I felt sneaky, pulling into my own driveway just before ten o’clock. I got out and stood by the car for a moment, the sun’s heat pressing along my arms and cheeks. A cacophony of bird song rose in the humid, still air, and I concentrated to pick out a Carolina wren and a song sparrow.
I was stalling, with no good reason. No one would be home until Michelle came in around three. I took a deep breath. My heart thudded. Do it.
Inside, I sprinted up the stairs and pulled the lock book from under my mattress and the little brown sack of tools from my desk drawer. I thumped back down the steps, grabbed the flashlight from a kitchen drawer, and crossed the hall to Mother’s study.
Sunlight glared through the wide windows, flashing off the desktop and the slick-jacketed books that filled a wall of shelves. The scent of lemon polish hung in the air. Overhead I heard the distant roar of an airplane.
Sitting cross-legged on the beige carpet, I opened the lock book to the right section, then shook out the sack’s contents. Paper clips. A length of stiff wire cut from a coat hanger. A putty knife. Two flathead screwdrivers, a set of slender miniature screwdrivers, a long metal nail file.
All right. I rose to my knees to study the oak filing cabinets. Four drawers in each cabinet, a lock on every drawer. The book made lockpicking seem easy, and I was certain someone with my manual dexterity could do it even with crude tools.
But faced with the reality of bolts and tight drawers, I fumbled and struggled.
If these were ordinary metal cabinets I might have been able to maneuver them open. But Mother had invested in expensive units with strong locks and drawers that fit perfectly flush. I couldn’t get a screwdriver between the cabinet face and a drawer, much less pull a drawer out enough to insert the coat hanger wire behind it and ease back the bolt.
One by one I tried each of my tools in the keyholes. Coat hanger wire, paper clip, mini screwdrivers. With my ear close to the lock I listened for any faint sign that the bolt was yielding.
I was startled by the slap of metal against metal, racketing down the hallway from the front door. I froze. Who? The plop of mail falling through the slot to the foyer floor left me limp with relief.
Swiping at the moisture on my upper lip, I got to my feet, rolled Mother’s red leather chair from under the desk and sank into it. What had possessed me to think I could do this quickly and easily? I’d thought it was like surgery, requiring only a knowledge of the parts involved and a deft touch. But I hadn’t learned surgery from a book, and I couldn’t learn lockpicking by reading about it. Even if I had the right tools, I’d probably have to practice for hours or days before I could do it.
I swiveled to my right. The desk had two file drawers. Expecting resistance, I yanked angrily at one of them. It flew open and banged my right knee, making me yelp. I saw a collection of file folders. With one hand I rubbed my throbbing knee—I’d have a nasty bruise—and with the other I searched the folders. Clippings from psychology journals and newspapers. Drafts of papers Mother was writing.
I swung around and tried the other big drawer. It held only half a dozen folders, all of them containing what appeared to be final drafts of articles.
My disappointment was irrational, since I couldn’t expect to find anything sensitive in an unlocked drawer, but knowing that made no difference in how I felt. Idly, certain it was useless, I slid open each of the desk’s small side and center drawers. Pencils, pens, index cards, sticky notes, all neatly arranged, a place for everything and everything in its place. I was about to close the center drawer when I caught a glint of metal in a rear corner. I reached back and pulled out a key ring.
Most of the dozen keys had familiar shapes. I recognized them as duplicates that would fit the house locks, Mother’s office door, her car’s ignition and trunk. But here was something odd: three small, similar keys attached to their own circle of metal, which was in turn clipped to the key ring. As I fingered them, hope jolted to life again.
I tried them first on the desk drawers. None fit. With mounting excitement I inserted each of them into all the file cabinet locks. “Turn,” I muttered through clenched teeth. “Open it!”
Nothing happened. The file drawers with their lode of secrets remained shut tight.
“God damn it!” I slammed a foot against one of the cabinets. Then, alarmed, I bent to check for dents or scratches, anything that would give me away. The oak surface was unmarred.
Slapping the keys against my thigh, I turned in a circle. I skimmed bookshelves, focused momentarily on a small print of Escher’s strange drawing “Belvedere,” in which nothing was what it seemed at first glance. An odd choice for a woman with Mother’s refined taste to hang on her wall, but perhaps not odd for a psychologist who sat in this room writing about people with warped perceptions.
I slid open one of the closet’s louvered doors and found exactly what I expected on the shelves: packages of laser paper, boxes of stationery, myriad other office supplies. On the floor, pushed back against the wall under the bottom shelf, were four fireproof boxes, three smaller ones lined up in front of a single large one.
I knew Mother kept important documents in these boxes, and I wouldn’t find any secrets hidden in them. Still, I got down on my knees, favoring the one that ached, and slid them forward. One was no more than a foot long, a couple were about eighteen inches long and looked like file boxes. The last was close to two feet. They were heavy; the shells of gray space-age plastic had steel liners. All were locked, but maybe I had the keys in my hand.
I tried a key on a medium-sized box. It didn’t work. I tried another key. The lock popped open with a satisfying click, and I lifted the lid.
The contents were in perfect order. An expanding file had been set inside the box, and within the labeled divisions were all of our insurance papers, for the house, our three cars, health care, plus records of car and home repairs. I closed the lid, disappointed at finding exactly what I’d expected.
The next box opened on the first try. It was filled to capacity with manila envelopes.
They weren’t sealed, just closed with their little gold butterfly clasps. Each was labeled on the outside in my mother’s graceful clear handwriting, and contained exactly what she’d written: Girls’ vaccination records, Rachel’s report cards, Michelle’s report cards, and so on. She’d kept the minutiae of our progress through school, our grade school drawings and high school essays, the little awards and certificates of accomplishment we’d received along the way. Safe in a box that not even fire could destroy.
I sat back with one of my science fair prize certificates in my hand. Our mother, who considered so little worth saving, had preserved every scrap of her daughters’ lives. Suddenly my actions, my doubts, the questions that had swirled in my mind for weeks seemed the worst kind of betrayal.
Then I looked at the other two boxes and my guilt vanished as curiosity took over. I stuffed the science fair certificate into its envelope and put all the envelopes back as I’d found them.
None of the keys fit the largest box. I let it go for the moment and moved on to the smallest one. It opened easily, but inside I found only the key to Mother’s safe deposit box and a small green notebook full of account numbers. I closed the lid and locked it.
I ran my fingers across the oblong bulk of the inaccessible box and tried to reason with myself. It wasn’t worth any more effort. The odds were it contained nothing but household records.
And yet.
Mother hadn’t left the key lying around, any more than she’d left the keys to the file cabinets.
For ten minutes I worked on it, sticking each little key into the lock, trying to twist it, pulling it out and starting over, again and again with no result. Frustration fueled my determination. I’d get the damned thing open if it killed me. If I found a method that worked, it might work on the file cabinets too.
I tried the wire, a paper clip, the nail file. Sometimes I heard a faint click inside the lock, but it didn’t open. I ran to the k
itchen, rummaged in the drawers for anything I might use, grabbed a corkscrew and a metal skewer. They were also useless. I slammed my fist on the top of the box until pain stopped me.
I sat back and shoved hair off my damp face. A bead of sweat dropped from my chin to the carpet, leaving a dark spot. In spite of the cool air pouring from the overhead vent, my underarms were wet and my blouse clung to the skin between my shoulder blades.
This is nuts, I told myself. Calm down.
Then I thought, A locksmith.
Hire somebody to enter Mother’s private space and break into the cabinets and the box?
No. It was unthinkable.
I shifted the box, judging its weight. I could take it to a locksmith. Obviously I couldn’t take the file cabinets, but I was strong enough to get this box out to my car. It would be back in its proper place by the time Mother came home from work. But no, this had to be done before Michelle came home at three. I glanced at my watch: almost noon. I pulled the yellow pages from a bookshelf and hurriedly thumbed through it.
I found a locksmith shop in Arlington, near enough to reach quickly yet far enough afield that Mother wasn’t likely to ever use its services. The man who answered the phone said he had to leave for an outside appointment soon but he could make a key if I got the box to him within half an hour. Fifteen minutes later I pulled into the narrow parking strip outside the shop on a commercial stretch of Lee Highway.
I staggered in with the box.
“Hey, whoa,” the young locksmith exclaimed. “You shoulda let me do that.” He hustled around the counter and lifted the box in muscular arms bristling with curly black hair. The box seemed to become weightless in his grasp.
“Now, let’s see what we got here,” he said, dropping the box onto the counter with a loud thump. But his attention was still on me. His grin, his appraising look, said I’d made his day just by coming through the door. When he failed to get an answering smile from me, he turned to his task and made a quick examination of the lock.
“Piece of cake. I opened one just like this a couple weeks ago. They don’t make these things for security, you know, just fire resistance. About the only thing the lock’s good for is keeping the lid on real tight so it won’t pop open if a fire heats it up.”
Easy for you to say, I thought.
Almost apologetically, he added, “I have to get your ID before I can do this. It’s pretty silly, but I gotta have it. I mean, I know the box belongs to you, I’m not saying—”
“That’s all right, that’s fine,” I said, hoping my alarm was well hidden. Calm down, I told myself. This will never get back to Mother. I showed him my driver’s license and waited while he jotted information on a form.
He described in detail what he was going to do, how he would select a key blank that matched the lock type, and little by little grind it to fit. He inserted the blank in the lock, pulled it out and showed me the faint scrapes that told him where to start cutting. I was nearly crazy with impatience, but nodded and smiled and held my tongue. At last, when he got down to the work of making the key, he became absorbed and fell silent.
Too restless to sit in the single orange plastic chair, I surveyed the display of locks on a side wall. Padlocks ranging from minuscule to monstrous, dead bolts, childproof latches, keyless security locks. All the ways to keep people out of places where they didn’t belong. I couldn’t believe I was here, doing this.
The minutes dragged. I bit my lip to keep from urging the locksmith to hurry. Through the storefront window I watched the traffic start and stop, start and stop in response to the light on the corner. A sharp pain shot through my bruised knee whenever I shifted position.
“Miss? All done.”
I turned. The box sat on the counter with its lid thrown back. I caught a tantalizing glimpse of something inside, a smooth blue surface, before he lowered the lid again.
He grinned and held up the shiny new key. “Want some extras in case you lose this one too?”
“No, thanks,” I said, not bothering to go along with his good-natured joke. I held out my hand and he dropped the key into my palm. The metal was warm from the cutting. What was that in the box?
I paid the bill in cash so I wouldn’t have to wait for my credit card to clear.
The locksmith carried the box to my car. I thanked him and closed the door on his friendly goodbye.
I drove with caution, conscious of the danger my hyper state created. I laughed at the thought of having an accident and afterward trying to explain to Mother why the box was in my car. My gaze strayed to it, sitting beside me like a smug silent passenger with a story that would, in time, come out.
Back in Mother’s study, I sat on the floor and opened the box. A photo album. I lifted it and found a second album underneath. And a third.
Pictures locked away in the back of a closet. Why?
Would I find something here to jog my memory? I plopped an album onto the carpet and opened the cover. On the first page was an 8x10 color photo of Mother, young and lovely in a white satin wedding dress, a cloud of veil floating around her head. Her smile was joyous. I’d never seen this picture before. I’d never seen her smile that way.
I turned the page. Now she was joined by a young man with blond hair, dressed in a wedding tuxedo. My father, the man in the picture Mother kept on her dresser. The man whose other pictures I’d supposedly destroyed in my grief.
Confused questions crowded my mind. I searched the pictures for answers.
Leaning close, I looked into my father’s eyes and tried to feel a connection. If he’d been a monster, if he’d done unforgivable things to me, some part of me must remember. But he remained a picture, nothing more. It was hard to believe he had anything to do with my life.
I turned to the next page. Snapshots, four to each sheet, probably honeymoon photos. Her, him, the two of them together, in some place with palm trees and a beach. Pages and pages of them smiling, laughing, kissing. Then came a photo of them posed before a house I didn’t recognize, white with blue shutters and door. More pictures taken in the yard. My young mother planting a rose bush, standing proudly beside the same bush in flower.
I wandered through the early days of their marriage. The entire first album was filled with photos of the two of them, separately and together. They’d been happy. Their love was palpable in their eyes, their smiles, their touching hands.
Suddenly choked with tears, I closed the book and put it aside. Now I understood, more completely than ever before, what my mother had lost. A whole life, a whole future. Love.
With a kind of dread, I lifted out the next album. I wasn’t sure I could look at any more pictures of their brief shattered happiness. But I had to see it through. They were my parents, and this might be the only way I’d ever learn about their life together.
I took a deep breath and turned back the cover.
The two of them sat on a blue sofa, and Mother held a blanket-swaddled infant. The parents smiled down at the baby, whose eyes were squeezed shut. I had the sensation that I was hurtling back into another time. This must be me. Their first-born.
I bent low over the photo to study the baby. I recognized nothing of myself in the child, but that wasn’t surprising. Infants seldom resemble the adults they’ll become.
Eagerly I flipped the page to more baby photos, many of the child alone, others with the parents, one or both. I soon realized that these weren’t pictures of me. The fuzz of hair growing in on the baby’s scalp was blond, not red. Her eyes were blue. Michelle.
I turned the pages with increasing puzzlement. Where was I? Why wasn’t I in any of the pictures with my little sister and our parents? I looked through to the end without finding myself.
I sat for a few minutes with the third and last album unopened in my lap. Surely this would be the one with pictures of me, pictures of all of us together. If I saw myself with my father, something might shake loose and rise to the surface of my memory.
I found more photos of Mother,
Father, Michelle, and dozens of pictures of my sister as she grew from a baby to a toddler to a beautiful little girl of two or three.
I fumbled through the album, faster and faster. Where were the pictures of me? Why were the pictures of Michelle separated this way, all together, with no sign of me?
Swallowing back the sourness that rose in my throat, I forced myself to think. One thing was clear: Mother had lied to me when she said I’d destroyed all the pictures of my father. But had it been a complete lie? Why would she make up something like that? Maybe I’d destroyed the photos that showed me with my father. Yes. That must be what happened. I couldn’t imagine what else would explain my absence from these family pictures. As if I hadn’t been part of their lives, wasn’t one of them.
But why did Mother hide all the pictures of herself and my father? Why pretend they didn’t exist? All I could think of was that she was protecting both of us from painful reminders.
I returned to the first page of the album. For a long time I sat staring at my young parents and tiny sister, trying to make sense of it all.
In the dogwood outside the window a mockingbird broke into song, imitating a cardinal. The throaty, mellow notes were pitch-perfect, but I realized absently that the cadence was off, too rushed and insistent. I would never mistake it for the real thing.
Chapter Eleven
When I was twelve and Michelle was nine, Mother bought a telescope so we could all look at the stars and planets and moon together. On a hot clear night, we set the instrument on its wooden tripod in the back yard, and waited for daylight to recede and the universe to come shining out of the darkness.
Mother sat in a wrought iron chair she’d brought down from the patio, and Michelle and I lolled on the grass at her feet. The pink-washed sky faded to black, the birds hushed in the trees around us. Fireflies winked across the lawn. Michelle, giggling, tickled my neck and ears with grass blades until she saw the first bat swoop low, then she squealed and clutched at me, burying her face in my shoulder. We smelled of sweat and citrus insect repellent.
The Heat of the Moon: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) Page 12
