“He doesn’thateyou,”I tell him, struggling to find a way to explain the hard looks and endless questions Dad fires at Elliot every time he comes into the shop with me. “He’s just a bit over-protective, is all.”
He’s just scared I’m going to run off to America with Elliot and never come back, would be closer to the truth here, but I don’twant to have to admit that this is a possibility that’s so much as entered my head, even in the context of Dad and his paranoia about it, so I let it go.
“I guess that makes sense,” Elliot says, kissing me softly on the top of the head. “You’re all he’s got. I can’t blame the guy for being afraid of losing you. You would be a very hard person to lose, Holly Hart.”
Is it just my imagination, or is there a wistfulness to his tone that suggests it’s not just Dad he’s talking about now?
For a split-second, I consider asking him; of breaking the unspoken promise that we’re not going to talk about anything as serious as ‘us’ — because thereisno ‘us’. Not really. Not after Christmas Eve, when he’ll fly back home to Florida and his family, and that’ll be that.
So, I just reach up to kiss him, and I don’t think about how every single kiss takes us one step closer than the one that will be our last.
I don’t think about that at all.
Instead, in the days that follow, I pour all of my energy into helping Elliot try to figure out the identity of the woman in the photo.
We visit the library and the war memorial. We go back to the barracks, and even wander among the graves in the snowy churchyard, holding hands and feeling like characters in a movie who’re about to stumble upon the answer to a decades-old mystery.
But, of course, we don’t.
The village library does, indeed, have a local history section and a selection of old newspapers, which are accessible via an ancient microfiche reader. But none of the books and pamphlets hold any clues for us, and we don’t know what to even search for in the newspapers (“Local woman photographed with U.S. soldier” being an unlikely kind of headline, even for a timewithout rolling news media…), so we leave empty-handed. The war memorial, of course, contains only the names of the village men lost to the war, and the barracks, as Elliot predicted, can tell us nothing other than that his grandfather was, indeed, stationed there for a while. As for the graveyard, meanwhile … I have no idea what we thought we were looking for in the graveyard. We’re probably not going to be starting new careers as detectives after this, let’s put it that way.
And so the mystery woman remains elusive. But instead of being discouraged by this, Elliot becomes even more determined to find her.
“You know you don’t have to know the truth about her,” I remind him one morning, a few days into the search. “You can just make it up. Turn it into fiction. At least that way, the mystery woman can be whoever you want her to be.”
We’re sitting together on a bench at the top of the hill just outside the village. It’s not a steep hill, or even a very interesting one, but it has a view out over the village itself and the surrounding countryside, which makes it a popular place to come for a stroll.
“I know,” replies Elliot, handing me one of the paper cups filled with hot chocolate which we bought on the way here. “But I don’t want to make it up. I need to know who she was, and what happened to her. I want what I write to be real.”
“She’s really got under your skin, hasn’t she?” I comment, sipping my drink and trying not to feel jealous of a woman who’s either long dead, or almost as old as the hill we’re sitting on.
“It just bothers me,” he replies, taking my hand in his. “I hate the thought that she existed, and then she was gone, and no one seems to know what happened in between. You know that thing about how you’re never really dead until your name’s spoken for the last time? I don’t think that should be just for famous people,or one’s who’ve lived dramatic lives. It should be for everyone. Everyone’s story deserves to be told.”
He turns and smiles at me self-consciously, as if he thinks I might make fun of him for the slightly schmaltzy sentiment. Instead, I just squeeze his hand through my mittens.
“You want to keep her memory alive,” I say simply. “And his, too. I get that. I really get that.”
“You feel the same about your mom, I guess,” Elliot replies. It’s not a question, so there’s no need to answer it, but I give his hand another squeeze, grateful to be understood without having to explain just how hard it is to think Mum could have been here — that she could have lived an entire life, fallen in love, given birth,mattered —and then just suddenly be gone, as if she was never here at all.
I really, really get it.
“You were right, though,” says Elliot. “About the story, I mean. This is exactly what it needs. It needs that element of… well, romance, I guess. A human connection. I like that.”
“That’s what all the best stories are about, aren’t they?” I reply, watching as he sips his hot chocolate, leaving a tiny spec of froth on his upper lip, which I would very much like to lick off. “People. Connections.”
“Exactly,” says Elliot, nodding so enthusiastically he almost spills his drink. “Because what else is there, really? When all’s said and done?”
It’s the kind of thing I’ve always thought, but never actually said, too worried that I’d sound pretentious, or just plain stupid. But Elliot never seems to think about things like that; or, if he does, he doesn’t let it stop him. He just says what he thinks, truthfully, and from the heart. It’s one of the things I admire most about him.
“Are you even real?” I ask, chuckling. “Or am I just imagining you? Because I feel like you must have a flaw of some kind.Maybe not afatalone, exactly, but still; no one can bethisnice and not have a flaw.”
“Oh, now, we agreed you wouldn’t use that word,” he grins, dropping a kiss on the tip of my frozen nose. “Anything but nice, remember?”
He kisses me again, and then he wraps an arm around me, and we sit there and finish our drinks, looking down at the winding streets, and the little snow covered-rooftops. From this distance, and under its unaccustomed blanket of white, Bramblebury actually looks quite pretty. Snow has a way of doing that, though; of tricking you into thinking things are better than they are, by briefly hiding all the imperfections.
That’s why I don’t trust it.
And I shouldn’t trust Elliot, either.
