by Jo Watson
After we came home from the cove that day, Father ransacked my room. He found my diary under my mattress and found the paintings of you in the back of my cupboard. I’m grateful he didn’t find your letters, though. I’ve never seen him like that before. His face went red, even the jagged white scar down his cheek went red. I was so afraid. He dragged me outside and made me build a fire; he wanted me to throw everything into it. It felt like I was digging my own grave as I piled the small sticks together and rolled the newspaper into small balls. And then he dropped the match and it all went up in flames. My heart might as well have been in that fire, it hurt so much to watch the corners of my papers curl and disintegrate, to watch the paint blacken on the canvas until there was nothing left of you. And then he dragged me back inside and told me that, if I ever saw you again, I would be dead to him. But I was already dead. A little part of me died in the fire that day.
But, when we were inside, Miriam managed to save some of my things from the fire. She kept them for me. She told me that she’s known about us all along; she saw us once at night. She won’t tell anyone, though; she’s on our side.
The next day, Father took me to see Father McMillan because he says I have to marry Ian. He’s arranging my marriage to him and I can’t stop him. How can I marry him? How can I marry a man I don’t love? I stood there, outside the church on the hill, and I looked out over the town. It had rained the night before and the river was overflowing, escaping its banks and running into the sea, turning it brown. The water was so fast and quick and breaking free of its confines . . . it gave me an idea.
I’m going to try to escape. I’m going to pack a bag and I’m going to meet you under our willow tree on the river. I’ll be there at midnight on the last day of September—my father will be away—and I’ll wait for you there, right in the place where we carved our promise to each other in the tree.
It’s perfect, us meeting there, under the largest and oldest willow tree in the country, because I imagine our love is a lot like the tree itself. It’s big and will stand up to gale-force winds and thunderstorms and black frost, and still it will never stop growing. No matter what my father says, the government, the world, I will never stop loving you.
I’ve found a better hiding spot for my letters to you. You will be able to get them there. I’m putting them inside my “favorite book.” Please go and look for them as soon as you can, in case there is a change in plans. Miriam says she will deliver this one letter to you only, but she says she can’t deliver any more—it’s too dangerous for her. If Father found out she was helping us, who knows what he would do, and I can’t put her in that kind of danger.
I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you and I cannot wait to be with you again. It’s been thirteen days since I saw you. I’ve been making markings in the wall behind my bed, like someone in prison might do. Because that’s what it feels like without you—that I’m trapped in prison.
We’ll see each other soon, though. We’ll run away somewhere, like we spoke about. We’ll build a little house in the middle of a forest where no one can find us. And we’ll live in it together, away from this cruel, cruel world . . . just like we talked about.
We’ll wake up together every morning and hold each other for hours in bed, because we don’t need to be away from each other. We’ll spend our days swimming, and I’ll paint you and you’ll read to me, and we’ll talk all night long if we want to, because neither of us has to run off somewhere. And we’ll tell each other that we love each other, out loud. We’ll say it all day and all night, until finally we’ve said it enough to make up for all the times that we weren’t able to utter the words, and then we’ll still keep saying it . . .
I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.
Wait for me under the tree. I am coming and then we will start our life together.
You, me, forever.
CHAPTER 7
Tears.
This was the saddest and most beautiful thing I had ever read. This wasn’t some made-up scene in a movie or a book. This was straight from someone’s heart. Raw, real, beautiful, emotional . . . and this was so wrong. What I was doing was so, so wrong. I knew that, but . . .
I started opening and closing each letter, one by one, looking for more letters that had been written by her. But there was only this one, and the story ended so abruptly. What happened next? I was dying to know, and I also needed to know. I had a very incomplete story in front of me, and I’d promised my agent a complete story, from two perspectives.
I stood up and paced my room a few times. I was feeling so agitated and unsettled, like I needed to claw my way out of my skin. The letters on my coffee table seemed to be calling my name—not literally. Well, I hoped not literally, or I would definitely be requiring a very specific sort of help, the sort that kind doctors with clipboards handed out. The letters seemed to be calling to me in a way I didn’t understand yet. This all seemed so fortuitous; only a few hours ago, I had been so desperate for a story, and now one had fallen into my lap. Was that just a coincidence? Or was it more? Or was I just looking for ways to justify my actions?
I turned and looked at the letters again. There were a lot of them—thirty, maybe even forty—but there certainly weren’t enough to write an entire book with, and certainly not without the other side of the story, or the ending, or a setting, or more context!
I rushed back over to them and started scanning them for clues. If only I could find this place, I could fill in the blanks. I read through them, picking out small details here and there: more mentions of the willow tree and the engraving, mention of the hot summers on the beach, an old town hall, a river that ran into the sea. I gathered up clues like lost puzzle pieces, trying to fit them together to see the bigger picture.
I reached for my computer and opened Google. I didn’t have much to go on—in fact, there was almost nothing. But Google usually has the answers to absolutely everything. (Although, sometimes the answers can be wrong. Turns out that rash I’d had wasn’t a deadly reaction to pomegranate juice and I wasn’t going into anaphylactic shock.) My fingers hovered over the keys for a while; I was deciding what to type . . . church, Father McMillan, willow tree, river, sea. This was like a needle in a haystack. I was never going to find this place, or was I . . . ?
And then, a sign. Big, bright red, flashing and screaming at me. An article about a church on a hill in Willow Bay that had been burned down, rebuilt and dedicated to Father James McMillan, who had died some thirty years ago, heroically saving a child when the river flooded and washed the boy out to sea.
What are the chances?! It was all there, as clear as daylight.
I stared at the screen and blinked a few times. I googled the name of the town, and the more I looked at pictures of it, the more I knew this was it. There it was: the river mouth that ran into the sea, making a strip of the sea a brown color; the willow tree; a church on a hill; hot, summery beaches.
Shit, it couldn’t be this easy, could it? I went straight to Google Maps and entered the address. It was a five-and-a-half-hour drive away. I stood up and walked the room again, pacing back and forth. I couldn’t sit still; a furnace of energy burned inside me, making me feel hot and itchy, and not the kind of itch you can scratch or the kind of hot you can douse with a cold shower. This was deeper than that.
“Crap!” I cursed and bit my nail clean off. I looked down at my nail; what the hell was I doing? I didn’t bite my nails. Then again, I also didn’t usually lie to my agent about having written a book that didn’t exist, and I didn’t usually plan to plagiarize letters I’d accidentally found in a handbag after almost plummeting to my death in an elevator.
But my career was hanging by a thread. I had no book, and if I didn’t write this story, there was nothing I could write. I had been existing in a stale, lonely state of writer’s block for almost an entire year now, and these letters were the first beacon of light I had seen in months. These l
etters were my only way out of my situation, the only way to save my career and save myself. Because, without my career, who was I? I had been nobody before it, and I didn’t want to go back to being nobody again. I couldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing me fail, I couldn’t give any of them that satisfaction . . .
I didn’t want to go back to being the girl with the wrong name, living an ordinary life. I wanted to be Becca Thorne. That’s the life I wanted. But was I really going to steal someone else’s life to get it . . .
CHAPTER 8
The next morning, I was in my car, driving towards Willow Bay. I’d spent the whole night not sleeping, and I lay awake just thinking until my body and brain were unable to do so anymore. I’d plied myself with every single justification I could think of for doing this, until I almost believed them all. And then, at around three in the morning, when the fear of being caught out for doing this hit, I went off on another train of thought. It was clear that these letters were never meant to be seen, and they had been written so long ago that whoever wrote them was probably not around anymore. And if they were, it seemed unlikely that they would step forward and claim them, since they were such a secret. So, if I plagiarized them, I would (logically) get away with it. And these were the originals and I doubted any copies would exist.
Okay, don’t hate me for thinking that; I hate myself enough already. But I could almost feel the pressure of the gun against my temple, forcing me to do this. I was that desperate!
I’d left the cold, grey buildings of Johannesburg behind about an hour ago and I was now heading into South African no man’s land—those big, open spaces that exist between towns and cities that seem to stretch on forever. It was all so beautiful, the autumn sun was rising and the roads were lined with fields of pink and white cosmos flowers. Cosmos were a staple here in autumn, and as a child I always associated their pink and white spray with Easter. Easter eggs and bunnies and colorful cosmos all blurred together to form one of my favorite childhood memories—possibly the only good one. I swallowed as my throat tightened just thinking about it.
As you can imagine, the days, weeks and months following my birth were hard for my grieving mother. So hard, in fact, that my grandparents stepped in to look after me, and this is where my merry-go-round childhood all began. Being passed around from family member to family member in those moments when my mother was too depressed to look after me, and when finally my grandparents were just too old. From aunts and uncles, to cousins, and even to the neighbors on a few occasions. I was never really in one place long enough to form any kind of attachment to anyone, never at a single school for long enough to do well at anything, make any kind of a mark or make friends, never in one house long enough to be able to call it a home. I was this little lost girl with the lost sloping line, going round and round in a tumble dryer until I didn’t know if I was up or down, left or right, who I was or where I belonged. I longed to be with my mother as I spun around on this never-ending carousel—until, one day, I was. Just like that, she came back into my life and we were going on holiday together.
It was a particularly warm autumn, that year. The cosmos were brighter than I’d ever seen them. The Easter eggs were sweeter, the moments spent with my mother on the beach were funnier and more joyful. The nights that she tucked me in bed and sat there reading to me, taking me away to magical worlds with her, were some of the happiest I’d ever had. And, for the first time since my birth, I felt like I belonged somewhere again and that I knew who I was. I was someone’s daughter, and I thought it would stay that way. Only it didn’t. After the holiday, I was back on the carousel; I reminded her too much of my father, you see. It was too painful to look at me every day, and just too hard to be a single, depressed mom, raising a daughter. I was better off with someone else, they all said. Funny thing is that no one ever bothered to ask me where I wanted to be. Perhaps I wouldn’t have known, though, since I barely knew myself by then. But what I did know—the only thing I really knew—was that I was clearly not good enough to be looked after by my mother. I was not good enough. In my small, childlike brain, the one that saw the world in black and white, I decided that I would need to become good enough in some way. I would need to show her, and everyone else, that I was worthy of being with her. But no matter what I did, who I became, how good I was, it was never enough. Still isn’t, really.
I spent my entire childhood floating around, untethered. Like a balloon being blown around in the breeze. Being pushed and pulled around by external forces, never in control of my own destiny. One day I was here, one day there, and the next day I could be somewhere else entirely.
And I could sense that I was an imposition everywhere I went, even though they never said it directly to me. So, to be less of a burden, I tried to fit. I tried to be the person that they wanted me to be, so they would keep me. I worried about everything I did, I worried about what they thought of me constantly, always trying to be the perfect person, but never really feeling like I was. The only real constant I had in my life was the songs and stories that had always filled my head. I’d always turned to them when things got tough.
I sighed as I thought about it all. I knew I couldn’t blame all that for who I had become and the wrong choices I was currently making. Those were all very much mine, no one else’s.
The more I drove, the less I saw of humanity and civilization, which suited me. There was nothing here other than open grasslands that stretched to the horizon, with the odd rusty windmill to break up the monotony. I continued to drive as grasslands gave way to mountain ranges that stretched across the horizon like the backs of sleeping dragons. I’d done a bit more research on Willow Bay and discovered that it was a unique small town, situated both on the banks of a river and the coastline. The whole town seemed to sit perfectly on a small hill, which was so out of place with the rest of the flat landscape around it. One of the local folk tales tells the story of a great big turtle who liked living in the river and the sea. And, because he couldn’t decide where he wanted to be, he stopped right there, so that half of his body was in the fresh water and the other half in the sea. I liked that image. I liked the idea that a whole town was built on the back of an indecisive turtle.
The small town was now a bustling tourist hub and seemed to attract a lot of artists and creatives. Small pottery studios and art galleries and craft-coffee shops seemed to line their one main road. And, when I’d tried to book a room, I discovered that most of the hotels were fully booked; I’d managed to get one of the last available places.
Because I’d set out early, I got there before lunchtime, luckily for me. My stomach was rumbling like it hadn’t seen a snack in days. Oh, there’s something else you should know about me. I can go from zero to more-starving-than-I’ve-ever-been-in-my-entire-life-and-I-will-eat-my-own-arm-if-necessary in a few seconds. I’ve always been like that. The second I get hungry, I need to eat. Clearly, I must have some kind of speedy metabolism, because, for the most part, I am slim. But then there’s my ass. It seems that my body decided to deposit all my fat cells there. Thank God for the shift in beauty standards in the last several years, so large asses have actually become quite a hot commodity. Because, if that hadn’t happened, I might not have ever gotten laid. Not that I got laid an awful lot, and not that I liked the word “laid,” either. It always makes me think of a chicken on a nest. No, as far as sex went, I’d had enough to know what was good and what was bad, but not enough to truly know what I wanted yet. As far as relationships went . . . the same. Enough to know what a lying cheat looks like, but not enough to know what I want from a relationship yet—or, more to the point, to know what I deserve from one.
CHAPTER 9
I pulled into the hotel parking lot and looked at it. It was a typical-looking motel in that it was built around a large parking lot—no cars in sight, though. The architecture had a very mid-century modern feel to it. You know the vibe: flat roof, those white, metal balustrades that run the length of the balconies, and, inevit
ably, there’s always a flamingo somewhere. In this case, the flamingo was perched in a pot plant by the entrance. I climbed out of my car and walked into the reception, only to be met with an interior I was not expecting. Where was the wood paneling? The retro, orange wall tiles and pea-soup-colored carpet?
I looked up at the disco ball that was spewing out dancing dots of light across the black-painted floor. I looked at the tie-dye neon wall-hanging and the chandelier that seemed to be made with glow sticks.
“Right,” I mumbled to myself as I rang the bell at the counter. But, when no one came after ringing it three times, I leaned over the counter and called out.
“Helloooo! Anyone there? Checking in.” Suddenly, a door opened and a woman came walking through it. The first thing I noticed was her blue eyeshadow. Stretching like a great blue sea from her eyelids to her eyebrows, it was a glittery blue that shimmered when it caught the ultraviolet light in the room. Her brows were those thin, black, nineties ones that arched too high, giving a permanently surprised look. Her lips were lined with a black liner and filled in with a shimmery white pink. To top it all off, she was wearing a tie-dye neon dress with equally neon bracelets around her arm, and her blue hair was up in pigtails, with tufts sticking up like long, wild grasses.
“Hello, and what can I do for you?” she asked, leaning across the counter.
“I booked online,” I said, feeling somewhat wordless.
“Sure,” she said. “What room would you like? We are completely empty; the choice is yours.”
I shrugged. “What rooms do you have?”
“Depends what you’re looking for,” she said, pulling a brochure out from behind the counter. “We have a variety of different rooms here.” She tapped her bright neon fingernails on the desk as she opened the pamphlet and flattened it out in front of me. I looked at the brightly colored pictures of rooms and beds and strange decor that filled the pages.