by Nancy Thayer
Quietly, Jim said, “I want the same thing for both my children. Happiness. It just happens that Julia’s the one who wants to get married now, not Chase.”
“I know,” Diane agreed bleakly, her anger subsiding. Sighing, she leaned back against the headrest.
Jim started the car and drove out of the school grounds. They rode in silence for a while. Diane stared out the window at the mellow fields and forests that bordered Route 2. She was always surprised to come across this rural beauty so near Cambridge and Boston, and she was surprised now that she could appreciate it while filled with worry for her daughter. Several maples still flamed with color. Farm stands at the side of the road caught Diane’s eye. Long tables set out under the autumn sun held buckets of glowing golden chrysanthemums; straw baskets were piled with rosy apples, pyramids of green and orange and striped and spotted gourds.
Her stomach growled. She’d had only a quick cup of coffee early that morning. What kind of mother am I? she wondered, not for the first time. My daughter’s slashed her wrists and run away from school, and I’m admiring the landscape and longing for a glass of apple cider.
Perhaps she hadn’t been a good mother. Just as she hadn’t been a good daughter. She was too selfish. Indeed, even now, autumnal brass shapes bloomed in her mind; if she had her pad and pencil with her now, she’d be sketching. That was her gift, and her shame.
“That headmaster is a pompous jerk,” Jim was saying. “All he cares about is expelling Julia and erasing her existence from Gressex before she can leave any kind of blot on its record.”
“Um,” Diane replied absently. The headmaster didn’t interest her. He’d been supercilious, couching his self-interest in convoluted expressions of concern for Julia’s welfare. Now that Julia had run away from Gressex Academy, he wished to wash his hands of her—fast.
“I don’t give a damn if she’s expelled,” Diane said. “I don’t even want her at that place if there’s so little attention paid to the kids that they can go around attempting suicide. I want to find her, and bring her home, and talk some sense into her.”
They pulled into their driveway, and Jim put the car in park but did not turn off the engine. “Look,” he said, facing Diane, speaking with forced patience, “there’s nothing you can do now. You know Sam’s sensible. He’s bound to call you as soon as he can. He won’t do anything stupid. Nothing will be gained by your flying down to Middletown and knocking on doors in a panic.”
Diane’s shoulders sagged. “You’re right. I know you’re right.”
“I’ve got to go. Call me if you hear anything.”
“I will.”
Leaving the car, she slammed the door, frustrated with Jim and his cool logic. Then a thought hit her, and she hurried into the house and back to the kitchen. A light was blinking on the answering machine. Trembling, she hit the wrong button. It took several minutes to find the message: Peter Frost wanted her to call as soon as possible. Peter Frost. Since the phone call from Gressex the night before, she’d almost forgotten about him. She dialed the number he’d left and spoke with him briefly, arranging for him to arrive after lunch to start looking through her mother’s things in the attic. Well, she thought as she went up to change into jeans and a sweatshirt, at least the search would be a distraction.
While she waited for the FBI agent to arrive, she called both her brothers and her sister to see if they’d heard from their mother. No one had, but when Diane heard Susan’s warm voice, she told her about Julia, her voice breaking as she spoke.
“Oh, honey, I’m so sorry. You must have been out of your mind with worry last night. But Julia will be all right.”
“I hope so.” Diane sighed.
“I know she will,” Susan said, “I just know it,” and even though that wasn’t logical either, still Diane felt calmer when she hung up the phone.
“Hello,” Peter Frost said pleasantly as he came in the front door that afternoon.
“I see you didn’t take my advice,” Diane remarked. Wear old washable clothes, she’d warned him earlier, the attic’s filthy. But here he was in a three-piece suit. His short black hair was shining, as perfect as a helmet.
“This is all I brought with me from Virginia,” he told her. “I left my jeans at home.”
The idea of Peter Frost in jeans and a T-shirt was oddly exciting. He really is a gorgeous man, Diane thought as she took his trench coat and hung it in the closet. Undoubtedly the FBI used that. “Well, Peter,” she could just hear them say, “we’ve got another invasion-of-privacy job. It’s a woman this time, so we’ll send you. Shine up those pearly whites and get to work.” She smiled in spite of herself.
“Is your answering machine on?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Good. I’m expecting some calls.”
“So am I. Well, not expecting them, but hoping for some.” She paused, then blurted out: “My daughter’s run away from boarding school.”
“How old is she?”
“Eighteen.”
Peter smiled—a wry, sideways smile that brought a dimple to his left cheek. Suddenly he seemed human. “I have a son who’s twenty. The year he was eighteen was the longest year of my life.”
“Is he okay now?”
“Yes.” He smiled again. “But I’m exhausted.”
“Your wife must be, too.”
“I wouldn’t know. My wife and I’ve been divorced for a few years. We seldom talk.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not.”
The blue in his eyes seemed to darken, contradicting his words, and for a moment Diane stood looking up at the man, curious about what emotions he might be hiding. Then she shook her head and turned to mount the stairs.
“I hate letting go of control of my children,” she confessed over her shoulder. “I hate giving them the responsibility for their own lives.”
“I know what you mean,” he replied.
Yes, she thought, thinking of the air of tacit but powerful authority with which Peter Frost moved, I’ll bet he does know what I mean.
Still she felt oddly vulnerable as she led the stranger through the long second-floor hallway, past bedrooms and baths, to the attic door at the end of the hall. She hadn’t shut the bedroom door this morning and Kaitlin hadn’t been up here yet, and as they passed, the open door exposed a tousled bed and a floor littered with Jim’s pajamas, jockey shorts, and socks. Trust Jim. He could locate a polynucleotide chain in DNA but he couldn’t find the clothes hamper in his own bathroom.
“You have a lovely home,” Peter said. “And a great backyard.” He was looking out the window at the end of the hall, and Diane smiled, surprised and pleased by his sensitivity, by the way he purposely directed his gaze outward.
“Thank you.” With her hand on the doorknob, she admitted, “It’s hard to let a stranger into our home.”
“I’m sure it is. I’m sorry to trouble you. I’m trying to get clearance to tell you more—when you understand, I know you’ll feel better about this.”
“Well”—she shrugged and opened the door—“it’s up these stairs.”
The attic was one open room but so divided by bookcases, piles of cardboard boxes, and clutter that it seemed to be broken up into shadowy chambers. She sensed Peter Frost standing quietly behind her.
The kitchen was the heart of her house; the attic was the memory. It slumbered in the slanted light, full of dreams of the days when the children were babies and Diane wore a size ten. She led him past boxes of fine, soft newborn clothes and blankets that she was saving for her grandchildren, past quilted garment bags of dresses that she kept only because she couldn’t bear to see them go, past open trunks jumbled full of Christmas wrapping paper, pastel woven Easter baskets, and orange plastic pumpkins in which the children had collected their Halloween loot. This Halloween Diane had not carved jack-o’-lanterns or roasted the pumpkin seeds for them all to munch on as they listened to their old, scratched record of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.�
�� Without young children, a year could slip by, unmarked in its seasons.
“Good God! What’s all that?”
She followed Peter Frost’s gaze and laughed. “Treasure,” she told him. Near the boxes of children’s costumes, feathered Indian headbands, spangled tutus, capes and crowns and swords and shields, were several boxes overflowing with jewels and gold. Even in the dim light, the treasure gleamed and beckoned. “Costume jewelry. Imperfect bits and pieces. I used to buy bags of this stuff at cut-rate prices, toss in anything broken or left over from my own work, and make pirate’s loot for Chase and Julia. We’d have treasure hunts on rainy days. I suppose I should donate all this to some day-care center.”
Diane moved past him and knelt before a chest. She put both hands into it and lifted up two scoops of glittering gemstones. Emeralds, rubies, diamonds, rings and chains and coins rained back down into the chest with tempting dainty clinks. False jewels, each one was like a memory of the days when her children were blessedly young, innocent, safe, when Chase and Julia were rich within the realm of her love.
Now she knew those days were treasures. Then she’d thought the noise and mess and unpredictability of each day would drive her mad.
She rose. “Attics are like private museums, aren’t they?” And it’s my life on display, she thought silently.
“I miss having an attic,” Peter said. “My ex-wife has the house and all the photo albums, the memorabilia of my past.”
Diane looked at him and thought his eyes were sad. She felt drawn to him, wanting to touch him gently, in consolation, but instead she turned away.
Still, she appreciated his kindness in offering up bits of his life; it made it easier for her to open hers to him. She brushed her hands together as if removing dust and said briskly, “Well, you’re lucky, in a way. Most of this stuff is useless, I suppose. Taking up space.” She held up a bit of white sheet wrapped around a Styrofoam ball and trimmed in orange. “Casper, for example. Our wounded Halloween ghost. We used to hang him from the hall chandelier every Halloween, but gradually he became rather—seedy. I guess I thought I’d fix him up sooner or later, but now my children are too old to get excited about Halloween.” She looked around her. “I really should clean this place out. Throw stuff away.”
“No,” he said, “Keep it. Someday you might enjoy remembering times past.”
Diane stared at Peter, surprised and touched. He returned her gaze. After an intensely intimate moment, she had to force herself to drop her eyes. Turning away from him, she moved down through the crooked aisle to the spot where her mother’s boxes stood.
“Nothing’s marked or sorted. Susan and Mother and I just sort of tossed stuff into whatever box was handy. Mother was a pack rat, and I am, too, I’m afraid. My God, I didn’t realize I’d brought back so much junk.”
An odd thing had happened in her parents’ house in July: Diane and Susan had reverted to a childish sibling rivalry. They’d cloaked it within adult gestures of generosity and goodwill, but it had been there. Their mother had always loved Susan the best of the girls, and Diane didn’t blame her. Susan had been the good girl. Well, all the children had been good, freed by Diane’s rebellious black-sheepdom.
Until she was in her forties, Diane had been bitterly stung by the multitude of pictures of Susan’s life that her mother displayed in her house: Susan graduating from college, Susan in a fabulous lace wedding gown, Susan and her mother smiling through tears in the hospital when Susan’s first son had been born with both Susan’s husband and her mother in attendance. God, Mother, it’s as if I didn’t even exist for you! Diane had thought. She’d been miserable, ill with envy.
But as her own children began to enter adolescence, Diane remembered her youth. Her mother had no pictures of her progress through life because Diane hadn’t had any taken. Diane hadn’t gone to her own graduation or been married in a church in a gorgeous gown. Jim would have gone along with anything, but she’d insisted on a small private wedding without the fairy-tale trimmings. She’d disdained the ceremonies and rituals of her parents’ lives. Their home, filled with its predictable, ordinary things, had smothered her.
Yet this past summer when her mother dispensed with the collected objects of her life, Diane had grabbed all she could. Not the china or crystal or silver or antiques; she had enough of that stuff. Susan, who served her family on brightly colored, expensive plastic plates—because her four boys were such klutzes—had been thrilled to inherit some of her mother’s beautiful things.
Diane had chosen to take entire unsorted contents of desks, and boxes of clothes from her mother’s attic. She’d blithely insisted she really wanted her mother’s very old dresses, hats, scarves.
“They’re so terribly out of style, and you couldn’t possibly fit into them,” Susan had said.
“Oh, they’re not for me,” Diane replied. “They’re for Julia. Girls love old clothes. Besides, you know me. I get ideas for my jewelry from all sorts of things.”
“Darling,” her mother’d said, “are you sure you want to take all that old junk? I don’t even remember what’s in half of those boxes.”
“It’ll be fun sorting through them, Mother,” Diane had insisted. She’d been pleasant, but adamant.
“I think some of my old diaries are in there.”
“Mom!” Susan exclaimed greedily. “I didn’t know you ever kept diaries!”
“When you children were very young I did. I don’t know where I found the time. They aren’t very interesting. I can’t imagine why I bothered.”
Diane had rummaged through the cartons as soon as she’d gotten back to her house with them and had found the diaries. Her mother was right. They weren’t very interesting.
“ ‘… Diane smiled at me this morning. The doctors say a baby one week old can’t see and differentiate and smile, that it’s only gas, but I know they’re wrong. I saw her lying awake in her crib and I said, ‘Hello, my sweetie pie,’ and she smiled at me.’ ”
“ ‘… The morning sickness is so bad that today I just lay on the kitchen floor while Diane toddled back and forth, taking every single pot and pan from the cupboards and arranging them to her satisfaction under the kitchen table. Yesterday she took all the shoes out of the shoe bag in the closet and put them in the bottom drawers of my dresser. They’re still there. Our house is beginning to look rather bizarre.’ ”
“ ‘… The baby doll we gave Diane when we brought Bert home from the hospital is abandoned under a chair. I’ve tried to encourage Diane to feed and dress her baby when I do, but she shows no interest. Fortunately she does love to color, and we keep her supplied with huge pads of blank paper and fat crayons. Diane says the baby is noisy. Well, she’s right, he is. I think he must have what they call colic. He cries every evening from five until eight, three hours straight of crying, and nothing soothes him. Mother says to dip a pacifier in sugar and scotch, but I wouldn’t dream of it. I just rock him and rock him and now and then Al takes a turn so I can read to Diane or take a bath.’ ”
The diaries went on for years, trailing off just after Art was born. Diane found them oddly impersonal. Her mother had recorded the minutiae of their lives without including any sense of how she felt about it all. Had her mother ever wept with exhaustion or regretted the changes in her body, the thickening of her hips? Did she feel passionate love for her husband? She must have—look at all the times she got pregnant! Had she never desired a dress with a plunging neckline or had a secret crush on a movie star or longed to travel to China?
Perhaps not. Perhaps her mother had been the sort of woman Susan was—unselfish, devoted to … completed by her family.
Diane had been a terrible daughter, and a terrible sister. She had loved her children and put their needs first, but she had never been completed only by her family. Always there were other things she enjoyed all by herself—friends, travel, work, books, a sense of adventure.
Of course everyone felt private, slightly guilty pleasures, like the tang of lu
st she felt now for Peter Frost.
Looking around the attic, she said, “I suppose I brought at least twenty boxes back from my mother’s.” Running her hand over some quilted blue dress bags, she said, “These are filled with dresses she wore as a young woman, and some old grungy furs. Some have beads I thought I might cut off for jewelry … and I thought my daughter might like to have the rest someday.”
Her daughter.
Where was Julia now? Was she safe?
In July Julia had gone down with Diane to help pack up the house, but the old odds and ends had bored her and she’d offered to help by cooking lunch and dinner for everyone. They’d been a real mutual-admiration society, Jean and Julia—Jean praising Julia’s pastas and pies and Julia babbling on about Jean’s wonderful bright big old kitchen with its wooden table and thick English-pottery mixing bowls. When her daughter, her mother, and her sister grew engrossed in an enthusiastic conversation about various chocolate-cake recipes, Diane had felt oddly slighted.
Now she wondered: Had she been too introspective this summer, mourning her father, remembering her own youth? Had Julia been dropping hints about her emotional stability that Diane just hadn’t been observant enough to notice? No. It had been a happy time.
Diane knew she couldn’t be happy again until she knew Julia was safe.
She moved to the largest pile of boxes. “Her diaries are in here—all about her babies. Photograph albums, too. I know, because when I brought them home I looked through them. But over here, these boxes—well, they’re filled with God knows what.”
She and Peter Frost knelt beside the tall pile of boxes. A shiver passed over her. She was seldom this close to such an attractive, unknown man. Jim’s hands were slender with long, tapered fingers. Peter Frost’s hands were broad, massive, thick, and tufts of dark hair crept under his white shirt cuffs and down past his wrists. She imagined that his naked body would be almost shaggy. She found herself imagining that his lovemaking would not be gentle and civilized but demanding and greedy.
