by Nancy Adams
“Here goes,” Claire announced softly as she answered the phone and clamped it to her ear. “Hey, mom,” she said into the phone.
“Hey, honey,” her mom replied in an excited voice, “guess what I have in my hand?”
Claire closed her eyes as her heart felt like it was about to fall through her.
“I take it,” she said in a trembling voice, “that it’s not a rattlesnake.”
“No, silly,” June said in return. Then, with open enthusiasm, she added, “It’s your results letter.”
“Really?!” Claire let out sarcastically. Then, after taking a deep breath and squeezing Paul’s hand even tighter, she continued with, “You better open it then.”
“Eek!” her mom let out. “I’m already standing here with the letter knife. Here goes.”
Claire heard her mother opening the letter and the sound made her shudder.
“Okay,” June mumbled as she began reading, a ticking bomb of anxiety eating away at Claire as she listened to her mother mumble to herself while going over the letter. She heard June pause, before her mother began going over the letter again.
“I don’t understand,” June let out after a while.
“What don’t you understand, ma?” Claire replied with a trembling voice.
“It says that you failed the year, but that can’t be right. Can it, honey?”
“What else does it say?” Claire asked, a pang pulling at her heart as she did.
“It says that you failed two classes, but passed the rest. But because you failed them, you’ll have to retake the classes next year—that you’ll have to repeat the year. But I don’t understand, Claire? What happened?”
Claire could make out the deluge of tears that was about to come breaking out of her mother, the woman’s voice breaking as she spoke. It caused tears to began collecting in her own eyes and they were soon dripping down her face.
“I told you, ma,” Claire tearfully informed her mother, “this year was hard. I found it hard to concentrate after working at the hospice. I kept thinking of all those people I’d seen die over the summer and—”
“It’s my fault,” June suddenly declared in a distressed voice.
“No, ma,” Claire contested.
“I pushed you to volunteer there,” her mother continued frantically. “It was me who told you to do some volunteering. That it would be good for your resume. What was I thinking? You’re just a girl, you shouldn’t see that type of heartache at your age.”
“Come on, ma. It’s all my fault. None of it’s yours. I wanted to volunteer and I’m glad of it; it was a fulfilling experience—”
“But it’s cost you a year,” June interrupted. “I knew that something was up. Ever since you volunteered, you’ve been really distant and sad—much more than usual. I should have never pushed you…it’s all my fault…”
June sank into despairing sobs and Claire’s own tears fell with greater relish. Paul placed his arm around her shoulders and held her into him.
“Ma,” Claire wept, “it’s not your fault—it’s all mine—and it’s not the end of the world…I just gotta repeat the year is all. I’ll get my head down and really try harder than I ever have. I spent this year hardly studying…I took it for granted…I…”
Like her mother, Claire fell into deep sobbing and Paul held her even tighter. It harrowed him to see the woman he loved so painfully broken. He’d admitted to himself long ago that he loved her. In fact, only days after he’d first met her in their human biology class almost two years ago, he’d felt the strings of his heart being strung sonorously by the very thought of her.
“Ma,” Claire wept, “can we talk about this later? Everything’s going around in circles at the moment.”
“Of course, sweetie,” June said cheerily through her tears, attempting to sound positive for her daughter. “I won’t say a word to your father until you tell me to. We’ll talk later on tonight when I’m on my lunch hour and we’re both feeling a little better. And, Claire honey,” June then added.
“Yeah, ma?”
“Don’t worry. I love you and we’ll get through this together.”
“I love you too, ma.”
Claire put the phone down and threw herself into Paul’s arms, crying pitifully into him. She felt so awfully cruel in that moment. She’d lied so much to her mother this past year that she was ashamed of herself. Now, this latest lie had cruelly injured her. And what for? Claire asked herself. To hide more lies from her? She doesn’t deserve any of this. All she does is support me and love me and now I’ve made her think that she’s somehow responsible for all of this. And what is ‘all of this’? Just another bunch of bullshit that I’ve thrown in her face. I’m wicked.
“Claire?” Paul said from beside her.
“Yeah?” she answered, lifting her head up.
“You shouldn’t blame yourself for any of this.”
“How did you know I was blaming myself?” she asked with red eyes and wet cheeks.
“I know you, Claire. You take so much onto yourself. You’ve done your best to protect your mom, not the other way around.”
“How have I protected her? I’ve hurt her with lies, Paul.”
“No—you protected her from the heartache of your pregnancy and then the adoption. You’ve saved her from that. This latest part was necessary to protect her one last time from it all. In just over a month, we re-enroll for college. You’ll enroll for your second year. You’ll study hard. You’ll pass with flying colors. In one year’s time your real exam results will fall through your mom’s door and when she opens them, her heart will explode with light. You’ll make her so proud, and all of this—all this past year—will wash away from both of you.”
Claire allowed herself to smile through her tears. She raised herself up and kissed him on the lips, smiling as she did.
She felt so lucky to have him by her side.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Juliette sat gazing out the car window as she and Jules drove through the small mountainside city of Colorado Springs. They hadn’t been back there together for almost seventeen years. Jules had visited twice since he’d been released from prison, and Juliette came once a year with Margot. Back in the seventies, they’d lived in the city for eight happy years, but at the end of those years it had become a painful place. More a reminder of what they’d had, rather than what it could offer.
They’d set off by car the previous day from L.A and had spent the night in a motel. It was now almost midday as Jules turned down the fateful road that led to Evergreen Cemetery. Ever since they’d entered the city, the two had been in somber, reflective moods and hadn’t spoken. On reaching the cemetery gates, Jules parked the car and the two got out. From the backseat, Jules took some flowers and a copy of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
The two entered the cemetery and proceeded through the vast collection of stone monuments of angels and other creatures associated with eternal rest, gravestones and tombs, a gray sheet of sky overhead, the couple holding hands. In the distance were the Rocky Mountains, and the sight of them looming high over the stone garden always made Juliette feel that her boy was safe, that the earth was looking out for him.
Soon, the two were where they needed to be, standing in front of a modest gravestone made from black marble with an inscription on the front of it in fading gold lettering that read:
Here lies Danny Joseph Lee,
Beloved son of Juliette and Jules Lee.
Born February 11th 1970. Died July 16th 1980.
So brief was the flicker of your candle, that it only got to shine upon our lives for the briefest of moments. But even in that brief moment, it illuminated our hearts forever.
The two stood side by side holding hands. It was twenty-one years to the day since Danny had died. As they gazed down at the gravestone, Juliette leaned up against Jules and rested her head on his shoulder. In turn, he leaned his chin on her. Without realizing it, tears began to fall from both of t
heir eyes as they stared down at all that was left of their beloved boy.
“Hey, son,” Jules sobbed, “I brought ya favorite book to read, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I’ll read ya some in a moment. But first, if you look here, me and ya ma are back together after so many years. The last time I came to see ya, I told ya that I’d get her back and here she is, back by my side.”
Juliette burrowed her face into Jules and kissed his neck, sobbing as she did, wringing her hands around his arm, which she held on to.
“Anyway,” Jules continued, “I thought we’d update ya on things. Firstly, our friends Margot and Claude got married. I know you never met either of them, but you would’ve liked them…”
Jules continued to speak to his son for five more minutes, Juliette sobbing into him the whole time, tears falling readily from his own eyes, soaking into his beard. Once he’d finished updating Danny on everything that had happened in the last year, the two began cleaning his grave, pulling out the weeds, replacing the dead flowers with fresh ones, wiping the gravestone with a cloth and generally caring for the grave in a way that would have befitted the boy himself.
Once they’d finished tending to Danny, Jules read out a passage of Charlie and the Chocolate factory. As he did, he couldn’t help but choke up from time to time. Every word, every passage, every scene, reminded Jules of Danny. He had first read it to the boy when he was only three. After that, he’d read it to him constantly until the boy was old enough to read it himself. The book was synonymous with so much of this sad chapter of Jules’s past. But as unhappy as it was, it also made Jules proud that he was remembering the boy. Reading through the book, he would constantly see within his mind’s eye the smiling face of the joyful boy, hear him asking questions about the chocolate factory, about the Oompa-Loompas, about Willy Wonka and the characters’ lives away from the pages of the book. The boy wanted to know everything, and often Jules would be forced by his son’s demands to make up his own adventures involving the book’s characters, and tell them to the boy.
Once he’d finished the recital, Jules placed the book delicately at the base of the gravestone. Juliette then kissed her fingers and placed them on the gravestone. After she had, Jules did the same. Having taken one last look at the grave and saying goodbye to their boy, they began making their way out of the cemetery.
On their way, they stopped off at a small bench that stood in front of some metal railings that had an old oak tree behind that appeared to be growing through it. The tree was expanding so much into the fence that it was buckling the metal structure and forcing it out, expanding through the gaps in the rails, oozing through bit by bit, year after year, swallowing it up. Once they were seated, Juliette balanced her head once again on Jules’s shoulder and the two sat holding hands, gazing out at the mountains in the distance.
“Sure is beautiful here,” Jules commented.
“Do you miss it?” Juliette asked.
“I miss the life we had here, as a family. We were doing well. I had a good job with the park rangers. We had a nice home. You were the happiest I’d ever seen you. I was the happiest I’d ever been. It was heaven. I guess that’s why it hurt us so much when it was taken away so suddenly.”
“It was like the sun suddenly went out without warning,” Juliette reflected. “One minute it’s warm and sunny. The next, it’s freezing cold and you’re surrounded by darkness.”
“Beautifully put, my love,” Jules remarked as he kissed her on the top of the head.
“He was so happy, Jules,” she said sadly. “So very happy his whole life. Never did that boy not have a smile perched upon his little lips. He was always so enthusiastic, so playful. Remember the way he’d play with the other children on the street?”
A big grin pulled Jules’s cheeks and lips apart.
“Remember those epic games of hide and seek they used to play?” Jules asked her from within his grin.
“Huh! They used to go on all day,” she replied with a smile. “Thirty or more kids all playing together, hiding in people’s yards, the whole neighborhood giving up their gardens and houses to it, even those without children. It was such a wonderful community out here.”
“The celebrations were the best. The big street parties we used to have on the Fourth of July, everyone having competitions with the fireworks.”
“Oh my!” Juliette exclaimed gently as she remembered the racket that used to go off on the street, before remarking, “I preferred Halloween.”
“Because you loved the costumes. You’d fret about it for at least a month before, deciding on what you wanted to dress Danny in. Remember the year when he was seven and he decided that he didn’t want his mom picking his costume anymore?”
“Yes,” Juliette answered with a glum look. “I had a beautiful costume ready for him. He was going to be a pumpkin.”
“Ha! Yeah, I remember. He took one look at it and said, ‘No.’ He wanted to go as Luke Skywalker. I’d taken him the year before to see Star Wars and he was mad on it. I remember his four best friends—oh, what were their names?”
“J.T,” Juliette answered without hesitation, “Robbie, Kacy and Flynn.”
“That’s them. Anyway, they were all gonna dress up as Star Wars characters. One was gonna be Han Solo, one was Chewbacca, another was Obi-Wan-Kenobi and the last one was Darth Vader. He wouldn’t have fit in too well as a big ol’ pumpkin!”
“No. But he would have looked cuter!”
The two fell into silence for a moment, smiles glittering across their faces as they each held the memory of that time within the grasp of their minds.
“Where do you think they are now?” Juliette asked, breaking the silence.
“Who?”
“Those boys; Danny’s friends.”
“It’s impossible to know,” Jules said with a slight shrug of his shoulders.
“Do you think they’ve got wives and children of their own? They’ll be in their early thirties.”
“Juliette, my love, it’s not worth thinking about things that’ll only make you sad.”
“We should’ve had some grandchildren by now,” she put to him.
“Please, Juliette, you can’t think about impossibilities. You’ll go insane.”
“I can’t help thinking what if, Jules. All my lonely thoughts are about what if.”
“Our lives go where they gotta go. We can only narrowly steer the boat, we don’t get to choose the weather. For all the planning in the world, things are gonna come and take you by surprise. No one can stop what was always gonna happen. The past is gone, like last autumn’s leaves; nothing will bring it back. So for that reason, there ain’t no use wasting all your present on worrying about the past. Otherwise the past has won twice; once when it kicked you in the face the first time, and again now that it’s sapping all of the joy from the present.”
“I know, Jules,” Juliette said softly as she squeezed his hand. “But it’s not always horrid to think of what ifs. Sometimes it’s nice to imagine Danny as a man. What he’d be doing. Going to college. Getting a career. Traveling the world. Falling in love. Having a family of his own. Visiting us from time to time.”
Jules sat beside her smiling, his eyes misty with tears.
“That sure woulda been nice,” he remarked warmly.
“We should’ve had another child, Jules,” Juliette suddenly said.
“Where did that come from?”
“It’s something I’ve thought of many times these past few years.”
“But when Danny died, you said no more heartache and we left it at that.”
“But a few years ago it became the end, and I suddenly realized that I would never be a mother again. It was awful—I felt so hollow all of a sudden.”
“Oh, Juliette,” he said as he held her into him even more, kissing the top of her head. “Look, we got little David back in L.A.”
“It’s not the same,” she let out despondently as she gazed into the distance.
“Of cours
e, it is. We’re his Godparents and pretty much his grandparents too. And the way that Margot loves to travel the world and go off every now and then, I say we’re gonna have plenty of opportunities to look after the kid.”
Juliette sat silently for a while as she imagined it. Her and Jules with the boy. Watching him grow up. Sure, it wasn’t the same, but it was something.”
“We got a responsibility to that boy,” Jules added.
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, I know I’m not the biggest Christian around, but some of the words of that pastor when he was baptizing David stuck in my head. Not the stuff about praying for him and all that—if the boy finds Jesus then he should be allowed to do that on his own. No, it was the stuff about looking out for him, always having the boy’s best interests at heart. I been tossing a lot of that stuff around in my head, and I really think we owe that boy something. We should be there for him, always.”
Juliette lifted her head from his shoulder, took his face in the palm of her free hand, craned her head forward and kissed him with warm affection on the lips.
“You’re right,” she said when their lips parted. “That boy is the future and—as much as it hurts to say this—Danny is the past. We should shower all the love that’s been left behind by Danny on David.”
“Yeah, we should,” Jules uttered with a smile. Then glancing down at her head rested upon his shoulder, he asked, “You wanna go?”
Juliette let out a long sigh before saying that she did. So, they got up from the bench and made their ways back to the car, ready for the two-day road trip home to L.A.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Signore,” came the horseman’s husky Italian voice crying through the old villa from outside. Sam came from the bedroom out onto the little wooden balcony and looked down into the courtyard below. He immediately saw the Sicilian horseman sitting atop a large brown stallion holding the reins of two saddled horses, a filly and another stallion.
