Ada Unraveled

by Barbara Sullivan

  Not only was this version of the photo clearer, it was uncropped. And it showed two more people in the posed portrait on “Anne Stowall’s 1st Communion Day.”

  I read the full caption underneath. The two new people included were a very young John holding his older sister Sarah’s hand. The damaged sister.

  But, in this picture, I didn’t think Sarah was damaged yet. She was maybe seven or eight, and her face was full of happy mischief. Again, in contrast, the two- or three-year-old John was thin and sickly looking.

  In very small print beneath the primary caption, were the words, “Photo by Dr. Marcus Borman, physician to and friend of the Jake Stowall family. I am pictured here at the age of two.”

  I checked the index, looking for Borman. There were two entries for him. I went back and quickly scanned them.

  Marcus Borman was described as a local, general practitioner who “assisted Jake Stowall with John’s hemophilia, working tirelessly on finding remedies for John Stowalls’ ‘difficulties.’

  A thought popped into my head so suddenly it forced me back in my chair.

  Was this physician the man who would later sterilize the Stowall daughters? And, was he still a fugitive, wanted for questioning?

  Another glance at my watch lit a match under my meandering mind. Four-thirty, time to run, or settle in for a couple more hours of work. Rush hour was upon me, like midnight upon Cinderella.

  As I hurriedly returned John Stowall’s book and raced out the front door for the parking lot, I wondered afresh at the author-brother-Brother’s opening apology to his siblings. He definitely believed his genetic blood “disease” had prevented them all from procreating. I felt sorry for him and wondered where he was today.

  Unfortunately, John’s small family history said nothing about Luke’s marriage to Ada and the birth of Eddie—the only grandchild born to Victoria and Jake. Perhaps John thought Eddie was dead too.

  So I hadn’t answered the other two questions I’d walked in with either, namely who fathered Eddie and a clearer picture of Ada’s father and sister, Gordon and Hazel.

  Chapter 39: Bullet-Flying

  But I had taken too long. Rush hour, it seemed, was a non-stop event now in Southern California. Or should I say stop-stop. As I finally approached the turnoff from I-5, it was after five. To pass the time of what I knew would be a long, grueling drive I began reviewing what I’d learned today, first from an angry Andrea, then from an inexplicably terrified Ruth, and now from an irrationally remorseful John.

  I turned my car to the east. At least the traffic on highway 76 was moving fairly well. Sudden movement behind me made me glance up in my rearview mirror. I froze, almost releasing the wheel of the car, as terror swiftly flowed from my gut to my brain.

  Moving quickly from two lanes over was a white pickup truck with a bulbar on the front.

  The same bulbar that had chased me across half the Cleveland Mountains only a week ago.

  It was gaining fast, and in the three seconds it took for all this to happen I know I saw who it was. I know I tried to escape the driver’s rage.

  I know the bulbar was the last thing I saw before the earth began spinning wildly on its axis, turning me up, turning me down, twisting me like a sideways tornado.

  I know it was noisy because all car accidents are noisy. I know it was terrifying, because all car accidents are terrifying.

  I know I survived, because I’m telling you this now.

  I know…but…I don’t.

  PART THREE

  final stitch

  Chapter 40: Stoned

  Monday-Thursday, October 12-16

  I woke in a hospital bed. I’d been transformed into a human neck made of shattered glass encased in naked nerve endings. Someone was screaming.

  The next time I rose from the darkness I stayed long enough to cry for pain killers.

  The third time--or maybe the fourth--Matthew’s worried brow filled my vision. Two of our sons were next to him. They were fidgety, making stupid happy noises. I tried to move my hand to scratch at something liquid tickling my hairline, but my hand appeared to be tied down.

  I left again.

  Returned again.

  Left.

  Three days of this in and out passed before the doctors would allow Matt to bring me home. I vaguely remember a uniformed officer at my bedside, asking me what I recall of the accident. Nothing, I croaked. Nothing at all.

  The trip in the new rental van, a Lincoln Gas Guzzler XL—replacement for my beloved station wagon--was from hell to hell. I couldn’t stop the tears from making their way to the soft leather seat beneath me. The ceiling looked like velvet. The ride was really smooth, quiet. I wondered about Matt buying a car without me. I drifted in and out of sleep.

  And in and out of luxury vehicle to modest home. I still couldn’t find my arms.

  Matt’s face was a patchwork of fear, worry and weird smiles.

  Was I paralyzed?

  Of course not. Why would they just send me home?

  On the fourth day I decided I needed to find out if I was really paralyzed or just stoned on pain pills. Matthew was hanging about, worry weighting him down like a lead cloak.

  “What day is it?” I think I asked.

  “I’m right here. I’m not leaving you. You’ll be fine,” he breathed, rushing to my side. He jostled the bed which made me cry out.

  “Oh! I’m sorry hon.” He was standing again, looking as if he wanted to know if it was his turn to cry.

  “What day is it?” I tried once more. “Am I in the hospital?”

  “No, you’re home. Take it easy.”

  Okay, maybe I was paralyzed. He lifted a glass of water with a bent straw and shoved the fool thing in my mouth right behind a pill. I sucked in the cool water and left once more.

  Sometime Wednesday the phone rang. It was a call from my bladder telling me it was full. I tried to answer, but it went to the message machine in our office.

  “Rachel? Hi hon, are you there? We’re so worried about you.” Hannah’s chocolate voice. I smiled and decided I might live after all.

  I croaked, “Matt?” But there was no answer and I had to empty my bladder now. The good news was my arms worked. I felt around my head and discovered I was wearing some kind of neck brace. So I rolled over on my side and promptly fell on the floor and screamed again. This was getting to be a habit.

  “Rachel! I’m right here. I just had to pee.”

  Through my tears and moans I said, “Me too.”

  Poor Matt. It took him ten minutes to get me back on the bed and cleaned up.

  A little while later the phone rang again. I listened to the message from a room away, a solitary “Rachel?” I wasn’t sure but I thought it was Elixchel sighing on the other end of the line. That’s all she left. Just my name and the sigh.

  Late Wednesday afternoon the phone rang again. This time it was Gerry, and she spoke to Matt for several minutes. I heard him laugh lightly. I fell asleep again before hearing what she’d said that was so funny, but her happy face filled my mind with yet another reason to live.

  I was experiencing a kaleidoscopic shattering of space and time. I wasn’t sure if the phone was ringing now or if the phone was ringing then.

  I dreamed of Ruth, the biblical Ruth, and…Paul, yes that was his name. The biblical Paul of Tarsus, who drove a Taurus, wrote all those letters. Paul of the blue eyes and race cars.

  No. That was Paul Newman. I woke staring into Matt’s blue eyes. I smiled dreamily.

  “Ruth says Paul needs her,” I muttered, then slid away again into dreamland.

  Wednesday evening Elixchel called a second time. Matt came and told me she called to say she couldn’t speak Mayan. I think I giggled, and asked Matt why she would say such a thing. He hung over me with furrowed brow, like Snoopy hanging off his dog house.

  “She says you called and asked her, something about Ada’s quilt. She said she’s using Mayan embroidery on a quilt she’s preparing for the January bee.
That’s her bee, I guess. I don’t think you should continue with this group.”

  He slipped that last statement in there as if he was hoping I wouldn’t notice it. Maybe to implant my brain with the thought, like a subliminal advertisement. Leave the bee group; bee group no good. I waited for him to say more but couldn’t seem to focus my eyes long enough to keep watching him, so I closed them.

  He sighed. “She said there’s some professor from Cal State San Marcos who has been helping her. Maybe he can help you. You know Rachel, I’m worried about you. Maybe they released you too soon.”

  “Tell her it was snakeheads, not Mayan.” With eyes closed and mouth stuffed with cotton.

  The front doorbell rang, and Matt started. He said, “Who the hell could that be at this hour?” He left the room rubbing the several days’ growth on his face.

  Moments later I heard fighting…no, I heard someone arguing with Matt in a thick…Ukrainian accent. A nurse’s uniform swooped angrily by me and went into our master bathroom. Matt of-the-wrinkled-brow stood watching her from the bedroom doorway as she made rifling noises in our medicine cabinet, the whole while angrily muttering--something about how she was going to report my doctors to the AMA for over-medicating me.

  “Oxycontin! Vot the devil are they givink her Oxycontin for? That’s an opioid!” The toilet flushed. And flushed again. She swooped angrily back, almost bowling Matt over on her way out the door. Not an easy task. Matt’s a big guy. Gloria was a little woman.

  “She can have an aspirin four times a day, max, and that’s all. Do you hear me? Cold turkey!” I thought I heard her cry as she disappeared down the hall.

  Now I was worried. Did she just flush my pain pills?

  I slept again, until eleven at night. And then I was through sleeping, probably forever. Nurse Gloria Pusto-whatever had stolen all my pain pills!

  The shattered-glass neck was back with a vengeance. I threw up the soup Matt tried to feed me. I begged him to give me a bottle of aspirin. The whole bottle. He stood just out of reach and waited. I cried in frustration. I cried in fear. His face mirrored my emotions.

  Another definition of love.

  Chapter 41: Mark

  Friday, October 17.

  Somewhere in the wee hours of the fifth day I finally slept, this time a normal sleep, a healing sleep. Matt lay next to me, keeping stone still.

  By Friday noon I was sitting up, alternately cursing out Nurse Gloria P and thanking God that she’d come and released me from the stuporous haze. My neck still yelled at me whenever I tried to change positions. But now it was a normal pain—if you can call feeling like your vertebrae have been replaced with ground glass normal—and I had a more-or-less clear head again.

  Friday afternoon the phone rang again. This call was for Matt, and then he left, off to deal with another failed California marriage. We were up to at least two a week now. It was an epidemic.

  After he left I plotted and planned how I would roll my legs over the side of the bed and carefully raise myself into an upright position. If I didn’t move too quickly, I reasoned, I’d be okay. I walked slowly and carefully into Ada’s bedroom and found her diary—the one that was purloined during our search of her house.

  Then back to bed, keeping my neck still and rigid. A sense of urgency caused me to open the diary all the way to the back. I needed to know how far into her life the book would take her—and me. I stared in astonishment at the final words.

  “Hazel! Mark is dead! Mark is dead! Mark is dead!

  Please come get him. Please find him and care for him. He is with you now.

  My life is over.

  Your loving sister, Ada.”

  My heart was pounding. This could well be the last time Ada recorded her life. Ada the young girl was gone.

  I flipped backward from this final entry, only skim-reading, until I noticed a different handwriting in several places throughout the diary, scrawled in blue printing along the sides of the pages. I wondered if it was Eddie’s.

  Realizing it would give me an insight into this man’s thinking, I began reading them.

  “He killed Mark…just like he killed my mother.”

  “Luke should have stayed in Donovan.”

  “Luke can’t be my father! I’m not a beast!”

  And finally, “I need to know that Luke is not my father. Mark was my real father.”

  But Eddie didn’t point to evidence, just to his need not to be the child of Luke. I checked several pages of the book near the added notations, and nowhere could I find Ada saying the father of her child was Mark.

  Near the middle of the small diary I found a picture of Ada when she was very young, glued onto an empty page. Next to the picture, again running vertically down the edge were the added words, “My mother Ada was beautiful before Luke made her his drunken whore.”

  I needed to get the diary to Detective Tom Beardsley immediately. A more thorough read of the diary might reveal evidentiary value.

  Chapter 42: Hello Rage

  Again the phone wakened me. I’d been napping, the little diary lying on my chest like a small weight of guilt. I heard Matt answer, and then he appeared in our bedroom doorway.

  “That was the Oceanside police again. They want to know if your memory of the accident has returned. Now that you’re off the hard drugs.”

  I stared at him, thinking.

  “No. It’s a blank.”

  He stood stock still. He had something to say, something he didn’t want to say. I waited. Finally he began.

  “You and the red wagon did four freeway cartwheels.”

  I smiled. He was trying to be funny. “Where is it?”

  He smiled back. “In the morgue.”

  “Shame. I loved that car.”

  “This is turning out to be an expensive hobby of yours, quilting.”

  I tried to remember the accident again. But I couldn’t.

  “Were there witnesses?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  He took a deep breath and said, “I had Will following you.”

  A sudden anger filled me. “What?”

  “I had Will watching after you.”

  “Since when?” It was a building wave.

  “The day after we married. I knew I couldn’t keep you without help and I couldn’t find a pumpkin so….”

  “Matt! When did you put Will on me as a tail?” I was yelling.

  Snatches and bits seeped forward from the back of my mind.

  “You had Will following me! Like one of your deadbeats, like…like a common…criminal!”

  Where was this coming from?

  I suddenly realized it was the pills, the Oxycontin, still messing with my mind. I consciously relaxed my body. Breathed in. Breathed out.

  I said more gently, “He was in the library, wasn’t he? In Carlsbad.”

  “Yes.”

  “I glimpsed some movement out of the corner of my eye. But I never saw him. You can tell him for me I think he’s amazing. So he saw the accident?”

  “He saw a white truck with a bulbar on the front of it. He didn’t catch a clear view of the driver. It all happened too fast.”

  I looked at him, smiled meekly. He smiled back, nervously.

  Great.

  “Any other witnesses? Maybe they could help.”

  “Yes, one woman said it was a teen-aged boy with pimples. And a guy said he was certain it was his ex-wife.”

  I sighed. And then something snapped into place.

  “I remember something, Matt.”

  “Okay.”

  “Ruth. Ruth called me.”

  “What?”

  “Ruth McMichaels, she called me while I was driving to the library. She sounded worried. No! She sounded terrified.” Fresh tears rolled down the side of my face. I’d moved too quickly trying to sit up. My face clenched; my teeth ground against each other.

  I contained the pain with all my will.

  “The phone, give me the phone, please.”r />
  Matt cautiously moved away from the safety of the doorway and handed me his cell phone.

  “Did Hannah call? Do I remember that she called?” I was punching numbers into his cell as I asked.

  “Rachel, you need to rest…”

  “I need to speak to Hannah…Hannah it’s me, Rachel.”

  The chocolate voice said, “Oh, hi hon. How are you?”

  “Your mom called me last Saturday. While I was driving to the library.”

  There was a pause. Then she said, “We found her, Rachel. Thanks to your messages, we found her on time.”

  Hannah’s voice was flat, emotionless. I almost spoke over the meaning in the deadened sound.

  “Found her? You mean….”

  “She’s alive Rachel, resting. You need to do the same. Don’t worry about my mom.”

  Something bad was wrong. Something she wasn’t telling me.

  “Oh. Hannah? I just remembered something else. I had this weird dream. About the biblical Ruth and biblical Paul….”

  “Who? Paul, my dad? He’s dead, Rachel. Died a few years back.”

  “Ruth said…he needed her. In my dream. No even before. She called to him while we were talking on the phone.”

  I started crying and Matt reached for the phone, but I resisted. Until I saw his face.

  I let it go. Holding my head in my hands, trying to stop the wracking sobs because they hurt my neck so badly, I closed my eyes against the tears and the pain.

  I heard Matt laugh gently, and say, “No, I won’t. Don’t worry, Hannah. She’ll be better soon.”