December 2007  

Manhattan around Christmas time was one thing and one thing only—utter and complete madness.  Residents generally avoided downtown on the weekends as tourists flocked to the city to snap pictures in front of the most famous Christmas tree in the world, to strap on skates and take a spin around Rockefeller Center, and do whatever else touristy types felt it necessary to do on their trips into the city.  Pam was not, and had never been, a resident of New York City, but she had visited just enough to have the mentality of a local—total annoyance.   

She latched onto Jim’s hand and pulled him along, weaving through the crowds gathered in front of Penn Station with surprising skill.  “Come on,” she said, tugging on his arm.  As soon as they had cleared the crowd, Pam looked up him and smiled, laughing at his dumbfounded look.  “What?” 

“I’ve never been to the city this time of year,” Jim said, still a little stunned but the crowd, and a little stunned at how comfortable Pam seemed to be.  “There are a lot of people here.”  

“Tourists,” Pam muttered darkly.  “My aunt’s place is about ten blocks away.  Do you mind walking?”  

Jim hitched their duffle bag higher on his shoulder tossed the edge of his scarf over his shoulder dramatically.  “Of course not.”   

“Okay, but anyway,” she said, bounding along enthusiastically.  “I should give you a crash course on my aunt before you meet her,” Pam said, pausing long enough to lay a hand on his arm solemnly.  “First of all, Aunt Matilda is out of her mind.”   

Jim snorted out a laugh at her serious expression.  “Oh really?”  

“I mean, she’s not like schizophrenic crazy, but she’s eighty two, and she thinks that being eighty two is a permission slip to say whatever she wants whenever she wants.” 

“Is she going to ask me what my intentions are and then make me sleep on the couch?”  

“No, but once she told my sister the reason she was grumpy was because she was obviously sexually frustrated, and then proceeded to give her husband tips on how to please a woman.”   

“Oh good lord,” Jim said.  “So, she’s the most inappropriate aunt ever, basically.”  

“Considering this conversation was at my sister’s wedding, yeah.  Basically.  But she’s awesome, I love her.”  

“It sounds like it,” Jim said, squeezing her hand gently.  “I can’t wait to meet her.  And you never know, maybe she’ll teach me a thing or two.  And how are you related again?”  

“She’s my grandfather’s sister.”    

“And she never got married?”  

“No,” Pam said with a shake of her head, pointing left at an intersection.  They jogged across the street before the light changed.  “Family lore is that her one true love died during World War II, and she never got over it.  That isn’t to say she didn’t have affairs with, like, half the men in Hollywood in the fifties and sixties, but whatever.”   

“Like who?” Jim asked curiously.  One of his guilty pleasures was old movies from that very era.  “Anybody I would know?”  

“Apparently, Aunt Matilda is why Cary Grant’s third wife left him,” Pam said with a smug smile.  “Like I said, she’s had a pretty wild life.”   

Jim arched a brow, but said nothing for a moment.  “She was an actress, right?”  

“Among other things.  She was a ballerina first, and then she moved over to Broadway and had a cabaret show for a while.  Then she did a couple supporting roles in some movies, then went back to her roots and became a choreographer.”   

Jim noted the hints of genuine admiration in Pam’s voice.  “She sounds like quite a lady.”   

“As long as she doesn’t terrify you, you’ll love her,” Pam said, jumping up and kissing his cheek as the nervous energy took hold of her once again.  “She’s really great.”   

They walked along Riverside Drive in comfortable silence, hands linked.  They had been dating for a little over six months, and even though they had both just been through the runaround of meeting each other’s family’s at various Thanksgiving dinners, when it came time for Pam to visit her great aunt in New York, she had insisted that Jim accompany her.  “She’s really important to me,” she’d said, and the quiet pleading in her voice was enough to have him using one of his few remaining vacation days to make a long weekend out of the trip.   

“You know what she said to me when I called off my wedding?” she blurted suddenly.   

“What?” Jim asked with a perplexed smile.  The topics of Roy and Karen weren’t the sensitive issues they were months before, time together easing those particular wounds, but it still wasn’t something they brought up often.   

“While everyone else was trying to get me to explain why I did it, she just laughed and said ‘Good.  That boy was never good enough.’  And then she mailed me brochures for art schools.”   

Jim grinned.  “Yeah, I definitely like her already.”   

Pam smiled softly, still remembering opening her mailbox a year and a half earlier and finding an envelope full of brochures from art schools in New York City.  Her aunt had offered to foot the bill for her to move to the city and enroll in the school of her choice, but Pam had been determined to do things for herself for once, and opted for one class at a time at Scranton Community College.   “There’s her building,” she said, pointing at one of the many skyscrapers.   

They walked from the cold, grey streets straight into an opulent lobby. 

“Welcome to Valencia Towers,” a uniformed doorman sitting at a low desk said.  “How may I help you?”   

"Pam Beesly for Matilda O’Malley in 25A,” Pam said politely.    

“Yes, of course Ms. Beesly.  Ms. O’Malley is expecting you,” the doorman said after checking a clipboard in front of him.  “Go ahead to elevator number four and I’ll buzz you right up.”   

Jim waited until they were in the elevator before gawking.  “This is…quite a place.”   

Pam smiled, glancing over the ornate gold leaf panels of the elevator walls.  “Yeah, it’s kind of tacky, isn’t it?”  

“A little,” Jim said, wrinkling his nose.   

“Don’t worry, Aunt Matilda’s not so much into gold leaf as she is into making fun of people who like gold leaf.”   

The elevator doors opened directly into Matilda O’Malley’s living room, something Jim had never actually believed existed outside of movies and television shows.  They walked through a short hallway.  Jim whistled as they stepped into the large room, decorated in simple blacks and whites, but was most impressed with the large picture window that overlooked the Hudson River.  The place reeked of quiet money, the kind of money that didn’t need to be flashy.  He smiled at the magazines and mail strewn about the coffee table.  The place looked lived in, not like the showroom he expected when they entered the lobby. 

“Aunt Matilda?” Pam called up a set of winding stairs.  “Aunt Matilda, are you here?”  

“Two floors and this view?” Jim said, arching a brow at the stairs.  “So, we’re talking serious money here.” 

“Shh,” Pam admonished.  “Aunt Matilda?”  

“I’ll be right down,” a voice floated down from the stairs.  “Make yourself comfortable.”   

“Come on,” Pam said, grabbing Jim’s hand again, pulling him back the way they came, throwing open a door along the hallway.  “Here’s our room.”   

Though the room might have been smaller, it was well decorated with pale lavender walls and a large wrought iron bed.  There were framed artistic prints of ballerinas in various positions in black frames hung on the walls, with a particular portrait catching Jim’s eye. The shot was black and white of a woman, her eyes heavily lined and her lips dark, her hair curling wildly underneath a black bowler hat.  She was looking over the shoulder of a man with his back to the camera.  She held her hands dramatically stiff on the unseen man’s shoulders, as if waiting for a cue.  Her lips were parted, her head tilted back, and the photograph seemed to capture the perfect moment of anticipation.  There was something decidedly powerful, nearly sexual about the photo.   

“That’s her,” Pam said from behind him.  “That was one of her promotional shots when she was going on tour with her cabaret.”     

At the sound of heels clicking across the hardwood floor, Pam dropped her book bag and rushed into the hallway.  Jim tore his eyes from the photo, from the beautiful face that held the faintest traces of the face of the woman he loved, and followed Pam back to the living room.   

“It’s good to see you, dear,” he heard Pam’s aunt say before rounding the corner just in time to see her pull her niece into a tight hug.   She wore pearls at her ears and her throat, along with wide legged black trousers and snug black sweater.  Her hair, ruthlessly dyed auburn, swung straight around her and ended abruptly at her chin.  She was taller than Jim expected, around five foot nine with the assistance of her tall heels.  She certainly wasn’t the stunner she had been in the photograph, but for an eighty year old, she didn’t look bad. 

“Aunt Matilda,” Pam said breathlessly, glancing over her shoulder at Jim.  “I want you to meet my boyfriend, Jim Halpert.  Jim, this is my favorite aunt in the world, Matilda O’Malley.”  

“I’m your only aunt,” she gently reminded as she turned to greet Jim.  “Hello, it’s very nice to finally meet you.  I’ve heard…” she trailed off suddenly when she met Jim’s eyes.  Her face went slack as she stood there staring for a moment.   

“Uh…” Jim said awkwardly.  “It’s great to meet you too.”  He glanced over to Pam in concern.   

“Aunt Matilda?” Pam said, reaching out to touch her arm in concern.  “Are you okay?”  

The hand on her arm had Matilda jumping.  “I’m sorry,” she said, recovering quickly.  She extended a hand to Jim.  “I just got lost in my thoughts for a second.  It’s good to finally meet you; Pam’s told me so much about you.”   

“All lies,” Jim assured, shaking her hand warmly.   

“I certainly hope not,” Matilda said with a small smile that even Jim noticed didn’t quite reach her eyes.  She looked shaken and pale suddenly, and Jim desperately hoped the elderly woman wasn’t about to have a stroke or something.   She still hadn’t taken her eyes off Jim’s face, narrowing her eyes at him suspiciously before shaking it off.  “Are you two hungry?  I was going to order in some lunch.”   

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Jim figured she had to be a multi-millionaire to be living in such an insane apartment, so he found it to be ridiculously charming that she ordered lunch from your average, run of the mill Chinese restaurant.  He was surprised to find that the apartment didn’t extend to a kitchen, only a small refrigerator behind the mini bar in the living room, stocked with snacks and bottled water.  When he questioned the oddity, she only laughed and said “I had the option between a kitchen and a guest room, and I have a lot more friends than desires to cook.”   

“And I thought you I was bad with my one kitchen,” Pam muttered, elbowing him lightly.   They ate lo mien and Hunan shrimp off of paper plates, sitting on the floor around the coffee table in the living room.  Jim felt like the odd man out, the only one who didn’t know how to use chopsticks properly, and the only one who didn’t have an extreme emotional investment in the latest gossip of the New York art world.  He didn’t mind sitting and watching, though, he never had when it came to watching Pam when she was obviously delighted.  After too many years of watching her muted ambivalence to life, any opportunity to see her light up was cherished.   

When the conversation shifted to the big shoe sale at Barney’s, Jim had no choice but to laugh.  Pam’s love for shoes had been one of the many surprises Jim had discovered in the past six months.  He had always assumed that someone who wore the same white pair of Keds to work for three years did not really care all that much about shoes, but he had been mistaken.  She just didn’t care about what shoes she wore to work.  He was reminded in the difference as Pam and Matilda discussed sling backs and mules and wedges and boots with what he felt to be an inappropriate level of animation.     

He was captivated by Matilda O’Malley, enamored with her tawdry stories of who was sleeping with whom, even when he didn’t know any of the players involved.  She had a brightness about her, an impishness that said ‘I’ve been there, I’ve done that, and I’m totally not impressed with what you’re selling.’ 

It was also clear that she loved Pam, asking about her art classes, teasing her about wasting her time at a dead-end job, wondering when she was going to just move to the city already and be bohemian, as Matilda seemed to think was Pam’s destiny.   She was funny, engaging, warm, and it was no wonder Pam seemed to hold her in such high regard.   

He was growing uncomfortable, however, with the amount of times Matilda would look over at him and lose her train of thought, something going dark and emotional in her eyes.   

“How about you, Jim?” she said suddenly, turning to face him directly.  “Pam tells me you sell paper at her company?”   

Jim smiled and nodded.  “Yes, ma’am.” Matilda snorted derisively. 

“I didn’t think it was possibly to have a job more dreadfully boring than Pam’s,” she said.  “I guess I was wrong.”   

He had no choice but to laugh.  “Yeah, well.  It pays the bills.”   

“There’s more to life than paying the bills, Jim,” she said, pausing a moment before tossing her head back and hooting.  “Of course, it’s easy for me to say that from my ivory tower, isn’t it?” 

Jim glanced around the apartment and arched a brow.  “You said it, not me.”   

“Oh well,” she said, waving a hand around dismissively.  “When I came to this city, I lived with two prostitutes.”  

Jim and Pam both choked on their drinks at once.  “Wow, Aunt Matilda,” Pam said, clearing her throat.  “That’s a detail that was always left out of your stories before.”   

“Oh silence, child.  You’re a grown up, and I never said I was a prostitute.  I was a lot of things, but never a prostitute.”   

“Good to know,” Pam said, her cheeks turning pink.   

“Why are you embarrassed, Pam?” Jim asked with mock innocence.  “Does it make you uncomfortable when your aunt says ‘prostitute’?”   

“Shut it, Jim,” she said, tossing the wrapped from her straw at him.   

Jim grinned at Pam, an intimate look passing between them, and that’s when it clicked.  Matilda barely choked back the gasp.  “Jim,” she blurted.  “This is going to be a completely odd question, but amuse an old woman, won’t you?”  

“Of course,” Jim said, bracing himself for the expected onslaught of raunchy questions.    

“What was your mother’s maiden name?”  He laughed, caught off guard. 

“Yeah, that is pretty random.  My mom’s maiden name is Wesley.”   

Matilda looked pained for a moment, but then she smiled, slow and bright.  Her eyes glazed over, and for a moment both Jim and Pam wondered if she was about to burst into tears.  “You were named for your grandfather,” she finally said, her voice a dreamy whisper.   

“Yeah...?” Abruptly on edge, he wasn’t sure why it came out like a question.  Maybe it was because suddenly this woman seemed to know an awful lot about him.  His eyes flew to Pam’s, and she looked just as confused as he felt.  “How did you know that?”  

“It’s appropriate that you were named for your grandfather,” she said, her voice nothing but a wisp in the air.  “You have his eyes.” 

August 1937 

The town of Hamilton, Pennsylvania, in the rural suburbs outside Philadelphia, had been smothered by the record breaking heat wave for weeks, with no end in sight.  The humidity had become this tangible thing, a curtain that seemed to drape over the Northeast and never let up, not even for a second.  Breeze didn’t stir the trees, and even though the sky had a permanent greenish grey tint, it hadn’t rained in eleven days.  The small town wasn’t exactly the Sahara, but at least the desert was a dry heat.   

Either Matilda Jane O’Malley was out of her mind, or she really did want to be a dancer.  That was the only explanation as to why she was out in her backyard in the middle of the worst heat she had ever experienced in her life, practicing her footwork exercises until she was blinded by the streams of sweat dripping in her eyes.   

The recession had not affected her family, with her father making a good living as the principal of the high school in town.  She was not completely unaware of the hardships of those who had lost their jobs.  Her closest friend from the seventh grade, Beth Grant, had moved away after her dad lost his job at the mill.   

There was food on her plate every night, there were chores to be done every morning, and there was still enough money to pay for her ballet lessons twice a week.  These were the things that concerned her most.   

She was twelve years old and gangly with it, all arms and legs, and she was nearly a head taller than her sister who was two years older than her.  Her brown hair looked nearly red in the right light, but her most striking feature was her eyes—an interesting shade of blue that edged towards violet.   

It had been a lonely summer, especially with Beth being gone, but she didn’t mind being alone so much.  She was a quiet girl, but with a stubborn, charming determination that frequently drove her parents absolutely crazy.  She had long ago convinced herself that being along was a personal choice.  She didn’t have time to walk into town everyday with her schoolmates for ice cream and soda’s at Lawry’s Malt Shoppe, because she had a goal in mind and there was no time for socializing if she was going to be en pointe by the fall.   

That is what she told herself when she watched her brother and sister skip off with their friends, shouting and laughing as they came back with arms sticky with the last evidence of ice cream.  That’s what she told herself as Bette Myers, the girl from her class that lived across the street, did not even both to invite her to go to the cinema anymore.  She did not want to go anyway, she insisted.  She had too much work to do.   

Her ballet teacher told her she had to wait until she was thirteen to start her advanced ballet classes, but she just knew if she practiced hard enough, she could be ready by the time classes resumed.  She practiced everyday for hours, filling her days with stretches and plies, with leaps and arabesques.   

But the heat was killing her—killing her dead—she thought dramatically before flopping on her back in the shade behind the big sycamore tree in her backyard.  It was pointless to practice in this killer heat, she reasoned, because all the practice in the world would be useless if she died from complications of it being too darn hot.  She would just take a rest for a few minutes, maybe go inside and beg some iced tea off her mother, and then she’d get back to work

If her father would just hurry up and build the barre in the basement like he had promised, she could be inside in the cool, damp air of the basement, practicing properly instead of twirling and swirling in the backyard like an amateur.   

She had helped her father clean classrooms four Saturdays in a row to get that barre, and it was infuriating her that he wasn’t holding up his end of the bargain.  She made a mental note to sit him down tonight and remind him of that fact.   

She heard the back door slam and looked up to see her fifteen year old brother, Michael, ambling down the sidewalk with one of their mother’s old, ragged towels draped around his neck.  She arched a brow and studied his attire, his oldest short trousers and the tee shirt that was splattered with paint from when he painted the fence out front.  What was he up to?  “Mikey,” she called, sitting up from her position under the tree.   

Mike turned around, both annoyed and concerned at being caught by his little sister.  “What?”  

“What are you doing?” 

“Nothing,” he answered quickly.  “Going into town to play ball with my friends.”   

“Why do you need a towel to play ball?” she asked suspiciously before gasping.  “You’re going to the creek, aren’t you?”  

“No!”  

“Yes, you are!” she said leaping up and bounding across the yard.  Suddenly, the prospect of a cool, refreshing dip was much more promising than more exercising in the sweltering backyard.  “Let me go with you,” she demanded.   

“No, now beat it,” Mike said firmly, horrified at the mere idea of any time spent watching over is pest little sister.   

Matilda smiled the slow, evil smile that any youngest child with leverage over an older sibling knows well.  “Mike,” she said evenly.  “You know Mama doesn’t want us going to the creek by ourselves, ever since the Adam Sullivan drowned last year.  I guess I better go tell her what—“  

“Fine,” Mike snapped, annoyed.  “You can go.  Just shut up, and don’t embarrass me.”   

“Wait for me,” she exclaimed, giving her brother a quick hug, despite her annoyance.  “If you leave me behind, or I’m definitely telling Mama.”   

“Just hurry,” he muttered.   

Less than fifteen minutes later, they were walking down the sidewalk of Sycamore Lane, and she was surprised to see another boy standing in front of the old Baldwin house.  She knew a new family had moved in recently, the new clinic doctor and his family, but hadn’t met any children yet.  “Who is that?” she whispered to her brother, elbowing him in the ribs when he didn’t answer.   

“Hi,” the boy called, pushing himself off the iron fence he’d been leaning on.  “Who is that?” he asked suspiciously.   

“James, this is my bratty little sister Matilda.  Matilda, this is James Wesley,” he said in a rushed, obligatory sort of tone.  Introductions over, he rushed them along, afriad of being spotted along the street with their rather obvious towels.  "Okay, let’s go.”   

“Hello Matilda,” James said with a small, kind smile, glancing over the younger girl and falling into step beside Mike.  He was taller than her brother, but appeared to be about the same age.  He had messy brown hair light green eyes, and Matilda wasn’t exactly sure why she was smiling anymore.   

She quietly walked behind the pair of boys, studying them with inherent fascination as they fell into easy, whispered conversation about all the things that concerned teenage boys—baseball and women.  She was sure they did not think that they could hear her, which only made this glimpse into the minds of teenage boys all the more fascinating to her.   

“You should have seen her,” Mike exclaimed.  “Bill was walking by with a bucket of water, and he tripped and threw it all over Melanie Watkins.” 

“No way!” James laughed with disbelief.  “What did she do?”  

“Well, she was running around screaming, and she took off one of her shoes and started to hit him with it, and the entire time you could see right through her dress, if you know what I mean.  It was a riot.”   

Matilda rolled her eyes at that point and drifted off to her own little world.  Boys, to her mind, were a ridiculous set of creatures that she had yet to completely figure out.   

While she was greatly looking forward to getting older and finally growing into what she thought to be her freakishly large feet, the whole growing up thing seemed like an awful lot of trouble anyway.  Breasts didn’t seem like they were that bad, but if boys were going to throw buckets of water on her just so they could see them, maybe they were more trouble than they were worth.   

She walked slowly along behind them, just close enough that she could hear them, but far enough away that they wouldn’t notice her practicing her hand positioning as she walked along, humming quietly along with some waltz in her head.  First position, second position, she idly thought, occasionally spinning in a delicate pirouette.  Third, fourth, fifth.     

Before she knew it, they were deep in the woods, about a third of a mile outside of town, where the sun cut through the trees in wavering streams, where the world took on a green misty color.  It was a mystery to her how it could be so cool, so refreshing in the small meadow while the rest of the world seemed to melt around them.  The boys were off and running, shoving each other and roughhousing as they stripped off their shirts, tossed their towels over a branch, and dived into the deep water.   

The town of Hamilton referred to the area simply as the creek, as if the formal name of the South Gunpowder Falls Creek was too formal for their little town.  It was kind of a poor name choice, the idea of a creek so normally being a tiny little bubbling stream of water.  It was a little larger than that, with some adventurous soul having built a damn out of rocks some time ago, leaving the water to back up and form a deep swimming hole that teenagers had been flocking to since her parent’s generation.   

It used to be acceptable for kids to spend their time there during the summer, but all of that had come to a close when Adam Sullivan had gone missing the year prior, only to be found a half mile down stream a few days later.  Rumor had it that he had swiped a bottle of his father’s whiskey and a pack of smokes to mourn the break up with his girlfriend.  Matilda was only twelve years old, but gossip that juicy had even made the rounds of her seventh grade class.   

Parents were not ones to blame the idiocy of a boy with a broken heart, but instead blamed the creek.  Parents across the town expressly forbade their children and their friends to play there.  As much as Matilda was one to follow the rules so explicitly under normal circumstances, it was too darn hot to humor the paranoia of her parents today.  She toed off her shoes at the edge of the creek, dipped her toes in the surprisingly clear water, and wondered how long Mike had been sneaking off to splash around with his friends.  It didn’t matter; she was grateful enough that he let her come along that she’d keep his secret.   

She kept to herself, ignoring the older boys as they splashed and wrestled in the water, each battling to dunk the other, shoving each other deep underwater.  They yelped and shouted, as boys tended to do, and she was more than content to float on her back away from the melee, languidly paddling as she daydreamed, closing her eyes and drifting away.   

When she opened her eyes again, she realized she had drifted about a hundred feet away from her brother and was close to the damn, and more interestingly, an oak tree that had fallen across the banks, creating a natural bridge from one side to the other. Fascinated, and sufficiently cool from her swim, she swam to the side, hauled herself into the bank, and leapt easily onto the tree.  Instead of feeling guilty about skipping her practice, she decided to take this opportunity to work on her balance.                 

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“What is your sister doing?” James asked, hesitating in his quest to bury Mike underwater.              

“Dancing,” he said with a marked tone of bafflement in his voice.  “She’s always dancing.  She wants to be a ballerina.”              

“She’s good,” James commented, unable to tear his eyes off her, the simple joy she found in her movements apparent by the coy, dreamy smile on her face.              

“How do you know?” Mike joked.  “A ballet expert are you?”             

James snorted, cupping his hand under the water and splashing water Mike’s way.              

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The considerable noise her brother and his friend made faded away, and her head was filled with music only she could hear.  She rose up on her toes and reached, loving the feeling of her muscles stretching as she strained towards the sky, flexing her wrists and dropping down to her feet.  Experimentally, she carefully leapt, testing the strength of the oak. 

When the tree didn’t even wobble under her weight, she moved to the middle and slowly, carefully bent her leg behind her at an angle, standing at attitude, then leaping into a series of batterie jumps.  She hesitated as she regained her balance, then spun around, settled her feet in fourth position, and then pliéd, her arms in first position.  She spun around on the balls of her feet and turned her left foot out, carefully circling her leg in the air in a perfect rond de jambe.             

Growing confident in her moves on the narrow beam, she leapt in the air and spun around, and immediately slipped, losing her footing as a piece of ancient bark shifted.  She wind milled her arms backwards as she fought for balance, but it was a futile effort.  She yelped a little squeal of a scream as she fell.  Her last thought as she hit the water was ‘how embarrassing’.  She only had a moment to register a quick flash of light and a split second of blinding pain before she felt nothing at all.                

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The boys turned at the sound of her shout just in time to see her hit the water.  They laughed, amused at her clumsiness, but there laughter died in their throats when she surfaced, face down in the water, completely still.      

“Matilda?” Mike asked, confused.  They stood in frozen shock for a moment before they were diving forward.  “Matilda!” Mike yelled, choking on water as he struggled through the water.              

Mike beat James by only seconds, quickly scooping his arms under his sister and flipping her in the water, supporting her with one arm and pushing the ropes of wet hair out of her face.  “Matilda, wake up,” he urged, smacking her lax face with the back of his hand.  “Matilda, come on, wake up.”  It was then that he saw the blood seeping from the long scrape along her left temple.  “Oh god.  She’s dead.”              

“No she’s not,” James said, cupping his hand under her nose.  “She’s breathing,” he said with a gasp of relief, revealing that he hadn’t been sure of anything in that moment.              

“What do we do?” Mike asked in a strangled voice.  James looked up and studied his face, struck by how pale he had suddenly become, his skin adopting a chalky white color, his eyes glassy and unfocused.  Something about the way he wavered in the water, dipping Matilda back into the water dangerously, had James convinced that Mike was only seconds from fainting.              

“Here,” he said, dipping his arms under Matilda and lifting her out of Mike’s arms.  “Run ahead and get my father, you run faster than me any how.”  He had no way of knowing if that was true or not, but knew that he’d have bigger problems if he had two unconscious people floating in the water.  “I’ll carry her back.”                         

“Okay, okay,” he muttered.  He didn’t so much as stop for his shoes as he sprinted out of the woods.              

James carefully cradled her against his chest as he struggled his way out of the water, climbing over the side of the back and walking as fast as he could without jostling her too much, careful not to bump her head against any of the low branches.  His father was a doctor and he knew it was important not to move her too much, because she could have hurt her back or neck. 

They had just hit the first sidewalk in Hamilton when he saw her eyes flutter.  “Matilda?” he questioned. “Matilda, can you hear me?”              

The quick flash of her striking blue eyes had him stopping dead in his tracks.               

The first thing she registered was the sound of an unfamiliar voice urging her to open her eyes, ordering her to wake up.  The light that seeped through her lids seemed blinding, so the idea of opening them further seemed cruel.  However, the idea of the staying the dark seemed worse.  She cracked her eyes slowly, groaning a little at the stinging pain on the left side of her body.              

She was met with a pair of kind green eyes and a lopsided smile.  “Hi there,” he said quietly, his relief tangible.                         

“My head hurts,” she croaked.              

“I’ll bet it does,” he answered with a nervous half laugh.              

She rolled her head into the curve of his shoulder and sighed.  “Your name is James,” she uttered before succumbing to the darkness again.

“Yeah, it is,” he whispered, picking up the pace as he saw his Mike and his father running in his direction.      

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Dr. Christopher Wesley diagnosed her with a mild to moderate concussion and ordered her to bed rest for a few days.   Mrs. Catherine O’Malley diagnosed both of her children with an incurable case of the stupids and sentenced them both to a life sentence of never leaving her sight again. 

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Five days later, James was too absorbed in his thought to hear Matilda approach him from behind.  He was greasing the chain of his bike, dreaming of the not to distant future when he could cruise the streets of Hamilton in one of the many cars he fantasized about each night before he went to bed.   

The gentle hand on his shoulder might as well have been a gunshot with the way he jumped, tipping forward from his crouched position.  He caught himself with his hands seconds before his face was splattered across the driveway.  He spun around only to see Matilda standing above him, her hand clapped over her mouth. 

“Don’t knock yourself out,” she managed over a burst of giggles.  “I’m definitely not strong enough to carry you into your father.”  

“You scared the life out of me!” James gasped, pushing himself over to sit cross legged on the gravel, a hand to his chest as he waited for his heart rate to return to normal.  

“I’m sorry,” Matilda said, but she couldn’t quite smother the grin.   He couldn’t help but grin himself.  She had such a pretty smile, and the sun brought out the hints of red in her hair, and her eyes were the same color little checks in her pretty sundress, and— 

He realized he was staring at her, gaping really, for an entirely inappropriate length of time.  “How are you feeling?” he blurted, clearing his throat nervously.   

“Much better, thank you,” she said, moving her hair to the side to show off the carefully applied bandages to her temple.  “I came to thank you again for your help the other day.” 

“I’m just glad you’re all right,” he said, wondering how silly he must look with such a dumb grin on his face.  She’s just a kid, he reminded himself.  Mike O’Malley’s little sister.  Mike O’Malley’s really beautiful little sister… 

“I made you these,” she said, holding out a plate of cookies.  “Your father told my mother that peanut butter is your favorite…” She trailed off with a little shrug.   

“Hey, neat,” he said, finally pushing himself off the ground to stand in front of her.  He snagged a cookie off the plate and stuffed it into his mouth.  “Wow,” he said with his mouth full.  

“I made them myself,” Matilda said, preening a little.  She wasn’t the best baker in the world, not nearly as good as her older sister, but she got a little flutter in her belly at the way he grabbed another two with his left hand before taking the plate out of her hands with his right.   

“These are very good.”  

“And to think, all you had to do was carry a half conscious girl for a couple of miles,” she said with a quirky, self deprecating grin.   

James was taken off guard momentarily.  From how quiet she’d been at the creek, along with how Mike had described her, he had not expected wit and sarcasm.  He thought she was just another shy, demure girl, and he was starting to that he had been mistaken.  She had a brain, not to mention a sense of humor.   

“I’ll carry you around once a week if it means I get cookies again.”    

There was something about him, she thought to herself as she shifted nervously on her feet.  There was just something about him that was warm and inviting.  He was her brother’s friend, she had to remind herself.  He didn’t want some little kid hanging around.  “Anyway, I’ll let you get back to what you were doing,” she said, slowly backing away.    

He didn’t want her to go, he thought suddenly.  “Uh, actually,” he stammered.  “I was going to walk into town, get a lemonade at Lawry’s.”  He decided it wasn’t important to mention the big pitcher of lemonade already sitting on his counter.  “Want to keep me company?”   

She should probably just decline and go home.  She should be at home in the basement practicing at the barre she finally guilted her father into installing.  And he was probably just being polite anyway.    

But instead, she smiled and nodded.  “I’d love to.”  

December 2007

“What a small world,” Matilda recovered quickly, but not quite quick enough for Jim and Pam not to be completely confused.

“You knew my grandfather?” Jim questioned, dropping his fork onto his plate and leaning forward with great interest.

“Yes, I did,” she answered, fiddling with the edge of her napkin. “We grew up in the same town. He was a friend of your grandfather’s, Pam.”

“Really?” Pam exclaimed. “Woah, weird.”

“No, seriously,” Jim said. “Are you sure?”

Matilda looked at Jim. “Your grandmother’s name was Sofia, and I believe they named their first daughter Abigail. Is that your mother?”

“No, Abby’s my aunt,” Jim said leaning forward, excitement etched across his face. “My mom is Larissa.”

“Larissa,” Matilda said, tapping a finger against her lip. “She must have been born after I left for Europe and lost touch with James and Sofia.”

“This is too weird,” Pam said.

“That why I was taken aback when you first got here, Jim. You look a lot like him.”

“That’s what my grandmother tells me all the time,” he said, running a hand through his hair nervously. “I never actually met him, he died before I was born.”

She made a noncommittal noise and smiled faintly.

“This is too weird,” Pam said flailing her arms around frantically before pushing herself off the floor. “I’m going to the bathroom, and when I come back, I don’t want to be in Weird Town anymore.”

“Weird Town?” Jim called at her back as she wandered away. “Seriously, Pam? That’s the best you can come up with? This is unreal,” he said, turning his attention back to Matilda. “I’m not really sure what to say.”

“How is Sofia?” Matilda asked politely, busying her hands with gathering the trash off the table and stuffing it back into the takeout bag.

Jim hesitated, noting the subtle changes in Matilda’s tone and posture. There was a distance, a lukewarm detachment, that hadn’t been there moments before. “She’s doing okay. She had some health stuff lately, but she’s bouncing back.”

“That’s good to hear. If you’ll excuse me for a second, I need to use the ladies room.” Matilda fled as fast as she could, without making it abundantly clear that she was fleeing. The last thing she wanted to do was cause more alarm than she already had, raise more questions than she could already read written across the face of her niece and the man that was a link to a past she had spent the past sixty years distancing herself from.

She brushed past the bathroom she claimed to need to use and headed for dressing table, grabbing a slim silver plated cigarette case. She rarely smoked these days, the lectures from her doctors being more tedious than they were worth, but allowed herself the occasional indulgence.

Matilda stepped out onto the terrace and breathed in the city, drinking in the lights of her adopted home, focusing on the familiar view of the Hudson River, the sounds traffic briskly clipping through the streets below, the biting of chilly air over her skin—she hadn’t bothered to grab a jacket in her rush outside.

Anything to keep her from going back, anything to keep her firmly anchored in the present. She lit a cigarette with shaky hands and inhaled.

Fireflies and moonlight, bubbling water and crickets, warm hands through the cotton of a navy blue dress as they slowly swayed—

She nearly jumped out of her skin at the hand on her shoulder. “Jesus Christ, Pamela,” she said. She took another shaky drag of her cigarette. “When you scare me to death, maybe then you’ll learn to never sneak up on an old woman.”

“I called out to you a couple times,” Pam said, draping a coat over her aunt’s shoulders. “You must have been in another world.”

“Not another world,” she replied with a faint smile. “Another time.”

“Jim said you rushed off in a hurry,” Pam said, deflecting her own worries. “Are you okay?”

“Yes, yes,” Matilda said. “I’m sorry, I’m just taken aback.”

“I know, what are the odds?” Pam murmured quietly. “How well did you know Jim’s grandfather?”

She said nothing for a moment, turning to look Pam in the eye. “You love him.”

“Who?” Pam asked, startled. “Jim? Of course I do. Love him, I mean.”

“Why?”

Pam laughed nervously. “What do you mean, why? I just…do. He’s great.” Her face fell at her aunt’s serious tone and expression. “Do you not like him or something?”

“No, nothing like that. He seems like a very nice boy. You should be able to answer that question, though. You loved Roy just because and look how that turned out.” Pam tensed next to her, and Matilda sighed. She leaned against Pam for a moment before turning to go inside. “I’m tired. I’m going to go to bed early.”

“Aunt Matilda,” Pam said, reaching for her hands. She could see now why Jim was so worried, worried enough to send her after her aunt. Something was definitely off. “Are you okay? Should we call your doctor or anything?”

“There is no cure for being eighty-two,” Matilda said with a half laugh. “I’m just decrepit and tire easily. Go take your gentleman out on the town.”

“We can just hang around,” Pam offered. “In case you need anything.”

“Please. There are much better things for two young kids like you two to be doing in this city than sitting around and listening to me snore. Go.”

After significant reluctance on both of their parts, Matilda managed to shuffle Jim and Pam out the door. And just as soon as she was alone, she wept.

May 1940

Thomas Wesley was a quiet man by nature. He used his words sparingly, but when he spoke, he was heard clearly. He had a steady hand and cool eyes, a reputation as a stable man who worked tirelessly to ease the suffering of the sick in his care. All of these qualities made him an excellent surgeon, respected by both his fellow doctors and his patients, but none of these qualities helped him think of a thing when sitting across the dinner table from his son.

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Abbey had been gone for five years, yet there were still nights when Thomas rolled over in his sleep and reached for her only to be confused by her absence, still moments when his grief was this tangible thing that swelled in his throat and robbed him of his breath. His Abbey had been gone for five years, yet there seemed to be no end for his mourning.

He met Abigail while working at the veteran’s hospital in Philadelphia in the fall of 1919, just weeks after his return from the trenches of France. She served coffee and apple pie at her family’s shop on the corner and she quickly became the brightest point in his day. With her sparkling hazel eyes and pale pink lips that always seemed to be pulled back into a grin, she was the perfect antidote to his days spent elbow deep in blood and gore, his days spent holding saws against the flesh of men who had survived the horrors of warfare abroad, only to lose their limbs to infections in hospitals at home.

It took him weeks to work up the courage to ask her on a date, and she accepted readily. She confessed over dinner that she had been waiting for him to ask her out since the first time he’d sat down in her section. He touched her hand across the table and said he hoped it was worth the wait. They married three weeks later.

After his discharge from the Army medical corps, they lived in a tiny apartment near the hospital where continued working as a surgeon. After the first year, Abbey became a little frantic as she made no secret of her desire for children. All of her sisters had become pregnant immediately after marriage, so she turned to the church, lighting a candle with a quick little prayer everyday on her way to her family’s diner, where she continued to work part time to keep herself busy while she waited to be blessed with a child.

Finally, after three years, she found herself with child. They were on top of the world. Abbey stayed home, spending her days readying the second bedroom of their apartment into a nursery. Despite their difficulties with conceiving, the pregnancy went by breezily. Thomas recalled many nights of lying next to her as she slept, his hands resting on top of hers on her rounded stomach, feeling the gentle movements of their child inside of her. He could not wait to become a father, but even more than that, he could not wait to watch her as a mother. Just as medicine was his calling, motherhood was hers.

James William Wesley was born a hale and healthy in December of 1922, and Thomas and Abbey focused on that, focused on their healthy son instead of the complications that rendered Abbey unable to carry further children. They were a happy family, a loving husband and wife with a bright, cheerful boy, and then out of the blue, just before James’s thirteenth birthday, Abbey discovered she was again pregnant.

From the very beginning, Thomas had a bad feeling about his wife’s state. She laughed at his concerns, saying that God was answering their prayers, but from the beginning she was confined to bed. Twice, Abbey began bleeding and he was sure she was losing the baby, and twice she recovered, apparently unscathed.

James was attentive, often bringing her chocolates from the candy shop he passed on his way home from school, or making her tea and sitting on a chair next to her bed as he completed his homework assignments. He was the one who found her slumped forward in bed with her chin resting against her chest, a fashion quarterly open in her lap. They later determined that she had been bleeding internally for days, suffering in silence, likely believing that her agony was just another part of an already difficult pregnancy.

By the time a neighbor who had heard James’s shouts for help fetched Thomas from the hospital, it was already too late. A doctor deemed it necessary to attempt an emergency Caesarean surgery to attempt to save the life of the child; though even through the misty clouds of shock Thomas knew it was futile. The baby, another boy, lived for less than two hours.

The baby was buried next to his mother in an impossibly small coffin as Thomas and James watched on in silent, dull shock, neither having had the ability to fully process the magnitude of what had happened. It seemed as if one minute she had been there, and the next she was gone.

When he was offered the job in the small town of Hamilton as a general practitioner of medicine, he accepted after little consideration. It would do them good to get out of the city, he believed. As a small town doctor, his working hours would be less demanding, less erratic, which would mean less time that James would eat his meals alone.

______________________________________________________________________________

Thomas sipped at his tea thoughtfully, watching as James paged through a French text book. He was very nearly a man now, with his graduation just weeks away, and his leaving for school in New York just a handful more weeks after that. In these times he had no choice to think of the family dinners of years before, with his beloved wife sitting at his side, bubbling with enough life to lead a thousand conversations. There had never been drawn out quiet dinners then.

He cleared his throat after a moment. “Are you going to the Prom?”

James looked up from his book, surprised. “What?”

“I heard that the Prom is coming up,” Thomas said. “Will you be attending?”

James jerked his shoulder and turned his eyes back to his book. “I might. It depends.”

“It depends on what?” Thomas asked.

James looked up again. “It just depends.”

“Do you have a date?”

James laughed. “No.”

“Oh.” Thomas frowned and sipped at his drink again. They fell into silence again, the only sounds being the gentle scrape of paper whenever James turned a page of his book and the quiet clink of silverware against china as they ate. It’s times like these that he missed his wife—not just because his love was gone, but because he had zero idea of how to talk to his own son.

It was hard to decide when to push and when to let the boy be. His excellent grades had earned him a spot at Columbia University, so he had no room to complain about the young man’s school work. James seemed to be well liked at school, according to the often-chatty teachers that were patients, and had captained the newly formed Hamilton High School basketball team the year before. Yet, at home, he was quiet, with sadness behind his eyes that worried him.

After dinner, James carried both of their dishes to the sink, running water over them briefly so that they wouldn’t be too crusty in the morning for Eleanor, the woman who had been tending to their house since their move to Hamilton. She managed the laundry, kept the pantry stocked, and picked up the odd jobs that fell between the cracks of a household that lacked a wife and mother.

James glanced at his watch and set his book back on the table. “May I please borrow the car?”

“Where are you off to on a school night?” Thomas asked, even as he pulled his keys from his pocket and tossed them.

James caught them one handed. “I am meeting Matilda O’Malley to help her with French.”

Thomas glanced at the French textbook on the table, knowing full well that James had not elected to take additional French classes this year, instead taking an addition course in anatomy. He smiled knowingly after a moment. “Why don’t you ask Matilda to the Prom?”

James looked at his father, momentarily horrified, before turning a bright pink. “I won’t be late,” he muttered as he rushed out of the room. Thomas waited until he heard the front door slam shut before laughing quietly. So that was the way the wind was blowing these days.

Thomas put a kettle on for tea, tided the kitchen while he waited, and retired to his office. He turned on the radio and picked up the newspaper Eleanor left next to his favored armchair everyday, frowning at the further news of Hitler’s invasion of Brussels. He was grateful of the United States’ lack of involvement in the latest war in Europe, and hoped that it would remain that way for the sake of his son. He wished that James might go to college without incident, without having to experience the horrors of war that Thomas experienced at too young an age.

James drove along searching for an open spot along Main Street. It was growing more difficult every day, as the weather turned warmer, the good people of Hamilton came out of the homes they had burrowed in over the winter, flocking to town for scoops of ice cream and root beer floats from Lawry’s, walks along the tree lined roads. It had been a particularly frigid winter, which only made the warm spring more pleasurable.

After he had parked the Ford coupe his father had bought just a few short months ago, he made his way down the busy street, his hands shoved deep in his pockets, lost in thought. His father had caught him off guard with his suggestion to ask Matilda to the prom. That was the very thing he had planned to do that night.

They had been friends since that smoldering summer when they had walked into town together. Those first few years, she was akin to the sister he never had, or at least he convinced himself as such. He often walked her home from school, even took her to the cinema a few times when there was a show they both wanted to see. He became a fixture at the O’Malley house, often being invited over for dinner when his father had to work late. He was still good friends with Michael, as well, which kept most from raising their eyebrows concerning the close friendship that he and Matilda carried on.

Then last year, everything changed.

She had campaigned for months, but finally her parents had granted her permission to travel to Baltimore for the summer to study at the Baltimore Ballet Conservatory, given she would stay with her aunt and uncle who lived in the city. She had left shortly after the completion of her ninth year of school, and returned old weeks prior to the beginning of her tenth. They had written each other frequently that summer, her raving about her classes under a former prima ballerina from London. He wrote of their mutual acquaintances in Hamilton, a mix of local gossip and events that kept her from feeling too terribly homesick.

She returned that August, and her family celebrated her return with a small picnic. He remembered clearly walking up to her house the afternoon of the picnic, he remembered when she first spotted him. She ran barefooted across the yard, her pale green dress billowing behind her. She threw her arms around his neck in a giggling hug. “I missed you most of all,” she whispered, her warm breath tickling his ear.

His reaction had been immediate and precisely the reaction you didn’t have for a sister. There was no accounting how three months had changed so much, but nonetheless, things were most definitely different between them, even if Matilda hadn’t seemed to notice.

He had made many excuses over the past year to spend time with Matilda, running into her as she left her ballet lessons on his way to the store, when it was rare that he ever needed anything at all. He would walk her home from school, even when he needed to be back at school not long after for basketball practice. And when she had complained of struggling with her French class he dusted off his text book and dug out his old notes so he would be ready to help.

James arrived at the library first, scoping out a table farthest from the hissing librarian that got agitated whenever her extraordinary hearing picked up the sound of human voices. All too often, he and Matilda lost focus on conjugating irregular verbs and got going on some other topic—anything from his anticipation of college to her nerves over her upcoming recital.

It wasn’t long after he had settled that Matilda was rushing up to the table on a cloud of infectious energy. “Bonjour,” she said brightly, unloading her bags on the floor next to her chair. She wore a pleated skirt and pale yellow cardigan sweater, but her hair was pulled into a tight bun, indicative of the excessive amount of time she spent in the ballet studio.

“Salut,” James said with a slight smile. “Comment allez-vous?” As the scent of lavender registered in his consciousness, he made up his mind once and for all.

“Ca va bein,” Matilda said brightly. “Sorry I’m late. Have you asked anyone to Prom yet?”

James eyes widened at the sudden change of topic, and he laughed nervously. “Not exactly, not yet.”

“Well, you’d better hurry up,” Matilda urged, sliding into her chair and leaning forward with a big smile. “Because you have to go, and you have to save me a dance.”

“What?” he asked in confusion.

“You’ll have to save me a dance,” Matilda repeated, practically vibrating in the chair next to him. “Robert Sullivan just asked if I would be his date.”

James’s baffled smile remained frozen on his face. “What?”

“He just asked me,” Matilda said, pulling out her French book and flipping open through the pages. James stared, transfixed, at her trembling hands. He could hear the excitement in her trembling voice, and he felt ice settle in the pit of his belly. “Robert Sullivan?” He thought of his classmate, a popular football player who displayed a special sort of ignorance of basic grammar in their mutual English class.

“He was waiting for me after rehearsal,” Matilda continued, oblivious to James’s reaction. “He actually offered me a ride home, and when I told him I was coming here, he walked with me. He was so sweet.”

“Robert Sullivan asked you to the Prom?” James repeated.

“Yes,” Matilda said, her head tilting at the funny, pinched look on his face. “You, sir, had better save me a dance.

James took a moment, looking down at the table as he swallowed the lump that had formed in his throat. So much for that brilliant plan, he thought. “Of course. Now, do you want to go over your assignments first?”

James took Rachel Thomas to the Prom, clumsily danced with her all night, and ducked out early before he could be held to the promised dance with Matilda. He kissed Rachel underneath the oak tree in her front yard, and liked her enough to date her through the summer, even though they both knew that things were likely to end shortly after his relocation to Columbia.

Even though he wasn’t terribly attracted to Rachel, she was a kind girl and seemed to enjoy his company, and he needed someone new to take to the cinema, because it wasn’t long before Matilda was going steady with good ol’ Robert Sullivan.