The deliveryman had already turned back toward his van when I called after him.
“Excuse me. Are you quite sure these are for me?”
He stopped, glanced down at the clipboard in his hand, and read off the name.
“Mary?”
“Yes. That’s me.”
“Then they’re yours, ma’am.” He gave me a small, uncertain smile, the smile of a young man who has just handed an armful of flowers to an old woman living alone and isn’t sure whether he’s made her day or intruded on some private grief he can’t see. “Have a good one.”
And then he was gone, the van rumbling away down my quiet street, and I was standing in my own doorway with an enormous bouquet filling both my arms.
Yellow roses. Dozens of them. So many that I could barely see over the top of them, their scent rising up sweet and heavy in the cool morning air.
I carried them inside and set them on the kitchen table, and then, because some old habit in me needed to be certain, I counted them. Once, and then again, to be sure I hadn’t miscounted the first time.
Fifty six.
My fingers stopped on the final stem, and something cold and quiet moved through me.
Fifty six roses.
Today would have been my fifty sixth wedding anniversary.
I stood there for a long moment, one hand resting on the table’s edge, letting that land. Nobody sent me flowers. Nobody had sent me flowers in a very long time. My friends were mostly gone now, the way friends are when you reach my age, and the few who remained were not the sort to spend what fifty six long stemmed roses must cost. My social security check did not leave much room for such things, and I had never been the kind of woman who bought herself flowers. This was not a mistake, I was certain of it now. Fifty six was too exact a number to be an accident.
I found my largest vase in the cabinet under the sink, the crystal one I’d been given as a wedding present and had used perhaps four times in fifty six years, and I filled it with cool water and began, carefully, to separate the stems and arrange them.
That was when something sharp scraped across my thumb.
“Ow,” I said, out loud, to my empty kitchen, and pulled my hand back.
I looked at my thumb, expecting to see the bright bead of blood a thorn leaves. But it hadn’t been a thorn. Wedged deep among all those fresh, perfect roses was something else entirely. Something yellow, and crumpled, and out of place.
Paper.
I eased it free with two fingers, gently, the way you’d remove a splinter, and held it up to the light from the window.
It was a flower. A rose, or something meant to be one, folded out of a piece of faded yellow paper. And it had been folded very badly. One side leaned out farther than the other, so the whole thing sat lopsided in my palm. The petals were creased and uneven. And the stem, such as it was, had been reinforced with a narrow strip of tape gone brittle and amber with age, so old that it had stopped being sticky decades ago.
I almost laughed at how ugly it was. It was, without question, the most poorly made paper flower I had ever seen in my life.
And then I turned it over, and I saw the letter written near the bottom of the stem, in faded pencil, in a hand I would have known anywhere, in the dark, after a thousand years.
J.
Just the one letter. J.
James.
My husband.
The man who had been missing for fifty six years.
I sat down so suddenly and so hard that the chair scraped against the floor and one of the fresh roses slid off the table and landed on the tile with a soft sound I barely heard.
“No,” I whispered. “No, that isn’t possible.”
But I was holding it. It was real, it was in my hand, this crooked, ugly, impossible thing with his initial on it. And a question rose up in me that I had not let myself ask in half a lifetime, a question I had buried so deep I’d nearly forgotten the shape of it.
Could it really be James? The man who had been my husband for only two days, and who had somehow remained my husband, in my heart, for the fifty six years since?
Let me tell you about those two days, because they are the two days my whole long life has been built around.
James and I were married in my parents’ backyard on a bright afternoon while he was home on leave. There were twenty three guests, folding chairs borrowed from the church, and a cake my aunt had made that leaned noticeably to one side, which struck me as terribly funny at the time and strikes me as almost unbearably poignant now, given everything. My mother cried through nearly the entire ceremony, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief, so overcome she could hardly say a word to the guests afterward.
James teased her about it later, at the little reception, holding a paper cup of punch.
“Now, don’t you cry, Mrs. Doyle,” he said to her. “I’m only borrowing your daughter. I’m not stealing her.”
My mother pointed the cake knife at him, only half joking. “You bring her back,” she said. “You bring her back happy, James, or you’ll answer to me.”
James looked over at me then, across the backyard, in my yellow dress, and he said, “That’s the plan. That’s the whole plan, right there.”
We had two days. Two days of being married, of being husband and wife, before his leave ended and he had to report back. I have turned those two days over in my mind so many times across the decades that they have worn smooth as river stones, every moment polished by handling. The way he made the coffee too strong that first morning and drank it anyway rather than admit it. The walk we took around the neighborhood as a married couple, nodding at neighbors, feeling grown and official and terrified and thrilled all at once. The plans we made for a life we were both so certain we would have. A little house. Children, two or three of them. A dog. A porch to grow old on together. We had it all mapped out, the way you do when you are young and the future looks like an open road running straight and clear to the horizon. And then, on the third morning, I stood with him on the platform at the old train station downtown, wearing the same yellow cotton dress he’d liked so much, the one he said made me look like sunshine.
Before he boarded, he pulled me close and kissed me, and he said, right into my ear, “Next anniversary, I promise you, I’m going to buy you the biggest bouquet of yellow roses I can find. A whole armful. You won’t even be able to see over the top of them.”
And I laughed, because I was twenty three and in love and could not yet imagine a world in which he wouldn’t, and I told him, “You’d better. I only married you for the flowers, you know.”
He threw his head back and laughed at that. A big, warm, open laugh that I can still hear if I close my eyes and try.
It was the last time I ever heard him laugh.
Weeks later, his unit came under heavy fire somewhere far away, in a place I could barely find on a map. Men died. Others simply disappeared into the chaos of it, unaccounted for. And James, my James, was listed as missing.
His closest friend from the unit, a young man named Adrian, eventually came home, and one gray afternoon he sat in my parents’ living room with his cap in his hands and his hands locked together between his knees, unable, at first, to look at me.
“I saw the explosion, Mary,” he’d said finally, his voice low and careful. “I was there. And I’m so sorry, but I have to be honest with you. I don’t see how James could have survived it. I don’t think he made it. I’m so sorry.”
There was no body. There was never any body found. There was only the terrible uncertainty, and then, eventually, after enough time had passed and enough forms had been filed, there was the official paperwork that reduced the enormous fact of my husband to two small cold words.
Presumed dead.
That was all I was ever given. Presumed. As though even the government wasn’t quite sure, and had left a door cracked open just wide enough for a young widow to torture herself with for the rest of her days.
I never remarried. People told me I should, over the years. My mother, before she passed. Well meaning friends. A kind man or two who came calling in my thirties and forties, decent men who would have given me a good life. But some stubborn, foolish part of me kept waiting, long after there was supposedly no one left to wait for. Kept setting a place, in my heart if not at my table. Kept the yellow dress folded in a cedar chest. I told myself it was loyalty. Perhaps it was only that I never got to say goodbye, and a heart cannot close a door that was never properly shut.
I built a life anyway, of course. You have to. I worked as a bookkeeper for a lumber company for thirty one years, good honest work with numbers that always added up the way they were supposed to, which was its own kind of comfort in a world that so rarely did. I bought this little house on my own, made every mortgage payment myself, paid it off the year I turned sixty and felt, for one afternoon, almost proud. I kept a garden. I was a good aunt to my sister’s children and a better great aunt to theirs. It was a small life, and a quiet one, and it was more than many people get. But there was always the empty chair in it. There was always the door left cracked.
Until, on the morning of what would have been our fifty sixth anniversary, a badly folded paper rose appeared in my kitchen among fifty six real ones, with his initial penciled on the stem.
I searched the bouquet again with shaking hands, pulling the stems apart, and this time I found something I’d missed. A small cream colored envelope, tucked beneath the wide satin ribbon that bound the flowers together.
My name was written on the front, in a hand I did not recognize.
Mary.
I opened it. Inside was a plain card, and on it, a few lines of handwriting. I read the first line, and then I read it again, because the first time my eyes seemed to refuse to hold the words.
“Darling, you won’t believe why I had to disappear. Adrian lied to you.”
My chair scraped backward across the floor. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat, in my wrists, in my temples.
There was more.
“Act normal. If you still have the yellow dress, bring it with you. Take the roses to the old station at 11:00. Do exactly what I’m asking you to do now.”
I looked up at the clock above my stove, the round white one that had hung there for thirty years.
10:17.
Take the roses to the old station at eleven. In forty three minutes.
My first thought, and I am ashamed of it because it was so impossible, so childish, so much the thought of that twenty three year old girl who had never truly stopped waiting, was simple and enormous and it knocked the breath out of me.
James was alive.
Somehow. Somewhere. All this time.
My second thought was worse, and it came right on the heels of the first, cold where the first had been hot.
Because if he had been alive all this time, then it meant something unbearable. It meant that every anniversary I had spent alone, every Christmas morning I had faced by myself, every birthday, every ordinary Tuesday evening across fifty six years of ordinary Tuesday evenings, all of it had happened while my husband was breathing somewhere else in the world. Living a life. A life that did not have me in it.
I picked up the card again and made myself read the one line over.
Adrian lied to you.
Adrian.
The man who had come to my parents’ living room and wept, or nearly wept, and told me James was gone. The man who had come to both my parents’ funerals, decades apart, and stood at the back of the church in a dark suit. The man who had mailed me a Christmas card every single year, faithfully, until his arthritis got so bad in his eighties that the writing became a shaky scrawl and then finally stopped altogether. Adrian, who had been, in his distant way, one of the last living threads connecting me to James.
And he was the same man who had looked into the face of a twenty three year old bride and told her that her husband was almost certainly dead.
I reached for the telephone on the kitchen wall. My hand was actually on the receiver.
And then I stopped.
Act normal.
If James had truly written this card, then why the secrecy? Why the strange instructions, the specific time, the old station? Why not simply come to my door? Why not call?
And if James had not written it, then a far more frightening question presented itself. Who else in this world knew about the yellow dress? Who alive today could possibly know what I had worn the morning my husband left, sixty years ago, from a train station that no longer even ran trains?
I let go of the telephone.
I went upstairs, more quickly than my old knees usually allowed, and into my bedroom, and to the cedar chest that sat at the back of my closet under a folded quilt. I hadn’t opened it in years. The hinges protested. Inside, beneath a layer of tissue paper gone soft with time, was the dress.
Its color had faded, the bright sunshine yellow softening over the decades to something paler and gentler, like the memory of the color rather than the color itself. But it was unmistakably the same yellow cotton dress I’d worn the morning James left. I lifted it out and held it up, and the years fell away, and for a moment I could smell the train platform and feel his arms.
I ran my thumb along the hem, and then along the side seam.
And there they were. Three crooked stitches near the seam, catching my thumb the way the paper rose had.
It made me smile, despite everything, despite the terror and the confusion and the impossible card downstairs. Because I knew those stitches. I knew exactly where they came from.
The night after our wedding, walking arm in arm around my parents’ porch in the dark, I’d caught the skirt of the dress on a nail sticking out from the railing and torn a small hole in the side seam. And James, my James, who could not sew to save his life, had insisted with great confidence that he could fix it. He absolutely could not. His stitches had wandered across the fabric like a drunk ant staggering home, crooked and uneven and pulling the seam into a little pucker. I had laughed at him until I cried, until he threatened, in mock outrage, to divorce me before we’d even made it to forty eight hours of marriage.
I stood there in my closet, sixty years later, looking at those three terrible stitches.
And then I thought of the paper rose downstairs.
Bad folding. Crooked petals. A stem held together with a strip of tape by hands that had never had the patience for delicate work.
James had always been hopeless with his hands whenever a task required patience and care. Give him an engine to fix, a fence to mend, something he could throw his strength at, and he was a marvel. But ask him to thread a needle or fold a piece of paper, and he was all thumbs and frustration.
Whoever had made that flower had the same hands James had.
At 10:42, I left my house. I carried the folded yellow dress over one arm, the way a person carries something precious and sleeping, and I held the enormous bouquet of fifty six roses against my chest with the other, and I walked out into a morning that had rearranged itself entirely since I’d woken up in it.
The old station was not far. Nothing in our town is far. They stopped running passenger trains through it decades ago, and for years it sat abandoned, but recently the town had restored the building as a kind of museum and gathering place, keeping the old clock and the long benches and the high windows. I hadn’t been inside it since the morning James left. I had gone out of my way, for fifty six years, not to go inside it.
I went inside it now.
I stood beneath the great clock on the wall with fifty six yellow roses in my arms, and I felt twenty three years old again in the very worst way, the way that has nothing to do with youth and everything to do with standing in the exact spot where your life once broke in half.
At exactly eleven o’clock, an elderly man rose slowly from a bench near the far wall.
For one confused second, I didn’t recognize him. He was old, older even than I’d braced myself for, stooped and thin, moving with the careful deliberation of a body that has begun to fail. My heart did something wild and terrible, because for that one second, that one impossible second, I let myself believe.
Then he took off his cap.
“Mary,” he said.
And I knew him. Older, ruined by time, but unmistakable.
“Adrian?”
He was holding something. An olive green military duffel bag, old and worn soft, and across the side of it, stenciled in faded letters, was a name I had not seen written anywhere in fifty six years.
James’s name.
