A Quiet Death

by Marcia Talley

  Although Lilith was thirty years older than the pictures I carried, I would have known her anywhere. We all should age so gracefully. Her dark hair was laced with threads of silver, but the graying had progressed so evenly that one could easily mistake it for highlighting. Skilful highlighting, too. A dye job you’d pay extra for. She had the same slight frame, and as she approached, she moved with elegant grace. I imagined her as a young girl, practicing that walk while balancing a dictionary on her head.

  I held out my hand. ‘I’m delighted to meet you, Lilith.’

  Lilith’s azure eyes strayed to the tote in my hand, then back to my face without betraying a single ill-mannered sign of curiosity. ‘Before we get down to business,’ she said, ‘I’d like to show you my studio.’

  After visiting Lilith’s house, I was holding my breath, mentally bracing for the studio experience. I followed her down a straight, narrow path to a wooden A-frame structure a hundred yards or so from the creek. Imagine my surprise when she opened a door and led me into a spacious room that pulsed with light and color. White-white walls and pale oak floors seemed to go on forever. A chaise lounge was tucked into a corner by a wall of windows that framed the water view, a colorful crocheted afghan neatly draped over its arm. Next to the chaise, a camera was mounted on a tripod, its lens pointing outside, ready for the next shot.

  On an easel in the center of the room stood Lilith’s work in progress, a painting of a toy sailboat floating on water amid a sea of fall leaves. Clipped to the easel was a photograph of the same scene. ‘You’re still into photorealism, I see.’

  With her eyes on the painting, she smiled. ‘It’s light that’s always interested me, Hannah – how it’s reflected, refracted, diffused and distorted by the water.’

  Although the work was incomplete, I felt I could reach into the painting, swirl my hand through the leaves and come out wet. ‘What’s it called?’

  She grinned. ‘Sailboat Twenty-three.’

  Finished canvases – still lifes and landscapes – were propped up against the wall to my right, and to my left was a tiny kitchenette with a hotplate, where a teakettle was just starting to scream.

  ‘I’m making tea,’ she told me. ‘Lady Grey. Would you like some?’

  ‘Yes, thank you. That would be lovely.’

  When the tea was ready, she carried the tray outside to a table on a round concrete patio. From the patio, a leaf-strewn lawn sloped gently down to the creek where, at the end of a short dock, a motorboat was tied. Closer to shore, a kayak bobbed.

  ‘Milk and sugar?’

  I shook my head. ‘Do you get out on the water often?’ I asked as Lilith stirred milk and sugar into her tea.

  ‘Every day I can. I find paddling a kayak very relaxing. Nature’s chorus sings all around you in a kayak. A motorboat drowns it out. I keep the motorboat in case of emergency, of course.’

  ‘I know what you mean about motors,’ I agreed. ‘My husband and I sail, but only on other people’s boats.’ We sipped in silence for a while, listening to the susurrus of the wind in the trees.

  ‘You mentioned you had something that belongs to me,’ Lilith said at last.

  I pulled the Garfinkel’s bag out of my canvas tote and set it on the table between us.

  Lilith’s eyes widened in genuine surprise. She laid a hand lightly on the bag. ‘Where on earth did you get this?’

  ‘I’m afraid it comes with some bad news.’ I told Lilith about the Metro crash, about the gravely injured man I’d comforted. ‘He told me his name was Skip.’

  Lilith exhaled slowly, then looked away, swiping sudden tears away with the back of her hand. ‘That’s what they called him in school, because he was always cutting class.’

  ‘Your son?’

  Still staring out over the water, Lilith nodded. ‘His given name is Nicholas. Nicholas Ryan Aupry.’

  Aupry. Where had I heard that name before? Was Nicholas actually Aupry’s son?

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘I wish I could tell you what happened to your son, but when I asked the hospital for information I didn’t know his name, so naturally they refused to tell me anything.’

  While I waited for Lilith to comment, my mind raced, paging through the names of the seven train crash victims. None had been named Nicholas Aupry. I was positive of that.

  Lilith set her cup down carefully, centering it on the saucer. She smiled knowingly. As if reading my mind, she said, ‘He’s not dead, I’m sure of that.’

  My heart did a somersault. ‘So, you’ve been in touch?’

  ‘No. But, if Nick had died of his injuries, somebody would have contacted me. I’m his only next of kin.’

  ‘I don’t mean to pry,’ I said, fully intending to, ‘but why did Skip – excuse me, Nick – have your letters with him?’

  ‘I didn’t even know they were missing. I haven’t seen them since Nicholas . . .’ Her voice trailed off.

  Small wonder, I thought to myself. If the box of letters had been in Lilith’s cottage . . . well, you could park a construction dumpster in the driveway and spend a week hauling stuff out of Lilith’s cottage and no one would notice a bit of improvement.

  Yet her studio was impeccable. Clearly, this place was her refuge.

  ‘So Nick stole your letters?’ I asked.

  She nodded, her face twisted with anguish. ‘Apparently.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I imagine he’s trying to track down his father.’

  Something wasn’t making sense. There had been no mention of a child in the letters. No mention of anyone named Aupry. Yet, if clues to Skip’s paternity lay in those letters, then his father had to be Zan.

  ‘Zan?’ I asked.

  She raised one elegant eyebrow.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘When I couldn’t track Skip down, I had to look through the letters for clues in order to find you.’ After a moment, I said, ‘I hope I’m not being too nosy, but is Nick’s father named Alexander Aupry?’

  Lilith smiled enigmatically. ‘No.’

  ‘Why didn’t Skip take his father’s name, then?’

  I was hoping she’d let her lover’s name slip and I could catch John Chandler in a lie, but she simply looked pained and said, ‘Things were different back then, Hannah. An unmarried woman. An unexpected pregnancy.’

  Suddenly, Lilith smiled. ‘Unexpected, but definitely not unwanted. Nick was my gift from Zan, and Zan . . .’ She shrugged. ‘Well, Zan was no longer part of my life. So . . .’ She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘We, that is my family and I, decided it would be best if Nick were raised by my mother’s brother in Switzerland. Nick always knew I was his mother, but . . . well, for many reasons, it was easier if he took his uncle’s name.’

  That’s where I’d heard the name before – in the report of the Air France crash that took the lives of Lilith’s parents: Lucille Aupry. Aupry was Lilith’s mother’s maiden name.

  I wondered what Lilith meant by ‘family.’ By my reckoning, her parents had been dead for almost twenty years by the time Nick was born. Who did the troubled young woman turn to for advice? Her aunt? Her grandmother?

  Lilith sat quietly, gnawing on a thumbnail as if trying to decide how much to tell me. Finally, she looked up. ‘When Nick got old enough to ask about his father, I lied. I told him I didn’t know who his father was. Before Nick was born, I lived in New York City, as you know, working as an artist. I was part of the “New York scene.”’ She drew quote marks in the air with her fingers. ‘Painting all day, clubbing every night. Sex, drugs, rock and roll. Some nights I never went to bed at all. I’m not proud of that, mind you. I’m just telling it like it was.

  ‘Do you remember Andy Warhol’s show, Fifteen Minutes? On MTV?’ she continued.

  I stifled a groan. I suppose there must have been a time when MTV actually aired music videos rather than littering the television landscape with mindless prank and reality shows like Jackass and Jersey Shore respectively, but I was never a dim-witted twelve-to-eig
hteen-year-old, so I never fit in with their demographics. ‘On MTV? I must have missed it.’

  ‘I appeared in Warhol’s first episode, along with Jerry Hall and Dweezel and Moon Zappa.’ Lilith grinned. ‘That was in 1986.

  ‘I don’t know what came over me, but I told Nick that he was the result of a one-night stand. Honestly, you’d think I could come up with something better than that, even when stoned.

  ‘The last time Nick came to visit, we had an argument about . . . well, never mind. I left him alone in the house, to stew in his own juice, and went out by myself to the movies in Cambridge. Nicholas doesn’t deal very well with chaos. That’s probably when he found . . .’

  Lilith slid the package off the table and placed it in her lap, cradling it against her breast like the precious object it was. ‘Nicholas looks a lot like his father when his father was the same age,’ she said. ‘Sometimes when I look at my son . . . well, my heart aches.’

  ‘And Zan is . . . who?’

  Lilith chuckled. ‘If I wouldn’t tell Nick, my own son, why would I tell you, Hannah?’

  I felt my face redden. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No need to be.’ She drained her cup and set it down carefully on the saucer. ‘It’s something that happened a long time ago. No need to dredge it up. Both Zan and I live other lives now.

  ‘One thing that puzzles me, though, Hannah. If Nicholas is still alive, most likely recovering from his injuries somewhere, why didn’t he contact you? You said you left word at the hospital telling him that you had his package.’

  I decided there’d be no harm in telling Lilith about the sleazy lawyer who’d come knocking at my door. ‘I believe your son is working through an attorney. I think there’s a very good reason he’s doing that. He doesn’t want me to know who he is.’

  Lilith blinked. ‘Why on earth?’

  ‘Back on the train, when Skip thought he was dying?’ I paused, trying to recall Skip’s exact words. ‘He confessed to a killing.’

  ‘Nick? You have to be joking.’

  ‘I’m afraid not. He didn’t tell me any more than that, but I held his hand and we prayed together. Whatever happened afterwards, I like to think that prayer gave him peace of mind.’

  Lilith reached out and squeezed my hand. ‘Thank you for that, Hannah. Not everyone would have been so caring, especially under the circumstances. My God, it must have seemed like a war zone.’

  The horrors of that day seemed another world away from Lilith’s quiet garden, where the sun dappled the autumn leaves and decorated the water with shimmering light. ‘What troubles me is this,’ I said after a moment. ‘If Skip asked me to pray with him about his role in a killing, maybe he doesn’t want to be found.’ A chilling thought entered my head. ‘Do you think Skip tracked down and murdered his father?’

  Lilith smiled. ‘No, no. Zan is very much alive.’

  Hearing that, I felt a great sense of relief. ‘You still see him, then?’

  ‘Alas, no. We haven’t been together since 1987.’ Again, she stared off into the trees as if a memory were painted there. ‘We spent a magical New Year’s Eve in Seville.’

  ‘If Skip is twenty-three . . .’ I counted backwards and came to the obvious conclusion. ‘Zan doesn’t know about Skip, does he?’

  ‘No. I never told him.’

  ‘Why not?

  ‘Hannah, Zan was Roman Catholic. He had a wife and two young daughters. I just couldn’t.’ She pressed a hand to her mouth, took a deep breath. ‘We’d already gone our separate ways when . . . well, when I found out that Nicholas was on the way.’

  ‘But surely, if Zan had known—’ I began.

  Lilith raised a hand, halting me in mid-sentence. ‘Zan and I were soulmates. Separating from him was the hardest thing I ever had to do. It nearly killed me. It nearly killed us both. But after we’d made the decision to part, the last thing in the world I wanted was for Zan to come back to me purely out of a sense of obligation.’

  I nodded, encouraging her to go on.

  ‘I wasn’t much of a mother, I’m afraid. More tea?’

  As she tipped the teapot and refilled our cups, she continued. ‘Money wasn’t an issue, so Nick went to boarding schools, here and abroad. He got a great education, that’s true. Graduated with honors from Stanford. He’s just started working at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab on some project involving thought-controlled prosthetic limbs. I can’t begin to understand it.’

  ‘What did he hope to find among your letters?’

  ‘Proof of his father’s identify, I guess.’ Then she told me something I already knew. ‘But there’s no evidence of that in Zan’s letters. As I said, he didn’t know.’

  ‘But wouldn’t DNA testing establish that Zan is his father?’

  ‘Of course. But Nick would have to locate his father first.’

  ‘And get him to submit to the test,’ I added.

  Lilith nodded in agreement, then said, ‘As I said, I didn’t even know Nick had taken Zan’s letters. I keep them in . . .’ She waved a hand. ‘Under my bed.’

  ‘What do you suppose he wants from his father?’

  ‘Acknowledgement would be my guess.’ She stared off into the trees where two crows were engaged in a noisy squabble over prime position on a limb. ‘As I said, Nick’s last visit ended badly. I’ve tried calling him on his cell to smooth things over. I’ve left messages, but he’s not calling me back. I thought maybe the lab sent him away on business. I didn’t know about the accident, of course.’

  ‘I lost my cell phone in the crash. I suspect that Nick did, too. And if he’s still in the hospital . . .’

  ‘I love my son, Hannah, but he’s never been a very likable boy. He’s willful. Selfish. It ate him up inside that he didn’t have a dad like the other boys.’ She folded her hands on the table in front of her and leaned forward. ‘How will I find Nick if he doesn’t want to be found?’

  ‘Now that I know Nick’s real name, I think I can help you with that. My brother-in-law is a policeman. They have their ways!’

  Lilith’s face brightened. ‘Thank you! You’ll let me know?’

  ‘Of course.’ Since I seemed to be in Lilith’s good graces, I decided to risk pushing my luck. ‘Can I ask you a personal question?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You told me Zan was married. Does Zan’s wife know about your relationship?’

  Lilith stared deep into her cup, swirling the liquid around as if reading her answer in the tea leaves. Without looking up, she said, ‘Honestly? I don’t know.’

  ‘Whose idea was it to break off the affair?’

  ‘Believe it or not, it was mine. “I looked for no marriage bond, no marriage portion. The name of wife may seem more sacred or more binding, but sweeter for me will always be the word friend.”’

  It was obvious that she was quoting, but I didn’t recognize the source. ‘Sorry?’

  Lilith sighed wistfully. ‘Heloise to Abelard. Zan was fond of quoting Barrett-Browning. I think it rather annoyed him that the poetry I borrowed was far more Catholic and philosophical in nature.’ She swept her arm in a theatrical arc. ‘“She is all States, and all Princes, I. Nothing else is. Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere; This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere.” John Donne,’ she quickly added, in case I didn’t recognize the poet.

  I hadn’t.

  Lilith looked so somber that I burst out laughing. ‘Give me a moment and I might be able to recite Part One of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but I think I’ll spare you.’

  ‘Zan could have confessed to his wife after we separated, of course,’ Lilith continued after a moment. ‘As I said, he was a devout Roman Catholic – we both were – but repentant wasn’t the word I’d use to describe us. There’s only so many times you can go into a confessional and ask forgiveness for the sin of adultery before the Good Lord sees fit to slap you down.’

  ‘Ten years,’ I muttered softly.

  ‘Exactly. And Zan and I embraced that pa
rticular sin every chance we got, as you probably surmised from reading Zan’s letters.’

  My face grew hot. A voyeur, I’d been caught in the act.

  Lilith’s smiled sympathetically. ‘You know how I signed my letters to Zan? No, of course you don’t. “My only love.” I still love him. Always will.’

  The lyrics of a hauntingly beautiful duet sung by Placido Domingo and Maureen McGovern began running through my head, a song that never fails to make me cry when it pops up on my iPod shuffle, and was doing its best to unhinge me now: a love that comes but once and never comes again, a love until the end of time.

  Lilith began chewing on her thumbnail again, worrying it so hard that I feared it might bleed. ‘Heloise dealt with her separation from Abelard by becoming a nun, you know, but the cloistered life simply wasn’t my style.’

  It seemed to me that Lilith’s life of virtual seclusion in Woolford-Freakin’-Nowhere on Maryland’s eastern shore had a lot more in common with convent life than, say, a high-rise condo in Ocean City, but didn’t say so. Instead, I asked about something that had been puzzling me. ‘If Nick was brought up in Switzerland, Lilith, how come he doesn’t speak with an accent?’

  Nick’s mother grinned. ‘Four years at Phillips Andover can knock an accent out of any kid, especially one struggling to fit in.’

  ‘And you?’ I asked.

  ‘Me? I’m a Noo Yawka. That’s how I tawk.’

  I laughed. ‘No you don’t.’

  ‘A bit surprising I don’t, actually, since I studied art at NYU.’ Lilith set her teacup down on the table. ‘My mother was American. They tell me I sound like her.’ She grimaced. ‘It troubles me sometimes that I can’t remember her voice.’

  ‘I understand completely. Like you, I lost my mother way too soon.’ I swallowed the lump in my throat, then quickly changed the subject. I shared news of my visit with the Simon sisters and their irrepressible dog, Bruno, with Lilith and by the time we finished our tea, she was smiling again. It seemed like a good time to go, so I stood up. ‘I’ll contact my brother-in-law and get back to you as soon as I know something.’

  ‘Thank you, Hannah.’ Lilith accompanied me back to my car. ‘I’ll keep trying to reach Nick, too. Perhaps the lab knows where he is. I think it’s time for a little mother-to-son chat.’