by Karen White
My feet landed on paper as I slid them over the side of the bed. With a groan, I reached down and picked up the letter that I’d read at least a dozen times, my disappointment having now morphed into full-out anger. I relished the emotion; it was the only emotion I’d felt in a very long time.
Holding the crumpled paper in front of me, I read it again, curious to see if maybe reading it in the light of day after a night’s sleep might change the way I felt.
Dear Ms. Mills,
It has come to my attention that you have been trying to contact my grandmother, Mrs. Lillian Harrington-Ross, in the hopes of talking with her about your late grandmother, Annabelle O’Hare Mercer.
Unfortunately, my grandmother is now very frail and bedridden, and she is not receiving visitors. On your behalf I did ask her about your grandmother and it took several moments for her to even recollect that she had once known her.
I’m afraid that even if my grandmother were healthy enough to meet with you, she wouldn’t be able to answer any of your questions at all.
My deepest condolences on your loss.
Regards,
William T. Gibbons
My gaze traveled from the letter to the newspaper on the bedstand. I hadn’t yet canceled my grandfather’s subscription and I found myself reading it from cover to cover as if to make up for my own lack of involvement. It was folded open to the front page of the people section—written the same day as William Gibbons’ letter—where a large photograph taken at a charity horse event was the main feature. The photograph focused on an older woman, looking neither frail or bedridden—her only seeming nod to her age being a beautiful ebony cane—and a younger man flanking a young girl tricked out in equestrian garb and holding aloft a gold trophy.
The caption read:
Mrs. Lillian Harrington-Ross of Asphodel Meadows Plantation and her grandson, Dr. Tucker Gibbons, award the winner’s cup to Katharine Kobylt of Milledgeville at the Twin Oaks Charity event.
I slapped the letter on top of the newspaper, welcoming the new wave of anger. I’d still only skimmed through the scrapbook pages, not completely understanding why I hesitated to read them thoroughly. But I’d seen the name Lillian Harrington on practically every page and from what I could tell, the pages spanned nearly a decade of my grandmother’s life, beginning around the age of thirteen.
And then there was the picture of the three girls sitting atop a pasture gate, grazing horses visible in the background. Their arms were thrown around one another’s shoulders, their identical expressions of joy, mirth, and friendship plastered on eager faces. I shut my eyes, having finally accepted that my anger was aimed at myself. I shifted uncomfortably on the perch of my bed, realizing that all the answers to my unasked questions were now buried along with my grandmother under the alluvial soil in Bonaventure Cemetery.
I felt something else, too—an undercurrent that wasn’t anger or disappointment. It was what I imagined I’d feel if I looked up into the sun to find all the answers and found instead only blindness. I wasn’t naive enough to assume that any answers I’d discovered would be what I wanted to hear.
Stumbling to the bathroom, my back and right knee aching with the sudden movement, I hurriedly showered and dressed, pulling my jeans out of the bottom of a pile of laundry I hadn’t yet found the energy to wash. The burst of energy I’d discovered with my newfound purpose of contacting Lillian Harrington had fizzled, then gone flat like a bottle of Coke left open too long. William T. Gibbons’ terse letter had taken care of that. My eyes stung as I pulled my hair back into an unforgiving ponytail and tried to think of anything else to get excited about beyond the arrival and departure of the Goodwill truck.
After limping down to the kitchen and rummaging through the cabinets to find large plastic garbage bags, I returned to my grandfather’s room and opened his closet. Not allowing sentiment to cloud my progress, I dumped suits, ties, slacks, and belts indiscriminately into the bags. I paused only when I came to his straw hat. I didn’t touch it, but left it on the shelf where my grandfather had last placed it, then watched as it quickly became the last item remaining, a lone survivor of a long life, my part in it no longer clear. I considered it for a moment, seeing the hat and myself as the last testaments to my grandfather’s years on this earth and couldn’t really decide which one he’d put more faith in. At least the hat had shielded his eyes from the sun. I’d only succeeded in letting him down.
Almost as an afterthought, I grabbed the hat, then closed the closet door, feeling only regret in the brittle straw in my hands as I firmly tucked the hat into the open plastic bag.
Glancing at my watch, I limped back down to the kitchen with the bags, quickly scrawling out tags for each bag and taping them to the outside. Then one by one, I dragged them to the back garden, settling them into what had once been my grandmother’s herb garden, the rocks delineating the edges now mostly gone, the remaining ones bleached by the sun and placed as sporadically as tombs in a graveyard.
Sweating and out of breath, I leaned forward with my hands on my knees and felt something digging into my thigh. I reached into my pocket and found the old-fashioned key George had given me in the envelope with the letters to Lillian. I’d forgotten about it until now, and made a mental note as I returned it to my pocket to test all the doors in the house with it.
After returning the key to my pocket, I headed toward the kitchen door, glancing up at the back of the house as I made my way down the weed-covered flagstone walk. I reached the back porch and stopped, the view of the rear of the old house suddenly flashing through my head. Retracing my steps, I stood again in the deserted garden and looked up at the back of the brick house.
The row of windows on the upper story that marked my bedroom and the bedroom shared by my grandparents appeared as they always had: neat tidy rectangles of six-on-six panes with ripples visible in the old glass.
My eyes traveled to the attic level, where three shorter windows were centered over the upper story, the two brick chimneys on either side of the roof framing the windows like parentheses. I stared at them for a long time, fighting against the encroachment of my inertia as the excitement of my new discovery pressed me forward and into the house.
I took the stairs slowly, my knee aching and urging me to sit down. But I pressed forward, feeling the key in my pants pocket and trying to imagine why my grandmother would think that pain could ever be useful.
At the far end of the upstairs hallway stood the door that led to the attic stairs. As I’d thought, the key protruded from the lock and the door was unlocked. I pulled it open, sneezing as the dust motes, disturbed from their resting place for the first time in years, drifted up to tickle my nose. I sneezed, then pulled the door open farther and made my way up the stairs.
I stood amid the old trunks and broken furniture, antique appliances and the Victorian doll house that my father had made but that my grandfather had relegated to the attic because it distracted me from focusing on horseback riding. On the opposite side of the room from the single brick chimney sat a large mahogany open armoire filled with my horse show ribbons and trophies. These had once been kept in the front parlor until my accident, after which I’d begged my grandfather to get rid of them. I hadn’t known what he’d done with them and I was still too numb to care that they hadn’t been thrown away. All I’d cared about at the time was getting them out of my sight, an unwanted reminder of the girl who had cheated death once and had been stupid enough to believe that there would never be anything else to lose.
This attic was the old stomping ground of my imagination back in the days of my childhood when I still had one and before life taught me that dreaming was only for those young enough to have not experienced too much of real life. But in all of those years of playing up here and digging in the trunks for old-fashioned dresses made of soft clingy fabrics and high-heeled shoes that were three sizes too big for me, I had never noticed that the two windows visible from the inside of the attic didn’t correspond
to the three windows seen from the back garden.
I walked to the wall where the third window should have been. The walls in the attic were plastered and painted a stark white and there was nothing remarkable about this wall except for the large armoire in the middle of it. Pressing my forehead against the plaster, I peered into the small crack behind the armoire and saw the door exactly as I’d imagined it.
My first thought was to call Mr. Morton and have him save me the trouble of moving the armoire by asking him to tell me what was behind the door. But he was on his trip and he’d already made it clear that he’d told me all that he was going to. Whether his choice had been to protect me or my grandparents, I wasn’t sure.
After removing most of the larger trophies from the shelves of the armoire and stacking them on the floor, I leaned my back against the armoire and dug my heels into the old wood floors to give it a good shove, succeeding in doing nothing more than making the piece of furniture groan and my back and knee ache.
With a heavy sigh of resignation, I went downstairs to my bedroom and made a quick phone call to George from Mr. Morton’s office, telling him only that I needed his help to move a heavy piece of furniture. Then I went down to the foyer and waited on the bottom step for the doorbell to ring before slowly answering the door.
Without preamble, I led George up to the attic and walked straight to the armoire. “Here’s that piece of furniture I told you about. There’s nothing in it but I still can’t get it to budge. I was thinking that maybe with the two of us pushing on one side, we could slide it.”
George eyed the massive piece of furniture speculatively before taking off his seersucker jacket and hanging it on an old hat rack that jutted out of a pile of packing boxes. “I think I can do this by myself, Earlene. I wouldn’t want you to strain your back.”
I bit the inside of my lip to keep from saying something I shouldn’t. “Humor me, okay? I’m pretty sure it’s going to take both of us.”
With a furrowed brow he placed his shoulders next to mine so that we were standing next to each other with our backs against the armoire, George’s frown changing to a smile as soon as he realized that he was standing closer to me than I’d ever allowed him.
Digging in our heels, I counted to three and then we both pushed as hard as we could and succeeded in budging the armoire about an inch. My back and knee protested but I felt encouraged by our progress. Turning to George I said, “Let’s try it again. It shouldn’t take too long.”
With renewed energy, we continued to push an inch at a time until we’d completely uncovered a door that matched the rest of the doors in the house.
George raised his eyebrows. “Did you know this was here?”
“Not until about four hours ago,” I said as I dug the key out of my pocket and fit it into the lock. It was old and unused and I had to use my whole hand to turn the key but finally I heard the click of the locking mechanism. I paused and put my hand flat against the door, then faced George. “Whatever we find in this room stays between you and me—do you understand?”
He pretended to zip his lips and throw away a key. I turned back to the door and pulled it open, the unused hinges complaining loudly.
The room was cramped, with a sloped ceiling and only enough space for a single bed, washstand and a small chest of drawers. I moved to the center of the room, slowly turning around and taking it all in, trying to get the four walls to give up their secrets. A basket by the lone window held faded and rumpled magazines. I peered at the one on top, a Good Housekeeping magazine dated June 1939.
George moved to close the door to make more room for both of us to stand inside. “There’s no knob on the inside of the door.”
I looked at him, feeling sick. “Don’t shut it all the . . .” My voice trailed away as I spotted the small bassinet that had been behind the door. I approached in small steps, holding my breath.
“It’s empty, Earlene.”
I let my breath go as I stood looking down at the white whicker of the bassinet, tiny dots swimming in front of my eyes. Inside the baby’s bed, folded neatly and with care at the bottom, lay a small knitted blanket made of pale blue yarn.
CHAPTER 5
That night, I dreamed of the accident again for the first time in months. I was transported back as Fitz and I tackled the cross-country course and approached fence five, the flower basket. Officially, they said it was a misjudgment in striding that didn’t allow Fitz to get his legs out of the way. To me, though, the reason why didn’t matter. Because in the end, I had still lost everything.
In reality, my accident had been over in a matter of seconds, but my dream always progressed in slow and hellish detail, and I saw things I couldn’t have. In the dream we’re heading toward the obstacle, a jump through the basket handle, not considered one of the more challenging jumps on the course, and I sense something’s not right. But Fitz is heading forward and I still think we can do it, that we’ll catch up and everything will work out. When it’s too late I realize Fitz is going too fast, his body is not up as high as it should be, he can’t clear the jump. His body starts to rotate and I’m flying off in front of him. For a brief second I see he is now perfectly vertical in the air and when he falls it’s clear that he’s going to fall on me. But I can’t move; I’m broken into a million little pieces and I wait there for what seems forever with my beautiful horse poised above me in a grotesque dance. I’m consumed with the absolute astonishment and disbelief that the worst thing that could happen to me could happen twice.
But this time in the dream I feel the sweat under my helmet, hear the sweet creak of the leather as I lean forward in the saddle, smell the reassuring scents of horse and grass and anticipation as I move toward the jump. And when Fitz clips the top of the obstacle I’m seeing everything from an impossibly high vantage point, not recognizing the doll lying in the grass is me. He lands on the doll, then rolls off and hits the ground, then bounces up three feet, coming back down. He struggles to stand and takes a few steps before staggering to the right and collapsing. Both horse and rider are eerily still but I feel nothing.
I float over the spectators behind the ropes and see my grandfather. He’s not screaming or rushing toward me. Instead, he’s frowning with disappointment and saying something to the woman beside him. When I fly closer, I see that the woman is my grandmother and that next to her are my mother and father. Their faces are blurry but I still recognize them. They’re wearing the same Christmas sweatshirts that they’d been wearing the last time I’d seen them alive. I continue to fly over the course, staring at the rag doll and motionless horse on the ground, so calm it appears both are sleeping. The noise of an approaching helicopter blocks out all sound, pulsing in my ears.
Then I look down and see my grandmother is alone, and that strikes me as odd because my grandmother hadn’t been there in real life, hadn’t even been to an event for a long time before it. But she’s there now and she’s moving her lips but no words are coming out. I float down slowly to get closer, and just as I’m near enough to hear what she’s saying, I spot the blue baby blanket clutched in her hands. Her lips are still moving, and when I finally hear the words, they sound like gibberish or another language and I’m overcome with frustration that I can’t understand anything my grandmother is trying to tell me. And then I’m back in my body on the ground, feeling again the agony, and I’m screaming, screaming, screaming.
My throat felt raw as my eyes opened in the bedroom of my grandparents’ house, the sound of my screams still settling into the four walls like ghosts. I sat up in bed, shivering despite the warmth of the summer night. I stayed like that in the dark room for a long time, listening to the occasional car and tracing the headlights against the far wall. It was only as I was drifting off to sleep again that I realized what my grandmother had been saying to me in the dream. Dum vita est, spes est. And by the time the sun began to poke holes in the morning, I had almost come to believe that maybe my life wasn’t over yet and that it might be
time to finally listen to what my grandmother had to tell me.
By mid-June, the asphodels in Lillian’s garden had shot through the earth and were pointing at the sky like bright yellow spears. They’d never been her favorite flower but she’d felt obliged to cultivate them in a nod to her ancestors, who’d named their plantation for the flower and for the Greek mythological meadow where indifferent and ordinary souls were sent to live out eternity after death.
The heat of the day simmered up from the soil in waves as she squinted under the large straw brim of her hat at the sound of tires on gravel. She watched as Tucker’s Jeep approached through the alley of two-hundred-year-old oaks, and straightened as he pulled up into the circular drive, stopping in front of the large Roman sundial that had marked the time at Asphodel Meadows since 1817. Lucy and Sara, in identical eyelet sundresses, scrambled out of the backseat. The older of the two, Lucy, wore her somber expression like an accessory and held tightly to her little sister’s hand.
Sara jumped up and down, creating a cloud of dust around her anklet socks and white patent leather Mary Jane’s. “Malily! Daddy said we could have supper with you and Aunt Helen tonight.”
Lillian smiled at the girls, then rubbed her lower back as Tucker approached. It was getting harder and harder to move anymore and she’d known since the beginning of that spring that these would be her last gardens. Even with Helen’s help, it was beyond her physical limitations now. Her twisted and curled fingers couldn’t hold a clipper any better than she could kneel or squat for any length of time and she grieved for her garden like the moon mourned the night sky at sunrise. But grief, she’d learned in her ninety years, was as much a part of life as breathing, and disappointment and regret its eager companions. So was guilt, which she tried not to think about anymore. Especially now, after receiving Piper Mills’ letter. If only she’d been able to throw away the guilt with the letter. But guilt, she’d also learned, was a lot like tree sap: it stuck to everything and after a long time it hardened to stone, trapping unsuspecting creatures inside of it.
