Clouds (20 page)

This time he had nothing behind his back to offer. He couldn’t even give Shelly back her trampled heart.

“Jonathan, I want you to know that I like Elena. I’m sincerely happy for you. For both of you. And I wish you both the very best.”

He stared at her. Shelly couldn’t read him. It was the same look he had given her the other day right before he and Elena announced their engagement. She felt he was waiting for her to say something, but she didn’t know what it was.

If the situation were different, Shelly would have pursued that thought until she found out what he wanted.
She would have opened her heart to him and told him everything she had been thinking and feeling and how she wanted him back. But now she couldn’t put that kind of burden on him. Jonathan was engaged to another woman. As his best friend, Shelly would honor that relationship. She wouldn’t download her emotional baggage on him. What was past, had happened. What was now, had to be.

He continued to wait for her to say something. She wanted to ask if he and Elena had set a date yet, to find out why Elena didn’t have a ring. She wanted to know if they were going to stay in Belgium or move back to the States. She wondered what he had told Elena about Shelly. It seemed all he had told Elena was that he and Shelly were childhood companions, and he had left out the part about their being in love with each other as teens. She mostly wanted to ask Jonathan if he loved Elena.

But all she asked was, “May I have your parents’ new address? My folks wanted me to ask. In case I saw you. I didn’t want to forget.”

Jonathan looked as if he was about to say something, but his lips finally closed, and he nodded. Turning to head back up the trail, Jonathan fell into a quick stride, and Shelly walked beside him. As they entered the woods, she felt a sharp pain in her chest. It was the kind of pain she used to get on cold winter days in Seattle if she ran and then tried to draw a deep breath.

She knew what it was. She didn’t want to admit it, though. And she knew why this pain was happening here in these woods. She was walking beside the only man she had ever truly loved, and the two of them were in the most romantic, enchanting place she had ever been in her life. The woods begged for secrets to be whispered under the sympathetic eaves, for lovers to promise themselves to
each other and to seal their pledge with a kiss. Here Shelly and Jonathan walked; yet they harbored no hope of any vows or of any more kisses between them. Ever.

Yes, she knew where this pain came from, all right. This sensation came to anyone who had such a full treasure chest in her heart and then locked it up for good and heaved it into the depths of nothingness.

They emerged from the woods and marched past the playground, where the carefree children still spun each other on the merry-go-round and laughed happily.

Enjoy it, dear hearts
, Shelly silently exhorted the young ones.
Enjoy your moment of innocence. One day it will be gone
.

Chapter Nineteen
 

I
told Elena we would meet her at the car,” Jonathan said in words that were unevenly spaced. Had the woods jolted his soul as well?

“Do you want to walk down the back side of the castle or go around the way we first came up?” Shelly asked.

“This is fine.”

They continued down the wide trail away from the castle wall. Just before the parking lot, facing the valley, they saw a ten-foot-tall memorial surrounded by a short iron fence. Inside the fence grew a dozen rosebushes, guarding the simple yet regal-looking monument.

“What do you suppose this is?” Shelly asked, stepping off the trail to have a look. Jonathan followed her. He was the first to find the carved names.

“Look. The one at the top: Ludwig Rudi. He’s listed as one of the founding fathers of this town.”

Shelly felt a swell of pride in her heritage. “Would you
mind taking a picture for my mom?”

Jonathan snapped her photo, and when he handed her camera back, his fingers brushed softly across her hand. They felt warm on her chilly flesh. Shelly decided right then that the farther she stayed away from Jonathan the better. The two of them could not pretend they didn’t still feel something for each other.

Shelly reasoned that Jonathan wouldn’t have proposed to Elena unless he loved her. And he wouldn’t break a commitment once he had made it.

They needed to be away from each other if his relationship with Elena was going to work. As much as Shelly hated the idea, she knew that the sooner she extracted herself from Jonathan’s life, the sooner he could get on with it. And wasn’t that the true test of love? Being willing to give up something for the other? Shelly knew right then that she loved Jonathan so much she was willing to give him his future, void of any complications from her.

Elena was waiting inside the car, curled up in the back seat taking a nap. She perked up when they arrived and asked Shelly if they had found the grave.

“No. We think we saw a church spire down in the valley. Do you mind if we look for a graveyard near the church?”

“Of course not. You don’t mind that I came to the car, do you?”

“No,” Shelly said.

Elena motioned to her. “You have a little smear of something right there under your eye.” Shelly pulled down the visor and checked the mirror. Her eyes were a puffy, red mess. The smear was mascara that had most likely run when she had started to cry. Shelly dabbed it away. It felt strange to be told by her former boyfriend’s fiancée that she had smeared makeup,
which had happened when she cried over that boyfriend.

Yes, the sooner I extract myself from this crazy triangle, the better. There are other fish in the sea, as they always say. Maybe some wonderful man is right around the corner waiting for me, but I couldn’t meet him until I had closure on this relationship
.

She kept pumping herself with logical explanations of why this was happening to her as they drove through the quiet town and made a circle around the church. There were no graveyards.

“Entschuldigung ich, bitte,”
Elena said, rolling down her window and calling out to a man walking down the street. He stopped, and she proceeded to ask him where the graveyard was. He answered, and she thanked him. Shelly found it hard not to admire Elena’s spunk and ability with the language.

“Two kilometers down this road,” Elena reported as she rolled up her window. “Be sure to take lots of pictures. Your grandmother will cry when she sees them.”

“Yes,” Shelly agreed. “I’m sure she will.”

When they arrived, they all got out and walked into the graveyard. The first headstone they saw read “Rudi.”

“Look,” Elena said, “another one is over here. And one is over here. This little cul de sac looks like a whole family of Rudis. No wonder that guy at the Hilsbach graveyard was so excited when you told him you were a Rudi. It looks as if the Rudis once ran this town.”

Shelly strolled up and down the rows. She was distantly related to all of them. The thought amazed her and sent shivers down her spine at the same time. They were all gone. She was their offspring. In a sense they had entrusted her to carry on. But carry on what? A career?

Suddenly her life felt shallow. Even if she lived to be a hundred, her life was almost a quarter of the way gone. What had
she done with it? There rose within her an urge to accomplish something, to create some kind of heritage she could pass on. For the first time she felt an urgency to have children. She wanted to live on in them, the way her rows of relatives somehow lived on in her.

“I don’t see a C. C. Rudi yet,” Jonathan said, continuing up and down the rows in his quest. “Do you have any idea what his first name was or his parents’ names?”

“No, I don’t.” Shelly continued to look, too. But it didn’t matter so much that she find the grave now. It seemed she had already found something in this hunt. She understood, or at least thought she understood, a little better the beautiful gift of her Christian heritage, and she had arrived at a clearer picture of what she wanted out of life. She wanted to be married, to raise a family, and to bring them up, as her mother used to say, “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.”

The painful part of making such a discovery was that less than an hour earlier she had purposed to emotionally release herself from the only man with whom she had ever wanted to undertake such an endeavor.

All the logic, emotions, and self-discovery gave Shelly a headache. She was hungrier than she had realized and didn’t think she could handle any more exploring.

“Can you take a couple of pictures for me?” she asked.

Elena reached for Shelly’s camera and directed her to the most attractive of the Rudi-family graves. Pink geraniums bloomed atop the grave mound. The marker was done in black marble with white highlighting behind the letters. Next to the names, “Lina and Alfred Rudi,” was an impressive carving of Christ dressed as a shepherd, carrying a staff, and knocking on a closed door.

“Thanks,” Shelly said after Elena snapped the picture. “My mom and grandma will both be very happy.” Shelly put out her
hand, palm up, and as she did so she felt a raindrop hit her hand.

“Looks like we found this just in time,” Elena said. “The heavens are about ready to dump on us. Are either of you as starving as I am? Let’s find someplace to eat.”

They hurried to the car and drove away as the rain began to seriously come down. Jonathan drove almost to Heidelberg before they found a tavern that was open. It was a smoky, loud, brawl-just-waiting-to-happen kind of eatery, but Jonathan assured Shelly that this was the best they would be able to find on a Sunday evening in this part of Germany.

The waiter recommended the special of the evening when Elena asked what was good. She closed her menu and took his advice. Shelly couldn’t read much of the menu anyway, so she ordered the same, as did Jonathan.

They weren’t disappointed. A two-inch-thick slab of raw meat was delivered to each of them on a sizzling flat rock bedded on a wooden paddle board. Two sauces were provided in metal dividers. The idea was to slice the meat as it cooked on the hot stone.

Shelly was a little leery, but the first portion that looked cooked came right off with her knife. It was like cutting butter. The meat cooled quickly, and when she took a bite, it seemed to melt in her mouth. She was so hungry she ate almost all of it before trying the last few bites with the accompanying sauces. The sauces only made it better.

“This is unbelievable,” she said, searing the last bit of beef. “What do they feed their cattle?”

“This isn’t beef,” Jonathan said. “You’re eating venison. And judging by the color, this fellow may have been on the hoof this morning.”

“Try these potatoes,” Elena said, offering Shelly the large bowl of whipped potatoes. “They taste really good if you warm them on the platter.”

Shelly ate until she couldn’t take another bite. This was the first time since she had been in Germany that she had eaten her usual amount.

She had always had a quick metabolism and was teased about how much she could eat. As she thought about it, she realized that she hadn’t had much of an appetite since she had moved back to Seattle. Maybe this was a sign that her emotional struggles of the past few months might be coming to an end.

“Do you have a boyfriend, Shelly?” Elena asked on their drive home. “Or did I already ask you that?”

“You did,” was all Shelly said.

“The reason I ask is because I know this guy that I think you would really like. He’s a little younger than you, I think. But he’s nice. His name is Tony. He’s just about your height probably,” Elena said. “I come up to his nose, if that helps you judge. Anyway, he works at an auto body shop in Akron, but he wants to work on airplane jet engines. That’s why I thought you two might be interested in each other. Plus he likes brunettes.”

“Flight attendants and jet-engine mechanics don’t often overlap in their job descriptions,” Jonathan said. He said it nicely, but Shelly realized he thought Elena’s logic was off.

“I know, but he’s a really nice guy, and I just think Shelly would like him. I’m sure he would like her.”

Shelly was sitting in the backseat biting the inside of her mouth to keep from laughing. This was crazy. Her old boyfriend’s fiancée was trying to set her up with a mechanic in Ohio. Meredith would get a good laugh out of this one.

When they arrived back at Mike and Jana’s, it was dark. Shelly thanked Jonathan and Elena from the backseat of the car and told them they didn’t have to drive around to find a parking place, they could just drop her off.

Elena reached over the seat when they said good-bye and gave Shelly’s arm a squeeze. “I’m so glad I got to meet you. I know Jonathan thinks highly of you. I can see why. I wish you lived here. It would be great to get to know you better.”

Shelly absorbed Elena’s words with the affection with which they were being offered. Of course Elena liked her. She didn’t know that Shelly had once been inside of Jonathan’s heart the way Elena apparently was now. Jonathan had chosen not to show her any of his past scars. Shelly could only assume that when Elena had entered his heart, she had found no shrines to past loves that she had to knock down, which meant that Jonathan had swept his life clean of Shelly. Either that or Elena didn’t yet have full access to his heart.