One Summer in Savannah

by Terah Shelton Harris

The gray metal door opens, and Daniel inches toward me, his steps slowed by the chains on his ankles. With his every step, the knot in my chest tightens. It’s too soon, I think. Too soon to face him after the reappearance of Sara and the discovery of Alana. Twenty-four hours later, I still haven’t grasped the notion of Alana’s existence or considered the implications to my family or to Sara. Their presence introduces a wider dimension on my road to amendment and forgiveness. And I have no intention of telling him about them. Not yet. If ever.

I’m hit with pride and melancholy that our DNA could produce such a wonderful being.

“She? A girl genius? An eight-year-old girl genius?” Your daughter, I fight the urge to say, ignoring his sexist implication.

“I don’t know,” I say, more to myself than to him. If only he knew the complications. Sara refused my request to simply speak to Alana. Tutoring her to solve one of the hardest equations in the history of the world would be out of the question.

It’s past midnight, and I can’t sleep. The full moon beams like a spotlight in the cloudless night sky as I sink into a chair on the porch. A hushed breeze rattles the live oak leaves and ruffles the Spanish moss that hangs like spiderwebs as two seagulls squawk constantly, diminishing in the distance.

It is all too much. All of it. Sara’s return. Alana. Her genius. Her similarities to Naomi. Not to mention Daniel’s diagnosis and the bone marrow transplant.

How did I become the bearer of this burden?

“So, you’re just going to keep running, hiding?”

“You have to stop running. You can’t run. They know about her.”

“Sara…Jacob seems different.”

“I don’t want to go back to Lubec! I wanna stay here!”

It didn’t seem fair to take a life for the sins of the father.

Despite my presence here, Sara still harbors ill will toward my family. And I don’t blame her. For so long, I did too.

“That’s not rational. You can’t continue to keep this a secret.” For eight years, from what I can glean, Sara has kept Alana hidden from the world, raising a brilliant daughter who could very possibly solve one of the world’s most difficult math problems. I have no doubt that she could disappear again. I cannot allow that.

“We get by. Alana has always had what she needed,” she says. And I believe her. Alana looks healthy and happy. But as I listen to Sara breathe and with each deliberate intake and outtake of breath, I know there have been lean times, and I cringe thinking about what it’s been like for her financially. “Accepting that money gives your family an invitation into her life.”

“I didn’t raise you to work with your hands.”

“Girls like that don’t grow up to make a difference in the world. And all these years later, I see that I’m right. She’s back working at that store, doing nothing of importance with her life.”

I should be telling her that she already has a grandchild, her next generation. A genius granddaughter who corrected the Mathematica exhibit. A beautiful little girl who embodies everything she wanted for us and everything she lost. That Naomi’s laughter lives on just fifteen minutes down the road.

And one too many people commented on her bold green eyes or her beauty. I imagine he encounters the same. To look at him doesn’t hurt your eyes.

I’m startled by our resemblance, and a tinge of sadness and joy fills me. A tiny miracle.

“Your mom said no more math, but she didn’t say we couldn’t fix this watch.”

My mind drifts to Sara when he says, “I’ve been thinking about Sara, especially of late. What happened to her. If what happened altered her life.”

He squirms as if it’s possible to make the metal chair more comfortable. “I don’t want her to hate me.”

She’s wearing the gray V-neck T-shirt I gave her and, from the looks of it, nothing else. Of course, she’s wearing something else, shorts, perhaps. Sara’s a lady, but the thought of just a thin piece of cloth shielding her body from view sends blood to all sorts of interesting places.

“We should have gone with Dr. Downey for the transplant,” Birdie says on the drive home. “He was a good friend of your father’s. How did they not see Daniel’s infection? Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.”

He doesn’t look at me as much as he looks through me. “I don’t know. But I think she knew about you and Alana. She wanted to bring us all together.”

She was drunk. I was drunk.” He stops. “I didn’t invite her into the room with the intentions of… I

thought she was pretty. I was in so much pain from losing Naomi, and I didn’t want to hurt anymore. I would have done anything to not hurt anymore. It was like I was outside of myself.”

“Do you regret it?” I ask, my voice cracking as I fight the sudden dryness in my mouth. I think of eighteen-year-old Sara, innocent, free, a whole world ahead of her, at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong man. “And don’t quote scripture from the Bible or justify your actions in any way. Yes or no. Do you regret it?” My voice rises with reserved anger. “Yes,” he says, so simply, final, that I believe him. “I do.”

They say the truth hurts. This truth knifes my heart and bleeds for my family, for Sara and Alana. One mistake. How one bad decision can alter the course of so many lives. Set us all on a course we never planned or imagined. But no

matter how painful this truth is, it needs to be free. And we all have to let it be. True freedom comes from the truth, and this truth ...

“What about Birdie?” Marsha asks, her voice a raised whisper. “She has a granddaughter ten miles away. You don’t think she needs to know?”

“I’m torn. I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing by Daniel, my family, if I’m betraying them somehow.”

“Daniel raped Sara. He did. And that’s what he is going to say during the interview. He’s going to tell the whole world what really happened. What you never wanted to believe happened.” She turns and walks away, but I keep talking. “You didn’t want to believe it because you were grieving for Naomi.”

Sara just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“I wish it were you instead of Daniel. He would have made something of himself.”

“Forgive me? Forgive me?” Again, every time she repeats, the tone changes, her voice rising in anger as if someone is turning up the dial notch by notch. “For what?”

“Were you scared?” Sylvia asks, listening intently with Hosea to the harrowing tale. Alana shakes her head. “Mom ran in, and she looked really scared, and then I got really scared, but then Jacob busted through the door and got us.”

But he’s dying. And I hate that.”

He mouths her name, silently, several times, turning it over and over. Each time his face lights up as it moves through him.

“He broke his promise.” “A promise that he should never have been asked to make. He was placed in a very hard position, but he tried. He tried for you because he’s a good man. He continued to try because he loves Alana like she is his own.”

“He lied to me,” I say weakly, sounding unconvincing to my own ears.

“My father left instructions in his will to financially provide for you and your father. I went into the bookstore when I came home not only to apologize on behalf of my family but to give him the money. This”—he holds up one envelope—“is the paperwork. We used some of it to renovate the bookstore, but there’s quite a bit left. You’ll never have to worry about money again. There will always be enough.”

I want to apologize for breaking my promise. I’m so sorry.” “There’s nothing for you to be sorry about. I should have never asked you to choose between me and your family.”

“I did it, Birdie. I did. I was drunk. I was grieving Naomi. I didn’t know how to do that. All of the things you taught us, you never taught us how to grieve.”

“She…Sara never meant to ever tell any of us. We were never supposed to know.” “That little bitch,” Birdie says.

“Why did you go see Sara?” “I wanted to look her in the eye. Let her know the damage she’s caused.”

“She’s our blood.”

He is a little boy again, the boy in the picture I saw at the cottage, before death and grief ripped him apart. He opens his arms and pulls Birdie into his chest. She lays her head on it and wraps her arms around his waist. “My baby,” she says into his chest.

She looks at my hand again, then pulls me into a hug.