by Laura Miller
I run my fingers gently over the glass of the next photo. It’s of a sea of green fields where our names live forever. I can almost hear our voices bouncing off those tall, dirt levees.
I move to the third photo. It’s of an attractive man with strong features and almond skin, who’s wearing a smile that says I love you.
I wish I had seen that back then.
Two bricks down, there’s another frame, and inside of it, another photo. This photo is nothing but black, yet I can still see that old sawdust pile and those weathered wooden boards of his parents’ dock. And I see the moonlight reflecting off the creek water at Hogan’s slab, and I can feel our hearts beating.
And there are others. Photos of me. Photos of him. Photos of all the places we’ve spent time together. All the Polaroids we ever took together—they’re all here.
I move my fingers over each one, barely grazing the glass. And with each one, I briefly close my eyes—remembering the strength of the deep blues and the dark grays and the smell of rain and October and sweet tea. And I remember what it’s like to live in each one—to feel like the ocean at dusk in the summer, peacefully pushing its way to the shore, only to relent and then press on again—never thinking, ever moving.
And then, when I’ve made my way all around the room, I stop. And I look at him.
“Those are for me,” he says, smiling. “But this is for you.” He rests his hand on the wall.
I give him a questioning look, right before he flips a little switch. And instantly, the room grows dark.
We wait there, perfectly still, until gradually, tiny, white stars start springing forth from the walls.
I gasp. “Eben.”
“Alongside the stars, right?” he asks.
I glance at him and then back at the hundreds of tiny white lights all over the walls.
“It’s beautiful,” I say, spinning slowly in a circle, my eyes never leaving the stars.
And then I stop and find him.
“I can’t believe you did this.”
“I didn’t. I found it.”
I search the shades of brown in his eyes—those I can see in the little light that surrounds us.
“Are we on Sheppard’s Hill?”
He takes a breath and then nods. “We are.”
Then he walks toward me and wraps his arms around me.
“Thank you,” I whisper near his ear.
He squeezes me tighter.
“It’s nothing. A very wise man once told me: ‘you find a girl that gives you a piece of her treasure, you hold onto that treasure. And better yet, you hold onto that girl.’ And I guess that’s what I did.”
I let my head rest against his chest. My heart is beating wildly. I can’t stop smiling.
“Savannah Catesby,” he whispers, “I’ve definitely touched things with half of my heart before, but you were never one of them.”
I feel his lips touch my forehead.
“I’m in love with you, Savannah. ...I always have been.”
I press my cheek to his chest and breathe him in. “Salem Ebenezer...I’m so in love with you.” I pull away from his embrace and find his gaze. “And I plan on spending the rest of this life falling in love with you more and more every day.”
He smiles, and I swear my heart does, too. And then he leans away and reaches for another switch. And just like that, a piece of the dome above us starts to peel back.
I’m wonderstruck, just watching that night sky come alive above us.
“Eben...”
He shakes his head slowly back and forth, instantly halting my thought.
“It was here all along. You built it in your mind. I just organized the bricks and the boards. That’s all.”
I look into his eyes, praying he can see how much I love him. And after a moment, he gently takes my hand and leads me up the few little stairs to the raised platform.
“Go ahead.” He eyes the small mouth of the telescope. “It’s another world.”
I move my eye over it, and just like that, I’m floating. I’m floating in a sea of thousands of painted stars in a universe far above ours.
“It’s like I’m there,” I say.
Eben flips another switch, and the roof starts retracting in pieces. I look up and just watch in awe as the night fills the little room.
And after a minute, when the sky is all that’s above us, I notice an open space on the platform, so I go to it and lie back against the wood.
He smiles and then finds a spot next to me.
When he’s settled, I take his hand. His touch feels like a thousand memories hitting my fingertips all at once.
“Why did you do this? All of this?”
He shrugs. “Because I made a promise. I said I would always look up at the sky with you. And even if I couldn’t have you—like this, by my side—at least I’d still have you. I built you into the walls of this place.”
I let his words—as if they’re spoken from his very soul—sink in. They fill my heart and then spill over.
“Until we’re thirty?” I ask.
He laughs softly. “Until we’re one hundred and thirty.”
I smile. And then, the world around us grows still.
“Eben.”
He looks my way.
“If I had never come back, would we be here right now?”
He keeps his gaze in mine for the length of time it takes a bird to spread its wings, and then his focus travels to the black sky.
“I don’t know. I’d like to think that it was meant to be—that someday, we’d eventually cross paths again.”
“But would it have been too late?” I ask.
He breathes in deeply and then breathes out a sigh. “Maybe.”
The weight of his word is almost too heavy to bear.
“But still, nothing would have changed,” he says, looking into my eyes again. “I was always going to love you. No matter if you were right here next to me or all the way up there, sitting beside that man in the moon.” He points to that big, round light in the sky. “I was going to love you; I had already conceded to that much. And I guess, before you came back, I was thinking the cards had already been dealt for us. I figured you had moved on and taken my heart with you. And I guess I had just hoped I’d find a way to love without it. But as it turns out, I think you can only really love with your heart.”
A soft laugh plays on his lips. And the sound of his broken voice slowly begins to lift the anvil from my chest.
“If you try to love with anything else, you won’t get too far; trust me. Your gut is too cautious. Your mind is too rational. But the heart,” he says, “the heart is just crazy enough.”
He smiles wide. And I squeeze his hand. And at the same time, I feel my own heart swell—with love, with joy, with understanding.
“You know, I used to dream about you,” I say.
He brushes a strand of my hair away from my face. His touch is like suddenly remembering a favorite moment you had long forgotten. It warms every part of me.
“When I was gone, when I came back,” I say. “I don’t even know where they came from...or why. But you’d always be holding my hand.”
His smile fades a little, as if he’s in thought.
“I could feel every real sensation of your thumb rubbing the back of my hand. And when I’d wake up, I’d remember the dream—everything about it, including the way you looked at me. It’s as if you looked at me to say: Always.”
“Always,” he repeats, in a soft whisper.
“Mm hmm. And I rested in the fact that no one could touch that—that no one could break it or bend it into something different. It made me feel as if no matter what—no matter where we were or who we were with or what place in time we existed—I would be yours...and you would be mine.”
He squeezes my hand.
“I held onto that, I think,” I say. “Those dreams were so real. I held onto them.”
His head bobs slowly up and down.
“That’s what love doe
s,” he says, looking into my eyes. “It takes over every part of us—even our dreams—if only just to remind us where our heart is, where it will always be.”
He brings my hand to his lips and softly kisses my fingertips. Then he presses our intertwined hands to his heart and returns his gaze to the world above us.
But I keep my eyes on him, as a tear trickles down my cheek.
He was always my moon,
my stars,
my world.
Epilogue One
Savannah
Day 25,551
My name is Savannah Catesby. And this is my love story.
It’s not pretty. And it’s definitely not poetry. But as it turns out, it does have a happy ending.
I married Salem Ebenezer on a warm day in September. The maples were just beginning to turn. The smell of dried leaves and sycamore filled the air. And I looked into his beautiful, sandy eyes, and I said: “I do.” And he said: “Always.”
That was nearly fifty years ago to date.
A lot of life is lived in fifty years. And then again, fifty years feels like a blink of an eye.
Some days, I just stare into our Polaroids on the wall in our star tower, and I swear that they were taken just yesterday. I swear, just yesterday, Eben and I were under those stairs in junior high, talking and dreaming. And just last night, I swear, our backs were pressed against that concrete at Hogan’s slab. I can even feel the heat from the rock seeping into my bare skin. But mostly, I just feel the way his thumb caressed the back of my sun-tanned hand.
Those were our Polaroid years. Those were the years we didn’t think much beyond the way the afternoon sun felt on our faces or how the cool creek water stung every inch of our skin. And that’s precisely why I love them.
But then those Polaroid years melted into something even more beautiful, I think. They melted into a life we called ours.
Eben and I had three children: two boys, one girl. One of the boys is now running Ebenezer Lumber. All of our children are married and happy, and now they have children of their own—our grandchildren.
And then again, some things never change. Eben never sold his old truck. In fact, it still runs today. And every time I look at it, I feel that old woven fabric and vinyl sticking to my skin and the wind from the scoop in my hair. And it’s funny, but I can still feel the way my body swayed at every hill and turn, as we wore out a path from his house to mine.
And to this day, there’s a key that hangs around Eben’s neck. I made a copy and gave his back to him the day we wed. It reminds us of being young. And it reminds us of his grandpa, my Uncle Lester and Olivia. But most of all, it reminds us that sometimes we need to stop and remember where our hearts are—where they’ve always been, where they’ll always be.
And yet, when the night is at rest and the darkness is silent, I still just can’t help but think sometimes how, fifty years ago, we almost missed out on love.
But of course, love would never allow that. See, it never leaves us. We just have to choose it.
And on that cool, February day, at the place where we first began, we took back our story—we chose love.
Because I think, deep down, we both decided, somewhere along the line, to throw out all the truths we ever learned about life, except one:
Sometimes the hearts we steal are not the hearts we were ever meant to keep.
But then, sometimes...they are.
Epilogue Two
Salem
Day 28,105
People say birds are a bad omen.
They’re wrong.
My name is Salem Ebenezer. But as you know, you can call me Eben.
I fell in love with Savannah Elise Catesby a long time ago. I can’t exactly tell you if it was on Day One or Day 4,592. But I can tell you that on that very first day I saw her at that little creek that crawled right through the center of our little hometown, she stole my heart.
And I’ve never once asked for it back.
But then again, the mind gets foggy over time. And the things you thought you’d never lose sight of, somehow, you do. Because one day, I forgot she had my heart, and I almost lost her for it.
See, on that day I was asking her to choose, I had forgotten something. I had forgotten that I had already made my choice long before she ever had a chance to say a word. And that’s all that really mattered. Because no matter what she said or didn’t say, I loved her. I loved Savannah Catesby. That was my answer. That was the story I would forever tell; that was the dream I would forever live in. I would love her. I would love her with every breath I took—until my last.
So, yes, while she didn’t choose me that day, I sure as hell chose her.
And I still chose her every day after that.
I chose her every morning before the sun came up and the air was cool and I found her under the covers and I pressed my skin to hers.
I chose her every afternoon in those moments where my mind would drift back to the days when her hair was short and our adventures were long.
I chose her every evening when the sun was tiptoeing on that orange horizon and she was in my arms, telling me about her day.
And every night, when we were climbing the stairs in our little home, next to our little star tower on Sheppard’s Hill, I chose her.
And I can’t tell you how my life would have turned out had she not come home. I only know that my heart would have always been with her.
I’m eighty-two today. I’m standing with a cane in a field next to a little, stone church. I’m not alone. Although some might say I am, I’m not.
Vannah’s here. She’s in my heart.
A lot of people came up to me yesterday and gave me their sympathies and reminded me that we had fifty-seven good years together. I always corrected them and said: We had seventy-seven. We had seventy-seven good years together.
Seventy-seven years. The number makes it seem as though it was enough. But it wasn’t.
“Vannah...” My voice catches, and I start again. “Vannah, it hasn’t even been a day, and I’ve already forgotten how I like my toast. I didn’t even realize, until this morning, that you always made it for me. And there are other things, too. I’ve forgotten if I take two sugars or one; you always knew. I’ve even forgotten how I filled my days because for the last day, I’ve only been doing what you always enjoyed doing: I’ve fed your hummingbirds; I’ve watched the cooking channel; and I’ve organized your gardening magazines.
But there are some things I haven’t forgotten. I haven’t forgotten which chair is yours; it’s pushed under the table. I stared at it for a long time this morning, pretending you were just at your sister’s for breakfast. And I haven’t forgotten what side of the porch swing was your favorite—the right. You said it was because you could see the kids coming down the road first and you could jump up and get supper on the table. But I knew better. You liked the right side because from that side, you could see my old truck. I would catch you smiling at it every once in a while. I know you missed being young in that old vinyl just as much as I do.”
I grow quiet as a warm breeze pushes past me. Then carefully, I lean against my cane and gently set a photo down onto the ground next to the stone that reads her name. It’s the Polaroid of those green fields in the river bottoms.
“They’re still there, V. I want you to remember that our names are still there, bouncing off those levees.”
I take a handkerchief from my shirt pocket and wipe my eyes.
“I want you to remember that they’ll always be there—yours and mine, together.”
I pause and look at her name etched in that stone: Savannah (Vannah) Elise Ebenezer.
The second death.
I use the handkerchief to wipe my eyes some more. They leak the more my heart longs for her gentle touch—just one more time.
“There was a second,” I say to her. “We couldn’t help that. But there won’t be a third, my bird.”
And from somewhere deep inside my soul, a sob escapes me.
> “I miss you, Vannah.”
I stare into that photo against the turned-up dirt, and I think about the only girl who ever had my heart. And I don’t know how much time the good Lord has me down here still, but I do know this for sure: I was made to love a little girl with short blond hair and green eyes, who liked stars and made up stories about magic keys. I was put here to love her. And until my last breath, that’s what I’ll keep doing. And I’ll keep loving her right into the next life, too. Because it doesn’t matter the day or the hour or the life—I choose her. I’ll always choose her because bottom line, I never really had a choice. She was just a bird on a windowsill. But she was always my bird.
The End
The future for me is already a thing of the past. You were my first love and you will be my last.
~Bob Dylan
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are so many people who have touched my writing career and this book, in particular, that I can’t possibly fit all my gratitude for them into one book, much less one page. But here is my best attempt at thanking a few of you.
As always, I thank God, my greatest inspiration, for giving me the opportunity to write each and every day.
And thank you to my amazing editors and sources for all your time and contributions. Thank you especially to Donna, Calvin, Kathy, April, Sharon, Jon, Jesse and Mike. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. None of my stories would be what they are today without you!
And thank you to my newspaper friends and former editors, including Steve, John, Tom, Bruce and Andy. Thank you for teaching me how to tell a story. Today, the stories might be different, but my mind is never far away from that black ink. [The] wise shall be the bearers of light. ~Walter Williams
And thank YOU, for reading. I know there are so many stories out there. Thank you for taking a chance on my small-town characters. Thank you for taking the ride with them—for pulling for them, for cheering them on. And as always, thank you for cheering me on!
