Page 45 of Love Conquers All

Sylvie hurried into the living room. She needed to ask. But how?

“Is something going on at school?” James demanded.

Sylvie shook her head. James groaned, reached for the remote, and turned down the volume. “Out with it,” he said.

Sylvie took a breath. “How did you meet Mom?”

James rolled his eyes into the back of his head. A profound silence fell. Sylvie thought she was going to pass out.

And then he said, “Your mother was married to my best friend from high school. But he died.”

Sylvie was shocked. “I don’t understand,” she said. It was so far away from the romantic story she’d craved that it felt like a nightmare.

“If you don’t understand, your school isn’t doing its job,” her father said. He turned back up the volume and took a bite of pizza.

Sylvie went up to her room and couldn’t sleep all night. It was the greatest cruelty, giving her just a glimpse of the past but not filling in the rest of the picture.

Years later, when they were teenagers, Sylvie told this story to Graham. Graham looked just as surprised as she surely had at eleven. “But they’re not from Nantucket,” Graham remembered of her parents. “They must have escaped something.”

Sylvie didn’t even know where her parents were originally from. They weren’t “real Nantucketers” because they’d moved here a few months before Sylvie was born. They were strangers until they weren’t. Strangers until the rest of Nantucket had adopted them.

So many years after those days, Sylvie mounted the ladder to the attic. She remembered how desperate she’d been, how hopeful that her father hadn’t really been her father. She’d thought that maybe her father’s best friend was her “real” father, and he’d died before she’d been born. Maybe her father had stepped in to marry her mother and take care of Sylvie. Perhaps he’d “saved the day” while also ruining both of their lives.

As a child, Sylvie had loved this idea. Her father was cruel, manipulative, and terrifying. She’d liked to imagine that her real father had been kind and loving, that he’d opened his heart to children, that, had he been alive, he would have spent days telling stories and playing and laughing with her.

Even now, she wasn’t sure what was real. But she knew the diaries would tell her something. They would help her understand her father, too.

Sylvie was amazed at how peaceful the attic was. The eggshell blue of the walls, the delicate features on the wooden desk, the piles of books spoke of a young woman who’d needed a quiet place to think, away from her domineering husband and a daughter who probably needed her all the time. Sylvie had never had children, and now that she was forty, she wasn’t entirely sure it would ever happen to her.

She guessed that Graham had dismissed the idea of having a child for environmental reasons. But something within Sylvie clawed out of her, a hope for a child she could show beautiful things to. A hope for a child who would go on to support the earth, tend to flowers and vegetables and remember what had come before. She knew that wanting a child was not a unique feeling, but it was profound all the same.

Sylvie used a dust rag to clean up the desk, the books, and the lamp. Her heart pumped. She half considered cleaning up the rest of the attic just to avoid the pain that surely awaited her within the pages of the diaries.

But there was nothing else to do but sit down and read.

Sylvie was surprised to find that the journals weren’t organized—that a journal from 1989 was stacked on top of one from 1977, which was stacked on top of one from 1982. If these journals had belonged to James Bruckson, they would have been neatly organized and labeled. But Sylvie remembered James Bruckson never kept a journal. His would probably have been filled with boring lists of reasons his daughter had failed him.

Sylvie knew that, most likely, she wouldn’t discover the cause of her mother’s death in these pages. She knew that she was encountering a woman’s life rather than her death.

Sylvie was born in 1985—the same year her parents moved to Nantucket. For this reason, Sylvie opted first for the journal from 1982. Maybe she’d discover clues about the man her mother had loved before her father.

She read:

This is the journal of Sarah Navy Allerton: 1982

The name rang through Sylvie. Allerton!

The first few entries of 1982 spoke of simple things. Sarah wrote of friends she met for dinner, sailing trips, and recipes she’d tried out. She spoke of her mother, who was sick and would go on to die two years later before Sylvie was born. And she often mentioned a guy named Wally, who, Sylvie guessed, was Sarah’s husband before James. Sylvie’s heartbeat quickened.

Here was an entry from April 11, 1982

Fixed Wally’s coat today. I felt sort of like a silly housewife, mending his things as he chopped wood in the front yard, but I sort of like that about myself: that I can hold all these different identities at once. An artist, a businesswoman, and a woman who cares for Wally’s coat.

We have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow. We can’t seem to get pregnant, and I’m sure it’s something I’ve done wrong.I didn’t eat right there for a while (too little), and I lost my period. I hope the doctor will tell me what to do to fix it. I so want a child.

Sylvie teared up. It wasn’t hard to imagine her mother penning these words, watching her first husband through the window, listening to the chop of the ax. It wasn’t hard to imagine her mother’s ache for a child. It felt so similar to Sylvie’s own ache.

She kept reading.

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