A Symphony of Cicadas

by Crissi Langwell

  “What did you tell her?” Sara asked.

  “I told her I didn’t know if I was going to divorce you,” he said. The words lingered between the two of them.

  “You don’t know?” Sara asked. He shook his head with a small smile. “So what about her?”

  “Well, that’s about when she told me not to call her until I had signed divorce papers.”

  Sara stared at his face, studying the emotions there. It had been a long time since she’d known what he was thinking. Her eyes began to fill with tears. “Is that why we’re here? You want me to sign them so we can move on?”

  “Sara!” Kevin was incredulous. “Are you even listening to a word I’m saying?” He heaved a huge sigh and threw caution to the wind. “Honey, I miss you. I miss us. I miss us being a whole family. I want to come home. That is…if you’ll have me.” Sara was dumbfounded.

  “But you said you didn’t love me anymore.”

  “I didn’t know what I wanted, Sara. My mind was so muddy from being overworked that I couldn’t see what I was throwing away. All this time I was blaming you for not giving me the attention I wanted that I couldn’t see how much you were doing already.” He chuckled in embarrassment. “Taking care of those girls is really hard work!”

  “Right? They’ll suck the life right out of you,” she laughed. Sara’s heart warmed at the acknowledgement.

  “But they’re so dang smart, and fun! I realized I had been letting all the parenting fall on your shoulders, and I was actually missing out on them growing up. These past few months I’ve been forced to stop focusing on all my stuff when they’re around, and it’s been really eye-opening.” He took Sara’s hand in his. “Sara, if you’ll have me back, I promise to be around more. And not just physically. When I’m at the house, I promise to be your partner in life, and not just someone who lives there.”

  She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Of all the scenarios that had played through her head, this was one she never thought of. She’d been so sure he was going to start making arrangements for the divorce, to discuss lawyers and paperwork, to rip her heart out of her chest and crush it with the bottom of his shoe. And here he was, wanting her back, wanting to be a family. A brief glimpse of the other night with John burst into her mind.

  “Oh god,” she said, pulling her hand away from Kevin’s grasp.

  “What is it?” he asked in alarm. “Is it me? Are you saying no?”

  “No,” she said. She saw Kevin’s face fall, and she rushed to correct herself. “No, I mean I’m not saying ‘no.’ Oh Kevin, I did something. I did something really awful.”

  “Did you sleep with someone?” he asked her, guessing on the very first try. She nodded, fearful tears filling her eyes.

  “But it was just once, and it wasn’t planned,” she swore.

  He thought for a moment. “Do you care for him?”

  “No. I mean, not like that. It was a total accident, and we decided it wasn’t ever going to happen again,” she insisted.

  I caught just a flash of Kevin’s thoughts in that moment. John’s face appeared in his head, and he brushed it away as soon as it came. He knew it was him. He was the only man Sara was even close enough to become intimate with. Kevin knew she wasn’t like him. She wouldn’t have been able to sleep with just anyone – unlike he had with the first person who showed interest in him.

  He took her hand back in his.

  “I don’t want to know anymore. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters. The only thing that’s important is if you’ll take me back.” Sara didn’t say anything, afraid to answer, afraid of what he was asking, afraid that it could mean she would be trapped in a passionless marriage, afraid that he would walk out of the restaurant and never come back. “Sara, do I need to get on my knees and beg you? Because I will if I have to,” he promised. He started to get up.

  “No, stop!” she said, laughing. “You’ve just caught me off guard.”

  “Does that mean you need time to decide? Or is your mind already made up?” he asked her.

  “I’m just afraid,” she admitted. “What if it doesn’t work? What if we’re fooling ourselves into being trapped in a miserable situation?”

  “Thing is, Sara, being miserable without you is way worse than being miserable with you,” he told her.

  “Well, that’s reassuring,” she laughed. “I’m being serious.”

  “I am too. And if things get rocky, we fix it before it gets worse. We go to counseling. We read all those self-help books by your bed. We talk it out. Hell, I’ll even go to church if I have to. I just don’t want to be without you,” he pleaded. When she still didn’t answer right away, he slid off his chair onto one knee before she realized what he was doing.

  “Sara Marie Ashby Ferguson. Will you do me the immense honor of being my wife?” he said, his voice carrying through the whole restaurant. Sara reddened as she felt hundreds of eyes turning to look in her direction.

  “Oh my goodness, he’s proposing!” she heard a woman gush at a table behind her.

  “We’re already married,” Sara said to the woman. “We’re already married, Kevin,” she repeated to him. “Get up off the ground, you’re embarrassing yourself.”

  “I’m not embarrassed,” Kevin said with a grin. “In fact, I’m quite enjoying this.”

  “Then you’re embarrassing me,” she hissed.

  “Will you?” he asked. “I’m not getting up until you give me an answer.”

  The rest of the restaurant was quiet as they all waited for Sara to say something, the only sound being the occasional whisper and the clink of a fork on porcelain. She glared down at him as he continued to hold her hand tight. He smiled in encouragement when a little smile crept onto her face. She thought about how absurd the situation was, Kevin bent on one knee and both of them the center of attention. At last, she nodded. The whole restaurant erupted in applause as he got up and pulled her up in a huge embrace.

  “You won’t regret this, Sara,” he whispered in her ear. “I’ll spend my whole life making sure of it.”

  Twenty-two

  It had been several months since John had last seen Sara, and he still couldn’t get her out of his mind. He had tried, putting all of his energy into unpacking the house and making it a home, as well as diving headfirst into work. With the summer weather extending into fall, work had been steady enough that he was always busy. His contractor had secured a project for a new subdivision in South San Francisco, taking one of the rare rural areas and building high-priced homes on it. Many days he didn’t see his own home except in the glow of streetlights, spending all his daylight hours working on someone else’s house under the October sun.

  Days were easy, his only focus a job that demanded all his attention. But at night, when he lay within the quiet of his empty house, it was Sara’s face that haunted him in the moments it took him to fall asleep, and who greeted him when he woke from a dreamless slumber. It was easier for John to focus on Sara than it had been to be so consumed by me. I tried to remind myself of this every time I started to get hurt that he no longer seemed to need me. It helped that he still thought of me from time to time. But whenever he did, he traded my face for Sara’s, giving his attention to someone more attainable than a dead fiancée.

  He had only called Sara a handful of times in the past three months. The first time, he hung up after her voice gave instructions on how to leave a message, before the beep obligated him to say something back. The second time, he tried to act casual, giving an unbelievable performance of someone who was just checking in to see what was new in her world. By the third phone call, he was aware that she was avoiding his calls, and he called her out on it in the phone message. But it was the fourth call he left that he regretted the most, one that he replayed over and over in his head and wished he could take back.

  “Sara, it’s John. You might not want to see me, but your girls might. After all, I was a part of their lives too. I was almost their uncle. So… Shit. Okay, this isn
’t going how I planned. Leave it to me to try and get you to call me back by reminding you that I was once going to be married to your sister. But I’m going crazy here. Look, will you just talk to me? Damn, I probably should just re-record this-” Beep.

  The phone cut him off before he could do anything, holding his jumbled up message hostage in her voicemail box until she listened to him make an ass of himself. He almost called back, but decided the damage was done. Calling her repeatedly wasn’t going to make any of it look less crazy. So he left it as it was, and never called again.

  But her non-communication was eating away at him. And on his next Sunday off from work, he knew he needed to see her in person and at least plead his case.

  Most flower shops in town were closed on Sundays and Mondays. Knowing this in the beginning days of opening our shop, Sara and I had decided we would place the odds in our favor by keeping limited hours on Sunday mornings to fill the needs of those in a bind. At first, staying open for four hours on a Sunday morning didn’t make much sense. We only saw one or two customers on the first dozen Sundays, making the expense of staying open cost more than closing one day a week and losing the small amount of business. But soon word got out that we were available on Sundays, and we began to see the church altar guild buying replacement lilies for the ones that had wilted too soon, funeral directors who needed a last-minute arrangement, and apologetic husbands who had strayed into the excitement of the city, afraid to go home empty-handed to their waiting wives. This was one of the reasons our shop didn’t fold when many new businesses were affected by the economy. It seemed that even in the poorest of times, people still needed flowers to say what they couldn’t with words.

  With the limited time Sara would be at the shop, John knew he needed to move fast. His conscience told him just to let her go. Or perhaps it was my voice he heard somewhere within the thoughts that scrambled up his mind, pleading with him to forget her as I tried to protect him from breaking his heart any more than it already was. But he wouldn’t listen. He knew he wouldn’t be able to rest until he had seen her face to face, pled his case, convinced her that he was the answer to everything she needed and she was his answer as well.

  He took a quick shower, pulling on the cleanest pair of jeans he could find in a pile of laundry that had been building up for weeks. He then grabbed a granola bar for breakfast and hopped into his truck, taking the drive over the Golden Gate Bridge to reach the small shop Sara and I had set up so many years before. As he drove, he went over what he was going to say to her. In truth, he didn’t have a clue. All attempts to formulate a plan failed, fluttering away like the leaves on his windshield.

  There were no customers when John walked in the door. Not even Sara was in sight, leaving John alone in a room of flowers. He paused in his mission and looked around. It occurred to him that this was where he had first laid eyes on me, when he had fallen in love with me but wouldn’t know it for a few more months. The room seemed smaller than he remembered, encased by flowers on the walls and in buckets around the shop. The claustrophobia set in before he even knew what was hitting him. I was everywhere he turned - my eyes, my smile, the mango smell in my hair.

  “What am I doing?” John said out loud, his hands shaking. He couldn’t breathe, the air swallowed by the fragrance of flowers, suffocating him with their sweet aroma.

  “John?” Sara asked, emerging from the back room. “What are you doing here?” She saw how pale his face was, and changed from curiosity to concern. “Are you okay?”

  “I need to get out of here,” John said, rushing back through the doors he came in from. Sara grabbed a bottle of water from beside the register and followed him out.

  “Here,” she said, handing him the bottle. “Drink this.” He took it with an embarrassed smile, and drank half of it without pausing. Wiping his mouth, he sank to the ground, squeezing the area between his eyes in efforts to get his mind to shut up. “Feel better?” Sara asked him. He nodded, though his hands were still shaky.

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come here,” he said.

  “Why are you here, John?” Sara asked. I could tell she already knew why, having listened to each of John’s messages with a guilty heart, afraid to answer the phone or even call him back for fear of rocking the boat with Kevin. Things were good at home. She didn’t want anything to interfere with that. Seeing John here, she knew it was because she had cut off all communication. She remembered how it had felt, months earlier, when she had been the one on the other line, searching for some kind of connection since her husband was unable to give it to her. But she found it easier to pretend innocence than to admit she knew what John was going through.

  “You won’t talk to me, won’t even answer your phone. Look, I know what happened that night was sudden. But we were friends before that. And now you won’t even give me that,” John said.

  “I can’t, John.”

  “Why not? I mean, I know it’s totally weird. It will be hard to explain to everyone around us. But… Shit. I’m not good at this anymore. I haven’t dated since before your sister.” Just mentioning me flooded his brain with my face once again, and he took a deep breath in and out. “What the hell is wrong with me, Rachel? Why am I having such a hard time even talking to you?” he asked.

  “I’m not Rachel,” Sara murmured.

  “What do you mean?” John asked. “I know you’re not Rachel. You’re Sara.”

  “No, you called me Rachel.”

  “I did?” He racked his brain over the past few minutes, and realized it was a huge possibility that he had slipped up, using my name instead of hers. “Sara, I’m sorry. I know you’re not Rachel. I think just being here is making me think of her more than ever.”

  “But don’t you see? That’s exactly why that night was a mistake. You don’t love me, you love the idea of me – the one that is mixed up with thoughts of my sister.”

  “That’s not true,” John protested. But just the mention of it made him question what was going on.

  “What happened in there?” Sara asked. “I know that wasn’t from me. What were you thinking of when you entered the store and suddenly needed to leave?”

  “I was thinking of her,” John admitted. He sighed, rubbing his temples at the realization he wasn’t over me yet, that he had transferred all of his pain over losing me into obsessing over Sara. “This was where we first met. It was an accident, really. But it was one that was meant to happen.” He relayed the story, telling her about how the forgetfulness of his friend brought him to this shop. “From the moment I saw her, she took my breath away. She didn’t know it, of course. She was adorably flustered as she tried to help me with some last minute flower needs. But it gave me the in to be able to ask her out.” He smiled at the memory, taking in the details of the dress I wore that day, the way my hair escaped from the loose bun I wore at the nape of my neck, the rich coffee of my eyes.

  “You know, you were the first guy she really let get close to her, I mean, since Joey’s dad took off. She had a hard time trusting anyone. But something about you let her believe that even she could fall in love. I never saw her as happy as she was when she was around you.” Sara paused, her eyes twinkling at a memory only she and I shared. “If she were here, she’d kill me for telling you this. But she called me the day that she met you. She actually told me she had met the man she was going to marry.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No!” Sara insisted. “I remember thinking that was so unlike her. The few dates she had gone on before she met you, she saw as dead-ends. Eventually she just gave up dating altogether, finding it easier to take care of Joey and focus on the shop than, in her words, ‘deluding herself that any man could be anything more than disappointing.’ So to hear her tell me that you were the one, after only having just met you… Let’s just say I was both delighted by her hopefulness and fearful that she was about to get her heart totally ripped to shreds.” She smiled at the memory of her sister in those early days of love
. “I don’t believe in soul mates, John. But when I was witness to the beginning of my sister’s relationship with you, seeing how it grew so purely out of just a chance meeting, even I had to re-evaluate how I perceived the idea of love at first sight. You two were meant for each other, and you made her final years on earth the happiest she ever had.”

  “I guess everything happens for a reason,” John mused. “If it hadn’t been for a forgetful friend, I never would have met her.” He paused at the thought, remembering how that meeting had led to a night of dancing at the wedding, the first of many consecutive days and nights we spent talking to each other, getting to know each other, and when we weren’t together, thinking about each other. But his thoughts darkened at the loss that followed a life that had promised so much happiness. “Or maybe it was a mistake. If I hadn’t been in here that day, I never would have known what it feels like to lose her.”

  “And you never would have known what it felt like to love her, either,” Sara pointed out. The tears he had worked so hard to keep at bay broke free and ran down his cheeks in sheltered sobs. He tried not to let it all go, but when the first sob shuddered through him, the rest barreled down and bowled him over in unbridled sorrow.

  I watched with compassion as everything he had kept so close to his chest was now pouring out of him. He held no power to stop it either. He was healing as he mourned, enveloping the whole section of the world where we were with the strength of his emotion. They couldn’t feel it, of course, but I experienced every teardrop as a tiny ocean of hope, the breaking of his heart allowing the past to break free and make room for whatever the future held.

  And I was suffocating him.

  By indulging my selfish need to be close to him even as he grieved, I was making it impossible for him to let me go. I hadn’t thought I would ever be able to walk away, that if I did it would mean I didn’t love him enough. But I was beginning to believe I was ready to leave, that I could move on and leave behind all I loved in this world. John was taking the first real steps toward doing the same. I also saw, for the first time, that leaving him was an act of love in its own way.