredible gift from him. The fact that she was never even privy to the fact that he played piano at all seemed to prove that she indeed knew nothing about the gifted and loving man that Levi Collins truly was.
With every page Lily turned, she felt more and more confident that her father truly loved her. The feeling of his love emanating from the pages was like a healing potion for her broken heart. What astounded her most, though, was the feeling of love that she found growing for her father in return. It made the very last passage he ever wrote, nearly impossible to read. Much like Wyatt, Lily was barely able to make out the sentences through the sea of tears in her eyes, as she read the last page of her father’s words aloud:
February 26th, 1859
I am a failure. I failed at marriage. I failed at music. I failed at being an example of an upstanding man of honor for my sons. I failed the only woman I have ever truly loved. I failed at loving Maya the way she deserves. I failed at healing her heart, revitalizing her jubilance, and giving her a reason to smile at her precious rainbows again. But by far, my most epic failure was in being the loving protective father I should have been to my only daughter. I have even failed at my mission to find her.
For weeks, I searched for my beautiful Lily. I wanted to brin
g her home to her mother where she belongs. I’ve been desperate to return happiness to her and her mother’s lives. For over a decade, I’ve been dreaming of the moment they would see each other again. To see their joyous tears as they embraced would have instantly ceased this pain in my heart for an eternity. I know that no grand gesture or passionate poetic words could ever make up for my betrayal fourteen years ago. But still, I wanted so badly to tell Lily how very sorry I am for what I did to her. I was ready to spend the rest of my natural life proving that fact to her and her mother, not just with words, but with my actions. I wanted Lily to know that there has not been a single minute of my day, for the last fourteen years, that I have not thought about her. I wanted to tell her that I have missed her more than my words could adequately convey. I have prayed that there may come a day when she would sit with me on the porch, and let me share with her my fondest memories of her as a child. I longed to share with her the way that I was literally brought to my knees with joy the moment I learned of her existence. I wanted to tell her how my heart swelled with pride and my eyes flooded with tears the moment I first held her in my arms. Selfishly, I hoped maybe one day Lily would consider forgiving me, and that we may have some semblance of the father daughter relationship I had always craved to have with her. I would have felt so honored to one day walk her down the aisle and dance with her at her wedding. I would have loved to spoil any beautiful grandchildren she gave me with lots of candy, handmade toys, and adventurous trips. I would have loved to introduce Lily to the piano, play songs with her side by side, and perhaps grow to have a shared love of music with her. I know such things were likely impossible dreams, but I dreamed them, nonetheless. At the very least, I wanted to tell my sweet Lily that I have prayed for her every single day, asking the Lord to give her the extraordinary life that I failed to give her. But what I’ve prayed for, most of all, was for the chance to finally look my only daughter in the eyes and tell her that I love her more than anything that God has ever created. But I have failed. Despite my efforts, I have been unable to find my little flower, convey these things to her, and return her to her mother where she belongs.
