Crossing the Line

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  World War I, on the other hand, sparked a huge patriotic outburst and thousands of civilians joined up, many in the so-called “Pal’s Battalions.” These were battalions that promised if you joined together, you’d serve together. Every walk of life formed Pal’s Battalions. The London Stock Exchange clerks had one.

  I liked to think that Mary Jr. and I and her friends—and even Sophie and her set—had formed a Pal’s Battalion: women who banded together in the common pursuit of a different kind of battle, the battle against so many odds to see that you raised your children healthy and well.

  Now Mary Jr. and I were still in the Pal’s Battalion, only now it was one of loss. Her family had, long ago, lost Sarah. And I had now lost Em.

  Since losing Em, I’d heard from everyone—my mother, Soph, the people at work, even Tolkien’s parents called—all of who were sorry for my “loss.”

  But after that, the conversations quickly devolved into silence. After all, what could people say? “I’m sorry that, previously, you lived your life in such a screwy fashion that you were bound to one day lose the one thing you could not bear to lose?”

  People just don’t say things like that; if, for no other reason, because they’re simply not that long-winded. I hadn’t been back to work since the day I’d dropped my unsipped-from champagne glass, the glass shattering against the floor as I’d run out, racing to beat the unbeatable wind. If something desperately needed doing for Churchill & Stewart, if Simon Smock needed an answer to one of the many nervous-author questions Candy was forever asking or if one of my other authors needed anything, I could do those things from the relative safety of my home, that safeness being an illusion, since every square centimeter was a reminding cut of the loss of Emma.

  I also hadn’t accepted the calls from newspapers, magazines, TV either, all calling to interview me about The Cloth Baby. What did any of that matter now?

  In fact, the only time I’d left the house had been to go with Tolkien to talk to Sarah’s friends, to look at places she’d been seen early on after going missing, to chase a child—a teen—that might still be brought back.

  But now Armistice Day was upon us, the following Sunday being Remembrance Day. In previous years, I’d never bothered much—I guess, not at all—with Remembrance Day. After all, what had it to do with me? It mourned people I’d never known in a world I’d never known. Each year, special services were held, but I’d never taken part. Each year, there was a big ceremony in London with the Royal Family participating, with two minutes of silence at 11:00 a.m., which was widely, but not completely, observed.

  Whatever I’d been doing in previous years, I hadn’t been observing any silence.

  But this year was different.

  In the week previous, I’d seen the paper poppies for sale everywhere, as always, only this year I bought one of my own, so that when the day came, I had my own red poppy to wear with nearly everyone else.

  I went to Mary Jr.’s church, the Shakespeare Baptist Revival Church, and stood there between her and David, all of us with our red poppies, listening to the service to commemorate the loss of those no longer with us.

  I held tight to the hand of my Battalion Pal, feeling the loss of her niece all over again. Sarah had been gone so long, no one in the family believed she would ever be coming home again, at least not alive.

  And as I stood there, holding my Battalion Pal’s hand, I realized that, of we two, I was surely the luckier. For while she believed that she would never see her niece again, and while I believed I would never see my daughter again, our losses were different. Whatever else I might think of Stephen Triplecorn, however much I might hate him for taking Emma from me, I knew that, wherever he had taken her, it would be a good home and that he would see to it that she was safe and well cared for.

  When Mary Jr. started to cry, I put my arm around her, realizing that as great as my loss was personally, it would be far worse to believe that Emma no longer existed in this world.

  I’ve never found what I think you’re supposed to find in churches, never found anyone else’s definition of religion, certainly. But I’d found other things there that day, as David and I “Hallelujah”-ed once again and “Praise the Lord”-ed and clapped with everyone else. I’d found hope in the form of Mary Jr., found hope in the belief in Emma, still loose out there somewhere in the world.

  The night I’d broken into my mother’s house to see if I could discover any evidence of her lover, I’d seen the changes she’d made to the living room, kitchen and bedroom. But, not wanting to get caught, I hadn’t taken the time to check out any of the other rooms: like Sophie’s, to see if it was still a pink testimony to all of Sophie’s schooldays glory; or mine, to see if my poster of the mouse wizard with a joint wrapped in Union Jack rolling paper still hung on the wall. Nor had I seen the changes in the dining room.

  But I was seeing them now, since Mother and Vic had invited me and Sophie over for dinner. Replacing the dull oak family dinner table was a Romanesque-looking long dark wooden table with eight high-backed chairs covered in crushed crimson velvet. On the wall hung a beautiful tapestry depicting a pastoral scene from another era. To lighten the heaviness of the rest of the decor, there were loads of live plants, which somehow made things balanced.

  I’d arrived first (for a change). My mother and Vic were busy in the kitchen, so I let Sophie in.

  “Why isn’t Baby Jack with you?” I asked in a slightly caustic tone. “Still afraid I’ll be a bad influence?”

  She looked earnestly surprised, stopping in the midst of taking off her coat. “I just thought it might be painful for you to see a baby who is so close to, well, Emma’s age.”

  This is what my life had come down to: being pitied by my sister. Of all the things I’d aspired to have my family and others feel for me over the years, pity had never been one of them. Empathy? Always. Sympathy? Sometimes. But pity? Never.

  “That’s okay, Soph,” I murmured, making a vague pat at her arm that just missed. “Mum and Vic are in the kitchen.”

  As we sat down at the table to eat, it quickly became apparent that my mother’s cooking habits had altered as well. The diet she used to prepare for us consisted mostly of overcooked vegetables and boiled beef, but now the paella she served was positively refreshing.

  It also became quickly apparent that someone, either Sophie or my mother, had taken the time to fill Vic in about some of the details of my past. She knew about the fake pregnancy. She knew about finding Emma and losing her.

  Vic spoke to me with a certain carefulness, but with strength as well. “Have you ever stopped to think,” she said, “that you’ve played a role in the things that have happened to you?”

  “Isn’t that a bit harsh?” Sophie surprised me, defending my honor.

  “I don’t mean it harshly,” Vic said. “But you have to admit, Jane makes things harder on herself than they need to be.”

  “Do you mind my asking what you mean by that?” I asked.

  My mother spoke for Vic, “You know, Jane, you’ve always had a problem with doing things in a straightforward manner.”

  “True,” Sophie agreed.

  “Can you give me an example?” I felt somewhat attacked on all sides.

  “Take for instance your breaking in here and going through your mother’s drawers to find out about me,” Vic said, spearing a shrimp.

  “How did you—”

  “You put the date book back in the wrong drawer,” my mother said, with a surprising degree of gentleness. “Since nothing was missing and the door was locked that night when I got home, I knew it had to be someone with a key, which leaves just you and Sophie…” Her voice trailed off, the implication being that it could never be Sophie.

  And of course it could never be Sophie. It could only ever be me, doing something like that. Still…

  I put my fork down carefully. “Let me get this straight…Are you saying it’s my own fault I lost Em?”

  Sophie covered my hand with h
ers. “No, Jane. It’s just that—”

  “Because,” I continued, “it’s not like if I’d told the truth from the start, about my past, they’d ever have let me keep her, not for a single night.”

  Nobody could argue with the accuracy of that statement. Nor did they try. However, I felt Vic studying me. What was she seeing? Did she see my loss? Did she see the depth of my pain?

  She shook her head slowly. “No, of course you’re right,” she said. “They’d never have let you keep her at all. It’s just that…”

  “Just what?” I demanded.

  “I don’t know, maybe things would have turned out the same no matter what you’d done. Or maybe, if you’d been more straightforward at times, oh, I don’t know, you might feel differently about the outcome.”

  Between the main course and sweet, I helped Vic clear the former and prepare for the latter—something intensely chocolaty, since my mother does know me (a bit)—while Mum and Soph leafed through photo albums in the living room. Sophie’d mentioned she was trying to put a special album together for Baby Jack, so he’d know who all of his relatives were, even the dead ones, and Mum was helping her.

  Since I’d grown up in this house, it was odd to see Vic loading the dishwasher while I assisted her by hand-drying the special things, as though she took precedence there and now I was a guest.

  “It must be hard on you,” Vic said carefully, rinsing off a plate, “going through everything you’re going through right now. You might be better off if you talked about it more.”

  “Who would I talk to?” I asked. “Besides,” I added, “I have Tolkien.” Although he and I didn’t talk about Em anymore, not really; the pain was too great, she lived in every corner of the flat we shared, in every cupboard and cabinet where there were still her boxes of biscuits, her special videos, but we couldn’t talk about her. “I have David, and Christopher too, come to that.” But we didn’t talk about her either. How could I turn to them for comfort when I could see how much they were hurting too?

  “You could try talking to your mother,” Vic suggested.

  “You’re kidding.” I snorted. I’ve never been much of a snorter, but, honestly, her suggestion did invite snorting.

  “No,” she said. “I’m quite serious. Why wouldn’t you talk to her about things that are troubling you?”

  “He-llo,” I said, surprising even my thirty-year-old self with my ability to impersonate a snotty teenager. “Have you even been paying any attention at all to the family dynamics here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  I led her over to the doorway of the kitchen, from which we could see on a diagonal through the dining room to Mum and Sophie sitting on the sofa in the living room beyond.

  Vic wiped her hands off on her apron. “What am I supposed to be seeing?”

  “Them,” I said.

  She looked at me like I was nuts. “Now, that’s cryptic.”

  “Look how they sit there, with their heads together. It’s always been like that, ever since Dad died. There’s them together and then there’s me.”

  Vic studied my face for a long moment, considering. “You really don’t get it,” she finally said.

  “Get what?”

  “You look.” She gently turned my chin so I was looking again at Mum and Soph together.

  “The reason your mother focuses on Sophie so much is because Sophie asks for it, Sophie needs to be taken care of. But you? You never let people get close enough to help you, you never let your mother in.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that you’ve built up such armor around yourself that you don’t even see it when people love you, when they want to help you. Some day, Jane, you really should think about letting your mother in.”

  I am a writer.

  I am a writer who wrote a funny book. I know this to be true, because the reviews, the reviews I no longer look at, all said it was so.

  Actors are always saying that comedy is harder to do than drama. You hear it said less in the world of books, but it’s true nonetheless.

  In comic writing, if you have a book that’s supposed to be funny, but the laughs just aren’t there or they’re of the tight-smile tepid-laugh variety, then your literary house of cards comes tumbling down around your ears.

  But drama? It’s much easier to write drama; it’s more forgiving. All you need do is create a moving moment, a heart-breakingly sad moment, and you have your story.

  The evidence of that was right in the room, with me all the time. All I needed do was pick up Emma’s misshapen bunny costume one more time, hold it to my face one more time, inhale the slowly-slipping-away scent of her one more time, that scent that grew a little fainter with each passing day:

  The evidence of it was all right there.

  It was Tolkien’s voice on the phone.

  “I’ve found her,” he said. “I’ve found Sarah Johnson.”

  I hurried to Mary Jr.’s home, knowing now that it was impossible to ever beat the wind, but hurrying just the same.

  When I got there, breathless, it was Tolkien who answered the door, Mary Jr.’s baby Martha in his arms.

  It was hard to see him like that, with a baby in his arms once again, the baby not being Emma.

  “They’re in the bath,” Tolkien explained of Mary Jr. and Sarah. “When I found her, Sarah was…dirty, to say the least.”

  “Where did you find her?”

  “Would you believe sleeping on a bench in London? She’s been under our noses the whole time.”

  “But why? Why did she run away? Where has she been? What has she been doing?”

  “She wouldn’t tell me,” he said. “She was just there, on a bench, sleeping with a newspaper for a blanket. I recognized her face from the snap, despite the dirt. I simply waited for her to wake up.”

  “And when she did?”

  “I didn’t want to scare her, but I did tell her I knew who she was, that her family had been looking for her, that they were worried sick.”

  “And?”

  “And then I asked her if she’d like to go home. And then she just got up and came with me. She didn’t struggle in the slightest. It was as though she’d merely been waiting all these months for someone to come along and ask.”

  For the first time in a long time, I felt an incredible joy spreading inside of me. Whatever else was wrong with the world—and there was a lot—this one thing was at last right.

  Sarah Johnson had come home.

  And then there she was, fresh from the shower, a robe of Mary Jr.’s swimming around her.

  In Sarah Johnson’s school picture, despite the sadness of her face, there had been a mystique, something almost regal about her. In the flesh, that impression still came across, in the high cheekbones, in the way she carried her head high.

  But when she opened her mouth to speak, she was all teenager, her speech liberally peppered with today’s jargon of youth.

  “Yo, man,” she said to me, toweling her hair. “Who you be?”

  “I be Jane Taylor,” I said. “I be a friend of your aunt.”

  “No need to mock me,” said Sarah. “Just be yourself.”

  Would you believe it when I say that that’s one thing I’m rarely advised to do?

  “She’s the one who got Tolkien to look for you,” smiled Mary Jr.

  “Wicked.” Sarah smiled.

  But when we tried to get her to tell us where she had been all this time, why she’d left in the first place, she was unwilling to talk about it.

  “What did my mates tell you?” she asked, eyes narrowed.

  “They just told us about an older boyfriend that no one in your family had heard about before,” Tolkien said. “That’s all. I figured you must have taken off with him, since he disappeared right around the time you did.”

  “Right. Him,” Sarah said. “It looks like you come around the right time, innit? Another winter on the streets might’ve killed me. Yo, Auntie Mary—” she turned from
Tolkien “—got anything to eat ’round here?”

  And that was all she’d say on the subject, for the time being. She just wanted to eat—which she did a lot—and then she just wanted to sleep in a bed.

  Mary Jr., who’d called Sarah’s parents to let them know she was alive, was the kind of aunt who was smart enough to just let Sarah call the shots for at least one night, content to leave her questions unanswered just a little longer, content because one she’d counted gone for good was finally back home.

  “Isn’t it amazing,” Tolkien said to Mary Jr., “that this all came out of Jane being behind you in line one day at the supermarket?”

  Mary Jr. was clearly puzzled. “The supermarket?”

  “Yes, where you two met for the first time.”

  “But we didn’t meet at the supermarket. We met for the first time at Mum’s funeral.”

  “But I thought…”

  They both looked at me for explanation.

  “Jane?” Tolkien asked.

  So I explained. With a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach, I explained how I’d gone to Mary Sr.’s funeral, hoping somehow to come up with some ideas of how I could better give Emma the cultural background she had the genetic right to.

  I could actually see Tolkien harden against me.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You exploited a moment of grief for something you needed?”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. What could I say in my defense? I said nothing.

  Then Mary Jr. spoke, slowly at first, as though recovering from the shock. “I could see where you might see it that way, but I don’t see it that way at all.”

  “No?” Tolkien asked, jaw set firm.

  “No. Maybe, in the beginning, Jane came for the wrong reason. Although I wouldn’t even say it was the wrong reason completely. She did, after all, want to help Emma.”

  “But she lied to you!” said Tolkien. “She lied to you and to your whole family, your friends.”

  “But who did she hurt?” Mary Jr. asked.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Tolkien replied. “She hurt all of you. She hurt you by lying.”