Unbreathed Memories (3 page)

The librarian had suggested that I complete the Bromley collection by rounding up copies of the author’s short stories. They had been serialized in publications such as the
Saturday Evening Post
and
Collier’s
, so I was expecting to spend a great deal of time with
Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature
, visiting other libraries that kept complete runs of popular magazines, and shelling out dimes by the ton for photocopying. I was fascinated by the work, and after only a day had decided that even if the creeps who had laid me off last year from Whitworth & Sullivan wanted me back, even if they crawled down Route 50 after me, begging on their hands and knees, I’d never agree to work in Washington, D.C., again.

The part-time job also gave me the flexibility I needed to help my parents with their recent move to Annapolis from Washington State. Dad had graduated from the academy in 1950 and had been stationed there again when Ruth and I were in high school. He liked the town so much he always swore he’d retire there, so after leaving the Navy in 1980 and spending nineteen years as a consultant to the aerospace industry, he and Mother made plans to move east. Mom seemed relieved. My recent illness had affected her more than she let on, and we both had the telephone bills to prove it.

Now the calls were local, but I preferred the face-to-face contact I had missed when we were separated by a continent. Recent afternoons found me heading for my parents’ new home in the Providence community, out Greenbury Point Road, just past the Naval Station. It was a comfortable, ranch-style house on a quiet street, one block from the water. As a housewarming gift Paul’s sister, Connie, had painted a mailbox featuring entwined
anchors, a mermaid, and other nautical flora and fauna. I noticed it had been installed at the head of the drive. “Capt. George D. Alexander, USN, Ret.” gleamed from both sides in bold, gold letters.

Mother was removing glasses from a packing barrel and layering them into the dishwasher when I arrived shortly after lunch. She swiped with the back of her hand at a damp tendril of graying hair that hung down onto her forehead, then nodded in the direction of the laundry room. “Hang your coat up in there, darling, then come give me a hand.”

I smiled at my mom, a petite woman not more than five feet tall, wearing black jeans, a faded red cardigan, and a favorite pair of fleece-lined slippers from L.L. Bean. Rolls of shelf liner, a ruler, and a pair of scissors lay out on the kitchen table. “Be a dear and finish up with that cabinet over there, so that it’ll be ready when these glasses come out.”

I dutifully measured the shelves, then used the scissors to cut the paper to fit, following the preprinted grid on the back of the sticky paper while Mom continued unpacking. At one point she held up a Peter Rabbit bowl that had been mine as a child. There was a chip in the rim where I had once banged it too hard with my spoon. “Remember this, Hannah?”

“I sure do.” I remembered my favorite bowl well, but had no clear recollection of the temper tantrum that had resulted in the damage. Mom must have told me about it. I had been two and a half; no one could remember back that far. Now Georgina was trying to dredge up memories from when she was that age. I didn’t believe it was possible.

I was trying to think of a way to bring up the subject of
Georgina’s therapy with my mother, but wasn’t sure how much she knew. “Mom, have you talked to Georgina lately?”

She looked at me sideways over her shoulder. “Not for several days. Why?”

“She’s been calling and asking idiotic questions about her childhood. I told her what I knew about it, but can’t understand why she doesn’t ask you.”

“She’s probably afraid her father will give her an earful after the phone call he had with her last week. I overheard him saying that if she didn’t get herself to a
real
doctor, he didn’t want to talk about it any more.”

So they knew about the therapy sessions. I put down the scissors. “I thought she
was
seeing a doctor.”

“Dr. Sturges is a therapist, but she’s not an M.D.”

“I thought therapists
were
M.D.s.”

“Not always. Some are psychologists or social workers.”

“But surely she’s competent.”

“Your father doesn’t think so.”

“That woman is a quack.” My father entered the kitchen from the dining room carrying a wrought-iron pot rack and a hammer. He brushed my cheek with his lips, handed me the hammer, then climbed onto a stool and positioned the rack on the wall over the stove. He turned, towering over me, a handsome, broad-shouldered man, his close-cropped sandy hair only slightly gray at the temples. “She’s filled your sister full of the damnedest nonsense I’ve ever heard.” He extended his hand, and I put the hammer in it. He used it to bang away at a nail, swore when the nail bent double, and wrenched it out of the wall with the claw end of the hammer, sending it ricocheting off the wall and skittering across the tiles. He inserted another nail in the hole he had started and began pounding again. “God!—damned!—quack!”

I looked at my mother, her brown eyes serious and unblinking. “Why don’t you use a drill and some proper screws, George?” When my father didn’t answer, she shrugged. “I’d invite you to stay for tea,” she said to me, “but we haven’t found the teapot yet.” She gestured vaguely in the direction of still more boxes piled up in the corner of the kitchen, spilling out into the adjoining family room. “There’s coffee.”

“No thanks, Mom.” I gave her a hug. “I’ve got to get going anyway. I promised Paul I’d make chicken curry tonight, now that I’m a woman of leisure. More or less.”

I squeezed my father’s leg where he stood on the stool. “Bye, Dad.”

He patted my head. “See you later, pumpkin.” As I shrugged back into my coat I heard him say, “Lois, I’ll take some of that coffee, if you don’t mind. On second thought, make that a martini.”

In the fifteen minutes it took to cross the Severn River, drive home, and find a parking spot in front of our house on Prince George Street, I worried about Georgina. What on earth was going on in that screwball head of hers? At the turn onto the Severn River bridge, I was cut off by a silver Toyota speeding down the hill through a red light. I honked at the driver, a young man with a cell phone grafted to his ear. I had owned a Toyota once, until I drove it into a pond at my sister-in-law’s. I’d recently replaced it with a 1996 Chrysler Le Baron convertible in a pale purple color the used car salesman had described, with an expansive sweep of his hand, as wild orchid. Paul called it the Grannymobile, my midlife-crisis car. Could well be. In any case, I figured it was a heck of a lot cheaper than Georgina’s shrink.

At home, I retrieved the mail from the floor where it
had fallen through the mail slot. Nothing but bills, and the U.S. Postal Service had torn the cover of my
New Yorker
magazine again. I tossed the lot onto the hall table, hung up my coat, draped the strap of my purse over a doorknob, and headed for the kitchen. I pulled some chicken breasts out of the freezer and put them in the microwave to defrost, and had just settled down with a steaming cup of Earl Grey when the telephone rang. I wiped my hands on a towel, sighed, and resigned myself to giving the brush-off to another telephone salesman. Nobody else ever called me at three o’clock in the afternoon.

“Hello.”

I heard a strange, disembodied whispering, like summer wind through the trees.

“Hello?” I said again.

The same plaintive sound sighed down the line, but this time it separated into two recognizable syllables. “Han-nah!”

“What? Who is this?” My heart began to pound.

“Hannah, it’s me, Georgina.” Her voice was so husky I hardly recognized it.

“Georgina! You sound terrible. What on earth’s the matter?”

“Hannah, you’ve got to come and get me!”

“My God, what’s happened?”

“I’ll explain later,” she whispered. “Just come!”

“OK, but I can’t do anything until you calm down and tell me where you are.”

“At my therapist’s.”

“Are you OK?”

“Yes.” Georgina drew a ragged breath. “No! Oh, please hurry!”

“I’m thirty miles from Baltimore. Even if I drive like a
bat out of hell it’ll take me forty-five minutes to get there. Will you be OK until then?”

Whatever Georgina meant to say was lost in a noisy snuffle. She began to wail.

“Breathe, Georgina! Breathe.” I could hear her gasping, so I tried to distract her. “Where’s your car?”

“Scott … dropped … me … off.”

“Look, he can get there faster than I can. I’m going to call him right now.”

“No, Hannah, don’t! He’s home with the kids. He’d have to bring them along. They can’t …” Georgina paused as if listening for something, then said, “I think somebody’s coming. Please hurry!”

I knew that Diane Sturges lived on Lake Roland, a city park since 1861, yet one of Baltimore’s best-kept secrets. Georgina had pointed out the back of the elegant, ultramodern Sturges home last fall when we had been hiking with the children along the footpath that ran through the woods and along the lakeshore. We had parked down by the bridge like everyone else and had walked up the dirt and gravel path, holding hands and singing. I wasn’t sure I knew how to get to the house directly.

Georgina’s breathing had steadied, but she began moaning. I found myself shouting, hoping to get her attention. “How do I get there, Georgina? Roland to Lake and turn right on Coldbrook?”

“Pleeeease!”

I could see that I was on my own. I checked my watch. Three-fifteen. If I was lucky, I could beat rush-hour traffic and make it to Baltimore well before dark. After dark, I doubted I’d be able to find a white elephant in the deeply wooded, exclusive neighborhood, even if it
were wearing a neon tutu. I threw the packet of chicken into the fridge, scribbled a note to Paul suggesting he nuke a Stouffer’s frozen macaroni and cheese, and headed for my car.

As I sped up Interstate 97, I wondered what on earth had happened. Did Georgina have a difficult therapy session? If so, what? What could be so awful that she couldn’t share it with her husband? Was their marriage on the rocks? Or maybe she had worked herself up into such a state that she didn’t want her children to see her that way. I had pressed Georgina pretty hard for answers, but she only cried harder and pleaded with me to hurry.

I took the ramp to the beltway at thirty miles over the posted limit, exited at the BW Parkway, and broke all speed records getting to the stadium, where I peeled off on Martin Luther King and headed straight through the city to the JFX. At the Northern Parkway exit I darted across three lanes of traffic to make a left turn on Falls Road, then headed east on Lake Avenue. I had reached the Boys Latin School when I realized I must have overshot the turning to Coldbrook Lane, so I U-turned in the school’s drive and headed back down the hill. Coldbrook appeared almost immediately on my right. I turned and drove slowly along the narrow, forested lane, hoping I would recognize the Sturges house from the front, but none of these expensive homes had been built anywhere near the street.

At the end of the lane, I came to a dead end at a wooden gate. I steered to one side, parked my car on the soft earth near a pile of leaves, and climbed out. The Sturges house had to be near here somewhere. I remembered seeing this gate during our hike.

To my left, a driveway angled up steeply and disappeared
around a corner. A box containing salted sand and a small shovel stood near the mailbox, but there was no name painted on the mailbox, just a number. Still, it seemed a likely candidate. I looked around, feeling guilty, then opened the mailbox and thrust my hand in. I pulled out a packet of magazines and long envelopes held together by a rubber band. The letter on top was addressed to Diane V. Sturges, Ph.D., and another envelope announced that she was a member of the Mystery Guild book club. Her husband, Bradley, had investments with Salomon, Smith, Barney and read
Sports Illustrated
and
Forbes
. I stuffed the mail back in the box, then, leaving my car parked on the street where it wouldn’t get blocked in, I hurried up the drive.

At the top of the hill, the driveway widened enough to accommodate two cars and circled around under an elaborate, pillared portico attached to a substantial, modern, yellow brick dwelling. A spur led to a three-car garage, also made of brick. One garage door stood open. No cars were in sight.

I stepped up to the front door and stood there for a few minutes, my finger hesitating over the bell. What if I rang it and somebody answered? What would I say?
Excuse me, but may I use your phone, I seem to be lost?
I could always claim to be collecting money for charity. Or be a Jehovah’s Witness. I mashed the doorbell button with my thumb.
Silly
. I would simply ask for my sister.

When no one came to the door after several minutes, I peered through a window. Everything inside was dark. Where was Georgina?

To the right of the entranceway a flagstone path led around the house, passing through a well-tended garden that, in summer, would be brilliant with color but now contained mostly boxwood, rhododendron, and ivy.
I picked my way carefully along the path, hugging the foundation of the house, then stopped. A sign, “Office,” hung on a white-painted door. The door stood ajar.

I pushed it open with my palm. “Georgina?” There was no answer. I stepped into a small, prettily wallpapered entrance hall simply furnished with a small table, an umbrella stand, and a brass coatrack with Georgina’s green winter coat and paisley scarf hanging on it. Ahead of me a short flight of stairs, lushly carpeted, led up to a landing. I took three steps. “Georgina?”

I gasped when Georgina appeared unexpectedly at the head of the stairs, looking like a madwoman. Her hair tumbled loose about her shoulders, and her mascara had melted into black streaks that ran down her cheeks. “Thank God you’re here!” She stumbled toward me and hugged me so fiercely that I thought my ribs would break and we’d go tumbling backward down the stairs together.

I took hold of my sister’s arms and eased her into a sitting position on the landing, keeping one arm around her shoulder. “Now. Tell me what’s wrong.”