The Charm Bracelet(42)

“Ignore them,” Clem replied.

But Arden couldn’t. These women were everywhere: They descended on auctions of foreclosed homes and farms like vultures, picking and plucking possessions, while tired families watched from behind curtains.

“Could you ever see yourself in a city?” Arden asked Clem one day. “What does our future look like?”

“God, no,” Clem scoffed. “A city? I can’t live like that. I’m a farm boy. I love this town. I want a simple life with a big family. Don’t you?”

Farm boy. Simple life. Big family.

For weeks, Arden was panicked, haunted by Clem’s dreams. She avoided him at school, hid out on weekends, made up excuses.

But when Arden was without him, she was haunted even more.

At a school assembly, Clem was honored by his chapter of the Future Farmers of America for service, and in his acceptance speech, Arden could hear his joy when he talked about farming. When he showed her his medal after the assembly, his face beamed.

Arden shut her eyes, but no longer saw Clem: She saw the tired faces of broken families. She saw her mother.

“Meet me after school,” she told him. “In our spot.”

“I can’t marry you,” Arden said when they met, bursting into tears. “I love you, but I just can’t live here. I will die here, just like you’d die in the city.”

And so, like the city women, Arden ran—from Clem, from Scoops, from her mother, from her past—toward the city.

The next summer, Arden left for college. She thought of Clem every day for years as she finished school, started as a journalist, worked on her book, and became a part of Chicago.

Arden was working at the Chicago Reader when her mother sent a letter that included a clip from the local paper, The Scoop, that read, “Local Boy Killed in Farming Accident.”

Even after so many years, Arden’s heart shattered.

She sat in her cube and wept, thinking of the boy she had left, of the most vulnerable time in her life, when Clem had made her feel so safe.

Clem had married a local girl and had three children, two boys and a girl. The paper ran a picture of the family: The kids looked like Clem. The family looked happy.

In the bottom of the envelope was the charm of the loon, dangling on the bracelet Arden had left at home, her past hidden in an old shoebox in the closet.

“My heart breaks for you, my angel,” Lolly had written in her looping script. “He loved you so much, didn’t he?”

Arden took the next day off work. She held her bracelet for hours, before removing the loon charm. Then she wrapped her bracelet in a Pennysaver ad that was shoved into her mailbox and hid it away in a shoebox in the back of her closet.

Arden went to the Lincoln Park Zoo to visit the animals in Clem’s memory. She walked the park and buried the posting of Clem’s death under a stand of sassafras, using her hands to dig a shallow grave. When she had finished, she walked to the bridge overlooking the zoo’s pond—the Chicago skyline framed in the distance—and sat, her legs swinging over the side.

Arden thought of Tom, the man she had just begun to date. He was the exact opposite of Clem: A businessman, urban and polished, driven by a desire for money and success.

The two are as different as, well, Chicago and Scoops, Arden thought, staring at the skyline.

That’s when Arden heard the familiar sound. At first, she thought she was hearing a siren. But, no, running across the pond, calling, crying, singing their soulful song, were two loons, right in the middle of Chicago.

It’s a sign! Arden thought. I made the wrong decision! I should have married him and had his children. No man could love me like he did.

Arden watched the loons take flight, wondering if they were already beginning to migrate south for the winter.

Clem will always be with me, but I have to let him go. I have to move on somehow, too, even if it will never be the same.

Suddenly, she stood and, without thinking, began to catapult the loon charm her mother had sent from her bracelet into the lake. But just as she was about to let go, the loons circled overhead and wailed. Arden stopped, retracted her arm, fell to the earth sobbing, and clutched the tiny charm to her chest.

*

Whooo-dooo-ooooh-ooooh!

Loons sounded their mournful wail as Arden realized she was still sitting on the embankment of the creek. She rubbed her knees, now shivering as she remembered falling, remembered all of this. Her tears made the sassafras trees appear to move, wiggle in front of her, like ghosts.

Yes, Mom, you were right: I loved him. And I never allowed myself to feel that again after that pain.

“Mom! Are you okay?”

Arden jumped and turned to find Lauren behind her.

“I fell,” she mumbled. “I don’t know if I’m okay … I don’t know.”

Lauren took a seat on the damp ground beside her mom, checked her mother’s knees and head, before laying an arm around her mother’s shoulder. The two listened to the burble of the creek.

“Wow,” Lauren finally said, “those sassafras are magical, aren’t they, Mom?”

Arden smiled, clenched her jaw, and turned away, trying to hide her tears, but it was too late.

“Mom? What’s going on?”

Arden thought of her mother’s words earlier, and suddenly the story of Clem tumbled out of her mouth, along with more tears.