And yet he didn’t want anything from anyone, and he certainly didn’t want to alert the school. All he wanted to do was see her.
So Jack parked his car in the early hours before school started, away from the main parking lot on a side street that still had a view of the entrance, and waited. One thing he knew about Becky was she was always early.
She was the fourth person to walk toward the entrance. He sensed it was her even before seeing her face in profile. Her gait, the way she placed her palm over her brown saddle bag, the carefree way she threw back her hair and laughed with another woman who was clutching a stack of papers. He just knew it was her. And the sight of her laughing, the image of her standing there with her long chestnut hair and slim physique, filled him with something that he hadn’t experienced since he woke up in the burn unit of Brooke. Jack finally felt alive.
Anh reached for her cup of tea but found it empty. “But then what happened?”
She wasn’t sure if she has grasped all the pieces in his story correctly. She wanted to know if he ever told this woman how much he loved her.
Jack opened his palms in his lap and stared at them, then lifted his eyes to Anh’s. “What happened? I’d gotten what I needed. I saw she had stayed the same. That she was still as beautiful as she had been and that she was now teaching children, as she always dreamed she would. But I still had this,” he said, pointing to his face. “That wasn’t going to change.”
Anh’s face fell. “This story … it is too sad.…”
Jack lifted his head and stared directly at Anh, showing his face completely.
“I think it goes back to what that nurse told me … one has to find a way to keep love in your life.…”
Anh nodded, hanging on to his every word. “Yes, but why you leave?”
Jack bowed his head. “I didn’t leave completely, Anh. I got a job at Foxton Elementary as a night janitor.… I worked there just so I could be as close to her as I could. I saw the classroom she had filled with joy. I saw her desk filled with all the pencils she touched and papers she had graded.” He lifted his head, and a pained smile crossed his lips. “I realized that was as close to love as I was going to get.”
CHAPTER 70
LOVE, THIS THING THATAMERICANS SO ENJOYED REFERRINGto, was an abstract concept to Anh. So much value was put into that word—so many expectations that she wondered how it ever managed to keep afloat.
Anh had always believed love was tied up with duty. A sense of respect and obligation to uphold those who had sworn to take care of each other. But she had learned one thing since her husband’s death and that boat taking the lives of B?o’s parents. And it echoed what Jack’s nurse had told him. One needed to find a way to keep love in one’s life at any cost. Had she not had B?o, Anh wondered if she would have abandoned all hope. He had given her a sense of commitment in her new life. When she imagined herself working, it was because she wanted to provide him with the best possible life. She studied her English books long into the night, after many of the others at the motherhouse had gone to sleep, saying the words quietly aloud, as though they were words in a prayer.
Dinh had been responsible for opening up her heart in other ways too. He made her laugh, made her feel like she would succeed, even though she felt herself floundering about on so many things. Love was something that inspired a sense of purpose in her, a sense of hope. She could understand how Jack could survive just on a kernel of this by working in such close proximity to Becky.
“But why you give up this job at the school?” She queried him. “Why now work in watch store?”
“I lost the janitor job five years ago,” he answered. “That’s around the time I met Tom.… He and Grace saved me in another way.” He looked down and smoothed the material of his pants. “I guess I still have love in my life … just another kind. And when I miss Becky, sometimes I drive the twenty minutes it takes to get to Foxton and I park my car in the same spot, just as she’s walking toward the entrance. And when the sunshine hits her from behind, when I see her talking with someone or laughing, it’s enough.…” He bit his lip and straightened his shoulders. “Really, Anh, it’s enough. I tell myself over and over again that it’s all I need now.”
CHAPTER 71
GRACE SAT NEXT TOANH, LISTENING TO HER TRY TO REPEATwhat she had learned in her conversation from Jack.
There was so much of the story that Grace still did not understand. But what she knew, not as the wife of a man who worked on watches and keeping time, but from her position as a woman who had experienced her own loss and pain, was that time did not always move in a linear path as her husband and father-in law believed. Instead, for some people, time radiated from a single epicenter, a point in time, where everything began and eventually returned. For Jack, the loss of Becky was that singular point around which everything revolved. Like the planets around the sun, his love radiated from that center. From the outside, it might appear that their love affair remained steeped in the memory of the past, not evolving the way a marriage might over time with the addition of children and the weight of age. But was it not something sacred to have one thing in your life that transcended time?
Grace’s heart felt cleaved between the sadness of knowing that Jack had spent seven years living in such close proximity to Becky, never revealing himself to her in fear of rejection. The other part of her heart was awed by how deeply he felt toward her that he would have taken such steps just to be as close to her as he could.
There was not a single clock on earth that could capture the minutes or hours of a love like this. And it went back to that note Harry had taped to the wall of the workshop:
Sundials can measure the hours in the day and reservoirs every drop of water. But no one has ever invented an instrument to quantify love.
Becky does not recognize the two women who are waiting for her in the principal’s office after classes have ended for the afternoon. But she finds herself silenced by their words as they explain why they’ve come.
She listens to the woman named Grace describe how her husband welcomed a wounded veteran into their lives, giving him a quiet and safe place to live above their family’s store, as well as a chance for him to learn a trade. She begins to cry when this woman describes the disfiguring wound, the cloudy blind eye, the face that tries to smile each day despite the difficulty of scar tissue where he endured his countless skin grafts.
But it is the part of the story that the Asian woman details, about him working as a janitor at the school for two years just so he could be close to her, that makes Becky sob into her hands.
She now knows who had laid those single flowers on her desk all those years ago. The one daffodil. The solitary rose. She thought it might have been another teacher who had a crush on her, but she could never quite figure out who it could be.
Jack had been there all that time.
The two women scanned the young teacher’s hand and observed no wedding band.
“We don’t know what you want to do with all this information,” Grace said gently. “But we thought it was important for you to know.”
