Unbreathed Memories

by Marcia Talley

  She hopped off the stool. “OK.”

  First we stopped at the hardware store, where I had a copy made of Georgina’s church key. All the while I was paying at the pharmacy for Julie’s antibiotic and driving back to my sister’s home on Colorado, I puzzled about the party Julie had described. Julie was the most pragmatic child I knew. If she said it happened, it happened. But perhaps it had happened in a fever-induced dream. No matter how I looked at it, it just wouldn’t compute.

  Back at the house I sat Julie on the kitchen table and gave her a generous spoonful of a viscous pink medicine that the pharmacist said was supposed to taste like strawberries, but, judging from the grimace on Julie’s face after she swallowed it, probably didn’t. Upstairs, I settled Julie into bed for a nap and read her the first few chapters of Muttketeers!, a Wishbone adventure book. By the time I got to “ ‘All for one and one for all,’ the musketeers and D’Artagnan shouted together,” Julie was asleep, with Abby rabbit nestled in the crook of her arm. I laid the slim paperback next to her hand and slipped out of the room.

  Remembering my promise to do something about the laundry, I visited the bathroom used by the children and dumped the overflowing clothes hamper out on a spread-out towel. I gathered up the corners of the towel like a hobo’s bundle and headed for the basement. With both arms full, I had to flip the light switch up with my elbow and make my way cautiously down the wooden stairs.

  Georgina’s washer and dryer sat in a dark corner of the basement, near the furnace. I batted my hand around over my head until I made contact with the cord that turned on the overheard bulb. When light flooded the area, I could see I had my job cut out for me. Piles of laundry were already stacked up in front of the washing machine, and the dryer’s door yawned open. Clean, dry clothes spilled out onto the door as if someone had been pawing through them, looking for something. I tossed my bundle on top of the accumulated pile and leaned over the dryer, pulling out items, mostly towels, and folding them up on top of the machine. That done, I lifted the lid on the washer. It was full of damp laundry still stuck to the sides of the drum by the spin cycle.

  I reached into the washing machine and started extracting items and shoveling them into the dryer. A sheet. Several washcloths. A towel. Another sheet. And another. My God! The load was almost entirely sheets. With my heart pounding in my ears, I checked out the pile of laundry that had been waiting to go into the washer. More sheets. Hardly daring to breathe, I counted them. My sister (or someone) had been in the process of washing twenty-three sheets. Some were twin size; some doubles; and many bore the telltale stains of red wine. Julie hadn’t been imagining things, after all!

  I leaned against the washing machine and tried to catch my breath. Surely there was a logical explanation. If so, I couldn’t imagine what it could be.

  I loaded the children’s clothes into the washer, scooped some detergent out of the box and sprinkled it over them, twisted the dial to regular wash, and got the machine going. Other than incredible sloth, what could explain the presence of so many dirty sheets? The washer began vibrating against my back as I pondered. Visions of Georgina and Scott frolicking around their living room with their sheet-clad friends while the children were consigned to bed made my blood run cold. I thought about what Gwen had said about satanic cults. Oh, my God! Had the children witnessed some sort of diabolical ritual?

  Normally I would have stuffed the clothes into the machine, tossed in a handful of detergent, and gone upstairs. But for some reason, I stayed there with my troubled thoughts, mesmerized by the rhythmic ja-jung, ja-jung of the washer and enjoying the warm, gentle vibrations against my back. The washing machine entered its first spin cycle, making so much noise in combination with the dryer that I didn’t hear my brother-in-law until he had come all the way down the basement steps and was standing behind me. “You didn’t need to do that,” he said.

  I nearly leapt out of my Nikes. I pressed a hand to my chest, hoping to keep my heart from bursting out of it. “You scared the hell out of me, Scott!”

  Scott’s face crinkled into a grin. “Sorry.” His arm swept the room. “You didn’t have to do the laundry. Taking care of Julie was enough.” Beneath the light from the unshaded overhead bulb, Scott looked older than forty-five. His prominent brows shaded his eyes, causing dark half-moons to appear under his lower lids.

  “The children were out of clean underwear,” I said. “You should see what Julie wore this morning. Straight out of the Salvation Army reject bin.”

  Scott’s face grew serious. “I’m sorry about that. Georgina …” He shrugged. “Well, you know.”

  I nodded. “That’s OK. I don’t mind doing the laundry. Not a bit.”

  “Thanks, Hannah.” He bent over and began sorting through the pile of laundry at his feet.

  It was this touch of domesticity that moved me. I found myself warming to my brother-in-law, although I wasn’t so blind as to discount entirely the possibility that I was being manipulated again. I couldn’t stand not knowing. “Scott, you have to tell me one thing.”

  He glanced up from where he had been separating dark green towels from the light-colored sheets. “Yes?”

  “What’s the story with all the sheets? You have months’ worth down here. I don’t even own that many sheets.”

  I studied his face, looking for any signs of panic or alarm, but he simply grinned.

  “It’ll sound kind of funny, but the truth is, we were having a party.”

  “A party?” I gawped.

  “I thought it would cheer Georgina up. Last month I talked her into serving as rehearsal accompanist for the amateur theater group I’m involved with. She may have mentioned it.”

  I shook my head. “Nope.”

  “So when they were looking around for a place to hold the cast party, I volunteered.”

  “A party I can understand, Scott, but sheets?”

  He broke into huge, rumbling laughter, throwing his head back with his mouth open so wide I could see his fillings. “Oh, Hannah, whatever must you think? Didn’t I mention the play? It’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”

  Even in the uncertain light, relief must have flooded my face, because Scott crossed the room and slipped his arm around my shoulders. “Toga! Toga! Toga!” he chanted, inches from my ear.

  I slumped against him, weak with relief. “When Julie told me about the party, Scott, I have to confess I was more than puzzled.”

  “I think the party did Georgina good, but it’s hard to say. At least she smiled at me for the first time since Diane Sturges died.” Scott indicated the laundry. “Georgina had put everything on hold.” He cast me a glance heavy with meaning. “I mean everything! But, after the party, she seemed almost normal. She even agreed to look for another therapist.”

  Until he reminded me, I had nearly forgotten the reason for my niece-sitting gig. “And did she find one?”

  Scott shook his head. “We didn’t think the guy she saw today was a good match. But she’s got an appointment with another therapist early next week. It won’t be long.”

  I yanked the cord that turned off the light immediately over our head. “Togas, huh?” I remembered a similar party at a co-op dorm on East College Street, a dilapidated pile that in later years I swore had been used as a set for the movie Animal House.

  “Togas.” He led the way back up the basement steps, then turned to look down at me, standing four steps below. “Why? What did you think?”

  “Scott, you really don’t want to know.”

  chapter

  14

  On Saturday, my parents arrived early, not too long after lunch. Distressed at how washed-out and tired my mother had appeared when I last saw her, I had called and invited them over for dinner. After depositing Mother with me, Daddy and Paul disappeared almost immediately, heading for Galway Bay, the pub around the corner, to bend an elbow over a beer or three and trade corny jokes with Fintan, the owner’s irrepressible brother. Mother and I adjourned to the
kitchen where she sat bolt upright in a chair, her hair, closer to the color of apricots in the artificial light, curling damply and in sharp contrast against her pale cheeks.

  “Thanks for having us over, Hannah. If you hadn’t asked, I would have hinted. I just couldn’t face cooking today, and I know your father is getting tired of carryout.”

  I was making lasagna from scratch, a favorite recipe that used meatballs instead of crumbled hamburger. I dumped a cup of seasoned bread crumbs mixed with Parmesan cheese into the ground round, added an egg, and began kneading the mixture with my bare hands. “We’ll have salad with this, and garlic bread.”

  “Sounds delicious. What can I do to help?”

  I held up a hand, gooey with meat mixture. “Absolutely nothing. Just sit, drink your tea, and keep me company.” I pinched a bit of the mixture from the bowl and began rolling it between my palms, forming a meatball about three-quarters of an inch in diameter. “And I’ll tell you the story of Julie and the Sheets.” I tossed the meatball into a hot frying pan, pinched off some more of the meat mixture, and began shaping another.

  “Julie and the Sheets? Sounds like a rock band. I can’t wait.”

  By the time I finished my tale, eight more meatballs were sizzling in the pan and my mother was sprawled in her chair, convulsed with laughter. “Scott is such a stick! Just the picture of him romping around, draped in a sheet …” Mother wiped her eyes with a napkin. “That’s just too funny!”

  “And Julie tells me Georgina wore pink. Even in her selection of recreational toga wear, your youngest daughter remains resolutely fashion-conscious.”

  The smile slid from her face. “What are we going to do about Georgina, Hannah?”

  I dropped another meatball into the frying pan. “I honestly don’t know, Mother.” I didn’t dare share the information I had learned posing as a police official to make highly illegal telephone calls. She would have scolded. But I did mention my visit to the therapy group and my conversation afterward with Gwen and Mindy. Mother seemed enormously cheered when I told her about the Cabbage Patch doll. “I’m sure it will sort itself out,” I said. “Georgina is interviewing new therapists as we speak. Diane Sturges was just one bad apple in a very large basket of good ones. Surely she’ll find somebody competent.”

  “I hope you’re right.” She stirred her tea. “Want to know what I’ve been doing since Tuesday?”

  I turned my head and raised a questioning eyebrow.

  “I’ve been surfing the Internet.”

  “You? No way.”

  “I went over that information you got from L. K. Bromley and started hunting on the Internet for information on childhood sexual abuse.” She leaned forward in her chair. “It’s all very distressing, I’m afraid. While I have no doubt that there are adults out there who were sexually abused as children, people who may well have wiped the memory of abuse clean out of their minds, I’m equally convinced that Georgina’s memories are totally false.”

  “We all know she wasn’t abused, Mother, so the memories must be false. And if so, we have to ask ourselves: Where did they come from?”

  “That damn therapist,” my mother said. “Over the past few days I’ve read articles about hundreds of young women like Georgina, and I think I can see how it happened.”

  I turned my back to the stove. “How?”

  “Well, a patient comes in with a list of symptoms. If the therapist believes in recovered memory and tends to see sexually abused children around every corner …” She extended her hands, palms up, and shrugged. “I rest my case.”

  I remembered my conversation with Mindy and Gwen, about our present condition being the result of some dreadful, long-hidden event in our past. I paraphrased Gwen. “I see your point. If I’m an alcoholic, I must be trying to drown the evil memory. If I try to slit my wrists, it’s because I hate myself for allowing Uncle Hugo to take advantage of me.”

  “Exactly. And Georgina’s a textbook case.”

  “How so?”

  “She’s depressed. Reason unknown.”

  “If I were married to Scott, I’d be depressed, too.”

  “Hannah, mind your manners.”

  “Sorry. Go on.”

  “It’s all so scriptlike. She had stomachaches. Recurring nightmares. She wet her bed until she was ten.”

  “What does that say about sexual abuse?”

  “If the bed is wet, who’d want to crawl into it?”

  “Oh, gawd, Mother. That’s gross.”

  “Your sister took an overdose of sleeping pills at fourteen—”

  I spun around, the lasagna forgotten. “What? You never told me that!”

  “You were away at college.” She moistened her lips. “It was exam time and I didn’t want to worry you, honey.”

  “Jeez, Mom. What else haven’t you told me?”

  She ignored my question. “The point is, it all fits a pattern. It’s a red flag that screams ‘child abuse.’ ” Her violet eyes widened. “Even if it didn’t happen.”

  “So what else did you learn online?” I returned to rolling up the meatballs.

  “That there are parents in easy reach of my modem who’ve been falsely accused of abusing their children.” She pushed her cup, still full of tea, away. “I can’t tell you how much comfort it gives me to know that there’s a logical reason behind Georgina’s delusions—that those memories were planted there by an irresponsible therapist. I’m confident that over time, she’ll come to realize this and change her story.”

  I hoped my mother was right. I turned my attention to the simmering sauce, tasting it with a wooden spoon and adding a slug of Tabasco. I was rolling up the last of the meatballs when the telephone rang. “Could you get that, Mom? My hands are a mess.”

  Mother pushed herself out of her chair and moved to the telephone with uncustomary slowness, as if every bone in her body hurt. She reached for the receiver. “Hello?”

  Her face transformed itself from blank indifference to surprise, then to shock. “I beg your pardon?”

  I looked up from the sizzling meatballs. “Who is it?” I whispered.

  Mother listened a few more seconds, then slammed the receiver into its cradle. She returned to her place at the table and sat down with an audible plop.

  “Who was it?” I asked again.

  “I don’t know! He frightened me, Hannah. It was a man’s voice, but he didn’t identify himself. He just growled into the receiver, ‘We know who you are. Cut it out or you’ll be sorry.’ ” She studied me seriously. “He thought I was you. Then he said, ‘Leave Diane Sturges’s patients alone.’ What did he mean by that, Hannah?”

  I pumped some soap onto my palm and washed the meat off my hands in the sink, keeping my back to my mother until I figured out what I was going to say. I felt like a high school kid trying to decide how much of the fun at a slumber party I was going to tell her about. Mother had enough on her mind without my sharing with her everything I’d been up to. I turned to face her. “After I found out Georgina had been involved with that therapy group at All Hallows Church, and I talked with some of the women … maybe I upset someone.”

  “Who the hell was that, then?” She gestured toward the telephone. “It certainly wasn’t a woman!”

  “I don’t know.” I sat down next to her, drying my hands on my apron. “It could be the husband of one of the women. A father, maybe.” I tried to make light of the situation. “It could even have been Scott, I suppose, disguising his voice.”

  “It wasn’t Scott. I would have known Scott.”

  “I know one way to find out.” I crossed to the telephone and pressed the review button on our caller ID. “Damn. Unknown. The bastard was blocking his number.” I reached out and patted her hand. “It’s nothing to worry about. Somebody’s nose is out of joint is all.”

  She grasped my chin and turned my head so that she could look directly into my eyes. “Speaking of noses, are you sure you aren’t poking yours in somewhere it doesn’t belong?”
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br />   “Yes, Mother,” I lied.

  “You don’t have a good track record on minding your own business, as I recall.”

  “No, Mother.”

  I rose and picked up the loaf of French bread from the counter and set it on a cutting board in front of her. I handed her a serrated knife. “Here. Would you slice it for me?”

  “Be happy to. On the diagonal?”

  I nodded. Mother began carefully slicing the bread while I returned to the stove and moved the meatballs around the pan to keep them from burning. I had just put the lasagna noodles on to boil when I heard the front door slam. “Finally! Our menfolk are home from the perilous hunt.” I rested the spatula on the edge of the pan. “We’re in the kitchen,” I shouted.

  But it wasn’t Paul or my father. I knew it when I heard the surprise in my mother’s voice. “Well, hello.”

  I paused in my stirring and turned around. Georgina stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, her green coat unbuttoned, revealing a scoop-necked T-shirt tucked into a pair of slim blue jeans. “I … I didn’t expect to see you here,” she stammered.

  Mother laid the knife down carefully next to the cutting board. “But I’m glad you’re here, sweetheart. I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

  “Well, I don’t want to talk to you, Mother. And you can stop sending me those articles.”

  I looked from my mother to my sister. “What articles?”

  Georgina answered, “Those damn false-memory articles.” She stood in the door and seemed prepared to stare Mother down.

  “You were such a wonderful, happy child until all this happened, Georgina. You’ve been brainwashed by that therapist. She planted those awful memories in your head.”

  Georgina threw her purse down on the floor. “For the love of God, Mother. You don’t understand anything! Why would my therapist put ideas into my head? Why would I have gone into therapy if I hadn’t been abused? I didn’t need a therapist to convince me I’d been abused, for Christ’s sake, I went to therapy for help because I had been abused!”