Roots of Wood and Stone

by Amanda Wen

  Gut knotted, he piled a few more weathered paperbacks into the box. “Look … I’m sorry if I overstepped.”

  She stopped, book in hand and brow furrowed. “What?”

  “Last night. When we … when we kissed. I thought you were okay with it, but if you weren’t, then I apologize, especially since friends don’t—I mean, it’s been a while, if I’m honest, and I may be a little rusty on the finer poi—”

  Leaning over the boxes, Sloane wrapped her free hand around the back of his neck and pressed a kiss to his lips. Firm enough to shock him into silence, and just short enough to leave him aching for more.

  “It’s not you, all right?” She eyed him. “I’m sorry if I made you think it was.”

  Okay. Boundary officially obliterated. He’d sort out its impact on his plans later.

  “I’m glad for that. But if it’s not me, then … what is it?”

  Sloane studied the worn cover of an Agatha Christie novel. Finally, she sighed and pushed her glasses up on her nose. “My birth mother emailed me last night on that adoption website I look at sometimes.”

  “What?” He couldn’t have been more shocked if she’d reported an email from the Queen of England. “That’s huge.”

  “Yeah.” Sloane gave the book a cursory glance, then tossed it into the crate.

  “What’d she say?”

  “She wished me a happy birthday, if you can believe that. Said she never forgot.” A pair of faded romance novels sailed into the box atop the mysteries. “But if that’s true, then why’d she wait thirty years to drop me a note? Did it never occur to her to do so before?”

  “Maybe she had a good reason not to.”

  Sloane’s eyes shot sparks. “The woman left me on a bus, and now you’re defending her?”

  “No. I just …” He floundered for something that wouldn’t hurt her further. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it? To find her? To make contact?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know.” Sloane ripped some old tape off the box and folded it into tiny squares. “I thought it was. But now that she’s surfaced, now that there’s an email from her on my computer, it’s this weird emotional tossed salad I don’t want to deal with. Or talk about. Or even think about.”

  “Well then.” He gingerly withdrew a small brown notebook from the box, a notebook he’d just discovered beneath a pile of old National Geographic magazines. “Maybe this’ll take your mind off it for a bit.”

  “Ooh. Gimme.” Sloane dove for her gloves, slipped them on, and took the diary. But when she opened it, instead of the wide smile he hoped for, she covered her mouth with her hand, and … were those tears in her eyes?

  “Oh no.”

  His heart lurched as she held the diary out to him.

  October 27, 1872

  Annabelle knelt under the cottonwood on the small rise overlooking the creek. The sky was overcast, and a cold, stiff wind blew from the north. As long as she’d been out here, that wind should’ve made her cheeks raw.

  Maybe it had. She had no way of knowing.

  The little mound of sandy dirt beneath her skirts crowded out everything else.

  Seventeen days.

  Seventeen days since pain engulfed her world.

  It was subtle at first. Twinges in her lower back while preparing dinner. But those twinges turned into aches she couldn’t ignore. And the aches became outright pains, pains that dimmed her awareness and blurred her vision and sent an ashen-faced Jack galloping off for Uncle Stephen.

  She hadn’t had a chance, their Emmaline. Not this soon. Not this small.

  She should have. She was so perfect. So complete.

  But the womb that was supposed to protect and nurture her until February had failed, and now their little girl slept in a womb of cold, soulless earth.

  Annabelle’s body had betrayed her. And it had betrayed Jack, whose beloved Sarah lay nearby, her grave marked by a simple stone carved with her initials and grown over with grass.

  Another infant lay there too, but at least little Josiah wasn’t alone.

  As her neighbors coaxed Emmaline’s resting place from unforgiving soil, the scrapes of the shovels gouging holes from her heart, it had taken everything in her not to leap into the grave and let them cover her too. So she could hold her daughter in her arms and fall asleep and wait for the resurrection together.

  Only Jack, holding her up as her knees gave way, kept her from doing exactly that.

  Jack. When had they last spoken more than a handful of words to one another? From within grief’s suffocating shroud, she couldn’t even look at him. Couldn’t bear to see the pain in those gray eyes. The streaks of tears he tried so valiantly to hide. The tightness of his jaw, his pale skin, all because of her failure to do the one thing she’d dreamt of doing since the day she fell in love with him.

  She had failed him. Failed Emmaline.

  Agony upon agony. Which was worse, she couldn’t begin to know.

  Footsteps crunched on the fallen leaves behind her. A hint of a brogue broke through the silence.

  “I should’ve known I’d find you here.”

  Why was Jack here? Where was Oliver? What time was it? The leaden clouds gave no hint of the hour, and pain had removed all awareness of time.

  Jack cleared his throat. “Oliver came out to the barn when he got home from school and couldn’t find you.”

  She turned to look at her husband but only got as high as his mud-stained boots. “Is he … ?”

  “He’s fine. I fixed him some milk and cookies. He’s playing with Chester.” The black-and-white barn cat with whom she’d consented to share her home, provided he kept the mice away.

  “I’m sorry, Jack.” A tear slipped out, stinging her cheek.

  “It’s all right, love. Oliver’s big enough to be alone now and then. And I came here often myself when …” Sorrow roughened the words, and she doubled over with the pain of it. Jack shouldn’t have to be here again, standing by another too-small grave. He shouldn’t, he shouldn’t, he shouldn’t.

  In an instant, he knelt beside her, wrapping her in an embrace she didn’t deserve.

  “It’s not Oliver,” she gasped between sobs. “It’s … Emmaline.” It was only the second time she’d spoken their daughter’s name aloud since that terrible day.

  “You—you think it’s your fault?”

  The iron grip of grief choked any words out of her, so she merely gulped and nodded.

  Jack’s sigh resonated through his muscular frame as he drew her closer. “Oh, my love.”

  While she waited for the latest storm of tears to subside, Jack held her. Whispered reassurance into her ear. He didn’t blame her. Of course he didn’t. And whether she deserved his comfort or not, she clung to it, hard and fierce. The warmth of his embrace, the passion beneath the kisses he lavished on her hair, her cheeks … how lonely he must have been.

  How lonely she’d been too.

  “Oh, Jack. I can’t move. I can’t breathe. I can’t do anything except hurt.” She heaved a shuddering breath. “How did you survive this?”

  “I didn’t. Not for a while.” He pressed his lips together. “I wanted to die. I was so mad with grief that I lay abed for days, weeping. Begging God to please, please take me too.”

  A tear dove down her face at the crack in his voice. For God to take her. To be with Emmaline. That was what she wanted. More than anything.

  “Eventually I stopped asking. In fact, I stopped talking with God altogether. Either he didn’t exist, or his purpose was to gut me like a fish. Whichever it was, I was through.”

  Annabelle raised her head from his tear-soaked shirt. Looked him in the face. Fully. Finally. The man she adored. The man for whom she’d walk through fire. “I didn’t understand those feelings before. Now I do.”

  Beloved gray eyes shone bright. “I may have given up on the Lord, love, but he never gave up on me. Even when I stopped clinging to him, he never for one moment stopped holding on to me. He sent friends, neighbors. Pe
ople whose own survival was at stake took the time to come help me when I couldn’t manage. To keep things going until I got back on my feet.” Tears wobbled on red-rimmed lids. “And when I feared I’d lost Oliver too, that every last soul I loved had been torn from my arms … God rescued him. Rescued me. And led me straight to you.”

  Another tear slipped out. Sweet mercy, how did she have any left? But though pain still consumed her with each breath, hope flickered. For the first time in seventeen days.

  “I miss her, our little Emmaline Rose. Till the end of my days, I’ll miss her.” A tear trickled down the side of his nose, and he reached up to brush it away. “But as true as that is, and as deeply as I grieve, I also rejoice. Because if you were in that grave too …”

  His voice broke, and she gripped his hand. What would it have done to him if he’d been forced to mourn another love lost, another grave dug in this desolate place? How selfish her earlier wish had been, and how gracious was God not to have granted it.

  “I’m not, Jack. I’m here.”

  He took her hand and kissed her fingertips. “And all my moments now are both piercing pain, because of Emmaline, and indescribable joy, because you lived. With every breath I thank God that I can still hold you. Kiss you. Love you. Weep with you. And dream with you.” His shimmering gaze sought hers. “Do you remember?”

  She swallowed hard and nodded.

  “The big white house. The table full of food.” His words were slow. Measured. Spoken with great effort, as though he needed to cling to them as much as she did. “The seven little ones. Four dark like me, two fair like their mam, and one wee redhead …”

  One hand wandered to her hollowed-out womb. “It seems so far away. So impossible.”

  “I know, my love. I know.”

  They clung to each other and wept. And for the first time in seventeen days, grief was no longer a burden she bore alone.

  A solemn heaviness draped over Sloane’s shoulders as she followed Garrett up a slight rise to a copse of trees behind the house.

  “This is about the only place that counts as a hill around here.” His words bounced on a gust of wind. “But I’m not sure, since the diary made it sound like that cottonwood was off by itself.”

  “It probably was back then.” Sloane’s foot caught on a gnarled tree root. “Cottonwoods are one of the few species native to Kansas. All these others must have been planted on purpose.”

  “If I remember right, there’s a cottonwood in the middle of all this.” Garrett’s pace quickened as he crunched through twigs and leaves and years’ worth of growth. Sure enough, amid twisted dead branches and sprigs of pale green newness stood a stately cottonwood, infant leaves shimmering in the incessant wind.

  Sloane walked around the thick trunk of the old tree, and her pulse quickened. “I’m no arborist, but this thing’s been here a hundred years, easy. And Annabelle said it was on a hill near the creek. This has to be it.”

  The ground was strewn with autumn’s leftover leaves and choked with dead brush.

  Wait. There. Buried in a thatch of tangled undergrowth. A corner of stone peeking out.

  Could it be … ?

  “I think I see something.” Sloane grabbed the branches and tugged. The dead ones snapped easily in her hands. “Help me.”

  Garrett crouched next to her, and together they cleared away enough brush to see the stone clearly.

  Satisfaction and sorrow mingled in her core. There it was. A small, rough stone, its letters filled with lichen and worn with the passage of time. Still legible, but only just.

  S. B. & J. B.

  1870

  And next to it, another stone.

  E. B.

  1872

  Right here. Right where she stood, the heartrending scene had played out. Sloane had never felt closer to Jack and Annabelle.

  Garrett’s arm slid around her shoulders. “I can’t imagine. Losing a child.”

  “It was sadly common back then. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t still hurt.”

  “Yeah.” His voice sounded thick. His lips were tight, and a muscle at the corner of his jaw worked. Her heart wrenched at the losses he’d faced. His mother. His father by extension. His grandfather. And now his grandmother by infinitesimal, torturous degrees.

  He turned to her then, something alight in his eyes. “What if your birth mother missed you? Sorta like Annabelle missed Emmaline? I know it’s not the same, but what if she did?”

  Ah, the Pollyanna pipe dream she’d forced herself to suppress. The idea that somewhere out there was a perfect princess of a mother who loved and missed her, who’d spent her life regretting a terrible choice. Who’d whisk her away to the land of rainbows and roses and happily-ever-after.

  Sloane scuffed the ground with the toe of her sneaker. “Then why’d it take her thirty years to say hello?”

  “I don’t know.” Something about Garrett’s voice drew her gaze back. “But she finally did. She reached out. So maybe she wants to know a little bit about you. Just like you want to know a little bit about her.”

  Hope struggled from the piles of cynicism and bitterness she’d buried it beneath. The effort made her chest ache. “Even if that’s true … what do I say? All she said was happy birthday. For the first time. What am I supposed to say to that?”

  “Well, there’s always ‘thank you.’”

  “Thank you.” She rolled the words around in her mouth, like a familiar food covered in an unfamiliar sauce. “I could do that.”

  “You could.”

  She smiled at him. “Thank you.”

  “See? Piece of cake.”

  And late that night, long past when she should’ve been asleep, after multiple false starts and several laps around her living room, Sloane typed, with trembling fingers, those two little words in the reply box to Marinera72 and hit send before she could lose her nerve.

  Thank you.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  To: HistorICT

  From: Marinera72

  In closing, you asked about my screen name. I’m not ready to reveal many personal details yet, but I can tell you I love the Mariners even though I no longer live in Seattle. I’m also part Italian and was born in 1972, so put all those together with some creative spelling, and there you have it.

  Hope to hear from you again soon.

  A half-eaten microwave burrito in hand, its flavor ignored in favor of far more pressing matters, Sloane stared at the words on her laptop. Just as she had with each message from Marinera72 over the past nine days.

  All Sloane’s life, her birth mother had achieved almost mythical status, but now she had proof. Marinera72, her mother, was a real flesh-and-blood woman. A woman who, only an hour ago, sat at a computer and typed words onto a screen and sent them straight to the eyes and heart of the daughter she’d never known. Myth melted away with each detail that sprang from the screen.

  She liked baseball.

  Had a playful knack for screen names.

  And she’d been only nineteen when she gave birth. Nineteen. Sloane shook her head. Even as studious and responsible as she’d been at nineteen, enough goldfish had died on her watch that she’d half expected a cease-and-desist order from PETA. No way would she have been able to handle a baby.

  But even at nineteen she’d have taken her newborn daughter with her when she hopped off the bus.

  So why didn’t you?

  As much as the question burned, she wasn’t ready to ask it. Not yet.

  She needed to work up to it.

  To: Marinera72

  From: HistorICT

  The Italian I knew about. I took one of those DNA tests a while ago. It said I’m a mix of Italian, Ukrainian, Irish, and some smaller bits of British Isles and Western Europe. Do you happen to know the story behind any of that? You don’t need to share anything you’re uncomfortable with, but I have always wondered where I came from.

  She clicked send before she could talk herself out of it, then forced another bite down
her throat and waded through her work emails, trying to find something else—anything else—to think about. Thirty years without a word and she’d been fine. But now minutes seemed like months. Seconds like centuries. The only thing more nerve-racking than waiting for a reply was—

  Ding.

  Getting one.

  Stomach flip-flopping, heart pounding, she clicked to the Adoption Bridge inbox. Marinera72—her mother—was on the computer right now. Sitting out there somewhere, looking at a screen, just like Sloane.

  With a trembling hand, she opened the message.

  To: HistorICT

  From: Marinera72

  Yes, the Italian is for sure from us. My great-grandmother—we called her Nonna—was born there and came to the US with her family as a little girl. There’s an old letter somewhere from her where she talks about her life. Give me a day or two to look for it. Not sure about the Irish. My dad’s side maybe?

  The Ukrainian must be from your father’s side. I am not in contact with him.

  Her father.

  Of course she had a father. One who, from the minimal information Marinera provided, must still be a sore point.

  As with all research, each nugget of new information led to several other mysteries. Questions piled on questions. Who was this man? What had their relationship been like?

  Did he even know he had a daughter?

  As reluctantly as Marinera revealed information about herself, she’d doubtless be doubly so when it came to the other half of Sloane’s DNA.

  But there was a letter from Nonna. So maybe, just maybe …

  To: Marinera72

  From: HistorICT

  I would love to learn more about Nonna, your family, or anything else you’re comfortable sharing. If you can find that letter, that would be amazing …

  Garrett held a hastily assembled sandwich in one hand and clicked at his computer with the other. With the Patersons due in at one o’clock, he once again didn’t have time for a normal lunch.

  Nor did he have time for the call he’d ignored from a mysterious Wichita number. Or yet another call coming in now. His teeth on edge from the incessant buzzing, he reached for the phone and glanced at the screen.