When We Meet Again (37 page)

“Promise me we’ll talk again, Peter,” Margaret said softly. “Promise me this isn’t the end.”

“Margaret, my love,” Peter said, “I plan to spend eternity with you. This is only the beginning.”

The next morning, Ingrid woke Peter at just past ten. “I slept in the guest room,” she said curtly. “I figured you’d want to be alone with your thoughts of Margaret.” She spat the name out.

“I spoke with her last night,” Peter said softly. “I spoke with Margaret.”

Ingrid’s jaw dropped. “But she’s dead.”

“No. No, she isn’t. She lived, and so did her son.
Our
son. I have a child and a grandchild, Ingrid. Victor and Emily Emerson.”

Her face was white. “That’s impossible.”

“It’s true. And I must find them, Ingrid. I know I’m at the end of my life, but I must tell them that I love them.”

“You don’t even
know
them.”

“They are my blood,” he said. “And they are Margaret’s blood.”

Ingrid stared at him. “So that’s it, then? I’ve been by your side for the last thirty years, but in your final days, Margaret comes back and I’m forgotten?”

“I could never forget you, Ingrid. You’ve meant so much to me.”

“But you don’t love me. Not the way you love her.”

He longed to comfort her, but he didn’t know how. “Ingrid, you and I have spent a life together. I missed a life with her. You can’t envy her.”

“What nonsense, Peter. Your life wasn’t with me. It was with her. It was always with her.”

He was silent for a long time. “If I die before I reach them, Victor and Emily, will you find them for me? Will you tell them about me? Will you explain what happened?”

He held out the slip of paper on which he’d written their names and numbers, and Ingrid nodded, but she didn’t take it. After a while, he set the paper back down on his nightstand.

“Do you promise me?” he asked.

“I promise.”

“Thank you. You’re very good to me. I never deserved you, Ingrid.”

“No,” she agreed. “Perhaps you didn’t.” She bent to kiss him and walked out of the room.

He picked up the phone and tried Victor’s number first and then Emily’s. There was no answer on either line, and he didn’t leave a message. What would he say? No, he would talk to them and tell them everything as soon as they answered his call. But in the meantime, he wanted to know everything about them. So he spent the next forty minutes searching their names on the Internet. He found Emily’s columns and Victor’s business website, and there were photos of both of them, enough to show him that Victor looked just like a younger version of himself, and Emily looked just like Margaret, just as he’d always imagined a grandchild of theirs would.

Slowly, with great effort, he rose from his bed, surprised at how weak his legs had become beneath him. In fact, once he was on the floor, he found that he could no longer walk, so he lowered himself to the ground and crawled toward the closet. He knew that in the back corner, he had stored blank watercolor paper and some old paint, along with a selection of brushes, and he needed them now. It took him twenty minutes on his hands and knees to pull them out and drag them into the center of the room, where he positioned them beneath the wash of sunlight from the window. He rested for a moment on his haunches, catching his breath, and then, he picked up his brush and began.

Tears burning his eyes, he painted. He painted the world as it could have been, the world he would never know. He painted the faces of the son and granddaughter he loved, and of the woman he had created life with after all. He worked until his hand ached, until the room throbbed, until he could no longer keep his eyes open. And then, he lowered himself onto the floor, prone on his back, and he stared up at the faces smiling back at him.
He had made them. They were his.

Later that day, he would call them again. And he would call Margaret to hear her sweet voice. He knew that the great violet sky, the one that would bring him home, was closing in. But until it came for him, he had this. He had hope.

W
ait, go back,” I said, staring at Ingrid in disbelief. “You’re saying he actually talked to my grandmother?”

“The night before his death.” As she turned toward me again, I could see that the tears had overflowed and were streaming down her face in silent rivers. “The day before he died,
Louise
came to visit,” she said, spitting the name out like it was a dirty word. “She’d heard about his illness on CNN, and she came to tell him the truth.”

“My grandmother’s sister? She came here?”

Ingrid nodded. “She told him that Margaret had lived and that she’d had a child—
his
child—and a granddaughter. You.”

“But my grandmother never said anything.” I stared at her as a potential explanation dawned on me. “Wait. When did he die? What date?”

She shook her head and looked down. “February fifteenth. Just after Valentine’s Day, in the afternoon.”

I swallowed hard. “My grandmother died that day too. Several hours earlier. She passed away sometime during the night.”

Ingrid’s mouth fell open. “They even
died
together?”

I shrugged, suddenly uneasy. “I’m sure it was coincidence.” But the truth was, it didn’t sound coincidental to me. It sounded like two people who had always hoped against hope that the ones they loved were still out there. When it turned out they were right, they were ready to let go. Or perhaps once my grandmother died, Peter Dahler had felt it in some corner of his soul, and he’d followed her at long last. As Ingrid’s face twisted tighter in despair, I hurried to change the subject. “But I had the impression that Louise hated my grandmother. As far as I know, my grandmother never talked to her sister again after leaving Belle Creek in the late 1940s. Why would Louise come here all these years later to reveal that Margaret was alive?”

“I don’t know. To clear her conscience? To torture my husband once more? To make the last hours of his life miserable for me?” She looked at the floor. “Ralph asked me to call you if something happened to him.”

The words were so quiet I barely heard them. “What?”

“He spoke to me that morning—just a little while before he died—and told me everything,” she said. She took a deep, shuddering breath and looked up to meet my gaze. “He wasn’t well. He said he was planning to call you and your father after ten, in case you were sleeping in. That day was a Sunday. But he asked me to call you myself if he wasn’t able to do it. It was like he knew that he only had a few hours left.” She paused. “He died just past four that afternoon.”

“And you didn’t call,” I said softly.

“No.”

Silence lay heavy between us. “Why?”

“Because
I
was his family.” Her voice sounded almost like a whimper, a plea. “I’d been the one to stand by him for thirty years. To love him for thirty years. And it was never enough. He was dying, Emily, and at the end, that woman swept in to reignite the torch he had carried all these years. It wasn’t fair. Don’t you see that?”

“Yes.” And somehow, I did, despite everything.

“It’s why I sent the painting. I didn’t want to be involved, but after I read your column, I wanted you to know that you were wrong about him. I’m sorry I didn’t reach out to you sooner, Emily.” She blinked back tears. “It was too little, too late, I know. But I wanted you and your father to know that Margaret had been loved.”

“But why didn’t you just explain it?” I asked. “Why send me just a painting and a cryptic note?”

“Because I didn’t really want you to find me. You being here, it’s the right thing. But do you know how much this is hurting me?” She sighed. “There’s a part of me that wishes you hadn’t come. That you didn’t exist in the first place. I’m sorry. That must be hard to hear.” She drew a ragged breath. “He was always hers.”

“I’m sure he loved you too.”

“But it wasn’t the same. It was never the same.” She took a step back and nodded toward a doorway on the left. “There is something I must show you. Will you follow me?”

I walked behind her down a long hallway to a closed door. Ingrid stopped in front of it, murmured something to herself, and turned the knob. As I stepped into the room and she flicked the light switch on, I could feel my eyes widen.

The room was the size of a bedroom, which is probably what it was intended to be, but there was no furniture. Instead, there was a single, small painting hanging on the far wall—the only object in the entire room. And in the center of the image were four figures: my grandmother, my father, me, and an older man, who I could only assume was my grandfather. We had our arms around each other, and my grandfather was gazing adoringly at the three of us under the same violet sky that had graced the painting that had arrived at my doorstep from Munich.

“What the—?” I murmured, staring at it in wonder.

“After Margaret told Ralph about you,” Ingrid said flatly, “he looked you both up and found a handful of pictures online. While he tried to reach you, he imagined what his life would have been like with the two of you in it. With
Margaret
in it. This was the last painting he ever did. He painted it the morning he died.”

I gazed at it in wonder. He had perfectly captured the shape of my eyes, my father’s chin, my nose, my father’s laugh lines. And somehow, he had conjured exactly how my grandma had looked at the end. When I finally turned back to Ingrid, I was crying, and she was too.

“He got all of it right, didn’t he?” she asked.

“Yes. It seems impossible, but yes.”

She sniffled. “That was Ralph. He was special that way. Art critics have speculated for years and years about his technique, but I’ve always believed that he painted with no specific process at all. He just let his heart pour into the work.”

“I don’t even know what to say.”

Ingrid looked around the room. “Then just say this: that you’ll take the painting.”

“What?”

“It was for you. You and your father. It was his way of telling you he loved you. He wanted you to know that you were in his heart. He would have wanted you to have it.”

“I couldn’t possibly—”

“Please,” she interrupted firmly. “It is yours. He always loved your grandmother, and once he knew about you, I know he loved you with every ounce of his heart. The proof is here. This is among the best work he ever created, and he did it in only hours. You and your father restored something in him that had always been missing, Emily.” She paused and wiped a tear away. “In the end, he was happy—happier than I’d ever seen him, happier than I was ever able to make him.”

I left an hour later with the beautiful painting carefully wrapped and packed into a small, flat gallery box.

“Are you sure?” I asked her once more before we parted. “It feels wrong to take it from you.”

“Emily,” she said, touching my cheek, “I spent all my years with Ralph trying to pretend that his life before me, his life with Margaret, didn’t exist. But it
did
exist. It defined him. It was the basis for the man he was.
You
were the basis for everything he was, even if he didn’t know it until the end. Family’s like that, isn’t it? The ones we love are always in our blood, in our hearts, even if they’re not in our lives.”

I arrived back in Orlando just past three in the afternoon. I hadn’t told my dad yet about my visit with Ingrid because I wanted to explain things in person, so I called him as I was leaving the airport to let him know I was on my way. He was waiting for me when I walked through his office door twenty-five minutes later.

“What is this?” my father asked. He embraced me awkwardly and stared at the flat cardboard box in my hand.

“See for yourself,” I said, handing it over.

My father slid the painting out, gasping as he saw the image.

“This was done by my father?”

I nodded.

“He painted
us,
” he said softly.

I smiled as he gazed at the image of all four of us together. “Yes.”

“But . . . I don’t understand. How? Where was he all these years?”

And so I explained everything. The lies that had kept Margaret and Peter apart. The way they’d both always carried a torch for the other, even when the flame should logically have gone out. The way that Peter never gave up, even when he changed his name, even when he tried to become someone else.

“You’re telling me my father was Ralph Gaertner?” my father repeated in disbelief.

“That’s how the world knew him,” I said. “But I think in his heart, he was always Peter Dahler, a German boy waiting for the love of his life to come back.”

My father’s eyes were wide and filled with tears. “But . . . how did my mother never realize it was him?”

I had asked Ingrid the same general question. “He did one big TV appearance in the sixties, but after that, he became more and more withdrawn. He agreed to very few interviews, and even fewer cameras. Unless you were a huge art buff, or you’d happened to catch that one episode of the
Tonight Show,
there’s no reason you would have seen his face.”

“My mother almost never watched TV,” my father said. “But all those years . . . They were both here . . .”

“They both thought the other was gone.”

“But then how did he know about us?”

I told him about Louise’s visit on Valentine’s Day and the phone call he’d placed to my grandmother that night. My father simply stared at me as I explained that they’d died within hours of each other the next day.

“He was out there all this time,” my father whispered. “He didn’t abandon me. He didn’t abandon my mother.”

“No.”

He sat down slowly in one of the chairs facing his desk. “It’s all my fault.”

“What do you mean? You had nothing to do with your father leaving.”

“No. Not that.” He paused and seemed to be gathering himself together. “You. What I did to you and your mother.”

I didn’t know what to say. “Dad—” I began.

“No. Please let me say this. Emily, I thought that when things got tough, it was okay to leave. I thought that’s what my father had done. And you knew my mother: when life became too much for her, she just shut down. It was hard for me when I was growing up, when it was just the two of us, me and her. She’d disappear, even though she was physically there. Do you understand?”