by Sarah Jio
I felt my cheeks get hot. Of course Elliot is Jack’s grandfather. How did I not connect the dots in the first place? How eerie and wonderful and confusing.
“It’s remarkable, the resemblance,” he said, pausing for a few seconds more. “It’s like I’m looking at her.”
I smiled nervously, but said nothing.
“Well, look at me just standing here,” he said. “Please, come in.”
His apartment was small and clean. There was a little kitchen and pint-size dining area next to the living room, which was just big enough for a small sofa and two chairs. Around the corner was the bedroom and a bathroom.
“Make yourself at home,” he said, pointing to the chair by the window.
Instead, I walked over to a wall filled with framed photos—mostly baby pictures and family portraits, but it was the black-and-white wedding photo that caught my eye, the one of Elliot and his bride, a bride who wasn’t, as far as I could tell, Esther.
“Your wife,” I said to him. “Is she still living?”
He shook his head. “She died eleven years ago.”
I could detect nothing in his voice that told me he had cared for her, or that he missed her, but then again, it was a simple question, and he stated a simple fact.
“You’re probably wondering if I loved her,” he said, “my wife. If I loved her in the way I loved your grandmother.”
It was what I was wondering, but I didn’t dare ask.
He nodded. “I loved Lillian, I did. But it was different with her. She was my companion. Your grandmother was my soul mate.”
It seemed wrong—blasphemous, even—to speak of a dead spouse in this way. I wondered if Lillian had come to accept that she came second, next to Esther’s memory. If I hadn’t read the diary, and seen for myself the depth of that love, I suppose I wouldn’t have understood.
Before I sat down, something on the bookshelf caught my eye. Sandwiched between a Bible and a Tom Clancy novel was the dark blue spine of a book. My heart fluttered as I extended my hand to the shelf. “Do you mind?” I asked, looking back at Elliot for permission.
“Not at all,” he said.
I knew it was Years of Grace even before seeing the gold letters of the title on the spine.
“She loved that book,” Elliot said, his voice sounding distant. “After . . . well, after everything happened, I read it so many times. I thought if I could understand the characters, maybe I could understand Esther.” He sighed. “But eventually it started to blur together, the way a story does when you’ve read it too many times in one lifetime.”
“Elliot,” I said, sitting down on the couch. “What happened? What really happened to my grandmother?”
“I know you want to understand,” he said. “And that’s why I wanted you to come here today.”
He stood up and walked to the kitchen. “Tea?”
“Sure,” I said.
He filled one of those electric pots with water, then plugged it into the wall. “Let me start by saying that no one could tell your grandmother otherwise. She was passionate and strong willed. Determined. If she got an idea in her head about something, that was that.”
I sat up straighter in my chair. I thought about Jack, for a split second, and wondered if I had misjudged the scenario the other night. Did I jump to conclusions like Esther did? Am I genetically wired to repeat history?
“We were engaged,” Elliot continued, “your grandmother and I. I’d scrimped and saved and financed myself to the hilt to buy her that ring. But there was a misunderstanding. She thought I’d been seeing someone else, another woman in Seattle.”
“Were you?”
He looked horrified. “Absolutely not. The woman she saw me with was an old friend who owned an apartment in the city. She was engaged herself, and selling it to me for well below market value. Your grandma always wanted an apartment on Marion Street, with big windows and a dumbwaiter. It was something, this place. I wanted to surprise her on our wedding day, but she beat me to the punch.”
“Why didn’t you explain it to her? Why didn’t you just tell her about the surprise?”
“I tried,” he said. “But there was no reasoning with Esther.”
I remembered that scene in the book, the anger in Esther’s voice. The desperation in her eyes as she stood there on the edge of the street—or at least that’s the way I had imagined it. “So she broke off your engagement and that was that?”
“Yes, that’s about how it went.” He looked dejected, as if the wound was still raw, as if even after sixty-five years, he still hadn’t figured out what went wrong or why, or whether he could have done something differently to change the course of time.
“And she married someone else?”
“She did,” he said again, looking at his hands resting in his lap, one on top of the other. “I was angry with her for a long time, and I made her pay. I dated half the women in Seattle, and I’d bring them to the island and parade them around, hoping Esther would notice. But when she didn’t, I left for the war. But I couldn’t even escape her there. She plagued my heart in the South Pacific. She was all I thought of and dreamed about. She was in every thread of my being.”
“But you sent her letters while you were at war, right?”
“Just once,” he said, his voice thick with pent-up emotion. “I was worried her husband would find them. I didn’t want to meddle, but I had to tell her my feelings, in case I didn’t return.”
“I know what happened when you returned,” I said.
“You do?”
“Yes,” I said. “I read the story.”
He looked confused. “What story?”
“The story she wrote about her life, in her red velvet diary. Don’t you know about it?”
“No,” he said. “But I’m not surprised. Esther was always writing the most beautiful stories. She wanted to be a writer. A professional writer.” He paused for a moment. “This story,” he continued. “May I see it?”
“I don’t have it with me,” I said, “but I can send you a copy.”
“Would you?”
“Of course. I don’t see any reason why she wouldn’t want you to see it. She loved you, even after . . .” I hesitated, questioning my intention to confront him about the details of the story. “Maybe you can help me sort out the people in the story.”
“I’ll try, Esther.”
I was startled. “Elliot, you just called me Esther. I’m Emily.”
He shook his head, as if to scold himself. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just, all these memories.”
“It’s OK,” I replied. “In the diary, she calls her best friends Frances and Rose. Could they, by any chance, be . . . ?”
“Evelyn is Rose,” Elliot said without question. “Didn’t you see it on the program at her memorial service? Her middle name is Rose. Everyone called her that back then.”
I nodded.
“And Frances is—”
“My aunt,” I said. “She’s my aunt, isn’t she?”
“Yes,” he said. “Back then she used to go by Frances, her given name. Nobody started calling her Bee until many years later.”
“So you”—I paused to consider what I was about to say—“you and my aunt were once . . . ?”
He knew exactly what I meant, and he didn’t make any attempt to refute the idea. The next few seconds of silence, as he gathered his thoughts, told me that there was something complicated about their history. I began to understand, in some small way, the emotional baggage my aunt had carried with her all these years; I saw it downloading in Elliot’s eyes.
He sighed as if he’d hoped that the conversation wouldn’t turn to Bee, but now that it had, he’d have to tell me the whole story.
“For me, there was never anyone else but Esther. All the other women were just scenery. But Frances . . .” He paused. “Frances was different. She was so unlike Esther, and for a time, I fell into the comfort of that. Your aunt never meant to fall in love with me, nor did I int
end to fall in love with her. She told me a hundred times that she hated that she had developed feelings for her best friend’s beau. She loved your grandmother so much,” he continued, his face suddenly grief stricken. “We both loved her.”
He paused and looked at his hands, then up at me again. “Your aunt suffered through the ups and downs, never hoping for anything but happiness for Esther and me. She put her own happiness aside. That was your aunt. But there was a time . . .”
“What time?”
“There was a time when Esther had said good-bye to me—forever, I thought—and your aunt was there, and I let things happen that shouldn’t have.”
The silence in the room was so pronounced I could hear his fingers rubbing the stubble of his unshaven chin. “It was the night she disappeared,” he said, his eyes welling up with tears. “She’d gone to your aunt’s house, and she saw us together through the window.” He closed his eyes tightly. “I can still see her there. I can still make out her face. Her eyes. The sadness. The look of betrayal.”
“I know,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“It was all in the story.” I walked over to his chair and knelt down. “Don’t blame yourself,” I said.
“How can I not?” he said through tears. “I betrayed her. But, believe me, if I had any hope that she was coming for me, that she wanted a life with me . . . well, I would have never been there. That night, that horrible night. Things would have been so different. But our timing was off. Our timing was always off.” He buried his face in his hands.
“Elliot,” I said softly. “I need to know what happened to her that night.”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought I could talk about all of this. I thought I could get this all off my chest, but I don’t know. I don’t know if I can.”
I looked into my lap and realized my fists were clenched. “Something bad happened that night, didn’t it, Elliot?”
He nodded.
“You have to tell me,” I said. “For Esther.”
He looked down at his hands.
“Elliot,” I said. “Just answer me. Did something happen to her that night? Did somebody take my grandmother’s life?”
He buried his face in his hands. “Yes!” he cried. “Yes. It was me. It was me and Bee.”
Chapter 17
I probably should have left then—or maybe I should have run and called the police on my cell phone just as soon as I was safe on the street. I wondered how I would have sounded on the phone with the 911 dispatcher: “Hi, I’m calling to report the murder of my grandmother—in 1943.”
But it didn’t make sense, what Elliot had said about his and Bee’s part in Esther’s death. How could he have killed the woman he loved? Or maybe I was stunned by the finality of his statement—that Esther was, in fact, dead. Dead. The word didn’t seem to fit with the life I had dreamed Esther would go on to lead, and deep down I’d been holding out hope that maybe she was alive somewhere, somewhere far from here, and that maybe Elliot had been in contact with her and they were continuing some kind of secret rendezvous beyond the pages of the story.
If only.
“Wait, Elliot,” I said. “You’re saying you killed her?”
He paused for a long time. “No,” he said. “But I may as well have. It is the most grievous moment of my life, dear Emily, to have to tell you all of this, to have to tell you that I am responsible for her death. We’re responsible for her death, your aunt and I.”
I frowned. “I don’t understand.”
Elliot nodded. “After she drove away from Bee’s house, we were both terrified—of where she might go, or, worse, what she might do.”
“So you followed her?”
“Yes,” he said.
“But why?”
“Bee wanted to apologize, but I—well, I guess I wanted to take her into my arms and tell her how much I loved her, and only her, before it was too late.”
“Too late?”
His eyes clouded up again as he began to speak. “Bee drove, and I rode along. We weren’t sure where she was headed, so we checked the ferry terminal first, but we didn’t see her car there, so we scoured Main Street. Then it hit me. I knew. I knew where she was. The park. We’d been there a dozen times together. She loved Fay Park.”
“So you found her there?”
“Yes,” he said, shaking his head as if to dispel the painful memories that were playing in his mind. “It all happened so fast.”
“What?”
“I saw her eyes, just a flash, in her rearview mirror. I saw the look on her face. That last look. It’s frozen in my mind. Every night before I close my eyes, every damn night of my life for the last sixty years, I see that face. Those eyes—they were so sad and lost.”
Elliot’s hands began to tremble under the strain of the past.
“Tell me what happened next, Elliot,” I said softly. “I need to know.”
He took a deep breath. “She was parked there in the middle of the parking lot. So we both got out. I pleaded with Bee to stay in the car. I needed time alone with Esther, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She followed me toward Esther’s car, but when we reached the passenger door, Esther started up the car . . . and she . . .”
“Elliot, what? What did she do?”
Tears were streaming down his face now. “It was dark. It was so very dark, and the fog. The fog.”
“Elliot, stay with me,” I said slowly.
“There were headlights, and the car,” he sobbed, each word smothered by more layers of grief. “We blinked against the glare, and just then she drove that car straight over the cliff. Right over it. Right in front of us.”
I gasped. What about her pregnancy? What about the baby?
“I started running after her, running toward the edge of the cliff,” he continued, trying his best to compose himself. “I thought I could save her, if she had survived the fall. I was close to jumping off that cliff after her, but your aunt coaxed me back. We stood there on the hillside, staring down at the wreck. Her car was in a hundred pieces, and the engine had caught fire. All Bee could say was, ‘She’s gone, Elliot. She’s gone. Let her go.’ ”
“Didn’t you call the police or an ambulance?”
He shook his head. “Bee said not to. She thought they might pin us for murder, say we forced her over that cliff.”
“So what did you do?”
He reached for his handkerchief. “We drove away. I was in a state of shock. All I could think of was that I deserved to be in jail. I felt responsible somehow, as if I’d caused her death.”
“But what if she survived the crash? What if she was lying in agony down there on the beach? What if you could have saved her? Elliot, what if that’s why she drove over that cliff? What if she wanted to be saved?”
He looked at me with eyes that seemed to beg forgiveness. “I will go to my grave with those same questions haunting me. But that car, seeing the way it was crushed—as horrific as that image was, it’s the one thing that gives me a fragment of peace. Nobody survives a crash like that. Bee was right. Leaving that night was our only option. In those days, we would have been convicted with zero evidence. It’s just the way things worked. We were there, so any jury would have determined that we drove her to it.”
I sighed. “Where does this leave Bee? Do you think she has any regret?”
“Yes,” he said. “A part of her died that night. She’s never been the same. It’s why we haven’t been able to face each other, even after all these years. There’s too much history between us, too much anguish. We can’t look at each other without remembering that night, and without remembering Esther.”
Just then, I recalled something I’d read in one of the articles about Esther’s death. While the wreckage of her car was found at the bottom of the cliff, there had been no body.
“Elliot, I read that they never recovered Esther’s body. How can that be?”
“Yes,” he said. “I read that too.”
/>
I wondered if there was something he wasn’t telling me. How could her body miraculously disappear after such a horrendous crash? Had someone actually gone down and rescued her? Had she walked away from the crash unscathed? Impossible, I said to myself.
“What do you think happened?”
“I wish I could tell you that I thought she survived. Since the wreck wasn’t found until the next day, some speculated that she’d washed out to sea, to that beautiful water she loved so much.” He paused to consider the idea and shuddered. “Others believed she did survive. And I would be lying if I said there wasn’t a part of me that didn’t hold on to that hope, but it’s been too long. If she had survived, wouldn’t she have returned to the island, her home? Wouldn’t she have returned for her baby? Wouldn’t she have returned for . . . me?”
At that moment, I realized that Elliot didn’t know that Esther had been carrying his child that night. It seemed cruel and unfair to share the news with him now, a “you’re going to have a baby!” message some sixty years too late, so I kept quiet. He’d read about it in the book soon enough, and maybe that was the way he was supposed to find out.
“But there is something,” he said, looking hopeful for a moment.
“What?”
“Well, it might be nothing. But, for the record, that night as Bee and I were driving out of the park, we did see a car pulling in.”
“Anyone you recognized?”
“I can’t be sure,” he said, “but I’ve always suspected it was Billy—well, Billy Henry Mattson, but he goes by Henry now.”
“Wait,” I said. “Henry, the man who lives on the beach near Bee?”
“Yes, you know him?”
I nodded. So Billy is Henry. I thought about the way he’d acted when the conversation had turned to my grandmother and the woman’s photo he kept on his mantel, the one that had mysteriously vanished. Esther had considered him a friend in her diary, yet he was always appearing out of nowhere, which struck me as strange. Was he stalking her? I shivered. No, I reassured myself. Even if he had been crazy for her, Henry wouldn’t have carted off her body. But then my mind started to wander. People aren’t always who they seem to be. I remembered a time Annabelle and I had overheard a conversation between two seemingly posh women in an upscale Manhattan restaurant. They were practically dripping with jewels, and had that socialite air to them. Then one opened her mouth and said, “I’ve tried all different brands, but I just love Copenhagen. I like to dip after the kids are in bed, out on the terrace.”