by Susan Wiggs
Lost in wonder, Jenny wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly. “It’s a weekly column, not a full-time job.”
“At the moment,” Philip pointed out. “I always wanted to be a writer. Didn’t seem practical for me, though.”
“And it seems practical for me?”
“You’re still young enough to take a risk,” he said.
She felt flustered as she looked at her sister and father. “Thank you. I’m flattered that you’ve been reading my column.” She smiled, determined to conquer the panic knocking in her chest. “I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be a full-time writer, maybe gather my recipes and essays into a book.” There. She’d said it. She’d told these people her dream. The idea of being a writer had always seemed so fragile and unlikely, a secret best kept to herself. Yet maybe Rourke was right. When she shared her dream, it took on shape and substance, grew sturdier.
And she would need to work full-time if she was going to rebuild all the writing that had been lost in the fire. Although the paper had archived her columns, everything else—the things she hadn’t published because they were too raw or too personal or too new—were gone now, and she didn’t know if she could ever get them back.
“Then you should go for it,” Olivia said.
“Your writing is delightful to read,” Philip added. “I love the glimpses into the life of the bakery. I feel as if I know your grandparents, the regular customers and the people who worked there over the years. And I’m proud of you. I’ve never read a food column before, but lately I’ve been bragging to everyone about my daughter’s writing.”
It felt shockingly good to hear those words. Never in her life had she thought she would experience this—a father’s pride in something she had done. Sure, her grandparents had recognized her accomplishments, but neither had been a big reader of English. Now here was this intellectual man—Philip Bellamy—proud enough to tell his friends about her.
“How do you feel about spending some time in the city?” he asked in all sincerity.
“I...” Jenny took a gulp of wine. The city? New York City? Was he kidding? All right, she thought. Be cool. “I’m not quite sure... I haven’t considered it.”
“Maybe you should.”
“But the bakery—”
“You could take a sabbatical from the bakery.”
The Bellamys, Jenny had realized some time ago, did not always understand the way the real world worked. “It isn’t that simple. You don’t just take a sabbatical from the bakery. It’s open seven days a week.”
“It could be done,” said Laura. “I can look after the place while you take some time for yourself.”
There had never been a time in her life when Jenny wasn’t involved in the bakery. Even as a child, she had spent a portion of every day there, sweeping floors, stacking trays or sometimes just keeping her grandmother company. They used to sing old songs together in Polish.
As if it were yesterday, she could feel the caress of her grandmother’s hand, smoothing over her head. “You have the most important job of all,” Gram used to say to her when she was tiny. “You make me remember why I bake.”
A lovely memory, yes. And Jenny admitted that she was blessed with an abundance of them. She reminded herself that she had a lot of blessings—including the entire town of Avalon. She loved this town and she loved the bakery, yet there was something, some unfulfilled yearning that haunted her. She had gone from school to the bakery to sole ownership and, all right, it wasn’t a bad life, but maybe, just maybe she should grab this chance to walk away, to live a different life.
Now? The question nagged at her. Since the fire, she was finally feeling a connection with Rourke. Maybe that was the biggest reason of all to turn tail and run. She took another sip of wine, hoping the others wouldn’t notice the emotion that seemed to emanate from her. And then she felt it—a familiar panic, chugging toward her like a locomotive gathering steam. God, not now, she thought. Please, not now.
Okay, she told herself. Okay. She could simply excuse herself, go to the restroom and take a pill. No problem. As she sat there, expressionless, struggling to hide her distress, a curious thought pushed up through the quagmire of anxiety. She had not suffered a panic attack while staying with Rourke.
Coincidence? Would this have happened anyway, or did it have something to do with the way she felt when she was with Rourke McKnight?
Greg, Olivia and Connor cleared the table and went to do the dishes, leaving Jenny with Philip and Laura.
“Talk to me about Mariska,” Philip said suddenly to Laura. “I want to understand.”
Jenny leaned forward, intrigued. He seemed to be making a point of asking with Jenny present. Laura seemed to take the blunt question in stride. “She spent a lot of time away,” she said, glancing from Philip to Jenny. “And then after she moved back here with Jenny, she still went out a lot. Her parents were more than happy to look after the baby.” Laura beamed at Jenny. “You were everybody’s angel.”
Jenny tried to read between the lines. Going out a lot meant partying, probably. She knew from things her grandparents had said that her mother didn’t always come home at night. A weekend trip was likely to stretch out to a week, sometimes two. That was why no one raised an alarm when she failed to come home one night. Of course, no one could know that first night was the start of forever.
“The Majeskys were wonderful,” Laura said. “They gave Jenny all the love in the world. A happy child is a powerful thing. It’s impossible to be sad when you have a laughing little girl in your lap.”
Jenny tried to hold a smile in place. Yes, she’d been a happy child, but she was also a girl who, by the age of four, was accustomed to the fact that her mother had a habit of taking off.
“When did people realize she wasn’t coming back?” Philip asked.
“I couldn’t say exactly. Might have been a month, six weeks. I remember Leo telling a sheriff’s deputy who stopped in for coffee and pastry every morning that she usually called but that the calls had stopped. Eventually, the concern became a formal report, which in turn grew into an investigation. However, we were told from the very start that when a grown woman with a history of lengthy, unexplained absences took off, chances were she wanted it that way.”
Clearly, Jenny’s mother hadn’t wanted to be found and brought back to the small town where she’d never been happy.
The anxiety thrummed in her chest, and she excused herself to go to the bathroom. She swallowed half a pill, dry. When she returned to the dining room, she paused in the hallway outside the door. Laura and Philip were leaning across the table, talking intently and unaware of her. She sensed an intensity in their voices that made her pause, loath to intrude.
“...didn’t know if I’d see you again after that summer,” Laura was saying. “You visited Camp Kioga with your new wife and, a few years after that, your little daughter.”
“But you knew, Laura.” He drained his wineglass. “My God, you knew.”
“There were things we didn’t talk about, ever. You were one of them.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“It wasn’t my place to say anything.”
“You were the only one who could have spoken up for Jenny, and you didn’t say a word.”
“I was protecting that child,” she snapped.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Think about it, Philip. She was a supremely happy little girl who was being raised in a world of love and security. I couldn’t imagine what might happen if some strange man suddenly came into her life and started calling himself daddy. For all I knew, you had enough Bellamy money and power to take her away from us.”
“From us?”
“Her grandparents,” Laura amended, and then she grew fierce. “And yes—me. I loved Jenny but I had no
claim on her. I was terrified of losing her.”
“Did we seem like such monsters to you?”
“You seemed like a normal family. And I simply could not picture Jenny with you. Why would your wife accept her? Another woman’s child. And your daughter, Olivia—I had no idea if giving her a sister would be a good thing or not. Either way, I would be playing God with a little girl’s life, and I wasn’t willing to do that.”
That little girl didn’t exist anymore, Jenny thought as a decision firmed in her mind. She was a grown woman now, and she was through being ruled by secrets and fear.
* * *
After dinner, Jenny drove home and automatically turned down Maple Street before she realized her house was no longer there. She was supposed to go back to the vast, too-comfortable-to-be-good-for-her bed at Rourke’s house. But now that she was so close, something compelled her, even at this hour, to drive past the place.
The tires of the car crackled over the salted roadway, and she parked at the curb rather than turning into the driveway, now covered in deep drifts of snow. The empty spot where the house had been looked incongruous. There was a pair of tall maples in the front yard. In the fall, when Jenny was little, her grandfather used to rake the leaves into a pile so high, she could jump into it and disappear. Now the trees looked out of place, bare skeletons randomly standing in the middle of nowhere. She could see clear through to the backyard. A demolition company had followed in the wake of the salvage workers, leveling the place to rubble. Freshly cleared, it had resembled a war zone of black, scorched earth.
But it had snowed the previous night and most of the day, and thick drifts had virtually erased all traces of a house that had stood on the site for seventy-five years. Now all she could see was a lumpy expanse of white, cordoned off by safety tape. In the light of the street lamp, she could make out every contour. A set of rabbit tracks bisected the area where, she guessed, the living room had been, where her grandmother used to sit in the evenings and talk with Jenny.
Before her stroke, Gram had been a great talker. She loved to discuss things in endless detail, and loved to answer questions. This made them a good match, because Jenny had always been full of questions.
“What was it like when you were a little girl in Poland?” she would ask.
That was one of Gram’s favorites. Her eyes would soften and shift focus as she went away somewhere, to a far-off place. Then she would tell Jenny about the old days in a village called Brze´zny, surrounded by wheat fields and sycamore woods, the air filled with birdsong, the rush of a fast-moving river and the sound of tolling bells.
When she was sixteen, Helenka’s father put her in charge of driving the wagon loaded with wheat or corn to the miller for grinding. There, she met the miller’s son, a young ox of a man who was strong enough to operate the mill single-handedly, and who had eyes the color of a robin’s egg and a laugh so loud and merry that people who heard it tended to stop what they were doing and smile.
And of course, she fell in love with him. What else could she do? He was the strongest, kindest man in the village, and he told her she was brighter than the sun.
To Jenny, it sounded like an idyllic fairy tale. But she knew that unlike a fairy tale, there was no happily-ever-after for the newlyweds. Just two weeks after they married, the Germans initiated their September Campaign and invaded Poland. Soldiers overran the village, burning homes and shops, murdering or conscripting able-bodied men and boys, terrorizing women and children. When Jenny grew old enough to research the massacre of Brze´zny, she realized her grandmother had protected her from the ugliest of details.
The only reason Helenka and Leopold had escaped the carnage was that they had been sent that day to the district capital to register their marriage. When they returned, the village was in chaos, and their families gone—murdered or fled.
“The next day,” Gram would tell Jenny, “we started to walk.” It took several tellings and much questioning before Jenny learned that they had walked away from their village with only the clothes on their backs, a sack of withered apples and a few supplies, including the coffer of rye starter Gram’s mother had given her on her wedding day.
The Germans attacked the Poles in the west and the Russians in the east. For the people of Poland, every river and roadway became a battleground, and not one square inch was safe for the people who lived there, tilled the soil, raised their children and buried their dead. About six million Poles died in World War II. Jenny’s grandparents were lucky to escape with their lives.
“Where did you walk?” she used to ask.
“To the Baltic Sea.”
When Jenny was little, she thought it was like walking to the corner store to buy a quart of milk. Later she learned that her grandparents, who were little more than children themselves and had never before left their tiny rural district, traveled hundreds of miles on foot and, once they reached the port of Gdansk, paid for their passage by the labor of their backs.
Sometimes, Jenny would think about the people Gram had never seen again—her parents, six brothers and sisters, everyone she’d ever known. “You must miss them so much,” Jenny would say.
“That is true,” Gram told her. “But they are here.” She pressed her hand gently to her chest. “They are here in my heart, forever.”
Leaning against the idling car, Jenny closed her eyes and pressed her fists to her chest, praying that Gram was right, that you could never really lose someone, so long as you held their memory in your heart and tended to it, nurturing it with love.
She let out a long, unsteady breath, opened her eyes and blinked at the cold night. It wasn’t working. There was nothing in her heart. She felt hollow, with unreasoning panic ricocheting back and forth inside her.
A car rounded the corner and washed the area in white light. Across the way, a curtain stirred in the window of Mrs. Samuelson’s house. As the visitor drew closer, Jenny recognized Rourke McKnight. He pulled over to the curb and got out of his car and walked toward her. Jenny’s heart skipped a beat.
He was still dressed for work, his long overcoat billowing out behind him as he came closer.
She shivered and stuffed her hands into her pockets. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey, yourself.” He looked around the empty lot. “Everything all right?”
“Sure,” she said, knowing that the real question was, What are you doing here? “I, um, I drove here by mistake. You know, driving home on autopilot.” She offered an ironic smile. “It takes some adjustment, this homeless business.” She couldn’t bear to look at his expression—a mixture of compassion and kindness—so she leaned back and studied the spot where the second-story bedroom window used to be.
“Do you know,” she asked, “that when I was a kid I used to climb out the window and onto that branch?” She pointed at the maple tree. “I never once got caught.”
“What were you doing, sneaking out?”
She tried to figure out the source of the sharp note in his voice. “Depends,” she said. “It was usually to meet my friends down by the river and hang out. Sometimes we went to the drive-in movie at Coxsackie. I wouldn’t say we were juvenile delinquents or anything. I really tried to stay out of trouble for my grandparents’ sake.”
“I wish all kids tried to do that,” Rourke said. “It would make my job a hell of a lot easier.”
“I always felt sorry for my grandparents, because of my mother,” Jenny explained. With each breath she took, the panic in her chest was subsiding. “She broke their hearts. There was always a sadness in them—my grandfather, especially. When the doctors told him he wasn’t going to make it, he said maybe she would come back for his funeral.” Jenny stabbed the toe of her boot into the snow. She’d always felt she should somehow atone for her mother’s abandonment. “Since my mom would never come back to see them, I promised I would never leave them.” At
a very young age, Jenny came to realize that her job was to keep her grandparents’ sadness away, and she had played that role for years. It felt strange, not having to do it anymore.
He was quiet for a few minutes. She did the self-check the doctor suggested. Moments ago, she’d been an eight out of ten. Now she’d subsided to a six, perhaps even a five or four, a huge relief. Maybe it was that half a pill she’d taken. Or maybe she was finally moving past this phase.
“There were several boxes of reports about my mother’s disappearance,” she said. “They were lost in the fire.”
“The department has everything archived,” Rourke assured her. “If you want, I can check and see what they’ve got in the records.”
“Thanks. I’ve been thinking about her more than I usually do, these past few days.” A sprinkle of snow flurries started. “It’s funny, but some part of me thought she might come back after my grandmother died.”
“Why is that funny?”
“Poor choice of words. Strange is more like it. It was strange for me to think of that. I mean, if she didn’t come back when her father got sick and died, and she didn’t come back after her mother had a stroke and we filed for bankruptcy...if those things didn’t bring her back, then it was silly to think Gram’s death would.”
He didn’t say anything, and she was glad. Because one conclusion was that her mother had never come back because she was dead. Jenny refused to think that. If Mariska had died, they would have heard.
“What’s ironic,” she said, “is that Philip showed up, out of nowhere, practically. Just when I think I’m completely alone in the world, this whole other group of relatives shows up.”
“You don’t ever have to be alone,” he said.
His words and the tone of his voice startled her. “Rourke?” she asked softly.
He seemed to catch himself, and then the Officer Friendly mask dropped back in place. “What I mean is, you’re part of this town,” he explained. “Everybody here loves you. Your best friend is the mayor.”