He bent to kiss her on the cheek. “I’m thinking of looking for a larger place and staying here all year.”
Until he spoke, he didn’t realize that he had been drifting toward such a major decision, but it was true. Either Maddison would explain herself to him, as she had promised when she’d ask for his patience, or he would learn the truth of her on his own. In spite of all the strangeness associated with her, he believed in her, in the rightness of her, and he yearned for—ached for—a domestic life with her at his side and perhaps one day children. No mystery in this world was so complicated or so dark that love could not solve it; and because he felt that he knew her heart, he believed no sin she had committed could be so great that love could not pay penance for it. He was not an author of misanthropic fiction. Although he was no Pollyanna, he had considerable faith in people, in humanity’s capacity for good and in its future. He had been foolish ten years earlier and, by his foolishness, had lost a shining future of his own. He would not lose this one. He would cling to Maddison through whatever might come, believe in her, be faithful to her through all challenges and revelations.
“Move here full-time!” Calista declared as he settled at the table, in the chair immediately to her right. “Oh, child, how lovely that would be. You always say this place inspires you, gives you ideas for your books. Living here, the writing will come more easily, too. I’m sure it will, dear.”
“Whatever has you so buoyant?” he asked. “You look as if you might soar up out of the chair like a helium balloon.”
“I had a visitor at breakfast. I’m almost afraid to tell you, as if the telling will take all the magic out of it.”
“Someone visited and talked about ghosts.”
“Not exactly, no.”
Calista sipped her wine, put the glass down, and crossed her arms over her breasts, as though to compose herself and restrain herself from babbling out the story in torrents of words that might somehow diminish it.
After a pause, she said, “I was sitting right here, just where I am now, listening to the harbor, enjoying the early sun, eating a morning roll and having coffee. This girl spoke to me from the promenade, said she thought my kimono was beautiful, and just like that, we were chatting as if we were old friends. I invited her in, and she came through the gate and sat where you’re sitting now. I offered her coffee, but she said she needed nothing.”
Balboa Island and Little Balboa were connected by a bridge, and a promenade encircled each of them. People walked the islands at all hours, and locals frequently stopped to visit.
“I thought I recognized her voice, but she wasn’t a local. She said she’d been here when she was younger but hadn’t been back in a long time.”
After fifty-four years of blindness, Calista’s ear for voices was uncanny. When a passing local called out a greeting to her, she nearly always answered with the person’s name—and rarely ever got it wrong.
“She said her name was Maddison. She was here more than an hour, and we were like old friends from the get-go. David, I can’t describe how fluid our conversation was, from the serious to the silly, back to serious, each of us so easy with the other. It was like . . . maybe you remember . . . like Emily and I were together.”
“I remember,” he said.
“It was exactly like Emily and me. And gradually . . .”
“Gradually, what?”
She searched his face with her sightless eyes. “I don’t want you to think I’m a crazy old woman.”
“You’re the farthest thing from that.”
“Gradually, I knew it as well as I know my own, even though I hadn’t heard it in ten years. She sounded just like my Emily.”
Her voice broke on the last few words, and she turned her head from David to gaze out at the harbor as though she could see the prows of three small sailboats cleaving the water as they raced up the channel.
He gave her a long moment to recover and then said, “But her name was Maddison.”
“Yes. And when I first recognized the voice, I thought it was only coincidence, a remarkable soundalike. However, the longer we talked, the more I became convinced that something extraordinary was happening. Her attitudes on so many things were the same as Emily’s. Her sense of humor, that quick wit, the way she would reach out and touch my hand and tap it three times with one finger. She used to do that, the three taps, and with each tap she’d say a word. ‘I. Love. You.’”
“Did she say that this time?”