Twilight Children

by Torey Hayden

  The story became more curious, because eight years after returning east, they turned around again and came back here. This amazed me, because the distance one way would have been close to twenty-five hundred miles and this was in the era of covered wagons. The thought of making three such cross-country journeys in such conditions seemed an astounding undertaking. Why, I wondered, had they not stayed the first time?

  I went back to the statistics section to look at the birth dates for Gerda and her siblings. She had been born here on the homestead, as had Louisa, Willie, Alfred, and Karl. They weren’t the only children, however. There were five elder children, two of whom had been born in Pennsylvania and three during the first period the family was in the West. All five had died in childhood. Indeed, as I looked carefully at the dates, I realized four of them had died within six weeks of one another.

  There was nothing to tell me more than that. Just the statistics. The four children who had died close together were three girls and a boy, aged six, four, three, and one at the time of death. The other was a girl, aged four, who died about the time the family was returning west for the second time.

  I looked at the names and the dates. There was no way to know how or why so many children had died close together. Illness? That was the logical conclusion, because if it had been a disastrous accident, one would have expected them to all die about the same time. I suspected it was something like diphtheria, as I knew there had been a couple of catastrophic epidemics in the early history of the community. Or perhaps it was simply the ills of poverty and hardship. No way of knowing.

  This couple’s story came forth, even with nothing more to go on than dry statistics. A wedding, a new start in the West, no doubt with dreams of wealth and fortune. Land of their own. Land of opportunity. And then devastation. Far from home and their own families, they lost all their children. I looked at the records more closely. Yes. All of them. There was five-year gap between those deaths and the birth of the fifth child to die, a girl named Elfie. So the couple packed up and went home to Pennsylvania. Then what? What drove them to make the long trek back again to the homestead? No money? No work in the East? Or was it something more daring, more romantic? Had they been escaping from the confines of one of the many closed religious communities in Pennsylvania, which were largely ethnic Germans? Or had they perhaps always intended to return all along. Perhaps they just needed to find their feet again, needed the strength to start over. Elfie had been born by the time they started the trek back. Gerda’s siblings and she followed in the years soon after they had arrived.

  I moved off to another part of the library to confirm what I was already quite certain of, that the small holding where Gerda had been living with her cats and her chickens was, indeed, the same donation land her parents had settled almost a hundred years earlier. And yes, it was.

  Spending the evening in the library did prove a successful transition away from the intensity of Cassandra’s situation, but it left my head full of other kinds of thoughts. During my Montana childhood my family had frequently gone on outings to nearby ghost towns, and I’d loved walking through the old abandoned cemeteries. They were often sited on hillsides, lonely and windswept, yet with breathtaking panoramic views. The land had long since reverted to buffalo grass, and the overgrown graves were havens to whirring locusts and rattlesnakes nestled midst the fallen headstones. An oddly sweet sadness, almost a kind of longing, would always overtake me in such places, as I tried to bring to life in my imagination the people behind the carved dates, the stone angels, the weathered lambs. So it was this night in the library. I felt the same sort of poignancy, to be reminded how everything that feels so vital and important now will also fade, like shadows into twilight, and be forgotten.

  On my way into work the next morning, I called by the rehabilitation center to see Gerda. Armed now with some concrete information on her background, I hoped I could stimulate conversation. Real conversation, the kind with give-and-take.

  Pulling the orange plastic chair over, I sat down and told Gerda of my library adventures. She listened carefully as I talked about the procedure I’d gone through to find information on her family and on the farm. I said how interesting it was to me to learn things like this. Imentioned how, in my childhood, I’d explored abandoned homesteads in the area near where I grew up and loved hearing about the people who had lived in the West in that era.

  Listening to me, Gerda had a soft, very slight smile, but she didn’t speak.

  “I saw where your parents came all the way out here from Pennsylvania but then after a few years, they went back to Pennsylvania. Then came back here all over again. I looked it up in the atlas this morning and it’s 2,575 miles from there to here.”

  Gerda’s pale eyes were on my face.

  “Did you know they did that?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “It seems astonishing to me. They would have walked much of the way … covered wagons, oxen. Crossing the Rocky Mountains.”

  Gerda nodded again.

  “Did your family ever talk about those journeys?”

  Gerda looked away. There was a patient in another room who was calling out. The voice was quivery and frail. “Nurse! Nurse!” she called, only it wasn’t quite that urgently said. But it was very plaintive. For a moment it seemed to pull Gerda’s attention away from me and she listened to it.

  “Laudanum,” she said softly, still looking toward the door.

  “Pardon?” I asked.

  Gerda turned, although she didn’t look back at me. Her eyes went to some unseen spot beyond the end of the bed. “She wanted to taste the laudanum. Mama kept it in an earthenware jar with a stopper. Was precious. Laudanum was precious. It took pain away.”

  I knew laudanum to be an opium-based drug that had been popular with morose romantic poets of the nineteenth century but that was really all. I didn’t know how it came to be mentioned here nor who “she” was.

  “Most folks didn’t have laudanum. Mama brought it with her. She’d made it herself. Kept the basket of poppy-heads sitting on that box. On the gun box. Papa’s gun box. All withered. Withered poppyheads, looked like nothing, but she’d poke them and sweat them by the fire. Mama said they’re precious. They take the pain away.”

  “Your mother was making laudanum from poppies herself?” I asked.

  Gerda looked at me. It was an unexpectedly searching look. She scrutinized my face almost as if she were taking my measure, as if she wanted to know if I was equal to what she had to tell me. On the other hand, there was a faint undercurrent of uncertainty to her expression, as if perhaps she’d simply forgotten for a moment who I was. Then she looked toward the door again.

  “She was tired that afternoon. Sleepy. Mama couldn’t wake her up,” Gerda said. “Then Mama found the laudanum jar. Found she’d gotten into it. Gotten into it for a taste. And because it had sugar in it, she ate it all.”

  “Who was this?” I asked.

  “They couldn’t wake her up. Put her by the fire that night, but she was too sound asleep.”

  “Was this a sister of yours?” I asked.

  “She slept for two days. Then she died.”

  “Who was this? Can you tell me? Was this in your family? One of your sisters?”

  “She died. Four years old. And nothing even said she’d been born. Wasn’t wrote nowhere. Wasn’t wrote she’d been born. Wasn’t wrote she died. They had to leave her there. Bury her in the dirt and wasn’t no marker. No one to remember. Except Mama.”

  “And you,” I said.

  Gerda looked over at me then. There was eye contact and with it Gerda nodded. “Yes, I remember.”

  “And now me, too.”

  Chapter

  28

  Clearing my schedule, I made plans to drive to Quentin on Thursday. I was quite worried that once Lucia calmed down after the phone call, she would have second thoughts about meeting me, especially if it risked crossing her father-in-law. This would give her cold feet and she wou
ldn’t show up at Starbucks. Needless to say, the thought of making a seven-hour round-trip for something that might not happen wasn’t something I relished.

  Harry and I discussed the phone conversation at great length. Clearly something was deeply upsetting to Lucia, both in her emotional behavior and in arranging to meet me in this clandestine manner. The obvious conclusion was that she had important information to share. Harry speculated that she might be planning to leave her husband, no doubt taking Drake with her, and this would cause a huge furor. He talked about how, in strongly male-dominated families in his native India, the wife was often in great danger if she tried to break away, and perhaps this was a similar situation.

  My guess was that Lucia was going to reveal the events leading up to Drake’s mutism, that she was finally ready to divulge what had happened behind closed doors to affect her son in such an extreme way.

  Regardless, we both knew that for the first time we were going to see inside this family, and that, in all likelihood, Lucia was going to disclose either past or present domestic violence or child abuse, possibly both. This, of course, would then leave me with a very sticky situation to deal with right there in Starbucks.

  Harry and I talked about the options for handling such revelations. Obviously, her choosing to talk to me in a public place indicated her unwillingness to be at home. Was this because the abuser was likely to come in on us? Because she feared being overheard? Who was involved? Mason Sloane himself? Or was the abuser her husband, Walter? Thus far, Walter had remained a very mysterious figure.

  If Lucia did disclose domestic violence, how could I then best support her? Getting her to the police was of paramount importance, but she well might not be willing to make that step straightaway. Unfortunately, Quentin was so far away that neither Harry nor I had any personal contacts in the social service structure there. Was there a rape crisis center? A safe house for abused women? How sensitive were the police in these matters? How completely had the Sloanes infiltrated the infrastructure of Quentin? Was it the company town Mason Sloane implied, built on his family’s money, and thus, unlikely to provide Lucia any confidentiality or safe haven at all?

  Worse, what if she disclosed violence and then didn’t want help? Didn’t want me to do anything about it, except listen to her? What if she disclosed abuse toward Drake but then said, “Don’t tell anyone”? This kind of situation had happened to me before, and it was hell to deal with. Given my position, what were my legal obligations in a situation like this? Did I have to inform her before she started to tell me anything that I would not be able to maintain confidentiality if Drake’s welfare was involved? Did I say then that I would have to report abuse, if I were told about it, and risk her not telling me at all? Or did I keep silent and betray her confidence, if need be?

  So many gray areas. Harry and I talked and talked and talked, trying to think of all the possibilities, trying to prepare for all eventualities.

  It was a long drive out to Quentin and not the carefree journey it had been for me the previous time. On the seat beside me was a sheaf of contact numbers I had compiled, numbers for as many supporting agencies and helplines as I could find, numbers for both Quentin and the city. I also had brochures and leaflets on domestic violence and child abuse and how to handle such things. I’d even included information on separation and divorce and the issues of stalking and harassment, just in case.

  When I arrived, I was feeling genuinely nervous, which was something that didn’t happen to me often. This had been such a strange case. I’d realized for some time that there had to be more going on than had been made known to us, but the cloak-and-dagger aspect of making this long journey to meet someone in a coffee shop in anticipation of hearing secret details of private lives set me on edge. More than that, however, I was unnerved knowing that at the end of whatever Lucia disclosed, inevitably some kind of difficult decision would be called for, and, ultimately, resolution would lie with me.

  I didn’t have the nice weather of the first journey. It was cold and overcast. It should have been spring. Or at least thinking of spring, because it was March. Early March was still too close to winter in this part of the world, however. We’d have snow before the day was out.

  I found the Starbucks easily enough. Lucia was already there. She’d taken a small table tucked in the corner. I waved, smiled, and then delayed as long as possible by going to the counter to get the biggest, strongest latte I could find.

  “Hello, hello,” I said perhaps a bit too cheerfully, as I came to the table. I extended a hand.

  Lucia shook it limply. She already had tears in the corners of her eyes.

  I sat down.

  A dreadful silence intruded immediately, that type of horrible, discomforting quiet that is as loud as a shouted obscenity.

  “I very much appreciate this chance to meet again,” I said in an effort to break it. “I was so sorry for Drake to go like that. I’ve been worrying about him ever since.”

  Tears spilled over her cheeks.

  I reached into my handbag and took out a small package of tissues, as she didn’t seem to have any.

  Lucia left them laying there, so I took one out and handed it to her so she’d know I was comfortable with her crying. I said, “It’s all right. I know it’s hard to talk about things like this.”

  Too hard, apparently, because before I realized what was happening, Lucia got up and ran for the women’s restroom.

  Hmm.

  I sat a moment, still feeling nervous myself and now a little embarrassed as well, because other people were noticing. I got up and went to the women’s restroom.

  Lucia was vomiting.

  I stood outside the stall and waited for her to finish and come out. Which she did eventually, looking drawn. She was still weepy.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She nodded. Turning on the faucet, she splashed water into her mouth and spit it out. She took a paper towel and wiped her face. “Yes, I’m fine,” she said. Which was the baldest lie I’d heard in a long time.

  We returned to the table and our now cool coffee.

  Again, she started to cry.

  “Take your time,” I said gently. “I know this must be hard.”

  She made no effort to speak. Instead, she just wept, going tissue by tissue through the small pack.

  Hoping to give Lucia some format with which to articulate her misery, I put the folder of materials I had brought with me onto the table. I opened it. On top was a bright blue, glossy brochure developed by our metropolitan police force for victims of domestic violence. It wasn’t too subtle. DOMESTIC ABUSE was emblazoned not once but twice across the front in jagged red graphics, as in-your-face as any rock band logo.

  Lucia regarded it tearfully.

  “I know these are very hard issues to talk about,” I said quietly. “I do understand. And, please, you understand I really am only here to help. I know these are very distressing matters.”

  Renewed tears.

  I maneuvered the blue brochure more directly in front of her. A moment or two passed. I waited patiently.

  Still she cried. We’d gone through all the tissues in the pack and were now onto Starbucks napkins. I was past being uncomfortable, past worrying what others in the small café might think I was doing to her, but I wasn’t past being horribly aware of our drawing attention to ourselves. If Lucia had wanted this venue because it was more private than at home, she wasn’t really making it easy to keep our privacy. I hunched forward, trying to physically enclose us at the small table, but I knew people were staring—quite blatantly in a few instances—and I worried that she was too recognizable in this small city, that too many people would want to eavesdrop just because it was a Sloane talking.

  So, once again, I broached the matter with her, hoping to urge the process forward. “I appreciate it’s very difficult to talk about these things. And that’s okay. I came out here, understanding that. I’ve had many other parents in situations like yours, so I d
o understand how hard it is to talk about. I have plenty of time. So don’t feel rushed. Don’t feel pressured. We’ll get it sorted out.”

  Renewed tears.

  I nudged the blue brochure yet closer to her. “Is this what we’re talking about?” I asked very gently.

  “Noooo,” she replied and it came out almost a howl.

  “Abuse?”

  “Noooo.”

  I sat back.

  She snorted into a napkin, wiped her reddened face. Mascara left a sooty trail in the corner of one eye.

  “How so ‘no’?” I asked. “Are we talking … about Drake? You?”

  “Noooo. No, not that. None of that.” She pushed the brochure away as if it were a dirty thing.

  “Not … abuse?”

  “Noooo.” She lost her composure again.

  I didn’t really know how to interpret what she was saying. Did she literally mean no, that I was on the wrong track altogether? Or was she saying no defensively, because she wanted to put me off the topic? Or did she mean a specific kind of no, such as, no, it wasn’t the kind of abuse you went to the police about, but another kind might still be happening?

  I sat, silently watching her cry.

  “It isn’t that,” she said at last. “It isn’t anything like that. It’s me.”

  “Can you tell me more?”

  “It’s me.”

  Puzzled, I regarded her.

  “I made it up.”

  “Made what up?” I asked.

  “He can’t talk.” This made her cry harder. Burying her face in a napkin, Lucia bent forward until her head was almost on the table. I sat quietly, feeling the eyes of other Starbucks customers drilling into my back.

  When she came up for air, I asked, “Is this Drake we’re talking about? Can you tell me more about what you just said?”

  “Drake can’t talk.”

  “How do you mean? Can’t talk?”

  “He can’t talk. I made it up.”