Unbreathed Memories
Page 2
“Seriously.” She pulled up a chair and sat down. “First I’m taking a wood carving course, then I’m checking into a health resort in Ubud. I need to get rid of all the poisons in my system.” She moaned with pleasure. “Saunas, herbal wraps, meditation, vegetarian meals, mountain hikes—”
“And don’t forget the souvenir T-shirt.” I jerked my head toward the wall, just in case she had forgotten about the mirror. “How long will you be gone?”
“About a month. Sunnye is taking care of the store.”
“What about Eric?” Eric Gannon was Ruth’s ex-husband. He still owned a half interest in the shop and used that as an excuse to pop in from time to time and fiddle with the displays, just to annoy her.
“Mon-sewer zee artiste won’t even notice I’m gone. Last time I saw him he was walking down Main Street arm in arm with that Sylvia creature who used to work at Banana Republic.” She heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Thank God we didn’t have any children.” Ruth wiggled her fingers. “A little more to the right.”
I complied, although my arm was beginning to ache. You’d think she was building the space shuttle or something. When the telephone rang, seconds later, I made an eager move to answer it.
Ruth raised her hand, palm out. “You stay there, I’ll get it.” She snatched the receiver off the wall. “Ives residence.” She turned and looked at me, head tilted, considering the present placement of the mirror. “Oh, hi. How’re you doing?”
She waved her hand, indicating that I should move the mirror a few centimeters to the left. I was praying she’d find a cosmically acceptable position soon.
“Sure. She’s right here. I’ll get her.” She extended the receiver in my direction. “It’s Georgina.” Ruth wore that puzzled look where her eyebrows nearly met. “Apparently she doesn’t want to talk to me.” She held the receiver by the cord with two fingers, as if it were dirty and she’d forgotten the Lysol.
I set the mirror down on a chair, walked to the phone, and took the receiver from where it hung from Ruth’s outstretched fingers. “What’s up, Georgina?”
“Sorry to trouble you again, Hannah, but I thought of a couple more questions I wanted to ask about when I was a kid.”
“Why don’t you ask Mother? Or Ruth? Ruth was nine when you were born. She might remember more than I do. I was only seven.”
“I can’t talk to Mother and I don’t want to ask Ruth. She’s so … judgmental.” Georgina was practically whispering, as if she thought Ruth might overhear.
“If it’s for therapy, I’m sure we’d all be willing to help.”
“Don’t give me a hard time, please, Hannah. I’d rather talk to you, is all, if that’s OK.”
I sighed. Might as well get it over with. “Sure. Shoot.”
It seemed forever before Georgina actually spoke. Strange, for someone so anxious to talk. “Why was I hospitalized in kindergarten?”
That was easy. “You had your tonsils taken out.” I remembered how jealous we’d been when Georgina’d been allowed all the ice cream she could eat.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure.”
“How long was I in the hospital?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe two days.”
“I seem to remember it being longer than two days.”
“Georgina, you were only five. Two days away from your family would seem like forever to a five-year-old.”
“I guess so.” Georgina paused. She didn’t sound convinced.
I made a brave effort to change the subject. “Speaking of children, how are the boys liking Hillside?”
Georgina ignored me. Her next question caught me completely by surprise. “Tell me. How did Mary Rose die?”
Mary Rose was our infant sister who died when I was barely three, long before Georgina was born. I felt guilty that the only memory I had of Mary Rose, other than photographs, was from the tantrum I threw when the new baby moved into my room and I had to share a bedroom with Ruth. But I will never forget my mother grieving over the empty crib. “It was SIDS,” I told her, not believing that she didn’t already know this.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure! If you don’t believe me, ask Mother.”
“I told you, I just can’t talk to Mother about this stuff. She wouldn’t understand.”
I turned my back to the stove where Ruth had her head under the exhaust hood and was using the heel of her shoe to pound a nail into the center of a white rose on the wallpaper. “I’m not sure I understand either, Georgina.” I paused, waiting for her to reply. When she didn’t say anything I said, “Look, I’ve got to go help Ruth. She’s running amok in my house, feng shui-ing all over the place. Call me back later if you still want to talk.”
“I thought that you, at least, would understand,” she said in a small, sad voice; then she hung up abruptly, leaving me with a dial tone buzzing in my ear. I shrugged and returned the receiver to its cradle, feeling like I’d just bought a one-way ticket into the Twilight Zone.
Ruth stepped back to the kitchen table and surveyed her handiwork. “Good!” she said. Then after a few thoughtful seconds asked, “What’d Georgina want?”
“She was asking me some damn fool questions about when we were little.”
“Questions? Like what?” Ruth mumbled around a nail that wobbled between her lips.
“Like when she had her tonsils out and why Mary Rose died.”
“How odd.”
“She says it’s to help with her therapy.”
One eyebrow arched. “Therapy? What the hell’s she in therapy for?”
“She’s been depressed. Although what having one’s tonsils out has to do with depression, I have no idea.”
“I’m glad she’s getting help, Hannah, but why on earth didn’t somebody tell me about the therapy? You, for instance.”
I poured us each a fresh cup of jasmine tea and motioned for her to join me at the table. “I didn’t think it was important.” But in less than forty-eight hours, with my hands wrapped around a similar mug of tea, I would learn how very wrong I could be.
chapter
2
Other than to make an appointment with Dr. Bergstrom, for the next few days I didn’t worry much about my reconstructive surgery. Or about Georgina and her imaginary problems. Instead, I spent my mornings engrossed in a project an old friend at St. John’s College had steered my way. I had been temping at a local law firm, filling in for a secretary on maternity leave. I confessed to my friend over lunch at El Toro Bravo that I was glad the woman was coming back. I was pretty damned tired of doing nothing more constructive than answering the telephone and filing updates as thin as Bible pages into fat black legal loose-leaf binders.
“Have you heard of L. K. Bromley?” my friend asked.
Of course. Everybody had heard of L. K. Bromley, the famous mystery writer, who in her time was crowned “America’s Agatha Christie,” writing more than seventy mystery novels in a career that spanned fifty years. But few people knew that L. K. Bromley was also Nadine Smith Gray, that tweedy, straight-backed, white-haired Annapolitan who lived in a wee brick house on the corner of College and North Streets and walked her dachshunds every day on the back campus. She looked more like a Navy widow or someone’s sweet old grandmother. So when she moved to the Ginger Cove retirement community at the ripe old age of eighty-two and left her entire library—or, rather, L. K. Bromley’s library—to the college, along with the money to process and maintain it, everyone was surprised. No one at the college could figure out why Ms. Bromley had singled out St. John’s for that honor. Maybe it was in gratitude for all the lectures she attended there, someone speculated, or the classic film series, or the privilege of letting her dogs poop on the well-manicured lawn. Ms. Bromley, as mysterious and tight-lipped as her protagonists, wasn’t saying.
A delighted St. John’s needed someone with experience to organize and catalog the collection. I had just spent an enjoyable and productive two days per
ched on a low stool in a bright workroom on the southeast side of the recently renovated college library. There I sorted through Ms. Bromley’s novels, putting plastic covers on to preserve the dust jackets and deciding what to do with the large number of books that she used as references. There were guidebooks, maps, train schedules, trial transcripts, and books on forensic evidence, just the thing if you live a quiet suburban life and need to know what a bullet can do to a person’s head at close range. I pored over Coroner’s Quarterly with the same morbid fascination that I used to give to my grandfather’s medical texts, delighted in the old maps of Savannah, Georgia, and Reno, Nevada, and marveled that in the 1950s you could catch a train from Annapolis to Baltimore every hour. In recent years the tracks had been torn up, and you were lucky if you could find a bus going there once or twice a day.
The librarian had suggested that I complete the Bromley collection by rounding up copies of the author’s short stories. They had been serialized in publications such as the Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s, so I was expecting to spend a great deal of time with Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, visiting other libraries that kept complete runs of popular magazines, and shelling out dimes by the ton for photocopying. I was fascinated by the work, and after only a day had decided that even if the creeps who had laid me off last year from Whitworth & Sullivan wanted me back, even if they crawled down Route 50 after me, begging on their hands and knees, I’d never agree to work in Washington, D.C., again.
The part-time job also gave me the flexibility I needed to help my parents with their recent move to Annapolis from Washington State. Dad had graduated from the academy in 1950 and had been stationed there again when Ruth and I were in high school. He liked the town so much he always swore he’d retire there, so after leaving the Navy in 1980 and spending nineteen years as a consultant to the aerospace industry, he and Mother made plans to move east. Mom seemed relieved. My recent illness had affected her more than she let on, and we both had the telephone bills to prove it.
Now the calls were local, but I preferred the face-to-face contact I had missed when we were separated by a continent. Recent afternoons found me heading for my parents’ new home in the Providence community, out Greenbury Point Road, just past the Naval Station. It was a comfortable, ranch-style house on a quiet street, one block from the water. As a housewarming gift Paul’s sister, Connie, had painted a mailbox featuring entwined anchors, a mermaid, and other nautical flora and fauna. I noticed it had been installed at the head of the drive. “Capt. George D. Alexander, USN, Ret.” gleamed from both sides in bold, gold letters.
Mother was removing glasses from a packing barrel and layering them into the dishwasher when I arrived shortly after lunch. She swiped with the back of her hand at a damp tendril of graying hair that hung down onto her forehead, then nodded in the direction of the laundry room. “Hang your coat up in there, darling, then come give me a hand.”
I smiled at my mom, a petite woman not more than five feet tall, wearing black jeans, a faded red cardigan, and a favorite pair of fleece-lined slippers from L.L. Bean. Rolls of shelf liner, a ruler, and a pair of scissors lay out on the kitchen table. “Be a dear and finish up with that cabinet over there, so that it’ll be ready when these glasses come out.”
I dutifully measured the shelves, then used the scissors to cut the paper to fit, following the preprinted grid on the back of the sticky paper while Mom continued unpacking. At one point she held up a Peter Rabbit bowl that had been mine as a child. There was a chip in the rim where I had once banged it too hard with my spoon. “Remember this, Hannah?”
“I sure do.” I remembered my favorite bowl well, but had no clear recollection of the temper tantrum that had resulted in the damage. Mom must have told me about it. I had been two and a half; no one could remember back that far. Now Georgina was trying to dredge up memories from when she was that age. I didn’t believe it was possible.
I was trying to think of a way to bring up the subject of Georgina’s therapy with my mother, but wasn’t sure how much she knew. “Mom, have you talked to Georgina lately?”
She looked at me sideways over her shoulder. “Not for several days. Why?”
“She’s been calling and asking idiotic questions about her childhood. I told her what I knew about it, but can’t understand why she doesn’t ask you.”
“She’s probably afraid her father will give her an earful after the phone call he had with her last week. I overheard him saying that if she didn’t get herself to a real doctor, he didn’t want to talk about it any more.”
So they knew about the therapy sessions. I put down the scissors. “I thought she was seeing a doctor.”
“Dr. Sturges is a therapist, but she’s not an M.D.”
“I thought therapists were M.D.s.”
“Not always. Some are psychologists or social workers.”
“But surely she’s competent.”
“Your father doesn’t think so.”
“That woman is a quack.” My father entered the kitchen from the dining room carrying a wrought-iron pot rack and a hammer. He brushed my cheek with his lips, handed me the hammer, then climbed onto a stool and positioned the rack on the wall over the stove. He turned, towering over me, a handsome, broad-shouldered man, his close-cropped sandy hair only slightly gray at the temples. “She’s filled your sister full of the damnedest nonsense I’ve ever heard.” He extended his hand, and I put the hammer in it. He used it to bang away at a nail, swore when the nail bent double, and wrenched it out of the wall with the claw end of the hammer, sending it ricocheting off the wall and skittering across the tiles. He inserted another nail in the hole he had started and began pounding again. “God!—damned!—quack!”
I looked at my mother, her brown eyes serious and unblinking. “Why don’t you use a drill and some proper screws, George?” When my father didn’t answer, she shrugged. “I’d invite you to stay for tea,” she said to me, “but we haven’t found the teapot yet.” She gestured vaguely in the direction of still more boxes piled up in the corner of the kitchen, spilling out into the adjoining family room. “There’s coffee.”
“No thanks, Mom.” I gave her a hug. “I’ve got to get going anyway. I promised Paul I’d make chicken curry tonight, now that I’m a woman of leisure. More or less.”
I squeezed my father’s leg where he stood on the stool. “Bye, Dad.”
He patted my head. “See you later, pumpkin.” As I shrugged back into my coat I heard him say, “Lois, I’ll take some of that coffee, if you don’t mind. On second thought, make that a martini.”
In the fifteen minutes it took to cross the Severn River, drive home, and find a parking spot in front of our house on Prince George Street, I worried about Georgina. What on earth was going on in that screwball head of hers? At the turn onto the Severn River bridge, I was cut off by a silver Toyota speeding down the hill through a red light. I honked at the driver, a young man with a cell phone grafted to his ear. I had owned a Toyota once, until I drove it into a pond at my sister-in-law’s. I’d recently replaced it with a 1996 Chrysler Le Baron convertible in a pale purple color the used car salesman had described, with an expansive sweep of his hand, as wild orchid. Paul called it the Grannymobile, my midlife-crisis car. Could well be. In any case, I figured it was a heck of a lot cheaper than Georgina’s shrink.
At home, I retrieved the mail from the floor where it had fallen through the mail slot. Nothing but bills, and the U.S. Postal Service had torn the cover of my New Yorker magazine again. I tossed the lot onto the hall table, hung up my coat, draped the strap of my purse over a doorknob, and headed for the kitchen. I pulled some chicken breasts out of the freezer and put them in the microwave to defrost, and had just settled down with a steaming cup of Earl Grey when the telephone rang. I wiped my hands on a towel, sighed, and resigned myself to giving the brush-off to another telephone salesman. Nobody else ever called me at three o’clock in the afternoon.
“Hello.”
“Hello?” I said again.
The same plaintive sound sighed down the line, but this time it separated into two recognizable syllables. “Han-nah!”
“What? Who is this?” My heart began to pound.
“Hannah, it’s me, Georgina.” Her voice was so husky I hardly recognized it.
“Georgina! You sound terrible. What on earth’s the matter?”
“Hannah, you’ve got to come and get me!”
“My God, what’s happened?”
“I’ll explain later,” she whispered. “Just come!”
“OK, but I can’t do anything until you calm down and tell me where you are.”
“At my therapist’s.”
“Are you OK?”
“Yes.” Georgina drew a ragged breath. “No! Oh, please hurry!”
“I’m thirty miles from Baltimore. Even if I drive like a bat out of hell it’ll take me forty-five minutes to get there. Will you be OK until then?”
Whatever Georgina meant to say was lost in a noisy snuffle. She began to wail.
“Breathe, Georgina! Breathe.” I could hear her gasping, so I tried to distract her. “Where’s your car?”
“Scott … dropped … me … off.”
“Look, he can get there faster than I can. I’m going to call him right now.”
“No, Hannah, don’t! He’s home with the kids. He’d have to bring them along. They can’t …” Georgina paused as if listening for something, then said, “I think somebody’s coming. Please hurry!”
I knew that Diane Sturges lived on Lake Roland, a city park since 1861, yet one of Baltimore’s best-kept secrets. Georgina had pointed out the back of the elegant, ultramodern Sturges home last fall when we had been hiking with the children along the footpath that ran through the woods and along the lakeshore. We had parked down by the bridge like everyone else and had walked up the dirt and gravel path, holding hands and singing. I wasn’t sure I knew how to get to the house directly.