Three years later…
Willow
I woke up to a sticky Indiana summer morning, the heat laying on me like a second, damp blanket. Air conditioning was on the long list of household improvements to my rental in The Cottages. I’d only been back in Harmony for three months, and food and rent ate up most of my little salary from the HCT. I didn’t have much left over for home renovations.
I kicked the covers off to get some air on my skin. My bed was the same four-poster queen-size from my parents’ house in Emerson Hills. It had moved with me to Canada, to Billings, Montana, and then to Austin, Texas. Three times in three years my dad was relocated, chasing the oil profits. My mother finally gave up packing and hauling furniture and insisted on pre-furnished homes with every move. It was wasteful and silly, but it was her way of protesting being dragged around North America.
I didn’t protest. I had no voice. No money. Nothing. The only thing I asked was to take my bed, including the sheets and blankets. If I pressed my nose to the linens and inhaled, I imagined I could still smell Isaac there—gasoline and smoke, peppermint and aftershave.
“Isaac.”
I let his name sigh out of me as I lay on the bed in my cottage, my hand pressing over my heart. No matter how often I thought of him—and it was constant—the ache in my chest never diminished. Missing him never got easier.
I shook off the sadness before it weighed me down, and got out of bed. I padded across the hardwood floors, through the living area, decorated with my own little touches. Wooden comedy and tragedy masks I found at a swap meet in Texas. A colorful Cheyenne throw rug I’d bought in Montana, soft under my feet as I crossed into the kitchen.
I started the coffee and my gaze lingered on the framed poem hanging next to the kitchen window. Angie wrote it for me in Mr. Paulson’s English class in high school. She sent it to me in Canada, before she left for Stanford.
Willow Tree
Its limbs the long hair
of a sad girl,
reaching for the
ground.
‘Sturdy as an oak,’ they say.
A willow is stronger.
It bends to the storm.
Harsh winds whip it,
its leaves are torn
and carried away.
It bends but doesn’t break.
It may weep
but it will
never
fall.
I smiled as I lifted my coffee mug, gratitude and anticipation in every sip. Counting the minutes until this weekend, when Angie would be at the final performance of A Doll’s House at the HCT.
I hadn’t seen my best friend in three years.
I showered, tied my long hair in a braid down my back, and dressed in a pale green sundress with yellow daisies on it. While Marty didn’t enforce a dress code at the HCT offices, I liked to look as professional as I could on my little budget.
After a quick breakfast of toast, juice, and coffee, I grabbed my bike off my front porch and strapped my helmet under my chin. Greta, my neighbor, was already in her front garden with a smock and gloves, weeding.
“Morning, Greta.”
“Guten Morgen, my girl.” She stood up and stretched her back. “I have fresh peas for you,” she said in her thick German accent. “When you come back from work.”
“I’ll trade you for some lemonade,” I said.
“Yes, that would be fine.”
I had a little lemon tree in a pot in my tiny backyard. It was my pride and joy, watching it grow tall and bear fruit. Bright yellow suns in a galaxy of green leaves. Greta said it wouldn’t survive the winter, but I’d put it in a pot just for that; so I could bring it inside when it got cold.
I wouldn’t leave it to die in ice and snow, but would take care to always keep it warm.
That afternoon, the sun was bright and warm on my face. People groused about Midwest humidity, but I basked in it. I craved being warm. I turned my face into the rays, let it seep into my bones and drive out the terrible memories of Canada when I was so lost.
Everything I loved—Harmony, Isaac, Angie—had been ripped away and trampled on. For long, agonizing months, I was a passenger in my own body. Feeling nothing, because allowing myself to feel anything hurt too much. Numbness was easier; and I’d returned to the dark, cold place I’d been the summer after Xavier had assaulted me.
My parents didn’t know what to do with me. My eighteenth birthday came and went, but I had no money, no job, no savings, and no will to do anything. I stayed in my room for three solid months, hardly eating or bathing or sleeping. My mother tearfully begged and pleaded. My father sternly told me to stop acting like it was ‘the end of the world’ and to ‘pull myself together.’
I had no sense of self to pull together. I was broken and scattered, the pieces of me spread out over a cold ocean floor. More than once, I imagined my robotic body transporting me out onto the small lake behind our house in Edmonton. Maybe the ice wasn’t thick enough yet, and I’d hear a crack under my feet—a gun shot across the still, frigid air. A split second later, it would give way, and drop me down into the black water.
Bonnie McKenzie saved me.
My father had confiscated my phone and laptop for months, cutting me off from the world. When he finally permitted me a new phone, I called Angie one cold November night. She was home for Thanksgiving. One word in my cracked and trembling voice made her pass the phone to her mother.
It took months of late night phone calls and secret Skype sessions to break through the numbness. To pull myself together. By January, I got a job at a clothing store in Edmonton, and from that first paycheck to the last from a boutique in Austin, I saved for my return to Harmony.
Now I saw Bonnie twice a week at her downtown office on Juniper Street. She was kind enough not to charge me for her time, and I vowed to make it up to her somehow. On my own. If I were starving to death, I wouldn’t ask my parents for a dime. I’d never be dependent on them or helpless without their money, ever again.
I rode my bike downtown. Past The Scoop, where tourists and locals crammed every booth, down to the theater. I locked my bicycle to a parking meter out front and glanced up at the marquee.
Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House
Final Performances this weekend!
When I returned to Harmony three months ago, one of the first things I did was visit Martin. Stepping back into the theater felt like coming home, and Marty’s arms closed me up like a benevolent, kind father. He was about to start auditions for A Doll’s House, a play about a young woman who is tired of being treated like a precious doll by her older husband and bucks 19th century conventions and leaves him to find herself.
Martin thought I’d be perfect for the part. Nora was the opposite of Ophelia. Treated like a pretty toy by her father and husband, but instead of succumbing, she fights back. Fighting back was something I was slowly learning to do. The play gave me a road map. Bonnie’s therapy was rebuilding my shattered self-worth. And Harmony had given me the peace to let it happen.
In the lobby’s dim, coolness, I waved at Frank Darian, our stage manager. He waved back from the box office where he was preparing for this Friday’s performance.
In the theater itself, the lights were low over the stage, casting spooky shadows on the sets. The chairs and tables of a 19th-century well-to-do home felt like a haunted house, waiting for Len, Lorraine, and myself to come give it life.
I found Marty upstairs in the offices with a pile of paperwork in front of him, as usual
“Hello, sweetheart,” he said. Out of professional courtesy, he only called me sweetheart when we were alone. I didn’t mind the fatherly endearment. Martin had been a better dad to me than my own.
And to Isaac.
“Hey, Marty. What’s the news?”
“Nothing good, I’m afraid,” he said. “The city council wants to move forward with the proposal to consolidate the entire block, including the theater. It’ll attract investors for restoration.”
“You don’t think you’d get lucky with some benevolent investor who’d let you run the HCT like you want to?”
“I should be so lucky,” he said. “I’m more concerned we’ll get a callous corporation that doesn’t care or understand what I’m trying to do here. It sucks, as you young people like to say. Especially since we just got back on track, thanks to Isaac.” He glanced at me. “I’m sorry, does it bother you if I mention him?”
“You ask me every time and the answer is always the same,” I said. “No.”
Hearing his name hurt like hell, like pressing a bruise that would never heal. At the same time, I loved hearing how Isaac was taking care of the HCT from afar.
As predicted, after Hamlet, Isaac was snatched up by the casting agent and immediately went to California. He got a small role in a big movie, and his pay got HCT caught up on its back taxes and current with its rent.
I picked up a few bills to file, kept my gaze down and my words casual as I asked, “How is he? Still nothing?”
“Not a word,” Marty said. “I guess we could open an entertainment magazine. That’s the only way I get the news about him.”
“His last movie did well. Rave reviews.”
“Did you see it?”
Long Way Down had been playing at the Guild Movie House for weeks, but I could never muster the courage to buy a ticket.
“No,” I said. “I’m not ready. Did you?”
He smiled sadly. “Six times.” He reached over and patted my hand. “He went quiet on all of us, sweetheart. You, me, Brenda and Benny. I can’t even thank him for the money. An LLC wires it every month and all the correspondence I’ve tried to send…” He shrugged. “Nothing.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I knew he’d be…upset with me, but I never expected him to cut you off too.”
“It’s not your fault, honey,” Marty said. “It’s what he does. How he copes with loss. He locks himself in his own mind and only lets the emotions out on the stage. Or the movie set, these days.”
He watched the pain flit over my face. “I know it hurts. You did what you thought you had to do to protect Isaac. And now he has a brilliant career ahead of him, and he’s making plenty of money doing what he set out to do. And you, my dear, have a brilliant career head of you. Your Nora is sheer brilliance.”
“No.”
“Don’t take my word for it.” He tossed today’s copy of Harmony Tribune on my lap. “Vera Redding says you’re a tour de force, and that woman hates everything.”
I smiled and put the newspaper aside. “It’s a good play for me. It’s just what I needed.”
The play, and the theater, and Marty Ford, were exactly what I needed; more steps in my healing process. The fear of potentially losing him or the HCT to the city council’s renovation plans shook me to the bone.
“We have to fix this city council situation, Marty.” I cleared my throat. “Can Isaac help?”
“The council says the project can cost millions. I don’t know that he has that.” He smiled sadly and held up his hands. “And even if I wanted to, I have no way of asking him.”
As I biked home after work, my throat ached with tears. The pain of missing Isaac was slugging me in the chest with every heartbeat. I didn’t have an appointment with Bonnie that afternoon, but I wished I did.
Back home, Greta and I sat on my little porch. We shared a pitcher of homemade lemonade and ate peas straight out of the pod. The sun was setting in Harmony, the lightning bugs flaring as they flitted among the juniper bushes that separated Greta’s and my house. The cicadas were deafening—waves of buzzing that came and went like a tide. Children played in their yards. Neighborhood cats slunk here and there or dozed in the last of the sun’s rays. Greta and I didn’t talk much. We didn’t need to. The evening was quiet. Warm. Peaceful. It was everything I needed.
Almost.
When the sun had set, Greta packed up her baskets and said goodnight. Inside my place, my phone lay on the kitchen counter, a notification flashing on the display: I had a missed call and a voicemail from Dad. After the stint in Texas, Ross Wilkinson had moved them back to Manhattan. They’d come full circle and arrived back where they started, this time without a daughter.
“Hello, Willow.” Dad’s voice always sounded strained on voicemails. As if he were forcing it over a boulder of guilt. “Mom and I wanted to see how you’re doing. She told me about your work with the theater, trying to restore it and…such. A worthwhile endeavor.” He coughed. “We’re looking forward to flying in for the last performance of your show. And I hope this isn’t too presumptuous, but we planned a little party afterward for you, your cast mates and director at the Renaissance Hotel in Braxton.” A pause. “I hope you consider attending. Please let me know. All right, then. Goodbye.”
I set the phone down. I didn’t want a party. I wasn’t even certain I wanted my parents at the show. We were slowly rebuilding a tentative relationship though I suspected deep down, we’d never be the same. Bonnie told me that forgiveness is for the giver’s peace, not the receiver’s, but I wasn’t there yet.
And hearing Dad’s voice piled more painful memories on top of the mess in my heart, and made Isaac’s silence all the more deafening.
I sat on my small blue couch, opened my laptop and Googled his name. I scrolled past the articles about Long Way Down. Article after article raved about the breakout performance of Isaac Pearce—”an electrifying actor of raw intensity”—the Los Angeles Times raved. The text was broken up by photo stills. He was twenty-two now, and even more ruggedly handsome than before.
I checked articles on tabloid sites, because I had to know.
I found more shots of Isaac, caught at bars and clubs and events in Los Angeles. Always alone, a cigarette tucked in the corner of his mouth, a hard glint in his eyes. Comparisons to a dark-haired James Dean abounded, right down to the speculation that Isaac was gay. His lack of female companionship hadn’t gone unnoticed by Hollywood.
Or me.
It was insanity to think he abstained from women for me. I’d broken his heart. More likely, he was being careful with his privacy. Guarding it against outside threats.
Who could blame him?
Still, hope burned in me, small and fragile. With shaking hands, I picked up my phone again and scrolled through my contacts for Isaac’s phone number. It rang once before an electronic voice message played: We’re sorry, this phone is no longer in service.
Though it was silly and hopeless, my fingers typed a text.
A2, S2
“Never doubt I love,” I whispered, like a prayer.
I hit send.
The little red exclamation point in a bubble popped up immediately.
This message could not be sent.
The message was sent. It just couldn’t be received. Not for three years now.
Still, hope burned.
I kept calling for him, sending my plea into the void.
No answer.