All We Left Behind

by Danielle R. Graham

  I laughed. ‘How come those sometimes never occur when you’re with me?’

  Her mouth turned up in a sheepish grin. ‘Don’t you enjoy talking to me?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I’m just having a hard time imagining what it would be like if you weren’t chattering constantly. Do you at least talk to your brothers?’

  ‘Not any more. You’re the only person I’ve talked to since my parents died.’

  Her disclosure was both heartbreaking and strangely comforting. ‘Why?’

  ‘I told you, I have nothing to say.’

  ‘I meant why me?’

  She tugged at the grass. ‘I have nightmares about the bombings. I see my parents’ dead faces every time I close my eyes. You are the only person who really knows my sad.’

  I studied her for a spell, then nodded because I did know. We were a strange and unlikely pair.

  She caught and released another ladybug, then asked, ‘What did you love best about growing up on Mayne Island?’

  ‘Chidori,’ I said without even pausing to think about it.

  She pointed at the envelope that half stuck out of my pocket. ‘Is that from her?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Really? Oh my goodness. Why didn’t you say so earlier?’ She sat up excitedly and pressed her fists to her lips in excitement. ‘What does it say?’

  I sucked in air and choked out, ‘I don’t know. I can’t bring myself to read it.’

  She stood and spun around. ‘Why in the world not?’

  I closed my eyes and exhaled to steady my erratic pulse. ‘Too much time has passed since she wrote it.’

  ‘Just read it and get it done with.’ She stomped her foot on the grass and gestured wildly with her arms. ‘The suspense is killing me.’

  I sucked back a few steeling breaths and handed the envelope to her. ‘I can’t. You read it.’

  She tore open the envelope and unfolded the paper. Then, as if she were public speaking in school, she straightened her posture. ‘My Dearest Hayden.’ She looked over and raised her eyebrows in encouragement. ‘That’s a splendid start.’

  Not sure it was, I waved for her to keep going so I could get the torture over with.

  ‘I hope this letter finds you well. My greatest wish is that you are safe and happy wherever you are. You may not be aware that I wrote numerous letters after we were first separated years ago. So many things have changed since then, including us, surely. Our life together on Mayne Island seems only a distant dream now. It was such a wonderful dream, and it still brings delight to my heart whenever I think about that peaceful time. Sadly, it is gone now. We were young and naïve about the world when we promised to wait for each other—’

  ‘Okay, stop reading. I don’t want to hear the rest.’ I stood abruptly and rubbed my palms on my trousers.

  Marguerite paused and her eyebrows creased together. ‘Why? You don’t know what she’s going to say.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘No you don’t. Shush.’ She focused back on the letter and tracked the page with her finger until she found the spot where she had left off. I headed for the forest but she followed and read as she ran to catch up to me. ‘You have certainly gone off to war and I pray the reason you haven’t written is not tragic. I prefer to convince myself that you have built a nice life for yourself on Mayne Island. There was a time when I wanted nothing more than to return to Mayne Island to be with you, but with regret, that is not how things worked out for me. I have had to rethink my future and come to the difficult acceptance that it will not include Mayne Island. Or you.’

  ‘Stop reading, Marguerite.’ I walked faster and rubbed my eyes with my sleeve. The crushing in my airway was worse than when the white-haired, nasty-nosed guard had dug his heel into my throat. Marguerite chased after me, and in her attempt to read and keep up, she tripped on a log and landed on her face without putting her arms out to break her fall. Her fantastic garden hat fell to the ground and the flower braid broke apart. After a shocked delay, she started to cry and flung her hands up to cover her cheek. I rushed back and scooped her up, then sat on a stump with her seated next to me. ‘Let me see.’ I gently pulled her wrist to check the injury. A superficial scrape covered a large portion of the left side of her face.

  She inhaled to compose herself, wiped her tears, and brushed her knees, which were also scraped.

  ‘Do you want me to give you a piggyback home?’ I asked as I picked up her hat and reassembled the flower arrangement.

  She shook her head. ‘No. We have to finish reading the rest of the letter.’

  ‘It’s fine. I’ll read it after I take you home.’

  ‘No.’ She pushed off the stump and bent over to pick up the letter from the ground. I didn’t have the heart to argue with her when she was hurt, so I closed my eyes and braced for impact as she reread the line she was on before she tripped, ‘I have had to rethink my future and come to the difficult acceptance that it will not include Mayne Island. Or you. I wish that were not the case because I have never stopped loving you.’

  Marguerite’s head snapped up to grin at me. ‘Did you hear that? She never stopped loving you.’

  I nodded, cautiously optimistic.

  She kept reading, ‘I think about you with every breath I take.’ Marguerite’s eyes popped open with thrilled anticipation. ‘If you want to stay on Mayne Island and live out the dream you started before the war, I completely understand, but please know that I will never stop loving you. You probably think I’m foolish to have kept our promise to wait for each other for all these years, but you once told me our love is too strong to be broken. I believed you. I honestly do not want to ever be with anyone else, so the promise has not been difficult to keep. There is a part of me that hopes you feel the same way. There is also a part of me that reluctantly accepts it may not be true for you any more. And even more dreadfully, I have to accept that perhaps you are not alive to receive this. I believe I would have felt the loss in my soul if that were true, but I fear that possibility.

  Although I have changed in so many ways both from age and circumstance, it is perhaps more remarkable that there are traits about me that have remained exactly the same despite the adversity. I recently read this passage by a French philosopher and writer named Albert Camus that helped restore my faith that good will prevail:

  In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.

  I pray you have also discovered the summer inside you and are pushing back against the winter. I will never forget the life we had before. You were, and will always be, my one true love. I forgive you if you do not feel the same in return. I also forgive you if you are gone. I don’t want to make a nuisance of myself, so this will be the last letter I write to you. I wish you nothing but the very best. Love Chi.’

  Marguerite clutched the letter to her chest with sheer joy. ‘Golly. You need to go there as soon as humanly possible.’

  I nodded and then shook my head, overwhelmed by the intensity of my adoration for Chidori and my distress at the probability that I had already lost her forever. ‘What if it’s too late? She wrote that over a year ago.’

  ‘You must go and find out for sure.’

  ‘What if she has a husband? I can’t just show up.’

  ‘Ring her up.’

  I exhaled, not sure what to do, then took the pages from Marguerite to devour the letter again.

  Chapter 42

  The telephone earpiece tremored against my cheek as I waited in my parents’ kitchen for the line to connect to the Blake residence in Alberta. My voice was primed to fail me the way it had at my third-grade spelling bee competition. The word I had been given was ‘sanguine’. I knew it, but I froze when I made the mistake of looking at the audience, which consisted of pretty near every resident of Mayne Island. Chidori sat in the fr
ont row, and when my eyes met hers, she nodded encouragement to remind me I knew it. I took a deep breath, squeezed my legs together so I wouldn’t wet my pants, and spelled the word.

  I needed her to nod at me to get through the telephone call.

  ‘Hello.’ It was an older gentleman’s voice.

  I cleared my throat. ‘Uh, hello, sir.’

  There was a long silence. ‘How may I help you?’

  ‘Um.’ I wiped the sweat from my brow with my sleeve and switched the receiver to the other ear. ‘I’m calling to speak to Chidori Setoguchi, if that is possible. I’m not sure if I have the correct number.’

  ‘It is the correct number. She’s not here right now.’

  ‘Oh, okay.’ I paced a few steps in each direction, then leaned on the edge of the sink to support my weight.

  ‘She’s in town picking up some items for the wedding. If you’re calling to respond to the invitation, I can pass the message along.’

  ‘Wedding?’ My knees gave out, and I had to reach for the stool to prevent myself from falling to the floor. ‘No. No. I’m not calling about … wedding? No.’

  ‘Is there a message you’d wish me to pass along to her?’

  ‘No, sir. No message. Thank you.’ I hung up and stared at the wall.

  A chair scraped across the wood planks behind me. Pop cleared his throat and said, ‘Lethbridge is only a one-day train journey from Vancouver.’

  I slowly turned on the stool until I faced him. ‘She’s getting married.’

  He sat at the table and unfolded the newspaper. ‘She’s not married yet, is she?’

  ‘You think I should stop the wedding? What if she doesn’t want me to?’

  ‘You won’t ever know unless you go see her. She might rather marry you instead.’

  ‘But she can’t live here.’

  He nodded, completely aware of what that meant. He slid his glasses down his nose to peer over them at me. ‘Were you dreaming all those years about coming home to Mayne Island or Chidori?’

  My mouth stretched into a smile as the answer settled in. I leaned over and slapped his back. ‘I guess I’ve got a wedding to interrupt.’

  Pop chuckled.

  I stood, but paused. ‘Wait, what about Ma?’

  ‘You should do whatever will make you happy,’ Ma said from the living-room doorway behind me. ‘Just be happy, darling.’ She wiped her tears with a hankie as I crossed the room to hug her.

  The steamer was scheduled to leave Mayne Island at ten o’clock. I packed, said my goodbyes to my family, and rushed so I would have time to stop by the Setoguchis’ old house. Marguerite was wearing knicker trousers, a newsboy cap, and an argyle sweater vest that matched her argyle socks. She spun around wildly on a swing she’d twisted into a tight corkscrew. When she came to a rest, she took in my dress clothes, clean-shaven face, and fedora. She flashed me a toothy smile. ‘The Hayden from the journals is back.’

  I nodded. ‘I’m back. That’s why I’m leaving. I came over to pick up the rest of the journals and to say goodbye to you.’

  ‘Hold on.’ She leapt off the swing and sprinted to the house. While she was gone, an entire tree full of songbirds simultaneously lifted into flight, singing as they rose. Marguerite returned with the stack of Chidori’s journals, a silver locket that held a picture of Chidori’s grandparents, and a silk Japanese fan. ‘These are the most beautiful things she left behind. I’m sure she’ll want them back.’ She tucked them into my canvas bag for me and hugged me around the waist. ‘I’ll miss you, but I think it’s the bees-knees that you’re going to see her.’

  ‘Here.’ I placed Rose’s hair clip in her palm. ‘I want you to have this.’

  ‘Oh my goodness.’ She removed the newsboy cap and reached behind her head to loop her hair up with the clip. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘No, thank you. Even though I acted as if I didn’t want to hear what you had to say, I’m glad you said it. All of it. Your words helped me a lot, and I think maybe there are some more folks who’d also be glad to hear what you have to say.’

  Her shoulders dropped and she stared at her feet. ‘I can’t talk to anyone but you.’

  ‘Hey.’ I lifted her chin with my finger so she’d look at me. ‘Maybe it’s time for both of us to be more like the people we used to be before all the wicked things happened. That’s how we win. All right?’

  She nodded with tears in her eyes and a smile on her face.

  ‘I have to get going or I’ll miss the ship. But I’ll send you a postcard and let you know how it goes.’

  She flung her arms around my waist to give me another hug, then stepped back and pointed in a cautionary manner. ‘Chidori is going to write about your homecoming in her journal, so make it brilliant.’

  I chuckled. ‘I’ll try. See ya, Margie.’

  Chapter 43

  The train to Lethbridge hit something and stopped abruptly enough to throw most of the passengers out of their seats. Children and luggage ended up sprawled in heaps all over the cabin. I assisted a few women as I climbed over the chaos to reach the door and then leaned out to see what we had hit. The engineer stood near the front of the train and scratched his head.

  ‘Cows,’ a man who had stuck his head out the window on the other side said. ‘We’re going to be here a long while yet.’

  I sighed and looked out over the barley fields. ‘How far do you figure we are from Lethbridge?’ I asked.

  ‘Another ten kilometres.’

  I couldn’t wait any longer. The anticipation, and not knowing whether my arrival would be received well or not, made me vibrate worse than a grenade about to explode. I grabbed my kit, hopped off the train, and jogged through the hot and dry midday weather. I was tragically out of shape. But I kept going.

  When I finally arrived at the train station in Lethbridge, out of breath and parched, I asked the ticket master directions to the Blake farm. He didn’t know, so I wandered down the street and entered a general store. The clerk sold me a lemonade and pointed me down the dirt road heading east. Before I left town, I bought a bouquet of garden roses for Chidori from an elderly woman who had a stand set up on the boardwalk in front of her house.

  ‘Are you just returning home from the war?’ she asked.

  My initial reaction was to say no, but when I considered it with more thought, I realized I was. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  She smiled with a reassuring warmth. ‘Welcome home.’

  The flowers started to feel foolish when I imagined myself walking up to the house to find Chidori’s fiancé there to greet me with my sweat soaked through my shirt and the dust stuck to the wet patches. I stopped at the fork in the road and glanced back to where I’d just travelled from. Chidori was probably happy. Seeing me would only remind her of all the things we had lost and make her melancholy. The right side of my body wanted to confidently sprint the rest of the way and see her, even if it would only end in rejection. The left side of my body wanted to slink back to the train station like a broken-down coward and find a place to start over, a place that wouldn’t remind me of her in any way.

  My body was still stuck in a tug-of-war when a truck surrounded by a cloud of prairie dirt rolled up the road. The driver slowed to a stop and rolled down the window. He was Japanese and about fifty years old. ‘Where are you headed, son?’

  I glanced in the direction of the Blake farm, then in the direction of town. ‘I, um, I’m looking for the Blake farm.’

  ‘Are you in town for the Setoguchi wedding?’

  The question hit like the truck had lurched out of gear and rammed into my gut. I sucked in a breath, cleared my throat, and croaked out, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hop in. It’s on my way.’

  I nodded and considered retreating back to town once more before sliding in the passenger side. I had read Chidori’s last letter so many times that I had committed to memory the Albert Camus quote: In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says th
at no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back. I believed it to be true for both of us, and I reassured myself that even if we could be nothing more than friends, I would still value the opportunity to simply be a part of her life again.

  The driver and I made pleasant small talk as the truck bounced another kilometre down the road. Once a farmhouse appeared on the horizon of the prairie, I became distracted from the conversation. At the end of the driveway, the truck brakes squeaked and the wheels slowed to a stop.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said as I hopped out and then shut the door.

  He waved and drove off, perhaps curious what the story was behind a stranger showing up with flowers in hand. All I could hope was that the tale was not going to end up a tragedy of Shakespearean proportion. A hummingbird felt trapped in my chest, beating its wings wildly from the uncertainty.

  The main farmhouse was two storeys, painted white with blue trim, and had a wraparound porch. A small wood cabin stood about two hundred metres down the road. An extension and a glass solarium were built out from the side, and a Japanese rock garden was intricately arranged in front of it. Just as Chidori had described. With a steeling breath I walked across the field to the cabin, swallowing repeatedly to produce enough moisture to be able to talk. It wasn’t working that well. I closed my eyes, said a prayer, and knocked on the cabin door.

  Nobody answered, so I knocked again. There wasn’t any movement inside. I cupped my hand to peek in the window. It was tidy and simple. On the desk near the window was the journal I had given Chidori for Christmas, which raised my hopes.

  The optimism was short-lived, though, as I made my way to the farmhouse and spotted a man off in the distance working in the beet field. He was too far away to make out his face. It was hopefully Tosh or Kenji but could have been Chidori’s future husband.

  Nausea flared up in my stomach as I realized how woefully unprepared I was to meet her new fiancé. As I stood, staring out at the field, the sound of singing rose from somewhere behind the farmhouse and reached me. My soul recognized the voice instantly. It was a voice that had been inside me the entire time. That settled it. I had to see her, no matter how fatal the result might be.