As Bright as Heaven(90)

We were both quiet for a moment, each lost in our memories of Mama.

“Might you marry again, Papa?” I had been wondering this for a long time.

He didn’t stroke his chin in contemplation. He answered me straightaway like he’d known the answer to this all his life. “Your mama is the only woman I could ever love, the only woman I was ever meant to love.”

I carried those words up the stairs with me.

They plucked at my dreams as I slept, and they tugged me awake at two thirty in the morning and kept me sleepless until sometime after four. I didn’t think I would get back to sleep at all, but I guess I did.

I hear another voice downstairs now, and this time I recognize it. Alex is down there, too. Perhaps a person Papa knows well died during the night, and now someone from the family is at our door to let him know they need him as soon as he can come. He will need breakfast.

I rise and dress as quickly as I can, working my long hair into a loose braid. When I step out onto the landing, I see that Evie’s door is ajar, and I catch the aroma of coffee and toast. She is up, too. I descend the stairs, all the while trying to place the voice that I hear. Papa is asking the visitor if he would like to use his washroom to shave and the man says no, thank you. I reach the bottom of the stairs and turn toward the sitting room, where the voices are coming from. Papa is kneeling on the hearth and feeding the fire. Alex is standing at the sofa in front of our visitor. I don’t see the man’s face until I am at the doorway.

And then I see him. Jamie Sutcliff, sitting on the sofa next to a bed pillow and a rumpled blanket. He turns toward me as I enter, and I see a softening in his eyes and face that I can only describe as hinting of regret. Or gratitude. Maybe both.

“Jamie.” I say his name and it feels like I had last said it out loud only yesterday.

He stands. “Hello, Maggie.” His hair is long and a bit mussed; his trousers and faded flannel shirt are wrinkled from travel and sleep. The wool socks he wears are threadbare. At his feet is a tattered rucksack, half-open. But underneath all these evidences of a roving life, I see in his gaze tiny traces of the man I met when I was young, before he went to war, before the flu killed people we loved, before he returned from the trenches a hollowed-out soul.

There is so much I want to ask him, and it seems by the way he is looking at me that there is so much he wants to tell me. But I can’t think of what I want to say, so what comes out of my mouth next is laughable.

“You’re here.”

He cracks a smile. “I am.”

“Willa found him sleeping on the back stoop last night,” Alex offers.

“Willa?” I murmur, but not to Alex. To Jamie.

Papa stands and turns from the fireplace. “She’d gotten up to get a drink from the kitchen and heard a noise. Found our old friend here trying to take shelter for the night and wisely asked him to come in and sleep on the sofa.”

Willa comes into the room. “Hello, sleepyhead,” she says as she walks past me. She holds a coffee cup on a saucer that she hands to Jamie. He thanks her for it and takes a sip.

“Didn’t think Papa would be too pleased with me if I just left him there,” Willa says. “And he didn’t want to wake his parents up to let him in.”

“He’s come from California,” Alex adds. “He’s seen a whale.”

“You were sleeping on our stoop?” I am still trying to grasp that Jamie is standing a few feet away from me. He had slept in this room. While I lay awake last night pondering the abrupt turn my life is about to take, he was just below me, sleeping on the sofa.

“I got into the city late. I didn’t want to wake my parents in the middle of the night.” He breaks into another smile. “I’ve actually slept on a stoop before, many times actually, so I was perfectly fine with the idea of sleeping on yours. Daylight would have come soon enough.”

Evie now enters the room with a plate of toast cut into triangles and offers it to Jamie. He doesn’t reach out to take it.

“That’s so very kind of you, but I should probably get going.”

“It’s just some toast, Jamie. You should eat something,” Evie says, in a half-motherly, half-doctorlike way.

She sets the plate down on the sofa table in front of him, and a second later he places his coffee cup next to it. “It’s not that I’m not grateful, because I am. I just know my mother will be wanting to feed me, too. And it’s been a while since I ate a great deal of food all at once.” He turns to Willa. “If I could have my coat, I’ll be on my way and out of yours.”

“You’re not in our way, son,” Papa says.

“I know where his coat is!” Alex scampers past me and out of the room.

Jamie moves forward to follow him, but he stops as he’s right next to me in the doorway. “It’s good to see you again, Maggie.”

His eyes are telling me something. I don’t know what it is and I am unable to say anything in return. A second later he is at the front door putting on his coat and then slipping his feet into worn boots that had been left in the foyer.

Papa, Willa, and Evie have followed Jamie. He thanks us again for our hospitality and Papa tells him as he lifts the latch and opens the front door that we’re all glad that he’s come home.

I am watching him about to step out of the house when I see out of the corner of my eye his rucksack where he left it.