“Nora? It’s John Bates.”
Oh, God. The hospital. Her job. “Hi, John.”
“Nora, how are you? I can’t believe it. Your mother, your daughter—it’s awful.”
“I know, I know. And I’m sorry, but I just don’t know when I’ll be back. I have five surgeries this week, but—”
“Don’t worry. I’ve already covered them for you.”
Relief swept through her. “Thank you, John. I know how shorthanded you are.”
“I’ve told Personnel you’re on a leave of absence for a while.”
“I pray I’ll have Rose back soon, but I can’t even think about work now.”
“It’s a terrible situation.” There was an awkward pause. “You know I’ll give you as much time as I can.”
“I understand.” Nora closed her eyes. He couldn’t promise to keep her job open. Residencies like the one she had were rare. There were scores of young doctors who would kill to take her place. “John, how long a leave do I have?”
“I’ve bought you two weeks so far.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.”
“Call me when you hear anything. We’re all thinking about you.”
“Please thank everyone for me. I’ll call as soon as I know anything.”
“Of course.”
Nora hung up and stared across the room. She had completely forgotten about work. God, was it only a few days ago that she had operated on Rita? Nora’s eyes felt gritty and raw as tears welled up and coursed down her cheeks. She remembered her dismay when she diagnosed the three-year-old with a brain stem tumor. And although she would have preferred a less dangerous course of action, the magnitude of Rita’s tumor forced Nora to perform a surgery that might kill her. She’d had no choice but to go in and pray that she could sufficiently debulk the tumor and give Rita a fighting chance.
Nora could still feel the nausea that had gripped her when she had opened Rita’s tiny skull. The cancer had spread, its evil tendrils wrapped around the ganglia of the lower hemisphere of her cerebellum and had already crept through the opening to her spine. There was nothing she could do. Then, as Nora began to close, Rita’s frail heart simply stopped beating. In her mind’s eye, she saw the monitor flatline. Her stomach clenched. She would never get used to the dread of that long walk from the O.R. to the waiting area. The mother had rushed toward her, had taken one look at her eyes and wailed—a keening that filled Nora’s ears even now.
And what about Michael, a seven-year-old whose malignant brain tumor had returned? The brave little boy had made Nora promise that she would do his operation. Then there was Alana, a teenager, terrified by the blindness caused by a tumor pressing on her optic nerve. Nora dreaded letting them down. But if she didn’t have Rose, she didn’t care about her job, about anything.
Her coffee was now cold and she felt too tired to pour herself another cup.
Rose, Rose. Each day that passed without a sign or information of her abductor meant that the chance she’d be found decreased dramatically. Thinking that Rose might be one of those kids, sought for years and then lost for all time, made Nora desolate. “We can’t just sit here,” she said through clenched teeth.
“What else can we do?” Marijke asked. “We have to let the police here and in Holland do their jobs. I know you hate this, Nora, but we have to be patient.”
“I’m sick of waiting.” Nora stood and paced.
“Then let’s do something productive.”
Nora heard the very Dutch, let’s-get-on-with-it tenor in her voice. “What do you suggest?”
“Have you thought about whether you want to stay in this house when Rose comes back?”
Nora sank to the floor in her old jeans and T-shirt, surprised by her friend’s question. “I haven’t given it a moment’s thought.”
“What do you think you will do?”
“I never want to live here again. I couldn’t bear it.”
Marijke put down her knitting needles and stood. “So maybe we should just start packing things up? Wouldn’t that be more positive than just sitting here feeling trapped? Besides, I’ll have to go home soon and I don’t want you to have to do this alone.”
“God, Marijke, I’m so sorry. Of course, you have to go back. Is there more news about your mother? Is she worse?”
“She’s the same, but there’s also my job.” She poured herself another cup of coffee. “The director has subtly informed me that I must return soon. He knows I’m up for tenure, so I can’t risk disobeying him.”
“Damn. You told me you couldn’t stay much longer, but I didn’t want to think about it. It’ll be hell for me without you here.”
Marijke looked stricken and Nora forced a smile. “No, I’ll be fine. I always pull through. And I’ll let you know the moment I hear something.”
“Surely there must be someone you can call when I go?”
“Well, it’s embarrassing, but the answer is no.” Now she hesitated, avoiding Marijke’s gaze. “When I came back to the States, I was still broken-hearted about Nico.”
She hated hearing the sadness in her voice. Nora thought briefly of her two years in Amsterdam, the happiest of her life, and her fellowship with Dr. Jan Brugger, one of the world’s top researchers in brain cancer. It had been intense, thrilling, each day more fascinating than the next, and she somehow had become the superstar of his program, the reason that John Bates had contacted her to come work for him in Houston.
Nico. Falling in love with him, living together in perfect happiness. Until it all fell apart. She had so tried not to dwell on him and their tortured breakup, his refusal to move to Houston with no future for himself in America. Nora still felt a stabbing regret. She glanced at the silver ring of his she still wore, its tulip design delicate, lovely.
“Nora?”
Nora returned to the present. “I didn’t want to be around anyone except my mother. And she understood that I needed to be left alone until I could get my life back on track. Then just as I started meeting people, I found out that I was pregnant. What a shock! But so exhilarating. It eclipsed my life. I didn’t have time for anything else.”
She saw Marijke give her a sideways glance. “You’re still in love with him.”
Nora avoided her gaze. “No, I don’t think about him anymore.”
“Hmm,” murmured Marijke. Nora was relieved when she said no more about it.
She glanced at the silver-framed photograph on the coffee table. Rose’s newborn face was red and scowling, as if birth had not been the liberating experience it was cracked up to be. She stared out with her big eyes and fierce wisps of copper hair. Nora felt comforted. It made Rose look as if she had come into the world a fighter, a survivor. Like herself.
Marijke slipped her knitting into her bag. “So, if you’re not going to stay here, why don’t we start packing up boxes?”
“Not Rose’s room.”
“Sure. But we can work here and then tackle your mother’s bedroom.”
Nora was so deathly sick of waiting and of the adrenaline rushes that plagued her that Marijke’s words brought her a welcome sense of purpose. She stood and dusted off the seat of her jeans. “All right. You start here. I think I’ve got some empty boxes in the garage.”
“Fine.” Marijke stood.
“Wait a minute,” said Nora. “Do you suppose the killer and the kidnapper might have been looking for something?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. But the investigators said there seemed to be a struggle—footprints up and down the stairs.” She rubbed her chin, thinking. “What if killing my mother wasn’t the only thing they came for? And we still have no idea why they’d take Rose.”
“Nora, maybe you’re just grasping at straws.”
“But what can it hurt? We’re going
to pack up all of this stuff, anyway—why not search for a clue?” Possibilities rushed through her mind. “Something my mother had that they needed? Something that could give us insight into why this nightmare happened?”
Nora thought she saw Marijke bite her lip. “We have to pack up everything, anyway, and if we do a thorough job, who knows what we’ll come up with?”
“There must be a link between my mother’s bizarre murder and that man on the floor. But what?” Her eyes now fixed upon Rose’s bassinet, a cruel reminder that pierced right through her.
Marijke returned to the couch and motioned for Nora to sit, but Nora remained standing, energized by her theory. “Look, the police searched the house, but how much time did they really spend looking? Their objective was physical evidence, not motive. And one guy said he could tell by the footprints that two people went upstairs. Maybe that’s what we should focus on.”
Marijke shrugged. “If the FBI and all those policemen can’t find a connection, how can we?”
Nora felt excitement for the first time since that terrible evening. “Look, we’re going to search every nook and cranny of this house. We’ll go inch by inch until we find something—anything—that might shed light on the murder.”
“Nora, even if we do find some motive, how will that help us find Rose?”
“Because the two have to be linked. Mom was Dutch. The forged Dutch passport, the Dutch money on the killer—these aren’t coincidences. Maybe the accomplice panicked, grabbed Rose and then ran away, not thinking of the consequences.”
“But even if we find out why your mother was killed, how will that explain why his accomplice would risk kidnapping Rose? And why wouldn’t he already have called demanding a ransom?”
Nora saw Marijke react to what must have been Nora’s look of disappointment. “But,” said Marijke kindly, “anything is worth trying at this point.” She stood. “Tell me what you want me to do.”
Nora hugged her, the most positive reaction she had mustered since that awful day. She went to the kitchen counter and picked up a pad of paper and a pen. She chewed on the plastic cap, her brow furrowed. Then her eyes cleared and she wrote furiously on the pad. She tore off two pages and handed one to Marijke.
“Here’s a list. You start in Mom’s bedroom. I’ll look downstairs. Even if we don’t find anything, it will give me something to do instead of sitting by the phone going crazy.”
Marijke glanced at the page Nora had handed her. “What am I looking for?”
Nora shrugged. “I don’t really know. Anything. Old papers or letters, documents, something hidden away. If there’s anything at all, it won’t be sitting out in the open. I’ll start down here with the oldest files in my father’s study. Who knows where they would hide things?”
Marijke stood and folded her arms. “Nora, do you really think they would have kept incriminating documents?”
“Maybe not, but what else can we do but try?”
“Vooruit! I will begin.” She disappeared down the hall.
Four hours later, Nora, still sitting on the study floor, looked at the cardboard boxes now packed with books, files of financial papers and tax returns, small Delft Blue plates and figurines. The sad detritus of over thirty years—all she had left of her mom and dad. She looked around her. In a way, it was the souls of two people she was packing into those boxes, fragments of two lives not only unfinished, but unlived. She had found nothing relevant from their past, but every object had evoked a memory. In her mind’s eye, she saw her father’s wide, gentle hands holding a thick book with a look of pleasure on his face. The needlepoint pillow nestled into her mother’s chair, its profusion of roses like the ones Anneke had tended so passionately in her garden.
Nora stood, her legs cramped from sitting cross-legged while poring over her father’s files. She glanced outside. The fiery Houston sun was setting in a bath of surreal colors. Probably pollution, she thought. She walked to her father’s desk, picked up a framed photo and studied it. A dark-haired, beautiful Anneke stared out at her, a quiet smile on her face. The photo, she knew, had been taken in 1946, the year her parents married. She studied the background. Was it Holland or Houston? The sepia backdrop and faded black-and-white figures told her nothing.
She studied her father’s expression—proud and happy. He had been the affectionate one, a disciplined academic with one soft spot—his daughter. She’d never known him to be anything other than patient, kind and fair. She stared at the smaller photo next to it, Hans pulling a red wagon up the hill at Hermann Park, while a five-year-old Nora waved and smiled.
Her eyes blurred with tears. Her mother had had terrible bouts of depression, often emanating an all-consuming sadness. Sometimes they would make her angry; other times she’d withdraw to her garden or stare out of the small bay window next to her bed. Nora’s poor father had never seen Rose, had never known the relaxed woman Anneke had become during the years after his death.
As a child, whenever Nora would try to touch Anneke’s arm or awaken her from what seemed to be some kind of trance, Anneke would not react, as if her mind were elsewhere and her soul had fled. It had frightened Nora as a child and even more now.
Where had Anneke disappeared in those moments? Could it have something to do with the man who killed her? Why didn’t she ever tell me? How will I bear it if Rose never comes back to me—if I’ve lost both of them without any answers? Nora heard a keening cry, an animal in the wild, lost by its pack, howling in the dead of winter. Only after she had heard the piteous noise did she realize it had come from her.
She looked over at the door to Rose’s nursery and walked into the dark room. Rose’s sweet smell, which had permeated the house, had started to fade. Nora panicked. What if she forgot what Rose looked like? The tiny details of her chubby cheeks, the unique spectrum of blues in her eyes...would they fade, too? Would she forget all the features that made up the Rose she adored, the minute, vital things that no one knew but her mother? And if she forgot those, would Rose—wherever she was—know instinctively that her mother’s image of her had faded, feel it and then give up?
“No!” She grabbed a photo of Rose and, through blurred tears, studied each of her features—every crinkle of her smile, every shade of her flushed cheeks, every pixel of color that made her eyes the only ones Nora believed in.
She would find Rose. Rose would be safe. Her baby would come back to her. To think anything else was a black road to madness. Taking a deep breath, she walked into the dining room and stared at herself in the huge mirror over the china cabinet. The light of dusk that sifted through the plantation shades cast a fading glow. Nora felt she was looking at herself in a different century, like the wedding photograph of her parents, which had branded itself in her mind.
In the photo, Anneke sat without smiling, her dark, long hair and eyes somehow resigned, the terrible fragility of her thin body, her white skin a sharp contrast to the dark hair and eyelashes. A second look at herself in the mirror told Nora that she was her mother, her coal-smudged eyes set in skin too-pale, paper-white.
Turning away, she wondered if she should have acceded to Anneke’s pleas that she live with her. If she hadn’t agreed, at least her mother would be alive and she would still have Rose. No, she could not have done otherwise. When she saw her mother’s radiant face as she’d exited the blurred Customs door in Houston, she’d known that there was no other choice. Her mother’s piercing look of longing and love had overwhelmed her.
And Nora did need her. When she found out that she was pregnant, it had sealed their commitment to each other, walking the ancient path of life: mother, daughter, granddaughter.
She wiped away her tears and looked at the dining table, so dark, heavy and worn. Four plain chairs surrounded it, the fourth rarely hosting a guest. Although born in America, Nora was raised in an undeniably Dutch home. Dinner at six every evening—meat,
potatoes, gravy and applesauce—vegetables optional. And canned, never fresh. Family meals passed through her mind, the quiet murmur of Dutch as they related the small details of their day. The house always spotless, the stoep scrubbed every day with her mother’s hard bristle brush and a cake of old-fashioned soap. Work was work, duty was duty, family was private.
As she walked through the downstairs hall, it struck Nora that Anneke had changed nothing since Hans’s death. Every object on the walls and tables, every stick of furniture, every candlestick and piece of silver, was precisely the same as it had been when Hans drew his last breath. Did it give her comfort to keep everything the same? Did she love him?
The banging of opening and closing drawers from upstairs brought Nora back to the present. Marijke had taken her instructions to heart.
Opening the hall closet, Nora pushed the winter coats aside and looked at the floor. Nothing. She ran her fingers down the row of jackets and suddenly felt something familiar, the coat Anneke had bought for Hans only months before he died. His cancer had made him so weak that he was freezing all the time. Nora tried to imagine what that felt like—to have Siberia in your bones. Raising the thermostat to its highest setting hadn’t helped. Anneke had abandoned the Dutch rule against extravagant spending and bought him a full-length navy cashmere coat. From the moment he slipped it on, Nora knew that he would never take it off. On the morning he died, it was wrapped tightly around him, as if he had created his own shroud to avoid further troubling his wife or daughter. She crushed her face into the soft sleeve, wishing he were here now to help her.
An hour later, she was finished. And not one step closer to any discovery than when she began. She felt too exhausted to cry. She heard footfalls as Marijke came downstairs and into the hallway. Marijke looked at her and shook her head.
Nora closed her eyes. Maybe she should take a nap. She hadn’t slept more than a few hours at a time since that horrible day. And Marijke must be dead tired, too. As Nora watched her open the door and walk into the garage, she felt a stab of guilt. Had she had taken terrible advantage of the fortuitous visit of her dear friend? If her mother died, Marijke would never forgive herself for not being there. Well, a few hours’ sleep might give them both the strength they needed to carry on.
The Tulip Eaters Page 6
