Claire traced the heart and slid her fingers across the dates they’d renewed their anniversary, sad to forget they had carved this testament to the bond between them, and yet in awe of it, of the years that they had passed together. She tried to remember each of those years, to recall the exact moment in each that David had taken out his pocketknife and carved the date into the bark. But as she thought, a single acorn toppled from a tree branch above and landed resolutely in Claire’s lap. She opened her eyes to the small nut, brown and with a thin crack running up its side, and it reminded her immediately of Jake. She put a hand to her throat, feeling for the pendant that wasn’t there.
Even with her heart full of memories of David, Claire still had room to ache for Jake. His memories were fresher and more colorful than the ones of her past—the way her heart beat through her chest when Jake put his leg against hers in the coffee shop, the tear that trickled down his cheek during the ballet, the way his eyes lit up every time he saw her. It was the kind of love that lifted her off her feet and made her forget the world. But it was a new and untested kind of love—the kind that could end almost as suddenly as it began. Perfect, painless, and passing.
But loving David wasn’t faultless either. It was an old love, strengthened by a bond that wouldn’t be broken easily, but it was messy and riddled with complication and compromise. It was a changed kind of emotion—one that had always been but had only recently transformed into something different, something familiar, and still unexplored. That made it somehow scarier, like there was more potential but with more risk. Loving David felt like a gamble—a lifetime of memories against a future of the kind of love she wouldn’t find anywhere else.
The acorn in her hand, Claire realized that no matter how many times you carved your name in a tree, or how perfect you pretended love could be, it wasn’t perfect. It was complicated and full of choices, of hurt and mending broken pieces and moving on. In fact, being in love might have been the hardest thing Claire had ever done.
Chapter 21
She returned to the farmhouse to wash up for dinner just as the sun was beginning its descent into the horizon. Her day spent in the forest had been a wonderful romp through the past, and neither Tabitha nor Mark meddled with questions, which was just as well because those memories were not ones she wished to share.
“Tabitha,” Claire asked as she stood washing dinner dishes with Tabitha. She hoped her question wouldn’t sound too strange. “How did you know that you were making the right choice with Mark?”
She hadn’t meant to ask it that way, but she just couldn’t find any other words to ask the same question. Claire had begun to think that maybe love wasn’t perfect, after all. And, more curious, was that maybe it was somehow better that way.
“Oh, I don’t think it was much of a choice really,” Tabitha laughed. The older woman smiled in the glow of the kitchen light. “I just couldn’t imagine anyone else to spend my life with. It was as Shakespeare wrote, ‘I would not wish any companion in the world but you’.”
Claire continued to dry as she reflected on Tabitha’s answer. Companionship wasn’t a word she had associated with love before—passion and romance, sure, but not something as unassuming as friendship. Thinking of love in simpler terms seemed to peel away the mystery of it somehow, make it less overwhelming.
“Do you still feel like…like he’s the only one in the world you want to be with? Even after all these years?” She snuck a shy look over at Tabitha, who was rinsing a salad plate under the running water, using her fingers to rub away a stain on the china. Mark rustled in the living room, tending the logs smoldering in the fireplace. A warm glow crept around the corner, tracing the kitchen doorway in a deep orange frame.
“Every day. Although some days are better than others, but that’s the way life goes, I suppose.”
Tabitha’s smile was reassuring, but Claire still felt anxious. Lurking inside her thoughts was the fear of regret. She didn’t know if she would ever be able to forgive herself for letting her heart choose, and then having it turn out wrong. Losing David or Jake would be devastating on its own, but losing them both was a fate she didn't think she could survive.
“But when you met Mark, how did you know you loved him, really loved him?” She felt a little silly as she searched for the right words. Describing the way love felt was almost like describing the sunset. Poets had tried for years to put it on paper, but never got it quite right. It was a feeling almost too big for words. “Did your heart flutter and did you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, the way they say love is supposed to feel?”
“In the beginning, sure, but it’s been over thirty years now since we married.” Tabitha sighed. “Thirty years,” she repeated out loud. And then, as if she was resisting the words waiting in her mouth and finally gave in, she twisted the faucet off abruptly and turned to face Claire. It was an almost unimaginable thing for Tabitha to scoff, but she did, looking at Claire severely as she wiped her wet hands on her housedress. The look on her face was unfamiliar but made Claire nervous and excited, eager for the wisdom that it was obvious wouldn’t come lightly.
“Claire, love isn’t just about butterflies and roses, no matter how much we wish it were. Love is about day-in, day-out, about filling the years with smiles and laughter, tears and heartache. It’s about going through the ups-and-downs of life together, making the choice to love each other every day no matter what happens, and to know that whenever you need someone, the person you’ve chosen to spend your life with will be there, right by your side. You’ve got to let go of this idea of love being perfect all the time, sweetheart. That’s just not how life works.”
It was a long speech for Tabitha, and one more blunt than Claire had ever heard. It was as if Tabitha’s woman’s heart could feel the heaviness in Claire. And, even though it surprised Claire, she was grateful for it, and felt a sense of relief that Tabitha’s wisdom confirmed the new curiosity Claire had just begun to unravel about the actualities of love.
“I just always imagined love being bigger, or something.”
Tabitha took Claire’s hands. “Love is big, Claire honey. It is a beautiful thing, but it is also full of challenges. You have to be sure that the person you give your heart to is the one you’re ready to face those challenges with. Real, lasting love has to have foundation, something to keep it strong, not just ideas of what you want it to be.”
“But, what does it feel like,” Claire choked out, fighting to hold back tears. She was starting to feel like she did nothing but cry. Even the kind of love Tabitha was describing had to feel like something. “How does it feel to be ‘in love’?
“That’s an easy one, sweetheart.” Tabitha gave her a wide smile. “It feels like home.”
Back under the quilted blankets of her canopied bed, Claire lay awake as night fell, reflecting on what Tabitha had said long after the candle lit at her bedside had snuffed itself out in its own wax.
It would be easy to grow old with David, to spend every day riding the currents of life with him. After all, in many ways she already had. Their love certainly had the foundation to last a lifetime. But if love was really as simple as feeling at home with someone, then her heart was playing cruel games in how it yearned for magic and romance. And that was what she had found in Jake—the kind of beautiful vision of everything she had imagined love would—could—be. In his arms, she didn’t care if it was forever or not, because she was consumed just by the way her heart felt beating beside his, the pure and innocent love cultivated between them. But, as wonderful as Jake felt, he still didn’t feel like home. That was all David.
When she finally fell into a troubled sleep hours later, Claire dreamed that in a dark room with heavy air, she quarreled with a reflection of herself while both Jake and David slowly disappeared, waiting for her to make up her mind. She woke at midnight in a cold sweat and plunged one hand over the side of the bed, searching for David’s waiting hand the same way she might have done years ago. Her other hand reached o
ut across the empty space of bed beside her for Jake’s sleeping profile, wanting to feel his reassuring warmth next to her. Finding nothing but emptiness from either side, Claire’s dream felt fearfully prophetic and she passed the rest of the night sobbing, worried that the dream was a terrible premonition slowly coming true.
Chapter 22
The early Tuesday dawn chased away nighttime’s shadow and gave Claire a fresh start when opened her eyes to the sunlight slipping through the slanted blinds of her bedroom. Putting her goodbyes behind her, Claire boarded her plane back to New York with renewed spirits. She was ready, finally, to begin the new chapter of her life waiting on the other side of her flight. From inside her chest, her heart beat levelly, rebuilt with a new sense of courage that it hadn’t had before. Perhaps for the first time in her life Claire felt whole, and as the plane soared across the sky, she smiled out of the window, watching the patchwork quilt of green Texas countryside disappear beneath layers of swirling clouds.
With Christmas still over a month away, Tabitha had given Claire her gift early, watching with excitement as she opened it after years of mailed-in holidays. A skilled seamstress, Tabitha had fashioned dozens of beautiful garments for Claire over the years, but the ivory wool holiday dress was one of the most stunning pieces Claire had ever received. The dress was exquisite, with cap sleeves and a princess bodice above a dipped waistband and flared skirt. The bateau neckline was edged with black lace, grosgrain bows, and beads, trimmed from shoulder to shoulder like a rumpled shadow only barely stitched on the breast of a wedding dress.
Claire couldn’t have imagined anything more fitting to wear to meet Jake at the clock tower that morning—even it was only to say goodbye.
The Con Edison clock stood, towering story after story above her, like a cold gray mountain. Her eyes scanned the bustling crowd for the familiar sight of Jake as if she were searching for color inside an old black and white movie, hoping that the emerald sheen of his eyes would sparkle at her like two bright beacons through the monochrome crowd. Several times, she thought she saw him peering out at her from inside a swirling torrent of strangers, but each time she moved to go to him he was lost, his sandy hair winking in and out of view like a desert mirage.
Combing through the crowd for the boy with the acorn tattoo, Claire’s heart, once eager to catch a hint of his Lost Boy smile in the blank faces of strangers who passed her by, began to sink. Lonely minutes ticked by while her search went from nervous anticipation to uneasiness, culminating with a frantic sort of disbelief before falling off to tones of dismay. When the clock tower struck, clanging two solid, finishing notes in some kind of palpable ending and she still hadn’t found him, a cold realization pierced her thoughts. He wasn’t coming for her.
Claire sat alone on empty bench, confused and wondering why he hadn’t come, and if this had all been some sort of strange dream. Perhaps she had imagined everything and Jake had never really existed at all. Without anything solid, not a photograph or letter, or even the acorn pendant to prove he’d ever really been there, she couldn’t be sure. Maybe he had been nothing more than a beautiful daydream, something as intangible and evanescent as their love itself. Or, perhaps it was a plainer truth than that—he’d never really loved her after all, but had only been captivated by the idea of love as a great adventure and realized, ultimately, that it was just as ill-fated as her own faulty ideas of what love was supposed to be. Maybe he had somehow known that their meeting at the clock would be an end and not a beginning, and had simply wanted to spare himself the heartache, since today it was his heart that would be broken, not hers.
Regardless, she would never know his reasons, and Jake’s abandonment scratched the surface of Claire’s freshly reknit heart. She hadn’t looked forward to the pain of letting him go, but selfishly she had still hoped for one more moment with him, one last glimpse of his sheepish grin that she could etch into her memory as a final token of their time together. It was an unexpected and frustratingly ironic consequence of love, not to be able ever to really say goodbye, knowing that a small part of it persisted indefinitely, for better or worse. It made their ending bittersweet. And with that understanding, she gathered up every last detail of their romance she could remember, and tucked it all away safely inside herself.
“Goodbye, Jake,” she whispered to no one.
To her surprise, a voice replied from behind her, though not the one she had expected. Its words clipped coldly against her ears. “‘Goodbye’ isn’t the word I would expect a bride to say, Ms. Baker.”
Chapter 23
David sat gruffly beside her on the bench, bending his body so that his elbows rested on his knees. He clasped his hands together in his lap, hooking his fingers together in tense half-moons. His black scarf whipped in the wind around him like a swarm of angry bees. And even with his jaw set in restrained rage, he was wonderful and rugged. The rough shadow he’d shaved away a few days ago stretched back across his face in that dangerous way that Claire associated with things warmer than the icy anger in his voice.
“I hoped I wouldn’t find you here, Claire.”
Claire scrambled to redirect her unfinished thoughts away from the loss of Jake and at the same time push away the shock that David was suddenly sitting beside her, here in New York, at the clock tower, and that he’d known she was here to meet Jake. Whatever his reasons, he was here, and somehow, though she had come to break one man’s heart, it was obvious she had accidentally broken the other’s instead.
“I came to say goodbye, David, not to marry him.”
David looked at her then, his eyes filled with kind of deep sorrow that struggled under the heavy weight of despair. He was again the somber-eyed, brooding boy of her childhood, consumed with an incurable melancholy she’d only just begun to understand had less to do with losing and more with being lost. But even through that sadness, there was something else circling in eyes—a very adult resentment at being hurt, and it was directed straight at her.
He sneered at her, gritting his teeth. “Oh, did you, Claire? You mean to tell me that you showed up here, dressed in white, to tell him ‘goodbye’? Don’t take me for a fool.”
Claire blinked at him, surprised by his fierce reaction. Part of her wanted to snap back at him, tell him that the betrayal he felt was a result of his own overbearingness for following her here, whatever his intentions were, but she swallowed her frustration. How and why he got here and what he thought he knew were semantics that they could address later. Instead, she nodded reassuringly and reached across to slide her hand inside the cup of his. He jerked away, rejecting her attempts to comfort him. It hurt more than she wanted to let on, having him pull away from her, especially now.
“Yes,” she tried again, this time more forcefully. “I did. And then he wasn’t here, and I was just thinking about how I was okay with that. I have you, and what we have is bigger than anything I could have had with anyone else. My heart belongs to you, David. It always has.”
She watched him soften as her words soaked into him, and just when she thought he might turn to her, he shook his head and moved to stand, flattening his hands on his knees in that way that men do. It was so characteristically David, ready to retreat from her and from whatever emotions he was grappling with in his own heart, again.
Claire gulped back the sting of rejection. A feeling of boldness overtook her and she grabbed his hand. She curled her fingers in the space between his palm and his leg, clinging to him so tightly that her fingernails bit into his skin. He would have to pry her fingers away from his hand if he wanted to walk away from her, and she knew that no matter how upset he was at her, he wouldn’t be that cruel. Even if he did, she would follow him. She was never going to risk losing him again. It was time for her to take charge of her own love story.
“No.” Her voice was firm and unwavering as she locked her gray eyes on him. “Stay.” She forced her hand under his, weaving her small fingers between his larger ones so that he held her hand in a reluct
ant grip.
David stared baffled at her through a face still hard and unreadable.
“Do you trust me?” she asked.
“What kind of question is that, Claire?” The coldness in David’s voice had melted just a little, his surprise making it inch closer to the rich timber of his usual tone. He looked at her curiously, like her was finally hearing her through the noise of his own pain. “Of course I trust you.”
Claire kept her eyes focused on David’s, imploring them to believe in her, and in them. “I love you.”
Finally, when she had stared at him so long that her eyes began to burn for want of blinking, David’s hand relaxed around hers, rounding around her fingers so that he held her hand gently in his. “I love you too.”
His lips curled into an uneven smile then, and Claire returned his smile with hers.
The tension between them calmed, David let out a soft, relieved laugh, pulling Claire into him as he relaxed back against the bench. He traded her hand to wrap his arm around her shoulders, tucking her into the bend of his arm as he held her tightly against him. “I’m sorry, Claire. My God, I thought I lost you,” he admitted. “I’ve never felt something so absolutely terrible. It felt like my entire body had just suddenly turned into dust and I was crumbling from the inside out, just…destroyed.”
Claire peered up at him sidewise, flattered and saddened at the same time, and gave him a small smile. “Never. You’ll never lose me.” And then, unable to hold back her curiosity any longer, “How did you even know to be here?”
An amused look slid across David’s face. “Nikole, of course. I think she’s put a bounty on both mine and Mr. Holland’s heads.”
The Acorn Tattoo: The Neverland Series Part 1 Anniversary Edition Page 12
