Little Black Dress with Bonus Material (9 page)

“Of course he does.” She turned her head to look at me. “You did well to find him, and you should hold on tightly.”

Tightly,
because Jon was my only chance?

My spine stiffened, and I bit the inside of my cheek to keep silent as we finished preparing dinner, which we planned to serve buffet-style.

“I'm sure Jonathan's the type of fellow who appreciates when things are done simply,” my mother had suggested, and I couldn't disagree.

We soon had my grandmother Charlotte's heavy turn-of-the-century sideboard laden with dishes and I called the men to eat. I poured iced tea into glasses while everyone filled plates and settled at the table. Jon and Daddy were discussing mechanical equipment and how the winery might be updated to produce superior product with less manpower.

Mother took tiny bites and forced a smile now and then, but she drank more than she chewed (sipping often from her glass of sherry and not from the iced tea). Soon, I noticed her gaze drifting off toward the windows.

“The food's delicious, Mrs. Evans,” Jonathan said, and I could tell he meant it, as he'd eaten two helpings and had nearly scraped his plate clean.

“Evie slaved over the stove plenty today, too,” my daddy added, jerking his chin my way. “Didn't you, String Bean?”

“Sweated and slaved.” I dramatically wiped my brow with a forearm, causing Jon to laugh and father to chuckle. Mother smiled weakly.

I wouldn't say conversation flowed, but it wasn't as awkward as I'd imagined. In fact, I was rather pleased up until the moment when my mother's dazed eyes turned back to the table and she uttered without warning, “Do you remember, Evie, how Anna used to love my brisket? She always said the smell of it could lead her home if she were lost. If I made it more often, perhaps she'd find her way.”

“Anna knows where we live,” I said instinctively. “We're not the ones who are hiding.”

“She's not hiding, Evelyn.” My mother frowned at me, and I saw the newly emptied glass of sherry tremble in her hand. “There must be a reason why she's still gone. Perhaps, she's sick or hurt or—”

“Having the time of her life,” I said, interrupting, because I couldn't hold my tongue. I simply couldn't take any more of my mother's pretenses, the way she had always brushed off or glossed over every wrong thing my sister did. “As I see it, Anna's enjoying her newfound freedom a little too much. It's one thing to call off a wedding but another entirely to leave your family wondering if you're alive or lying dead in a gutter in Tanzania.”

There!
I'd said it. Because that's what bothered me the most about my sister's vanishing act: she'd deserted me without any more explanation than “the dress made me do it.” We were sisters, we were blood, and yet she hadn't elected to write me a single letter. In my eyes, that was unconscionable. Even if I saw her again, I wasn't sure whether I could completely forgive her.

“Tanzania?” my mother asked, blinking back tears. “So you
have
heard something, Evie. Is that where she is? Do you know how to reach her?”

“Good Lord, Mother!” My frustration bubbled to the surface. I had no idea where Anna was, no more than anyone else in the room. All the food I'd eaten churned in my belly, and I felt sick that Jon had to witness this. My mother's denial was beyond maddening. “Don't you think I'd tell you if I had any news about her?”

“You can be terribly secretive sometimes—”

“And Anna can be terribly selfish—”

“Enough!” My father struck the table with his fist, knife jutting up from between his clenched fingers. His face turned florid, and his chin quivered as he struggled to maintain his equilibrium. “I don't want to hear another word about Anna from either of you. Bea, Evie”—he turned a flinty stare on Mother and then on me—“I mean it. Not one word.”

Jon glanced at me across the table, his eyes narrowed and jaw tense, as if prepared to launch out of his seat in my defense. But I gently shook my head and kept mum, not knowing what else to do. Perhaps this eruption was overdue, considering how furious we all were with Anna, no matter how deeply we'd suppressed our emotions.

“Franklin, please,” Mother scolded. Her skin was as pale as his was inflamed. “Don't say such things.”

But he shook his head, and there was no sign of conciliation in his voice as he told her, “No more, Bea, no more. I don't want to hear her name mentioned in this house again, do you understand me? I'm done with her,
done
. She's torn us apart enough already. For Christ's sake, she hasn't even had the decency to apologize, and all the while she's out there, doing things that no good daughter would, without a single thought of how she's made us suffer. So far as I'm concerned, Anna's no longer a child of mine.”

My mother gasped; I might have, too, but I was too stunned to do much but sit with my hands in my lap, biting my lip.

Then he did something he'd never done before, not as long as I'd been alive, and certainly not when we had a guest at our table: he put aside his napkin, set down his silverware, pushed back his chair, got up, and left before dessert had been served.

“Franklin!” Mother called after him, but he kept right on going. Flustered, she turned to Jonathan and me. “Excuse us, please,” she said, her chair scraping the floor as she hurried after him, leaving Jon to gaze down at his hands and me to gawk at my father's empty seat, wondering what the devil had just happened.

A
fter surviving an interminable lunch with Bridget hovering like a mother hen and practically force-feeding her a sandwich and an apple, Toni went back to the hospital. She managed a cheery enough “hello” for the on-duty nurse, one Elizabeth Effertz, R.N., according to the badge on her scrubs, before she made a beeline for Evie's tiny room and pulled the chair up to the bed.

“So you want to hear what I did this afternoon?” Toni leaned over the metal rail, setting her chin on her forearm. “Bridget gave me a lecture about what a bad daughter I am,” she said, figuring she might as well say exactly what was on her mind. Maybe if it pissed off Evie enough, she'd open her eyes despite the medication. That would surely be worth an argument, wouldn't it?

“You know, Ma,” she went on, keeping her voice low, “if you were angry at me for leaving, you should have spoken up. I can't read your mind, much as I wish I could. And if I was too busy to come home and you missed me, you should've come up. The highway doesn't just go in one direction.”

How strange it was to say exactly what she was feeling, right to her mother's face, and not have to worry about repercussions. And still her pulse thudded frantically in her veins. She cleared her throat.

“In spite of what Bridget seems to think, you don't have the market cornered on lonely,” she murmured. “I miss Daddy, too, only I didn't give up when he left us. I kept going, because it's what he would've wanted me to do.”

For a moment, Toni held her breath, staring at the squiggles on the monitor measuring her mother's every heartbeat. Slow and steady, not a blip out of place.

What had she expected? That the blips would suddenly spike, and Evie would sit upright, glare at her only daughter, tug the tube from her throat, and reply, “How dare you speak to me like that!”

Well, hey, one never knew.

“What I really want to know is why you went to Hunter Cummings instead of coming to me when you realized the winery was in trouble. Did you think I wouldn't care? That I wouldn't want to help? Okay, don't answer that,” Toni said and stopped herself, because, honestly, she wasn't sure how she would've responded either.

What if Bridget was right, and she hadn't made the wisest choices in the past? What if she wasn't as good a daughter as she could have been?

Ix-nay on the self-flagellation,
Toni thought and took a deep breath before she refocused on Evie.

“Are you okay?” She gazed at the bruised spot where the IV needle went into the back of her mother's hand, stuck smack into a fat blue vein. Hesitantly, she reached over and touched the white taped “X” with a fingertip. “Does it hurt?” she asked. “Can you feel anything?”

In lieu of an answer, she heard the rhythmic hiss of the ventilator that caused Evie's chest to rise and fall. Her mother's hair puffed about her thin face like a cotton ball, and her skin appeared nearly as pale. Her lips, too, seemed absent of color.

She looked lifeless; lifeless and old.

In all her years growing up, Toni had never thought of her mother as any particular age. She was simply Evelyn Evans Ashton, wife and mother, the bedrock of the family, the lighthouse that guided boats safely into the harbor, as solid as a granite pillar, and too resilient to be entirely human.

Toni shifted in her seat, placing her forearms on the bed rail, watching her mother's expressionless features. “So what made you go up to the attic yesterday morning in your nightgown?” she whispered. “Why did you put on the black dress? Did something about it remind you of Daddy? Or maybe of Anna?”

The shift was subtle, but something changed in Evie's face. Toni detected the flicker of motion beneath Evie's eyelids, as if she were dreaming,
frantically
dreaming.

Could coma patients do that? And had the heart monitor begun to blip the slightest bit faster?

Her own pulse careening, Toni leaped up from the chair and raced out of the room, straight to the nurses' station. Breathlessly, she blurted out, “Something happened with my mother, something changed”—she gestured at Elizabeth Effertz, who quickly got up—“please, come see.”

Toni followed the woman's quick footsteps back to Evie's bedside, standing back a bit as the nurse checked her mother's monitors that showed her vital signs and the leads measuring her EEG.

“I was talking to her about going up to the attic, and I asked if it had something to do with my dad,” Toni babbled. “Bridget found her surrounded by photographs and wearing an old dress, and I wondered if it was important to her, if maybe it was connected to my father somehow. It seemed like she heard me, like she reacted—”

“I'm sorry, Miss Ashton, but that's not possible,” Nurse Effertz told her very matter-of-factly. “Your mother's unresponsive.”

“I saw her eyes move—”

“She opened them?”

“Not exactly,” Toni tried to explain, suddenly feeling stupid. “It looked like she was dreaming. You know, the whole REM thing, and I don't mean the band.”

“I know about rapid eye movement, yes,” the nurse dryly noted.

Toni saw Evie's hand hanging over the edge of the bed, and she stepped past the other woman to gently tuck it back against her mother's side.

When she was done, she straightened up to find Nurse Effertz watching her with a sympathetic expression. “Here's the thing, Miss Ashton. People want to believe their loved ones dream when they're in comas, but it's really not possible. Dreams occur during the deepest sleep, and we'd see that in her EEG. Everything we know about coma patients tells us they don't dream at all. It's likely they don't think of anything. Maybe it was an involuntary movement”—her smocked shoulders shrugged—“or it's just that you want to see something so badly that you imagined it.”

“I didn't imagine it,” Toni insisted, curling fingernails into her palm.

“It's okay.”

No, it wasn't okay. None of this felt okay in the slightest. Toni glanced past the nurse and looked at her mother, lying so still on the bed, no different from when Toni had come in. Had her mind played a trick on her? Had she truly not seen what she thought she'd seen?

“Look, if it's any consolation, your mother is holding her own. All her vital signs and her cranial pressure are stable. There's been no further bleeding. Hopefully, her brain is working hard to heal itself. I'm sure having you here is a comfort.” The woman smiled indulgently and started toward the door.

“Wait!” Toni blurted out before she could forget. “Do you still have it?”

The nurse paused and glanced over her shoulder. “Have what?”

“The dress my mother was wearing when she was brought in.” Toni needed to retrieve it. What if, when Evie did wake up, she asked about it? If she'd wandered up to the attic at the crack of dawn to put it on, it clearly meant something to her. “I'd like to take it home.”

Once again, Nurse Effertz smiled that indulgent I'm-sure-you're-acting-cuckoo-because-you're-under-stress smile. “It's in a bag at the station. I apologize for the shape it's in though. They had to cut it off her in the ER.”

Toni didn't care what condition it was in. “I'll pick it up on my way out.”

“Okay.”

“Sorry to have bothered you,” Toni apologized, even if she wasn't sorry at all.

“That's what we're here for,” the nurse replied before she disappeared through the door in a muted squeak of her rubber-soled shoes.

Toni settled back into the chair beside her mother's bed and reached through the side rails to hold Evie's hand. “I know what I saw,” she said quietly and squinted at her mom's impassive face.

Evie was in there, lurking somewhere within her frail human shell, perhaps even hearing; Toni wasn't taking any chances.

“You
are
in there, aren't you? Maybe you're not listening to every word I say”—she let out a dry laugh—“but then neither of us was very good at listening to the other, eh? Nurse Liz might think I'm hallucinating, but I know the difference between real and imagined, and something's going on inside your head. Whatever you're doing, be quick about it, would you? You know I totally suck at being patient.”

A
few days after Daddy's eruption at dinner, I arrived home from school and found sitting on the porch a half dozen closed crates, the kind the wine was packed in before it was shipped. One of the vineyard workers I recognized as Thomas was in the process of hauling the cartons onto the bed of a rusted-out pickup. I pulled my car up behind it and got out, catching Tom's attention as I slammed the door.

“What's this?” I asked and tucked behind my ears the hair that had escaped from my ponytail. “It looks like someone's moving out.”

The broad-shouldered fellow finished dumping a load onto the truck and turned to face me, shrugging. “I'm just doing a job for your father, is all.”

“But whose things are these?” I said and might as well have been talking to myself as Thomas didn't answer.

When I pushed the lid off a box, I saw a tangled mess of sweaters, books, and a faded Blue Birds uniform, all belongings of Anna's. I went to the next crate and opened it as well, finding much the same, and my mouth went dry.

“Excuse me, Miss Evie.”

I straightened up to find Thomas wiping gloved hands on the front of his overalls as he waited for me to step aside.

“Sorry,” I murmured, my mouth gone dry.

This was wrong. Very wrong.

Panicked, I raced inside to find my mother, who was no help at all. She'd taken the prescription for her headaches and was out cold, curled up in bed, eyes closed. Even when I gently shook her arm, she didn't respond.

Did she even know what was going on?

I left Mother's room and began walking through the first floor of the house, calling out, “Daddy? Daddy, are you here?”

He had to be behind this, and I needed to find him, to make him reconsider.

After a fruitless search within, I ended up on the back porch. From there, I spotted him sitting on a wicker chair positioned in front of the big stone barbecue, watching a fire burn, its flames licking dangerously upward.

I strode down the steps and across the lawn toward him. “What are you doing?” I asked before I'd even stopped moving. “Why are Anna's things boxed up?”

He didn't answer nor did his flat expression change. Instead, he slowly rose from his seat and poked at the fire with a stick.

“Daddy, tell me what's going on?” I demanded, looking away from him and toward the grill.

“It's nothing, String Bean,” he said, a slur to his voice, and I wondered if he'd been drinking. “Just getting rid of some trash.”

I went forward, close enough that I could feel the heat, and realized then my father wasn't burning charcoal bricks or even kindling. Paperwork and photographs fueled the flames, the edges brown and curling.

Instinctively, I grabbed the stick he'd leaned against the stone, and I poked the blaze myself. I glimpsed Anna's name and what looked like “Pinkerton” on a bit of letterhead before everything crackled and turned to ash.

Turning around, I stared at him, horrified. “Did you hire someone to find Anna? You know something, don't you? Tell me what it is,” I demanded.

“Go back inside, Evie,” he said, his voice rattling. “What I've done is my business. This has nothing to do with you.” Then he looked right through me as he stood again to toss more “trash” onto the fire.

“Daddy, no!” I grabbed his arm to stop him, and a photograph blew from his hand to the ground. I scrabbled to catch it. It was the shot of me and Anna from the rehearsal dinner. We stood arm in arm, my expression impassive; Annabelle gazed off into the distance, as if already planning her escape.

My chest ached, so distraught was I at the mere notion that Father had nearly destroyed it. Did he figure he could banish Anna from our memories as easily as that?

“You can't do this—”

“I already have,” he said and prodded his makeshift funeral pyre, his brow slick with sweat. With a satisfied grunt, he sat back down again and picked up his pipe to puff on it, as if all were right with the world and he was just outside enjoying the afternoon sunshine.

“What's gotten into you? I'm not saying I think she's right for what she's done, but this is wrong, it just is.” I stood in front of him, hanging on to the photo I'd saved, breathing hard, perspiration trickling down my back. “And the crates Thomas is hauling away, will you destroy those, too?”

He didn't even glance up as he drew the pipe from his mouth, expelled a line of smoke, and said, “She's not coming back. You should know that better than anyone. Every time I turn around, there's something to remind me of how she humiliated us. It's high time we did a little housecleaning, I decided. Your mother's lucky I'm not burning every damned thing that ungrateful girl ever touched.”

Oh, God. This wasn't right. I had cramps in the pit of my stomach. Anna may not have been the perfect princess everyone had long pretended she was, but she was still an Evans. She was still a part of us.

“Daddy, don't do this, please,” I said, sure that he'd regret it, if not tomorrow then in years to come. “You can't pretend she didn't exist.”

“Go away, Evelyn.” He waved me off and went back to his pipe, puffing away and sweating profusely. “Get!”

. . . doing things that no good daughter would . . .

“She's still your flesh and blood,” I insisted, my voice raw, my heart breaking, “no matter what she's done.”

A parent couldn't give up on a child, not in six months or ever. Wasn't that the unspoken rule? I realized my father had never been a huggable man or one who showered us with affection. But this was something that went beyond aloof. This was downright cold. What was wrong with him? Did he not see what this was doing to me? What it would do to my mother? He could strip the Victorian of Anna's existence, but we would never forget.

“If you could just try—”
to be patient,
I wanted to suggest, but he interrupted quite brusquely.

“I mean it, Evelyn, leave me be,” he barked, and I knew he didn't care what I had to say. He'd already stopped listening. “I need to be alone.”

That was precisely what Anna had told me before the rehearsal dinner, and I had gone along with her, to disastrous results. It was clear I was no good at rescuing anyone.

Clutching the photo in my hand, I backed away, wanting to scream so the whole world could hear me; but I ran to the house instead and up the stairs to my sister's room.

For the longest moment, I stood in the doorway, gazing at the starkness within—the bed stripped clean, the closet bare, and empty drawers hanging open—and I shook my head, astonished by how awry things had gone. When Daddy said Anna was dead to him, he'd meant it
.

God forbid I should do anything to set him off, or I may be next.

Although I realized it would take a lot to let him down quite the way Anna had, and I didn't have that kind of nerve besides.

I slipped the picture into my skirt pocket, drawing in some deep breaths before I deliberately went downstairs again. Peering out the front door, I waited until Thomas' back was turned as he added more crates to the pickup. The two I'd opened still sat on the porch floor, without their lids. I dashed out and reached inside the closest one, snatching a shoebox from within. I didn't know what was inside, and I didn't care.

What I wanted was something of Anna's before Daddy completely erased her.

Sweat stuck my shirt to my back, but I didn't slow down. Scurrying away like a thief, I carried the parcel inside and to the safety of my bedroom. I locked the door before I put the shoebox on my dresser. Then I reached into my pocket for the photograph of Anna and me.

Next, I went to my closet and pulled the floral hatbox down, set it on the floor at my feet, and opened it. I dug within folds of crumpled tissue and withdrew the black dress, tossing it onto the bed.

I dropped my skirt to the floor and unbuttoned my cotton blouse until I stood only in my bra and underpants. My eyes went to the dress.

Do you truly want to do this?
I asked myself, since I'd hoped never to use the dress again and to leave well enough alone. But how could I not in this circumstance? Did I want to know if I would see my sister again or not?

My answer then was
yes.

Before I could change my mind, I tugged the dress over my head, wiggling the silk over my hips, not caring a whit if I perspired all over it. Suddenly, my skin felt strangely and oddly cold, and I rubbed my arms as I stared at my reflection in the mirror.

“Tell me if she's coming back,” I demanded. “Tell me if Anna will ever come back, or if Daddy's right and we should all just forget.”

I closed my eyes and waited, expecting the tingle of electricity that had happened twice before. Only I felt nothing, heard nothing but the house creaking as it always did and the rumble of Thomas' engine out front as he started his truck.

“Please,” I whispered, my chest starting to heave, although I steadfastly refused to weep. There'd been too much of that going around of late, and I wasn't good at it besides. “Please, give me something to go on, either way. Just let me know that she's alive.”

I kept perfectly still and held my breath, hoping for the magic to happen. But not even the vaguest frisson of energy swept through me.

It wasn't working.

A cry of frustration slipped out, and I stomped a foot on the floor, like an ill-tempered child.

What was wrong with it? Why couldn't I see what was to be? What if all the magic was gone? Had I used it up already?

That first time I'd merely held it, about to toss it into the river, when it sent me a vision about Jonathan, and I'd simply been kissing Jon when I had the second brilliant flash.

Could it not give me answers about someone else? Was that it? Could it show me only something about myself?

Maybe it needed a piece of Anna in order to sense the connection. She was the first of us to wear it, and even now the scent of her lily of the valley clung to it.

Desperate for an answer, I tossed the lid from the rescued shoebox and rummaged within, finding a monogrammed silver hairbrush, a matching hand mirror, and a tortoiseshell comb that she'd used to pull up her hair on warm days such as this.

Yes, the comb. That would do. It even had a few of Anna's dark hairs tangled in its teeth. Surely the dress would sense her presence in it.

I cradled it in my hands and shut my eyes, my mind suddenly flooded with memories: my sister racing through the vineyards, her dark hair streaming behind her, and Anna laughing as I'd caught her, giggling and telling me, “Really, Evie, sometimes you're as slow as a tortoise. Try letting loose, why don't you!”

Soon, I breathed in the scent of lily of the valley, as fresh and real as if Anna stood next to me.

When I saw the vision, it came in a burst of light, hitting me so hard that I dropped the comb to the floor and ended up on my knees. My palms pressed against pine planks, I settled onto my heels, eyes closed tightly.

There was Anna, her once-flowing hair cut short as a boy's. She looked upon me with a thin smile, her blue eyes intense. She not only appeared very much alive but self-satisfied, as if she'd finally gotten what she wanted. I saw myself, too, seated in a wicker chair, gazing downward, my expression filled with disbelief and awe. For in my arms, I gently cradled a very tiny newborn.

Then I heard Anna's voice in my head, telling me, “You are meant to be her mother,” and a chill raced up my spine. “You are the most level-headed and responsible woman. All things I am not. All things a daughter needs from her mother. Things I can never be.”

Oh, God,
I gasped, keeping my eyes shut and praying it wasn't over.

But as swiftly as it had come, the vision washed away, and I sagged under its weight, settling on the floor with my bottom on my heels.

“A baby,” I whispered and blinked as reality set in again. What I'd seen suddenly seemed so unbelievable, so distant. Was I going to have a baby?

I was twenty-two and unmarried. The only children in my life were the fifth graders in my classroom. But if the dress was right—and I had no reason to doubt it yet—I would have a baby of my own, and Anna would be by my side.

Even if my father had given up on her entirely, I could not. Not after this.

Anna would come home. I would see my sister again, and I would make her an aunt. Surely that would cause her to stay, wouldn't it? How could she leave Blue Hills if she had a niece who needed her love and affection? Daddy would come to forgive her, Mother would cry tears of joy, and we could be as we once were, a whole and unified family.

“Thank you,” I said softly, beyond relieved, and pressed a hand to my heart, the energy of the dress still warm beneath my skin.

Once my pulse had slowed and I could stand without my knees knocking, I put away the salvaged photograph and Anna's comb, brush, and mirror. Then I took off the dress, folded it carefully, and returned it to the hatbox, which I stuffed deep inside my closet where it would stay until I needed it again.