The Singing Trees by Boo Walker
Chapter 41
WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN COULD NEVER BE
While he called his mother, Annalisa stood and went down the ten steps of the deck to the edge of the green grass. The wind blew hard against her as she looked left to the beach below. Celia was seated on the sand, playing with a piece of driftwood. Nonna leaned on her cane, talking with Glen.
“What have I done?” she whispered up into the heavens. “I don’t understand.”
Had his mother told the lie to break them apart? Had his whole family been behind it? Eighteen months, she thought. That was how long Celia had lived without her father. And Thomas had been kept in the dark for longer than that. She wallowed in purgatory, wishing to God that she’d done things differently.
The door shut behind her, bringing her back. He crossed the deck and then down the steps, meeting her in the grass. “My mom didn’t send that letter.”
Annalisa threw up her hands. What the hell was going on?
His eyes searched all over the place for answers. “She’s not lying. I don’t know what’s going on, but . . . she’s not lying. And I’m not lying.”
“I know that,” she whispered, taking a step toward him, wanting to wrap her arms around him.
He pressed his eyes closed, clearly in as much pain as she was. “All she said is that Emma had mentioned something about you having a boyfriend, and then a few days later you left the ring and the note back at the house.”
A light flickered in Annalisa’s mind. “A boyfriend? I didn’t have a boyfriend. What was Emma talking about? When did you find out? While you were away?”
He was even more optimistic now, as if she was a moment away from cracking the case. “Yeah, Emma wrote me. I was still in-country.”
“And that’s why you never wrote me again . . . ,” she said, making sense of it all. The light turned brighter and then it hit her. “Did Emma do this?” she asked, almost to herself, a pain making itself known in the pit of her stomach.
Annalisa locked eyes with Thomas, both of them putting the idea together at the same time.
He said, “Do you think she . . . ?”
“Wrote the letter?” Annalisa asked. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I do.” She searched her memory, finding the letter and rereading it in her mind. She remembered Emma hanging up on her. She’d never actually spoken to his mother.
“I wouldn’t put it past her,” Thomas said, stepping closer to Annalisa. “She told me that she saw you with a guy at the Spartans–Eagles game, and that not too long after you’d left that note.”
“What guy at the game? You mean Nino?”
He shrugged. “You tell me.”
“I was with Nino,” Annalisa said again, thinking this couldn’t have been happening. “Did she never meet him?” She tried to remember.
His eyes danced as he thought back. “I don’t think so.”
“All Emma ever wanted was to get me out of the way,” Annalisa said, feeling more sure with every second. “Would she have faked a letter? Forged your mom’s signature? Then written you about it? All to get you to let me go so that you’d return to Davenport? So that she could have you to herself?” Yes, she thought, answering her own question.
What an incredible betrayal this was. Were people that messed up in the world? Was Emma really that insane?
His eyes looked like hollow sockets. “I can’t imagine she would have done that.”
“She got what she wanted, didn’t she? You’re both going to Weston, probably both going to New York.” Slogging past the idea, she asked, “Why didn’t you come find me anyway? You came home and just gave up?” Had they really lost out on all these years because of a stupid letter Emma wrote? Because of a photograph a journalist in Vietnam had taken?
“I did come find you,” he insisted. “Despite your note asking me not to and Emma telling me about this other guy. A couple days after I got back to Davenport, I drove to Portland. You were on the balcony with some guy. It was dark, so I couldn’t really see, but you were up there with someone. I heard you joking with him and saw you hug him, and . . . and I . . . I didn’t want to screw things up for you.”
“What are you talking about?” Annalisa tried to remember being on the balcony with a guy. “You mean Walt?” That didn’t make sense, though.
“No,” Thomas said, as eager for answers as her. “I assumed it was the guy Emma mentioned, and I just wanted you to be happy. Lord knows I wasn’t in the shiniest of places after my tour. I guess I figured you might be better off.”
“There was no boyfriend,” she insisted with a fist through the air. “I never even saw Emma except . . .” She was back into searching her memory. “The last time I ran into her was at the Spartans–Eagles game. I was . . . I was with Nino.” Annalisa remembered having her arm around him. Had Emma thought he was a boyfriend?
Then it hit her like a truck running a red light. “That was Nino with me on the balcony. Seeing me with my cousin is why you gave up?”
Thomas’s face melted. “I didn’t know. He didn’t look like Nino, but it was dark.” He dropped his head and pinched the bridge of his nose. “The war, Anna. When I read your letter, I was in a bad place. I go over there to fight for my country, and I come home to get spit on. Tons of guys over there were getting broken up with all the time, girls writing to say they were moving on. Everybody back home was against what we were doing. And against us. I just thought you’d had enough. And I couldn’t have blamed you. I’ll never be the same after what I saw.”
“But you should have trusted me.” She wiped her eyes.
He looked at her like she was crazy. “It’s not that I didn’t trust you. I just felt like we were back to the same damn thing, like the last time you’d broken up with me.”
Annalisa knew he had a point. She was the one who’d not trusted him, and she’d gone on to hide his baby.
“When I drove to Portland,” he said, “I didn’t even know what I was going to say. I think I just wanted to see you. But then I saw you two together, and I was just too exhausted. Even if a guy hadn’t been up there, I might not have gone through with it. I felt like a beggar, being there after reading your note. By the time I got back to Davenport, I was so damn angry. I never wanted to see you again. Never wanted to hear your name again. As if that would have helped me get over you.”
He’d been two hours away the whole time, still loving her. Oh, how that hurt. “It was Nino up there, for God’s sake. I just don’t get it. All you had to do was ring the bell. Or call me.”
“I didn’t want to mess up your life. You asked me not to anyway.” He spun around and interlocked his fingers behind his head, looking out over the water. “What a damn idiot I am. My sister, my damn sister, kept us away from each other?”
There was no other way around it. And they’d fallen for it? In her weakness, Annalisa had fallen for it.
Another silence scorched the air. She looked back down to the beach, to their daughter. Right then, she knew she had to tell him the rest. The one thing he didn’t know. And she knew the space where they were now, looking at a second chance, was about to end.
“Were you ever married?” he asked, his question a rope tossed down into the quicksand in which she was sinking deeper. “Or is Glen her father?”
Annalisa shook her head, not ready for truth to come out but knowing it had to. “No.”
“Is her dad still in the picture?” More optimism poured out of him, and she wished to God there was a way she could save them. To stop the inevitable.
She looked at him and through him, speechless and bewildered. His never-ending love for her was about to die.
Leaving his question behind, he replaced it with another, all of them dripping with his frustration. “Why didn’t you come find me? How could you have given up on us by looking at a picture?”
She latched on to the last question, her last grip before she fell into the depths of her lonely hell. “It wasn’t just the picture. It was the note your mom wrote. Emma had just hung up on me, telling me it was best to never call there again.”
They both had strong points, but that didn’t solve the problem. “How could you not have come to me?” he asked again, this time a quiet plea to recover the past.
She shook her head. “I was furious. How was I to know your sister had lied? I saw the picture.”
“You should have found me and let me explain. You owed me that. You know me better than that. You were my everything. I never would have done that to you.” His voice cracked, and his cheeks quivered. “You’re still my everything.”
His words crushed her, and her face flushed with sadness, feeling all the more responsible. She loved him, too, and in this tiny space before she told him the truth, she tasted a second chance. But her decision to hide Celia would soon destroy it, and the time was now.
The time was now.
“There was another reason,” she said, wondering how this possibly could have happened, how their whole lives had been ruined.
“What?”
She pointed down to the beach. “Because of her.”
He was on the edge of exploding, his hands in the air, his head shaking. “What does that mean, because of her? Because you cheated on me?”
“No, Thomas,” Annalisa whispered. “Because she’s our daughter.”
Time stopped. Even the waves seemed to subside.
“What are you talking about?” The words barely left his mouth.
“She’s yours, Thomas,” she finally let loose. “I got pregnant in Hawaii, and she’s yours.”
Her confession was like lighting the fuse on a bomb, and she waited for the terrible explosion to come. He stared at her for a long time, his mouth open, his eyebrows curled.
As she started to apologize, he turned away from her and walked to the end of the grass to where the boulders lowered to the sea, looking at Celia for the first time, knowing that he was her father. She watched him, feeling pure misery for having kept his daughter a secret. Her crime was no lesser than Emma’s.
When he finally looked back at Annalisa, she couldn’t read what he was thinking. Sure, he was shocked, but was he angry too? He looked more deflated than anything, like a marathon runner who’d fallen short of the finish line, his feet bleeding through his shoes, his lungs running on empty.
“What’s her name?” he finally asked, misty eyed.
“Celia.” She said she was sorry with her eyes, knowing she’d screwed up everything, lied to the two people who mattered most to her in the world, and destroyed the best thing she’d ever had.
He repeated the name in bewilderment. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She almost reacted defensively but knew that wasn’t a fair response. “Because at first I didn’t want you to worry about us while you were gone. And then after the letter, from your . . . your sister, I was worried you and your family would take her from me.”
He winced, like he’d been shot in the shoulder. “Take her from you?”
“I was worried that you’d come home with your new girlfriend and start a new life and then try to take my baby. Or that your father would.”
“I’m not my father. I wouldn’t have let that happen.”
She knew that. She’d always known that inside. “I was a poor girl from the Mills, Thomas. I figured you or your parents could have found a way to drag me into court. I don’t know.”
She wiped the tears from her cheeks. “Besides, I thought you had moved on. Thousands of relationships were destroyed by that war. I thought we were destroyed too. You were different in Hawaii. It made sense.”
“Of course I was different.” His sadness carved deep lines in his face. “If you had seen what I saw, you’d be different too. Three days before I landed in Honolulu, I stuffed my friend’s intestines back into his body, watched his . . .” He stopped, sparing her the details.
She never could have imagined that he’d seen such terrible things, and she couldn’t handle the pain she saw in his eyes right now. He’d done nothing but love her and fight for his country, and she’d had such little faith in him that she’d left him and taken away his child.
He wept hard, each of his tears draining her of life. “Jesus Christ, Anna, tell me this isn’t happening.”
Those lines on his face grew deeper, and she braced herself for what was coming, worried he might turn into a shaking lid atop a pot of boiling water. She deserved it, though, and wouldn’t have blamed him. Everything was her fault. At worst, all he’d done was let a girl kiss him.
He surprised her, though.
Instead of anger came a smile that, starting with his eyes, covered his whole face. There was no boiling water to begin with. Returning his eyes to Celia, he said, “She’s really my daughter?”
“Our daughter,” Annalisa corrected him. “She’s eighteen months, born February 3, 1972.”
He blew out a giant blast of air, like he was letting go of anything else. “She’s so beautiful. So damn beautiful.”
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, a tiny cup of water on a wildfire. “So, so sorry.”
“Stop,” he said, walking up to her with a kind, understanding look, the creases on his face flattening. “My sister did this. Not you.”
Annalisa loved him for not hating her at that moment, even though she deserved that much and more. “Why aren’t you angry with me?” she asked.
With extraordinary compassion, he reached for her hand and said, “What good is that going to do? I’m here. Right now. With you. I woke up this morning not thinking I’d ever see you again, and now we’re standing here, and I feel . . . hopeful.”
Where her own hope was gone, a seed was planted. Did they still have a chance? Could he actually find a way to forgive her for what she’d done? Because she knew that she wanted one. She might not deserve one, but she wanted him back, and she never wanted to lose him again.
He took her other hand, only a small space between their bodies. “I’m not angry, Anna. Not at you, anyway. This was my sister’s doing. And as much as I’m fucking destroyed, I’m also hoping that you and I can . . .” He paused.
“Yes?” she said, hoping he’d take the leap and give her one last chance.
“That you and I can find what we lost.”
Had she not been looking into the depths of his soul, through his eyes that were now the color of jade, she might not have believed him. But she knew he meant it. That was how much he loved her, and that was how much he’d always loved her.
A river of tears poured out of her as she said, “Yes, that’s what I want too. I want you back, Thomas.” Forget her guilt. Forget her crimes. It wasn’t about what she’d done. It was about this moment and this man, who deserved so much more than her, but for some crazy damn reason wanted only her.
He pulled her closer, their bodies touching, their fingers interlaced. “You’re single?”
“Yes. And you? What about the girl at the market?”
“No. Well, we were dating for a little while, but she and I were over the minute I saw you. I have never loved anyone else. Never in my life. All I’ve ever wanted is us.”
Annalisa put her forehead to his chest and then looked up at him. “I’m all yours, Thomas. Everything that I am is yours. For always.”
She thought he might kiss her, but he let go of her hands and pulled her in with his strong arms, hugging her like never before. As if there were no further to fall, she fell in love with him all over again. No woman on earth had ever been so lucky or been so loved.
When he let go, he said, “I don’t even know how, but can we pick up where we left off? I can’t go another day without you or our daughter.”
She wiped her eyes and nodded over and over. He put his hands on her waist, and they inched toward each other just like that time at the drive-in when they’d first kissed. The hole that had been cavernous in her heart filled with each second. It was all too much, but it was everything she wanted, and when their lips met, it was the missing piece to her world, an explosion of colors that she’d never seen.
She wrapped her hand around his neck and pulled him in, their passionate kiss swallowing up the time since Hawaii that they’d lost to lies, fanning an ember that had never really burned out.
He touched his lips where hers had been, the happiness on his face enough for a lifetime. “If you only knew . . .”
“I do know,” she said, immeasurably happy herself. She knew how badly he’d missed her, missed kissing her, missed being with her, because she felt the exact same way . . .
After a long embrace, they separated and he said, “I don’t know what to do about my sister.”
A part of Annalisa didn’t want to blame Emma. “She was young and didn’t want to lose you. And she was . . .” Annalisa saw Emma back when they’d first met. “She was troubled, Thomas. More than I ever was.”
“Well, she’s happier now, and why wouldn’t she be?” He’d come out of his fog and sounded stronger. “She got what she wanted, and I refuse to look past it. She nearly ruined our lives; she did, actually. She took me away from the love of my life and our daughter.”
“She didn’t know I was pregnant.” Even as Annalisa said that, she thought it might not be true. Even if Emma had seen the stroller, though, she couldn’t have known it was Thomas’s baby.
“You being pregnant has nothing to do with it,” he insisted. “She’s looked me in the eyes a thousand times. She could have made this right.”
Annalisa didn’t want him to lose sight of the good in today, and she didn’t want to allow herself—or Thomas—to turn against Emma. Had she not been smothered in love herself, Annalisa might have turned out the same way. “Maybe there’s an explanation, like you said.”
“No,” he disagreed, clearly coming to his own conclusion. “I know my sister. This is a strategy game that she thought out many moves in advance. All to push you out of the way so she could keep me in town. She got lucky, really. To make it this long without being found out. Did she really think I’d never run into you again?”
“I was starting to think that.”
“I guess I was too,” he admitted. “But you know what? Nothing can get in the way of you and me. We’ve proved that time and time again. The only thing that matters is that I’ve found you.” He looked back down to the beach. Celia was dragging her stick in the sand, drawing a picture. “And that I’ve found her. My daughter.”
His knowing the truth now was an everlasting peace. Annalisa might have screwed up, and she’d have to forgive herself for that, but for now, he’d forgiven her. And more important, he and Celia would soon reunite.
She slipped her hands onto his waist. “You’re going to be such a good father. The best there ever was.”
He glided his fingers across her cheek and the side of her head, petting her lovingly. “Does she know about me?”
A shake of the head, trying to throw off the guilt of keeping Celia from her father. “She’s too young to understand. I told her you went away; that’s all.”
“But now I’m here.”
“Yes, you are.” She hoped in that moment that there would be no more obstacles, that now they could truly be together. “So what do we do now?”
Thomas put his finger to her chin, lifting her lips to his. “Whatever it is, we do it together . . . if you two will have me.”
Shivers rose up and down her body, the kind most girls would surely never know. With an iron will, she said, “Together, yes. Absolutely.”
Then she couldn’t help but say with a watery smile, “If we get married, though, I’m not changing my name. An Annalisa Barnes signature just isn’t going to cut it on my canvases. It would feel like I was burning the Italian flag.”
Thomas wiped his face on his shirt again and said laughingly, “Fine, then. Maybe I’ll even take your name.”
“I’ll consider allowing it. And I might even let you put up a blue picket fence out front.”
He grinned as their faces dried to pure joy. “Wouldn’t that be something?”
Annalisa stuck out her hand. “Would you like to meet her?”
“More than anything in the world.”
They walked together toward the steps. “While we’re getting everything out,” she said, “there’s one more thing I have been keeping from you; it’s kind of serious.”
He sighed and mumbled something to himself. “Hasn’t there been enough for one day? I’m not sure how much more I can handle.”
She held a straight face, winding up the tension.
He stopped at the top of the steps. “What is it?”
She couldn’t hold back anymore. “The day I drove into Portland for the first time to meet Walt . . .”
“Yeah?”
She flashed her teeth. “I backed into Walt’s Belvedere with your Beetle.”
He smiled and then broke into a laugh. “If that’s the last of your secrets, then I think we’re going to be just fine.” He shook his head, still laughing. “Now I’m gonna go talk to my daughter.”
Annalisa followed him down the steps, watching him with a full heart. He took two at a time. When he hit the sand, he slowed some, showing a twinge of fear. Nonna and Glen stepped out of the way and let him take in his daughter for the first time. He crept up to her and dropped his knees into the sand.
Glen started back up the steps, knowing he didn’t need to be a part of this moment. Annalisa put her arm around Nonna.
“Hi,” Thomas said. “I’m Thomas.”
She babbled a long string of mostly incoherence.
Annalisa let go of Nonna and knelt down next to Thomas, putting her hand on his back. “Celia, this is your father. Say ‘Hi, Thomas.’”
Celia hit the sand with the driftwood and made a mark. Then she looked at her father. “Hi, Thomas.”
With his knees in the sand, Thomas crawled to her and drew a heart with his finger at her feet. “You’re an artist just like your mother, aren’t you? I’m not much of one, but I know a few shapes.”
Celia, who didn’t understand a word, looked at him and let out a smirk. Annalisa, on the other hand, burst into tears. Yes, they’d missed some time together, but there was so much more to be had.