by Lucy Kevin
Hanna could sense that Milton was about to go off on another tangent. She would want to interview him about his father’s role later, but not when he was talking about something that was far too important to step away from.
“When you say that being jilted by my grandfather would ‘follow her through life’, are you saying that Poppy felt ashamed? Cheated? Or something else perhaps?”
Again, Milton took his time thinking about her questions before he answered. “Honestly, I think everyone felt those things on her behalf, if that makes sense? I was just a kid, but I remember how people were talking about the fact that a jilted bride should be more upset by it all.”
“More upset? I thought she committed suicide?”
“I know that’s what happened,” he said with a regretful glance towards Joel, “but even now, I can’t look back without it seeming wrong. Because despite your grandfather leaving her for your grandmother, Poppy looked happy to me.”
“Are you sure?” Hanna had to ask him. “After what had happened, she had plenty of reasons to be upset.”
“I know,” Milton said, “but I also know what I saw. All the other Petersons were upset. Some of them were furious about the deal with the Walkers being off, and some of them were furious at William for breaking off his engagement with Poppy, but Poppy herself didn’t seem to be angry or upset at all. In fact, the morning William and Ava got married, I saw her down in the soda shop, buying candy. She bought me an extra gum drop.”
“Maybe she was trying to put a brave face on it,” Hanna suggested.
“That’s what everyone said when they saw her: how brave she was being. Some of them came out with some nonsense about people who have decided to kill themselves seeming happier once their mind is made up. But even when people started talking about her suicide note, I just couldn’t believe it.”
“Are you really saying that you think her suicide note wasn’t a suicide note?” Joel asked.
It was the first thing Joel had said for quite a while. Hanna looked over to him again, just to check that he was okay. When she decided he looked more curious than angry, she turned back to Milton, who was nodding.
“Poppy was always writing poetry, scribbling away in notebooks. She read one to me once, but I was too young to really understand how good it was,” Milton said. “I never got to see the final poem she left behind, but I heard it recited from memory a few times. The Petersons tried to keep it to themselves, but enough people saw it. And there were always a few kids who thought that Poppy’s last poem was kind of romantic.”
“That still doesn’t explain why you think there was something, well, happy about it,” Hanna said, unwilling to let the point go.
“It was the tone of the poem, I suppose. It’s a little difficult to explain unless you’ve heard it, and I’ve never been much good at remembering poetry. But it certainly didn’t sound like something written by someone who had given up all hope about their life.” Milton shook his head. “Of course, I was just a kid, so maybe I was wrong.”
When she could see that he didn’t feel comfortable discussing Poppy’s poem anymore, Hanna moved the interview on to his father’s work with the Petersons and the Walkers, and then on to the conservation work he was doing these days. She wasn’t sure any of that would make it into the documentary, except maybe as background, but why not shoot the footage while she had the chance?
In any case, talking about it certainly seemed to make Milton happier than he had been talking about Poppy. Thankfully, Joel’s expression had also relaxed a fair bit by the time they finally said goodbye to Milton and started the walk back towards the center of town.
Even so, it took a few minutes for Hanna to pluck up the courage to say, “I think you and I both really need to see Poppy’s last poem.”
CHAPTER SIX
“You do have it, don’t you?” Hanna asked when Joel didn’t immediately respond. “It hasn’t been lost or destroyed, has it?”
“It’s at my house,” he assured her. “I read it when I was a kid because my family wanted me to understand what had happened. And I know it will help your documentary.” He sounded almost sympathetic. “But even at the time, my family didn’t want too many people to see the note.”
“I was fair about the interview, wasn’t I?”
They stared at each other for a long moment before he finally said, “Okay, I’ll let you look at it. But only because I can guess that if I don’t, you’ll probably go around the island looking for anyone who remembers a line or two of it to try to piece it together.”
Hanna couldn’t quite manage to hold back her smile. Clearly, they’d already spent enough time together for Joel to figure out that she was doggedly determined. Meanwhile, she’d learned that he would do anything to protect his family. Just like her.
She was caught between needing to get things to come together quickly for her documentary...and wishing that she could draw out this discovery period simply for the chance to spend more time with Joel so that she could learn more things about him.
“Once you read it,” he informed her, “you’ll see that Milton must have things wrong. He was just a kid at the time.”
Even if Joel didn’t think reading the poem was going to do any good, she was excited about getting to see inside his inner sanctum, and not just because she might learn something more about his family for her documentary.
No, it was simply because she wanted to learn more about him.
“So,” she asked as they walked close enough to each other through the crowds of summer tourists that they could have easily been holding hands, “you don’t think that there’s a chance that Poppy’s disappearance was, maybe, just a tragic accident?”
“She was from a shipping family. My father taught me to sail almost as soon as I could walk. Pretty much every weekend, we were out on the water. It would have been the same for her. And she would have known about the weather patterns and how to deal with even an unexpected storm.”
Joel seemed far more relaxed on the walk to his house than he’d been with Milton. A couple of times, he stopped to briefly chat when people greeted them. Much in the same way that people always said hello to her because she was a Walker, she now realized that Joel got just as much attention thanks to being a Peterson.
There was one awkward moment, though, which came as they passed one of the island’s older inhabitants. The gray-haired woman was carrying an easel, obviously one of the artists who called the island home.
“Shame,” she muttered as the two of them went past.
“What’s that?” Hanna asked, not understanding.
The look the woman gave her was actually a little frightening in its intensity. “I wasn’t talking to you, girl.” She turned her narrowed gaze to Joel. “Don’t you have any shame, walking around with a Walker? What would your father think? What would your grandfather think?”
Hanna flinched even as Joel frowned and shook his head. “You should get on with your painting, Greta.”
The woman scowled at him, then walked off.
“Thank you,” Hanna said softly.
“It’s not a problem.”
But it clearly was. A big one. “People still obviously have some pretty strong feelings about you and me being together, don’t they?”
“Of course they do. Did you honestly think they wouldn’t?”
And yet he’d stood up for her. What did that mean? Hanna resolved to give it some more thought later. After they’d looked at Poppy’s final poem.
The Peterson house was just far enough away from his office that he wasn’t actually living above his business, but still near enough that it was only a very short walk for Joel to get to work every morning. His home was old but well cared for, carefully re-painted as the ocean air wore it down. Even from the outside, it was easy to see that it was a house that had had a lot of love put into it.
“You know,” Hanna said in her best imitation of Milton as Joel led her inside, “this is only the second time a
Peterson and a Walker have been under the same roof in sixty years.”
Beyond elated to finally get a real smile out of Joel, her heart was jumping in her chest as she turned to study the prints and photographs of the ocean in his hall, along with a large map of the island and the surrounding water. The furniture had a functional, masculine feel to it, and while she couldn’t see him spending hours on interior design, she could see him carefully choosing everything in his home.
“That’s the Sea Spray,” Joel said, when he found her admiring a scale model of a mussel boat that sat on a plinth at the base of the stairs. “It’s the first new boat I had built when I inherited the business.”
It was hard, in a way, to imagine Joel being in a position to order up a new boat like that when, in her mind, he’d simply been the school quarterback she’d had a crush on. It struck her, yet again, that running his family business and being responsible for so many island jobs was a tremendous amount for one person to have to do. Plus, it was increasingly obvious to her just how much he loved the water. Truthfully, she could barely imagine him working in the Peterson Shipping offices all day. On the deck of one of his boats, maybe, but not in that small, stuffy space with a tie tight around his neck.
“I’ve put most of my family’s old things upstairs in the attic.”
It wasn’t much more than a crawl space reached by a rickety-looking ladder, so Joel went first, taking a flashlight with him. Hanna followed him, taking his hand gratefully when he offered it to help her up.
As his hand clasped around hers and he drew her into the attic so that she was standing right in front of him, Hanna couldn’t have denied how attracted she was to Joel, even if she’d wanted to. All she could think was that if she dared to lean in to press a kiss to his lips, it would definitely be the first time a Walker and a Peterson had kissed in sixty years.
Given the way Joel’s eyes held hers, she was almost sure he was thinking the very same thing. But before she could risk everything on a kiss, he abruptly said, “I think Poppy’s notebooks are towards the back.”
Was he really so oblivious to her, she wondered as she breathed out a disappointed sigh when he moved away from her?
But how could he be when she could have sworn that his eyes heated more and more every time they came close like that?
Just as she needed to know the answers about what had really happened between the Petersons and the Walkers, she needed to understand this, too. “Joel—”
“I think I have it.” He reached into the depths of the box, coming up with an old, leather bound notebook. There was a sheet of paper folded inside it, sticking out of one end. “This is the note. There’s more light downstairs to read it by.”
Just like that, the intimate moment was gone as Joel led the way back down the ladder, helping Hanna before closing up the attic again carefully. They took the old notebook downstairs to a living room where the coffee table looked like it had been lifted from a captain’s cabin.
With Joel’s permission, Hanna took out her camera, carefully filming as he laid out the note on the coffee table, making sure that she got a good shot of it before she moved in to read it aloud.
Happiness out of broken promises
Tossed across my family’s waves
Passing out of a sea spray life
Sailing off into the sunset
I’ll set my own course this time
Fresh beginnings rising on the morning tide
“It’s been so long since I last read this,” Joel said. “I’d forgotten what it was like.”
“It’s beautiful, and not nearly as dark as I expected,” Hanna pointed out, reading through it again. “That part about rising on the morning tide…”
Joel shook his head. “My parents always told me that was because she expected her body to be washed up now that her future and her pride had been taken from her.”
Hanna carefully kept the camera pointed at him. “Yes, but do you think that now, having read it again?”
Joel looked up, saw the camera and frowned slightly. “I don’t know. There are a lot of things here about leaving the island behind, but there are phrases that sound like they’re about new starts, I suppose. That part about ‘fresh beginnings’ and even the way the poem begins with the word ‘happiness.’”
Hanna nodded. “It almost seems as if she was looking forward to what was coming. Maybe she wasn’t as depressed as everyone thought she was.”
“Or maybe you’re just reading her poem like that because it’s how you want things to be for your documentary.”
Hanna lowered the camera. “I wouldn’t do that, Joel. I won’t do that. What I will do, however, is follow this story wherever it leads and do my very best to let the facts speak for themselves.”
“But the facts don’t speak for themselves,” Joel insisted. “It’s the person making the story who does that. And if you are the one telling the story—”
“Then all I can do is try to tell it as honestly as possible. And I will. I’m just here to try to get all the details.” She needed to know, “Now that we’ve just started to break ground and learn something about what happened to our families in 1951 that changed everything on the island, are you really going to try telling me to stop?”
“Would you stop even if I asked you?”
“I need to tell this story,” she told him in a quiet voice. “Don’t you want answers?”
“Maybe,” Joel admitted. “Look, I’ll admit now that you’ve started digging into things, I’ve got questions, too. But this...this is a big step.”
Hanna thought about reminding him of their deal—if he was happy with her interview, then he’d give her access to the archives. But Joel wasn’t the kind of man that she could force into this or anything else.
“Listen,” she said, “it’s obvious you need some time to think about this, and I need to get over to the dance studio to film the students’ dance recital. Ava, Emily, Rachel and her daughter Charlotte will all be there too.”
“I’ve always wondered,” he said, “what it would have been like to have a family that size?”
“It’s utter chaos.” But Hanna smiled as she said it. “The very best kind of chaos.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
That evening as Hanna filmed the recital in her family’s dance school, she thought about how nice it was to be back again. With its sprung floors and mirrors that ran the length of each wall, every inch of the studio brought back memories. She’d spent so many hours there as a young girl with her grandmother and sisters that it felt almost as much like coming home as going back to the house had been.
As she stood at the side of the small stage, Hanna was amazed, as always, by how gracefully the girls moved together across the dance floor. Grams had taught them well. Or more likely, these days, Paige had taught them while Ava looked on benevolently and made the occasional gentle correction to a student’s stance or posture. Paige had been practically running the dance school for years now, even if she insisted that Grams was in charge. She opened the doors most mornings, she taught most of the classes, and now she was the one sitting at a table in the corner, smiling up at grateful parents while she signed their children up for the next semester of classes.
Hanna had danced a little when she was that age, mostly because she’d wanted to copy her big sisters, but she was definitely better off being the one filming the performance rather than being in it. And sometimes, she thought, watching from the sidelines could be as important as being out there in the thick of things. Someone had to tell the story, and it was because of the footage Hanna was shooting that both the parents and the students would have memories of this lovely recital years from now.
Though the performance was over, Hanna still kept the camera rolling. The recital had been carefully honed perfection. Everything else was real life: children running around laughing and playing while their parents tried to keep them in line, dancers congratulating each other, boyfriends holding bouquets of flowers.
Hanna noted that her little niece Charlotte was enjoying herself far more in the aftermath of the recital than she had at any point during it as the five-year-old ran away with a tutu on her head while Hanna’s sister Rachel chased after her. Meanwhile, Emily was lining up the ballerinas for a photograph, trying to arrange the girls carefully by height while they kept wriggling out of position.
Hanna was the only sister not busy trying to corral would-be dancers or sign up new students, and she considered pitching in to help Paige or Emily or Rachel, but from what she could see, they seemed to have it all under control. Besides, she was still busy capturing the joyful chaos of it all on camera.
She’d wondered more than once if this would always be her role in things: to be the one watching life happen while the others lived it?
Or was it simply that she’d learned to stay out of these things just because she was the youngest Walker sister?
After all, how many times, growing up, had the others gone out of their way to look after her? Especially after their mom died. It had been less like having four older sisters than four mothers, albeit ones who occasionally gossiped with her about cute boys at school.
Hanna swung her camera around to find the other member of their family. Michael might not actually be a Walker, but he’d spent so much time at the house that it amounted to almost the same thing. He was a good looking big brother, constantly there to help, and occasionally to annoy her. Though these days he seemed to do both with Emily more than any of them.
Currently, he was putting a band-aid on the knee of one of the ballerinas, whose mother hovered over Michael, staring at the scratch closely when he looked in her direction, but straight at Michael the rest of the time.
“Thank you for doing this,” the woman was saying as Hanna moved a little closer. “Maybe I could thank you by having you over for dinner?”
