The Lemoncholy Life of Annie Aster

by Scott Wilbanks

  A smartly dressed, sturdy woman stood just outside the door. A quick glance at the warmth in her face told Annie that she wore good humor a cut above her Armani suit. As they made eye contact, the woman did something completely unexpected. “Oh… my…Lord! You’ve hardly changed,” she bellowed.

  “I beg your pardon?” Annie almost turned around to see if someone was standing behind her.

  “Wow, I wasn’t expecting—” Startled by her own brashness, the woman regrouped. “That was pretty rude,” she said, tapping her forehead. “Whatever goes in my head tends to pop out of my mouth. Runs in the family.” She broke from her outburst to gaze fondly at Annie. “It’s no surprise you don’t remember me after all these years,” she said. “I’ve put on a few pounds.” And once having said that, she executed a series of odd hand movements, grinning all the while.

  To anyone else, they would have meant nothing. But to Annie, it was a ritual—bound by spit, a “hope to die” oath, and mutual regard—that was conceived in a candlelit tent pitched on the Persian rug in the living room and shared between a little girl, her beloved godmother, and her godmother’s great-granddaughter.

  “Elizabeth?” Annie asked.

  The woman reached for Annie’s hand. “It’s been a while,” she said.

  Annie stared at the hand holding hers with a look that could easily have been mistaken for aloofness, but she was experiencing a disconnect that was only broken when Elizabeth said, “May I come in?”

  Shaking her thoughts out of the past, Annie blanched. “My lord, I’m so—” She practically pulled Elizabeth inside. “Come in, come in,” she said.

  Edmond appeared in the foyer, looking concerned. “Annie?” He nodded politely to Elizabeth. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but Christian wanted me to remind you that you have company inside.”

  He was about to say something more when Annie gestured toward her guest.“Edmond,I’d like to introduce you to my godmother’s”—she turned to Elizabeth—“great-granddaughter?” When Elizabeth nodded, Annie continued, “We were childhood friends.”

  Elizabeth extended her hand to shake Edmond’s. “Elizabeth Strathmore. Nice to meet you.”

  Annie put her hand on Edmond’s back and gave a gentle shove. “Would you mind whipping up some of that lemonade you made the other day?” she asked.

  Taking one last befuddled glance at Elizabeth, Edmond headed to the back, passing Elsbeth and Christian, who were peering through the kitchen door as Annie ushered her guest into the living room. At a nod from her, they came in and sat down.

  When everyone was introduced, Elizabeth reached into her purse to pull out a large manila envelope that she held in both hands. She smiled a child’s smile as she held it, recalling to Annie’s mind a little girl who would turn her upper eyelid inside out, then collapse on the bed in squeals of laughter.

  “This is for you,” Elizabeth said and handed the envelope to Annie. “It’s from Grandma Liza,” she added, chuckling quietly when Annie almost dropped it in surprise.

  “I know. Crazy, huh?” she said. “There’s something else, something I didn’t learn until recently. Grandma Liza was the one who saw to your adoption. Did you know that?”

  Perhaps it was one revelation too many for a single day. Dumbstruck, Annie shook her head. She stared at the envelope, almost afraid to open it.

  Elizabeth, however, didn’t share those scruples. “Go on!” she said. “I can’t stand the suspense!”

  That was definitely the girl Annie remembered. She grinned and started to tear open a corner, but hesitated once again. “Why now?” she said, her eyes glued to the handwritten letters on the envelope’s face. “After all this time.”

  “I’m really not sure.” Elizabeth crossed her arms, leaning back in the chair. “From what I can gather, it has to do with Grandma Liza’s will and a final stipulation regarding the maintenance of the family trust,” she said. “But why after all these years? Open it and let’s find out.”

  Annie peeled away the lip of the envelope to reveal a few sheets of paper. She withdrew one and stared at it for a heartbeat before gasping.

  Christian looked over her shoulder. “Annie? What is it?” He looked closer, reading a single line loud. “General Electric?”

  “What! May I?” asked Elizabeth.

  Annie handed her the document, warming to an impossibility.

  “That’s an original GE bearer bond,” said Elizabeth, confusion written on her face. She took a moment to gather herself. “They’re the cornerstones of the family fortune.” She pointed to the remaining pages. “What does the letter say?”

  Annie read aloud.

  June 22, 1980

  Hello, dear.

  Your Auntie Liza here. Today is the eve of your thirteenth birthday, but circumstances are such that I won’t be able to celebrate it with you in person. And while I regret it more than you can know, I will be there in spirit. I am a venerable woman of ninety-seven years, my dear, and must confess that as stubborn as I am, the universe will not bend to my will and see me to my ninety-eighth.

  So I’m sending your present by mail. And as it is my intention that this letter not be delivered to you for many years, I won’t be spoiling the surprise by telling you that it is that darling little pearl choker we found at Prudence Travesty’s to go with your Easter dress.

  But this letter isn’t about birthdays. I have something important to tell you, my darling Annabelle—a little confession I must make, and one that may be hard for you to understand.

  While I’ve had the incomparable pleasure of being your “Auntie Liza,” watching you grow up these last twelve years and loving you as only a mother can, you will also come to know me for a brief while by another name.

  For you see, my dear, I am also Cap’n.

  Yes, I know. It must come as quite a shock to learn that the little girl you befriended not so long ago is also the godmother who taught you how to ice skate when you were eight. But time, as you know better than most, has a funny way about it.

  Kindness is the antidote to an indifferent world, my dear, and you always did have a tender spot for strays, bringing home an endless parade of broken wings to mend. I think it was because you began life as one. And what was I or Christian—or Edmond, for that matter—but another chick that had fallen from the nest? You saved me from my circumstances and became the mother I never had, if only for a brief while.

  So when you left that day with my cap atop your head, I already knew what I was going to do. We orphans must stick together, after all.

  I solved the riddle you put to me. The enclosed token proves that. And I became very wealthy, indeed—wealthy enough to live an extraordinary life that should not have been obtainable by someone of my rank and file, let alone a woman, all the while biding my time until I would lay eyes on you some seventy years later, see to your adoption into the family of friends, and have a hand in your raising.

  So, here we are at the end of our story, except for one more little thing. It has something to do with a secret I stirred into the stream of our shared lives. A little paradox we created together. If you should think of me from time to time and find that your smile is more expectant than nostalgic, darling Annie, I offer a simple explanation.

  We meet again.

  Love,

  Auntie “Cap’n” Liza Tolliver

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-FIVE

  Fire and Fate

  Did you get that chocolate syrup for El?” Christian yelled, looking around the empty room. Getting no response, he lowered his duffel bag to the ground and walked to the back. “Hey!” he shouted, annoyed to find Edmond sitting on the edge of his bed— his shirt unbuttoned, an open carry- on sitting on the floor— and staring at the wall with a strange sort of preoccupation.

  Christian grabbed a pile of clothes from the floor. “Get a move on!” he said. “We miss the flight, we miss the concert.” As he prepared to drop them in the suitcase, Edmond reached down, closing the lid.

 
“Come on, we don’t have time to kid around,” Christian said, lifting the cover with his foot.

  “Christian.” Edmond put his own foot on the suitcase to get his attention. “I can’t go.” He walked out of the room without another word, leaving Christian to stand there with his arms full of clothes.

  Christian sat on the bed in the exact spot Edmond had just vacated, the clothes piled in his lap. While he fretted, his eyes wandered to the bedside table, a bubble of shock teasing at his spine when they drifted across something familiar. It was his bookmark— the one Edmond rescued from the street corner the day they’d met. The clothes in his lap tumbled around him as he reached for it, finding a list written in Edmond’s bold hand on the back.

  1. Be patient. (It takes courage to face the things we hide from ourselves.)

  2. Ask for forgiveness.

  3. Make amends. (How?)

  This was something very personal, something he wasn’t supposed to see. Feeling like a voyeur, Christian flushed and placed the bookmark back on the table where he’d found it. What the words meant, however, he couldn’t fathom. But courage—that word seemed to dog him lately. Annie had also said something about courage the day he and Edmond found her weeping on the kitchen floor after her encounter with Mr. Culler. Edmond had just disappeared through the door on his way to check on Elsbeth. “Promise me you won’t sacrifice your happiness for something as cheap as acceptance,”she’d said. “Find your courage, Christian. To hell with everyone else.”

  He dropped back on the bed and placed a pillow over his head to stifle a scream. Her meaning eluded him, but that wasn’t unusual. Annie loved to torment him with innuendo. He had the vague notion, however, that it had something to do with Edmond and what was playing out at this very moment.

  He lay there, the familiar smell of Edmond’s aftershave drifting off the pillowcase, thinking back to the first time they’d crossed paths. He’d been on his way to Annie’s and had almost collided with Edmond at the corner of Church and Twentieth. Storm clouds were gathering on the horizon, he recalled—a prelude to the “uneasy itch” he’d experienced for the first time as Edmond walked past. He’d put it down to déjà vu that day, fearing that Edmond might belong to the world he’d left behind in Texas. The itch never went away, however, only growing stronger as their friendship cemented itself—a curious thing he’d never stopped to reflect upon.

  Courage , Edmond had written. And courage, Annie had said. But he had so little of it, being better acquainted with fear. It bullied him—dictating his life, driving his choices. And as he thought about courage, something else Annie had said that same day began to slowly tease itself from memory—something about, something about…

  He sat up with a quick intake of air. “It wasn’t déjà vu,” he whispered to a pair of socks swimming on the carpet. Despite the fact that they were mismatched, he rolled them into a tube and dropped them in a drawer. “Annie knew all along,” he said. Suddenly panicked, he snatched the bookmark off the table and rushed into the living room, breathing a sigh of relief when he found Edmond sitting on a bar stool, nursing a diet cola. Not waiting to collect his thoughts, he blurted, “I’ve been af-af—” He closed his eyes. Accepting the inevitable didn’t make it any less frustrating. He fought with the word afraid some more. “—all my life.”

  Edmond’s chin dropped, resting on his collarbone for a fleeting instant before he shook his head. “Stop,” he said weakly.

  Determined, and deaf to anything but the sound of his own voice, Christian marched on. “I always kn-knew I had to make s-s-suh—”

  “Stop!”

  “—saaaa…crifi-fices. I’m sorry,” he said. His hand rose, and Edmond groaned as it took charge with nimble movements. “To be forgiven for my sins.”

  “Sins?”

  The word, sounding like a clap of thunder, broke through Christian’s barriers where the others hadn’t. He winced, his hands dropping to his side, and he looked up, surprised to find Edmond standing stiffly in front of the bar stool, his fists clenched, whiteknuckled.

  “I’ve lied to you, Christian.” There was a wildness about Edmond, a magnetic desperation in his features that caused the hairs on Christian’s neck to stand on end.“I’ve been lying all along.” He opened his shirt, exposing the scar Christian had first noticed when they were changing clothes before going off to rescue Annie. “You asked me about this,” he said, his lips rounding in an angry knot. “Do you know how I got it?”

  Unbalanced by Edmond’s anger, Christian stared dumbly at the puckered line that ran from the bottom of Edmond’s rib cage to his hip.

  “Shrapnel.”Edmond hugged himself, as if the act of remembering left him cold. “It was a Sunday morning—early. My ex and I had been partying.There was so much noise and heat and metal… He ran, Isaac ran!” He yelled the last two words and dropped back onto the bar stool, shocked into momentary silence by his reaction. “I caused an accident, Christian. I was high as a kite, and I walked across the street against the light and caused an accident. Someone was hurt bad, real bad.”

  This was important stuff, and Christian wanted to keep up, but he was disoriented, having been pulled from his own confession, and he found himself only able to lock onto a single pronoun, the word he. It was the fuse to a powder keg, being part and parcel of a conversation the two men never had on a topic Christian didn’t fully understand—not until a moment ago, anyway. Edmond had been content to keep the peace, and so had he, but now it brewed such a storm in his head that he had difficulty following where Edmond was going—that is, until Edmond turned him inside out.

  “You could’ve died.”

  Three words—a piece of dark magic that tilted the floor underneath Christian. He lost his balance, reaching for the door’s threshold to steady himself.

  Seeing that, Edmond’s head dropped again and began to swing back and forth, as if suddenly too heavy a burden for his neck. “My God, the fear. I’d never seen anyone so afraid in my life. You asked me—” His voice caught. “You asked me to s-s-stay with you.” He ground the heel of his hands into his eyes and moaned.

  “I covered you during the explosion, but I was young, and there was so much blood, and Isaac had run off, and I was afraid and stupid, and I was high as a fucking kite!” The words sputtered from his mouth, as if the engine driving them were on vapors. “I ran when I heard the sirens.” He made a wet sound, a gurgle. “I left you there to bleed all over the sidewalk.”

  And that was it. Edmond had run out of words.

  “You?” So many pronouns. So much meaning. An image formed in the back of Christian’s mind, superimposing itself over his hallucinations, all eyes and golden hair surrounded by a halo of flames that writhed from the twisted steel of a car in the background—golden hair that matched his mother’s but, more importantly, matched the image in a Polaroid paper-clipped to the sun visor in Edmond’s truck. And, for the first time, he heard the echo of a voice talking to him, a man’s voice, comforting him as strong hands pulled him from the wreckage.

  He only heard Edmond weep words about the impossibility of their paths crossing again with half an ear. Others like fate and atonement slid over the surface of his consciousness as if it were made of glass, because all he could focus on was that face and the voice that had been pulled from the lost-and-found of his mind. “I’ve got you,” it said. “Don’t worry, I’ve got you.”

  “You’re the angel?” Christian slid to the ground, his back supported by the door’s threshold, and began to pick at the carpet. “You’re the angel,” he repeated, but as a statement this time. It was painful, letting go of the certainty that he’d been saved by his mother, accepting the truth of it, and he rocked, a lumbering toand-fro motion as he ran his hands through the carpet’s weave to ease the pressure. “How long have you known?” he asked, immediately banishing the question with a wave of his hand before going completely, catatonically still—frozen under the weight of it all.

  From where Edmond sat, Christian’s
eyes betrayed nothing. It wasn’t so much that the spark animating them had gone out, he thought, as it was that the source of that spark had retreated to a place where he wasn’t invited. “Step nine,” he said, his voice tired. “It’s all about making amends, asking for forgiveness. But how can I ask for something I know I don’t—”

  “I forgive you.”

  The words might as well have come from a stone, as Christian hadn’t budged from his huddle, but before Edmond could protest, he repeated, “I forgive you,” only louder.

  Sometimes, mercy burns with a white-hot flame, and the flesh along Edmond’s jawline seemed to ripple from the heat it gave off. He gritted his teeth. It was too much, too generous, and too soon. He put his head in his hands, the same ones that had saved Christian’s life, and let Christian’s grace wash over him as he quietly fell apart.

  And as he wept, Christian said, “What’s left for me if I don’t, Edmond? A lifetime of broken m-muh-memories and fear?”There was a smudge on the wall opposite him. He concentrated on it as his hands awakened to form a channel in the carpet that alternated between dark and light shades of gray with each swipe. “I’m good with fear—a real pro. I’ve been badgered my whole life by it, starting with something, something I never wanted, something I—”

  His eyes closed, pulling at an invisible stitch that gathered the skin around them into folds, as he shared something he’d never dared voice, not even to Annie. “There’s a thing inside me, Edmond. And I can’t get rid of it. I’ve spent a lifetime trying.” He rubbed his hands through the carpet’s weave as if it were a drug. “The church, my family, everyone says I’m not trying hard enough. And I would take a knife to it for their sake, I would, but it’s tied to…”

  He broke. The words were gone.

  The talk of knives had unsettled Edmond, however. “But it’s what?” he asked, dropping his hands from his face, only to clench at the bar stool’s seat. “What’s inside you?”