I took the photograph from my pocket and held it up, glancing at it as I moved slowly across the open space. “This is where the picture was taken,” I said, coming to a halt.
Bill came over to where I was standing, looked down at the photograph, and pointed. “There’s the ridge Emma’s son fell from. And there’s the tree.”
The gnarled old oak tree stood by itself at the edge of the clearing, and we walked over, drawn to its cool circle of shade. I set the bag gently on the ground, not wishing to disturb the stillness, and Bill dropped his jacket on top of it, then gazed out over the land below. He turned, startled, when I uttered a soft cry.
A heart had been carved into the old tree. It was darkened with age, and the bark had grown back over some of it, but the initials it encircled were still plainly visible.
“RM & D—” I looked at Bill. “RM and Dimity Westwood. RM. Who’s RM?”
“Someone who came up here with her,” Bill guessed, “and took pictures to commemorate the day? Maybe someone who went to the zoo with her as well?” He traced the heart with a fingertip. “Clearly someone she loved.”
I sank to the ground at the foot of the tree, and Bill sat beside me. He took the water bottle from the bag and we each had a drink. Pouring some water into his cupped hand, he cooled his face, then recapped the bottle and put it away. He sat with his back against the rough bark while I watched the hawks glide gracefully through the air.
Whose hand had carved that heart? What had happened to him? I closed my eyes and sensed… something. A dream of distant laughter, a memory of voices, a whisper of sweet words echoing down through time; the stillness at the center of a raging world.
“Lori?”
Bill’s voice came to me from a long way off. Closer, much closer were those other voices, low voices murmuring, whispering, echoing, then snatched away by a roaring wind. I strained to hear them, but the roar of the wind was followed by silence. I felt a sadness, an intense longing, a sense of loss so powerful that it struck me like a blow. Who had come with Dimity to this still and peaceful place? Whom had she lost to the chaos that surrounded it?
Bill put his hand on my shoulder.
“A soldier,” I said, unaware that I was speaking the words aloud. “RM was a soldier, a boy Dimity loved, who joined up early and was killed.”
“Was he?” said Bill.
“I… I don’t know.” I opened my eyes and put a hand to my forehead, squinting against the sun’s sudden glare. “I don’t know, but I thought I heard… Did you hear it?”
“All I hear is the wind in the trees.”
“The wind…” The wind of death had silenced the voices in the clearing, as it would one day silence all voices. I rubbed my eyes and tried to shake the cobwebs from my mind.
“RM—a soldier?” Bill mused. “It makes sense. There was a lot of dying being done in those days, and a lot of hearts were broken. It would explain why Dimity was so shaken when your mother met her. It might even explain why she never married. But why would she get rid of the photos? If she loved him, why would she try to erase his memory?”
I ran my fingers along a twisted root, still touched by a sorrow that was, and was not, my own. “Sometimes it hurts to remember.”
Bill let the words hang in the air for a moment. “It hurts worse to forget. Because you never really do, do you?”
“No,” I murmured, “I suppose you don’t.”
“Dimity didn’t. If we’re guessing right, she may have tried to forget, but…” He looked up at the heart on the tree. “RM wouldn’t leave her alone. She’s still hurting, still in pain over… something that requires forgiveness. I don’t understand why she would need to be forgiven for the death of someone she loved.”
“I do,” I said, in a voice so low that Bill had to lean forward to catch my words. “Sometimes you feel guilty after someone dies.”
“For what?”
“For… all sorts of things. Things you did and things you didn’t do.”
“Like suspecting a perfectly innocent man of playing ghost?” said Bill archly.
“Something like that.” I glanced at him, smiled briefly, then plucked a blade of grass and wound it around my finger. “My mother used to do that—say silly things to pull me out of a lousy mood.”
“Did she?”
“She used to tease me all the time, the way you do. I was pretty impossible with her, too.”
“I find that hard to believe,” said Bill.
“It’s true, though. She never said anything about it, but…” I shook my head. “I don’t think I grew up to be the daughter she had in mind.”
“Who do you think she had in mind?”
“Someone who wasn’t stupid enough to study rare books, for one thing.” I began to shred the blade of grass into tiny pieces. “Someone who could manage to keep a marriage together. Someone who wasn’t so damned pigheaded. But I’ve always been that way. That’s why…”
“That’s why what?” coaxed Bill.
“Nothing.” I tossed the bits of grass to the wind. “We’re supposed to be talking about Dimity.”
“We’ll come back to Dimity. Right now we have to talk about something else. That’s why what, Lori?”
“That’s why…” The wind had ceased, and not a leaf was stirring. It was as though the old tree were holding its breath, waiting for me to go on. “She asked me to come home, Bill. She pleaded with me to come home. But I was too proud, too stubborn, too set on proving… I don’t know what. And that’s why…that’s why I wasn’t there when…”
Bill put his arms around me and pulled me to his side. He held me quietly, caressing my hair, then murmured softly, so softly that I could scarcely hear his words, “Did your mother ask you to come home for her sake or for yours?” I stiffened, but he tightened his hold, waiting for the tension to ease from my body before going on. “You shouldn’t have stopped reading those letters when you did. You might have learned a thing or two.” His fingers feathered lightly down my cheek. “You inherited more than your mother’s mouth, you know. You have her chin, too, and it’s a very determined one. That’s how your mother described it, at any rate. I don’t recall her ever using the word ‘pigheaded’. ‘As strong-willed as I am’, were the words she used.”
I shook my head in protest, but Bill continued on, regardless.
“Do you think your mother joined the army because it was a good career move? Do you think she sat down and weighed the pros and cons? She didn’t, Lori. She saw the war as a grand, romantic adventure, and she saw the same romantic streak in you. Why else would you study something as impractical as old books? She didn’t think you were foolish, though. She would’ve supported anything you did, as long as you were following your heart. You know that, don’t you?
“As for your marriage—she understood that, too. She had doubts about it from the beginning, and she was proud of you for discovering your mistake. Yes, she wanted you to come home then, but it was because you seemed lost. She thought you needed her help. She never wanted yours.”
“Because she knew I was useless,” I said bitterly.
Bill’s fingers dug into my arm. “Stop it. You know that’s not true.”
“But—”
“Your mother, Lori Shepherd, was just as pigheaded as you are. She never asked anyone for help. That’s why she clammed up after your father’s death. It took Dimity a long time to knock some sense into her.”