From the way her face cleared, he knew she’d taken it as absolution. That wasn’t what it was, but Peter was too weary to make the point. She stood to go, mumbling that she hoped he would get better. They both knew the words were useless.
“One more thing, Louise,” Peter called as she made her way to the door. She turned and he took a deep breath, which led to another coughing fit. She waited, and finally, he managed to ask, “Did she marry? Did Margaret marry someone else?”
“No. I thought she would have, but she didn’t. Said so in the letter. I figured it would only take her a little while to get over you. After all, you’d both been so young. No offense, but it sounds to me like you both wasted your lives.” And then she was gone.
Peter stared after her for a moment before whispering, “No. None of it was a waste. Without us, Victor and Emily wouldn’t be here.”
But there was no one left to hear him.
“Alice?” he called out. “Alice?” A moment later, his housekeeper appeared in the doorway of his bedroom.
“I let the woman out, Mr. Gaertner,” she said.
“Thank you. But Alice, I need you to do something for me, quickly. Can you bring me my laptop?”
“Of course, Mr. Gaertner.” A moment later, she reappeared holding his MacBook. “Will there be anything else, sir?” she asked as she handed it to him.
“No, Alice, thank you.” Hands trembling, he opened the computer and entered the name of Margaret’s nursing home in Orlando. A search brought up a phone number with a 407 area code. He grabbed the phone from his bedside table and dialed quickly.
“Hello, Sunnyside,” said the cheerful voice on the other end.
“I’m looking for . . .” Peter trailed off as his voice gave out. He took a deep shuddering breath. “I’m sorry. Hello. I’m looking for Margaret Emerson, please.”
“One moment, and I’ll connect you.”
“Wait!” Peter sat up a little straighter. “She’s still alive? She’s okay?”
“Yes, sir.” The woman on the other end sounded a little wary. “Of course, sir.”
“Thank you. Thank you so much.” Peter closed his eyes and waited while the woman transferred his call and the line began to ring.
But no one picked up. Peter let the line ring twelve times before hanging up and calling back.
“Hello, Sunnyside.” It was the same woman.
“Hello. I just called looking for Margaret Emerson. But there was no answer.”
“Hmm,” the woman said. Peter could hear papers shuffling in the background. “You know what? She may have had a visit with her doctor today. Maybe try again in another hour or so?”
“Yes, yes, of course. But you’re sure she’s okay?”
“Yes, sir. She’s fine. Have a nice day.”
Peter put the phone down, breathless. Suddenly, he was exhausted. “Margaret,” he whispered, sinking against the pillows. The cancer was stealing so many of his moments. “Victor, Emily.” He said the names again and again until he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
* * *
When Peter awoke, he was sure at first that he had imagined Louise’s visit, but just beside his bedside, Margaret’s name was there, along with an address, written in Louise’s unfamiliar hand. It had been real. Margaret was alive.
It was past ten in the evening, and Ingrid hadn’t come to bed yet. He knew she was angry at him, angry that Margaret couldn’t simply be erased. But of course she couldn’t. She was forever stamped on his heart. He knew it was late, but he had to try reaching her again. He had the sudden sense that time was running out. He redialed the number of her nursing home, and when a man answered, he asked quickly for Margaret.
“Sir, it’s past ten. She’s likely asleep.”
“Please, it’s an emergency,” Peter said. “I wouldn’t ask you otherwise.”
The man paused, and then Peter could hear ringing on the other end.
“Hello?” The female voice on the line was drowsy, but Peter would have recognized it anywhere.
“Margaret,” he said simply, his heart thudding. He couldn’t quite believe this was happening.
There was silence on the other end of the line for what felt like an eternity. “Peter?” she finally asked.
He closed his eyes. She had recognized his voice all these years later. That had to mean something. He was still in her heart too; he was almost certain of it. “Yes. Yes, Margaret, it’s me.”
“But you left me.”
Her words were so raw and full of pain that they brought tears to Peter’s eyes. “No, Margaret. No. I came back for you. Your sister told me you were dead.”
“But you never wrote.”
“I wrote all the time, my dear. I wrote love letters that told you how much I longed for you, how I was counting the days until I could return for you. She took them all. She explained it all today.”
“You saw Louise?” Margaret’s tone was confused, cloudy. He could also hear a wariness there, and he didn’t blame her.
“She heard I was sick, and she came to see me today for the first time in almost seventy years. She admitted everything—and told me where I could find you.”
“It’s impossible,” Margaret whispered. “What about the letter? The one that said you were marrying your old girlfriend?”
“It was fabricated. Probably by my father. Or maybe by my brother. He was the one who was better with English. The truth is, I never loved anyone but you.” He felt a surge of guilt about Ingrid, but the words were true. What he felt for Ingrid didn’t hold a candle to the feelings he’d always had for Margaret.
“You were the love of my life,” Margaret said after a long pause. “I didn’t want to believe you had changed your mind about me. But you never came back. It was like you had vanished. I tried to convince myself I had imagined the love between us. It was the only way to move on. I had to tell myself over and over that it wasn’t real, that it had never been real.”
“But it was real, Margaret. All of it.” He paused and blinked back tears. “I was stuck in a prison camp in England for two years after the war, and then it took me until 1950 to return to the States. I came right to Belle Creek. I couldn’t wait to see you and our baby. I showed up at your doorstep, and your sister told me you’d both died in childbirth. I stayed in Florida for years, trying to find you.”
“I didn’t want to be found,” she whispered. “Once I came to believe that you didn’t want me anymore, I only wanted to start over, to become someone new. Being Margaret Evans meant I was always going to have a broken heart. I thought I could change that by reinventing myself. But my heart never healed, Peter. Never.”
“I’m so sorry. Mine never healed either, Margaret. I never stopped loving you.”
“And I never stopped loving you.” Margaret drew a shaky breath.
Peter knew she was close to her nineties now, but he could imagine her on the other end of the phone just as she’d been the last time he’d seen her: eighteen years old with rosy cheeks, shiny dark hair, and eyes full of hope. He wondered if she’d lost that hope the same way he had. “Margaret,” he began.
“You have a son and a granddaughter,” Margaret blurted out. “Victor. And Emily. They’re good people, Peter. I wasn’t perfect, and I brought so much of the pain from losing you into the way I raised our child. I tried to be a good mother, but I know I failed Victor sometimes. I wish I’d been stronger. You’d be so proud. Of both of them. Victor runs his own business. And Emily is a wonderful writer. She writes about family, Peter. She understands love, even if she doesn’t realize it yet.”
“I can’t wait to meet them.” The words made Peter sad, because he didn’t know if he’d have the time. His body had given out, and he was confined to bed now, but he’d find a way. He’d find some way to see his son and his granddaughter. He had to.
“Peter, you said you are sick?”
He took a deep breath. “Cancer. I’m afraid I’m dying. I should be grateful that I’ve had ninety-fo
ur years, I suppose, but all I can think, Margaret, is that I haven’t had enough time. In that lifetime, I only spent a year of it with you.”
“I’m dying too,” she said softly. “I’m hooked up to machines, and my body is failing me. Do you think we will ever see each other again, Peter?”
He thought about the question for a moment. He knew she was more than three hundred miles away, and neither of them was in any condition to travel. Was it possible they’d come all this way, traveled through all of their lives without meeting again, only to miss each other at the very end? “Do you remember the way the sky looked the morning we first saw each other?” Peter asked after a while.
“It was violet,” she said immediately. “It was the most beautiful dawn I’d ever seen.”
Peter closed his eyes and imagined that day, the way Margaret had looked silhouetted against the sky, the way he’d known before he even talked to her that she would change his life forever. “I’ve always believed that the sky is just the edge of heaven,” he said finally. “And that the most beautiful sunrises and sunsets are just a glimpse of a better world beyond this one. I know I’ll see you again beyond that violet sky.”
He could hear her crying on the other end of the line. “Is that all we get at the end of our long lives? A promise to see each other after we die? It hardly seems fair.”
“None of it’s fair,” Peter replied, choking up. “But maybe the world that lies beyond the sky is everything. Maybe life is just a beautiful prelude.”
She cried quietly for a moment, and then she drew a ragged breath. “So what happened to you, Peter? Where are you now? How did you live your life?”
“I go by Ralph now. For Ralph Waldo Emerson.” He said it with a smile, and he could hear her gasp. “I live in Atlanta, and as a matter of fact, I’m a painter. I’ve made a whole career of painting my memories of you.”
For the next four hours, they told each other everything. Peter told her about reconnecting with Maus, finding his talent, coming to America, searching for her, and settling into a life where his paintbrush was like a window to the past. She told him about how Jeremiah helped her with Victor during his early years, what Victor was like as a boy, how he’d grown into a man, and how he’d had a wonderful child of his own. They talked about the places they’d been, the things they’d done, and the dreams they’d had of each other. Margaret even gave Peter numbers to reach Victor and Emily. And finally, at two in the morning, they agreed to hang up, for their throats were dry and they could barely keep their eyes open.
“Promise me we’ll talk again, Peter,” Margaret said softly. “Promise me this isn’t the end.”
“Margaret, my love,” Peter said, “I plan to spend eternity with you. This is only the beginning.”
* * *
The next morning, Ingrid woke Peter at just past ten. “I slept in the guest room,” she said curtly. “I figured you’d want to be alone with your thoughts of Margaret.” She spat the name out.
“I spoke with her last night,” Peter said softly. “I spoke with Margaret.”
Ingrid’s jaw dropped. “But she’s dead.”
“No. No, she isn’t. She lived, and so did her son. Our son. I have a child and a grandchild, Ingrid. Victor and Emily Emerson.”
Her face was white. “That’s impossible.”
“It’s true. And I must find them, Ingrid. I know I’m at the end of my life, but I must tell them that I love them.”
“You don’t even know them.”
“They are my blood,” he said. “And they are Margaret’s blood.”
Ingrid stared at him. “So that’s it, then? I’ve been by your side for the last thirty years, but in your final days, Margaret comes back and I’m forgotten?”
“I could never forget you, Ingrid. You’ve meant so much to me.”
“But you don’t love me. Not the way you love her.”
He longed to comfort her, but he didn’t know how. “Ingrid, you and I have spent a life together. I missed a life with her. You can’t envy her.”
“What nonsense, Peter. Your life wasn’t with me. It was with her. It was always with her.”
He was silent for a long time. “If I die before I reach them, Victor and Emily, will you find them for me? Will you tell them about me? Will you explain what happened?”
He held out the slip of paper on which he’d written their names and numbers, and Ingrid nodded, but she didn’t take it. After a while, he set the paper back down on his nightstand.
“Do you promise me?” he asked.
“I promise.”
“Thank you. You’re very good to me. I never deserved you, Ingrid.”
“No,” she agreed. “Perhaps you didn’t.” She bent to kiss him and walked out of the room.
He picked up the phone and tried Victor’s number first and then Emily’s. There was no answer on either line, and he didn’t leave a message. What would he say? No, he would talk to them and tell them everything as soon as they answered his call. But in the meantime, he wanted to know everything about them. So he spent the next forty minutes searching their names on the Internet. He found Emily’s columns and Victor’s business website, and there were photos of both of them, enough to show him that Victor looked just like a younger version of himself, and Emily looked just like Margaret, just as he’d always imagined a grandchild of theirs would.
Slowly, with great effort, he rose from his bed, surprised at how weak his legs had become beneath him. In fact, once he was on the floor, he found that he could no longer walk, so he lowered himself to the ground and crawled toward the closet. He knew that in the back corner, he had stored blank watercolor paper and some old paint, along with a selection of brushes, and he needed them now. It took him twenty minutes on his hands and knees to pull them out and drag them into the center of the room, where he positioned them beneath the wash of sunlight from the window. He rested for a moment on his haunches, catching his breath, and then, he picked up his brush and began.
Tears burning his eyes, he painted. He painted the world as it could have been, the world he would never know. He painted the faces of the son and granddaughter he loved, and of the woman he had created life with after all. He worked until his hand ached, until the room throbbed, until he could no longer keep his eyes open. And then, he lowered himself onto the floor, prone on his back, and he stared up at the faces smiling back at him. He had made them. They were his.
Later that day, he would call them again. And he would call Margaret to hear her sweet voice. He knew that the great violet sky, the one that would bring him home, was closing in. But until it came for him, he had this. He had hope.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
* * *
Wait, go back,” I said, staring at Ingrid in disbelief. “You’re saying he actually talked to my grandmother?”
“The night before his death.” As she turned toward me again, I could see that the tears had overflowed and were streaming down her face in silent rivers. “The day before he died, Louise came to visit,” she said, spitting the name out like it was a dirty word. “She’d heard about his illness on CNN, and she came to tell him the truth.”
“My grandmother’s sister? She came here?”
Ingrid nodded. “She told him that Margaret had lived and that she’d had a child—his child—and a granddaughter. You.”
“But my grandmother never said anything.” I stared at her as a potential explanation dawned on me. “Wait. When did he die? What date?”
She shook her head and looked down. “February fifteenth. Just after Valentine’s Day, in the afternoon.”
I swallowed hard. “My grandmother died that day too. Several hours earlier. She passed away sometime during the night.”
Ingrid’s mouth fell open. “They even died together?”
I shrugged, suddenly uneasy. “I’m sure it was coincidence.” But the truth was, it didn’t sound coincidental to me. It sounded like two people who had always hoped against hope that the ones th
ey loved were still out there. When it turned out they were right, they were ready to let go. Or perhaps once my grandmother died, Peter Dahler had felt it in some corner of his soul, and he’d followed her at long last. As Ingrid’s face twisted tighter in despair, I hurried to change the subject. “But I had the impression that Louise hated my grandmother. As far as I know, my grandmother never talked to her sister again after leaving Belle Creek in the late 1940s. Why would Louise come here all these years later to reveal that Margaret was alive?”
“I don’t know. To clear her conscience? To torture my husband once more? To make the last hours of his life miserable for me?” She looked at the floor. “Ralph asked me to call you if something happened to him.”
The words were so quiet I barely heard them. “What?”
“He spoke to me that morning—just a little while before he died—and told me everything,” she said. She took a deep, shuddering breath and looked up to meet my gaze. “He wasn’t well. He said he was planning to call you and your father after ten, in case you were sleeping in. That day was a Sunday. But he asked me to call you myself if he wasn’t able to do it. It was like he knew that he only had a few hours left.” She paused. “He died just past four that afternoon.”
“And you didn’t call,” I said softly.
“No.”
Silence lay heavy between us. “Why?”
“Because I was his family.” Her voice sounded almost like a whimper, a plea. “I’d been the one to stand by him for thirty years. To love him for thirty years. And it was never enough. He was dying, Emily, and at the end, that woman swept in to reignite the torch he had carried all these years. It wasn’t fair. Don’t you see that?”
“Yes.” And somehow, I did, despite everything.
“It’s why I sent the painting. I didn’t want to be involved, but after I read your column, I wanted you to know that you were wrong about him. I’m sorry I didn’t reach out to you sooner, Emily.” She blinked back tears. “It was too little, too late, I know. But I wanted you and your father to know that Margaret had been loved.”
When We Meet Again Page 29
