by Luanne Rice
“Can I tell you something?” she said to John now.
“Anything,” John said.
“It’s about my sister,” Sylvie said. “I’ve been unfair to her.”
“In what way?”
“All those years, when she was living in New York, and she never wanted to come home . . . I was so angry with her. I thought she had made a mess of her life. She had given in to a moment of weakness—with her boyfriend at Brown—and she had ruined her life.”
John was silent, listening.
“I felt very superior to her,” Sylvie said, her throat tight. “For many years.”
“But you don’t now?”
Sylvie shook her head and stifled a sob. “No,” she said.
“What changed?” John asked.
“You,” Sylvie whispered. “Until you, I never knew what love was like. I never knew how total it was.”
“It’s total for me, too,” John said, squeezing her tenderly.
Just then, a loon called from the lake. The sound was crazy, passionate, out of control. Sylvie closed her eyes for a moment. The call reminded her of Jane’s keening those days after she had given Chloe up. Sylvie had felt helpless; there’d been nothing she could do.
“I wish I could help her now,” she said.
“Just be there for her,” John said. “That’s all you can do.”
“How did you get to be so wise about love?” Sylvie asked, half turning to look at him. The sight of his wide brown eyes, high forehead, gentle expression, soothed her heart, and she smiled.
“My parents showed me, for starters,” he said. “And then I met you.”
“I wish I could have met your parents,” Sylvie said; John had told her they had died within six months of each other, five years earlier.
“They’d have loved you.”
“Thank you. My mother loves you,” Sylvie said. “My father, on the other hand . . .”
“Your father doesn’t deserve the name,” John said, holding her tighter. “How he could have walked out on your family, I can’t understand.”
“No,” Sylvie said.
“Children need to know their parents love them,” John said. “No matter what.”
Sylvie stared up at the sky, her heart aching. She knew that he was right. Sylvie—and Jane—were living proof of two girls who’d missed out on their father’s love. But then she thought of Jane and her daughter. Chloe’s lifetime had passed without Jane in it. Yet no one had ever loved anyone more than Jane loved Chloe.
“You’re thinking of your sister,” John said; he knew, because Sylvie had confided the whole story.
She nodded, unable to speak.
“Let’s wish on a star for her,” John said.
“A shooting star?” Sylvie asked.
“Yes. The next one we see will be for Jane—that everything works out for her and Chloe.”
“Jane and Chloe,” Sylvie whispered, staring at the sky.
A long time passed. After a whole night of seeing two, three, shooting stars a minute, suddenly the sky was still. Stars burned, the Milky Way traced the deepest part of the heavens, but there were no shooting stars.
Sylvie thought of Jane. She saw her as a young girl, but still Sylvie’s older sister, with braids and an intense look in her eyes. She thought of her as a teenager, hitchhiking to Hartford, with Sylvie in tow, to find their father. She heard her crying like a loon, missing her baby. And she saw her as she had been this spring—blooming like a flower, in touch with Chloe, falling in love with Dylan.
“Jane,” she said.
Just then, a meteor streaked through the sky. It was a fireball, a silver disk, Jane’s locket, leaving a trail of fire behind. Sylvie jumped out of John’s arms to stand and watch. She swore it was headed straight for the lake as it seemed to split the night.
Things happen, Sylvie thought. Miracles come out of nowhere. . . .
“Don’t give up hope,” she whispered, fingernails digging into her palms. She was talking to her sister, but she was also talking to herself: Love and meteors come out of the blackness and change the whole world, just when you least expect it.
The meteor disappeared. It left the sky scarred with a white-blue stripe; as she watched, it faded to silver, and then to black, so that after a moment, Sylvie wondered whether she had ever actually seen it at all. But then John walked over, took her in his arms, and kissed her.
And his kiss made the meteor live on.
“Did you see that?” Eli Chadwick asked, three states away, on his back porch in Rhode Island.
“I did,” Sharon said, sitting on the step beside him. “A regular fireball.”
“Chloe!” Eli called. “Come out and look at the shooting stars!”
No answer.
Sharon looked up at Chloe’s bedroom windows. The lights were on, the window open. Some of the orchard cats had climbed up the drainpipe and were sitting on Chloe’s windowsill. One of them yowled, as if for the sheer joy of a summer night.
“What’s she doing in there?” Eli asked.
“I don’t know,” Sharon said, gazing up.
“She asked me for all my old magazines,” Eli said. “When I passed by, she was cutting them up.”
“Making a collage,” Sharon said. “She and Mona were doing that before. I thought they had finished.”
In the silence, now that she knew what to listen for, she heard the “snip-snip” of scissors cutting paper.
“She’s a complicated one,” Eli said. “She begged to work at Dylan’s stand, and now she seems to want no part of it. Now that the pie source has dried up, and he’s buying from some wholesaler, she’s completely lost interest.”
“We know why she doesn’t want to work at the stand anymore,” Sharon said. “And it has nothing to do with wholesale pies.”
“That woman,” Eli said. “I’d have her arrested, if I could.”
Sharon set her jaw. She shook her head, looking up at Chloe’s light. “That would do no good.”
“She had no right coming here,” Eli said. “Under false pretenses, trying to worm her way into Chloe’s life. And Dylan’s!”
“Dylan can take care of himself,” Sharon said. “He looked happy this summer—for the first time in years. Since he lost Isabel.”
“Don’t tell me you’re letting her off the hook!”
Sharon didn’t reply right away. Her mind was racing with memories, many more troubling than what had happened this summer. She remembered the year Isabel died, when Chloe had stopped talking. She remembered trying to rock her daughter, trying to hold and comfort her, and how inconsolable Chloe had been. Only Dylan had been able to get through to her, and Sharon had known—understood at a level too deep for words—that Chloe was connecting with him over loss.
The loss of her natural mother.
Adoption was a strange, wonderful, painful, joyful thing. Chloe had come into Sharon and Eli’s life, turned it into a garden. She was a gift from above. They had prayed for children, and been given Chloe. Over the years, they had known the delights and frustrations of parenthood. When things went well, they congratulated themselves as parents. When they encountered difficulties, they wondered—Sharon was ashamed to think this even now—whether things would be different with their own child. Whether Chloe’s intensity, passion, fierceness were results of her genes.
They wanted to mold her into a Chadwick, and they had done the best they could, raising her, but deep inside, she carried the genetic makeup of her real mother and father. And because she was so intensely emotional, she felt things more strongly than Sharon and Eli; and she carried within her a true, visceral, cellular love for the woman who had brought her into the world.
“I think I reacted badly,” Sharon said, staring up at Chloe’s light.
“What do you mean?”
“When Dylan told me the truth of who Jane Porter was . . . and she drove into the driveway with Chloe . . .”
“How could you possibly react any other way?” Eli aske
d. “She had practically kidnapped our daughter.”
“No, she didn’t,” Sharon said softly. She closed her eyes. Although she had never given birth, she knew what it was to love a child with every bit of her heart. She had had Chloe all this time; every day of every year, Jane had missed her. And, although it hurt Sharon desperately to think it, Chloe had missed Jane.
“Stop this,” Eli said.
“Remember when Chloe put on my high heels and a fake wedding ring and went to Family Court to try to see her birth records?”
“Don’t remind me.”
“That was a very brave thing to do,” Sharon said.
“Sharon,” Eli said, taking her hand. “It was a foolish thing to do. She was just a teenager looking for trouble. Look at what happened this summer. Was Chloe happy to actually meet her birth mother? No, she was not. She was traumatized. She cried and wouldn’t talk for three days straight. She’s just beginning, only now, to really come out of it.”
“She was shocked, that’s all,” Sharon said.
“Shocked by the lies,” Eli said.
“What was Jane supposed to do?” Sharon asked. “Waltz in here and announce who she was? Do you think we would have accepted her?”
“She was supposed to stay away,” Eli said. “Instead of coming here and stirring up trouble. She was supposed to put Chloe’s welfare above her selfish need to be a mother—and what kind of mother, anyway? She didn’t want her baby—she made that choice almost sixteen years ago. She signed the papers!”
Sharon held Eli’s hand and watched his face get redder and redder. She loved him for it. He was working his way into a fit, all because he was being the Papa Bear. He was protecting his family. She wondered whether he remembered that he had been against the adoption. He had thought that if God hadn’t seen fit to bless them with children, maybe they should just let it be. . . .
But she had the feeling that he had forgotten. How could they even imagine a life without Chloe? She was part of everything they did. The orchard cats surrounded them, meowing from the fence posts, from the bushes, from deep in the orchard. Those orchard cats were alive because of Chloe. Sharon gazed up at Eli, knowing that he had a very unsentimental, farm boy’s approach to unwanted animals.
Chloe was in their mornings, noons, and nights. She was in every plan they made, every dream they had, every star they wished on. It was all for her. She had been born to Jane Porter, but she had become their daughter. For that, Sharon felt eternally grateful to Jane.
And her heart tugged now, as she stared up at Chloe’s window, thinking of what had happened in this very driveway. Sharon had been angry—angrier than she ever had been in her life. Dylan had really gotten her stirred up. She would never forget Dylan’s hurt eyes, thin voice, as he told Sharon the truth of what he’d found out about Jane.
But now, looking back, Sharon knew why he was so upset. Not just because a woman would want to meet the child to whom she had given birth; not even because she had done so under false pretenses.
Rather, because Dylan felt betrayed. After all those years with Amanda, trying to love a woman who didn’t love him back, and then losing her—and Isabel—to the violence of his own job, Dylan had finally fallen in real love. With Jane.
Real love . . .
Sharon thought about that now. She had it—she had never for one moment doubted that—for Eli Chadwick. He was her sweetheart, best friend, and partner. He was her mate.
And Sharon had real love for Chloe. Biology didn’t matter one bit; Sharon knew that she would be there for Chloe, would love her until the end of time, would happily die herself to protect her child from any threat that could ever come her way. Because of that real love, Sharon was glad that this summer wasn’t over yet, that there was still time.
Because she also loved her brother-in-law. He was her family, every bit as much as her husband and daughter. Dylan needed her, whether he wanted to think so or not. He had become the old man of the orchard again—withdrawn, taciturn, armored. And so, right now, as the meteor shower of August streaked the orchard skies, Sharon stood and brushed the dirt from the back of her dress.
“Want to take a walk with me?” she asked Eli.
“Where’re you going?”
“I thought I’d take a stroll through the orchard,” she said.
Eli shook his head. “No, thanks,” he said. “I’m still waiting for Dylan to come to his senses and sell those overgrown acres. We’re sitting on a family gold mine, and he just wants to get old pruning trees that ought to be bulldozed to the ground. Make nice new houses for young families . . .”
“Okay, dear,” Sharon said, kissing the top of his head. “You wait here, and I’ll be back soon.”
“If you see that brother of mine, try to talk some sense into him, will you?”
“That’s what I’ll try to do,” she said. “If I see him.”
CHAPTER 28
Dylan sat at his kitchen table, a circle of light coming down from the old lamp hanging above. He held a knife in one hand, an apple in the other. It was a ruddy Empire, the first of the season. He sliced off a piece and ate it. Then, using the tip of the knife, he dug out the five seeds.
They lay on the oak table. Dylan thought of John Chapman, who had walked the country in rags, carrying apple seeds in his deerskin bag. Johnny Appleseed. He slept in trees with possums. He wore a tin pan on his head instead of a hat. People thought he was crazy, but they loved him for what he left behind.
Dylan pushed the seeds around the table, thinking about things left behind. His orchard was a paean to his family, to his father’s legacy. When they were young, kids used to make fun of Dylan and Eli—their name, “Chadwick,” was very like “Chapman.” Dylan Appleseed, Eli Appleseed . . . They endured it all. Dylan cared a lot less than Eli; all those years in the cities, Washington and New York, Dylan had just been waiting to get back here, to the orchard, to the place his father had left behind.
Through the blue smoke of his cigarette, he looked at Isabel’s picture on the refrigerator. She seemed so excited, so alive, as if she could spring to life and give him a hug right now. She had been here for so short a time, yet Dylan felt her with him every second of every day.
These apple seeds contained all the mysteries of apple trees past and future: they were hard, black, inanimate. But Dylan could go out and plant them tonight, and within the blink of an eye, they could turn into trees. They would bear apples of their own.
It was mystical and romantic, the way life sustained itself. Apple trees, human beings. Apple seeds made apple trees. People had kids; the line went on. Or they didn’t have kids, or the kids died, and the line stopped. And did any of those origins matter? Sitting at his table, Dylan wasn’t sure.
He heard footsteps on the path outside. Without moving from the table, he listened as someone came onto the porch. He narrowed his eyes. Who could it be? He’d left the porch light off for a reason.
“Dylan?” came the voice through the screen door.
It was Sharon. She stood outside, hands cupped around her eyes to see better. Dylan hesitated. He wanted to tell her to go away, but he couldn’t.
“Come in,” he said.
She walked through the kitchen. She looked good with her summer tan. Her long dress was black, and it made him think of Jane. Jane always wore black. He raised his gaze to look into her eyes.
“What brings you over here?” he asked.
“You,” she said firmly.
The world tipped a little. He felt his stomach drop, but he kept his eyes hard and steady. He didn’t want this. Whatever she had in mind, Dylan didn’t want to hear. So he turned on his sister-in-law—a woman he adored—his fiercest perp stare. He narrowed his eyes and let her have it.
“Don’t,” he said.
“Don’t tell me ‘don’t,’ Dylan Chadwick,” she said. “You got us into this mess. I want you to get us out of it.”
“What mess?” he asked, irate.
“This summer. Giving Chl
oe a job at the stand.”
“She still has the job,” he said. “It’s August, she’s losing interest, she’s a kid—that’s natural.”
“She hates the pies you’re selling,” Sharon said.
Dylan hardened his stare, as if she was the worst drug dealer in the state. “The pies are fine.”
“They’re commercially produced,” Sharon said. “They’re like cardboard.”
Dylan took a long drag and stared menacingly through the smoke. She reached out her hand.
“What?” he asked.
“Give me that,” she said.
Dylan leaned back in his chair. He remembered when they were young, before he’d gotten married, how he and Sharon would smoke together. Eli had never approved. So she’d follow Dylan out behind the barn after dinner, sneak a cigarette while practicing smoke rings and getting him to tell her old stories about her husband’s childhood, then come back inside. He handed her the cigarette now.
Sharon took in a long lungful of smoke, blew out three perfect, concentric smoke rings, and smiled. “I can still do it,” she said.
“Yeah, you’ve still got—” Dylan started to say as she ground the cigarette out in the ashtray. “Hey!”
“Enough of this,” she said.
“Of what?”
“Self-destruction, isolation, misery—for starters! What kind of example are you, smoking up a storm in front of your niece.”
“My niece is nowhere to be seen right now,” he said.
“Well, then, think of Isabel,” Sharon said.
“Go to hell,” Dylan said before he could stop himself. His chest bubbled over with hurt and rage. But then, because he loved his sister-in-law and would never want to hurt her, he reached for her hand. “I’m sorry.”
Her eyes were unperturbed. He hadn’t upset her at all.
“I can take it,” she said softly.
“I can’t,” he said.
