“RM & D—” I looked at Bill. “RM and Dimity Westwood. RM. Who’s RM?”
“Someone who came up here with her,” Bill guessed, “and took pictures to commemorate the day? Maybe someone who went to the zoo with her as well?” He traced the heart with a fingertip. “Clearly someone she loved.”
I sank to the ground at the foot of the tree, and Bill sat beside me. He took the water bottle from the bag and we each had a drink. Pouring some water into his cupped hand, he cooled his face, then recapped the bottle and put it away. He sat with his back against the rough bark while I watched the hawks glide gracefully through the air.
Whose hand had carved that heart? What had happened to him? I closed my eyes and sensed… something. A dream of distant laughter, a memory of voices, a whisper of sweet words echoing down through time; the stillness at the center of a raging world.
“Lori?”
Bill’s voice came to me from a long way off. Closer, much closer were those other voices, low voices murmuring, whispering, echoing, then snatched away by a roaring wind. I strained to hear them, but the roar of the wind was followed by silence. I felt a sadness, an intense longing, a sense of loss so powerful that it struck me like a blow. Who had come with Dimity to this still and peaceful place? Whom had she lost to the chaos that surrounded it?
Bill put his hand on my shoulder.
“A soldier,” I said, unaware that I was speaking the words aloud. “RM was a soldier, a boy Dimity loved, who joined up early and was killed.”
“Was he?” said Bill.
“I… I don’t know.” I opened my eyes and put a hand to my forehead, squinting against the sun’s sudden glare. “I don’t know, but I thought I heard… Did you hear it?”
“All I hear is the wind in the trees.”
“The wind…” The wind of death had silenced the voices in the clearing, as it would one day silence all voices. I rubbed my eyes and tried to shake the cobwebs from my mind.
“RM—a soldier?” Bill mused. “It makes sense. There was a lot of dying being done in those days, and a lot of hearts were broken. It would explain why Dimity was so shaken when your mother met her. It might even explain why she never married. But why would she get rid of the photos? If she loved him, why would she try to erase his memory?”
I ran my fingers along a twisted root, still touched by a sorrow that was, and was not, my own. “Sometimes it hurts to remember.”
Bill let the words hang in the air for a moment. “It hurts worse to forget. Because you never really do, do you?”
“No,” I murmured, “I suppose you don’t.”
“Dimity didn’t. If we’re guessing right, she may have tried to forget, but…” He looked up at the heart on the tree. “RM wouldn’t leave her alone. She’s still hurting, still in pain over… something that requires forgiveness. I don’t understand why she would need to be forgiven for the death of someone she loved.”
“I do,” I said, in a voice so low that Bill had to lean forward to catch my words. “Sometimes you feel guilty after someone dies.”
“For what?”
“For… all sorts of things. Things you did and things you didn’t do.”
“Like suspecting a perfectly innocent man of playing ghost?” said Bill archly.
“Something like that.” I glanced at him, smiled briefly, then plucked a blade of grass and wound it around my finger. “My mother used to do that—say silly things to pull me out of a lousy mood.”
“Did she?”
“She used to tease me all the time, the way you do. I was pretty impossible with her, too.”
“I find that hard to believe,” said Bill.
“It’s true, though. She never said anything about it, but…” I shook my head. “I don’t think I grew up to be the daughter she had in mind.”
“Who do you think she had in mind?”
“Someone who wasn’t stupid enough to study rare books, for one thing.” I began to shred the blade of grass into tiny pieces. “Someone who could manage to keep a marriage together. Someone who wasn’t so damned pigheaded. But I’ve always been that way. That’s why…”
“That’s why what?” coaxed Bill.
“Nothing.” I tossed the bits of grass to the wind. “We’re supposed to be talking about Dimity.”
“We’ll come back to Dimity. Right now we have to talk about something else. That’s why what, Lori?”