When We Meet Again (38 page)

I nodded.

“It doesn’t excuse what I did,” my father went on. “God, it’s the opposite. It makes me an even worse person, because I knew how much it hurt to feel as if you weren’t important enough to stay for. But I thought they both left because when life got hard, disappearing was the only option.”

I thought of Nick, Catherine. “I’ve done that too.”

“And that’s my fault too. For teaching you that it’s okay to run.”

“No, that’s not on you. It’s on me.”

“I was wrong about all of it, Emily. I became unreliable, because I thought that’s just what people did. I didn’t have the backbone to be better, to stick it out. I guess I felt like I’d been abandoned, so maybe it was okay to abandon you.”

“Dad—”

“But he never abandoned me at all, did he?” he continued. His voice cracked. “My dad was there all along, loving my mom. Loving us. And my mom, she wasn’t really disappearing from me. She was going to him—or to his memory, at least.” He drew a shaky breath. “God, Emily, I’m so sorry. I was wrong about everything, and I completely screwed up your life because of it. I hurt you, and I hurt your mom, and there’s no changing that.”

I reached for his hand. “But we can try to do better, okay? We can’t change the past. But we can change the way we deal with each other now.”

Tears glistened in his eyes. “Emily, there’s something I need to tell you.”

Somehow, I knew from the way he was looking at me what he was about to say. “No,” I whispered.

He sighed and looked into my eyes. “The cancer, Emily. It’s terminal.”

“But you said—”

“I know. And I’m sorry. I didn’t want you letting me into your life just because you felt sorry for me. That wouldn’t have been fair to you. I wanted us to come together on our own terms without the specter of death looming over us. I wanted to try to set things right, to make sure I hadn’t destroyed your life with the things I’d done to hurt you. I wanted you to know that you weren’t doomed to repeat my mistakes, that you’re your own person with a beautiful future in front of you.”

“But the doctors—”

“—have done everything they can,” my dad finished my sentence for me, his tone gentle. “I was stage three when I was diagnosed, but I haven’t responded well to treatments. I need to address the shareholders in my company very soon, but I wanted you to know first.”

I began to cry, suddenly overwhelmed with a powerful sense of despair for a person I thought I’d lost years ago. He was slipping away all over again.

“I’m so sorry, Emily. So very sorry. For everything I’ve done. For being a fool for so long. For throwing away the most important things in my life. For being too late to fix things between us.”

My father stood, pulled me to my feet, and enveloped me in a hug. I could feel sobs racking his body too, and I held on tight, wishing I could take away some of his pain but knowing that I couldn’t. Sometimes, I realized, it’s only by going through the fire that you can come out the other side, reborn.

“It’s not too late, Dad,” I whispered into my father’s chest, hoping that somewhere up there, Peter Dahler was seeing this moment, and that he knew that one of his last acts on earth had led to this reconciliation. Yes, people leave. But sometimes, they come back. And when they do, maybe it’s worth opening the door a crack to let them in. “It’s never too late.”

I stayed with my father for a long time that afternoon, talking about the past and what the future held for us. I wanted to hear optimism in his voice, a sign that perhaps his doctor’s words weren’t exactly the death sentence they sounded like. But instead, I heard resignation and peace.

“I’m so glad we’ve had these last few weeks together, Emily,” he said as I hugged him good-bye just after twilight fell outside his office window. “I’ll remember them as some of the best in my life.”

I left the painting with him and promised to spend more time with him in the coming days. We parted ways after I had elicited a promise from him to meet for dinner the next night.

I cried all the way home, and when I got there, I felt exhausted and depleted. I sat for a long time in the kitchen staring at the painting in my kitchen, the one of my grandmother in the sugarcane field, the one that had started it all. I knew I’d be spending many nights in the future staring at the swirling purples, pinks, lavenders, and violets of the horizon in the background. It was the same sky my grandfather met my grandmother under. If that day hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be here now. I knew I’d never look at a beautiful dawn the same way again.

I called Myra twice, leaving her a message the second time she didn’t pick up. I sobbed my way through an explanation about my trip to Atlanta and my father’s terminal diagnosis before asking her to call me back as soon as possible. I really needed someone to lean on. Finally, although it was only 8:30, I crawled into bed, exhausted, placing my phone on the pillow beside me with the ringer turned to high, just in case she called.

I was jarred awake by the doorbell ringing some time later. “Dad?” I asked aloud, remembering my father’s news the second I was conscious. I glanced at the clock. It was 9:15; I’d only been out for forty-five minutes.

The doorbell sounded again, and I jumped out of bed, wrapped a robe around myself, and rushed to the front door. I looked through the peephole, expecting to see Myra or maybe even my father standing there.

Instead, I saw the last person I thought would ever be on my doorstep.

“Nick?” I murmured in disbelief as I opened the door. He looked tired and rumpled.

His face creased immediately with concern. “Emily? What’s wrong? You look like you’ve been crying.”

I wiped self-consciously at my eyes. “Oh. It’s . . .” I trailed off into silence, because it was too much to explain right now. “I’m okay. But what are you doing here?”

He held up the note I’d sent him two weeks ago. “I got your letter. I needed some time to think, Emily. But I woke up this morning and knew I had to see you. I got things squared away at the office for a few days and left this afternoon.” He smiled and pointed to the upper-left corner of the envelope. “Luckily, you included your return address.”

I still couldn’t understand what was happening, but I knew that I owed him another apology. Millions of them, in fact. “I’m sorry, Nick. For everything. I’m so sorry.”

“The past is the past, isn’t it? But you were wrong about something.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “I’d say I was wrong about an awful lot of things.”

“No, I mean in your letter. You were wrong. I’m not married.”

I blinked at him. “But your wife . . .” I paused, trailing off. “It says on your website you’re married.”

He looked surprised. “Does it still? Obviously I need to change that. The divorce was final last year. Jessica wanted a different life, one that didn’t include me, I guess. She lives in Arizona now. It’s for the best. We weren’t right for each other. We never were.”

“Oh.” I suddenly felt breathless. “I’m—I’m really sorry to hear that.”

“Me too. But that’s life, isn’t it? We all take some wrong turns along the way.” He took a deep breath, and when he looked up a moment later, he was looking right into my eyes. I could almost feel the years slipping away. “Did you mean the things you said in your letter?”

“Every word, Nick.”

“Then I have a question for you. I know a lifetime has passed. But I never stopped thinking about you either, and that’s got to mean something. And there has to be a reason that everything has felt different since you walked back into my life.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. I just stared, my heart pounding.

“So I guess what I came here to ask you is, I mean, maybe it’s a terrible idea . . .” He was blushing now. “But in your letter, you mentioned regrets, and Emily, I don’t want to have any. I don’t want to have to wonder what might have been. So what I’m trying to say is, do you think it would be crazy to see if we could try again?”

“I don’t think it would be crazy at all.” I paused, thinking of the life that might stretch before us, as wide open and beautiful as one of Ralph Gaertner’s violet sunrises, full of promise and hope. “Would you like to come in?”

Three months later

O
n the third Friday in February, I woke up to a glorious rainbow stretching across a brilliant dawn, and as I stood on my front porch a few minutes later, stretching for my morning run, I was thinking about how beautiful and surprising the world was. The sky was the same blend of violets and lavenders that my grandfather had rendered so many times, and for a moment, I let myself imagine that I was inside one of his paintings. It was a beautiful place to be.

As I set out on my run, heading west toward Lake Eola with the rising sun behind me, I thought about how after my grandmother had died last year, Myra had told me that she believed you could see the people you’d lost in the magic of a rainbow. I’d thought that she’d just been trying to comfort me on one of my darkest days and hadn’t meant a word of it. But then my father had died right before Christmas, and as I left the hospital on that terrible morning two months ago, there was a faint rainbow looming to the east. “Dad?” I had whispered, already doubting myself. But from that day on, there had been a part of me that believed.

This morning, as I ran with the rainbow looming overhead, I thought about how maybe I was seeing my father up there today. Or my mother. Maybe my grandmother and grandfather were together, looking down on me. Or perhaps it was just a trick of the light that meant nothing. Still, I felt a sense of peace, and I wondered if my grandfather had been right all along about the way the sky holds a certain kind of magic.

Nick and I were officially seeing each other now, but we were taking it slow. After all, we couldn’t wipe away the nearly nineteen years that had passed between us, nor could we erase the nearly four hundred miles that separated us now. Nick’s life and business were in Atlanta, and my life was here, in Orlando. I was still freelancing here and there, and although it wasn’t the professional life I dreamed of, I was scraping by. I’d probably move back to Atlanta one day, if Nick wanted me to. We had talked about it a bit, dancing around the topic, and I think we both wanted to be together. Rushing into it didn’t feel smart, but now that my father was gone, there wasn’t much to stay for anymore.

At the beginning of December, I had introduced Nick to my dad, and they’d liked each other, which meant a lot to me. When I’d visited my father at his bedside the next afternoon, he’d squeezed my hand and said softly, “I’m happy to see you happy. Just don’t let go of the way you’re feeling now, the way you love him.” He’d coughed, long and hard, and I’d ached to take away some of his pain. “Why is it only in the last few months that I’m realizing that family is everything?” he’d asked when he could breathe again. “It has been all along, hasn’t it?”

I’d nodded, thinking about how nice it felt to be his daughter again. And I thought, too, that knowing we’d reconnected in the end might make my mother smile. I’d spent years thinking that a reconciliation with my dad would be a betrayal of her, but I now realized that she’d probably want most of all for me to be happy.

Two weeks before he died, my father had asked me about my daughter for the first time since we’d discussed her in Atlanta. “Did she look like you?” His skin felt cold and clammy as he reached for my hand, his grasp weak, and I knew he was slipping away.

“Maybe a bit. But I saw Nick in her more than I saw myself. She had Mom’s nose and your facial expressions.”

“She looked like me?” His eyes were suddenly watery.

“A little. She was healthy, Dad. Seven pounds, three ounces, even though she was three weeks early. She was due on October 31, but she arrived screaming her little lungs out on October 8.” I smiled, and he smiled back. “I had her at Bayfront Medical Center in St. Pete, and I didn’t know a soul in that city except for Grandma Margaret. I think the moment they came to take her away was the most alone I’d ever felt in my entire life. I hadn’t realized during the time that I was pregnant with her how comforting it was to know she was right there with me. But having her taken was like losing a part of myself. I wish I’d understood that sooner.”

“It seems like the most important lessons in life are the ones we grasp far too late,” my father said.

“Yeah.” I knew he wasn’t just talking about Catherine. “You know, I went to Mom’s grave a couple months ago. I asked her to help me find Catherine, just so I could know she was okay. Do you . . . do you believe in stuff like that?”

“That your mom can hear you in heaven? I think anything is possible, honey.” My father started to say something else, but whatever it might have been was lost in a fit of coughing.

Later, after I’d grabbed a soda from the machine down the hall and a nurse had brought in a glass of water for him, he’d raised his cup in the air. “To second chances, however they happen,” he’d said, looking me in the eye.

“I can drink to that.”

“You deserve every happiness, Emily,” he’d murmured. Two weeks later, he was gone. And somehow, in the wake of his death, I had gone from having no family to connecting with the people who had once been a part of my grandparents’ life, in one way or another. I had visited Belle Creek in January to tell Jeremiah and Julie in person about the true story of Peter and Margaret, and they’d both called several times since. I’d reached out to Franz, who sent flowers for my father’s funeral, and I talked on an almost weekly basis to Arno Fromm, who loved to share stories of his memories with my grandfather. I felt like I was discovering pieces of my past at every turn, and it made me feel somehow like the circle of my family’s life was almost complete.

Maybe that’s what the rainbow this morning was trying to tell me—that it was okay to reach for all the colors of joy, all the happiness I could find, just like my father had said. The only thing missing was Catherine, but I knew that was something I’d have to learn to live with.

I did two loops around the lake and headed back toward my house, lost in thought. The rainbow had faded as the day grew brighter, but it was still just slightly visible, beckoning me home. I had just turned the corner from Shine Avenue onto my street when I saw a woman at my front door, her back to me. She was knocking, and in her left hand, she was clutching a piece of paper.