Jodi Thomas - Twisted Creek

He read each carefully, feeling like he was trespassing on someone else’s memories. Nana had signed each note “forever, e.” Nothing more. Carla had said the postcards were signed with the same word. Maybe that was all either of them needed to say. Maybe they both knew. This was no wild affair. This was simply a shared memory, never forgotten, always cherished.

He heard Allie open the door, but he didn’t turn around. The rainy-day air blew in around him, but he could feel her warmth before she brushed her hand along his shoulder. Luke smiled, knowing he’d never tire of her touch.

“I still don’t understand,” she said as she moved around him and stared at the pictures.

“It took me awhile to put it all together,” Luke whispered, as if invading Jefferson’s privacy by discussing it. “I think it was Willie mentioning that my grandfather used to call Jefferson ‘Red’ that made the pieces finally fit together. I’d heard Nana tell her story of her week at a lake with a boy named Red. She told me over breakfast about how they’d talked until sunrise. She couldn’t remember exactly where the lake had been located. They’d met that summer and kept in touch by one note and one postcard a year.”

“Odd. Nana never mentioned anything about keeping in touch with anyone from her past. If she did, I don’t think Henry even knew about it. The postcards were just there once in a while.”

“It’s more than that.” Luke closed his fingers gently over her shoulder. “I think they lived a lifetime together in their hearts.”

“No.” Allie stopped, then whispered, “Maybe.”

“Jokingly she told me once that she couldn’t marry me because she was sleeping with a memory.” Luke pulled Allie against him. “I think they fell in love that week but life kept them apart. She wouldn’t leave your grandfather or maybe Jefferson wouldn’t ask. First she had to raise Carla, and then you. Or maybe they were both happy with the way it was. For them, they had sixty years of being sixteen in their memories.”

Allie smiled up at him. “I wish such a thing could be true. It would have made my Nana’s life so much richer. But it can’t be, and these few pictures prove only that she knew him and wrote him once in a while.”

“They might not have written hot love letters, but she wrote him of what she loved-you. They shared that.” Luke knew he was sounding like a poet, but he saw the truth. “In a way, she gave him a little part of what she loved most. She gave him you.”

Allie shook her head. “I can’t believe that. Maybe he knew Nana. Maybe he was the boy who took her to the fireworks and the fair when she was sixteen, but that was all. He had no other relatives. I was just a name to fill in on the will.”

Luke took her hand and tugged her over to the old potbellied stove. He knelt down by the safe everyone used as a stool. “What’s your birthday, Allie?”

She told him.

He entered the numbers and twisted the dial. The safe clicked open.

Allie dropped to her knees beside him and looked inside. A wind chime exactly like the one her grandmother had lay inside.

“Still think you were someone he just wrote down?”

Allie pulled the wind chime out. “But why me?”

“Maybe he knew that you’d bring Nana back here where she’d always been in her dreams.”

Luke left her staring at the wind chime and walked to the door. He locked it, then flipped off the lights. Without asking, he lifted her in his arms and carried her up to her bed. There, he lay down beside her, and pulled the covers over them both.

She was silent for a long time, then she began to talk, piecing the story of Edna and Red together as if it belonged in a love story. The wind chime and the postcards were all Nana had of him, yet she’d tossed the cards away when Henry said they were clutter. Maybe she didn’t need them as a reminder. Maybe she just knew he was still thinking of her.

Allie talked of how hard it must have been on her to slip one letter a year to him. Henry never talked much, but Allie said she had a feeling he wouldn’t have stood for it. He was older than Nana and always treated her as if she were his child when he talked to her.

Finally, Allie talked herself to sleep and Luke drifted off beside her. His last thought was that maybe he understood about the way Jefferson felt about Nana because he knew he felt the same about Allie. It wouldn’t matter if they were separated tomorrow, she’d still remain in his memory.

I awoke to an afternoon of rain tapping on the window. Glancing at the clock, I counted down two hours before I could go back into ICU and check on Nana.

Suddenly, I smiled. I’d always thought of Nana as being alone, even when Henry was still alive, but now-now that I knew about Jefferson-she didn’t seem so alone. The thousand times she’d brushed the wind chime in her kitchen window she must have been thinking of him. Maybe even living a parallel life in her mind with the boy she’d met the first summer after Pearl Harbor. A boy who’d taken her to a fair and won two wind chimes so they’d have the same music in both their worlds.

I straightened, stretching. The feel of the man next to me was all too real. I shifted so that I could see his sleeping face. I had a hundred questions I wanted to ask him about what had happened last night, but I couldn’t bring myself to wake him. Deep down I knew I’d sleep with this man and make wild, passionate love to him for years to come, so right now it was enough just to know he was near.

I cuddled closer. He laid his arm over me, keeping me safe even while he slept.

A tapping sounded from below. I didn’t move, hoping whoever it was would go away.

The tapping came again.

Luke groaned. “Tell them to go away,” he muttered.

I giggled when the tapping turned to a rap.

“I’m not moving,” he said, sounding more awake even though his body hadn’t shifted an inch.

I slipped away. “Good, you stay here. I’ll see who it is and be right back.”

He tried to snag me with his arm, but I jumped out of bed and hurried downstairs. I knew if I looked back I’d forget about who kept rapping.

When I opened the door, Mrs. Deals stood before me. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting,” I said as I ushered her in. “I forgot today is your cookie day.”

She folded up her umbrella. “I didn’t come to shop. You got a call from the hospital and I came to deliver the message.”

I held my breath and waited.

She took a moment to snap the strap around the umbrella, then continued, “I’m to tell you that your grandmother is being moved to a private room and you can bring up a few of her things if you like.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Deals, for coming all this way to tell me.”

“You’re welcome,” she said without a smile. Then she added in a yell as if I’d gone suddenly deaf, “I also have a message to deliver to Luke if you see him. Tell him they have Sheriff Fletcher in custody.”

I turned to see Luke at the top of the stairs. His hair stuck up on one side and his shirt was unbuttoned. He looked exactly like what he was-a man who’d just crawled out of bed. My bed.

“I can hear you just fine, Mrs. Deals. You don’t have to yell.”

She crossed her hands over her chest and looked quite satisfied.

“How’d you know he was here?” I asked without thinking.

“I just guessed.” Mrs. Deals smiled. “I knew if he had any sense he’d be here. And if there is one thing Luke Morgan has always had it’s sense.”

Luke walked down the stairs. “Thanks.” He nodded once. “Is that all you know about Fletcher?”

Mrs. Deals shrugged. “Willie told me you and he guessed the sheriff might be behind the drug trafficking on the lake after you found out he always made personal deliveries of Jefferson’s medicine. You didn’t know it for a fact until he showed up at the jail demanding to talk to the three snakes you caught last night.”