by Jeff High
CHAPTER 41
Bracken’s Knoll
Later that day I left work shortly after five, delightfully anticipating meeting up with Christine. The hectic week had flown by, and the two of us hadn’t seen each other since Saturday night and the abrupt departure from the dance. But seeing her wasn’t going to happen. I called her while walking to my car, and she was on her way back to school for parent-teacher conferences that evening. I was leaving early in the morning to drive to Atlanta and planned to spend the night there. Our time together would have to wait.
There was something unsettling about our brief conversation on the phone. Christine’s responses seemed clipped, distracted, and numerous times she told me she loved me. This was always wonderful to hear, but it seemed she couldn’t say it enough. I told her I loved her too and asked if everything was okay.
“Everything’s fine,” she answered. “I just miss you a lot, that’s all.”
I was unconvinced, but there was little else I could do. “I’ll be back early Saturday afternoon. We’ll make up for lost time then.”
“Yeah,” she said sweetly. “That sounds great.”
We hung up, and I considered driving over to the school to catch her between meetings and surprise her with a hug and a smile. It was a pleasant idea, but I decided against it. She would be busy, and I needed to pack. Come Saturday, we would have the world to ourselves.
The next morning, the drive to Atlanta felt longer than it should have. Shortly after one o’clock, I met the moving company men at the storage facility. Several fifteen-by-thirty-foot climate-controlled rooms held all my worldly possessions, or at least all the worldly possessions belonging to my late aunt and parents. The storage units were paid for in a yearly draft out of my parents’ estate. The summer before I had started med school at Vanderbilt was the last time I had been here. What with med school, residency, and my year in Watervalley, eight years had passed.
I had conveniently tucked away these huge chapters of my life, endeavoring to look forward rather than back. It had been my way of putting painful realities behind me. But as I rolled up the first of the large entry doors, the dormant air from all those enclosed years poured over me and brought with it a thousand memories. Oddly, they were sweet and comforting. And as the men moved patiently around boxes and furniture to locate the things I wanted, I began to understand the anchoring strength that these possessions had always provided me. The passing years had managed to ease the pain of my loss. But these things remained, and they served as reminders of the happy times of my youth.
In the years since I had last been here, I had been adrift, always scheming toward a richer, fuller tomorrow. Looking back, I realized that I had partly been in a great sleep, shutting off parts of my life. Yet now it seemed I had found my roots again, awakened to a world that had been strong and beautiful from days gone by. It was a strange and consoling revelation.
I pointed out to the moving company men the few pieces of furniture I wanted shipped to Watervalley. Then I spent several hours rummaging through stacks of boxes, looking for the other items I wanted. In time, I found all of them: the family photo albums, my dad’s journal along with my own journal, and my mother’s jewelry box. It was nearing six o’clock when I pulled the last storage door shut and locked up.
I drove by my aunt’s old house where I had lived as a teenager and past my old prep school where I had starred in basketball. Not surprisingly, they weren’t quite as I remembered them. And yet, the memories were good ones. I grabbed some dinner and found my hotel, eager to spend time in a long conversation with Christine.
But she never answered the phone.
With the first call I left a message, assuming she would get back to me shortly. When an hour passed with no response, I called again, only to get her voice mail. I gave it a few minutes and called the landline at her mother’s house. The answering machine picked up. I left a message there as well. I sent her numerous text messages, but these also received no response.
Slowly, the nagging progression of emotions began. First came curiosity, followed by worry, then anxiety and aggravation. I went to the hotel bar and drank a beer, searching for a way to occupy myself until Christine called. But she never did.
By now it was well past ten o’clock. I thought about phoning Connie. I doubted she would know anything, but she would calm my concerns and possibly offer an explanation. But the hour was late. I would just have to wait.
I was up and on the road by seven the next morning. There was an hour difference between Atlanta and home, so I waited patiently before calling. A little after eight o’clock Watervalley time, I dialed Christine’s number.
Again, voice mail. It was maddening. My mind bounced between burning annoyance and sickening worry. All the possible explanations I could imagine went from bad to worse. I needed to be home, and now the long interstate miles seemed to drag on in monotonous, endless anticipation.
By midmorning I was two hours out and there was still no word. I pulled the car over and called Connie. At first she spoke lightly, endeavoring to mollify my feverish apprehension. But I persisted, and she offered to get in touch with Christine and have her call me. I thanked her and hung up, certain that soon my phone would ring and all would be fine. But another hour of driving passed in silence. I waited another thirty minutes and called Connie again. This time she didn’t answer.
I scorched the road over the last miles into Watervalley, pushing the engine of the Austin-Healey to its limits. I was furious, scared, sick beyond words. I raced down Fleming Street and into my driveway. Connie’s car was parked there. I was racked with the nauseating conviction that whatever the next minutes held, they would not be good.
Connie was sitting silently at the kitchen table, leaning forward and resting her elbows with her fingers slightly interlocked and tented, as if she had been praying. She turned and looked at me, her face framed in sadness.
“Sit down, Luke. I need to talk to you.”
My fear and anger were obvious. “I’m not sitting, Connie. Tell me what’s happened to Christine.”
She nodded. “Christine is okay. But there’s a problem.”
“What?” I practically shouted. “What has happened that she can’t talk to me about it?”
“After you and I talked, I called her. We spoke for quite a while. She got some pretty devastating news, and I think it has broken her in two. She didn’t know how to tell you, especially not over the phone. I offered to talk to you. At first she said no, then she said sure. I believe she doesn’t know what to think or say right now.”
“Tell me what’s happened, Connie.”
“She’s been having some problems lately; she’s missed her cycle for several months.” Connie paused and tilted her head slightly. “You’re a doctor. . . . You understand what I’m talking about.”
I nodded.
“Just before you two were engaged, she went to a gynecologist in Nashville, and they ran some tests. They found a problem with her hormone levels. They told her not to worry and to come back in a month so they could run a second set of tests. She didn’t want to say anything to you before she knew there was really an issue. But she looked up the possibilities, and it’s had her pretty worried this past week. Yesterday she went back for the second round of blood work, and the results weren’t good. Apparently she has something called premature ovarian failure. Luke, she may never be able to have children.”
I said nothing. After all the anxiety, all the fear, all the anguish of the last twenty-four hours, I simply shut down. It was my emotional fail-safe. I stared at Connie blankly. A thousand thoughts and feelings were pinging for my attention. I closed them out.
I spoke barely above a whisper. “Where was she when you talked to her, Connie?”
“Home. It was about an hour ago. She said she wanted to be alone and that she was going somewhere on the back of
the farm.”
I knew where Christine had gone. Without thinking to thank Connie, I turned and left. Numb to all the world around me, I started the engine and drove to Summerfield Road.
After parking the car at Christine’s house, I headed across the open pastures and far reaches of the farm to a small rise called Bracken’s Knoll. I had only a general sense of where it was located, so after crossing several broad fields, I called out for her.
“Christine, Christine, Christine . . .”
In the near distance, I saw her appear upon the crest of a low, treeless mound. I walked briskly up the slow rise and stopped several feet from her.
My words were wooden, void of emotion. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Her face was red and swollen from long fits of crying. The overcast October sky was cheerless, cold, unforgiving. She gasped deeply of the frigid air, heaving great breaths in and out. “Please don’t be mad at me. Please don’t be mad.”
I said nothing. I only stared at her, standing there shivering in the tall orchard grass, frightened, distraught, waiting. The sleeves of her sweater were pulled over her hands, and her arms were folded around her stomach in an effort to contain her deep wailing sobs.
“Talk to me, Christine. Tell me everything.”
CHAPTER 42
This Life
Her lips were quivering. Against her stilted, choppy breaths and the flood of tears, Christine bawled out her words. “It isn’t fair,” she cried. “It just isn’t fair.”
Weeping uncontrollably, she cupped her fingers over her mouth. I stepped toward her, but she held out her hand stiffly, signaling me to keep away. Her words were a muddle of defeat and rage. “I spent all these years trying to keep my dreams safe, trying to follow this—this ideal, and for what? I’ve just been stupid, completely, totally stupid.”
“Don’t say that,” I said firmly.
“And why not?” she snapped back in her anger. “Look at the two of us. I mean, what’s been the point of our holding off . . . like there would be some cosmic reward?”
I spoke calmly. “Is that what last weekend was all about?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is that why you were upset all day? Why you offered to make love? Because you were worried and angry at what the test results would show?”
She wiped the tears from her cheeks and folded her arms again. She said nothing but nodded her head in short, jerky movements.
I exhaled a heavy sigh and looked away. “You can’t do that, Christine. You can’t draw a circle in the dirt and leave me out of it.”
“I was afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“I didn’t want to disappoint you.”
“In what possible way?”
“By not being able to have children and then on top of that by being this foolish idealist. By cheating both of us out of so much. And for what? All these years of keeping this stupid promise to myself and the whole time the joke’s been on me.”
She burst into another gasping round of fitful sobs. Again, I endeavored to move closer, but she turned her back to me and stepped away. I stuck my hands into my coat pockets and stood there, giving her time. Finally, I walked around in front of her, crossed my arms, and stood patiently.
“What do you want, Christine?”
She gazed into my expressionless eyes, and her torrent of words poured out in an almost breathless whisper. “I want you to love me,” she said. “I want you to please love me. Just as I am . . . broken, afraid, foolish. Because if you can’t do that, if you think there’s ever a chance that the day will come when you wake up and regret this moment, then I want you to just walk away, Luke Bradford. Just please, walk away.”
I stood there like a ghost. Wisps of our breath vanished illusively into the frigid air, our voices swallowed into the vast landscape. The distant, shouldering hills, which had always been strong and protective, now seemed raw, cold, indifferent. She looked desperately into my face, searching. Finally, she could take it no longer. The last of her anger had been wrenched from her, leaving her frail and vanquished. She pleaded, “Luke, talk to me. Tell me what will happen.”
I stared for one final time into the far-flung expanse of Watervalley. Then I spoke the difficult words that needed to be said.
“This is our life, Christine. Despite all we do, all we plan, all we prepare, this stupid, broken world will find new reasons for us to say the hell with it and walk away.” I folded my arms and paused.
“Ever since I was a kid and lost my parents, I’ve been either building walls or walking away. Eight years ago, I walked away from my parents’ possessions because it was too painful to see them. I went to med school and built a wall of textbooks around me. Then I came here to Watervalley. And sure, I have to admit, every single day for the first six months, I thought about walking away. I thought about going back to Vanderbilt and doing research in a lab where I could control everything, where life could be planned out, made predictable.” Still holding my emotions in check, I turned and looked into her eyes, so full of pain and loss.
“But then I met you. And that changed everything.”
The broad, cold landscape of Bracken’s Knoll was held in an echoless silence, awaiting my next words. I spoke with tenderness, with a voice that was unhurried, resolute. “So here’s how it’s going to be. You and I will get married, and if we never have children, so be it. If we never have money, so be it. If you get sick and I spend the rest of my life taking care of you, so be it. If all our days are filled with one hardship after another, so be it.”
My emotions were overtaking me, choking me, consuming me. They welled up from all the buried years. I struggled to quell them, but it was little use. Tears rolled down my face, and I began to breathe in great gasps.
“If that is my fate, if that is my life, if that is my portion in this world, then so be it. Each night I will go to bed and count myself blessed.”
Christine’s tear-filled face was fearful, confused. “Why?” she whispered softly. “How can you say that?”
“Because I found you. Because out of the millions and millions of possibilities of where my life could have gone, I found you.” I drew in a deep breath, probing her face.
“Don’t you understand? There will never be another love. There will never be another life. There will only be you.”
She glanced at me before looking to the side, speaking in a voice both uncertain and defiant. “You’re just saying these things, Luke. I want to believe you, but I don’t.”
She was still consumed by her pain, desperately searching for some idea, some thought, some revelation that would suddenly reverse this harsh new reality and leave her dreams intact.
But there were none.
She spoke despondently. “Maybe you should just leave.”
“That’s not happening.”
“What if I want you to?” she said.
“Then I’ll wait.”
She was still shivering, her arms folded tightly around her stomach. “I don’t understand.”
“I’ll wait,” I said gently. “I’ll wait until you’re ready. I’ll wait until you’re certain. I’ll wait until you say yes again. I’m not walking away. I’m not leaving. For as long as it takes, I will wait.”
Christine’s face was drained and fragile. She spoke in a pleading whisper. “But why? Why would you want to? Why would you do that?”
I stepped toward her, smoothing the hair away from her face. “Because I’ve come to realize that waiting is the greatest test of love. You taught me that. You waited for me, Christine Chambers. So I will wait for you.”
She wrapped her arms around my neck, weeping into my shoulder. I held her tightly and whispered the promises of my heart. “Sometimes, Christine, we just have to write our own happy endings.”
With her eyes closed and her fa
ce pressed tightly against me, she murmured, “Tell me you love me, again.”
“I do, Christine. I love you with all my heart.”
In time her tears ended, and she reached up and wiped my face with her fingers.
“I’ve never seen you cry this way,” she said hesitantly. “I’m sorry.”
I nodded.
“How did you know where to find me?”
“Connie said you had gone somewhere on the farm. John once told me that when you were young you spent a lot of time at a place called Bracken’s Knoll.”
Her voice was low and soft. “I used to come here and write in my journal. It was always my favorite place on the farm, my safe place. I would sit out here and live in my dreams.”
“What happened to them?”
“Oh,” she said carefully, “I never really forgot them. I just got better at hiding them. Silly, I guess. But maybe that’s what all girls do with their dreams.”
Again, I smoothed her hair away and kissed her forehead before looking into the mysterious, undiscovered depths of her dark eyes. “I want to know your dreams, Christine. I want to be part of them.”
She pressed her cheek against my chest and whispered tenderly, “You already are, Luke. You already are.”
CHAPTER 43
Fathers and Sons
In the days that followed, I spent every spare moment researching premature ovarian failure. Given Christine’s age and overall excellent health, there was still a reasonable hope that we might have our own children. But in the end, I told her it simply didn’t matter. One way or another, we would have a houseful.
Even so, despite my constant reassurances and all the encouraging data available about overcoming the condition, the light in her eyes had dimmed. It seemed that there was now a small, buried sadness that would forever stain her, a faintly whispered voice of loss that could be triggered by a child’s laugh or a thoughtless word. She would never speak of it, but I could read it in the tightening of her gaze or the line of her smile. It would remain a silent understanding between two people who shared the joys and tears of a joined life.
