I looked up, pulled off my glasses, and rubbed my eyes. I scrubbed them to the point of pain trying to wake them up, wake me up, and clear my head.
“You’ll get bags and wrinkles that way.” Mom laughed at me.
“That’s the least of my worries.” Stars skittered across my vision with the release of pressure. “I’ll crash soon. I should’ve slept on the plane.”
“Quit now and get back to it tomorrow.”
I pushed up from the stool and arched my back. “I don’t have much time, Mom. It’s going to require some sacrifices.”
“How noble,” she said dryly as she poked a finger through the scattered papers. “What have you found?”
“Tons . . . Well, not much that refutes Mat’s article, but a lot about Grandmother and her sister.” I plopped down again. “It’s touching, scorching, uplifting, and sad. For the most part, it’s really sad. They were so close. Maybe twins are closer than mere sisters.”
Mom stilled. We both drifted to Amelia. Only in such close contact, with her or with Dad, did I feel Amelia’s absence so strongly. I always thought we would have weathered her loss better together, but when together, her memory pushed us apart. Perhaps we were all frightened of happiness, or of seeing and feeling it in each other.
I traced a line of the letter sitting in front of me. “Losing Caro would feel to Margaret like she lost herself.”
“She never recovered,” Mom added.
I looked up. Neither of us were talking about Caro and Margaret. Yet neither of us could make the leap.
I tapped the table—the first to back away. “To catch you up, I’ve been reading Caro’s letters in the order they were bound rather than chronological because these first four were tied separately and were the most worn. They seemed special to Grandmother, which made me wonder if the others were in order of importance as well. But I’m beginning to think no. I don’t sense she returned to most of these, so now I’m sorting them in chronological order.”
I reached to my left and gently picked up the first four letters I’d read. They were old, delicate, and so worn I feared they could disintegrate at my touch. Yet I couldn’t help but touch them. They felt vital to me. In just four letters, I knew my grandmother and my aunt—and I loved them both.
I passed them across the table to my mom. “In these, you get Caro arriving back in England in 1940, a later letter about her work, and a fabulously fun letter from Paris with a description of Elsa Schiaparelli’s famous Lobster Dress you’ve got to read.” I pointed to my computer. “Tap that on and you’ll see a picture of the duchess of Windsor in it.” I waved my hand back to the letters now lying in front of her. “And I have to read a section to you.”
I walked around the table and picked up the first letter, donned my glasses, and prepared to take Mom back in time . . .
I started at “George walked me back to my room” and read to the torn end of the description.
“That’s it. The page is ripped off there.” I flapped the page. “Either Grandmother was a prude and it offended her, or she was afraid their father might read it. Either way—”
I looked up, expecting flushed cheeks, wide eyes, and a compressed smile. Instead I found Mom in tears wearing the most tender, heartbroken look I’d ever seen on her—and I had held her hand when she buried her daughter.
“What?”
“She was neither. Margaret wasn’t a prude and she wasn’t protecting Caro from their father . . . To think that was her most important letter.” Mom swiped at her eyes with her pinkie fingers. Unlike me, she delicately moved her fingers across the lower lids from corner to corner.
She blew a shaky breath and continued. “She couldn’t bear it, tore it, then returned to it to remind herself, to make sure she never forgot and believed for a single second that he could actually love her. She probably read it over and over for self-preservation.”
“Mom?”
“My heart breaks for her. Because he did, Caroline. When I was up here earlier, I read a few from that last stack. His handwriting is the up-and-down stiff one you remarked on. His letters were affectionate and sweet and open. He did love her, always as a close friend. They could’ve been happy . . . but she couldn’t let herself believe it was real or that it could grow. She poked herself with this thorn again and again.”
“You’re going to need to slow down.” I reached for the block-lettered stack. I hadn’t read any of them yet. “These letters are from George? To Margaret?”
“Only Caro ever called him George. It was his middle name.”
I felt my lips part with the realization.
Randolph George Payne. My grandfather.
“I . . . Did you know? Did she tell you?”
“Not about that letter, no. But in those last months, she told me all about Caro and her George, and how Randolph hated his middle name and only ever let Caro call him that.”
Mom perched beside me. “It’s one of the many things we talked about. Regret. Only at the end could she see what she’d done her whole marriage. She pushed him away. She felt second-best her entire life. She always believed he only married her to protect her and Ethel out of duty. He waited nine years for word from Caro.”
“So he didn’t believe she ran off with a Nazi?”
“I don’t know what he believed. It was never spoken of until Margaret’s last months. She chose to believe it. Perhaps there was no alternative that felt better. I just know he stayed by Margaret’s side all those years, but didn’t marry her until 1950. Then your father was born ten months later.” She rubbed at her eyes again. “To feel so alone and to imagine every touch, look, or loving word was meant for her twin. That’s what Margaret did to herself.”
“That’s why he married her, but why’d she marry him?”
Mom sat straight. “I expect you’ll find that in the diaries. She adored him her whole life. I doubt she had any idea of the twists and turns her heart would take.”
Mom reached into the box and pulled out a black-and-white photo. Two men close together. One perhaps sixteen or seventeen, the other broader, more assured, even smarmy, and in his early to mid-twenties.
“The younger is Randolph, your grandfather, and the older is his brother Frederick. They grew up with the “Waite Girls,” as they were called. Their parents were best friends. The stories she told about their childhoods. It felt magical.”
I studied the picture, imagining magical. Nothing about my grandfather conjured such images for me, but looking at this young man, I could see it. He was alive. Handsome and tall with light hair and a smile that lit his whole face. Mischief danced in his eyes.
Mom gestured to the letter still resting in my hands. “I suspect that was why she ripped it and why she returned to it. First in despair, then as a barbed reminder of her real situation.”
“But it wasn’t her real situation.”
Mom shrugged. “How we feel can become our reality, Caroline. Nothing is objective.”