Authors: Ava Zavora
The woman he had loved enough to want to marry, had she picked out his clothes, that unlikely cologne? Had he taken her to Limantour and Napa, had dinners with her at the Lark Creek Inn? And if he had not returned to this house and been seduced by the past, as she had been, would he now be married to that woman, in another house, in another life, happily?
“You must have wondered at some point, what if. Right?” he had asked last night.
“If we had never fought and I had stayed put?”
“Or even if I let you go knowing that when you came back, I’d be waiting for you.”
She had hesitated, as if this thought had not punished her for these many years. “You remember Allison and Paul?"
He nodded.
“Remember how mad crazy they were about each other? They eloped two weeks after we graduated. She could have gone away to William and Mary, but he didn’t want to move to the East Coast, so they stayed here and she went to SF State. I thought they’d last forever. But a year-and-a-half later, I get this call from her---she’s at the airport and would I come pick her up because she’d just left Paul. She crashed on my couch for two months, crying every single day, over the love of her life. She thought she could never love again. But she’s now married with two kids to a guy who’s nothing like Paul, and she’s happier than I’ve ever seen her.”
“So you think we would have broken up anyway?”
“If I had stayed, Andrew, I would have ended up resenting you. And if I had left and you had waited or even moved to New York with me, you would have resented me. Either way, we would have grown apart.”
Andrew had shaken his head, his face unclouded by any doubt.
“Tell me that all this time, whoever you were with, no matter how happy you were, doing all that you’ve ever wanted to do, tell me there wasn’t a part of you that felt something was missing. Because that’s how I’ve felt, Sera." He
held her face in his hands.
“I know I could be happy with someone else—I’ve been happy with someone else. But it was decided a long time ago. It was always going to be you. You.”
This was their truth that shored her up now, her defense against the doubts that were beginning to assail her without Andrew there. Strange how vulnerable she was in this house, as if stepping into it had stripped her of all her strength.
Feeling lonelier in Andrew’s bed and surrounded by his things without him there, Sera reluctantly left
his bedroom and went to the attic, where she stepped out onto the unfinished widow’s walk.
Squinting in the bright sun, she shielded her face with a hand as she looked towards town. She imagined what it would have looked like a hundred years ago, a near-empty valley perhaps, with rows and rows of apple trees and the river a distant speck of blue.
The sea captain’s wife would have been forlorn all by herself in the valley, waiting for a sign of her husband’s sloop returning from its run to San Francisco. And when she left, the sea captain might have ascended here for the futile view of the empty road beyond and a child’s grave below.
And in Miss Haviland’s time, the valley would have been dotted by chicken farms. Had Miss Haviland ever stood where Sera was now standing, and searched the horizon, not because she expected to see anyone, but because she didn’t know what else to do as she waited for someone who will never come back to her?
Sera leaned against the window frame, not seeing the vivid valley before her as it was now, but how it might have been before, feeling as if she was just one in a line of widows.
If he were here, Andrew would shake her playfully, telling her that this was their time, no one else’s. “We have nothing to do with them,” he would say, drawing her back to the present with the heat of impatient kisses.
Chase would do the same, Sera realized, lamenting her obsession with lost causes. In that they were similar.
She stepped back from the broad ledge and closed the large windows. Returning to the great room downstairs, she fiddled with the table setting once more and re-arranged the roses to perfection. “Dessert!” she exclaimed as she slapped her head.
She grabbed an old wooden bowl from the kitchen and went out to the back, plucking warm, juicy blackberries from the green and prickly bramble. They tasted of sugar-spun sunshine, she decided as she savored some. If she had some flour, butter, and salt, she could fashion a simple tart, topped off with a dollop of Chantilly cream. But since all Andrew had was peanut butter and boxes of macaroni and cheese in his kitchen, she would have to cook for him another time.
Satisfied with her precious bounty, she then ventured to the garden, suddenly remembering the strawberries that used to grow by the rose bushes. Drawing the hem of her red silk dress about her, Sera carefully wound her way among the thorny briars until she spied the tell-tale red of luscious fruit against dark green vines on the ground. She knelt on the dirt and gathered the strawberries, liking how the bright red mingled with the purplish-black mound.
Reaching into the base of the briar for an especially plump berry peeking through some vines, Sera’s arm got caught against a hidden thorn on the other side. She had captured her prize but in drawing back her hand, the blade-like thorn had drawn a long line against the inner flesh of her arm.
She stared at the gash of ruptured skin, blood welling against white, wondering why it didn’t sting as it should. The large strawberry for which she had been wounded now lay crushed in the palm of her hand, its bright red juices running down to mingle with her blood.
“What are these?” Chase had once asked of her arms, miraculously detecting the faintest crisscross of old scars. He had always seen what no one else noticed.
Sera had briefly thought to laugh and say she used to own a cat with sharp claws, but his watchful manner and grave eyes discouraged withholding this truth.
Chase had listened to her without interrupting, as she told him what she had never told anyone, not Elise or Andrew.
Though he pressed her gently the night before, she had turned away from Andrew and he had let it go, perhaps thinking there would be time later to heal this particular wound.
Even Allison, her only witness, had wisely never mentioned it since.
“I thought it would be hard,” she told Chase, still surprised, years after the fact.
“But it was easy. The easiest thing I had ever done. You just lie down with your legs open and they vacuum your insides. You hardly feel anything and it’s over so fast. You get up and get dressed, with a pad on because it’s like you’re on your period, but you don’t look in the corner, because there’s a plastic see-through container at the other end of the vacuum full of something red. And then you leave.”
“Allison’s boyfriend rented a motel room for us. She stayed with me while I slept. I thought I would be more wounded somehow but I wasn’t. I had the procedure done at 8:30 that morning and by 3:00 in the afternoon, I
was up and checking out of the motel room. I was perfectly fine. I was fine the day after. I was fine when I moved to New York. Everything was fine."
There was no pity in Chase’s concern for her and it was then that Sera realized why she had fallen in love with him; for the first time in a long time she felt safe and completely assured that she was with someone who would never hurt her.
“I don’t regret what I did. If I had it to do all over again, I would still make the same decision. Even when I...started hurting myself. Because despite the ease of it all, I wasn’t fine.”
“When did you stop hurting yourself?”
“Someone in Elise’s building saw my arms when I was cleaning and told her. It probably wouldn’t surprise you to know how aloof I was. They correctly guessed that only someone like Elise could get through to me. And she did. I didn’t realize how badly I needed to be mothered, not until she came along. I really don’t know where I would be if it hadn’t been for her kindness."
“Ahhh, I see,” Chase had murmured thoughtfully.
Sera attempted a smile. “Another piece of the puzzle falling into place?”
“Or another turn in the labyrinth
. Just when I think I know you..." He had shaken his head, troubled. “You came to New York for a reason, and it cost you dearly it seems to me.”
“I came to New York because I wanted to and it’s worked out well in the end.”
“You once said your father lived in the Upper West Side. Have you ever---”
“No." Her exposed vulnerability disappeared in that instant, replaced by a steeliness. “What would be the point?”
“Not even curious?”
“That’s a dead end, Chase."
He had subtly attempted since then to bring up the topic of her father, but she had firmly led him away from that direction each time. She was not ready to share the hazy plans of vengeance she had aborted once she realized there wasn’t anything she could ever do to make things right. How could she confront her father, when she was no better than him? All she could do was live a life worthy of the one that had been taken from her mother.
“There’s a part of you that I won’t ever get,” Chase had once said. She had not contradicted him.
Sera swayed as she stared at the blood and juice now running down her arm and dripping onto her dress, staining it a darker red. She was starting to feel a bit lightheaded, not because of the blood, but because she felt again the peculiar sensation of the past colliding into the present—there was no room for all the memories, her own and others’, that wanted to be heard.
She heard ringing and shook her head. It was the phone.
Startled, she dropped the bowl of berries and ran towards the front door. She had almost reached the top of the stairs when she heard the answering machine take over and Andrew’s brief recorded greeting echoing throughout the house.
“Hi, it’s me." Sera froze at the amplified sound of a woman’s voice, intimate and tender.
A heartbeat or two of hesitation and then, “I finally read your letters. I wasn’t going to because I knew once I did---” The woman sighed a long sigh full of unfulfilled longing. “Andrew, of course I still love you and I want to be with you. And if what you wrote is true, that you’re willing to do whatever it takes to make it work, then I’ll come back. Call me and we’ll talk. I miss you so much."
A loud click of the phone and the house was again silent as a tomb.
Her arm began to sting and Sera remembered the still bloody gash and her stained hand. Dazed, she walked to the bathroom and ran cold water over her arm. She scrubbed her blood-red fingers with Andrew’s soap and tried to wash out the dark stain off her dress.
As she tried to clean herself, Sera glanced in the mirror. She was not sixteen, after all, but a grown woman wearing a ruined cocktail dress in the middle of a Monday afternoon, playing pretend in someone else’s house.
She was an interloper.
She stared at her reflection critically, meeting her own eyes with resolve as she wound her hair up and off her face in a tight knot at her nape. She wiped the sink down then found her heels where she had left them.
Tearing a piece of paper from the notebook in her purse, she wrote a brief note, the contents of which came to her with surprising clarity and purpose, and left it by the phone, held in place by the weight of one silver bullet.
It was easier than she would have thought, but then she was good at this. Without an unsure step or a backward glance, she shut the door, locked the gate, then walked away.
We hurt each other even when we don’t mean to, even when we’re apart. If we had stayed together, we would have killed everything, so it is for us that I do this now. Goodbye, Andrew.
Repentant for having been absent for the past day, Sera told her grandmother that she wanted to spend her last afternoon in the Bay Area treating her to high tea in the city. With an eye on her watch and an ear for the phone, Sera quickly ushered her grandmother out of the house and together they drove to the Palace Hotel on Montgomery Street after dropping off her rental car.
Under the hotel’s magnificent stained glass ceiling and surrounded by its lush topiaries, Sera tried to exert mastery over her feelings, pouring tea from a gleaming silver teapot with a trembling hand.
“I think Paris is a good idea,” her grandmother offered as she sipped her tea. “I’ve been worried about you,
anak
, living on your own all these years. And this Chase sounds like he will take care of you. He’s a good man?”
Swallowing a bitter brew of tea and unshed tears, Sera nodded. “The best. I don’t deserve him.”
Her grandmother set her tea cup down and placed a papery thin hand on her trembling one. “
Anak
, you do deserve him.”
The kindness of her grandmother’s eyes was too much. Sera could feel herself on the edge of breaking. She dutifully ate a scone although she tasted sawdust and could barely swallow.
As they drove to the airport afterwards, her grandmother, after staring bemused at Sera’s profile, said in Tagalog, as if she was thinking out loud, “How you do look like Stella.”
Sera had turned her head from the road in surprise, for her grandmother rarely said her mother’s name. “What?”