Because how can I paint for him the whole picture, the winding roots of the truth, through a window as the whistle sounds for my train to depart? What can I say in the space of five seconds to express all that I feel, in front of my children and a curious stranger?
On the other side of the window, Joel puts a palm flat against the glass. I reach out and do the same, and suddenly we’re together but divided, just as we always seemed to be.
Then comes the distress flare of a whistle before slowly, agonizingly, our hands begin to peel apart. Joel breaks into a jog, trying to keep up, but of course he can’t. My heart is tethered to him, a thread seconds from snapping. Then at the last moment he reaches up and drops something through the open window above our heads. It helicopters into my lap like a falling sycamore seed.
I grasp it, then look urgently up, but the station has already become the grimy façade of the railway depot. He’s vanished, perhaps for the last time.
I stare down at Robyn on my lap. Her face is raised to mine, like she’s trying to decide if she should burst into tears, and it occurs to me that it must have been a bit frightening for her, the unfamiliar figure at the window with the urgent eyes and muffled voice. So I draw her closer into me, cover her tiny hand with mine, give it a reassuring squeeze.
“I love you,” I whisper into her shining spirals of dark hair.
“Are you okay?” the old lady asks me quietly, her eyes wrinkled in sympathy.
I nod but can’t speak. I’m afraid that if I do, I’ll lose it.
“The one that got away?” is all she says, her voice gossamer-soft.
I glance down at Euan by my side. He’s staring up at the opposite window, absorbed in the sight of life rushing by.
Oh, how it rushes.
I blink just once, release a couple of hot tears. And she nods gently, because we both know there is nothing more to say.
•••
Moments before we pull into Blackfriars, I unfold the paper napkin.
On it, scrawled in pen, are just five words.
I’LL ALWAYS LOVE YOU, CALLIE x
92.
Joel—eight years after
I wait for her at the bend of the river, by the crooked old willow I saw in my dream. Though the air today is tonic-fresh, the light feels prophetically gentle. Soft-hued with sympathy, as if it knows what’s to come.
I look up at the sprawling tree, magnificent as a monument. Recall the loop of Callie’sCscraped into the muscle of its wood. I picture the letter in time lapse over all the years ahead. Warmed through with sunlight, powdered with frost, until eventually it’s lost beneath layers of lichen.
I’ve told none of Callie’s loved ones about today. The only thing she asked of me was to keep what I dreamed from her, and I couldn’t risk the secret spilling out. So though it’s crushed me to do it, I’ll honor her wish to the last. If I don’t, the past eight years will have been for nothing.
I guess she must be visiting her mum and dad, the children with their grandparents. I’m sure whenever she’s in Eversford she returns to Waterfen, drawn back toward it like a bird migrating.
Since I saw her on the train eighteen months ago, she’s been at every turn of my thoughts. A whisper on the breeze of my memory.
•••
The weather grows somber while I wait, the countryside excreting moisture like tears. Cold is pinching my skin as the sky slowly marbles with cloud. On the opposite riverbank, bare-boned trees bow their heads.
For so many years I’ve been praying my dream got it wrong. That Callie won’t show. That I’ll stand here alone until darkness, growing more and more euphoric with every fading gradient of light.
Because even though we’re apart, I simply can’t imagine waking up tomorrow without the comfort of knowing she’s out there. Without knowing that somewhere she’s happy, living a life of a million colors. When I saw her on the train that day, I wanted to break down the window, climb inside the carriage. Tell her I’ll never stop loving her, that it’s impossible to picture a world without her in it.
I’m counting down the minutes on my watch. I want to stop the earth turning, hit the brakes on time.
Please let me be wrong. Please.
But now there comes a shift in the air, the dampened strike of footsteps. And my heart hollows out, because she is here.
