by Mae Wood
Me:Still stuck on the 405.
Scott: That’s the worst.
Me: The worst.
Scott:I just looked it up. See if the guy will go through Long Beach on PCH.
Me: The cars aren’t going anywhere. We’re literally stuck.
Scott: I made reservations at that Italian place for eight. Think we can make it?
I glanced at the time, and sighed. By the looks of things, even if the road magically cleared, at best I’d be at his place at eight.
Me: That’s not happening.
Scott: Meet me there?
Me: I got on the plane straight from clinic. I’m in yoga pants and an old sweatshirt.
Scott: I never complain about you in yoga pants. Or out of them. You’ll be fine.
Yeah, okay, so we both knew what this weekend was about. Connecting. Remembering why we were together while we were apart. I needed that connection. I missed him. The abandoned, half-finished mugs of coffee that he left in his wake and all.
Me: Nope. Not going out like this.
Scott: Fine. We’ll order in. Text when you’re close.
I settled back into the seat, and wondered what Elliott and Alice’s reunion would have been like. I had visions of her in her prettiest dress—blue to go with her eyes. Of her waiting at the waterfront for him, of him in a smart suit and derby hat, of him crowding the railing to look for her below and descending the stairs from the steamer, of him pushing through the crush of passengers in a determined quest to find her. Their eyes meet and the breath leaves them both. Smiles fill their faces. A tentative hello escapes both of their lips as they stand two feet apart among the bustling crowd before he takes her in his arms and kisses her.
And here I was, in the back of a ten-year-old Volkswagen, wearing yoga pants, and now, per my phone, only a mere forty minutes from my guy. I’d like to say the months we’d been apart had been easy. That our love had grown and deepened. That I understood him. That he truly understood me. That absence hadn’t just made the heart fonder, but made our connection deeper and more resolute.
But I never liked lying. The distance was killing us slowly and we were fighting tooth and nail to hang on.
It was just after eight o’clock when the car pulled up in front of Scott’s place. He was at the curb, waiting for me. A hug and a quick kiss hello, then with one hand he grabbed my bag and with the other he held mine, leading me through the complex to his apartment.
He slung my weekend bag over his shoulder and opened his front door. The wall of windows that dominated the exterior wall was black. I’d missed sunset while I was stuck in traffic. I knew that, but that hadn’t been my plan. Sunset over the Pacific, even if only a small line of the ocean was visible from Scott’s apartment—that was the stuff of my dreams. I walked to the windows and looked out, the full moon high in the sky and casting white light on the water.
“Pick your poison,” he said from the open kitchen.
“Gin,” I answered. I wasn’t a gin drinker, but Scott liked making cocktails and I liked drinking them and making him happy.
“Cucumber gimlet?”
“Sounds good. Gotta get my veggies in somehow,” I called to him over my shoulder. I left the window and joined him in the tiny kitchen, which was, for all intents and purposes, a glorified wet bar. He also survived on cafeteria food and carry-out, so I knew the food offerings were much like the ones at my place: booze and protein bars, but instead of my comfort ice cream and chocolate bars, he’d have his favorite peanut butter cookies and a random assortment of questionable fresh produce that was strictly for cocktail garnishes.
“I’m hungry. Let’s order in.”
“Called in an order of sushi. Should be here”—he paused slicing the cucumber and glanced down at his watch—“in about fifteen minutes.”
I placed my hand over his, stopping his work on the cocktail. “We can work with that,” I said, my mind flooding with memories of hurried encounters shoved into our busy schedules when we were back in Boston.
“Yes, we can.” His hands came to my cheeks, turning my face up to meet his. “I missed you, Ali,” he whispered. His lips dropped to mine and I tried to get lost in his affection, lost in his touch, but he felt far away even though he was right here. We felt far away and I hated it.
“I miss you,” I said, breaking away a beat before renewing the kiss, trying to find him, trying to find us.
His hands fell to my shoulders to pull me close and my arms wrapped around his waist.
A series of beeps punctuated the moment and we broke apart.
“That’s my pager,” he explained, snagging it off the top of a pile of mail. He glanced at the screen and looked back at me, raising his eyebrows, neither one of us wanting to jinx the situation by speculating why he was being paged, but his mood had turned.
“I thought you weren’t on call this weekend.”
“I’m not.” Our eyes met. Phone in hand, he walked out of the kitchen.
Well, there goes our fifteen minutes before sushi, I thought. I poured some gin in the bottom of a glass, dropped in a cucumber slice and splashed some soda on top, not even bothering with any ice. I knew it wasn’t even close to whatever creation Scott had in mind, but it would do the trick. I sipped my drink and tried to listen in on his conversation in the living room, to catch if he’d been paged by mistake or if a case was cratering, but I couldn’t hear.
“Massive pileup on the 405,” he called to me across the room, the smile that had been on his face long gone. “Probably explains why it took you a year to get here. They need me. And, since I was waiting for you to have a cocktail, I’m good to go in.”
“Go,” I said, waving at him. “I’ll be here when you get back.”
A quick kiss and he was out the door.
Between the two-hour time difference and my early bird surgery hours, California sunrises and I weren’t exactly strangers. I was fixing my second cup of sugary coffee when the front door opened and Scott walked in. Or some approximation of Scott.
Surgeons on TV never looked like this. They always looked competent and strong and determined, even at the end of marathon surgeries.
Scott looked rough. Tired eyes, hair standing up in a million directions, and a slump to his shoulders that ran the length of his body.
“Hey,” he said.
“It was bad,” I said, giving him words so he wouldn’t have to dredge them up.
“Yeah,” he said with a nod, biting his bottom lip. “It was.”
“Go shower, crash out.”
“I didn’t—”
“I know you didn’t plan this, but it comes with the territory. Shower. Sleep. We’ll brunch or lunch or whatever later.”
“You’re the best,” he exhaled, dropping his keys on the glass dining table and nearly stumbling down the hall with exhaustion.
I filled the morning with a long walk, checking out house prices on my phone. Kansas City was looking better with every million-dollar, two-bedroom fixer-upper I saw. I wasn’t going to take the job in Bakersfield. No matter how sweet the offer, that wasn’t our plan. It was a half measure, a stopgap, and I was ready to jump in with both feet. Our plan was an ocean view.
I was enjoying the sunshine and watching surfers from a beachside coffee shop when Caroline texted.
Tot story time is now. Librarian wants update. Hear back?
Haven’t messaged the potential granddaughter, I texted back. Though I wanted to know what happened to Elliott, the thought of him and his family suffering in POW camps turned my stomach.
I adored the Elliott I knew from his letters. He was a dreamer and a worker and I couldn’t help but to feel some kinship with him. And I wasn’t sure if I wanted the real world to intrude on that man and turn him into a real person, a person with some unavoidable rough edges and likely even more sadness. I liked him as this quasi-fictional character. And I liked keeping him to myself. Well, sharing with Caroline didn’t quite count, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to s
hare him with the world.
I also didn’t know how Elliott’s family would react. Would this be welcome? Would it upset anyone? Bring up heartache or hard feelings? Would they even care? Because if they didn’t care, that would break my heart a little. And if they cared and they asked for the letters back? No. I didn’t want to return them. They weren’t really his anymore. They were letters to Alice. They were my letters.
“Oh, why not,” I said to my chocolate chip muffin. I opened Facebook on my phone and messaged the woman Caroline had found.
Hi, I’m looking for the descendants of Elliott G. Keller, originally of Burr Oak, Michigan. He and my great-grandmother exchanged letters when he lived in the Philippines in the 1910s. If you’re his descendant, please let me know. I’d like to send you copies of the letters and find out what happened to him.
I read it through a dozen times, fixing words and changing phrases, and trying my best not to sound creepy. Finally, I hit send on the message, and texted Caroline that the deed was done, that I’d tried to contact someone who might be Elliott’s granddaughter.
Cool. I hope you hear back! Got bit by the genealogy bug. Think Stuart and I may be related, but not sure. Either way, pity Bess. She’s got us for parents.
Doomed to a lifetime of counting by fives, I texted back.
Caroline met her husband in pharmacy school, which she joked had involved more forgetting than actual learning. “The first thing you do is learn to count by fives. We spend a whole semester on it,” she’d told me in her most serious voice. The only giveaway of her joke was the glint in her eye. Every time I wrote a script that was not divisible by five, I imagined a poor confused pharmacist somewhere, having a nervous breakdown by having to count out twenty-one pills.
I flipped over to my email and saw a message from a physician recruiter who I’d been working with to help me make the jump to California. She was the one who’d mentioned the small practice in Bakersfield. It was California, yes. But Orange County it wasn’t, and I was ready to let her down easy in hopes she’d find me something closer to Scott and the ocean. I opened the email and tried my best not to cry. The position was filled. I hadn’t even gotten a phone interview. Not that I wanted that position anyway, but now that it was off the table I felt like a failure yet again. It was the third practice in California that had passed on me.
Mr. Elliott Keller and Miss Alice Hirshhorn. Dr. Scott Sayer and Dr. Ali Waller. A war wasn’t standing in my way. Time and patience and I’d find my place, I told myself. Time and patience.
I returned to my house hunting, checking out sleek condos with ocean views and cozy duplexes with beach access. A home where we’d eat breakfasts, hang Christmas stockings, and one day bring a tiny person home to join us.
What did Elliott’s house by the sea look like? I wondered. He mentioned a seawall. Soon I had a map of Iloilo up on my phone and then I was down a rabbit hole of pictures from the nineteen tens. I found what had to have been his club, which had been named Santa Barbara and now was the Iloilo Golf Club. The oldest golf club in the Philippines. American and English membership only at first.
An old photograph showed a two-story wooden building with big verandas and wide shutters propped open to let in the breeze but keep out the sun. I could see Elliott playing bridge there with his friends. I could see him in a linen suit, a flat-brimmed straw hat, and laughing over drinks. I could see him in knee-length breeches playing golf with his European friends, and drunk in a dark suit, mourning the Irish woman who passed from cholera. He was more real to me now than before.
If Caroline could find Elliott online and I could find what I was pretty sure was his club, could I find Alice?
Finding her obituary was easy. The Seattle Times. The details were slim. She was born in Indiana. She taught school. She married Frederick in 1918. She’d been a member of the Seattle Tennis Club, the Seattle Garden Club, and a past president of the local chapter of the League of Women Voters. And she was dearly loved.
But other than those simple words, she was a dead end on the internet.
I turned back to my Elliott search and had more luck. I found the obituary Caroline had told me about, but it didn’t seem quite right. Too simple for the Elliott I knew. His name. That he was preceded in death by his parents and a son, and was survived by his wife, one son, and a granddaughter. Four years in captivity and the death of a child? Alice’s hurt was just a taste of the harshness life would bring him.
I poked around more, and using his wife’s name from the obit, located a photograph of women sitting on the steps of a wooden cottage around nineteen thirty, surrounded by pine trees. Either they’d come home for a visit or this wasn’t my Elliott. My Elliott. I smiled at the silliness, that I’d think of him with some sort of claim to him, but I downloaded the picture anyway.
Twelve
Ali
September
I arrived back at Scott’s place around noon to find him stretched out on the sofa, clean and damp from a shower. Some college football game was blaring from the giant TV.
“Hey,” he croaked out, his heavy-lidded eyes on me. He was a bit groggy and I didn’t make much out of the second it took for his brain to process why I was in his living room. “You are really here.”
My gaze swiveled to the bright blue sky beyond the wall of windows. I didn’t come to California to watch football. That I could do with my brother any weekend. “Yeah, I am. Want to go out?”
“Sure. This game is terrible,” he said, switching off the TV.
We headed out and wandered around Huntington Beach hand in hand in search of lunch.
“What have you been up to all day?” he asked me over salads, after he’d spent our walk debriefing me on the emergency spinal case he’d worked on all night. It wasn’t a happy story.
“Took a walk. Looked at some houses. Surfed the web. Did you know that the Philippines still has cholera outbreaks from time to time?”
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” he said.
“Also, did you know that Japan invaded the Philippines within hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor?”
“Studying up in hopes of a Filipino category on Jeopardy!?”
“No, but I realized how little I know about it. I mean, there was the president’s wife with all of the shoes back in the eighties, and I vaguely recalled that it was an American colony or territory or whatever its official status was, but that’s it.”
“Yeah, I’d forgotten about the crazy shoe lady.”
“Who is Imelda Marcos, Alex?” I teased him.
“Indonesia next on your list?” he teased me back.
“Nah, sticking with the Philippines. I got more things from Grammie—she keeps unloading stuff on me—and in with some table linens were some love letters to the original Alice.”
“The original Alice had an affair?” he asked, his eyebrows arching in surprise.
“No. This was before she got married. Some guy she met on a train. He lived in the Philippines and for years was trying to get her to move there, but he had to save up money and then the First World War started, and it wasn’t meant to be, I guess. She married my great-grandpa and here I am.”
“Years?” he said, his interest piqued.
“Yeah, three years.”
“Sure he wasn’t already married or something? Because that’s a long time.”
My jaw set and my breath stopped for a beat. I tried not to read anything about our situation into his comment about Elliott and Alice’s situation. “I’m sure. I’ve read his letters. He loved her.”
“Really? If he loved her so much, he wouldn’t have been in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. He would have been with her in Kansas City.”
“Seattle,” I said, focusing on correcting his facts rather than addressing the meat of his statement that if you loved someone you made things happen. “The original Alice lived in Seattle. That’s where my grandmother grew up and my mom was born there too. The family moved to KC when my mom was in high school.”
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“Wherever. I just don’t get it. If you want to be with someone, you be with them.”
His offhand comment hung in the air for a minute before taking root in my soul. It stung. I knew this was hard, and that we were both working to make us work, so I brushed it off as best I could to not ruin our time together. “Anyway, I’ve been trying to run down Elliott-the-letter-writer and try to find his family.”
“Hence the research.”
“Yeah, but I think Caroline tracked down his granddaughter.”
“Really? That’s cool. You should call the lady.”
“Yeah. She’s on Facebook, so I messaged her.”
“I never check my Facebook,” he said. “And messages from strangers probably go to some spam filter anyway. Get your sleuth Caroline to run down the woman’s contact info. Mail. Email. Phone. Worst thing she can do is tell you to go away, so I don’t see a downside here.”
“Worse things have happened,” I said, remembering the horror he’d witnessed last night and knowing that right now a family wasn’t having a happy, lazy lunch like we were.
“Worse things have definitely happened,” he agreed with a nod, finishing his second Bloody Mary. “And let’s not talk about them again. Want to walk on the beach?”
“You know it,” I said.
And all through our walk, I batted away the doubt, batted away the hurt that he didn’t want me. I wrestled with the knowledge that if he wanted me, we would be together. And I fought off the realization that if I really wanted him, I would have made the choice to be with him too. I could have made that choice but I didn’t. Instead of taking the offer with the small practice in Orange that I wasn’t in love with in order to be with Scott, I’d put all my eggs in the UC Irvine basket, only to have that basket break. That bit was the hardest to accept. At the end of the day, my head and heart both knew the fault lay with me.