Page 47 of The Lies We Leave Behind

47

William

Somewhere over the Atlantic 2003

Try as I might , I couldn’t sleep.

Lizzie sat beside me on one side, Emma across the aisle on the other. Both had been looking after me all day, from the moment they arrived at my house to pick me up, on the drive to the airport, as we went through security, to when we took our seats on the plane. But now, finally, they were asleep, and I was left alone with my thoughts.

It had been startling to hear from Selene that Kate had come to find me that day. It had been shocking to find out she’d been alive. Though shocking didn’t quite cover the feeling. It was something more along the lines of devastating. I’d been so sure she’d died. There was no other explanation in my mind. I knew there hadn’t been some other great love she might’ve gone back to. We had made plans. We were in love. I’d never been so sure of anything or anyone in my life. So the only thing that made sense was, she’d died. And in the chaos of war, when we weren’t legally bound or blood relatives, there was no reason I’d have been told.

I’d ached for her. Mourned. Grieved for months. I became a danger to my platoon, putting us at risk when my mind had wandered, bullets whizzing past my helmet, missing me left and right...until one didn’t. This time the damage would take more than a couple of months to heal, and with the war nearly over by all accounts, on February fourteenth, nineteen forty-five, I was sent home.

Except I no longer had a home. My parents had moved when my brother was sent home in a wheelchair, the stairs making it impossible to get to his bedroom.

I found a small apartment once I was released from the hospital, barely unpacked any of the boxes, threw a mattress on the floor, put a radio on the counter, and made do with one pot and one pan. I was isolated, sad, and angry. I’d lost friends. I’d lost the woman I loved. I didn’t care anymore and it showed.

And then an old friend showed up on my doorstep.

“There’s a group of us that gets together once a week,” Bill said. “We have a couple of beers, talk a little about what we went through, what we saw over there... It helps. No one else understands.”

“I don’t feel like talking.”

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to. It’s really just a way to get us all out of our houses and remembering how to have friends when there aren’t bullets coming at us.”

I said thanks but no thanks. But the next week when he came by again, I couldn’t find a reason not to. After that I was there every Thursday night. Sometimes I talked, sometimes I only listened. It didn’t matter. It was just nice to not feel alone after a night of thrashing, the nightmares chasing me around my pillow.

After a while, a couple of women joined the group. One was the sister of a guy we all knew who’d been killed. She’d been close with her brother and had had a hard time since his death. The other woman was named Olivia.

A widow, Olivia’s husband of two months had died almost immediately upon being sent to the front. He’d been friends with several of the men in the group, which was how she got the call to join. They knew she’d been struggling for a long time, her folks and several friends encouraging her to move on.

“I’m tired of people assuming I’m ready because of some timetable they’ve put on my grief,” she’d said quietly the first night she came.

We all understood. We felt the same.

And then one Thursday I got off work early from the job I’d just started at an architecture firm and found her tucked into the corner of the bar we all met at, reading a book and scribbling furiously into a notebook.

I bought her a beer and she told me she was a writer.

“Or trying to be anyways,” she’d said with a shrug. “I’ll get there eventually.”

I asked her what she liked to write about and she asked me what I liked to design. We started meeting before the gatherings every Thursday after that. We hadn’t made a decision to, it just began to happen. But despite my interest in her as a person, and the fact that she was beautiful and smart and kind, I was still too broken by the loss of Kate to care about her in any way other than as a friend. And despite her husband dying years before, I could tell falling in love was the last thing on her mind.

Until the night we got caught in the rain.

The meeting had been canceled that Thursday, but I was antsy after work. I had no idea if she’d be there, but I went to the bar anyways.

“It’s closed,” she said as I walked toward her on the sidewalk outside the pub.

I frowned and stared at the handmade sign inside the window. Short-staffed. Closed Thursday, it read in messy handwriting.

The rain was pissing down and neither of us had an umbrella.

“This must be why the meeting was canceled,” I said.

“It is,” she said. “I saw it this morning and called Hal to alert everyone.”

“Oh,” I said and then met her eyes. She gave me an almost embarrassed smile, which surprised me. Olivia didn’t get embarrassed. Every meeting she just talked about whatever was on her mind. Not ashamed to put it out there for the group to know. So to see her look shy was strange.

“I was hoping you’d come anyways,” she said, staring up at me with her warm, brown eyes.

I could never explain what happened to my body and mind in that moment. It was like a salve being gently massaged into my heart. And Olivia was the salve.

We were shy with one another at first. Careful. Afraid of stepping into a relationship together. We felt guilt for the memories we were stepping around, treading ever-so-lightly, wary of thinking less about the ones we lost, and more about one another.

But we were also tired. Tired of being sad, of feeling we had nothing to live for, nothing to look forward to. And so we began to live for one another.

Lizzie shifted beside me and I glanced down at her hand in mine. When she was just a girl and scared at night, she’d climb into bed between her mother and me and hold my hand. As she’d drifted off to sleep beside me on the plane, I’d felt her soft hand slip into mine and I’d smiled and met her eyes, so like her mother’s, and given her fingers a squeeze, saying in my head what I’d said when she was small: “You’re okay, sweet girl. It’s all going to be just fine.”

It was a surprise when Olivia got pregnant. For the both of us. We weren’t married yet, but had begun to talk of it here and there. And then she arrived at my apartment door one day, white as a sheet, and told me what she suspected. We went to the doctor the next day and had it confirmed.

“William,” she’d said, her eyes wide, mortified. We’d been so careful.

But I’d smiled. “Wanna have a baby with me, Ollie?”

It wasn’t something we’d ever discussed as we were still just trying to navigate being part of a couple again, but I wasn’t upset.

“You’re not mad?” she’d whispered. “I could—”

I pressed my finger to her lips. “I don’t know what you’re about to say, but don’t. If you want this baby, let’s have this baby. You and me. It will be the three of us. We’ll be a family. You’ll write books, I’ll design us a house, and we’ll be happy.”

She’d grinned through her tears. “You’re going to be the man I always write.”

“I damn well better be!” I said and we both laughed.

And so our life together began. And it was beautiful and full of light and laughter, some funny fights, lots of family vacations, a few nightmares that still haunted our nights, but we were okay. We were just fine.

We were more than fine.

Selene met us at the airport like she said she would, but I felt myself looking around for someone else.

“How was the flight?” she asked as we followed her to her car, a soft breeze cooling the warm Southern France air.

“Good,” we all said at once and she laughed.

The drive was easy, all of us staring out the windows, taking in the beauty of Nice. I’d told Lizzie and Emma how Kate and I had once talked about living here together if we decided Seattle didn’t suit us as a couple. She’d been here often as a girl and had fond memories. Had always dreamed she’d lived here one day, and I’d been fascinated and willing to follow her wherever she wanted to go.

“It’s so beautiful,” Emma said from the back seat. “I already don’t want to leave.”

While the three women chatted, Selene pointing and explaining bits about her hometown, I grew quiet, my mind elsewhere.

“Dad?” Lizzie said, her hand on my shoulder. “You okay?”

I smiled over my shoulder, meeting her eyes and feeling the gazes of the other two women on me.

“I’m okay,” I said.

It was strange being here. The place I always thought I’d come with Kate. Seeing what she’d seen every day of her life once she’d decided to leave New York.

Per Selene, after she’d seen me that day in Seattle, she’d gone back home to her aunt and uncle’s place in Manhattan and felt adrift.

“She took a lot of walks around the city with Willa, but it felt too big. Too claustrophobic. And not where she wanted to raise her child. She began to dream of the South of France, remembering how much she’d loved it as a child. She broached the subject with Aunt Vic, who told her to think on it for a while, and maybe get back into one of the nearby hospitals—to see how she felt about nursing again. To see if it was something she still wanted to do with her life. As soon as she stepped inside, she knew it was still what she was meant to do. She worked for about a year, saving and making plans, and then when Willa was nearly two, the four of them went to France. Uncle Frank was ready to retire by then, and Aunt Victoria wanted a smaller, quieter life. They found a house for the four of them, until Kate could afford to live on her own, and they were happy, living out their days by the seaside.”

“Did she ever marry?” I’d asked, feeling a small prickle of something related to jealousy at the thought.

But Selene shook her head. “She did not. She always said she was content. She liked it being just her and Willa. She said it was all her heart could handle.”

Kate had worked in a small medical clinic as the head nurse until she retired. She’d lived a mostly quiet life with a lovely group of friends who rotated dinners at one another’s houses every couple of weeks, and evenings and weekends were spent with Willa and her aunt and uncle until they passed when both were well into their eighties. She was by Willa’s side when Selene was born, was a collector of seaside paintings by local artists, helped in her community, and loved to work in her garden, a space filled with flowers in every color.

“She was magnificent,” Selene had said as she sat on the couch in my office that day that seemed so long ago now, but was only the month before. “Happy, peaceful, knowledgeable, funny, and beautiful.”

“She was stunning,” I’d said, smiling as Lizzie looked to me, curious about this woman she’d never heard of.

Kate had passed peacefully in her sleep eight months before Selene showed up on my front porch asking if I’d ever known a woman called Gisela. She’d always been honest with both her daughter and her granddaughter about what had happened in her life, and why she’d made the choices she’d made. But while Willa had worried looking for her father might alter their life in a way that was hurtful, Selene had always been curious about me. And so, eight months after Kate had passed, she’d come looking.

“I knew it was you the moment you came to the door,” Selene had said, reaching for her purse a last time. “She always said this was her most prized possession.”

She’d pulled something out and handed it to me. As my fingertips touched the image, my heart began to race. We’d taken one photo together and I’d given it to her. I hadn’t seen it since the day I left her in England. And now here it was in my hands.

“Some months after the war ended,” Selene said, “a bunch of boxes arrived at the apartment in Manhattan. Through their network, Aunt Victoria and Uncle Frank had been able to salvage some of the Holl?nder estate. Including a few of the belongings Kate had left behind.”

I’d stared down at the couple in the photo, choking back a sob. It was the day I’d asked her to marry me. I’d borrowed a camera and remembered Kate laughing as I set the stand precariously in the field our tree grew in, watching it fall over twice before I got it to balance and then ran to stand beside her, pulling her close, her hair brushing against my cheek, her body rising and falling against mine.

“Forevermore,” I’d whispered then before the camera flashed.

“Forevermore,” I’d whispered again as I stared down at the photo.

We pulled up to a small two-story house the color of the fading sun, shutters on every window, a small yard filled with ornamental weeping trees and flowering shrubs in front.

“This was Kate’s home,” Selene said. “She was so proud of being able to afford it on her own. Loved puttering around fixing little things, decorating... Maman moved in after she passed as neither of us could imagine letting it go to anyone else. We had too many wonderful memories here.”

She turned off the car and got out, Lizzie and Emma behind her. But I was slower. My heart beating hard in my chest.

I’d never known I had another daughter in the world, and I was afraid. Would she hate me for having another family? Would we like one another? Would she and Lizzie get along? What if this was it? Would we have this one meeting and then never see one another again?

“William?” Selene said.

“Yes?” I wiped my damp palms on my slacks.

She pointed to a little arched gate. “Through there.”

I glanced at Lizzie, then Emma.

“You’ve got this, Old Man,” Emma said, and I grinned, took a breath, and nodded, turning toward the gate. They didn’t follow.

As I pushed through, a little bell rang, announcing my arrival. The garden at the back of the house was somehow lusher than the front with layers upon layers of flowers and shrubs. It reminded me of something out of one of Olivia’s books.

I followed a stone path as it curved gently through the grass toward a patio with a table and chairs and a bright turquoise umbrella, a slender woman with light brown hair kissed by the sun sitting beneath it.

She stood, the skirt of her pale-yellow sundress billowing gently in the breeze, a hesitant smile on her face. My face. My eyes. She was the spitting image of me. There was no doubt this was my child. Mine and Kate’s.

“Willa,” I said, my voice hoarse with emotion.

“Bonjour, Papa.”