I.O.U

by Nancy Pickard

  “Heather?” I said. “Did you hear what happened to me?”

  Her gaze slid away again, and Ian grew positively frozen with silence. I asked her, gently, “What did you hear, honey?”

  She drew a shaky breath. “Mom said you got sick. But—” Her voice grew shakier, and she still wouldn’t look at me. “But some kids at school said—”

  “I’ll bet they said that your aunt tried to kill herself. Right? Well, listen to me, both of you. It isn’t true. I am fine. I am one hundred percent, positively, absolutely fine. I am a walking advertisement for mental health.” (Lord, I hoped it was true.) “I will tell you both exactly what happened so that you won’t have to wonder about it. Very few people know all of the details, but I want you to know everything that I know.” (Almost.) “You know how you’ve always heard that drugs and alcohol don’t mix? That they can be deadly?” (I couldn’t resist the auntly urge to sermonize.) “Well, I went to the doctor’s the other day and he gave me some vitamins and his nurse gave me some pills to help me relax. And later on I went to The Buoy and I had some beer, and I took one of those relaxing pills by mistake, thinking I was taking a vitamin. And the combination of the drug and the alcohol made me fall asleep in the car after I got into our garage. And the garage door came down and shut me into the garage, asleep, with the engine still running. And that’s how it happened. It was dangerous, and it was a close call, but your uncle got there in time to save me.” I smiled up at him. “My hero.” (Why was he frowning, and looking down in such a puzzled fashion at me?) “And I’m really glad he did. I love life. I love both of you! Do you really think I’d kill myself? I would never ever do that to you! Never! And besides, I can’t die yet. I haven’t put it in my will that I want Ian Guthrie to have my lifetime supply of sugarless bubble gum and that I want Heather Guthrie to have my earrings.” I tugged at the lock of her hair that hung below her navy bow. “Do you want my earrings?”

  “Yes!” she said, and smiled up at me, and then she added, shyly, sweetly, “But not real soon.”

  I bent down and kissed her forehead. “I promise.”

  “Aunt Jenny?” said Ian. “Do you really have a lifetime supply of bubble gum?”

  “Yes!” I reached behind Heather to punch her brother’s arm. “Used bubble gum! On the floor of my car! I’m sorry I missed soccer practice yesterday, kid.”

  “That’s okay,” he said, and grinned.

  “Come on, junior detectives.” Geof placed his hands on their shoulders, but he was still looking at me with that curious expression on his face. He opened his mouth as if he were going to say something, but then he glanced down at the children and seemed to change his mind. “Let’s go get a soda, and I’ll tell you some gory stories from the cop shop.”

  Their faces lit up—partly from anticipation of their uncle’s always-exciting police stories, partly from the knowledge that they could probably hit him up for hamburgers and a banana split to share, and partly from an awareness that they were getting off easy, at least until they got home and faced their parents—but I smiled away the offer.

  “You go on,” I said, and then I added, in answer to Geof’s inquisitive stare, “There’s something I need to do while I’m here, so I’m going back in. Why don’t you come back and pick me up after you take them home?”

  “You have to do something here, Jenny?”

  I nodded, and gave him a look over the children’s heads.

  “Francie may be here,” I explained to him. “She works in the office part-time.”

  Geof nodded in understanding, and said, only half joking, “My advice is to grab a wreath out of one of the chapels. Take the flowers with you as a peace offering.”

  I knew from previous experience that behind that door marked “Employees Only”—the door through which the funeral greeter had disappeared—lay a warren of administrative offices. Though I was acquainted with the owners and some of the employees, I hoped to be able to avoid everybody but Francie, as I just wasn’t up to having any more confrontations that day, even if they were sympathetic and friendly. I wondered, with no little nervousness, how Francie would greet me this time.

  I needn’t have worried on either score.

  In the first place, when I popped into the women’s restroom first, I found Francie Daniel there by herself. And in the second place, it had not occurred to me that by this time her sense of guilt would so far exceed my own as to eclipse it altogether.

  “Francie?” I said, tentatively, upon seeing her by the sink.

  Even as she met my gaze in the mirror, tears began to roll down her cheeks. “Oh, Jenny.” She ran to me, and pulled me into a fierce embrace. “Oh, Jenny, I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I’m just so very sorry.”

  It took me a moment to grasp her meaning. During that moment, she mistook my silence for anger. “Oh, honey, Duke and I feel so guilty. You came to us asking for help. And we turned you away. Oh, Jenny, I think it’s the most unforgivable thing I’ve ever done.” My face was getting wet just from being pressed so close to hers. “If we’d only known how lonely you must have felt, and how desperate… to go home the very next night and to…”

  Oh shit, I thought. Now I got it. Francie and Duke had heard that I’d tried to kill myself and now they were wallowing in guilt because they hadn’t “saved” me. For a vengeful, petty moment, I was tempted to let her wallow. Then my conscience kicked in. Or maybe it was my mother’s voice again: Here was this poor woman who’d never been anything but kind and compassionate to my family, who stood by my mother when nearly everybody else fled, and who always was the soul of goodwill to me. And she let me down once, just once, just one measly time in all of those years, and I couldn’t find it in my rock of a heart to forgive her? Nice, Jenny, I thought as I reached up with my free hand to touch her soft, wet cheek. My other hand was still trapped in her embrace. How wonderful that you’ve never made a mistake, yourself, or ever let a friend down. God, what a self-righteous little prig you are. How about thinking about somebody else for a change?

  I forced both of my arms around her and hugged her back.

  “It’s not your fault, Francie—”

  But she pushed me away from her, to hold me at arm’s length and to continue without letting me get another word in. “If we’d only seen how desperate you were, we could have made you stay with us that night. We could have gotten help for you. Oh, and we would have, Jenny, we would! I realize now that if I’d told you the truth, maybe you would have been satisfied, maybe you would have found some of the peace you were looking for and you wouldn’t have felt so desperate, but I didn’t know! I thought it would be worse for you to know—”

  “The truth?” I said. “What do you mean?”

  I felt my body go rigid under her hands, and I thought: If this is what it takes to get you to talk to me, Francie, then maybe you will have to wallow a while longer. I’m sorry, but you’ve got to talk to me, goddammit! I pulled her over to a metal and leather couch under a window, between the sinks and the stalls, and I made her sit down beside me. I pulled tissues from my purse and dabbed at her face until she smiled a little at me. “Shh, shh,” I murmured, “it’s okay, it’s going to be okay. Now. Tell me the truth about what, Francie?”

  I hoped she wouldn’t notice that my fingers were shaking.

  She sniffed, gulped, blew her nose on the tissue I handed her.

  And then she told me a story, never quite looking at me for more than a split second at a time while she told it, mostly looking at her lap, or into a tissue, or at the walls or the door, but hardly ever looking me straight in the eyes.

  “It’s about your mother,” she said.

  “Yes? It’s okay, you can tell me, Francie.”

  “Maybe I should check with your doctor first—”

  “Francie, please.”

  “All right. You know that she got so sick after she had her hysterectomy. Mentally, she just deteriorated. Well. Well, Jenny, that wasn’t the first time your mother was ever hospit
alized for mental illness.” I stared at her, willing her to keep talking, and yet dreading every word that dropped from her mouth. “Or for emotional illness, or whatever you want to call it, I never know which, it’s so confusing, it seems like one year they call it one thing, and then it’s something else—”

  “Francie,” I said softly. I hid my shaking fingers under my purse, and caught my lower lip between my teeth to keep its quivering from being obvious to her. If she doesn’t tell me what she was going to tell me, if she doesn’t get this over with soon, I thought, I’m going to hit her, I swear I’m going to hit her.

  She let out a breath, which seemed to relax her a little. “The first time was right after you were born.” She shot a glance at me. Under my purse, my hands found each other and held on hard. “Of course, you wouldn’t have known, you were just a tiny baby. But your mother got so… depressed, I guess. And she, well, she stopped caring for you, Jenny. She couldn’t nurse, and she… well, she just got really sick and your father had to put her into the hospital. Hampshire. She was gone about a year, Jenny.”

  “A year?” I said in a whisper.

  My first year of life? Without my mother? Even all those years later, I felt bereft and abandoned, knowing it to be ridiculous, but feeling it anyway. Mother! my child’s heart cried out within me.

  “And the next time,” Francie continued, unaware of the awful turmoil she’d set off within me. “There were a few episodes after that, but the next really bad time didn’t come until after your sister was born. Your mother wasn’t gone so long this time. Only a few weeks, I think, maybe not even that.”

  I would have been two years old when Sherry was born. Did I remember anything about my mother being gone that time? I searched my memory, my feelings, but nothing came, no buried longing.

  “Was it depression again?” I asked.

  Francie let out another breath, and then looked down at her hands, which were tearing a tissue apart. Clearly, there was something more she had to tell me, something she really, really did not want to say to me. How to get her to release it?

  I touched her hands, gently.

  “Francie, you loved her through everything. And I’ll always love her, too, no matter what happened, no matter what you tell me.”

  She took a sharp breath and then plunged into speech. “Your father said, he told me, I don’t think he ever told anybody else, that she… oh God, Jenny… she may have tried… she was depressed, she was… well, Jenny, the thing is, he said your mother tried to hurt herself. And Sherry.” Francie started talking very fast. “Sherry was a colicky baby, you see. Well, if you ever have children, you’ll know that’s the worst, I mean, that’s just the worst you can endure, the baby cries all the time, just all the time, and oh, you feel so helpless and so annoyed and angry, and that makes you feel so guilty, and oh, gosh, you’ve just had the baby, and you’re tired, so very tired, and you can’t cope, even the strongest of people can’t cope very well with a colicky baby, and your mother wasn’t strong, she was… oh, Jenny, she was desperate, I think—”

  Francie was crying again, and by then I was, too.

  “Like you,” she said, and clasped my hands in hers. “She was desperate like you. And I couldn’t save her. And I didn’t even try to save you, because I couldn’t stand to see you become like her, I couldn’t go through it again. And I didn’t want you to know about her. I thought I owed that much to her. I wanted to protect you—and her memory— from that. But I was a coward. Duke and I both, we were such cowards. And now look at you, Jenny. Forgive me. Please, please forgive me.”

  I reached for her to embrace again.

  “Yes,” I whispered into her shoulder. As I grasped her I suddenly realized—with apparent irrelevance—that Francie was wearing a wool jumper over a Peter Pan blouse. The dress was tweed, rough and knobby to my touch. But there was something comforting about it, maybe it was just the sort of jumper I thought a mother should wear. And Francie’s sensible shoes and her modest blouse and her comfortable, huggable, motherly body under her soft wool dress—it was all so damn motherly. So much like the way that my assistant, Faye Basil, dressed, I suddenly realized. And they even kind of looked alike, Francie and Faye. My two motherly friends and supporters. And then there was my old teacher, Miss Lucille Grant, so much older than they but also a sturdy, comfortable, steady kind of woman, who served me cookies and tea and who gave me good advice. Funny, I’d never put them all together in my mind before this. But then maybe I’d never before realized just how desperately I’d been looking—all my life?—for a mother.

  Francie disentangled herself from me, gently, and got up and washed her face at the sink. As I watched her I thought of that other Francis—Father Francis Gower—and of his warning to me: Don’t mess with other people’s memories—they are none of your business. I had no memory of any of the events that Francie had just confided to me. But now I knew unforgettable, searing things that I had not known before, and would never have recalled on my own. Was I better off for knowing them? The priest had also said of my mother, “You might not even like the woman you find.”

  Well, now I knew, I’d finally filled in those blanks.

  And now, how did I feel about her?

  “Francie? What did you mean the other day when you said that people accused Mom and Dad of something? What was it?”

  “Oh, it was so unfair, Jenny. Half the time they’d say he mismanaged the company. And then they’d turn around and say it was fraud. Some people thought that he took all the money and ran. I mean, it was so illogical, wasn’t it? If he was too dumb to manage the company, how could he have been smart enough to commit fraud?”

  “What about Mom? Where’d she come into it?”

  “Oh, that was the part that was really so unfair, but they said, people said, that your mother could never have been kept in such a fancy private hospital otherwise.”

  “Yeah,” I said, bitterly, “I guess she really scooped the cream off the top, didn’t she?”

  “There were so many rumors,” Francie said, “mainly because there wasn’t anything in the paper about it. Nobody really knew what was going on, so people just assumed the worst, and your parents took the brunt of it.” She turned, and gave me a quick, guilty smile that was like a tic. “I don’t know, Jenny, but what maybe your father deserved it.” Francie turned back around to the mirror. “But I know your mother didn’t.”

  Rumors. Which might have stopped if Sam Hayes’s father, who had sat on the board of PFF, had investigated the truth, and printed it. Rumors. Which had probably helped to drive my dad out of town, and which had probably helped to put my mother away for the rest of her life. And Sam Hayes, Jr., had sat there and lectured me about how grateful I ought to be, and my own dear Jack Fenton had defended the “good business” practices that had greased our slide into disgrace. Rumors.

  “I’ve got to go,” Francie mumbled. “I’ve done my damage. Now I’ve got to get back to work.”

  I met her eyes in the mirror above the sink, and gave her the best smile I could manage. “Nothing’s changed, Francie. Except that you’ve done me a wonderful favor, you’ve told me the truth, you’ve freed me from the pain of not knowing. I feel so much better.”

  “Oh, honey, do you, really?”

  “Yes.” She looked tremendously relieved, but of course I was lying. I’d never felt worse in my life. “And Francie, I didn’t try to kill myself. I fell asleep in the car with the engine running, that’s all. I’m sorry for the way I behaved at your house.”

  She seemed to believe me. She looked as if she wanted to believe me, and I realized there wasn’t anything else I could do or say to make it so. Any more than I could fight the rumors that would probably dog me all of my life, just as they had my parents.

  A little truth, I thought, might set us all free.

  After she left the restroom, I put my head down on the seat she had vacated and drew my feet up onto the couch and rolled myself up into a ball. I immediately fell asle
ep. It was a form of shock, I figured out later. When the system overloads, the system shuts down. When Geof came frantically searching for me an hour later, it was Francie who found me for him, still asleep in the ladies’ room.

  18

  IT GRADUALLY BECAME CLEAR TO ME THE NEXT MORNING, FROM the way Geof behaved, that he didn’t know anything about what had transpired between Francie and me in the restroom of the Harbor Lights Funeral Home the day before. I knew I hadn’t said anything about it, but I guess I assumed that Francie might have. Evidently still in the habit of keeping the secret, she had not.

  “Well, hello,” he greeted me, smiling from the bedroom doorway.

  I turned my face to see the clock: Seven. I’d slept sixteen hours.

  “I’d say you were still tired from the hospital,” he observed, wryly. He asked me if I wanted breakfast and I nodded and mumbled something about “half an hour.” My face was stiff, my tongue and lips didn’t want to move, and my eyelids were gummed together. It was going to take me at least that long to creak my way out of bed, into the shower, into some clothes, and then downstairs.

  “It’s a good day to go to Boston,” Geof declared, and then he disappeared from view. As I listened to the muffled tread of his steps on the stairs leading to the first floor, I thought: Boston?

  We were driving to Boston to see Cecil Greenstreet, it turned out. It appeared that I had agreed to it the day before, and since that was entirely possible, I went along with the plan, asking only that we postpone it until after lunch, because I had a couple of other things to do first.

  I didn’t say much during breakfast—Kix cereal and coffee—but Geof seemed to accept that as a natural effect of so much sleep. And that much was true: My head was awakening more slowly than my limbs, and the connection between my brain and my mouth was the last one to fall into place.