Green Card

by Elizabeth Adams

  “I’m sorry, Lizzy. I didn’t think it would… I thought I would be all right.”

  “It’s okay, baby. This is me. You don’t have to pretend for me,” she said in a soft voice. She stood behind his chair and rubbed his shoulders. He reached up and placed a hand over hers.

  “It was in there,” he said quietly.

  “What?”

  “My father. He died in there.”

  Liz pulled back horrified. “He died here? In this apartment?”

  He nodded.

  “Why didn’t you tell me? Oh, William.”

  He shook his head. “We were talking about a deal with the company, some new factory we wanted to buy out. It was late. He got a call, I don’t remember who it was. They argued, he got mad and slammed the phone down, then he got this look on his face.” Will opened and closed his mouth like he couldn’t find the words. “The next thing I knew, he was on the floor and I was calling an ambulance. I held his hand and tried to keep his head up. I don’t know why I did that.” He shook his head. “But it didn’t help. He was gone by the time they got here.” He took a ragged breath. “And I was alone.”

  She kissed both his cheeks and embraced him tightly. After a few moments he hugged her back, squeezing her so forcefully she could hardly breathe.

  “Do you want to go home?” she asked, her voice muffled by his shirt.

  He nodded.

  “Come on. I’ll tell Jackie we’re leaving.”

  Jacqueline didn’t want to stay there alone, so the three of them left, Jackie to her family’s brownstone and Liz and Will back to their apartment.

  As soon as they walked in the door, she told him she had the sudden urge to bake something and asked if he’d keep her company. So Will sat at the island in the kitchen, sipping a cup of tea and watching Liz roll out dough for a batch of cookies in the shape of gingerbread men.

  Will gave her a tiny smile when she handed him several bowls of icing and a small knife and told him to get started decorating while she washed up. She watched him from the corner of her eye as she soaped up bowls and then made them each grilled cheese sandwiches and a small salad.

  When she set a plate in front of him with a fork and napkin and a bottle of his favorite beer, she said nothing about the brown-eyed gingerbread man decorated in a dark grey suit or the one next to it that looked like Jacqueline. She looked more closely when she sat beside him and saw another in a lighter grey suit that looked like himself and a blonde woman in a blue dress with bright blue eyes; she assumed it was his mother. But nothing could prevent her surprise when she saw one with wavy brown hair and bright green eyes that looked suspiciously like herself.

  ***

  After the fiasco in the study, Liz took over clearing out Will’s family home. Luckily, with Ian Mellen in Scotland for the summer, she had the time to devote to it.

  She sorted through his father’s study and separated everything out as logically as she could given her lack of knowledge about the situation. Old business documents—the current ones had long been removed—were sent to Will’s office at Taggston where he could look over them at leisure and decide what he wanted to do. Family documents—old school enrollment papers, notes about properties in other places—were sent to Will’s study at home. The books she left in place, thinking Will would probably want them himself; she made a list of the titles and sent it to Evelyn. She left one family portrait of the four of them on the wall and had all the other art packed and crated and put into storage. She made a detailed list of what she put where, complete with pictures next to the description and a number for the box it was in.

  The living room was easy; most of the pictures were photographs and she and Jacqueline decided the easiest thing to do was to have copies made of everything so they would each have one. While she was at it, Liz also hired an artist to copy two paintings of family members that she thought both siblings might want. Beyond the odd question or request for a photo, Jacqueline didn’t seem to want much to do with the process.

  The hardest room was their mother’s personal sitting room. She had a desk with documents that were fairly easy to organize, but while Liz was sorting through a bookshelf, she found a few decorative boxes on the bottom shelf. She opened one and found an overstuffed white scrapbook. Opening it, she realized it was William’s baby book.

  There were a few photographs of his mother, young and pregnant and smiling, and a photograph of a nursery decorated in soothing colors with a red blanket in the crib. His date of birth, length and weight were all recorded. Liz smiled when she read that he’d weighed nine and a half pounds and had been twenty-two inches long. Further in, there were notes on all his achievements: rolling over, sitting up, eating solids for the first time. There was even a chart of teeth and the dates each of them came in.

  One page showed a chubby smiling baby William, sitting in a high chair, covered in some sort of sauce. Another showed him swinging in the park on a sunny day. The rest of the photos were William with his parents, a few with his cousins Teddy and Calvin, and several with older people she assumed were his grandparents. Next to the pictures, Cynthia had made short notes about the occasion or the people in them.

  This continued for William’s first three years of life and Liz put the book aside, planning to take it home and show it to her husband. Also in the box were two tiny keepsake boxes. One had several baby teeth in it, the other had a curling lock of baby hair tied in a blue ribbon. She set them aside to take home with her and moved on to the next box.

  Three boxes of photo albums and random trinkets later, she opened the last box on the shelf and found a stack of leather books. Liz opened them to find a journal, the first date being 1980. She quickly closed the book and took the box over to the corner where she settled into the chair by the window. She knew she was snooping into things that weren’t her business, but there was something she was curious about and she couldn’t stop until she was satisfied.

  She flipped through the first book, which only had entries every few weeks, until she got to the beginning of 1982. Liz scanned through the entries until she found what she’d been looking for. Cynthia Harper had just found out she was pregnant.

  *

  Liz kept the journals with her for a few days, trying to figure out what to do. She hadn’t told either of the siblings about them. Partially because she thought they might come between Will and Jackie and damage an already fragile familial relationship, but also because she wasn’t entirely sure about Jacqueline and she was afraid her sister-in-law might want them unequivocally herself and would then have ammunition on her brother, which Liz believed was unfair.

  Cynthia Harper had been thrilled to find out she was expecting a child. She described her excitement for the future and her husband’s happiness in the news. When Liz skipped ahead to the birth, she read of Cynthia’s pride in providing the next heir to the family and her satisfaction in a job well done. Liz attempted to skip over the other woman’s descriptions of her personal fears in an attempt to give her some modicum of privacy, but she read enough to know that Cynthia had felt enormous pressure to deliver a child, a male child, and that the birth of William had alleviated her fears that she would never be able to perform that particular task.

  Cynthia described her baby’s soft hair and dimpled cheeks and had many amusing anecdotes of what he said and did and how she liked to sneak into his room at night and sit and watch him sleep. She marveled that his first word had been “ball” as he pushed it to her across the carpet, and that he loved to suck on lemons and made the cutest scrunchy face when his mouth filled with sour juice. Liz thought that this was something that her husband needed to read and set it aside.

  However, as the years went on, Cynthia’s thoughts became more cynical. She spent more time complaining about her husband and less talking about her son. She resented her lack of influence and there was one particularly grueling argument recorded about William taking art classes. Cynthia thought he should take them—she thought he migh
t have her gift for color and space—but James Harper was adamant. No Harper man wasted his time on such frivolous activities. Cynthia raged on about her husband’s lack of understanding and culture and his small-mindedness for two pages, finally ending with a sad sense of resignation and a half-hearted wish that any future children be girls.

  Eventually, Cynthia began wishing she had more children and longed for a daughter, someone she could teach everything she knew to and have more influence over. Liz rolled her eyes slightly, but it was clear the Harper marriage was crumbling and that Cynthia was a very unhappy woman.

  One year, the Harpers went on a trip to Mauritius with friends to celebrate the other couples’ anniversary. When they came back, Cynthia was pregnant with Jacqueline. Her happiness was once again splashed across the page. When the baby was born, her joy knew no bounds.

  This was what Liz did not want William to read. While she had been happy with her first child and suitably impressed with her son, Cynthia was ecstatic about her daughter. She raved on and on about her precious little princess for pages, not mentioning her son at all for months at a time.

  Years down the road, when William was a teenager, another argument with James was recorded. James wanted William to intern at the family firm that summer while Cynthia thought he should travel with her and her sister. They were taking a tour of the Greek islands on her sister’s yacht and Cynthia wanted to take both of her children with her. From the looks of it, her sister Claudia doted on her children, having none of her own, and desperately wanted to spend the summer spoiling them and basking in their youthful affection.

  James Harper adamantly put his foot down. It was time for William to begin learning the business. Greece wasn’t going anywhere, he could go another time.

  Cynthia made another plea the following year to allow William to spend the summer with her and her daughter at the beach house. She offered to compromise and do every other week or only the last half of summer, but again, James was unmoved. She made one last half-hearted plea before she gave up. She wrote one line that made Liz shiver. “He’s turning my sweet, artistic boy into a cold-hearted businessman and I can’t bear to watch. I just can’t.”

  William wasn’t mentioned again for over a year.

  The remaining journals were filled with Jacqueline and all the things she was doing: the riding show she was in, her music recitals, the shopping they did together. The two were clearly very close and Liz was afraid she was reading evidence of the parents using their children against each other. Cynthia seemed to have laid a claim on Jacqueline while James was completely in charge of William’s upbringing.

  Liz decided she would show Harper the journal that covered his mother’s pregnancy and his early years. She thought it would do him good to see how he was happily expected and how much his mother loved him. She decided to wait on the others. Will was in a fragile emotional state when it came to his mother and she didn’t think it was necessary to remind him how much Cynthia had favored his sister. If he asked her outright if there were more journals, she would tell him, but she wasn’t going to offer up the information. One day, when he’d healed a little more and his relationship with his sister was a little more solid, she’d give him the rest of the journals, but today, she was sending them to storage.

  The next afternoon, she placed the journal on his desk in the study with a note saying she thought he would find it interesting. Several hours later, she came home to find Will in the leather chair in the corner of the room, a blanket over his knees, reading his mother’s journal.

  “How’s it going?” she asked tentatively.

  “Hmm? Oh, it’s great. I can’t believe you found this,” he said distractedly.

  “Me neither.” She watched him a minute longer, and when it was clear he wouldn’t ask her anything else, she went to the bathroom to get ready for bed, trying to ignore the niggling feeling of guilt for not giving him the other volumes.

  William finished the entire journal in three days. He read it in the car, between meetings, and during lunch at his desk. He couldn’t believe this book had been within his grasp all these years and he’d never found it. It was edifying and confusing and terrifying all at the same time. He loved being inside his mother’s head when she was pregnant, learning how she’d craved the most bizarre things including an insatiable desire for cinnamon and how she couldn’t stand spicy food at all, when it had previously been a favorite. He smiled thinking about how he’d put cinnamon on everything as a child, including his jam sandwiches, and how to this day he didn’t like spicy food. He wondered if her cravings had influenced him or if it had been the other way around. He liked thinking he had something in common with her, even if it was only a temporary pregnancy craving.

  He thought there were probably more journals. If his mother wrote steadily for the three years covered in this one, she was unlikely to suddenly stop, but he trusted Liz and he suspected what was in the others: his parents’ arguments, a narration of the steady decline of their marriage, her raptures over Jacqueline. He had no desire to read that and so he let it lie. Maybe one day, when he was feeling a little less adrift, he would read them, but for today, this was enough. It was more than enough really, and he basked in the peace he felt surrounding his relationship with his mother for the first time since his sister was born.

  Four days after the first journal was laid on his desk, William found a sheet of paper in the same location. It was some sort of ledger for the storage unit. There was a box number highlighted and next to that, a small photo of several leather journals set neatly in a row. There was a post-it note on the paper written in Liz’s handwriting.

  Whenever you’re ready, it read. He smiled and pocketed the note. He had more than enough.

  ***

  Thanks to a very detailed pre-nuptial agreement (courtesy of her ever-careful brother), Jacqueline’s divorce was fairly smooth. Barring any unforeseen circumstances, she would be a free woman by mid-October. After a rejuvenating summer by the beach, she went back to Cyprus to take care of business there. William offered to go with her, but she said it was something she needed to do on her own. She put the hotel she’d renovated on the market and sold it quickly to another hotel in the area that was looking to expand. Albert kept their house there so he could continue to draw inspiration from the sea and the scenery. Jacqueline rolled her eyes and signed it over happily.

  She went to London and stayed in her townhouse there, the one she had inherited from her mother’s family, and reconnected with her old friends in the area and spent time with her cousin Cece and various other family members in the city. It didn’t help that so few people expressed surprise on hearing about her divorce. It was not pleasant to realize everyone had seen coming what she’d never even considered. Her faith in men and in her own judgment had taken a beating, but she was determined that she would not let this define her life. She was entirely too stubborn for that and as Will had said, she was smart and young and had almost unlimited resources. What was stopping her from living a fulfilling life?

  She researched going back to university to study architecture and eventually settled on a wonderful program right there in London. She enrolled for the January term and was happy to be moving on with her life and in a direction she was genuinely interested in, but she still felt all the humiliation of having been cheated on in such a blatant way.

  She tried not to think about Albert and went through her entire collection of photographs and replaced his head with those of men in catalogs, an idea Liz had given her months ago. At first she felt silly doing it, but eventually the process became cathartic and she realized she had a beautiful life ahead of her and a pretty good one behind her, albeit a bit rocky. She would not let her cheating husband steal all her memories, hence replacing his face in the pictures. Doing this silly exercise eventually sent her into a flood of tears, only the second time she’d cried since the whole thing started in the spring, and once she’d wrung herself out, she realized she couldn’t let
him steal her future either.

  So with great excitement and not a little trepidation, she bought her books and began studying a month before term started, just to prepare. She bought a new winter coat and a mustard colored hat—as close to cheerful as Jackie ever dressed—and even got her hair cut in a new angled bob that made her look very mod. Fresh and unencumbered, she was ready to pursue her new life, sans Albert De(fuck)Witt.

  39

  Fade to Autumn

  August

  1 year, 4 Months Married

  August eighth was a big day for Will. The merger that he had been working on for more than two years, that had kept him up nights and was so important he’d gotten married to avoid jeopardizing it, was complete. He and Liz went out with his colleagues who’d been involved and his cousin Calvin who was working the Covington side of things. They ate, drank, and made merry and didn’t get home until dawn.

  Without the merger hanging over his head and nothing new to launch, Harper was enjoying a pleasant lull and taking full advantage of it by spending plenty of time at the beach house and inviting his cousins to visit. Calvin only stayed a few nights, but Teddy and Caroline came with the baby and spent ten lovely days playing in the sand and soaking up the sun. Harper discovered his heretofore unknown talent for photographing children and took hundreds of pictures of young Thomas, who for some reason had taken an immediate liking to him and smiled broadly every time he came around.

  After they’d stayed up late one night talking around the fire and laughing till their sides ached, Harper woke at his usual time. He was annoyed that he couldn’t sleep in, but decided to get up and make a cup of coffee. The house was quiet and he tiptoed around the kitchen while he prepared coffee for himself and hot tea for Liz. He put the mugs on a small tray and took them to the bedroom.