A Katherine Reay Collection

by Katherine Reay

  “Right.” James walked on. “Everything else, honestly, is overwhelming—not the facts, the sheer quantity. No wonder the woman fainted. Has she drawn breath since you two landed in London?”

  “She’s very sick, James. She told you that too, didn’t she?”

  James studied the shop signs, as if refusing to look at Lucy or directly face her question. “She did, and that was my other takeaway.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too.”

  James pulled the door open. A puff of warm air, full of grains, hops, yeast, and fish, welcomed them. “Perfect.” He sighed.

  Lucy inhaled in agreement. There was something so comforting, so elemental, about the atmosphere. The Inn was crowded with patrons and decorated with beer placards and awards lining the walls. Lucy read a few food reviews pinned among them. “Bette must have some serious standards. These reviews are great. The fish and chips seem to be their crowning glory.”

  “Isn’t it every pub’s crowning glory?”

  “You’re stereotyping,” Lucy joked. “Some favor bangers and mash.”

  “You order that then and I’ll get the fish and chips.”

  In the end, they both ordered the fish and chips. There was no talk of sharing and the absence felt like a chasm between them. And in that empty space all their words seemed to fall—for there was nothing to say. Lucy thought to ask a question. She decided against it. She opened her mouth to make a comment, then closed it when she realized how silly it would sound. She soon quit trying to bridge it at all.

  Their food arrived and still they sat. Lucy finally couldn’t stand it and tipped her half-pint of ale toward James. “Your grandmother told me they call these ‘bedwetters.’ I have no idea if that’s true, but it’s a great name.”

  James swirled his glass. “You want to know what I don’t get?”

  “Please,” Lucy exclaimed then checked herself.

  “She’s acting like this ‘Summer of Love’ was the defining moment of her life. It was a summer, big deal. Relationships end. You don’t hang on for sixty-five years.”

  Lucy wanted to recant her “please,” deciding that she would rather not know what James was thinking after all. She closed her eyes to imagine if James could be right. Could a feeling, unrequited, last for so long?

  Like a movie reel, scenes played before her and she saw James the first day they met and a flash of every moment after. She saw the gleam in Dillon’s eyes as Bette raced to greet their car. That spark was real and she doubted time diminished it.

  She opened her eyes. “I think one could. Even if the relationship ends, some are that defining. Don’t you believe in soul mates? Love at first sight?”

  She watched James ponder the question over one fry, two fries . . .

  “One person you’re destined to meet and love? No.”

  Lucy leaned back in her chair and let her fantasies go. Cathy slipped away from the window. Heathcliff called in vain. Jane stepped away from the tree and Rochester paid her passage to Ireland, perhaps he even married Blanche Ingram. Dillon and Bette drifted apart as he returned to London, deciding that she was one of and not the one, as Bette struggled alone at the inn. And James still walked away from the gallery that last evening, and even though he was right here, right now, he never returned.

  James continued, “I grew up seven miles from my grandparents’ house, Lucy. I was over there after school and stayed with them on weekends. Grams loved Gramps as much as he loved her. So, while I get revisiting one’s youth, especially now, I’m not going to get too undone over it and I’m not going to believe that your grandfather was her one true love.” James dunked his fish in the tartar sauce with such force it broke apart.

  He dug out the pieces with his fork. “I don’t think she was trying to hurt you. But negating the past sixty-five years of her life? And our entire family with it?” His eyes trailed over her shoulder and into the past. “It’s selfish.”

  “She’s changing, James. I think it’s surprising her as much as it is you. She isn’t trying to be selfish, just the opposite; she’s trying to let you in.”

  “People don’t change, remember?” James poked his fork at her.

  “I wish you’d stop saying that. It’s not true.” Lucy’s conviction startled her. She quickly searched for something, anything, to back her claim. “Look at the stories. Jane and Edward? Huge change for both of them. Catherine and Henry from Northanger Abbey? Both grew up. Admittedly she had more growing to do. Heathcliff and Cathy? Okay, bad example. That one kinda makes your point. But John Thornton and Margaret Hale? Huge divisions and huge changes in understanding . . . Writers wouldn’t write about change and true love unless they were real, and if they did, we wouldn’t read the stories because we’d know they were writing lies.”

  She heard a soft chuckle. “What?”

  “There you go, one full run-on sentence, trying to vindicate my grandmother’s choices with fiction.”

  “I don’t have any real-world examples and you’re making me nervous.”

  James’s eyes softened at her admission. “Only because I’m right. To twist a line from another book—all your examples are from stories written by women. Of course they make sense to you.”

  “You’re completely ruining Jane Austen and deliberately missing my point!”

  James threw out the same self-satisfied grin Helen had recently used.

  “You are so like her,” she spat out. His eyes immediately clouded and she regretted her words.

  “I know,” he whispered back. “That’s why I don’t like being told she should’ve taken another road.”

  “Then you haven’t been listening, because I know she didn’t say that. Never once has she said that she and Ollie were any good together or that she wished it had turned out differently. Quite honestly, he sounds dreadful. The only thing she says is that when she walked away from him, she lost some vital, alive part of her personality that she’s withheld from you all.”

  James’s eyes widened.

  “What now?”

  “I hadn’t thought about that.” He chuckled without a trace of humor. “She rewrote your family history too, didn’t she?”

  “That’s beneath you.”

  James reached across the table and grabbed Lucy’s hand. “I didn’t mean it like that. I promise you. It was thoughtless. I only meant that I feel hurt about my grandfather, my family—almost betrayed—and you must feel the same. That’s all. I’m so sorry.”

  “Let’s get our check and go.”

  James reached for the bill and paid. She avoided any eye contact with him and simply got up and left the restaurant.

  He was beside her within half a block. “Sincerely, Lucy, I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “Please, let’s not talk about it anymore . . .” She stopped. “No. I’ll say one thing. Every story I told you about my family, while I may have embellished here and there, they were true as far as I knew them. Now I know they were probably all lies. Knowing my dad, I figured some might have been, but now it’s so much worse. There’s a whole new generation of bad in my family tree. Okay? And that was my takeaway—that maybe there are things that just are and you can’t change them.”

  “That makes no sense,” James countered. “You just told me people can change. You even cited literature and now you’re switching sides?”

  “Don’t be such a lawyer, James.”

  “Witty retort.” He twisted, facing back down the hill. “Did you know, on the flight over, I read that the Parsonage was considered healthy because it was at the top of the street and all the sewage drained downward?” He glanced to Lucy, who refused to engage. “But considering how young they all died, I’m thinking ‘healthy’ is a relative term.”

  Lucy cracked a smile and leapt up the parsonage steps. “I know what you’re doing and I thank you for that, but . . .” She pressed her lips together as if stopping herself from qualifying her statement. Then she met his eyes. “Do you want to come in? Or do w
e part ways now?”

  James, two steps below, regarded her at eye-level and from only a few inches away. “I feel like we should talk.”

  Lucy backed up the last step and pointed to the door. “I can’t . . . I am going to walk in this door and visit the place that produced some of my favorite books in the whole world and you aren’t going to ruin it. You in or not?”

  “I’m all in.”

  Lucy tugged open the white wooden door to the Brontë Parsonage Museum. A large Lucite sign within the door described the family and their lives and times in the house from 1820 to 1861. Lucy read every word twice before an older woman welcomed them and offered a tour of the house. Lucy could hear footsteps above and all around.

  “We’d rather just wander, if we may.” James spoke before Lucy could. “Is that good with you?”

  Lucy nodded and they crossed the front hall into the dining room. She could feel a different vibration in the floor now—the footsteps of three girls, three young women walking round and round the delicate mahogany table. She could almost smell the melting wax and the closed stuffiness of the room as the sisters paced, reading aloud, brainstorming, editing, and creating their stories.

  It was the same table around which, after Emily and Anne’s deaths, Charlotte paced alone. The thought pricked Lucy’s heart. It felt familiar as if she, too, had paced alone for far too long.

  Lucy started talking, not caring if James was listening or not. There were simply things to say. Things she needed to share.

  “My dad always read to me. That’s about all I truly remember about him. Every night and sometimes after school while I ate a snack. After he left I continued. I started reading the Brontës’ books when I was in middle school. Part of me thought it’d bring him back; he’d sense that those moments were going on without him and miss them. It was silly, but I was just a kid.”

  She walked around the table. “He lived through books, through story. That’s partly why I loved our reading time together. Fiction and reality blurred and it felt magical. I could be Cinderella or the mice, or Peter Rabbit and his sisters, or Frog and Toad . . . And that’s all he sends, like you said, those books that pull the strings annually. And I dread each birthday and each book, fearing he’ll either ruin another story by tying it between us or he’s finally forgotten me and won’t send one at all.”

  At the landing, Lucy stopped and turned back to the dining room. “I read that their father, Patrick, would stop here each evening to wind this clock and use the moment to yell a reminder to not stay up too late. It was his ritual, but it was also theirs—that late-night creative time.”

  “That sounds like you.” James raised his eyebrows. “You used to call me when you couldn’t sleep and were bored of reading.”

  “I shouldn’t have woken you. Sorry about that.”

  “I liked it.” James didn’t wait for her to reply, but climbed the stairs to the second floor. There they entered a larger room at the front of the house. It boasted two windows facing the street.

  Lucy read the sign. “Charlotte moved in here after her brother died. Her father gave it to her and he stayed in the back bedroom. She was the breadwinner by then and, I think, he was paying her respect.”

  James squeezed her arm and wandered away alone.

  Lucy stayed. She let her eyes roam the room with its small desk, stiff, straight chair, and bed, and she thought of all the stories penned here. Jane Eyre, a journey of self-realization, passion, and promise . . . Shirley, emotionally distant with more of an eye to social change rather than to the heart . . . Villette, with its pervading sense of isolation and search for one’s place. How could the Brontës, all the sisters, write such characters, write of such change and of such loss, unless they’d felt it, endured it, and suffered through it? With Courage to Endure.

  As Lucy stepped down the stairs, going carefully over each shallow step and turning her feet sideways so as not to slide over the edge, she let the stories drift through her, and as she reached the bottom step, she recalled another statement Charlotte wrote. Human beings never enjoy complete happiness in this world. Again, most likely true.

  Lucy found herself stepping into the Parsonage’s garden. James stood a few feet away, staring at a statue of the three sisters. The small notice stated that the garden remained as it was during the sisters’ lifetime. Well over one hundred years and something could stay the same. Endure.

  James didn’t turn as she came to stand beside him. “It’s not all so black and white, is it?”

  Lucy knew he wasn’t talking about the Parsonage. “I guess not.”

  He meandered across the lawn to an empty bench and sat. He dropped his head into his hands. “She told me a lot more too.” James rested his forearms on his knees.

  “She told me that my dad wanted to be a math teacher and join the Peace Corps, but that she didn’t let him. She told me that she didn’t talk to my mom for the first three years of their marriage because she had wanted my dad to marry some family friend. She told me that she was too hard on her husband and my father, and even me and my sisters when we were children, because she wanted us all to learn responsibility and respect, but that maybe she’d gone too far and there were things she’d forgotten and she was sorry. She . . .”

  Lucy laid her hand on his back and he let his words drift away. After a moment of silence, she asked, “What’d you say?”

  “I asked if the doctor had given her any pain meds.”

  “You didn’t.” Lucy pursed her lips to stop a laugh as she dropped onto the bench next to him.

  The left side of James’s mouth curled up. “I did and her eyes shot daggers. Have you seen when they actually change colors?”

  “Sky to steel and back again. Happens in a heartbeat.”

  “Exactly.” James spun to her. “It took a few minutes and an apology for them to morph back to sky. But what did she expect? I’m not her confessor; I’m her grandson.”

  Lucy realized her hand still rested on his back. She slowly removed it and placed it in her lap. “You should have seen her after we returned the watch. She practically floated down the block and then we went to her favorite restaurant and drank champagne.”

  “Grams?”

  “Grams.” Lucy tilted her head. “Look, I’m not the best judge between truth and fiction, but this is all very real to her and she wants to share it with you. There’s definitely going to be a little bad with all that good because, as you say, it’s not so black and white. But, James?”

  She waited until he sat straight and locked eyes on her. “When she fainted, it was scary. She went ghost white and hit those stairs like a stone. You need to listen to her.”

  James dropped his head back into his hands and didn’t reply. After a minute or two, he flopped back. “I feel I owe you an apology.”

  “Me? Why?”

  “Everything.” James lifted his shoulders then lowered them slowly and purposefully as if knocking all the kinks out or resetting himself. “You’re right and you were before too . . . I didn’t listen back then . . . to you. I’m sorry. I heaped my own issues on you and that wasn’t fair.”

  Lucy reached for something to say and landed on “Thank you?”

  He chuckled at her tone, but only said, “You’re welcome.”

  Chapter 26

  Lucy squirmed in her seat. She and James parted ways amicably after the Parsonage, but as the afternoon progressed, she grew fidgety all over again. He was right; they needed to talk. There was more to say. She kept asking herself why it mattered what he thought—logic told her it didn’t any longer, but her heart beat a quick retort.

  “Here she is.” James escorted Helen into the dining room, looking every bit the dashing grandson and hero.

  Lucy released a long-held breath and pulled out the empty chair next to her. She kissed Helen’s cheek. “You look very well rested.”

  “Thank you. I feel much better.” Helen sat down and James pushed her chair in, then assisted Lucy with hers.

/>   “Grams, are you warm enough?”

  Helen tapped her finger on the table. “You need to stop fussing over me.”

  “And she’s back.” James threw the comment to Dillon and Lucy.

  “I haven’t seen you since James arrived.” Helen reached over and patted Lucy’s hand. “I hope you haven’t been avoiding me.”

  “I didn’t want to interrupt your time with him.” Lucy captured Helen’s hand within her own. “But I shouldn’t have stayed away. I’m sorry.”

  “As long as you’ve been well . . . He’s been reading to me, but he doesn’t do the voices nearly as well as you do.” Helen surveyed the table. “Tell me all that I’ve missed.”

  Lucy started with the previous afternoon and carried Helen into the morning with their redecorating plans and furniture moving; James and Dillon chimed in and took all the credit. Lucy moved on to the lunch at Wuthering Heights Inn; James raved about the fish and chips, the beer plaques covering the walls, and even Helen’s “bedwetters.”

  Lucy then shared about the Parsonage and James gave her the moment, not interrupting once. She retraced her steps and described every detail, inviting Helen into the rooms and into the emotions. “I’ve loved the books, and the characters have always felt so real to me, but now the authors feel more that way too. I touched the table where they ate, my shoes clicked on their same floorboards, Charlotte’s desk looks just like the one I sit at day in and day out in Sid’s shop and polish every Thursday.”

  She leaned closer to Helen. “That quote from Westminster Abbey fits in a way I hadn’t realized either. ‘With Courage to Endure.’ That’s what they gave to their characters, their full experience. And those young women had so much courage. They lived in isolation; they feared living without love; they had responsibility and caretaking for their sick and violent brother; they had to find work . . . Nothing was easy. They all had something to say about their lives, and they said it with strength, through those stories. But I’ve often gotten so absorbed in the drama, I missed the choices behind them, the very real lives behind them.”

  Lucy shifted her focus to James and Dillon and found them slightly dazed. “Okay, fine. It was a nice house.”