by Hood, Ann
“Strike you how?” Lotte said.
Oh, Lotte, Vivien thought as she looked into her friend’s flat eyes, are you in there somewhere?
“I can’t explain it really,” Vivien said. “Something just clicks and I know what to write.”
Lotte nodded absently. Her fingers kept working the hem of her dress. It was the dress she’d worn to the funeral, and she refused to take it off. I’ll wear it forever, she’d yelled at Robert when he tried to unbutton it and replace it with a clean blue one. I’ll wear it so I’ll never forget the day they put my baby in the ground.
“I should have taken her to the doctor sooner,” Lotte said. She said this a dozen times a day, maybe more.
“It wouldn’t have mattered,” Vivien said. It was what she always said in response.
Lotte nodded again.
“Did you think David would die that day?” she said softly.
“I don’t think he died, Lotte,” Vivien said.
“You think he’s in Denver,” Lotte said.
“Maybe.”
“Because you believe that if had died, you would know somehow. You would feel it.”
“Yes,” Vivien admitted.
“You see, that’s why I can’t believe Pamela died. I didn’t feel like she was sick enough to die. I didn’t feel anything out of the ordinary.”
Lotte’s fingers worried her hem, twisting it and turning it over and over in her hands.
“Do the people who come to you know ahead of time? Do they have some kind of sign, some intuition that I lack?” she asked.
“No, no,” Vivien said.
“What kind of mother doesn’t realize her daughter is dying?” Lotte said, and now her eyes were filling with fear and confusion. Her hands worried that hem, and her body began to tremble.
“What kind of mother doesn’t know?” she said, her voice growing louder.
“No one knows these things,” Vivien said.
Bo’s head popped around the corner. He saw where his mother was going and he quickly disappeared again.
“A mother should know,” Lotte insisted. She was on her feet now, pacing.
She rubbed her arms vigorously. “I could jump out of my skin,” she said. “I want out. I want out of here.”
Vivien got up and tried to stop Lotte, but her friend pulled away from her.
“Take me with you,” Lotte said, turning abruptly to face Vivien. Her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes shining.
“Where, darling?” Vivien asked.
“To Denver,” Lotte said, impatient.
“You can’t leave your children,” Vivien said. “Not now.”
Without warning, Lotte broke into a run. She ran out of the living room, past Bo and a neighbor boy at the kitchen table, and out the door. Vivien followed, trying to keep pace with her. Through the yard, across the vineyard, and beyond to the hill where the small family cemetery sat. There, on Pamela’s grave with the freshly dug earth, Lotte flung herself down. Like an animal, she clawed at the dirt, crying and calling Pamela’s name.
Out of breath, Vivien bent and tugged her friend upward. She wrapped Lotte in her arms, and led her out of the cemetery. Lotte resisted, but Vivien held firm. Dirt streaked Lotte’s worn face, and a small clump tangled in her hair. She smelled of sweat and earth. She smelled of heartbreak.
As they made their slow way back to the house, Lotte trying to break free every few feet, Vivien caught sight of Sebastian working in the field. Yesterday he had cornered her. You will come back to me? he’d asked. Maybe, Vivien had said.
“She was just a little girl,” Lotte told Vivien.
Hours had passed. Vivien had managed to finally bathe her friend, to comb the tangles from her hair and scrub the dirt off her hands and face. The sky was violet as dusk settled over the vineyard. The women sat at one of the long wooden tables outside, a salad of fresh tomatoes and cucumbers on a platter in front of them. Vivien opened a bottle of wine, and filled two glasses for them. Then she asked Lotte again: Tell me about Pamela.
“She was such a good rider for her age,” Lotte said, her gaze focused on some distant point beyond Vivien. “Bareback. Western.”
She continued, shaking her head. “I worried she’d have a fall, that she’d get hurt. How foolish of me. Instead some germ got her. Something I couldn’t even see.”
“I liked watching her ride that horse,” Vivien said. “The brown one with the white markings on his face.”
“Happy,” Lotte said. “She named him Happy.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes, sipping their wine. Crickets chirped. Out in the fields, fireflies blinked on and off.
“She loved Robert Louis Stevenson,” Lotte said. “You were reading her Treasure Island just a few weeks ago.”
“Pamela did love books,” Vivien said.
“Adventure stories. She would get mad if the boys could do something that she couldn’t. Like climb that apple tree over there.”
Lotte kept talking, in fits and starts. Remembering how as a toddler Pamela would chase her brothers, put her hands on her hips, and order them to stop being boys. How if they were too rough with her and made her cry, Lotte would make them tell her they were sorry and Pamela would shout: Sorry isn’t good enough. Vivien listened, glad that Lotte was finally talking and eating a little. She would write the obituary later that night, and then she would try again to leave for Denver.
The obituary was already taking shape, the words to capture the little girl who wanted to have adventures, who dreamed of fighting pirates and racing horses.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Vivien thought. She remembered reading Pamela his Child’s Garden of Verses last summer. “The Land of Counterpane.” When I was sick and lay a-bed, I had two pillows at my head, And all my toys beside me lay, To keep me happy all the day.
Pamela had said, “Auntie Viv, wouldn’t it be terrible to be so sick that you had to stay in bed all day every day?”
And Vivien had pointed out the last line of the poem, how the land of counterpane is called pleasant in it.
“Well, I don’t think it would be pleasant at all,” Pamela had said. “Imagine not being able to run outside?”
“I think Stevenson was a sick child himself,” Vivien explained. “But he grew up to be quite an adventurer.”
“What did he do?” Pamela demanded, unconvinced.
“He chartered a yacht named Casco and set sail from San Francisco.”
Vivien remembered when Stevenson set sail that summer day in 1888. The newspaper had covered his departure, and Vivien could still see the photograph of Stevenson with his wild long hair and bohemian clothes, standing at the prow of Casco.
“Where did he go, Auntie Viv?” Pamela asked, her curiosity getting the better of her.
“For nearly three years he wandered the Pacific. Tahiti and Samoa and the Hawaiian Islands. He became a good friend of King Kala-kaua.”
Pamela’s eyes were shining with excitement. “A real-life king? That’s what I want to do, sail the Pacific and meet kings and savages.”
Vivien stroked Pamela’s soft blond hair. “I have no doubt you will do all that and more,” she’d said.
Vivien had never seen mountains before. When she stepped off the train in Denver later that week, the sight of them made her weak. The Rocky Mountains loomed above the city, topped with snow even in spring, and appearing almost purple in the early morning light.
“Pretty, aren’t they?” a woman standing beside her said.
Pretty wasn’t the adjective that Vivien would use. Magnificent. Majestic. But she nodded to be polite.
“I came West in 1900, from Boston,” the woman continued. “To teach school. And I still remember stepping off the train here and seeing the Rockies. How they took my breath away.”
“You live here then?” Vivien said. The woman had dark hair coming loose from beneath her wide hat, and a long horsey face.
“I don’t anymore,” she said. “I left ten years ago for Oregon. You eve
r been to Oregon?”
Vivien shook her head.
“Now that’s God’s country,” she said. “We’ve got mountains too. And Douglas fir and redwoods and the Pacific. God’s country for sure.”
“I need to find the hospital.”
The woman grinned. “But I’m going to the hospital myself. We can share a taxi?” the woman continued. She was one of those people who didn’t require responses, Vivien thought.
Vivien followed her off the platform and into Union Station. In front of it sleek black cars were lined up, waiting for passengers.
“The Mizpah Arch,” the woman said, pointing to the beautiful stone arch that welcomed people to Denver.
“I didn’t expect such a sophisticated city,” Vivien admitted as they got into a taxi.
“We hosted the Democratic National Convention in ’08,” the woman said.
Her face had taken on a sadness Vivien took for nostalgia.
“The Mint,” the woman said, pointing out the window. “The Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception.” She sighed and settled deeper into the seat.
“So many trees,” Vivien said.
“One hundred and ten thousand to be exact,” the woman said. “Mayor Speer had them planted in his City Beautiful movement. That’s Speer’s Civic Center,” she added as they passed a large park.
“It sounds like you love it here,” Vivien said.
The woman nodded absently.
Vivien wondered why the woman had moved from this city that clearly moved her so much, but she was too polite to ask. She had left San Francisco because it was too painful to stay. People had their private reasons.
They turned onto West Colfax, a paved street lined with beautiful buildings and well-dressed men and women. Vivien shook her head. She had been imagining cowboys and cattle.
“Do you teach school in Oregon too?” Vivien asked.
“I cook in a lumber camp there,” the woman said.
“You’re quite an adventurer,” Vivien said, her voice catching on the word. She thought of Pamela, poor Pamela.
“I lived a dull life in Boston until I was twenty-five years old. When no one seemed to want to marry us, my girlfriend and I decided to head West. The land of opportunity, we thought.”
“Was it?” Vivien said.
“Abby died here, in childbirth. The man I married drowned, and they never recovered his body. So . . .”
“How terrible,” Vivien said. “I’m sorry.”
To her surprise, the woman smiled.
“But that’s why I’ve come back,” she said. From her purse she pulled out a folded newspaper clipping and handed it to Vivien. “See?”
Vivien recognized it as soon as she unfolded it. The man with amnesia.
“I think it’s my Jeremiah,” the woman said. “The description sounds just like him.”
“But what about the hotel key?” Vivien asked, her throat dry.
The woman shrugged. “Ten years of wandering around, lost. Maybe he went to San Francisco. Maybe he stayed at that hotel.”
Carefully, Vivien refolded the clipping.
She could feel the woman’s eyes on her.
“That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” the woman said.
“Yes.”
Their eyes met.
“Well,” the woman said finally. She put the clipping back in her purse and looked out the window.
For the rest of the ride to the hospital, neither of them spoke.
Vivien had not expected the sophisticated city of Denver, and she had not expected that she would be one of almost a dozen women who had come to identify the man with amnesia. But she found herself sitting in a waiting room off the lobby of the hospital with other women, all clutching that same newspaper clipping. They had come from Chicago and Wyoming and Ohio. One woman had come all the way from Philadelphia. There was a nervous energy in the room, the woman from Philadelphia’s leg jumping up and down, up and down, and one of the women from Chicago tapping on the table in a rapid pattern. No one spoke. What was there to say? Every one of them wanted that man to be their husband or son or father.
The door opened and a tall, thin older woman walked in, twisting a white handkerchief in her fist.
“He’s not my Simon,” she said. She looked around the room, surprised. “My Simon, he went to the war. And he vanished. The government can’t find him. No one saw him get injured. Or worse. He just vanished.”
The women all looked down at their laps, ashamed to show their relief, their hope. If the man wasn’t her Simon, he could still be Mark or Reginald or Jonathan.
Or David, Vivien thought as she too avoided the woman’s face. She heard the woman collecting her things and shuffling out of the room.
A woman holding a clipboard entered. She wore a honey-colored tweed jacket with a matching skirt and gold wire-rimmed eyeglasses.
In a loud, crisp voice she announced, “Martha Vale.”
From beneath downcast eyes, everyone peeked as the woman from the train station got up, smoothed her skirt and patted her hair into place, straightened her shoulders and walked out the door toward the man who had forgotten who he was.
It seemed that the entire room held its breath after Martha left. The woman from Philadelphia’s leg jumped restlessly. The woman from Chicago tapped, tapped, tapped on the table. The smells of lavender and violet water and lilies choked Vivien. There seemed to be no air in the room, all of it consumed by the hope and fear of the women. Beside Vivien, a woman had started to knit, and the clacking of her needles added to the other nervous sounds.
“This is torture,” the knitter said in a thick Irish brogue. “My Paddy would want me to find him, to bring him home. That’s the only thing keeping me here.”
Vivien glanced up. The knitter had steel gray hair pulled back in a messy bun and the red hands of someone who had worked with them all her life. She was knitting a sweater with thick oatmeal yarn.
“This will be the ninth sweater I’ve knit for him,” she said to Vivien. “I knit them and put them in his drawer with cedar, to protect them, you know?”
“Of course,” Vivien said.
The woman went back to her knitting.
Just when Vivien thought she might lose her mind, the door opened. Martha stood there, not moving until the woman with the clipboard nudged her forward.
Seeing the tears on Martha’s cheeks, Vivien got up and went to her. But when she touched Martha’s shoulder, the woman shrugged her off.
“What was I thinking?” Martha said as she angrily picked up her valise and her coat. “Everyone saw him go under that day. They saw him disappear in that river. Why would I put myself through this?”
“I’m sorry,” Vivien said softly.
Martha spun around.
“No you’re not. You want this to be your man. You hope everyone in this room gets disappointed so that he just might be yours.”
The vehemence with which she spoke forced Vivien backward, away from her.
Martha leveled her gaze on the rest of the women.
“The same goes for all of you,” she said.
They watched her leave, pushing past the woman with the clipboard as she did.
“She’s right, of course,” the woman from Philadelphia said.
“Vivien Lowe,” the woman with the clipboard announced in her clear, crisp voice.
Vivien wished she’d thought to put some color on her lips, to wear her good silver comb, the one David had bought her one Christmas. She wished she looked younger, more beautiful.
“Vivien Lowe?” the woman said.
“I’m Vivien Lowe,” Vivien said, surprised by how tremulous her voice sounded.
The woman held the door open. And Vivien walked through it.
The woman with the clipboard remained cold and efficient as she led Vivien down a corridor, around a corner, down another corridor where she stopped in front of a room with its door closed. There, she hesitated. Her face softened and she touched Vivien’s a
rm.
“Over one hundred people have come here,” she said. “All women. All hoping this man is the man they’ve lost. Maybe it’s the war that’s done it, made us all so desperate. Maybe it’s the Spanish influenza. So much loss these past years. We’re all walking around brokenhearted, filled with grief. Lost.”
As she spoke, Vivien thought of the obituaries she’d written. So many of them! Thousands of words, all of them trying to capture grief, to show the world what had been lost.
“Yes,” Vivien said softly. “I understand.”
“How I wish that the man in that room is your husband,” the woman said. “But as weeks pass, it seems less likely that he belongs to anyone.”
The woman shook her head. She looked at her clipboard, taking the pen she kept tucked behind her ear and preparing to write.
“Your husband’s name?” she asked.
“David. David Gardner,” Vivien said.
The woman wrote the name down. “San Francisco, California?” she said.
“Yes.”
“I’ll come in the room with you. I have to,” the woman said. “It’s hospital policy. If I didn’t, you could tell me that he recognized you even if he didn’t and we could release him to the wrong person. We’re not doubting your integrity—”
“You’re just recognizing our desperation,” Vivien interrupted.
“Well,” the woman said.
“May we go inside now?” Vivien asked.
“Of course.”
She put her hand on the doorknob, but hesitated. “We call him John Doe,” she said. “For obvious reasons.”
Vivien nodded and the woman opened the door at last.
The room looked very much like the waiting room where Vivien and the other women had been. Loveseats and chairs lined up against the walls. A hooked rug on the floor and a window looking out at the city.
Sitting on one of those chairs, reading a book, was the man.
When Vivien saw that the book was Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, hope fluttered weakly in her chest. David would be reading Jack London.
“John,” the woman said. “Here’s our next guest.”
The man lowered the book and looked wearily at the woman and Vivien.
