Not a Sparrow Falls (27 page)

A few pages followed of inconsequential things, but then it got interesting again.

Alasdair’s teaching assistantship will end in June. This message was delivered with a meaningful look. I smiled, knowing that he is telling me that when he is no longer my teacher, we can meet with no excuse whatsoever except that we want to be together.

“That’s very interesting,” I said, not admitting to a thing. He looked a tiny bit flustered and said he would be in Scotland until August. That took me aback. I suppose I hadn’t thought about his leaving the country, but of course, he would be. He looked positively pleased at my reaction. Unkind brute. I must get to work. My grades won’t be what they were earlier in the year, I’m afraid, except for one class. I seem to show a distinct appreciation for Biblical Literature.

“I can’t believe she was that goofy about Dad,” Samantha grumbled. Bridie stared into space and thought about Alasdair MacPherson’s smoky blue eyes and handsome features. She remembered the feeling of his hot lips on her palm, the warmth of his strong chest under her hand. She could believe it.

“Read,” Samantha demanded.

Bridie snapped to and turned the page. More pictures, these featuring Alasdair and Anna together. The first one featured the two of them standing in the middle of a narrow, curved street, smiling. This time Alasdair was the one carrying the sack. Anna must have been back to the jumble sale. She felt a funny sensation looking at the two of them, and she didn’t care to analyze it. She shook off the melancholy and read on.

“Show me Scotland,” Alasdair said to me the day school let out for the term, and I have obliged. Every day this week we’ve taken another tour. I now understand the term “whirlwind romance.”

Monday we took the train to the highlands and went hiking. We stayed overnight at a hostel. Separately, of course. He touched me for the first time. When we were up on the hilltop looking at the landscape, he pulled me close, brushed away the hair blowing in my face, leaned in, and kissed me. He was gentle, yet so intense. I have never felt this way before.

“TMI—too much information,” Samantha said.

Bridie turned the page. More pictures. Anna and Alasdair standing in front of a castle. Candy wrappers, a couple of pressed flowers, postcards. More pictures. A train schedule.
A calendar with Alasdair’s name written in every square. Wednesday they’d gone to the observatory, Thursday they’d had dinner at the Caledonian Hotel. Friday Anna had given Alasdair a choice between going to hear
The Siege of Troy
by Berlioz sung in French, a talk on postmodern dance, or
Cosi Fan Tutti
in Italian. Bridie smiled at the next entry.

He chose a concert by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra at Queen’s Hall. It was lovely. Afterward he bought us big cups of creamy chocolate at a café. We drank it, walking through the cemetery downtown, reading the epitaphs. Some were quite sad.

“I want a big gaudy headstone when I die,” I said lightly, wishing we’d walked somewhere else.

“I hope that won’t be for a long, long time,” he answered back, and suddenly I realized that I am alive, not dead yet. There’s no need for mourning.

He reminds me of a chivalrous knight. I half expect him to wear armor and carry a sword, but it’s probably just reading too much Chaucer that’s affecting my perceptions. Still, he has such a gentle strength about him. It does me good, and the proof is that there have been no dark times at all since he came into my life. I know it’s fanciful, but it’s as if his soul is the other half of mine. I don’t know what I will do when he leaves. I won’t think about that now. Instead, I will thank God for hearing the longing of my heart.

Bridie turned the last page. It was empty. She closed the book.

Samantha blinked. “That’s it?” she asked.

Bridie nodded toward the clock. It was nearly one. “It’s time for bed now, but we can read the others, too, if you like.”

Samantha nodded.

Bridie placed the journal in the box with the others. “Good night.”

“Good night.”

“Light on or off?” Bridie asked, her hand on the door.

“On, please,” Samantha said instead of her usual “whatever.”

****

Bridie’s heart was heavy as she undressed and prepared for bed. It was as if Anna had become flesh and blood to her and she could see that this new friend, instantly dear, was headed for trouble. Anna’s hope and vulnerability fairly cried out from the pages of her journal. She had trusted so much in what Alasdair MacPherson’s love could heal.

“The arm of flesh will fail you,”
Bridie’s grandmother had been fond of reminding her, especially after she’d started dating, bringing home this one and that one, going on and on about them.
“Love with all your heart, Mary, but don’t look to anybody but the Lord to fill up your empty spots. There’s never been a man born of woman who can do that, and I don’t care if he’s the finest thing since store-bought pickles.”

Grandma was right, Bridie thought, climbing into the bed. Apprehension suddenly gripped her. What was she doing? Reading Anna’s journals might have seemed like a good idea, a healing thing to do, but what if she was wrong? What if lancing the boil only spread the infection?

She didn’t pray. That would have been presumptuous, considering. But she whispered her doubts and questions into the darkness for quite a long while, wishing with all her heart that someone was listening. She finished and then lay there, thinking. She had no idea what this family needed to be healed from and even less idea as to how to do it. She supposed she would just take things one step at a time. She supposed that the first chance she got, she would go back to Samantha’s room and begin reading journal number two.

Twenty-Two

Alasdair approached his house. He blinked. It was his house, was it not? Or had it been sold and new owners moved in during the eight days he’d been gone? He pulled to the curb, bumping over the ridges of frozen slush left by the snowplow, then turned off the ignition and the lights and just sat for a moment staring.

Someone had shoveled the walk, but not with the neat, orderly strokes of the maintenance men from the church. This job looked as though it had been performed by drunken elves. The cleared path zagged through the piled-up snow, darting a foot or two to the left, correcting, then aiming toward the right, cutting a crazy course to the porch. Small footprints dotted the snow beside it and converged out in the middle of the lawn. He smiled. A family of snowpersons congregated under the snow-covered oak branches. They were a sagging, leaning, tipsy-looking bunch, but regally adorned. He squinted and recognized Father’s good derby and Mother’s old fox stole, its head and feet perched jauntily on snowmother’s ample bosom. Oh my. Winifred should not see this.

He got out of the car, so fascinated he didn’t bother to bring his suitcase, and followed the maze toward the porch. The house was lit up, from the outside as well as the megawatts spilling from the windows. Someone had retrieved the Christmas lights from the garage, and it looked as if they’d taken every set purchased over the years of his childhood. There were big colored bulbs running along the roofline, glowing in Jell-O tints, sagging in places where the cord had slipped from its fasteners. Apparently unfazed by running out of lights before the roofline, the artist had simply taken up with the newer sets—smaller twinkle lights. They outlined a third of the roof and the windows and the colors blinked on and off in furious rhythm. Three of the windows, that is.
The fourth shone with all white lights, as did the door. He felt his face breaking into the unfamiliar shape of a grin as he made his way to the porch. It had been similarly cleared, and the workers’ identities were given away by four sets of boots lined up by the doormat, one adult sized, one slightly smaller, two tiny sets—one pink plastic, one red, the price tags still attached. The doormat, also, was new. Santa waved from his sleigh, a wreath of words encircling his head.
Ho. Ho. Ho. Merry Christmas.

Unaccountably, Alasdair’s throat closed. His eyes filled. He breathed in and out—a spicy, fragrant breath from the massive concoction of evergreen boughs and red ribbon that hung from the door knocker. He took hold of the knob, turned it, and stepped inside.

He felt a moment of confusion, not sure which of his senses he should attend to first. Smell won. Someone had been making cinnamon rolls, and recently. The aroma lay over the scent of fried chicken, and both of these competed with the sharp, fresh tang of new paint and the resinous spritz of evergreen.

Sight sprang to life simultaneously. This entry hall was the origin of at least part of the paint smell. The wallpaper was gone. And good riddance, he thought with a burst of relief. The walls were now a warm cream color, and strung from one corner to the next were dripping, dipping ropes of thick red yarn from which dangled Christmas cards of every shape, size, and color, interspersed with homemade snowflakes cut from lined notebook paper.

He debated which sound to follow. Christmas music wafted from the direction of the kitchen, complete with organ and bells, but the other music had a greater appeal. The sound of children’s laughter mingling with the boinging background and silly voices of cartoons drew him like a piper’s call. He passed through what he vaguely remembered as a dim, shadowed hallway, briefly noted that the MacPherson family gallery had been removed to make way for the new paint, and glanced into the bare-looking dining room, obviously a work
in progress. The table was covered with a sheet, the walls half stripped of their paper. He rounded the corner into the living room. No one noticed him for a moment, so he had a chance to take in the scene.

Everything familiar was gone. Mother’s antique Chippendale furniture had disappeared. All of it. Now the place of honor was held by the old brown couch that had been in the kitchen sitting room. It was covered with toys: some kind of plastic parking garage peopled by tiny figures that resembled corks from wine bottles, two naked dolls, and a stuffed panda bear. Several picture books splayed open across the pillows. The walls had been painted a butter yellow. All of Mother’s framed prints, china plates, knick-knacks, and collections were gone. The mahogany piecrust tables were gone, but on second look he wondered if they were under the red plaid skirts on each end of the sofa. The only things on the tabletops besides a few small metal cars were two inexpensive lamps on ceramic pot bases that glowed warmly through buttercup yellow shades.

The television was where the curio cabinet had been. The children seemed to be watching a rendition of
A Christmas Carol.
Alasdair recognized a few of Dickens’s famous lines being spoken by Mickey Mouse. His children, all three of them, were plopped in front of it on beanbag chairs in jelly bean colors. Samantha, hair braided, wearing a red-and-white flannel nightgown and thick athletic socks, was watching along with Cameron and Bonnie. If it
was
Cameron and Bonnie.

His son sat cross-legged on his own brilliant blue beanbag, alternating between taking bites of his supper—a chicken leg, macaroni and cheese, and carrot sticks—and pointing and exclaiming at the television. He was drinking something from a covered cup, which tipped over each time he set it down. Milk. A trickling puddle of white spilled out and disappeared into the carpet.

Bonnie had lost interest in the television. She was moving
huge beads along wires on something that looked like an abacus. Behind them, in the corner, was a Christmas tree. Actually, on closer look, Alasdair could see that it didn’t reside in the corner. This huge tree, a fir from the looks of it, took up nearly a quarter of the room. It almost pulsed from the number of lights strung on its branches. It was covered with construction-paper chains, more of the homemade snowflakes, a string of popcorn and cranberries that ended halfway across, and some of Mother’s collection of ornaments, but oddly, they covered only the top half of the tree. The bottom half was decorated with iced cookies hanging from what looked like strings of licorice. The whole arrangement was topped by a cellophane angel whose bulb seemed to have burned out. A pile of colorfully wrapped presents sprawled over the knitted afghan that seemed to be doing duty as a tree skirt.

Samantha was the first to notice him. She smiled at something on the television, then turned her head toward the doorway. She wasn’t exactly bubbly, but at least she didn’t look tortured, as she had when he’d left. “Hi, Dad,” she said.

“Hi,” he answered back, afraid to say more, afraid of breaking the spell, afraid that all of this would disappear.

“Hi, Dad,” Bonnie mimicked, looking up from her toy and giving him a brilliant smile.

“Hi,” he said again, his own feelings too deep to fit into a smile. He felt something break open inside him. He was flooded with tenderness for these children and with shame that he was seeing them for the first time.

Cameron stood up, knocking over his plastic cup again. He stepped on the remains of his chicken and macaroni, sending his carrot sticks flying as the plate went over. He ran toward Alasdair and hugged his legs. Alasdair lifted him up. He’d been freshly bathed. His hair was still slightly wet around his neckline. He was wearing new red zip-up pajamas, still fuzzy. “Hi,” Cameron said. Alasdair hid his face in the boy’s
shoulder. He could feel the warm skin, smell the soap. He squeezed his eyes shut until the tears had abated.

“Well, look who’s home,” Bridie said, her voice warm and welcoming. He turned to greet her and was struck almost physically by the change in her appearance. Later he would realize it was only the color of her hair that had changed, from the light brown to a shimmering white-blond. But as he turned his head that first moment, it seemed to him that more than that had shifted.

“I was going to have them wait to eat until you got here,” she apologized, “but I wasn’t sure when you’d get in.”

“Oh no, that’s quite all right. Really. That’s fine.” He was blathering like an idiot.