A man with an umbrella dashed by, and Drew watched him leap over a puddle on the sidewalk.
“It wasn’t a joke,” Valerie said at last, speaking softly.
She said nothing more, and Drew wondered if she was crying.
“Valerie ...” With dread, he tapped his forehead lightly against the glass three times. “What happened to our baby?”
He was now certain that she was crying. She must have dropped the receiver and walked away a short distance. He could hear the sound of her breathing in shuddering gasps.
“Valerie ... please come back. Talk to me.”
Finally, she picked up the phone. “I’m here.”
Drew stood utterly still. His gut was on fire. “What happened to our baby?”
“He died,” she told him. “I’m so sorry. And I didn’t run off to New York. My father sent me to Alaska. That’s what happened to our son—he died in the earthquake. But it was all my fault.”
Drew sank down to a squatting position on the floor of the phone booth and cupped his hands together over his eyes. “Please tell me what happened. Tell me everything.”
For an unbearable moment, Valerie said nothing, and Drew feared she had dropped the phone again and gone off somewhere to cry. But finally, she began to describe everything about her life in Alaska, leading up to the day of the earthquake. She told him how she had pushed the baby carriage onto the city dock with hopes of her letter finally reaching him. But then the shaking had begun, and she had been knocked off her feet by a violent wave that had swept into town.
She described everything in horrific detail—her return to the place where Cameron’s carriage had gotten stuck. Finding him gone. She told Drew about her tumble into the crack in the earth. Her broken leg. Joe Brown saving her at the last second.
Drew listened to the tale of her friend Jeremy rescuing Angie’s baby from the floating rooftop and offering the child to Valerie as a gift to console her. And to console himself because he had lost the woman whom he loved. Jeremy had wanted to raise Angie’s baby with Valerie, somewhere far away where no one would find them.
By the end of it all, Drew was numb with disbelief while cars drove past, splashing through puddles that doused the phone booth like a fire hose. The streetlight overhead blinked off and on, and Drew wondered if this was all part of the nightmare. The crushing weight of his sorrow made him dizzy.
“If I had known where you were,” he told her, “I would have come. I would have come in a heartbeat, and I would have married you.”
Valerie’s voice was calmer now. Smooth and lovely, the way he remembered it. “Thank you for saying that. I wish I had known it back then, when I was missing you, and when I was trying so hard to hate you. But I never could. Whenever I played my guitar or wrote music, it was always about you. Every song of love is for you. And for Cameron.”
Drew looked up at the small ceiling of the phone booth and spoke in a guttural voice. “It’s your father I hate. If he was still alive, I’d go over there right now and strangle him with my bare hands.”
Valerie did not respond to that. Drew wondered if she had forgiven her father before he had died or visited him on his deathbed. He asked her that question.
“No,” she replied. “I never spoke to him again after I left Nova Scotia. At least he lived long enough to see me win the Oscar.” She paused contemplatively. “I wonder if he was proud.” Then she scoffed into the phone. “Knowing him, he was probably still ashamed of me. I don’t think I ever could have pleased him, no matter what I did in my life.”
Drew slipped a few more coins into the pay phone. “It doesn’t matter. You should be proud of yourself,” he said. “I was proud of you when I saw the movie and especially when I found out you’d written the theme song.”
“Thank you,” she said.
Drew looked out at the dark, wet street. He wished he had enough change to keep feeding the pay phone all night, even if they just remained on the line in silence.
But unfortunately, he was going to run out of change soon, so he hurried to say what needed to be said.
“Can I come and see you?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Of course it wasn’t.
Nevertheless, he asked, “Why not?”
“You know why.”
He fell silent. Did she know?
“I saw your engagement announcement in the local paper,” she explained. “Aunt Mary sends it to me every week. Congratulations.”
