Chandler, Ruth, and the girls sat before the living room fire. Slightly blackened popcorn kernels clustered on the bottoms of their bowls, and popcorn remnants, which had somehow escaped the puppy’s notice, scattered across the rug like oddly shaped pebbles. Chandler’s index finger marked the page in the first book in the Little House series, and Ruth sat against a pile of throw pillows with Vivienne on her lap, watching his face shift in accordance with the voices.
Sofie watched Chandler too. Her reflective eyes followed her daddy’s mouth as he read, as if she couldn’t rely on her ears alone. Everest curled in her lap, tail wagging, though he was entering that long-limbed stage foretelling he wouldn’t be a puppy for long.
It was the perfect end to a perfect day. Or at least the day was perfect in the eyes of the children, and that was what mattered. Or this, at least, was what Ruth told herself. Chandler finished the chapter, showed the page’s illustration to the girls, and closed the book. Sofie set the puppy down, nearly comatose from the warmth of the fire, and went to sit on her father’s lap.
“I like being with you,” she said. “I want to be with you all the time.”
Chandler looked at Ruth. His mouth thinned as he swallowed hard. “I like being with you, too, sweetheart,” he said. “I want to be with you, your sissy, and your mommy all the time.”
Sofie turned in Chandler’s arms. Her eyes met Ruth’s. A challenge there, in that dark gaze. At six years old, the foundling child possessed an eerie knowledge of the ways of the world. Perhaps this was because she and the world had been so harshly introduced.
Sofie asked her mother, “Do you want to be with us all the time?”
Ruth’s breath caught. Vi shifted in her arms, the child’s blue eyes lowered as she stared sleepily at the flames. “Yes,” Ruth said. “I want to be with you, your sissy, and your daddy all the time.”
“Walk with me?”
Ruth looked at Chandler, smiling at her from the doorway. She remembered all the times she had asked him that same question, when they shared Bethel House with an older missionary couple whom she could trust to watch the girls while she got an hour of fresh air.
Early in their relationship, Chandler had been her bodyguard, her protector, and yet after they married, his desire to go running—or even walking—with her stopped. He’d grown busier. His workload at the orphanage’s clinic increased exponentially until she could almost see his responsibilities weighing his shoulders down. But shouldn’t there be some contractual agreement that you must perform the same duties which won your spouse’s heart?
So, now, Ruth considered telling Chandler no, the same as he’d told her no all those years before she gave up and took walks on her own. But then she recalled Mabel’s words, Mabel’s suggestion that she needed to forgive her husband and embrace the man before her and not begrudge him for no longer being the man he’d been back then. Because she wasn’t the same woman either. Therefore, Ruth nodded, closed the page of the slim maroon book she’d taken from Elam’s library in the woods, and rose to her feet.
Chandler’s grin widened. He lifted her jacket down from the coat tree by the front door and opened it. Turning her back to him, Ruth slid the jacket over her arms and zipped it up. “Thank you,” she said and knew from his expression that showing gratitude was something she’d done without thinking when they were dating, but that gratitude had slowly dissipated after they married and her dissatisfaction grew. Which came first? she wondered. Chandler’s inability to put her first, or Ruth’s inability to show him the same kindness she would’ve shown a stranger?
The married couple walked together yet apart; their proximity, or lack thereof, appearing to mirror how they’d walked beside each other for most of their married life. But this was not walking weather. Drizzle slipped through the sieve of clouds, and the land looked like a hasty abstract, smudged in gray and brown. The glimmering lake and channels alone held a reservoir of beauty.
Though their pace was slow, Chandler’s breathing hitched between steps, and Ruth wondered if he’d damaged his lungs in the bombing. She had never asked about that night (or morning, she supposed, since it was 2 a.m. when the first bomb fell), and he’d never shared, as if they each knew it was best to put the past behind them.
Ruth glanced toward the cabin in the woods, then looked to see if Chandler had noticed. She wondered if he even knew the cabin was there, and if he did, if he realized its significance. She doubted it, considering how little contact the cousins had had since their teenage years. Now, no lantern light beckoned from the windows; no wood smoke signaled from the chimney. It was as though Ruth’s decision had pulled a curtain across that magical world, forever removing it from view. She wondered if the same was true for Elam. He hadn’t come to say good-bye.
“You will heal; it will just take time.”
The sound of Chandler’s voice startled Ruth. She glanced over again, nearly expecting someone else to be walking beside her. Who was this man who spoke so gently?
“What do you mean?”
But even as Ruth asked, she understood. Chandler was her husband. The father of her children. The keeper of her secrets. The man who—for good and for bad—had once known her more intimately than anyone else. Of course he could tell she was hurting. Of course he could tell she wanted Elam to be walking in his stead. She hated to think how this knowledge hurt him, and yet, at the same time, she blamed him for it too.
If Chandler had wanted to protect their love, he should’ve invested more time in their relationship. But he hadn’t, and therefore—after she learned of his death—it was easy for Ruth to give her heart away. She wondered, her pulse keeping time with Chandler’s hitched breathing, if she would’ve eventually fallen for someone else even if Chandler hadn’t died. That thought thinned the magic curtain surrounding her union with Elam, so she banished it quickly.
“What I mean,” Chandler said, “is that time heals everything, not just physical wounds.” He paused and looked over. “But can I ask one thing?”
“Yes,” Ruth said. “You can always ask.”
“When did you stop loving me?”
She inhaled sharply, stunned by the bluntness of his words and the hurt she felt behind them. This wound was fresh. “But I do still love you,” she said. “I’m afraid I always will.”
Chandler shook his head. The clue was in the word still. Pulling off his toboggan hat, he dragged an agitated hand back through his unruly hair—one of the few physical characteristics he shared with his cousin. “Then when did you stop being in love with me?”
Ruth stared straight ahead. For so long, she had wanted to ask him the same thing.
What was the difference between loving someone and being in love? She supposed the first was born out of duty and the second out of desire. The first meant you bookended your days with each other, but the days themselves were spent contemplating other things.
The second meant you woke and slept with that person on your mind.
How could Chandler and Ruth both have believed they were not loved or seen?
“It took time,” she said, “just as it took time to fall in love with you. I guess I daily focused on your faults so I wouldn’t be hurt when you failed me.”
“So you’re saying our marriage’s failure was my fault?”
Yes, she thought, that’s exactly what I’m saying.
But then she remembered how taken aback Chandler had been by her simple thank-you as he held out her jacket, and the revelation that he was not the only one in the wrong. If the construction of love required two people, equal energy must be required to tear it down.
So she said, the first step in reparation: “No, it was my fault too. You did so much for us every day, but I was blind to it because I was angry. I felt you were choosing the clinic over us.”
Chandler stopped walking. Rain fell more heavily now, so he had to squint at his wife to see.
“Sometimes, I thought of it like the other woman. You would come home at night and l
ook at me, at the girls, and it was like your mind was already focused on whatever you needed to accomplish the next day.”
Chandler blinked rain from his eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She looked down, saw how the water softened the tracks of some small creature that had scurried across the mud. “I thought you knew,” she said. “I all but told you so many times.”
He cursed beneath his breath. “All but telling me does not count as telling me.”
“I know.” She exhaled. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re not the only one. I guess we were just too exhausted from the day to talk.”
Ruth distinctly remembered the many days he was referencing: by the time he came home and they ate supper, cleaned the kitchen, bathed the girls, and got them into bed, there was no energy left to invest in each other. He would take his laptop and sit on the couch, sometimes with a mug of tea, and she would sit on the other side of the couch with a mug of tea and a book. Some nights, Ruth wouldn’t even read but would watch her husband above the page—her heart so raw and hurting, she feared he could hear it through the lapel of her robe.
As Chandler knew Ruth more intimately than anyone else, so did she know him, and yet she didn’t know how to reach him. And here, all along, he’d felt the same about her. Had he spent those nights rereading the same emails? Watching her above his laptop too? Tears stung her eyes for the exhausted young parents they’d been, and that was only last year. If just one of them had extended love, the cycle would have stopped. Their relationship would’ve changed.
“Why didn’t you tell me you missed me?” she cried. “Why didn’t I tell you?”
Chandler looked at Ruth. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe we didn’t want to be vulnerable with each other? Maybe we feared we were the only one who felt that way? But one thing I’ve learned through all of this is that—” he stepped closer and cupped her face; she felt the dampness on her cheeks paint his palms—“I sure miss you now.”
CHAPTER 18
ELAM WALKED DOWN THE SIDEWALK while eating a stale English muffin, remnants of the continental breakfast provided by the Tomah Motel. He had no destination in mind, convenient since his legs were the only medium he had to take him there. He’d spent the morning in his room but found few things more depressing than sitting by himself in a rent-by-the-week motel while the sun fought to penetrate dusty blinds. Besides, he’d only watched fifteen minutes of television before he became disenchanted with society as a whole. Elam had been too shy during his teenage years to dabble in the outside world like a few of his Mennonite friends (hiding contraband Walkmans, cigarettes, and Englisch clothes in their rooms), but he’d still often wondered if he were missing out. Now he knew he hadn’t been. If anything, his shyness had spared him from making poor decisions he would have later regretted. Really, when it came down to it, there was only one forbidden thing he regretted not pursuing, and that was music.
Elam swallowed the muffin, his dry throat muscling it down, wishing he’d accepted the continental breakfast host’s offer of orange juice in a carton with a peel-off lid. But Elam did not enjoy being fussed over, and he felt the host’s grandmotherly attention even more because he appeared to be the only resident in the motel. He continued walking: past the post office, hardware store, greenhouse and bulk food store, gas station, and then—finally—the church. Elam had never darkened any other church door in Tomah besides the community’s.
He went through the foyer, and the same sunlight that had tried penetrating the dusty blinds of his motel now swirled through the stained-glass windows in a multifaceted kaleidoscope. The church was empty, and the garnet-colored carpet bore vacuum stripes. Elam self-consciously looked down at his boots but he kept them on, figuring it would be worse to be walking around a somber church in socks. His heart seized when he saw the piano tucked behind the Communion bench. His work-hardened hands scrolled across the satin backs of the pews.
He walked up three steps and around the Communion bench and the offering plates with the red padding on the bottoms that matched the carpet. He went over and sat on the bench. He glanced out through the sanctuary, seeing the sturdy, walnut beams supporting the vaulted white ceiling. Fingers trembling, as if conduits directly connected to his heart, he lifted the piano cover and touched the black-and-white keys.
To be a man of so few words and yet to have the need to produce sound was one of the harshest contradictions. But as a bird needs to fly, a fish to swim, an author to write, and an artist to paint, Elam pressed down on the keys and began to play. He poured his sorrow into the melody, his tears into the chords that rose to the ceiling. There were only a few times in his life that Elam Albrecht lost all sense of self, but creating music was one of those times. He played and he wept and he poured himself out over the keys until the keys and the bench and the air and the sunlight, swirling through glass, all seemed to be pulse points, beating inside of him.
Only then, once he was finished, the chords still echoing inside the building, did he know that, if Ruth was now forbidden to him, he would now pursue this forbidden thing.
CHAPTER 19
FIVE MONTHS LATER
Ruth stood at the edge of the Mississippi. It was strange to think the same river that all winter had been a jigsaw puzzle of ice now flowed all the way south, where the water grew darker, moved slower, and teemed with a kind of life that could never survive here. But it was lovely, Ruth had to admit, though it could never replace the ocean beside Greystones. However, Ruth was beginning to understand she could not trust her memory, for time sanded off the rough edges and made her wish for something that had never been, and never could be.
The cold water lapped against her knees. The warm June sun reflected off the water onto the underside of her wide straw hat. Ruth closed her eyes and thought: Just be. She listened to her daughters’ mischievous giggles as they packed coarse brown sand over Chandler’s body, so all that was displayed was his dark head of hair contrasted by his wide, white grin. She looked at him, and her eyes and heart acknowledged the importance of the moment. It was as though each day Chandler awoke, he determined afresh to win her. Even last night, while they ate supper at the farm table, and Sofie said she needed more milk, Chandler and Ruth had both leaped to their feet. Sofie asked, “Daddy, why do you do everything now?”
Chandler had said, “I’m doing what I should’ve been doing all along.”
Ruth couldn’t quite pinpoint what was happening, though. A part of her mourned being her daughters’ main source of support. This made no sense, since she’d so long mourned that she had to be a single mom. Perhaps we only mourn what we cannot have.
Chandler’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “Ruuuth! Help me!” As he’d done every time the girls had covered him with sand, he acted like he couldn’t pull his arms free.
Ruth walked over and leaned down. “What are you doing?”
She tried to sound stern but failed miserably.
Chandler’s hand shot up and clasped her wrist, pulling her down in the sand on top of him. They lived in close proximity but hadn’t been physically close since the snowy day he kissed her. Chandler’s warm, sandy arms wrapped around her waist, and the children squealed and put fistfuls of wet sand on her back. She’d forgotten what life was like before she and Chandler had drifted apart, for just as time dulls the sharp edges of bad memories, so time dulls the good ones as well, or at least the good ones that are too painful to recollect. But life had been good, hadn’t it? The sun, the warmth, the water, the children giggling as they threw sand onto their parents reminded Ruth of this.
They were whole; they were together; they were good.
But then she felt it again, in her womb—that mysterious, subterranean flutter, which was becoming more pronounced as each week passed. There was no mistaking its origins. She looked down into Chandler’s eyes, crinkled with mirth, speckles of sand caught in the salt-and-pepper strands of his beard. Before the bombing, they’d been black.
&nbs
p; She sat up, heart pounding, mouth dry.
Chandler pulled himself free from the sand and sat beside her. “Something wrong?”
Ruth turned toward her daughters, saw their twin expressions of unadulterated joy. Her children—brought to her by genetics and divine intervention—were her life’s greatest gifts. She would do anything for them, and she had proven that by staying with their father.
But what was she willing to do now that the child she carried was not his?
Chandler said again, his warm hand splayed across her back, “You sure nothing’s wrong?” Ruth imagined she could feel the metal of his wedding band branding her skin. She turned to him and met his eyes. “Yes,” she said. “I’m okay.”
They camped out that night, on a small island encircled by the Mississippi: just the two girls and their parents, a campfire and some stars, as Sofie had requested when they’d asked what they would like to do to celebrate the beginning of summer.
As if they were a standard, summer-vacationing kind of family.
The girls—exhausted by a day soaked in sun and water—slept soundly in the tent, and Chandler and Ruth sat next to their campfire, watching the half-moon shining through the pines.
Chandler said, “I have something for you.”
Ruth looked over at him skeptically but did not speak.
He rose from the log and disappeared into the tent. It was a five-person tent, and she was suddenly grateful for the space. If she needed to, she could go toward her own side, and he could stay on his. Turning, Ruth watched Chandler duck as he exited.
“I’m sorry it’s not wrapped,” he said and passed her a box. A medium-size wooden box with a gilded latch. She lifted the latch and saw, inside, a set of six sealed ink pots and a silver-tipped quill. The box also held six Moleskine notebooks. “What’s this for?” she asked.
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