A Heart of Time (6 page)

“Olive,” I breathe out. “You need to listen to me.” Her lips purse together with a hint of the attitude I know is looming. “You do not ever need to worry about me. I have never liked being alone because I love being with you. And yes, you are a million percent correct: I will always, always need you, and I hope you will always need me too. Plus, I wasn’t alone today—I had Uncle AJ with me all day at work.”

“Oh, Daddy. You’re so good at avoiding the truth,” Olive responds. She is not five. I’m convinced of this. Rather than fight with the warrior of all fights, I pull her back in and her arms loop around my neck as she rests her head on my shoulder. “Whether you like to believe it or not, I was sent to you for a reason.” While there are many times when I feel like the use of her words surpasses her age, I’m beginning to question where she is getting these insightful statements from—or rather, who read them to her.

“Olive,” I sigh. “Who read your baby book to you?”

“Auntie Alexa,” she giggles. It has been a couple of years since I have opened Olive’s baby book. I used to read it to her every night, the parts that Ellie insisted on filling out before Olive was even born. A writer never has a shortage of words, and as an English teacher, it should never have surprised me how many letters she wrote to Olive in preparation for her life. There were nights when I would sit in Olive’s room after she had fallen asleep and read Ellie’s words under the glow of the moonlight, imagining the sound of her voice as if she were speaking the words into my ear. Some of the pages had stains from tears…tears of happiness she felt when dreaming of a life she was creating. I used to trace my finger over the soft, puckered spots on the paper, wishing I could wipe away another one of Ellie’s happy tears from her face rather than from a page in a baby book.

It got to the point where I couldn’t read it anymore. The pain it was causing me to imagine the words that had gone unspoken after Ellie’s death began to haunt me. I wanted to write the words for her—explain in great detail what Olive looked like, how the sound of her cry was nothing less than a soothing lullaby from heaven. I wanted to describe the incredible color of Olive’s eyes—how they are blue, but with greens, yellows and purples mixed in like a splash of watercolor. I should have been able to write about the time Olive looked up into the sky and said “Ma”. I know it was nothing more than baby babble, but to me it was a sign connecting our family.

It never fails, the second I place a pen down to the glossy paper in Olive’s baby book, the words seem to float above my head like a breeze, drifting just out of reach and causing me to forget how to put a sentence together. I’m not a writer. I’m a reader of a writer’s words and the only writer I have ever wanted to read words from can no longer breathe the air needed to form a syllable.

Olive slips herself out of my arms as we approach our driveway. “I’ll get the mail!” she shouts, running ahead. She whips open the door to the mailbox and pulls herself up on her tiptoes to reach whatever is inside. As she retrieves the mail, she looks at it quickly, flipping through it like she does every day. I’m not sure I understand the excitement of looking through mail, considering the amount of bills I receive, but for some reason she enjoys thumbing through it all. I can assume that might change some day when she has financial responsibilities. “Daddy, there’s a letter from that lady.”

Ellie
. Her heart. I jog over to Olive and take the letter from her hand. Turning it over, I’m hopeful for a return address, but once again, disappointment sets in when I see that this continues to be a one-way message.

Olive stands in front of me, looking up, waiting to hear what the note says. Before I open it, I look back down at her pleading eyes. Does she feel what I feel? Does she yearn for a connection to the heart surviving my wife—her mother?

“Inside,” I tell her, pointing to the front door. “We only have a few minutes because I have to get back to work with Uncle AJ.”

“Not until you read it, Daddy,” she says, walking ahead toward the door.

We sit down on the couch as Olive peels her backpack and sweater off. She pulls her leg up and twists toward me, waiting with eagerness. We haven’t received a letter in a couple of months and I was beginning to wonder if things had gone wrong in this woman’s life. But as long as her heart is beating and she’s well enough to write this letter to me, it all has to be okay. I slide my finger under the flap of the envelope and tear it open slowly, keeping the envelope intact.

Whenever I pull one of these letters out, my stomach turns heavy and my chest tightens. I find it hard to swallow or conjure up an intelligent thought. This isn’t just a letter from a stranger. This is a letter from the person caring for the last of what is left of Ellie.

When I was a child, I remember Mom telling me that when a person dies, it is only their body that passes on because their soul remains intact forever. If a soul stays behind, wouldn’t it make sense for it to remain attached to the heart that created this soul? I know it’s a foolish way of thinking, but it makes sense to me. I know the body I fell in love with is gone, buried deep under the soil of this world, but the heart I watched grow with age, the heart that adapted to a greater love as life evolved, perhaps it is sheltering at least a part of her soul that remains. At least that’s how it seems from these letters I continue to receive.

My hands shake as I unfold the typewritten letter. “Daddy!” Olive snaps me out of my haze. “What does it say?”

I wish the letter were created with handwritten words, offering just one minuscule hint of who she is.

Dear Mr. Cole,

I stood on the cliff of a mountain today and took a breath of sweet summer air. I closed my eyes and felt warmth embrace her heart—it felt full, as if it were taking up all free space in the cavity of my chest. When I squatted down and stretched my arms over the ledge, the strength of her heart pounded harder and sped up as if it were knocking on my ribcage, reminding me of her presence. This heart is so alive. I am alive.

When I laid down along the stony rippled edge of the cliff, I placed my hands over her heart and stared up into the sky, feeling the brightness overwhelm me as if heaven were covering me with a blanket, and her heart calmed under my touch. I felt her. I felt her life living within me, and I am grateful. I am alive because of her, just as her heart is alive because of me. The connection was strong today and I knew I needed to send you this letter. I hope it offers you a bit of comfort through the pain that must follow you around like a dark shadow.

Take care,

Her Heart

Rather than soak up the beautiful words from this stranger who might be the most familiar person in my lonely world, I can only focus on the mountain, and the question of where this mountain is. I need to find it, in hopes of finally meeting this woman. Although, I shouldn’t be dumb enough to think she’s just sitting around some mountain waiting for me to show up.

“Maybe she was at that mountain Grampy took us to last year,” Olive says. Mountain. What mountain? I don’t know if this woman even lives in this state, or on this side of the country. I don’t know how she knows who I am, and I certainly don’t know who she is. I always thought the donation and recipient process was anonymous. I’ve contacted the hospital several times, pleading for information, but each time I have been led to another roadblock. I did find out that this particular donation wasn’t completely anonymous, but the recipient requested to keep her identity private. I’ve looked up the laws and it doesn’t add up. Any time I’ve tried to get somewhere by arguing this, I get nowhere. “We should go to that mountain.” There is no mountain in this town or the surrounding area. Olive snags the letter from my hand and turns it over. “Look, Daddy.” During the short second it takes for me to take the letter back and flip it over, I pray that there is contact information.

But there isn’t.

Instead, I find a drawing.

“That was mommy’s favorite,” Olive whispers. “She likes them, too.” The letter falls from my limp hand, and I watch it float like a feather to the ground.

CHAPTER FOUR

NOVEMBER

-Two Months Later -

“Your sandwich is
in the fridge and your cereal is on the counter,” Olive says, pulling on her backpack.

I kneel down and wave her over. “You don’t need to make me food anymore, Ollie.”

“You can make
me
food,” AJ says from the couch. “You know Uncle AJ is always hungry.” He rubs his hand over his growing gut.

“Uncle, you eat all of our food! You’re going to turn into a piggy,” Olive says through laughter.

“Well, if your darn aunt wouldn’t keep me on this clean-eating, inhumane diet, I wouldn’t be so hungry every time I come here.” Olive just looks at him with question. She may sound older than five, but she’s five and has no clue what a diet, let alone a “clean-eating” one is.

“Well,” Olive says, turning back toward me. “If you don’t want me to make you food, maybe Miss Charlotte can make you lunch again, I guess.” A tiny smile pinches at her lips. “I think that would be okay. Don’t you, Daddy?”

“Olive, I’ve already told you—” She places her fingers in her ears and hums loudly, avoiding the words I’m trying to speak.

“That-a-girl, Ollie-Lolly,” AJ says, pointing at Olive with a wink.

“Come on, we’re going to be late,” I tell her, giving AJ the look he was desperately trying to get out of me.

As we step outside, Charlotte and Lana are coming out of their house, as well. Olive’s hand slips out of mine, and she books it down the driveway, stopping momentarily to look both ways before crossing the street. Within seconds, Olive and Lana’s hands are interlocked and they’re running down the street ahead of us.

“I take it she’s feeling better today,” Charlotte says. “Did the soup help?”

“I guess it did,” I laugh. “Thanks for bringing it over.”

“It was the least I could do after Lana was nice enough to share her germs with Olive.” Charlotte folds her arms over her chest and shivers against the brisk wind. “I guess autumn is here, huh?”

I look over at her. Her cheeks are rosy against the rest of her pale skin and her eyes are a bit puffy. For a second, I wonder if she has been crying, but then she sneezes. “Oh no. You’re sick?”

“I’m fine,” she shoos me off, sniffling a bit. “Moms don’t get sick.”

“You should be wearing a coat,” I tell her. She’s wearing a flimsy, long-sleeved t-shirt and I’m guessing the chill in the air is seeping right through the fibers of the shirt. I might be a frigid person, but I’m still a gentleman. I unzip my hooded sweatshirt and hand it over to her. “Put this on.”

“I’m good, but thank you,” she says, pushing my hand away.

“Put it on,” I say firmly. “I don’t make the best chicken soup, so—”

She looks at me with an arch in her brow and her lips press together. “Thank you,” she groans begrudgingly, giving in. Slipping on my sweatshirt, she scrunches up the sleeves and pulls her hands through. The fabric drops down to her knees, making the size difference between us quite apparent.

Her sniffles continue for the duration of the walk, and I notice an increased flush across her cheeks when we reach the bench at the bus stop.

“Do you have a fever?” I ask, taking a closer look at her face.

She shakes her head. “I’m sure I’m fine.”

“She’s not fine,” Lana says from the grassy area. “She was up all night coughing and sneezing. I gave her my cold.” Without thinking, I place my hand over Charlotte’s forehead, instantly realizing how cold my skin must feel against the scorching sensation of hers. I may be cold, but she’s burning up. She recoils at my touch, pulling back with a wide-eyed look as if it were a shock that I touched her. Actually, it’s a shock to
me
that I touched her. I’ve done a good job at keeping things very vanilla.

“Oh,” she says, finally coming to terms with having a fever. “Good thing I work from home, then.” With a garbled coughing laugh, she pulls her hands inside the sleeves of my sweatshirt and curls her arms up over her chest. I like the way she looks, all cuddled up in my sweatshirt.

“I have to run a couple of errands this morning, and the store is one of them. What can I get you?” I ask. “Do you have anything you can take to get your fever down?”

“I’m sure I can find something, but if you don’t mind picking me up some ibuprofen, that’d be great,” she says.

Lana runs over to us and wrenches her hand around my shirt, pulling me down to her level. She cups her hands around my ear and whispers, “Mom was tearing the medicine cabinet apart this morning, saying she couldn’t find anything that wasn’t meant for a—a damn kid.” I pull away, trying to maintain a straight face, but she pulls me back again, resuming her secret-telling position. “Then she said…‘Goddammit, why isn’t there ever anyone around to take care of me?’ She said a bad word. Two, actually.” I want to laugh at what Lana took out of that statement, but I know exactly how Charlotte feels. We spend every second of our lives caring for someone else and there is never anyone to take care of us when we need it.

I twist around to the side of her face and cup my hand around Lana’s ear, “I’ll have a talk with your mom about saying bad words.” Lana pulls away and slaps her hands over her mouth, giggling loudly, before running back over to where Olive is playing.

“What was that all about?” Charlotte asks.

I clear my throat and slip my hands into my back pockets. “Evidently, someone needs to wash their mouth out with soap,” I say, in my best mock-scolding tone.

Charlotte scrunches her nose and forehead with curiosity. “What did she say?”

“Don’t worry about it,” I laugh. The other moms arrive in their group and the roaring chatter that grew from halfway down the street stops almost immediately as they come within earshot. They are all very friendly, but I can’t help feeling as though they get quiet because they don’t know what to say to me. I assume meeting a single, widowed father isn’t the norm around here.

“How’s Olive feeling today?” one of them asks.

“She’s much better, thank you,” I respond.

“Chicken soup is always the cure-all,” another one sings with a cynical grin painted across her tinted lips. I know Charlotte doesn’t converse with any of these women, which means someone likely saw her walking across the street with the pot of soup yesterday.

Fortunately, the bus interrupts whatever conversation could have ensued and Olive runs over to take her backpack out of my hand. “Don’t forget to eat your mayonnaise sandwich today, Daddy. You’re going to get sick if you don’t eat.” Rather than argue with my little Ellie, I lift her up and place a kiss on her nose.

“Have a good day at school. I’ll see you when you get home.”

“Bring me home a jasmine today,” Olive whispers in my ear. “My last one died.” She drops out of my arms and runs for the open door of the bus. “Bye, Daddy!”

Once the bus pulls away, the other mothers begin to crowd but I break away just in time to hopefully make the obvious a little less obvious—that being said, I don’t want to answer any soup questions. Charlotte isn’t as lucky, though. She’s in the center of the conversation, and I decide not to look back and catch the look in her eye that would most likely tell me she hates me right this second.

She feels awkward around the other mothers, too, since we’re the outsiders—the single parents who aren’t lucky enough to have a normal family.

I jump right into my truck the second I get home, heading out to the gardens early enough to beat the daily crowd of elderly visitors. I’ve learned if I arrive within five minutes of their opening, I can have thirty minutes alone without the gawking eyes and whispers.

The fifteen miles between Sage and the gardens in Glenn blur by as I catch myself thinking about Charlotte. For the first time since Ellie’s death, my mind feels torn between mourning and healing. Mourning and memories are all I have left of Ellie, so if I let go of the mourning, Ellie is really gone. Moving on feels like betraying her, so healing has never been an option for me before, but lately, I find myself wondering if it’s possible to mourn and heal at the same time. Maybe I finally have room in my life for both.

In another life, a life where Ellie didn’t leave her permanent footprint, Charlotte would be a woman I could see myself wanting to spend more time with, maybe even pursuing something more than a friendship. Not that there is anything wrong with the friendship that has budded nicely between Charlotte and me over the past couple of months, but I’ve made it clear...maybe a little too clear...that whatever we are—will continue as is. She hasn’t exactly asked for more or even insinuated anything, but the reason I keep thinking about it may be because recently, the consideration of something more has crossed my mind more times than I’d like to admit. There is something about her that has me looking forward to the moment she walks out of her house in the morning, and waiting for the first laugh that escapes her lips each day. Being around her has brought me a sense of peace I’ve been missing in my life.

I pull into the gardens, seeing only two vehicles. One belongs to the groundskeeper, which means a visitor is already here.

I step out of my truck and head down the narrow, gravel-covered path. The scent of lilies and jasmines permeates the air, pulling me down the earth-made, moss covered steps toward the tree. Our tree.
My tree
.

We had these plans. Horrible plans that no twenty something year olds should ever be discussing. But we did for a reason I can’t even recall.
“Let’s be buried together by the tree in the gardens. That way we can always be together in the one place we love.”
I laughed at her that day and told her never to bring up the thought of dying again. It was the one and only time we ever spoke of it, but at least that terrible conversation made things easier when planning my twenty-five-year-old wife’s funeral. Her parents hated the idea. They were angry that it was my right to make the arrangements and decisions. I understood their desire to bury her in the cemetery that contained the rotting bodies of their relatives, but I had to carry out Ellie’s wish, regardless of how much her parents would hate me.

The one thing I didn’t plan for was the owner of the garden telling me it was against regulations to bury a body on their grounds. They would only grant me permission to bury an urn. I had to burn Ellie’s body into dust. Dust had always been an annoying particle I was used to sweeping into the trash can, but now, my wife’s remains are nothing more than dust and it’s the most beautiful, precious dust in the world.

When the cremation procedure was complete, I was called into the office to pick up the urn. My wife was handed to me in a fucking vase. I placed it in a small box down in the passenger seat and then secured Olive into her car seat. It was the one and only time our entire family was together.
Pretty screwed up.

I kneel down by the tree, along with the cliché carving of our names surrounded by a heart with the word “
forever”
below it. Who knew forever ended at twenty-five? With my hand placed up against the heart, I close my eyes and allow the words to flow. “I miss you, baby. So much.” I pull in the thick air that never seems to find a way through my lungs easily while I’m here. Even if I could breathe freely, the knot in my throat makes it hard to speak the words I save for these moments. But with a slight breeze blowing against my skin, comfort blankets me like a warm hand touching my back. “Olive is learning to read. Can you believe it? She wants to be a writer like her mom. She wants to be just like you, Ell. I’ve done my best to keep you alive in her mind. I want her to know you like I know you. I wish she had years with you like I did, but I’m doing the best I can. I know I say this every time I’m here, but I just need you to know how hard I’m trying.” I open my eyes and remove my hand from our engraved heart. “I hope you don’t mind, but I need to steal a blue jasmine for Olive. She requested it.” I lean down and pull the clippers from my coat pocket. If it weren’t for Ellie’s strict rules on how to remove a flower from the soil, I would yank the thing out, but that would be a sin to her. I clip the flower and replace the clippers in my pocket. “I love you, baby. I’ll see you next Friday.”

I stand up and turn toward the jasmine-lined pond. This was the place that sparked Ellie’s passion for flowers, jasmines in particular. They aren’t naturally grown here, but I guess the groundskeepers maintain them; though the temperature is dropping quickly now, so I’m guessing this will be it for a few months. As I pick a couple more, my focus catches something pink across the pond.