by Lucy Kevin
Hanna wondered how many of the other single mothers in the crowd cursed themselves in that moment for not thinking of the same ploy. Maybe not as many as might have done so if Michael hadn’t shaken his head then, politely declining the way he so often did.
Finally, at the center of it all, there was Ava, surrounded by the children she’d taught. The parents all wanted to speak with her as well regarding which class she thought would be best for their child in the next semester, and if she thought they were dancing to their full potential.
Hanna didn’t realize Emily had moved beside her until her sister asked, “Did you get all the footage you needed of the recital?”
She nodded. “I should be able to edit it tonight or tomorrow, and then the studio will have a finished piece for everyone to take home.”
“That’s great,” Emily said with a nod of approval. It reminded Hanna of the times when she’d done well at school, and Emily had always made sure to tell her how well she’d done. “They like having the photographs, but it’s the performance that they’ll really remember. We all really appreciate you taking the time to help today, Hanna.”
As they watched Charlotte spin around in Rachel’s arms, Hanna said, “Do you ever think that one day you’ll have your own?”
Emily smiled at that. “I already have four to look after, named Rachel, Paige, Morgan and Hanna. Keeping up with all of you is more than enough for the moment.”
“Hey!” She’d forgotten what it could be like, being the youngest, sometimes. Deciding to get in her own little dig, she said, “You know, Michael’s been getting a lot of attention from one of the mothers.”
Emily shrugged and said, “Good for him,” but for a moment or two, it looked like Emily might head off in Michael’s direction.
Instead, she remained with Hanna, looking over to where Ava was still chatting with parents and children, very much the center of attention. Their grandmother would kiss a cheek here, deposit some praise there. One of the mothers was reminiscing about when she’d been a student there herself, and Ava remembered every detail.
She remembers so much about the past, but she won’t tell me any of it, thought Hanna.
Grams had said that she’d made a promise, but to whom? And why say that it might be time for Hanna to tell the story of what had happened in 1951 between Ava, William II and Poppy, if she wasn’t going to talk about it?
“Everybody loves Grams,” Hanna said.
“But they didn’t always,” Emily reminded her. “Everyone’s so happy now, but that’s just because we’ve come a long way from the days when half the island wanted to drive Grams out.”
Hanna should have guessed that her big sister wasn’t going to leave the topic of her documentary alone. It wasn’t just that Emily had never been the type to leave things unfinished. Emily was as fiercely protective of Ava as any of Hanna’s sisters. But what annoyed Hanna slightly was that her sister seemed to think she didn’t care about Grams just as much as the others. What if there was more to the story that no one knew about? And what if what she and Joel had learned about the past changed everything?
“There was a time,” Emily said, “when the Petersons and their supporters would probably have gotten out their pitchforks and flaming torches if they thought they could get away with it. Can you imagine what it would have been like for her?”
Actually, Hanna could imagine it all too easily. If she’d been one of the island’s residents back in 1951, and the island’s golden boy had broken off his engagement to marry a dancer from the big city, hating Ava would have been the obvious choice. Particularly once her grandfather sold the company, because it would have looked like William Walker II’s new wife had talked him into it so that she could get her hands on the money. It would have been too easy to forget the part where the majority of the money went into building the school. And when Poppy disappeared…
“It must have been awful back then,” she admitted. “But I never heard anyone talking about Grams doing all these terrible things growing up. And none of you ever said anything to me, either, about how cruel people had been.”
“That doesn’t mean that we didn’t talk about it,” Emily said. “We just didn’t do it in front of you.”
“You didn’t have to protect me,” Hanna insisted hotly. “You don’t always have to protect me.”
Emily put an arm around her. “You’re our little sister. Of course we were going to protect you. And now you need to think about protecting Grams. She might have told you that what you’re doing is okay, but you know she would never deny you anything. You need to think about the difficult memories and feelings that your documentary will dredge up and what they will mean for her. Do you want people talking about her like that again?”
That was the thing with Emily. She always managed to be so…so reasonable, even when she was telling you precisely how you needed to live your life. And the truth was that so much of it was reasonable, even if her sisters had no business hiding things from her.
“I promise that I have been thinking about all of that,” Hanna told her. And for the time being, at least, that seemed to be good enough for Emily, who walked away to help Michael.
Hanna went back to filming the aftermath of the recital, but this time she focused just on Ava. Her grandmother had found a place in the middle of Walker Island’s small community, and her importance in everyone’s lives was reflected on the adoring faces of all the people around her.
If Hanna truly believed that making this documentary would hurt her grandmother, then she’d give it up in an instant, switch to Emily’s whale migration suggestion, and hope for the best. Yet Grams had as good as told her to go for it: “Maybe once you do make your documentary, it will finally be time that this story was told.”
And when Hanna thought about Poppy’s final poem...well, so many things just didn’t feel right. Besides, if she gave up the documentary, she might not see Joel again.
Could she really just walk away from everything?
Taking a deep breath, she worked to push away thoughts of her deadline for showing the documentary to her professor before the end of summer. Right now, it was far more important that she make the right choice, rather than a quick one.
And in the meantime, she reflected with a small smile as Charlotte started to perform a very creative dance of her own invention with the borrowed tutu still on her head, there were plenty of other wonderful things to film on the island.
CHAPTER EIGHT
After Hanna left, Joel had tried to put his thoughts about Poppy aside so that he could get back to work, but even after spending the afternoon bogged down by meetings and phone calls and emails in the office, he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about what else he might find in the attic. He’d gone back up and found a box with more of Poppy’s journals in it, and for the past several days whenever he could carve out free time he’d read through them.
So far, he’d been through three thick journals, a couple of smaller notebooks, and a stack of letters. Not all of it had been poetry. Poppy had included diary entries and sketches of the island, along with letters from people long dead, and scribbled random thoughts. Yet her poetry was at the heart of it all.
Strangely, though one of the notebooks was dated from just before the wedding, he couldn’t find any joyful or excited poems about her upcoming marriage. In fact, he didn’t find any mention of the engagement or wedding plans at all. He was sure he was missing something and that there must be another special volume he hadn’t yet found. But even after another exhaustive search of the boxes in the attic, he didn’t find any new journals or poems that Poppy had written.
Perhaps, he thought on Sunday, as he sat in his living room and re-read the entries from the month before the wedding was supposed to take place in 1951, if he showed the journal to Hanna, she would be able to find Poppy’s joy over her wedding.
Why hadn’t Hanna been back to demand access to the archives as per their earlier agreement? Several days had passed, but there h
adn’t been so much as a phone call from her. Had she lost interest in doing the documentary?
Or in him?
Joel pushed that crazy thought aside as he closed the journal, then got out his cell phone. “Hi Hanna, it’s Joel. I’m just calling to check whether you still wanted to go to the archives. Give me a call back when you get a chance.”
Several hours later, however, he still hadn’t heard back from her. And with the tourist season heating up, it meant Joel was soon going to be impossibly in demand over the next few weeks dealing with all of his skippers and their boats. If he and Hanna didn’t go through the island’s historic archives very soon, he simply wouldn’t have the time to do it later without damaging the family business.
Last week, he would have been more than happy for the whole documentary to be forgotten. And yet, hadn’t he seen for himself during their interview with Milton that she truly didn’t intend to hurt anyone by telling this story...but also that something wasn’t quite right about the story he’d believed to be true for so long?
If anyone was going to look deeper into the Peterson–Walker rift, he was starting to think it should be Hanna.
Now, he thought as he tried her cell again and got her voice mail, if only she would answer her phone. Joel looked out his living room window at the increasingly gray sky as he dragged on a coat. It was going to storm soon, and as the clouds grew thicker and darker and the wind grew colder and harsher, he realized the weather matched his mood perfectly. Joel felt like he was only barely holding back a storm inside himself, both with regards to his family’s tragic past, and also to Hanna.
He desired her more than he’d ever desired another woman.
But she could never be his. Never.
* * *
With the help of some locals who had noticed Hanna heading through town with her video camera, Joel eventually found her out on the northernmost tip of the island, where the bluffs of rock sticking out into the ocean were sometimes battered by the storms that never seemed to touch the rest of it. In good weather, however, the beach at their base was a great place to gather for a party or just to sit and watch the ever-changing ocean.
He parked his car at the top of the cliffs then trekked down one of the trails which passed the caves that had sheltered some of the island’s earliest settlers.
She was down on the stony beach by the bluffs, her camera on a tripod and pointed at a gathering set of storm clouds. In slightly faded jeans, a denim long-sleeved shirt, dark boots and her hair tied back to keep it from getting tangled in the rising wind, she looked a hundred times more amazing than any woman in an evening gown ever had.
Back in the attic, it had been all he could do to keep from pulling her against him and kissing her. She’d obviously wanted him to; yet that had just meant he’d needed to be the responsible one. The one who remembered just what a bad idea it would be for a Peterson and Walker to kiss after all these years.
But it was hard to remember the importance of being responsible as he looked at her gazing out over the ocean, looking at a storm as though it was the most beautiful thing in the world.
It wasn’t. She was.
Still, it was a stupid idea to even think of doing anything about it. On par with having foolish dreams about skippering boats when he’d been raised by his father to run the office.
Hanna was a Walker. Forget all those Romeo-and-Juliet fantasies of making things work out between the two families. Or better yet, remember what happened once their families got involved, and just how badly things had ended for everyone.
History had already proved that Petersons and Walkers just didn’t go together.
Her eyes widened with surprise when she realized he was coming down the path toward her. But soon, her surprise gave way to a wide, and extremely beautiful, smile.
“Joel, what are you doing all the way out here?”
“I was wondering why I hadn’t heard from you again about getting into the archives. Do you still want to go look at them?”
“Of course I do.” But she looked more than a little stunned as she said, “You really came all this way to take me into them? Why?”
It was such a direct question that Joel wasn’t prepared for it. Heck, he hadn’t been prepared for any of this. His attraction to Hanna. Her endless curiosity and questions. And the fact that the Peterson-Walker feud suddenly didn’t seem so cut-and–dried anymore.
“Does it matter? I thought you’d be happy about it.”
“I am. But I’d still like to know what changed.”
Joel tried to think of how to explain it. “I’ve been looking through some of my family’s old papers in the attic, and I have…not doubts exactly, but questions. And from what I can see, you’re good at getting answers, Hanna. Because you see things most people would miss.”
“Thank you,” she said with a radiant smile that made his heart beat just a little bit faster than it already was just being near to her out on the cliffs. “That’s one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me.”
Yet again, he wanted to put his hands on her waist and pull her against him so that he could finally see if her mouth tasted as sweet as it looked. Instead, he forcefully pushed away the urge as he asked her, “So you’re here filming storms? Has your documentary taken a new direction I didn’t hear about?”
“I needed some space, and time, to think about everything. So when I heard that there was a storm system coming in, I thought I might try to catch some footage. You know how rare storms are on the island.”
The moderate climate on the island not only made berry picking so successful, it also meant that Peterson Shipping could often send ships to sea on days when companies based on the mainland had to stay carefully in the harbor.
“I still want to go into the archives, Joel,” she explained. “But I didn’t want to rush you—or myself—into making any hasty decisions. Just tell me when you’re ready and I’ll drop whatever I’m doing to go with you.”
“Now.”
“Now?” Hanna looked at him oddly. “What’s the rush?”
“Things are about to get really busy for me at the office, so if you want me to take you into the archives, today is our best shot.”
“Okay,” Hanna said as she gave the rapidly darkening sky out over the ocean a slightly wistful look, “I’ll just need to pack up my camera and then we can go.”
The first rain fell in the lightest of dustings while the wind picked up. But moments later it was pouring down in splattering globules—more of a solid wall of water than individual droplets. The wind leapt to a roar, pushing at them hard enough that it almost tore Hanna’s camera from its stand.
“The caves!” Joel yelled over the wind as he grabbed her tripod and backpack.
As they ran together up the rocky path, Hanna began to laugh. The whole situation was so crazy—running in the rain with a Walker he couldn’t stop wanting to kiss—that Joel couldn’t help joining in. They didn’t stop running until they reached the mouth of the cave, huddling back from the sudden onslaught of the elements. Already, Joel was close to being soaked. Hanna was worse off, though, the storm having plastered her clothes to her body. Joel swallowed hard, trying not to stare, and failing miserably.
She was just so incredibly beautiful. Especially when he couldn’t picture any of the women he’d dated over the past decade running through a storm laughing the way she had.
“A group of us used to come here in high school,” Joel said to try to distract himself from just how close the two of them were in the small cave. “We’d go down on the beach and light a fire, then come back to the cave later.”
“Rachel was in your grade at school,” Hanna said. “Did she go to those parties?”
“I used to see her here sometimes, but we made sure to keep to opposite sides of whatever was going on.” Now that he put it like that, it sounded so childish, not talking to someone because of something their family had done two generations back. “How is Rachel? She has a daughter,
doesn’t she?”
“She’s great,” Hanna said with a warm smile. “My five-year-old niece Charlotte keeps her pretty busy. Did you ever notice Rachel when you were at school? Or think about asking her out?”
That question caught Joel by surprise. “No. I mean, it never occurred to me. She was a Walker.”
“Well, you’re a Peterson,” Hanna countered with a smile, “and I had a crush on you when I was a little girl.”
But she wasn’t a little girl anymore. Not even close. And if she were anyone else, Joel would be closing the space between them in a heartbeat, pressing Hanna back against the cave wall while he kissed her.
Of course, just then, the rain stopped, and he realized just how close he’d come to doing something truly crazy. “We should get to the archives.”
Hanna stared at him for a long moment, her blue eyes darker than usual, before she finally nodded. “Okay, but I’m frozen. How about we stop off at the café first for a hot drink?”
“I don’t know,” he said slowly. “Do you think the world can handle a Walker and a Peterson being under the same roof for a third time?” he asked, only half kidding. Especially when he didn’t know how well he was going to handle it himself, given that he’d almost just given in to kissing her breathless.
But Hanna didn’t laugh. Instead, she simply said, “Honestly, I’m not sure I care anymore what anyone else thinks.” And then she headed out of the cave and up the path to his car.
* * *
A short while later, they were sitting in the café, Joel with a cup of coffee, Hanna licking the whipped cream off the top of a mug of hot chocolate with her fingertip.
Just as he’d predicted, they got plenty of strange looks from the locals as they walked in together. Half of them probably wouldn’t have looked so shocked if aliens had walked in.
Yet aside from the stares, coffee with Hanna felt surprisingly natural. She was easy to talk to, for one thing. And to listen to, as everything seemed to set her off on a new tangent.
