Finders Keepers

by Karin Kallmaker

  “Well, this is not what I expected to talk about over a nice brunch.”

  “I just came out to you and all you can say is it’s not a good topic for brunch?”

  “What do you expect me to say?”

  Bitterly, but mindful to keep her voice low, Marissa replied,

  “How about I love you for who you are? But you never have, so that’s a pipe dream.”

  She picked up her purse and knew that her attempt to acces-sorize had gone either unnoticed or dismissed as poorly done.

  Likely the latter; her mother would consider it poor breeding to remark on it negatively.

  “You always were more his.”

  “We loved each other, if that matters.”

  Her exit from the club restaurant was sedate even though Marissa thought there must be steam blasting from both ears.

  Dear Dad:

  I guess that Mom took my news better than she did 109

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  from you. So far, nothing has been thrown at me and she didn’t scream that I’d ruined her life. Of course, I told her in a crowded restaurant with friends and rivals nearby.

  What could she do? The only better place would have been in church, between the Hallelujah and the Amen.

  Love, Marissa

  P.S. I don’t think I ever realized how much courage it took for you to finally tell her—and me—the truth. I’m proud of us both.

  Pinny had promised that working out reduced stress, so Marissa decided a workout was what she needed. The gym was crowded and she had to wait for some of the equipment. Given that she had hated to sweat and exercise her entire life, it was extremely vexing that she did feel better when she was done.

  Linda wanted to be anywhere but in the chilly conference room provided by her mother’s attorney. Her own attorney sat still as the dead. Maybe he was dead.

  Three weeks of big headaches and she was no closer to finding out what teenage Linda might want Dr. Kirkland to know. It had to do with her mother but she couldn’t make herself describe that recurring image of her mother handing her a plate of food. She couldn’t think why it mattered. It was all she remembered. How could it be meaningful? Yet . . . she wouldn’t tell Dr. Kirkland about it either. So it had to be important.

  The door opposite opened and her mother swept into the room followed by her lawyer in his very expensive suit. Linda didn’t look under the table but she guessed his loafers were alligator.

  The two attorneys exchanged pleasantries while Linda just looked at her mother, who made a great show of caring about what was being said.

  They ran into each other every day at her mother’s house and 110

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  exchanged no words at all. There was no resemblance between them that Linda had ever seen but then the plastic surgeries had begun at six. She would never have that sharp, hawk nose. Looking at her mother in this cold room made her shiver and she heard the echo of her little girl self asking, “What’s wrong with my ears?

  Why is the doctor going to cut them?”

  “They ought to lie flat against your head. I don’t know why I didn’t see it sooner. I think that’s why the other girl won last night.”

  “She was very pretty.”

  “Pretty is easy. We’re not aspiring to be pretty,” her mother had said firmly. “We’re going to be beautiful.”

  Linda stared down at her interlaced fingers and saw she was gripping them so tightly they’d gone white. But that memory wasn’t new. She had gotten over it, hadn’t she?

  “So, let’s get down to business.” Linda hadn’t caught the name of her mother’s lawyer but in her mind he was Alligator. “A rapidly scheduled competency hearing is in everyone’s best interest.”

  “How so?” Tiny Crawdad, her lawyer, did his best to sound bel-ligerent but it wasn’t very effective.

  “Because if there’s any delay, my client will press charges for the fraudulent use of her credit cards to the tune of thousands of dollars over the last three years.”

  “I had permission! And if she wasn’t holding up my inheritance I wouldn’t be living off of her.” Her lawyer made a shushing gesture and Linda subsided.

  Okay, she thought, that was teenaged Linda. I can’t let my mother, or her lawyer, do that to me, make me fourteen again. I don’t have to take it.

  “What’s the basis for the claim my client isn’t competent to handle her financial affairs?”

  “She’s itinerant and has made no attempt to learn any of the facets of its management.”

  In spite of a warning gesture from her lawyer, Linda said, “I used to ask questions but I never received any answers.”

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  Her lawyer gave her a severe look and Linda subsided. Say nothing, she told herself. Everything they say is a lie and you’ll never change their minds.

  “Finishing schooling at least through a graduate degree was agreed upon as a sign of competence when she was released from Shady Lawns. She never finished, even after my client paid for two years at Yale.”

  “The loony bin, you mean. There were no lawns and it is never shady indoors.” Dr. Kirkland, Linda wailed to herself, I’m still crazy . . . she still makes me crazy. And she hasn’t said a word!

  Helpless to stop herself from speaking, Linda rushed on, “I didn’t finish because I had to have surgery and by the time I recovered the semester had ended and I got deferred but then Mommy Dearest withheld funds and I couldn’t afford to finish the degree the following year. Because of her assets and my supposed inheritance I couldn’t qualify for any kind of aid. And the surgery I had to have was because the remnant of one of my floating ribs pierced my spleen.”

  “I don’t think this is productive.” Linda’s lawyer got abruptly to his feet. “Send your motions over and we’ll respond.”

  Still speaking to her mother’s lawyer, Linda said fiercely, “If you had a daughter, would you have let someone remove her lower ribs when she was eight?”

  Alligator gave her a stone-faced look in return and then held the door for her mother, still silent, to exit ahead of him.

  After the door closed, Tiny Crawdad sighed heavily.

  “I know, I know. I shouldn’t talk.” Linda put her head down on her folded hands. “But I’m tired of not talking. Of not being allowed to talk.”

  Matter-of-factly, he said, “This is what we’re going to do.

  You’re going to resume your normal life and I’ll delay them. I really don’t think they have a case here but it doesn’t hurt for you to show that you’re well past the trouble you had during and after college. We’ll file a motion to force her to relinquish control of your funds.”

  Linda nodded. “You must hear this a million times a day but the 112

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  trouble I’ve had all goes back to my mother. That sounds patheti-cally clichéd, I know.” She turned her head slightly to study him for the first time. He’d been a name on a local bar association list.

  He was older than she had first thought, perhaps in his late fifties.

  “I hear that a lot, you’re right. I have two daughters, and no, I’d not have let anyone take out their lower ribs unless their lives depended on it.”

  “My life didn’t depend on it. I think my mother thought hers did, though.” She stood abruptly and pulled her sweater up to reveal her midriff. Putting her hands on her waist, she pressed inward, slowly collapsing her waist to its smallest circumference.

  “It’s called a wasp waist. Not only does it create an enviable waistline, muscles in the buttocks are elongated and flattened, see?”

  Crawdad—not so tiny in her estimation any longer—looked shocked more than anything else. “How small is your waist as a result?”

  “My last pageant it corseted down to about sixteen inches. I stopped cinching it after that. I mean . . . that was when . . . it was
a little bit after that when I went to the first institution.” She hadn’t told him much about the teenage episode with the bottle of pills because he’d said it wasn’t admissible in an adult’s competency hearing. “Fast forward to my second year at Yale Business School and I got smacked by a soccer ball just right and a point of bone left from the surgery perforated some of my innards. I developed an infection throughout my GI, lost forty pounds and was wasted for four months.” Sometimes she wondered if she might have been able to graduate and get her life together had that not happened.

  But it had been too big a blow, not to be able to go back to the courses she’d liked and finish them. On top of that, the flashbacks on her childhood surgeries escalated into night terrors. She’d had nothing to build a normal life on. Dr. Kirkland had helped her at least become functional again.

  What had she been thinking she could even offer Marissa?

  Marissa owned a business and was incredibly smart with statistics and computers. Linda had nothing, nothing at all to give.

  “I’m really sorry for what you’ve been through,” Crawdad said, 113

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  then looked surprised at himself. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

  “My therapist thinks I’m not crazy.” A new thought occurred to her, something she hadn’t told him. “Besides, this isn’t about my competence or even the money. It’s about me not talking. She offered me the whole deal before I took off last time.”

  “Why didn’t you take it?”

  “Because I had to sign an agreement that I’d never tell. Things like I just told you.”

  “Surely, though bordering on a kind of child abuse, your mother isn’t that worried about her reputation.”

  Linda was quiet for a few moments then said with a quiver in her voice. “You’re right, that’s not enough for her to go to these lengths. She cares about the Price family reputation a lot, but then again, she had me in pageants, which is not what the blue bloods around here do to score points with each other. She was making me beautiful for reasons of her own. I mean, I’m not the only one who needed therapy. So reputation isn’t everything. There must be

  . . .” Wrinkles creased her forehead as she tried to find the right words. “There must be another reason for her to expend so much effort on me. But I don’t know what it is.”

  It repeated again in her mind: her mother tidied up the counter, then turned to her with the white plate heaped with food. That’s all she saw in her memory.

  “Are you going to be okay?” Crawdad—Ted Jeffers, she remembered—touched her gently on the back of her hand.

  “Yes. If I work on it, yes.”

  Hours later, after nursing a cup of diner coffee for a long time, she took the bus that got closest to Beacon Hill. Her footsteps crunched on the snow-crusted sidewalk and she wanted to be back on that wonderful beach, far away. Marissa had called her strong.

  She had felt powerful but it was so hard not to believe that it was the place, the time, the woman, the island—and not her—that had been strong.

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  She made herself climb the stone steps, ignoring the last glint of sunlight off the classic window panes of purple, black and white.

  The Price family had owned the house for two centuries. The Price family was rooted deep in Boston society but Linda had never felt as if she fit. She fingered her cold ears as she made her way into the chilly foyer. Had they really stuck out? She could hear the surgeon discussing the procedure with her mother—not the words, but the tone of voice, so impersonal, as if it was a steak to be sliced and not a little girl.

  “Have you returned for the evening, Miss?”

  Linda turned with a startled gasp, not used to the new butler’s quiet tread. “Yes. I won’t be going out again.”

  “Perhaps you’d like dinner, then? Madam is also in. It will be served in thirty minutes.”

  The idea of sharing a meal with the woman who hadn’t acknowledged her presence at the meeting earlier and had spoken less than a dozen sentences to her since she’d arrived made Linda want to laugh. Butlers behaved as if everything was normal, no matter what happened. “Something hot on a tray, like soup and some bread, will be sufficient. Thank you,” she added belatedly.

  The echo of her passage up the curving staircase didn’t drown out memories of recovery rooms and summer vacations swathed in bandages. She could easily hear the sadist who had perform most of the electrolysis saying over and over, “Just a little sting. Nothing to cry about.”

  Abruptly she realized her mother was coming down the stairs.

  Their eyes met—the only feature they remotely had in common. I hope, Linda thought, my eyes are never that cold, that dead. I don’t care what made her hurt so much she had to fix it by turning me into a freak show.

  Neither of them spoke. The only reason they were even in the same hemisphere was the past, Linda mused. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the past. She thinks I’m here for the money, though.

  And maybe she was. She knew she could—and would—roll up her sleeves and do any job. She only resorted to her mother’s credit card for emergencies. Otherwise she’d washed dishes across 115

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  Europe and volunteered to grunt supplies for ecotourism firms.

  She had tried to fill her life with so many experiences that the past went away and her mother’s control of money that was rightfully hers ceased to matter. But her mother keeping the money that had been left to Linda was just that—a form of control, and it kept alive a connection between them that Linda wanted to sever. One way or the other, she would not leave here with the issue unre-solved. All ties would be broken because that was what Linda wished, not because it suited her mother.

  Looking at herself in the bedroom mirror of one of the many guest rooms, she tried to scold herself out of her mulish expression. “You can’t let her turn you into a fourteen-year-old again.

  You’re your own woman now. You aren’t so afraid of the past that you have to run from it anymore.”

  Brave words but recalling her ranting at the alligator lawyer shook her belief that she could maintain her resolve. She needed to get out of this house so she could think but she’d used her mother’s money for the last time. She felt as if she was held together with rubber bands of reality that were cracked and stretched so thin that one more thing—like finding a job and a place to live she could afford—would snap her in two. Not right now, she thought. I will be my own woman. Right now is just transition.

  She went to bed early, exhausted as she had been every day since her arrival. She woke sweating, heart pounding and hands clenched over her stomach several hours later, uncertain of what she’d been dreaming then fell asleep again.

  This time she heard the saw and smelled the chemicals and dreamed that she woke to find her arms had been swapped for her legs and everyone told her she looked beautiful.

  She woke for real with her head throbbing, shaking with terrors of nameless monsters.

  I want to name them, she told herself. I want to talk. I want to tell.

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  “What’s wrong with this picture?” Marissa held up both arms for Heather’s examination.

  Heather studied Marissa from her seat behind the reception desk. “I’m not sure.”

  “My sleeves are too tight. And the calves of my slacks are too.”

  As hard as she tried, Marissa couldn’t keep a whining note out of her voice.

  “But that’s one of your favorite blouses. You wear it all the time.”

  “I think,” Marissa said with a frown, “I’m lifting too many weights. I like the muscle but so far none of the fat seems to have gone away.”

  “Are you overdoing it? You go two more days a week than I do.”

  “I guess I must be but I’m fo
llowing their accelerated program,” Marissa said uncertainly. She was motivated, she was careful about what she ate and she hadn’t been rigorous in meeting her goals—all for nothing. “I know Pinny said muscle weighs more than fat and I’ve gained five pounds. But when does the fat start burning off?”

  In the act of checking for her mail, Bianca said, “I saw an ad for some pills last night. They never said what was in them except it was all natural. Yeah, well, I was thinking that arsenic is all natural too. Anyway, a month’s supply was one hundred and seventy dollars. Their whole line was that the results would be worth it. The fat would melt off.”

  “Snake oil. It’s all lies,” Heather muttered.

  “Shipping and handling for this bottle of pills was another twenty bucks, in the fine print. Also in the fine print was a statement that the pills should be taken after consulting with a doctor and in conjunction with a low-fat diet and moderate exercise.”

  “For heaven’s sake!” Marissa put her hands on her hips. “That’s like saying a bottle of ointment will give you a golden tan but must be used in conjunction with real sunshine. Why do you watch ads like that?”

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  Bianca shrugged. “Because I want them to be true, I guess.”

  Tugging unhappily at the blouse’s suddenly tight upper sleeves, Marissa said, “I can see that. I mean I’m working out every other day. I could probably pick up a truck but my clothes don’t fit.”

  Heather said, “I think that I’m undoing all the good by having a treat after. To reward myself for going. Sometimes I have the treat before then I don’t go.” She sighed. “It’s been three weeks and I haven’t lost an ounce.”

  Bianca gave them both a sympathetic smile but Marissa didn’t think she could possibly understand their frustration. She and Heather were putting out an effort, certainly more than she ever had before in her life and getting nothing back. Marissa felt as if she was doing something wrong instead of something right. The woman in the mirror still didn’t look familiar.

  On the way back to her office she wrote her thrice-daily missive in her head.