“Here now! What are you about?” A deep clearing of a throat sounded from behind me, followed by the cock of a pistol. “Step away from her now, you lobsterback, or I’ll blow your head to bloody bits.”
I’d never heard such hard words come from Hugh Gregory’s mouth.
I LOOKED AT Brad over the center console of his Accord. “Ready?”
He turned onto Lydia’s street. “Gee, I kind of feel like a kid who’s about to meet my date’s parents.”
I clutched the bowl of marshmallow salad in my lap. “Am I that bad? Sorry, it’s just that Lydia asking me—and you—over is a big step.” Or rather, Lydia agreeing to Grace’s suggestion that they have us over. Still a big step.
On Easter, no less. A time of new birth, new beginnings. I’d attended church with Lydia’s family that morning—again at Grace’s invitation. Grace had sung and strummed her guitar to a song called “Cornerstone,” and I felt something foreign stir within. As soft as a whisper, as strong as a solid oath. I didn’t evaluate it too much for fear of scaring it away. I thought on Brad’s proposition from a while back that we depend on someone stronger than ourselves. Words from the song replayed in my mind, drawn out by reminders of the ring.
Weak made strong in the Savior’s love . . .
I rest on His unchanging grace . . .
My anchor holds within the veil . . .
I couldn’t even pretend to understand what they all meant, but whether it was emotion or the holiday, I glimpsed victory in that song and rested in the words.
At least I had in church, during the sermon. And even when I’d gone home to make the marshmallow salad. But now, on my sister’s street, I wrestled with them, wanting to retake control.
“So, Lydia and I, we haven’t talked about her meeting you in the hospital. She doesn’t know I took your card from her Bible.”
“Okay . . .”
“I was kind of hoping you could, like, go along with her if she pretends she never met you before. I don’t know how much Grace has told her about you.” I tapped a fingernail on the glass of the marshmallow salad bowl. Petty of me to even ask. But Lydia meeting Brad could really mess things up. I felt our journey to reconciliation was going smooth. Slower than a snail on wet plaster, but smooth. I wasn’t ready to confront her about Brad’s card, or anything to do with the time after the bombing. We were okay, going along at our own pace, for the most part ignoring the past.
“I’m not going to be dishonest, Annie.”
“I’m not asking you to lie. Just, you know, don’t bring up that day at the hospital.”
“It’s not like I was going to come right out and ask her why she didn’t give you my card.”
“Great. Thank you.”
“I was going to wait until after dinner at least.”
I flicked his arm.
He laughed. “No worries, I’ll play it cool. But really, don’t you think you should talk to her about all this?”
I shrugged. “I’m waiting on her timing. I don’t want to push too hard, you know? I’m the one who made the decision to stay away, to ignore phone calls and texts. I’m here now, offering myself back into their family. The ball’s in her court.”
He didn’t say anything, and we turned into Lydia’s driveway.
The sun made its weary descent behind the still-bare maple in front of my sister’s house. I knocked on the door and Lydia opened it, surprising me with what looked like a genuine smile and a “Happy Easter.” I wanted to hug her as we would have done in the past, especially on holidays, but she didn’t offer her arms and I sensed such a gesture wouldn’t be appreciated. I’d settle for the smile and the welcome, however forced it may or may not be. Scents of baked ham and green beans beckoned us into the warmth of the house.
Lydia reached for Brad’s hand as I introduced them. I tried to brush off the tension thick in the air. Had Lydia noticed the card missing from her Bible?
“Nice to see you again.” Brad smiled warmly. A part of me admired that he refused to be dishonest for even a second. Another part of me could have strangled him for adding the word again to his greeting.
Joel sauntered over, stuck his hand out to Brad in a very grown-up manner. “Hey. Heard you build things.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels, much as I’d seen Roger do in the past.
“I sure do. You a builder too?”
He bobbed his head, his mouth pressed in a serious line. “Legos mostly. But I helped Dad build a shed last summer. We finished it in one week.”
Brad whistled. “That’s some pretty serious building. I’d love to see it.”
Without taking his hands out of his pockets, Joel jerked his head toward the backyard. “Come on. Dad’s out there now.”
“Grab your coat, young man. It’s not spring yet, despite what the calendar says.” Lydia closed the door behind me and rolled her eyes. “I caught him out there after church in a T-shirt.”
I placed the marshmallow salad into Lydia’s waiting hands and shed my own coat, hanging it on the rack in the foyer.
Lydia started to the kitchen. “I’m just finishing up the sweet potato and green bean casseroles.”
I placed a gentle hand on her elbow. “Thank you. For inviting me—us—today.”
Lydia smiled but pulled away slightly from my touch. “We’re glad to have you.”
I ignored her likely unintentional move from me and concentrated instead on her genuine tone. I wanted to ask her if she was thinking the same thing I was when we were in church this morning. That new beginnings were always possible. That maybe God could help us repair our broken relationship. Wouldn’t that be small beans compared to bursting forth from a sealed grave?
But I didn’t want to scare her.
“Brad seems nice.” She put the marshmallow salad in a fridge full of cheesecakes and pies.
“He is.” I stood at the corner of the kitchen island. Remembered how Brad encouraged me to be straight with Lydia. Honest. “He’s the guy who gave me the ring the day of the bombing.”
She poured milk into a glass casserole dish and whisked it together with the cream of mushroom soup. Her gaze flicked to me, and I thought I saw something in it. Recognition? Guilt? “No way.”
“Yeah, he said he saw—”
“You know what?” The interruption, perfectly timed, couldn’t have been more clear. She didn’t want to talk. Not about the day of the bombing, not about Brad’s card, and probably not about breaking down that wall between us. “Grace is upstairs. She’s been up there awhile. Do you mind checking on her?”
If it hadn’t been an excuse to get me out of the kitchen and away from her, I would have taken her trusting me with a small task that involved Grace as a step forward in our healing—a stone removed from the barrier before us.
I looked at her back, her body shaking slightly with the furious whisking of milk and mushroom soup. “Sure . . . I’ll head up there.”
I shook off the feeling of defeat and jogged up the stairs, the muscles of my thighs protesting and feeling every foot of the four-mile run I’d completed early that morning. While it was beyond hard to lift my head off the pillow, swig down some juice, pull on my running clothes, and push myself out into the cold weather, my waistline—and my overall demeanor—was thanking me. How had I gone so long without this fuel?
I thought of Brad, of our discovery the week before, of our evenings together the past several days. Instead of trying to find further pieces of the story of the ring, we’d simply enjoyed the find. We’d watched the Red Sox take on the Phillies, we visited the Boston Marathon exhibit at Faneuil Hall Marketplace, cuddled on my couch watching Rocky movies, played wall ball with my landlord’s daughter, Emilia, and made up our own stories of how Liberty came into possession of the ring—a ring that was important enough to her family that it was left to the sons and daughters of nine generations.
I didn’t voice the thought, but I wanted a spectacular story for the ring. I think Brad did too. It was li
kely the reason we weren’t rushing to find any more answers right away.
I did know one thing. Somewhere in the past few weeks, I’d started living again. It was akin to flying, and I couldn’t get enough of it.
I took a right down the hall, knocked on Grace’s half-open door.
“Come in.”
I peered around her door. Grace’s little-girl pink walls had been done over in muted shades of green and blue, reminding me of a spring day. Posters of mountains and lakes adorned her wall. A Boston Strong T-shirt hung in a large frame above her desk. Avoiding it, I looked at another poster—a single green tree growing tilted from a bare, hard-rocked cliff, with text underneath: “Winners are committed to hang in there long enough to win.”
I almost missed Grace, lying supine on her bed. Her hair lay wet, soaking the pillow, her eyes closed. She wore flannel shorts. And no prosthetic.
I tried not to stare at the stump of her leg, about three inches below the hem of her shorts. It surprised me with its smoothness, pulled tight at the end in one long scar.
I lowered myself on the bed beside her. “You okay, kiddo?”
Her eyelids fluttered open. “Oh, hey. Thought you were Mom.” She smiled. “I took a shower after my run. Sometimes the hot water and exercise swells my leg and it won’t fit into the socket. I just have to wait a bit for the swelling to go down.”
“I—I didn’t realize—”
She squeezed my hand. “It’s okay, Auntie. Really. It happens.”
I didn’t have a clue about half her struggles. And here I was, thinking I was ready for new beginnings. Grace would never get a new beginning. A new limb. Her hurts were forever.
I pressed her hand back. Above her bed was a snapshot of a group of people beside Boston Public Library—near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. I spotted Grace at the front, searched the other faces, recognized a few from news interviews.
“All the amputees, right?”
Grace smiled. “Yeah. We kind of bonded, you know? We encourage each other. Sympathize with the struggles, the bad days.”
While I didn’t want to dwell here, especially on Easter, I had to know. “Will the trial being over bring you closure?”
It was a question I’d been asked myself. I still didn’t have an answer, but I couldn’t help wondering what Grace’s would be. She drew in a breath and her stomach rose. “A lot of those people in the picture with me . . . they think it will. A lot of them are for the death penalty, though not all of them.”
She quieted.
“What do you think, Grace?”
She swallowed, took her hand from mine to clasp hers together. “I think evil’s in the world. And one trial, like, isn’t going to change that. But I think justice needs to be served. Death . . . I’m not so certain. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for sending anyone to their death, even someone others may consider the worst of sinners.”
She lifted her residual limb up, then lowered it in what I assumed was a sort of physical therapy exercise she could probably do in her sleep. “You know the apostle Paul? He called himself the worst of sinners. He persecuted people. Imprisoned a lot of Christians, condoned their murders, even. It was pure evil. And to save him, he only looked to one person.”
“Christ,” I whispered.
Grace smiled, her straight teeth perfect against her flawless skin. “A guilty charge or the death penalty isn’t enough to wipe out the evil done on that day two years ago. I get that the courts have to do their job—that’s a good thing. And who knows, maybe it will provide some closure. All I know is for me, the healing didn’t begin until I let God take over.” She sat up, reached for her prosthetic cover, and slipped it over her limb.
I didn’t want to go downstairs. I wanted to mull over Grace’s words, ask her more questions, soak up her peace. But she was already rolling the liner of her regular prosthesis over her leg, and Lydia called to us that dinner was ready.
“Hey, kiddo?”
She looked up from squirting a mixture labeled rubbing alcohol/water into her prosthesis.
“Thank you. For accepting me back into the family. For forgiving me.”
She pushed me gently. “Auntie, you’re crying. Stop it. Of course you’re a part of our family. That didn’t go away just because you did.” She stood and pushed her residual limb into the socket, creating a whooshing sound of air. “Don’t worry. Mom will get there. I only had to forgive you for myself. I think . . . when you’re a mother, it’s different, you know. Like Mom feels if she forgives you, she’s saying it’s okay that you hurt me—hurt our family.”
I nodded, ordered the truth of the words not to bring more tears to my eyes.
“I could, like, talk to her for you.”
I shook my head. “Your mom and I need to tear down our own walls. You’ve already done more than you know, Grace.”
We started downstairs. “She’ll come around. You’ll see.”
MAY 1774
“You deaf and dumb? I said step away from her.” Hugh’s voice was hard. I scarce recognized it.
Alexander dropped my hand and backed away from me. I moved my mouth to try and assure Hugh that Alexander had meant no harm, but no words came out. What could I say to explain why he was here? Why he was in such close proximity to me? His marriage proposal would sound more absurd coming from me as an explanation than it had coming from Alexander himself.
Hugh came closer, his breaths heavy beneath a sweat-drenched shirt, the pistol still aimed at Alexander.
“I’m well, Hugh. No harm is done.”
He ignored me. “If I see you on this property again, I will shoot you without warning. Is that understood?”
Any other British officer would stand up to a colonist with a pitiful pistol, tell him that he was threatening the king himself, that he stood to go to the town gallows that very night. And how would he like to hang beside the graves of suicides, alongside other hopeless riffraff just like him? But Alexander nodded, looked at me one last time—which I sensed further enraged Hugh—turned, and walked around the house and out of the backyard.
Hugh’s rapid breathing didn’t cease, his eyes wild with unfettered fury. He lowered the pistol.
Upstairs, James called for me.
“You knew him.”
It wasn’t a question.
The sun dipped behind a cloud, and I scooped up Graham’s breeches—the pair Alexander had taken from me not minutes before—and went back to clipping them to the line. “Yes.” I tried to sound nonchalant. As if that were that, and now it was time to tend to my laundry.
James called for me again. I brushed my hands against my skirt, realized my left hand still held tight to the ring.
“Your dress. It’s ripped. Did he—”
“No, Hugh! No. I simply tore it.”
He grasped my arms, the muscles in his fingers pinning me tighter than the tension in the clothesline. “So help me, Liberty Caldwell. Tell me the truth now, or I will round up the militia and drive that man out of town on account of him accosting you.”
I shook off his hands, feeling as if I were a child being scolded by her father. “He did not accost me, and that is the truth of it.”
Hugh rubbed the muscles in the back of his neck. My heart went out to him with the single gesture. He was working hard building a home for us. Working hard to provide for James and me. He acted this way out of love. Should I blame him? Yet Alexander meant no harm.
I reached my hand out to Hugh, let my fingers flutter just enough to graze the hair plastered to his skin. “I am well, darling. Please do not fret.”
“Was that James’s father?” He whispered the words, bound in tangible fear.
Again, James called to me.
I forced out an awkward laugh. “Don’t be foolish.” Yet there was nothing so very foolish about it. “Now excuse me; I must go see to my son.” Something about how my words came out sounded divisive. My son. As if in a few short weeks Hugh wouldn’t offer up paternity to James out of l
ove for me, as if he didn’t love my son already.
Nevertheless, I didn’t rescind them. I needed distance between us, or Hugh would push me for answers I couldn’t give.
I scurried up the stairs to James, thankful Hugh didn’t follow. When I reached my son, I pulled him close, buried my face in his precious brown locks, so like my brother’s, and inhaled the scent of lye soap that clung to his clean clothes.
I thought of my brother while holding his namesake. “I am so sorry, James,” I whispered.
If I was to honor my brother, if I was to honor my husband-to-be, I could not see Alexander this night. Or ever again.
My son stayed still beneath my affections and played with my mud-crusted fingers until he pried out the ring, holding it in chubby fingers.
It was just as bright as a newly minted shilling. I could still remember it on Alexander’s hand the night he read me The Odyssey.
I let the fact sink in that Captain Philips was an ocean away, that he would likely never come back to the colonies, that James and I were free of him forever.
In my thoughts, I replayed Alexander’s sincere marriage proposal and tried to convince myself that I should risk meeting him tonight, at the very least to thank him for seeking me out, to thank him for his offer of protection. To return the ring.
Of course, I would never be able to share all of this with Hugh. And I would never be able to forgive myself for letting Alexander leave without a proper farewell.
From where he sat on my lap, James dropped the ring. It clattered to the wood planks of the floor where it spun around in circles and finally settled, its golden brilliance gleaming from where the sun shone through the window.
And the guilt returned. For no matter which decisions I made, the fact remained—Hugh could never know of my involvement in Boston at the officers’ house. He could never share in my shame. He could never know how I had fallen in love with one of the king’s Regulars.
Bored on my lap, James slid to the floor, then stuck his bottom up in the air to push himself to a walking position. He lifted the ring and studied it, as if trying to figure out its sordid history. He held it out to me. “What’s this, Mama? What’s this?”
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