During those first weeks after learning of Sara’s pregnancy, we kept busy getting the lodge ready to reopen. We celebrated Sara’s and Race’s birthdays, but nothing had the joy it should have.
I went with Sara to her first doctor’s visit, and we heard the baby’s heartbeat. It was a turning point. Sara and Marni began researching names, and when I showed Sara a modified plan to turn the attic into a small apartment with a nursery, she hugged me and said, “No baby will ever have a better view.”
We reopened the lodge in late September and decided to keep it open until the end of October to recoup some of our loss of income. Sara and I were setting up the breakfast buffet one morning when Frank walked into the dining room. He stopped just inside the doorway and looked at Sara.
“I’ve got this,” I told her.
I finished serving breakfast with tears rolling down my cheeks. “I tear like crazy when I cut onions. It just wipes me out,” I told the guests, which is true.
That night Sara and Frank knocked on the door of the cottage and told us their plans. They sat on the sofa, and Frank was holding Sara’s hands and looking at her, then at us, and back at her. “We'll stay on the island until the season is over, and then we’ll go to Washington for the winter and then back to Alaska in the summer. I’ve already arranged to be based out of Seattle for a while.”
I looked at Sara. “That’s what you want?”
She nodded.
And selfish me, my sadness that I would not be with Sara when she had the baby and we would not have a little one around in the spring, overshadowed the happiness I should have been feeling for two of my favorite people. And I was disappointed when I found out they weren’t getting married.
“He asked me to marry him. I said no,” Sara told me when I asked her about it.
“Sara, why?”
“Because I don’t want him marrying me because he feels he has to.”
“I know Frank, Sara. He doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want to do.”
“He wants me and the baby. He says he loves me. I really believe he does, Cammy. That’s enough for me.”
I call that time my season of letting go. Let it go, let it go, became my new mantra. We found out Paul had a girlfriend we hadn’t met, and he didn’t seem to be too anxious about introducing her to us. Janie hadn’t said too much when she found out Jeremy was working at the lodge, but I think it made her feel pressured. She called one night after he had left for school, and even though we were separated by hundreds of miles, I could feel her holding my face in her hands.
“I care about Jeremy, Mom. I really like him, I do, but I don’t feel about him the way he feels about me. I know that. I hope you and Daddy are not disappointed.”
“Janie, don’t you ever give away your heart to please someone else.”
“Even if it means I’ll be with David?”
“Yes,” I told her and then told myself, Let it go, let it go.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
A Basket of Rhubarb
A logical explanation exists for everything and if you wait long enough, it will eventually be revealed. The fire in the lodge, which exposed our ghosts for who they really were, was a prime example of this. And when something doesn’t make sense, there is something you don’t know. And there was plenty I didn’t know.
I was in the garden, basically feeling sorry for myself. Sara and Frank would be moving in a few weeks, and I was going to miss the birth of my niece or nephew and miss my friend. Marni was going back to her job in California, and Jeremy was back at school. It would just be George, Race and me again for the winter.
George, my mind wandered. What about George? Lucy was the reason he would leave the lodge the previous winter and not tell us where he was going. He went to be with her during the big storms, but what about him and Celia Alexander, and what about the lodge?
George knew why the owners of the lodge sold to me for less than half of what Stephen Alexander had offered them. He had to know.
I was feeling a bit ornery and hungry for some answers, so I pulled out some large stalks of rhubarb, cut off the leaves and filled a basket full. I carried it to George’s front door and knocked. His door wasn’t closed tight, so I pushed it open a crack and called, “George, George, its Cammy, George.”
No answer.
I would set the rhubarb on his kitchen table and leave, maybe look at the place as I walked through. George’s place was laid out just like Rhubarb Cottage. I entered into the room with a small eat-in-kitchen and a small living room with a stone fireplace. A short hall led to a bedroom, which I did not go into.
The home was tidy and simply furnished. In the kitchen a small table and three chairs sat in the corner. In the sitting area a sofa, chair, and a coffee table were arranged in front of a window on the front wall. Against the far wall was a narrow table that was lined with photographs.
I scanned the faces in the frames. They were mostly black and whites but there was a color photo of George and Lucy that looked like it had been taken in front of her cottage and one of Lucy when she was probably twenty years younger. She was wearing the same straw hat.
There were two photos of young girls, teenagers, both black and whites. One was a stunning dark haired young woman with dark eyes and Celia Alexander’s smile. The other girl was beautiful too. She had long blonde hair, light eyes, Lucy’s eyes but they were different. Next to these was a black-and-white photo that stopped me cold. It was of a woman who looked like me. She looked like Janie, and she looked like me. Her head was tilted to the side, her long dark hair hung in loose waves over one shoulder, and she flashed a movie star smile. I picked it up and stared at the eyes.
“UhHmm.”
The sound startled me. I dropped the frame and it landed in the basket of rhubarb I had hanging on my arm. I turned around, and George was standing in the doorway.
“Oh, George, you scared me. I’m sorry to have just come in, but I was here to see if you wanted some rhubarb. The door wasn’t closed. I was going to take it to the kitchen and leave it for you and…” I took the frame from the basket and held it up. “George, who is this?”
He didn’t answer.
“George, who is it?” I felt an intense impatience well up inside me, and it took away any guilt I might have felt for snooping. “Okay, George, I’m trying not to be disrespectful, but I want to know who this is and why you won’t to tell me who it is.”
He still just stood there.
I set the basket of rhubarb on the floor and dropped my butt onto the sofa. “George, I’m not leaving here until you tell me who this is.”
Still nothing, he was tenacious.
“I hope you want a roommate. I’m not kidding. I’m staying right here until you tell me.”
“Stay here,” he said.
That’s just what I told you I was going to do, I thought. Is he trying to work some kind of reverse psychology on me? And then he left.
After a while I was wondering, Did he mean stay here on the sofa or stay here at the lodge? Where did he go? And who is the woman in the photo that I’m staring at?
With his hands gripped on the doorframe, Race leaned into the room and said, “There you are. I’ve been looking for you. Sara wants to know if you need anything else from Kipsey. She and Frank are getting ready to take off.”
Then it seemed to hit him that it was a wee bit unusual for me to be sitting on George’s sofa. We had been living on the property for over a year and neither of us had ever been in George’s house.
“What are you doing?” he asked me.
“I’m not sure.” I held the photo out to him.
He stepped into the room, took it from me, and studied it. “Who is this?”
“That’s what I wanted to know.”
“Back up here a minute. What are you doing here, and where did you get this photo?”
“I came over here to talk to George about the lodge. I decided I was going to find out once and for all why the owners of the lodge
sold to me for less than what Stephen Alexander had offered them. I knocked and he didn’t answer. His door wasn’t shut tight, so I came in.”
“Cammy.”
“I had some rhubarb and I was going to leave it for him. I just thought I’d set it inside and then I saw this picture on the table. When George came in, I asked him about it. He wouldn’t tell me anything and then he said, ‘Stay here’ and he left.”
“Where did he go?”
“I don’t know.”
“How long ago was that?”
I looked at my watch. “A little over an hour.”
“And you’ve been sitting here, waiting?”
“He said stay here.” I pointed to the picture Race was holding. “Look at her, Race.”
Race held his hand out to me. “Come on, when he comes back, we’ll ask him about it.”
“No.” I gripped the edge of the sofa cushions as if Race was going to drag me out of the room. If I left, I was sure George would just go on his merry way and not answer yet another question. “I’m staying here.”
Race sat on the sofa next to me. “You’re shaking. Are you okay?”
“No, Race, I’m not.” My eyes filled with tears, and I felt completely drained. “Something’s not right. I can feel it. I can’t take all this not knowing anymore. Why is George always so secretive… about everything? And now this picture? I just can’t stand it anymore.”
Race put his arm around me. “I’ll talk to him, okay?”
Sara walked in and said, “You found her. The supply train is leaving. What do you need?”
Answers, I need answers.
Sara stepped into the room and asked, “What’s wrong?”
I knew if I spoke, I’d lose it, so I just shook my head.
Sara sat on the other side of me and grabbed my hand.
Soon after, Frank came in and asked, “What’s going on?”
And a laugh-cry welled up and shook my chest.
Race handed him the framed picture. Frank’s eyes widened and his head rocked back as if it had suddenly gotten heavier. Before long, in walked George with Celia Alexander.
“Cammy, George and I need to talk to you,” said Celia.
My heart was pounding in my chest, and I didn’t know why.
“Do you want us to leave?” asked Sara.
“That’s up to Cammy.” Celia was looking intently at me.
“No, stay,” I said and squeezed Sara’s hand tighter.
Celia saw the picture Frank was holding and held out her hand for him to give it to her, and then she sat across from me on the coffee table. George stayed standing.
She set the photo on my knees. “George wants to tell you who this is.”
I looked up at George and he said, “It’s my mother.”
“And… it’s your grandmother, Cammy,” said Celia.
“What?” I was truly beyond confused.
“Oh, man,” said Frank.
“Cammy, do you know you were adopted?”
“I wasn’t adopted.” I looked at Frank. “I’m not adopted.”
Frank looked at me and nodded.
“Frank?”
“Look at you, Cammy. Mom and Pop are German down the line. Look at me, German right?”
“What are you saying? Because I don’t look like you, I was adopted?”
“No, Cam, Pop told me.”
“That I was adopted?”
“Yeah.”
“When?”
“You remember the beer Uncle Axel sent to Pop from Germany every Christmas?”
“Yes.”
“One night, a week or so before you came home from college for Christmas, he’d had a few bottles, and then he came into my room and woke me up. You know how he rambles when he drinks. Well, Mom had been after him to give me the sex talk. I’d heard them arguing about it in their hushed tone, the way they do. The beer loosened him up, I guess, and that was the night he decided he’d get the talk over with. First, he took inventory of what I already knew, and then he started to get emotional and was telling me if I got a girl pregnant, I was going to take care of her.”
Frank looked at Sara with a sweet smile and then he continued, “Then Pop said, ‘If someone had taken care of Cammy’s mom, she wouldn’t have been shipped across the country to us.’ When I asked him what he was talking about, he patted me on the head and said, ‘Nothing, son, and don’t tell your mother about this, okay?’ Well, I didn’t say okay, and the next day I told Mom what Pop had said, and she slapped me across the face. She said she didn’t ever want to hear me say anything more about it. For the next week Pop and I ate dinner alone. Mom would set the food on the table and then tell me to go get Pop and eat. When we were done and had left the table, she would go back to the kitchen and clear the dishes.
“I know I should have said something to you, Cammy. I almost did that Christmas when you came home from college. I thought I knew what Pop was saying that you’d been adopted. But I thought if you didn’t already know, you might leave when you found out we weren’t your real family, and you wouldn’t be my sister anymore, and I’d have to be there all by myself. Of course when I got older, I knew you’d always be my sister, but I didn’t know that when I was twelve. You gave me that beanbag chair you made. Do you remember?”
Frank looked all blurry through my tears. I nodded and I was thinking about Frank and how scared he must have been. Leaving him to go to college was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.
Frank said, “I liked that gift so much. It made me think how much I didn’t want you to go away. And I was afraid of Mom. I decided I wouldn’t say anything, and I made myself forget about it. Honest, Cam, I’ve thought about talking to you, so many times since, but you never even seemed to suspect a thing, or I thought you must know but didn’t want to talk about it either. And, Cam, I shouldn’t have let it keep me from talking to you, but I knew Mom would be so angry if I said anything, and it would be a big mess. I’m sorry.”
I wiped the tears out of my eyes and looked up. “George, are you my father?”
“No, I’m your uncle. Lucy’s your mother.”
“My mother? Lucy?”
I was so overwhelmed. I stood up, left the cottage and walked down to the lake. Race followed me and held me while I cried. When I was almost cried out, I asked Race, “I don’t understand how any of this can be true. How, Race? Is it possible that I’m adopted and that…?”
Race gave me a half smile as if he knew.
“You didn’t know, did you?” I asked him.
“No, Cammy. It does make sense, but I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have kept that from you. But deep down, you probably knew or suspected you might be adopted, don’t you think?”
And I probably did know, but children just want to belong, and I had spent my childhood trying to belong in my family.
“If I am, Race, how can this… Lucy… here…?” I was crying again and Race held me and calmly suggested, “We could go back up the hill and find out.”
We did go back to George’s cottage. Sara and Frank were gone, and Celia and George were standing in the corner, holding hands and talking. Race and I sat back down on the sofa, and I asked, “How do you know what you’re telling me is true?”
“We didn’t at first, Cammy.” Celia sat next to me. “George saw you taking pictures down by the gate two summers ago, and then he watched you walk around the property. He thought he was seeing a ghost.” She looked at George and smiled. “Then when you tried to contact George about the lodge, we found out your name and where you were from. I hired an investigator. Then we knew you had come back to us.”
“Come back to you?”
“Yes, we think it’s a miracle, Cammy. You should have never been taken from the island, taken from Lucy.”
“Taken?”
“Lucy wasn’t always the way she is now. She was perfect, smart, funny, beautiful. When she was sixteen, she fell in love with a boy from the island that lived up on the Hill, Jonathan Tady
shak. Lucy and George’s father Heinrich Miller and Jonathan’s father Terrance Tadyshak forbade them to see each other. There was a lot of bad history, and that generation firmly believed there was an economic line that was not to be crossed. It’s the way it was then, and I married a man I didn’t love because of that stupid line.
“Lucy and Jonathan never considered for a moment that anyone would keep them apart, and they continued to find ways to be together. Before they turned eighteen, they ran away to the mainland and found someone to marry them. They had it in their heads that if they were married, no one could tell them they couldn’t be together, and they could still live on the island. When they came back to St. Gabriel, they found out their marriage wasn’t legal because they weren’t of age, and they didn’t have parental consent. But Lucy was already pregnant.
“Lucy knew her father would send her away, or worse, if he knew she was going to have a baby. She and Jonathan decided they would keep the pregnancy a secret until they turned eighteen, and then they’d get married again. Lucy went to George for help, and he came to me. When she began to show, we kept her here at the lodge. Jonathan’s family still owned the property, and it hadn’t been occupied since the war. So we prepared a room in the lodge, room number ten, where Lucy stayed until you were born.
“Mr. Miller thought Lucy had run away. I don’t know that we did the right thing. We were all so young, and it was such a confusing time. But Lucy and Jonathan were so happy. We couldn’t help but want them to be together. George and I had been kept apart.” Celia looked over at George and her eyes welled up with tears. “And we couldn’t bear the thought of Lucy losing her chance with Jonathan. Somehow it was easier to fight for someone else. You were born in that room, Cammy, and George was the first person to hold you. We kept the room just as it was then.”
I looked up at George. He was looking out the window.
“Lucy and Jonathan loved you so much, Cammy. They would twirl you around the lobby and when the weather cleared and temperatures warmed, they’d bundle you up, take you out to the second floor balcony and dance with you in their arms. When the ice thawed, they were going to leave the island with you and get married again.”
My Way Home (St.Gabriel Series Book 1) (St. Gabriel Series) Page 31