Isabel pauses a moment, as though gathering strength from the seconds of silence.
“I couldn’t sleep the night before Julia was to come, so I had plenty of quiet hours to ponder my new reality. I had been Isabel longer than I had been Emmy, you see. No one knew me by any other name. And I had my Umbrella Girls by then. Emmy was no one. When Mac had reached out to Julia for me, he had to tell her who I had become. Who I was. And who I wasn’t.”
I shake my head. “But it’s not true that Emmy was no one.You’reEmmy.”
“Am I?” Isabel looks intently into my eyes, as if seeking affirmation of some kind.
“Of course you are. None of this would’ve mattered if underneath that name you stole, you weren’t who you’ve always been.”
Isabel breaks into a wide smile. She looks like a proud parent whose child has figured something out.
“Right you are, Kendra. Right you are. But you can already guess I have been slow to realize what should have been clear to me the second I saw Julia again.” She cocks her head to one side and I can see that she is remembering the moment she saw her sister after nearly two decades. I wait for her to tell me what it was like. A few moments later, she does.
“Mac led her into this room. I was sitting right here where I am now. She was so tall and beautiful. Taller than me, and looking so much like Mum, so very much like Mum. She wore a dress of pink with a ruby pendant at her neck. Had I passed her in the street and not seen her face, I might not have known her. But her eyes werelocked on mine, and they were Julia’s eyes. She ran into my arms as though no time had passed, as though she were simply rising from the sofa where I had left her, and there had been no war, no slow waltz of time, no silent years of longing. She was a little girl inside a grown woman’s body, putting her arms around my neck, and saying the name Mum had given me—Emmy—over and over.”
Isabel is looking past me, into that long-ago moment. A tear is slipping down my cheek and I finger it away.
“That was the happiest day of my life, Kendra. I did not think I would ever live to see the heaviness of losing Julia lifted from me.”
I wait for her to tell me more. Several seconds later she continues.
“I was Emmy to her, not Isabel, but I really didn’t know how to be Emmy to anyone else. Julia seemed to understand that I became Isabel so that I might find her and I stayed Isabel so that I would be able to live with myself when finding her proved impossible. She told me she had her own ways of coping with her mistakes and then she handed me the journal she had written to me.”
Isabel raises her gaze to meet mine. “The journal answered many questions for me, and yet it raised new ones. If only I had gone to Mrs. Billingsley for help or answered the door when her butler came to the flat, either one would have told me that Thea had taken Julia to Neville’s parents, and wouldn’t I have been able to find her from the start? Or, if I had remembered Mum had gotten that letter from Neville’s parents, wouldn’t I have thought to look for it in the flat after Julia disappeared? Would I have figured out that since the letter was missing, someone had taken it? Or if I had been honest with Gwen from the start about who I really was, wouldn’t she have known that the woman who came to Thistle House inquiringabout an old box of bridal sketches was the sister that I had lost? Or if I had never tried to sneak away with those sketches in the first place, wouldn’t Mum have lived?”
I see her terrible logic, but I also see that a larger force had been at work. “There was a war,” I venture.
She nods slowly. “Yes. Strangely enough, war has a way of absolving us of the mistakes we make while in its dreadful shadow, but it keeps this absolution a secret. I didn’t realize I was playing my cards against a cruel opponent that had its own cards to play.”
We are quiet for a moment “So you remained Isabel, then,” I say. “Even after you and Julia were reunited.”
Isabel nods. “To all but family, yes. What is a name, really, but letters on a page, or a sound on the tongue? To the rest of the world, I was Isabel MacFarland, wife of the American writer, painter of the Umbrella Girls, half sister to a woman named Julia Waverly Massey.”
“Is Julia here today?” I finally ask, even though somehow I can already sense she is not.
“No.”
The word has never sounded more final to me.
Isabel continues as she strokes the cover of the journal. “Her son and daughter-in-law are here from York, and their three adult children and a great-granddaughter. Simon passed away five years ago. He married a lovely woman from Leeds many years after Julia was taken from us, but we stayed close, he and I. Losing her was very hard on Simon. He knew that I understood more than anyone what that loss felt like.”
A sliver of silence rests between us. At last I ask, “What happened to her?”
“Breast cancer.”
“I am so sorry.”
She nods once, accepting my meager condolences,and then turns her gaze to the Umbrella Girl just to her right. “You know, I tossed away twenty years of Julia’s life, but I was given them back—all of them. She died twenty years after we found each other again. They were very happy years, Kendra. Happier than I could have imagined. Much was restored to me.”
I am suddenly reminded of the letter in the bedside table that Charlotte had mentioned. I ask her if she wants me to know what it said.
“It was from my half brother, Colin. He had traced me to Charlotte’s in 1956 and written to her to see if I might possibly be willing to communicate with him. Start fresh. His mother had died and I was the only family he had. Imagine that.”
“And did you?”
She smiles, sniffs the air, and points to the open window. “Tell me, do you see a stooped old man sitting by the hydrangeas, smoking a pipe?”
I rise from the sofa, cross to the window, and peer out. In addition to party streamers, children on the lawn, and rows of fruit trees, I see on the terrace an elderly man puffing on a pipe. I catch a whiff of fruity tobacco. “I see him.”
