Authors: Colleen L Donnelly
It had taken me awhile to assure Kyle our story would be protected. Now I worried Jill’s zeal would drive me back to step one and I’d have to begin again to gain his trust. He was eyeing her, probably wondering if I’d misled him.
“Same rules.” I tried to rein Jill in. “No photos of us, and no clues about anyone’s identity.”
“Of course,” she said with a winning smile. “The two I just took of both of you…those are for me.”
The three of us sat down, and I briefed Kyle as to what we’d covered so far of Julianne’s story and letters. “We haven’t toured the house thoroughly yet,” I said, wondering if Isaac’s house should be brought into the story also. Kyle was watching me, reading the things I wasn’t saying, and he nodded. It was okay. He knew I was deliberating Isaac, and he thought it was okay. “And then we can go to her husband’s home,” I offered. Jill squealed.
As we made a slow and easy tour of my home, along with the attic, Jill filled the air with snaps, clicks, editorial comments, and flashes. On occasion I caught Kyle in her viewfinder and I wondered if she’d stolen candid shots of me, too. When we moved to the outdoors and she was rounding the house for pictures, I cornered him and warned him about her.
“She’s been stealing snapshots of you,” I whispered. “Probably has been of me too. I tell you, she’s an excellent person, but she’s an artist at heart and sometimes it’s difficult to control her.”
He looked down at me and gave me a half smile. “I know she’s been taking shots of me, and it’s okay. She knows I know. And don’t worry, she hasn’t been taking any of you.”
My jaw dropped. Had I just stepped off my own planet onto another where the rules suddenly changed? “But…but…” I stammered.
He touched me. Something Kyle rarely did, but at this moment he chose to. His hand graced my shoulder, slipped almost undetectably down my arm and squeezed. “I’m okay with it,” he said. “She won’t violate what you’ve asked. She’s a good person and a good friend to you.”
I waited for him to add the inevitable, “I like her,” but it wasn’t there. I let out the breath I’d been holding, not sure why it mattered. Maybe it didn’t.
Chapter 28
“I might have sent you away with joy and with songs, with timbrel and with lyre.”
Jill added a new dimension to my world, and to Kyle’s too, as it related to the work we’d undertaken. As we divulged as much as we felt safe sharing with her, she, with her intuitive eye, added photos to what we were trying to say. And before she went back to Cincinnati the three of us sat together and studied the panorama of Julianne’s life Jill had visually told. Pages and prints of color, texture, and angles panned before us, bringing depth and dimension to the invisible Julianne. Kyle and I sat spellbound as we looked at the pictures, at Jill, and at each other.
“She’s here,” he said to Jill, just as he’d said to me long ago in Julianne’s attic.
“You’ve done her story such a service,” I added, knowing I couldn’t give Jill a better tribute than what Kyle had.
Kyle nodded, admiring the photos with the same eye that must have put his house together, the kind that knew how to bring life where there had previously been none.
Jill put them away when we’d finished reviewing them, and I handed her a file of the next few articles to go with them.
“This should be a book someday,” she said, as she tucked everything away for her trip home.
“What if the ending’s disappointing?” I asked, not wanting to have to remind her again that a book was impossible, since I didn’t want this spread all around.
“It won’t be disappointing,” Kyle said unexpectedly. We both looked at him, my mouth falling open and Jill’s widening in a grin. One side of his kicked up in a half smile. “The story’s worth knowing, beginning to end.”
“I’ll bet you’re right,” Jill agreed. “So, for my last night here, how about we go out? My treat. Well, newspaper’s treat.”
We did the appropriate balking and arguing, but Jill won when she said Edith, the editor, was okay with it. We piled into Jill’s car, and she drove us two towns away so we could go to a raucous bar and grill, her preference, to celebrate. She entertained us the whole way there with humiliating stories about me in the city and a mad series of half songs on the radio because she only listened to fragments before she flipped to another station. I glanced over my shoulder into the darkened back seat where Kyle was sitting and gave him an apologetic eye for the commotion Jill brought everywhere she went. I was used to her, found this part of her charming, but I knew she was too brash for a man like Kyle. I could see his smile by the lights of the dashboard. He was okay, and I settled back in my seat. I’d miss Jill when she was gone, but it would be nice to return to the quiet orderly work Kyle and I shared so well together.
Casey’s Bar and Grill was no disappointment to Jill, who bought us each a beer and fed money into the jukebox. We ate well and sat long, talking and laughing, and making me miss those fun evenings of long ago back in Cincinnati. A band set up in one corner, just three instruments and a female singer. We watched them distractedly as we devoured food, then let the conversation wane until more beer arrived.
“You should dance,” Jill said looking at Kyle and me when the band members finally introduced themselves and began to play. “She likes to dance,” she said to Kyle while nodding toward me, “and she’s good.”
I felt my face heat up even more than the beer flush had caused. “That was a long time ago,” I said, eyeing her beneath furrowed brows.
“Not so long ago. You may be living in another generation, but in real time you’ve only been here a number of months. What? Four or five, maybe? Six? Has it been that long?”
I wished the band would play louder so Jill couldn’t be heard, but they were a rare polite band that didn’t come just to hear themselves play. They actually created a pleasant atmosphere. Jill’s face was alight with her usual gaiety, enhanced by the fueling effects of good food and beer. Her eyes shimmered as they shot from my face to Kyle’s and back again.
“Well, heck, I’ll dance with either one of you, just take your pick,” Jill exclaimed, throwing up her arms.
“It doesn’t go over so well here as it does in the city, when women dance together. I mean, it’s okay, but it just doesn’t blend in as well.” I glanced around and gave her a culture-warning look.
“Okay by me,” she said, and she snatched Kyle’s hand from the table top and yanked him to his feet. “A goodbye dance, since I’m leaving,” she said, and the two hurtled off to the dance floor.
I sat by myself, watching Jill weave Kyle through other couples, running my fingertip around the top rim of my glass. Kyle was keeping up with her well, and he didn’t look too overwhelmed. In fact he seemed to be enjoying himself.
“Miss?” A voice broke my concentration on Kyle’s long legs chasing around the floor with Jill’s skinny ones. I looked up.
“I asked if you’d care to dance with me?”
I registered, then, the handsome face of what could have been a cowboy, tan skin laid over perfect bone structure and set off by black hair. His western, pearl-buttoned shirt blended well with the rugged, sharp features of his face.
“I…I…” I muttered like an idiot. He extended a hand to me, which I took, and he gently lifted me to my feet. We floated to the dance floor, and he swiveled around until he faced me. Putting one hand gently at the small of my back and wrapping the other around my fingers, he brought back to me all the knowledge I had about dancing. He was wonderful, he was smooth, he was as agile as a muscular cowboy should be. I couldn’t take my eyes off his. He said nothing, but the smile he wore told me all I needed to know.
We glided around the dance floor, everyone else vanishing as my heart rate increased, my energy surged, and my legs suddenly yearned to dance all night. The pain of Trevor disappeared even more as my system engaged in living again, enjoying again, maybe someday loving again.
We bumped up against another couple, drawing my thoughts back to Casey’s Bar and Grill, and my eyes to who we’d collided with. It was Jill and Kyle, her face drawn into a not-so-cryptic
wow
and Kyle’s…Kyle’s unreadable. His eyes locked with mine for a brief second that seemed to speak into an eternity, the past and present there, the future looming ahead. I tried to smile at him, but I couldn’t. My mouth was already in a grin, a happy, sated expression of life and fun. My cowboy whipped me away, and Jill swung Kyle around, too, across the floor until they were out of sight. I craned my neck and spotted them as they focused on their game of dance and chase. Kyle never lost tempo and his expression was content. He glanced up and caught my eye again. Like the flash of a camera his smile was there, a deep and meaningful smile on fire with gaiety. It flashed and then it was gone as they disappeared once again from my sight.
Chapter 29
“Our soul has escaped as a bird
out of the snare of the trapper.”
My house became so quiet after Jill was gone. The whirlwind had passed, and the calm returned to Julianne and me. Jill’s visit left its mark on me, a breath of what I’d been, and what I might still be, behind the quiet scenes I lived in now.
It took a moment of sitting and gazing around my house to restore the reverie that had once been there. I felt like I’d neglected my sage for a few days and I needed to reconnect, remember who we were when we were together.
I looked at the stack of letters that had been sitting there and waiting, feeling it was right to read the next one before I returned to her story.
Settled on my sofa with my Julianne paraphernalia around me, I opened the top envelope as if it contained the name of the next Nobel Peace Prize winner, slowly extracting its contents as if the world were waiting. I unfolded the letter, seeing instantly it was from John, even though the name on the envelope said it was from Henrietta.
~*~
May 28, 1908
Dear Julianne,
I almost asked Henrietta to write this for me but felt it would hurt you too much if you heard it from her rather than me. I also considered never telling you, since it was unlikely you’d ever find out, and probably be the better off for it.
But I feel you must know I will be taking a wife. Not that I want to but that I should. Mother and Father worry so about me and have encouraged me to have a family of my own, raise some children. I’ve fought them on this for quite some time, but Mother insisted my heart has the capacity to love others while I continue to love you. Possibly so, but it won’t be as deeply. Never.
I will spare you the particulars. No names, no dates, no addresses. It is for the best, I suppose, that we press forward, not be anchors to each other but set each other free to live, even if it isn’t the life we would have preferred.
Never forget this, my dear Julianne—you will be carried in my heart forever. You were my first bride, albeit in spirit and practice vows, and therefore your place can’t be taken by another. Until I die, you are with me.
Yours eternally,
John
~*~
It had to come. I didn’t know whether to hate him or hope the best for him. After all, it wasn’t his fault Julianne ended up with another, so shouldn’t he have the right to some happiness? When a relationship ended, at some point didn’t living return to its ruined members? Didn’t the lifeblood begin to flow again?
I hoped so. Trevor was trying to revive his heart. And hadn’t Cliff, the man I’d danced with at Casey’s Bar and Grill, revived my feet? Made me smile? Reminded me life was out there when I was ready? Not yet, I’d told him when he asked me out. He’d left me with a smile, a soul unhurt and unruffled as he went his way.
A sense of sadness came over me, and I wished it hadn’t had to happen this way for John and Julianne. Why did he tell her? I wished he hadn’t. I wished I’d met Trevor at another time in life, a time when we would have been ready for each other or would have instantly realized we had no reason to even try to be together. Why this pain? Why did relationships have to be so difficult?
I stood up from the sofa. I had to walk away from John’s letter, get away from Julianne’s story. I had to digest this sad news and see how I felt about it before I returned to her tale to learn how she felt about it too.
I slipped on a jacket and went outdoors. I wanted to walk, but not toward Isaac’s house nor my own—in case another game of bump and squeeze was being played in our backyard—and not where anyone could find me. I turned in the direction Julianne’s bedroom window faced. Away. Away from everything here, toward something else that was out there.
I took the road for a short distance and then veered off into pastures and fields, marveling how different things looked from Julianne’s aerial view than they did from this microscopic one. I knew from growing up here that a creek meandered through a patch of woods down low between the fields. I went that way, naturally seeking a low level as if I were water myself.
I slid between the trees and made my way to the water’s edge. It was peaceful and pristine, and I wondered if Julianne had ever come to this spot. I seated myself on a large tree root that extended from the bank of the stream into the water. I leaned against the trunk and listened to a combine working in a nearby field, the roar of its engine soothing as it harvested late soybeans. Eventually its straining motors slowed, steadied themselves, and then revved up again. The distinctive whoosh of grain leaving its bin and flowing into the back of a grain truck filled the air. It was beautiful, it was my growing up years, but I wasn’t sure it was me. Maybe Julianne felt the same way.
I stood and walked away from the creek, across the fields and pastures, and along the road to my house. As I approached, I noticed a slim gray figure on the front porch. A person, a man…Kyle. He sat, his elbows on his knees, his face my direction as I made my way toward him.
“John married someone else,” I said as I came to stand in front of him. He nodded. Of course he knew. He’d known since he was a boy. “Will there ever be a happy ending?” I asked him.
“Depends on what they made of it,” he said as he stood. He turned and went into my house, and I followed him. We were like two bodies with one mind again, ready to settle back in after Jill’s fun distraction. He directed me to the sofa and picked up our notes from Julianne’s book. “You want to type this while I read it aloud?” he asked.