“So why keep lying?” I said. “For fifty six years. That’s not honoring a promise. That’s something else.”
“Because,” Adrian said, and here his voice dropped, and the real thing finally came out, “when I got home, I’d already decided what I was going to tell you. I’d rehearsed it on the whole journey back. The explosion. Quick. Painless. And then I came to your parents’ house, and I saw you.”
He swallowed hard.
“You were so young, Mary. And you thanked me. Do you remember? You put your arms around me and you thanked me. For being there with him. For being his friend at the end.”
I did remember. I remembered it with sudden awful clarity. I had hugged this man in my grief and thanked him through my tears for being a comfort to my husband, never knowing that he was, in that very moment, lying to me.
“And after that,” Adrian said, “telling you the truth wasn’t just telling you the truth anymore. It meant admitting I’d already lied to you. That I’d stood in your living room and looked you in the eye and lied. A month went by. Then a year. Then five years. And every single year that passed made it more impossible, made the shame of it bigger, until the lie was so old and so deep that I couldn’t see any way to ever dig it out.”
I stared at him.
“You weren’t protecting me for fifty six years,” I said. “That’s what you told yourself. But that’s not what it was.”
“No,” he admitted.
“Maybe you thought you were protecting me at the very start. For that first hour, in my living room. Maybe. But after that, you were protecting yourself. You lied to me for fifty six years to keep from admitting you’d lied to me once.”
Adrian lowered his head. He didn’t argue. There was nothing to argue.
I looked down at the paper rose.
“You knew James,” I said.
“Yes.”
“You knew me, too. You knew me my whole life. You came to my parents’ funerals. You sent me Christmas cards. You let me thank you, over and over, for years, for being a good and loyal friend.”
His eyes filled. He looked down at James’s duffel bag, and his shoulders sagged, and for a moment I thought that was all, that we had reached the bottom of it.
But then he said, “There’s something else, Mary. There’s one more thing.”
I waited.
“I know where James is buried,” he said.
The world went very quiet and very still around me.
“I know where James is buried,” he said again, as though I hadn’t heard, though I’d heard perfectly well.
“You know where my husband is buried,” I repeated slowly.
“Yes.”
“How long have you known?”
He didn’t answer quickly enough.
“How long, Adrian?”
“Years,” he said. “Many years. The information came out eventually, after things opened up over there. Records. Locations. By the time I learned where he’d been buried, I—” He stopped.
“By the time you learned,” I said, “telling me meant explaining everything else. The weeks. The capture. The lie. All of it.”
“Yes,” he said. “So I told myself there was no point. That it was so long ago. That reopening it would only hurt you, at your age, for nothing. I told myself there was no point dragging you through it.”
“No point,” I said.
“I know how that sounds.”
“No,” I said. “You don’t. You have no idea how that sounds. For fifty six years I did not know where my husband’s body was. I had no grave to visit. No place to bring flowers. Nothing. Do you understand? I had nowhere to put my grief. And you knew. You knew, and you decided there was no point in telling me. You decided that. Again. Just like James decided, except James was dying, and you were sitting comfortably at home mailing me Christmas cards.”
“I was ashamed,” Adrian said. “Mary, I was so ashamed.”
I looked at this man who had spent half a century deciding, piece by piece, which parts of my own husband I was permitted to have. Where he died. How he died. That he had lived at all after the explosion. Where he lay now. All of it parceled out or withheld according to what Adrian could bear, never according to what I deserved.
“Where is he?” I said. “Tell me the name of the place. Right now.”
He told me. He gave me the name of a cemetery, a military cemetery a few hours’ drive away, where the repatriated remains of men lost in that war had eventually been laid to rest, James among them, all this time, close enough that I could have visited a hundred times over if anyone had only told me.
Then Adrian said, hesitantly, “I could take you. If you wanted. I could show you exactly where—”
“No,” I said. And then, “Yes. You’ll drive. But I’m the one deciding. Not you. Not anymore. I’m deciding, right now, this minute, that I’m going to see my husband today. Do you understand the difference?”
He nodded. I think he did understand it, finally.
I held out the folded yellow dress to him, and after a moment he took it, carefully, into his free arm.
“Then drive,” I said.
We drove for a long time. Outside the car window the world moved past in a blur of highway and storefronts and open fields, a world that had changed almost beyond recognition in the fifty six years since James left it. New buildings, new roads, new everything. Everything had changed.
Everything except my love for my husband. That, I realized, watching the landscape stream by, had not moved an inch in all that time. It was exactly where I’d left it, on a train platform, in a yellow dress.
“Why today?” I asked Adrian, after many silent miles. “After fifty six years. Why did you finally do this today, of all days?”
He kept his eyes on the road. “Because every year,” he said, “I told myself I’d tell you before the next anniversary. Every single year, I made that promise to myself, and every single year I broke it. And then last week—” He paused, and his jaw tightened. “Last week, I found out I have cancer, Mary. It’s advanced. And suddenly I wasn’t sure how many more anniversaries I had left to hide behind. I ran out of next years.”
My anger, which had been sitting in me hard as a stone all morning, loosened for just a moment, in spite of itself.
“I’m sorry,” I said. And I found that I partly meant it, which surprised me.
“Don’t be,” he said. “Not yet. Maybe not ever, and that’s all right.” He looked briefly at me, then back to the road. “I should have told you when I still had decades in front of me. When it cost me something to do it. Not now, at the end, when I’m only telling you because I got scared of dying with it. That’s not courage, Mary. That’s just a coward finally running out of road. Don’t you dare feel sorry for me for that.”
I didn’t answer. But I understood, then, that whatever else Adrian was, he was not fooling himself about it. He knew exactly what he had done, and exactly why, and exactly how small it was. And there was something in that clear eyed shame that I could not entirely hate.
At the cemetery, we walked slowly across the grass, between the long straight rows of white markers, until Adrian stopped and pointed, and there it was. A simple stone. And on it, my husband’s name.
James.
After fifty six years.
Adrian hung back, a few steps behind me. “Mary,” he began.
“Go sit in the car,” I told him. “Please. I need to do this alone.”
He obeyed. He turned and walked slowly back the way we’d come, and for the first time in fifty six years, there was no one standing between my husband and me. No explosion story. No lie. No well meaning man deciding what I could bear. Just James, and me, and fifty six years of everything I’d never gotten to say.
I knelt down, my old knees protesting, and I laid all fifty six of the real yellow roses beneath his name, spreading them out across the grass, the biggest bouquet of yellow roses anyone could find, sixty years late but here at last, exactly as he’d promised on the platform.
And then I took the crooked paper rose out of my pocket and held it in my palm.
“You idiot,” I whispered to the stone, and a laugh escaped me along with the tears, a real laugh, the first real laugh I’d had all day. “You beautiful idiot. Look at this thing. It’s the worst flower I’ve ever seen in my life.”
I pressed my hand flat against the cool stone of his name.
“I would have come,” I told him. And I knew, of course, that I couldn’t have. I couldn’t have reached him where he was, in that terrible place, in those terrible weeks. That wasn’t what I meant, and I think he knew, wherever he was, what I meant. “If I’d known the truth. If Adrian had told me you were suffering, that you were frightened, that you were alive and needing me. I know there was nothing I could have done. I couldn’t have crossed the world and pulled you out. But I would have known. I would have carried it with you instead of carrying a lie.”
I traced the letters of his name with one finger.
“I would have been terrified,” I whispered. “Every single day. It would have been the worst thing I ever lived through, knowing and not being able to reach you.” My voice broke. “But I would have chosen it. I would have chosen the truth and the terror over fifty six years of a gentle lie. That was mine to choose, James. It was always mine. You didn’t get to make it easier for me by taking it away. Loving someone means being allowed to be afraid for them.”
I stayed there a long time, kneeling in the grass, talking to my husband the way I had imagined talking to him ten thousand times across a lifetime of empty rooms. I told him about the years. About my parents, and their funerals, and how Adrian had stood at the back. About the small quiet life I’d built around the hole he left. About how I never remarried, never stopped waiting, kept his yellow dress folded in a cedar chest for sixty years.
And when it was finally time to go, I left Adrian’s fifty six perfect store bought roses spread across the grave, a gift for James, the promise finally kept.
But the ugly one, the crooked paper one that James had folded with his own hands in the last weeks of his life, that one I kept. I slipped it carefully back into my pocket. It was the only thing of his I had ever truly been given, and I was not about to leave it in the ground.
At the car, Adrian was waiting, the yellow dress folded across his lap. He looked up at me as I got in.
“Do you hate me?” he asked.
I considered the question honestly, because he deserved an honest answer, this dying man who had finally, too late, done the right thing.
“Today,” I said, “I do. A little. Today I hate you a great deal, actually, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.”
He nodded. He’d expected nothing else.
“But you brought him back to me,” I said. “The real him. The one who lived a few weeks longer and folded me a terrible flower and, at the very end, wanted me to have the truth. You kept that from me for fifty six years, and I don’t know if I can forgive that. But you did finally bring it to me. So ask me another day. Ask me again some other day, and maybe the answer will be different.”
“I’ll ask you another day,” he said quietly. And we both knew he might not have many days left to ask in.
That night, I got home late, tired all the way down to my bones, hollowed out and somehow also filled up, the way you feel after you’ve finally cried tears you’ve been holding for half a century.
At 11:57 that night, three minutes before what would have been our fifty sixth anniversary ended, I stood in my kitchen and took the great crystal vase, the wedding vase, the one that had held fifty six roses that morning and now stood empty. I placed the single crooked paper rose inside it, standing it up as best its brittle taped stem would allow.
Beside the vase, I set our wedding photograph, the black and white one of the two of us in my parents’ backyard, impossibly young, him in his uniform and me in the yellow dress, both of us laughing at something the photographer had said.
One terrible little paper flower, alone in an enormous vase meant for dozens. It looked absurd. It looked perfect.
I touched one bent, faded petal with the tip of my finger.
“You were late,” I told him softly. “Fifty six years late, you old fool. You promised me yellow roses on our first anniversary, and look how long you kept me waiting.”
Then I smiled, through the tears, at the ugliest and most precious flower in the world.
“But it finally got here,” I said. “You kept your promise, James. It finally got here.”
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