Forty-one
KENDRA
WHEN I look up from Julia’s journal, Isabel is asleep on the sofa. Her head is bent forward on her chest and a gentle wheeze floats across to me every time she exhales.
For several long minutes I am torn between waking her and letting her sleep.
I am dying to know how Isabel got her hands on the journal. She had to have been reunited with her sister. Had to have been. How else could she have come by it? I turn my head toward the window as the thought occurs to me that perhaps Julia is in the garden with the rest of the family.
As I ponder this, Isabel stirs awake, sees that I have closed the journal, and she sits up abruptly.
“Oh! I must have nodded off. What time is it?”
I glance at a clock on the wall behind her. “Just a bit after two thirty.”
“Did you read it?”
“Yes.”
She takes the journal gently from my outstretched hand. “You’re the first to read it in many years.”
“How did you get it?” I hear urgency in my voice.
She smiles knowingly. “Do you mean, did Julia herself give it to me?”
I nod, wanting very much to hear that this is exactly what happened.
Isabel runs her hand across the top of the journal. “She did.”
Relief floods me. “Thank God,” I whisper, and her smile widens.
“Yes, I’ve God to thank for refusing to let me continue with my stubbornness.”
“How did you find each other?”
Isabel thinks about her answer for a moment. “Gwen brought us together, you might say.”
“She finally told you about Julia coming to the house that day, didn’t she?” I say, sure that this is what happened.
“I guess that is one way of looking at it. The short story is Julia handed the journal to me, from where you are sitting right now. The long story is a bit more complicated than that.” She settles into the sofa cushions behind her and I settle into mine. “We’d been back in the UK for nearly a year, Mac, Gwen, and I. We decided to stay at Thistle House after Mac joined us that first summer. He and I needed a quiet place to rebuild our marriage, and since Gwen’s best friend back in the States had recently moved to the West Coast, Gwen was amenable to staying and trying the high school here. I soon had other reasons for wanting to stay, which I will get to. But I still lived as though Emmeline Downtree had never existed. I still went by the name Isabel. I didn’t see any great need to shatter the myth, and being back at Thistle House after so many years was rekindling old aches that I thought Isabel could handle better. The only person who deserved to know the truth was Gwen, and what was the point in finally confessing to her that not only was I living my life with a borrowed name, but I had also abandoned my seven-year-old half sister on the day the Germans bombed London and she was likely dead because of me? I was looking for ways to bond with Gwen rather than distance myself from her, and since Mac hadn’t taken the news well when I finally told him the truth about who I was, it was easy to decide that nothing good would come from dredging it up for Gwen, either.
“So the three of us were in Oxford on a Sunday afternoon the following April for an art exhibition. Gwen and I had made some progress in our relationship, and she was fairly happy at Thistle House and with the new friends she had made. Things between Mac and me had improved, too, which was why the two of them had decided to come with me to this show. The Umbrella Girls had taken off, as the saying goes, and were selling well. The original was still hanging in Charlotte’s old bedroom at Thistle House, and, strangely enough, it was the one daily reminder of Julia that didn’t sting. It had quite the opposite effect, actually, which was why I was inspired to create more.”
My eyes are naturally drawn to the Umbrella Girl painting hanging behind her. “Painting Julia over and over was like finding her?” I venture.
Isabel nods slowly. “Perhaps it was. Painting the Umbrella Girls was definitely therapeutic, and selling them made me feel that at last I had something to give back to the world.” She draws a deep breath before continuing. “Anyway, Mac had bought a London newspaper to read over lunch that afternoon at the art show. When he was finished with it, Gwen began thumbing through the sections. She stopped at a page and said, ‘Well, would you look at that,’ and I asked her what she had seen. She folded the section over to isolate a picture. From upside down I could see that it was a wedding photo.
“‘I guess I can tell you this now,’ Gwen said, ‘if you promise not to go crazy,’ and I said, ‘Tell me what?’ As she handed the paper to me, Gwen said that way back when we first came to Stow, the woman in the wedding photo had come to Thistle House on a day I had been out. But, Kendra, I heard nothing after those first few words. I was now looking at a photograph of a bridal gown I had only ever seen in my head. Buttons down the front, fitted bodice, sleeves of illusion. The dress was one of my gowns. And then I looked at the face of the happy bride. The woman was Julia.”
“Oh my God,” I murmur.
“Indeed,” Isabel said. “You see, too, what lengths God had to go to reunite me with her. He had to practically move heaven and earth to undo all my mistakes.”
“What did you do?” I ask.
“Well, I had to have Gwen repeat everything she’d said, because I had heard none of it, and I did go a little crazy, which she had asked me not to do. Mac, who was looking at someone else’s paintings nearby, rushed over to see what I was fussing about. I thrust the paper toward him and through my sobs said who it was in the photo. I had not uttered Julia’s name in a very long time.
“Mac kept saying, ‘Are you sure?’ but there was no mistaking that dress, and that face, even twenty years after I had last seen it. And, of course, the bride in the photo, the former Julia Waverly, had known about the brides box. This Julia was my Julia.”
“So, you looked her up? You contacted her?” Stunned at the play of events, I am already picturing the sisters in a tearful embrace.
Isabel pauses to inhale deeply, as if the memory of that day still took her breath away.
“I asked Mac to get in touch with her. I didn’t know what Julia’s feelings would be toward me, though I should have guessed that wearing one of my dresses at her wedding was evidence that she did not hate me. But I could not lift the phone to call her when Mac found out where she was. It wasn’t difficult for him to locate her. The announcement in the newspaper said the couple both worked at the same mapmaking company in London. The hardest part was waiting for Monday to arrive so that Mac could ring up this place and ask for her.
“I didn’t want to be in the house when he called her. I stood at the edge of the pond while he and she talked. When he joined me outside a few minutes later, he said Julia had wept with joy to hear that I was alive, and that she and her husband would be driving out to Thistle House the next day. I sank to my knees on the wet grass, as overcome with emotion as I had been the day I lost her. Gwen had come out with Mac, and she dropped beside me, begging me to forgive her for not telling me that Julia had been to the house nearly a year before.
“But I knew Gwen owed me no apology. Everything was suddenly bright as a July noon, even though rain clouds spanned the horizon that morning. It was as if a great curtain that had been strung above me had fallen into a heap on the ground, and the sky was aflame with light. I could clearly see that fear and regret had made me so protective of Gwen, she had felt as if she were suffocating. That she’d had no desire to tell me about a stranger who had been by inquiring about a box of sketches had been my fault, not hers. And my inability to forgive myself for what I had done had made Julia an anonymous shadow to Gwen, a ghost whose name I never said nor allowed Mac to say. Gwen owed me nothing.”
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’re Emmy.”
“Am I?” Isabel looks intently into my eyes, as if seeking affirmation of some kind.