The Violets of March

by Sarah Jio

  Just as he sat down and took a bite, the phone rang again. “Good grief,” he said.

  I gave him a look that said, “It’s OK, go answer it,” but I really wanted to pull the plug out of the wall so that whoever this woman was, she wouldn’t call again.

  “Sorry,” Jack said, running back to the kitchen to answer the phone.

  “Hello?”

  He paused for a few moments.

  “Oh no,” he said.

  There was a long pause before he spoke again. “Of course. She’s right here. I’ll get her.”

  Jack ran back into the dining room and motioned for me to come to the phone. “It’s your aunt.”

  My heart nearly jumped out of my chest as I picked up the phone.

  “Emily?” Bee’s voice sounded frantic and confused.

  “Yes,” I said. “Bee, what is it? Is everything OK?”

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, but Henry was out on the beach this morning and he said he saw you walking toward Jack’s so I, well . . .” Her voice was quivering.

  “Bee, what is it?”

  “It’s Evelyn,” she said, sounding lost. “She was here for breakfast this morning. And she . . . she collapsed. I called 911. They’re taking her to the hospital now.”

  I didn’t hesitate. “I’ll be right there.”

  “No, no,” she said. “There isn’t time. I’m leaving right now.”

  “I understand,” I said. “You go. I’ll find my way there.”

  I didn’t have to ask if Evelyn had hours or minutes left. I already knew. And I sensed that Bee knew too, instinctively, in the way of twins, or soul mates, or lifelong friends.

  I hung up the phone. “Evelyn is in the hospital,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief.

  “I’ll drive you,” Jack said.

  I glanced at the table and the plates full of perfect French toast that had suddenly lost their appeal.

  “Just leave it,” he said. “If we go now, we can be there in under a half hour.”

  Chapter 11

  The nearest hospital was thirty minutes away, off the island in Bremerton, a small city to the west. We crossed a bridge to the peninsula, and I instantly felt the island’s aura dissipating, like coming back down to earth from some otherworldly stratosphere.

  When we arrived, Jack and I ran to the reception desk and asked Evelyn’s room number.

  The white-haired woman behind the counter took so long, I wanted to jump over the desk, commandeer her computer, and find the information myself. The tapping of my finger on the counter probably told her as much.

  “Yes,” she said, “here she is: sixth floor.”

  When we got to her room, Jack stood back. “I’ll wait outside,” he said.

  I shook my head. “No, come in.” I wouldn’t let him feel like an outsider, like he was shunned. Not any longer. Whatever reservations Bee had about his family would end with this generation, I decided.

  “Nah,” he said. “It’s OK. I’ll be here when you need me.”

  I didn’t push him, and instead nodded and opened the door to the room. Inside, Bee was sitting at Evelyn’s bedside, holding her hand.

  “Emily,” she said, “we don’t have much time left.”

  “Oh, cut it out, Bee,” Evelyn said. I was glad to hear the life, the spunk, was still in her voice. “I will not let you carry on like this, sobbing like a baby. Will someone get me out of this awful gown and into something decent, and for the love of God, someone get me a cocktail.”

  I could see why Bee loved her so much. I loved her too. “Hi, Evelyn,” I said.

  She smiled, and when she did, I could see the exhaustion in her eyes. “Hi, dear,” she replied. “I’m sorry, your geriatric friend has probably pulled you away from an exciting date.”

  I smiled. “I actually brought him with me.”

  Bee looked up at me, concerned, as if the thought of Jack being near her caused her great consternation.

  Evelyn ignored Bee’s mood. “You light up when you talk about him.”

  No one had ever said I lit up around Joel. In fact, it had been just the opposite. People always told me I looked tired, worn down, when we were out together.

  “Enough about me,” I said. “How are you feeling?”

  “Like an old lady with cancer,” she said. “But a martini would help.”

  Bee sat up, as if she knew exactly what she had to do. “Then a martini it is,” she said, standing. “Emily, will you stay here with Evelyn? I’ll be right back.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I said reassuringly. I thought it was sweet that she was going to try to fulfill her dying friend’s wish, but I wasn’t sure how she would pull it off. Drive to a liquor store? Buy a shaker? And then there was the business of smuggling the ensemble in past the nurses.

  Once Bee had left, Evelyn leaned in. “How’s your reading coming?” she said. There were so many wires and monitors hooked up to her that it felt strange to talk about anything other than her illness, but I sensed that she wanted none of that.

  “I’m absolutely enthralled,” I said.

  “How far are you into the story?”

  “Deep,” I said. “Esther has just gone to meet Elliot at his house.”

  Evelyn closed her eyes tightly, and opened them again. “Yes,” she said.

  A nurse entered the room and fiddled with an IV line. “Time for more morphine,” she said to Evelyn.

  Evelyn ignored her and continued to stare at me intently. “So what do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “About the story, dear. The love story.”

  “How do you know this story, Evelyn?”

  She paused and smiled, looking up at the ceiling before her eyelids got heavy. “She was always such an enigma.”

  I gasped. “Evelyn, who?”

  Her breathing was labored and slow and it occurred to me that the intravenous medicine had kicked in. “Esther,” she said softly. “Oh, how we loved her. We all loved her.”

  Evelyn’s eyelids looked heavy, and I stifled my urge to quiz her further.

  “You will make it right, dear, I know you will,” she said weakly, slurring her words. “You will make it right for Esther, for all of us.”

  I reached for her hand and laid my head on hers, watching her chest rise and fall with each strenuous breath. “Don’t worry, Evelyn,” I said. “You don’t have to worry anymore. Just rest.”

  Bee returned about thirty minutes later, looking exhausted herself, with a brown paper bag in hand. “Evelyn, your martini. I will make it now.”

  “Shhh,” I said. “She’s sleeping.” I made room for Bee to take her rightful place by Evelyn’s bedside, to soak up every last second with her best friend.

  Jack had been in the waiting room for at least an hour, and when I walked out to see him, he stood up nervously. “Did she . . . ?”

  “No,” I said. “Not yet. Bee is with her now. But there isn’t much time.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  He walked toward me, and his eyes searched my face. Right there in the waiting room he wrapped his arms around me and held me tight, tighter than anyone had held me before. I looked out the window, over his shoulder, and the view wasn’t much—large stretches of pavement with an occasional clump of dandelions courageously poking up out of the asphalt—but a boarded-up movie theater caught my eye. The marquee read E.T., and I wondered if it had remained like that since the 1980s.

  I looked up at Jack, and this time I really looked at him, deep into his eyes. He pulled me close and kissed me. Even though everything felt unsettled and unanswered, at that moment, I couldn’t deny the fact that everything also felt right.

  Evelyn died a few hours after I left the room, but not before Bee had made her that martini. In mere minutes, she had shaken over ice gin and vermouth, garnished with an odd number of olives for luck. Evelyn had opened her eyes briefly and shared a final drink with her best friend. It was a parting act that suited them perfectly,
and when we were home that night, Bee made another round, and we toasted Evelyn’s memory.

  I asked Bee if she wanted me to stay up with her, if she wanted a shoulder to cry on, but she said no, that she just needed sleep.

  I did too, but not with Evelyn’s words ringing in my head. How did she know Esther? How did the diary end up here, in Bee’s guest room? And why did Evelyn think these pages were meant to be found—meant to be found by me?

  Chapter 12

  March 10

  I didn’t want to get out of bed the next day, but I couldn’t sleep, either, so I turned my attention to the diary.

  Bobby was asleep when I got home from Elliot’s. I knew when I walked in the front door, because I could hear him snoring, just as I had left him. I undressed and pulled back the bedspread inch by inch, praying I wouldn’t wake him. I stared at the ceiling for a long time, thinking about what I’d done, thinking about where I’d go from here, but no answers came. And then Bobby rolled over and flung his arm over me, pulling me close. I knew what he had in mind when he started nuzzling my neck, but I rolled over and pretended to be asleep.

  The next morning, when Bobby had left for work, I wanted to call Frances and tell her everything. I longed to hear her voice, and her approval. Instead, I called Rose in Seattle.

  “I saw him last night,” I said.

  “Oh, Esther,” she said. Her tone was neither judgmental nor encouraging. It reflected the worry and excitement and terror I felt about the decisions that lay ahead. “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She paused for a minute. “What does your heart tell you?”

  “My heart is with Elliot. It will always be with Elliot.”

  “Then you know what you need to do,” she said simply.

  Bobby came home that night, and I made him his favorite meal: meat loaf, boiled potatoes, and string beans with butter and thyme. On the surface, it was as if nothing had changed. We were a happily married couple having a nice anniversary dinner. But I carried a heavy weight on my shoulders, the weight of great guilt.

  With every glance from Bobby, every question, every touch, my heart came closer to bursting. “What’s different about you?” he asked at dinner.

  “Nothing,” I said quickly, worried that he could see right through me.

  “It’s just that, well, you seem different,” he continued. “More beautiful than ever. March becomes you.”

  I felt as though I could no longer carry on and decided that I needed to go to the priest and air my secrets in a confessional booth.

  So, I dressed the baby in her Sunday clothes and we drove to Saint Mary’s. My heels clicked on the wood floors as I walked through the church to the row of confessionals along the right-hand wall. I walked into the first one and sat down, bouncing the baby on my lap.

  “Father,” I said. “I have sinned.”

  “What is it, child?”

  I suppose he expected me to say something like “I have gossiped” or “I have coveted my neighbor,” or something generally benign. Instead I opened my mouth and said the unthinkable.

  “I’ve slept with a man who isn’t my husband.”

  There was silence on the other side of the booth, an uncomfortable silence, so I spoke up again.

  “Father, I love Elliot Hartley, not my husband, Bobby. I am a horrible woman for it.”

  I listened for a sign that the priest was there, that he was listening. I wanted him to tell me I was forgiven. I wanted him to tell me to do a thousand Hail Marys. I wanted him to lift the weight off my shoulders, because it was getting too heavy for me to carry.

  Instead he cleared his throat and said, “You’ve committed adultery, and the Church does not condone such behavior. I suggest you go home and repent to your husband and pray that he forgives you, and if he does then God will forgive you.”

  Aren’t all sins the same in God’s eyes? Isn’t that the message I’d heard in Sunday school since childhood? Instead, I felt like a heathen, unable to work my way back to heaven.

  I nodded and stood up, holding the baby over my shoulder, and walked out feeling great shame, with an even heavier burden to carry. The big brass doors closed loudly behind me.

  “Hello, Esther.” It was a woman’s voice behind me in the parking lot. I turned around and saw that Janice was walking toward me, with a strange smirk on her face, but I just kept walking.

  Another day went by. Bobby came home from work and I thought about telling him, but I couldn’t bring myself to say the vulgar words I’d need to say to explain myself. No matter how I spit it out, there was the fact that I’d given myself to someone else. Bobby was always so sunny, always so cheerful, even when I wasn’t. He was too good a man. I couldn’t bring myself to shatter him. I wouldn’t do it.

  And then the next morning, after Bobby had gone to work, I got the call—the call that made me question every choice I’d made to this point, every emotion I’d felt.

  “Mrs. Littleton?” the female voice said on the other end of the line.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “This is Susan from Harrison Memorial Hospital; I’m calling about your husband. He’s in the hospital.”

  She told me that Bobby had collapsed just before walking onto the ferry that morning, and an ambulance had rushed him to the hospital in Bremerton. When I heard her say the words “heart attack,” my own heart cracked a little—cracked with regret, the way it does when you have been cruel to someone whom you should have loved. Bobby didn’t deserve this. He didn’t deserve any of this, and I decided to make it up to him.

  What would I do with the baby? I couldn’t bring her to the hospital, not today, not under these circumstances. So I knocked on Janice’s door, as a last resort, and handed the baby over, wrapped in pink blankets. I didn’t like the way Janice looked at her, with the disquieting sense that she’d take my child, take my home, take my place in Bobby’s bed if she had the chance.

  “Where are you going?” she asked, with that familiar look of disapproval in her eyes.

  “Something very important has come up,” I said. “It’s an emergency.” I didn’t dare tell her it was Bobby. She’d be at his bedside before I could blink an eye.

  “Of course,” she said. “And Bobby, when will he be home?”

  “Not for a while,” I said, running to the car. “Thanks for watching the baby. I really appreciate it.”

  I drove to the hospital and when I arrived, I backed into another car in the parking lot, but I didn’t stop to check the damage. None of that mattered. Bobby needed me.

  “I’m looking for Bobby Littleton,” I practically barked to the receptionist. She directed me to the sixth floor, where Bobby was getting ready for surgery, and I made it to the room just in time.

  “Oh, Bobby!” I cried. “When they called me I was beside myself.”

  “They say I’m going to make it,” he said, winking at me.

  I leaned over his bed and wrapped my arms around him. I lay like that until the nurses tapped my shoulder and said, “It’s time.” I didn’t want to let go, and as I watched them wheel him away, I was haunted by the fear that I had caused all of this.

  Waiting for him to come through surgery was agony. I paced the floors relentlessly; I was sure I’d walked at least three miles. Occasionally I’d look out the window, to the theater below to see what was playing. On the marquee was BLUE SKIES, WITH BING CROSBY. I watched couples, mostly teenagers, walking arm in arm, and I wished I were one of them. I wanted to turn back time and get it right, without any of the regret, without the pain.

  I gazed out the window a little longer, watching couples file in for the show.

  And that’s when I saw Elliot.

  His tall frame stood out in the crowd, in any crowd. And he wasn’t alone. There beside him was Frances.

  “Mrs. Littleton,” the nurse said from the doorway.

  “Yes?” I said, forcing myself to turn away from the window. I felt trapped between two worlds. “
Is he OK? Tell me he’s OK.”

  She smiled. “That husband of yours is a fighter. He came through surgery just fine. But his recovery will be tough. He’ll need your around-the-clock care.”

  I nodded.

  “Speaking of which,” she said, “I’ll just need to see your ID, for the discharge paperwork.”

  I reached down to the place where my purse always hung on my arm, but it wasn’t there. Then I remembered that I’d never retrieved it from the restaurant the night I’d gone to see Elliot. All of it seemed so unfathomable now.