Nothing surprised Tom. Nothing at all.
“All this time,” Julia said with regret, “all this time I’ve been here, and I didn’t speak up. I was afraid she wouldn’t want me. It was enough to just see her. So I didn’t say a word until the day she thought that other woman was her mother, and even then I didn’t tell the whole truth.”
Tom was struck by the precision with which Bree’s wish had come true. On the very day when she had wished to see her mother, Julia had come forward. The woman in the Mercedes had been a red herring.
“You were born in California?” he asked.
“Near Sacramento.”
“Who was Matty Ryan?”
“Me. Ryan is my maiden name. Martina was my middle name. When I was little, everyone called me Matty. Everyone but Teddy. I was always Julia to him.”
“Where did the name Bree come from?”
“My father. Bryce.” She touched Bree’s hair. “Haywood let you keep that at least. I wasn’t sure he would. It meant so much to me when I found out. My father was a powerful man, with a shock of thick auburn hair.” Her chin trembled. “Oh, Bree,” she whispered, “I should have told you sooner.” Softly, she wept.
Tom lifted the forgotten gift from the floor. It was small and compact, as a journal would be. He tucked it against Bree. “I think she knew. She told me how much you meant to her. She wanted you to be the baby’s godmother.”
Julia’s sobs deepened. Her words came, broken and wrenched, from behind the tissue she pressed to her nose. “I was so happy—early this morning—couldn’t sleep—so I opened Bree’s gift—an album for baby pictures—along with this.” She pulled a folded paper from her pocket and passed it to Tom.
Dear Julia, he read. This gift is really from my baby, so you’ll have a place to put pictures of him (I just know it’s a boy). He’s going to love you. He’ll know that he can go to you when he has a problem. He’ll know that you love him. Since I know all that, too, I’d be honored if you’d be his godmother. I’d be honored if you’d think of Tom and the baby and me as your family in Panama.
You’ve come to be special to me. I can’t explain what happens, but something does when we’re together. You always make me feel better, even when I didn’t feel bad to start with. I especially needed you these past months. Being pregnant has been a little scary for me. You helped me get through it. I’m lucky you’re here. Thank you for being my friend. Love, Bree
Tom stared at the note for a bit, then carefully folded it and returned it to Julia. He held her shoulder, but it was a while before he could speak. “I didn’t know she wrote that. I’m glad she did.” But the poignancy of it left him feeling more hollowed out than ever.
When Julia quieted, sniffling, she glanced at the foot of the bed. “Where is the baby now?”
“In the nursery.”
“Have you been there?”
“No.”
“I’ll help, Tom. Will you let me?”
What choice did he have? He couldn’t begin to think about the baby. He couldn’t think about the future, period. More than once he had been in the courtroom when a defendant was sentenced to life in prison without parole. He had truly tried to imagine what it would be like to face endless years of a cold and barren life. For the very first time now, he understood how it felt.
The thing about small-town life was that the choices were limited. Panama had a single undertaker and a single graveyard. Tom made the necessary arrangements from the hospital and stayed with Bree until the hearse arrived. Only when they took her could he leave.
Knowing she would have wanted it, he brought the baby home. The nurses dressed him in the tiny clothes that were in his little bag and wrapped him in blankets against the cold. Julia held him close, while Tom drove. Together they settled him in the crib Bree had picked out, and for the longest time, Tom just stood, looking around.
Bree was there—in the bunny lamp on the bureau, the framed clown prints, the turtle mobile over the crib. She had tested a dozen rocking chairs for comfort before buying one that was white, with a cushion of navy and yellow. She had placed it by the window with love.
Where are you, Bree? the panic in him cried. I need you here. I can’t do this. Not alone.
Baffled, he wandered from room to room on legs that were wooden, muscles that were tight. Bree was everywhere—on the bedroom dresser, in the bathroom medicine chest, on his office walls, the family room bookshelves, and the kitchen counters. The scent of her led him, the echo of her voice followed. He kept turning to her and finding her not there. Aloneness closed in on him, barren and stark.
Then the doorbell rang. It was Flash, looking as lost as Tom felt. On his heels came a sobbing Jane, needing to be held. She was followed minutes later by her mother and Emma. In short order, as word spread, others arrived—Liz, Abby, Martin, and LeeAnn, Eliot and Earl and their wives, the minister who had married Tom and Bree not a year before. None seemed aware that it was Christmas morning. Their grief was heavy, their compassion heartfelt.
By midday, the house had filled with townsfolk wanting to pay their respects. Bree’s childhood friends came, her father’s childhood friends came, newer friends came, diner regulars came. They opened the door for each other. They answered Tom’s phone. They brought food, though he couldn’t eat a thing. They expressed condolences, shed tears, spoke about Bree in hushed tones. When they left, others arrived. Tom was hugged by friends and acquaintances alike. One and all, they were grief-stricken.
The baby was the only bright spot. Visitors who crept upstairs to the nursery returned smiling. “He’s a handsome boy,” one told Tom, and another, “Tall and strapping, like his daddy.”
As for Tom, he didn’t know how he felt about the baby. He was tired enough, numb enough, to confess it to Jane when she caught him in the kitchen alone. He had been rearranging foil-wrapped packages on the counter, needless busywork what with all the women taking charge of the food, but he didn’t know what else to do with himself. He couldn’t laugh, couldn’t cry. Once a master of small talk, he couldn’t handle it now.
Jane began with a confession of her own. “I know about the wishes, Tom. Bree told me. She was worried this might happen.”
He thrust a hand through his hair. “She knew more than I did. I should have listened.”
“She didn’t know, not for sure. She just worried. But she was so excited about the baby. She wanted to give him to you. She wouldn’t want you having regrets.”
“How not to? She gave me back my life, so what did I do? I took hers.”
“You didn’t.”
“She died because she had my baby.”
“She chose to have your baby.”
“Yeah, well.” He rolled tension from his shoulders. “I wish she hadn’t. I wish she’d asked me. I’d have chosen her over a baby.”
“He’s innocent, Tom. Whatever you do, don’t blame him.”
Tom kept telling himself the very same thing. It would be so easy to say that if it hadn’t been for the baby, Bree would be there. So easy, so cruel, so morally wrong.
He sighed. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Do what?”
“Live without Bree.”
“You lived without her before.”
“And made a mess of things.”
“You have the baby now. He’ll keep you on track.”
Tom stared out at the terrace that Bree had loved, toward the woods Bree had loved and the brook Bree had loved. “I wanted Bree. I wanted to be a parent with her. It won’t be the same.”
“Don’t you love him?” Jane asked.
“I do.” He drew in a breath. It burst from him seconds later. “But how do you swallow something like this? Who do you get angry at? Who do you blame? What do you do?”
A soft knock came at the back door. Tom saw Verity through the glass and, feeling an odd need to connect with her, opened the door. She was hugging a gift-wrapped bundle. When she hesitated, looking carefully past him to see who else
would know she was there, he drew her inside.
She didn’t say anything at first, didn’t look capable of it. Her eyes were filled with a grief so intense that Tom understood why he wanted her there.
“It isn’t often that people like Bree come along,” she finally said. Her soft southern drawl was slowed by sorrow.
“She died too soon.”
“I keep asking myself if I could have stopped this from happening.”
“That’s two of us.”
“She died doing what she wanted.”
Tom was moved to argue but couldn’t. He recalled Bree’s face in death. That smile, that serenity, would be with him forever.
“She wanted you to be happy,” Verity said.
“Without her?”
“She didn’t know that for sure, so she took the risk. She didn’t regret it.”
“But now I’m alone with her baby.”
“It’s your baby.”
“He needs Bree.”
“He can’t have her. So who’s going to love him and raise him the way she would have?”
Tom knew who. He just didn’t know how.
Verity shot a nervous look at Jane, then beyond when Dotty and Emma suddenly appeared. “I have to leave,” she whispered, and turned.
But Tom caught her arm. He gestured toward the bundle she clutched. “What did you bring?”
Still whispering, she said, “It can wait.”
Jane was suddenly beside him. “You made something, didn’t you?”
Verity looked uncomfortable. “It’s not much. I wanted it to be ready for the shower.”
“I’m sorry about the shower. Bree wanted you there. I wanted you there. Whatever my mother said was mean and dead wrong.”
There was an indignant murmur from behind. Jane ignored it.
So did Tom. Bree had admired Verity. She would have wanted this gift.
With a brief spurt of feeling—defiance, as much as anything, at a time when he felt powerless—he said, “We’d like what you made, the baby and I.”
Verity held the bundle for another awkward minute before finally unfolding her arms. There were actually two packages. The smaller of them, on top, had been hidden. As soon as they were in Tom’s hands, she was out the door and gone.
From behind came Dotty’s arch “At least she had the good sense to use the back door.”
Tom looked at Jane, who was looking right back at him. In silent agreement, he lowered the bundles to the table.
“Why don’t I just put those away for you,” Emma offered.
But he was already opening the largest, the one with bright baby wrapping. He imagined Bree tearing at the paper in excitement and felt a vicarious thread of it himself. There was tissue inside the wrapping. Peeling it back, he lifted out an afghan. It was crib-size, navy, yellow, and white to match the baby’s room, and more beautiful than anything he and Bree had seen in the stores.
“It’s wonderful,” Jane breathed, moving a hand over the fine crocheted wool.
Dotty sputtered. “Did she think the baby wouldn’t already have a crib blanket?”
Tom said, “The one he has now wasn’t handmade. I’d rather use this one. Bree would have.”
“Bree would be alive if it weren’t for that woman.”
He looked at Dotty. “How do you figure that?”
“Verity Greene egged her on. Bree was too old to have children.”
“Mother! That’s crazy. Besides, you told her to wait.
“Oh, hush.”
“No, you hush,” Jane said, drawing herself even taller than Dotty. “Bree did what she wanted. No one made her do anything. If she took chances, it was because she didn’t want to live with the alternative. It’s taken me a while, but I understand what she felt.”
Dotty nodded. “So you’re going to art school. If you aren’t careful, you’ll end up like Bree.”
“Better that than living with the alternative.”
Dotty gasped.
Emma led her from the room, saying, “She’s upset. She’ll come around.”
Jane stared after them with her jaw set, then turned on Tom. “I have come around, and about time! Yes, I’m going to art school. Especially now. I’ll do it for Bree as much as for me.” Her eyes filled with tears. She pressed bitten fingernails to her mouth. Brokenly, she said, “I’m going to miss her so much.”
Tom couldn’t speak. The void in his life was gaping again, the emptiness of Bree’s absence. He wished he could cry. The emotion backing up in him was painful.
Then Jane handed him the smaller package. It had Christmas wrapping and a card with his name on it in Bree’s handwriting. His first instinct was to put it with the others under the tree. He couldn’t deal with them yet. They were the last gifts he would ever get from Bree. Once opened, they would be gone.
But something had him taking this package from Jane and opening the card. Dear Tom, he read. I had Verity teach me to crochet. I’m not very good at it, but this is the result. I was working on it all those afternoons I spent at her house these past few weeks. It’s a scarf, in case you couldn’t tell. Don’t look too closely. It’s got lots of mistakes. More love than mistakes, though. I adore you. Bree.
Tom spent the night in the nursery, with the burgundy scarf wrapped around his neck. Pure exhaustion kept him asleep on the carpet while the baby slept. He awoke when the baby did, and changed him and fed him, as Julia had taught him to do. Then he sat in the pretty white rocker and rocked him back to sleep, as Bree would have done, and all the while her voice didn’t call and her smile didn’t show.
It hit him then that speculative talk about beings of light and three wishes was all well and good, but death was real. It was a hard, final, scientific fact.
He rocked harder now, seeking solace and finding none. With each passing minute, the pain of missing her grew.
Pain of missing her.
Fear of the future.
Dread. Sheer dread. They were burying her the following afternoon. He didn’t know how he could stand there, cold all the way to his marrow and alone as never before, and watch.
But he wasn’t alone. Crowds of people were already gathered at the graveyard by the church when he arrived, and then, while he waited at its entrance, the hearse inched its way through roads clogged with even more who had come. The whole town was in attendance, it seemed. As often as people reached out to touch the coffin as it was carried from the hearse down the narrow cemetery path, they reached out to touch Tom, who followed.
That kept him from being as cold as he might have been. It was a dreary day. Snow a foot deep lay over the graveyard. Though he wore a dark suit and a topcoat and Bree’s burgundy scarf, his head and his hands were bare.
At the grave site, people closed in around him. He was barely aware of who was where, knew only that they were near and that they cared. The minister spoke simply. The choir soloist sang beautifully. Tom’s eyes clung to the casket, to Bree. She was wearing the dress she had worn at their wedding. Julia had insisted on it. Tom would always remember her as she had been that day, his bride, his first and last, only truly innocent love.
When they would have lowered her into the ground, he felt a moment’s jarring panic. Reaching out, he grabbed the wood and held it as though to keep her from the finality of death. But the wood was cold. What Bree was—her hope, her vitality, her love—wasn’t there.
The reality of it pressed on his shoulders. Bereft, he stepped back. The coffin was lowered slowly into the ground. Watching it settle, he felt an ache so intense he began to shake.
Then, suddenly, a single ray of sun broke through the clouds and touched the wood, giving it a soft chestnut color and the warmth he sought. He closed his eyes, opened them again, and the warmth remained. His body steadied. His heart lifted. As surely as any dream he had ever had, he felt her presence. It began in the warmth of that improbable ray of sun and moved into the scarf around his neck, but it didn’t stop there. He felt it in the people who wrapped thei
r arms around him and held him, one after another, before leaving the graveyard. He saw it in the white-spired church where they had been married, on the town green where they had laughed, down the streets where they had walked. He even knew it would be in the bungalow on West Elm, where their son lay sleeping under his grandmother’s watchful eye.
Bree was his soul mate. Her death couldn’t change that. She was the ray of sun in a dark day, had been that for him from the first, and she was with him still, cheating death in her own imaginative way. Indeed, he felt her presence so strongly that when the crowd finally cleared, he half expected that she would be there.
Instead, standing a short distance across the newly tamped snow was his father.
Something inside Tom cracked. He was vaguely aware that Alice was there and that three of his brothers were, too, but it was his father who held his gaze, his father who drew his aging body up to Tom’s height and started toward him, his father who didn’t stop until he was close, then stood for a silent sad minute.
Tom wasn’t sure what he saw then, because his eyes were filled with tears. But he felt things he had been too frozen to feel, felt love and grief and need. He felt regret and apology, felt acceptance, and suddenly he was ten years old, coming home to a place of unconditional love.
One open arm was all the invitation he needed. Wrapping both of his around his father, he buried his face in the collar of a coat where the scent of home was familiar and warm even after so many years away, and he cried as he hadn’t been able to do before. He cried for Bree, cried for his mother, cried for things that had been lost in the morass of success. It all came out in low gulps that might have embarrassed him had his father made any move to set him back. But even when Tom was finished and held on still, his father held him right back.
In time, the others joined them. He embraced his brothers, holding each in silent thanks, and shared more tears with Alice, who had known Bree and felt her loss. He led them to the graveside, knowing Bree would appreciate that, and knew from the warmth inside him that she did. Then, finding warmth in this, too, he invited them home.
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