Unbreathed Memories (30 page)

“It’s up to you, honey. Remember what Dr. Loring said.” He stared at his wife for a long time without blinking.

Georgina flopped onto a chair and patted the one next to her. “Can you sit down for a minute, Hannah?”

“Sure.”

Paul dragged another chair over so we could all sit together. It took a while for Georgina to come to the point. She sat there peeling the frosted pink polish off her nails, not looking directly at me. “I’ve been thinking about what you said,” she began. She chipped away at a nail with her index finger. “After you left, I telephoned Dr. Loring. He’s helping me put things together.”

I nodded, my hands wrapped around my cup. “And?”

“Suggestion can be a powerful thing.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Dr. Loring indicated that I might have been unduly influenced by some of the other women in that therapy group.”

Hallelujah!
A crack in the facade. I hoped that if I waited long enough, it might split wide open and my real baby sister would arise from the ruins.

“Stephanie Golden said the same thing, Georgina. It wasn’t until she withdrew from the group that she started thinking more clearly and began to question Dr. Sturges’s diagnosis.”

Georgina made the connection. “Hannah, you have to understand that all that stuff about the Cabbage Patch doll seemed so
real
to me. I could see her face just as plain as day. She had on a yellow flowered dress and little buttoned shoes.” She shook her head. “But I checked into what you told me, and you’re right. There’s no way I could have had one.”

I leaned against the back of the chair and exhaled. I felt dizzy, as if I’d been holding my breath for a week.

“I have to be honest,” Georgina continued. “I’m still not one-hundred-percent sure that nothing ever happened,
but after listening to you and to Dr. Loring, I’m willing to give Dad the benefit of the doubt.”

After all we’d been though in the past seven weeks, I felt like tossing my teacup into the air and dancing a jig on the tabletop. Scott looked more thoughtful. “That therapy group was like a fire. Each member was a log. The more logs, the hotter the fire. But as the logs were pulled away …”

“When I pulled
myself
away,” Georgina corrected, “it was if the fire grew cooler.” She studied me silently, chewing on her lower lip. “But I still have a feeling that something happened in Sicily. If it wasn’t Daddy …?”

I grew suddenly cold, as if a cloud had passed over the sun.
Paolo? Charming, lighthearted Paolo?
I shivered.
No. No way
.

As if he had read my mind, Paul laid a comforting hand on my shoulder, then spoke directly to Georgina. “It’s your mother who needs you now, Georgina. We may not have much time.”

Scott grabbed his wife’s upper arm and shook it. “Go!”

“But …”

Scott stood, took her hand, and pulled her to her feet. “Go, Georgina, or you may regret it for the rest of your life.” He pulled a crumpled tissue out of his shirt pocket and waited for her to blow her nose and wipe her eyes. She turned a blotched face toward me.

“Ready?” I asked.

“Ready.”

Outside our mother’s room Georgina stood frozen, looking in. I knew she had to be taking in the machines and the sounds and smells of serious illness. Fresh tears brimmed in her eyes, and she must have seen what I did—Ruth and Dad flanking the bed; Paul perched on
the arm of a chair talking to Emily on the telephone. And our mother.

Daddy spotted Georgina first. His face lit up, causing Ruth to pause in mid-sentence, turn her head, and follow his gaze toward the door. “Georgina!”

Georgina ignored him, brushing past Ruth without a word of greeting, and leaned over the bed. She grasped Mother’s hand where it lay on top of the covers and pressed it to her cheek. “I’m so, so sorry.”

Mother’s eyes had been closed, but she opened them and smiled.

“How can you ever forgive me after all the terrible things I said?”

“We love you, Georgina.” She reached up to touch her daughter’s cheek, still glistening with tears. “We
both
love you.”

I hoped that Georgina would apologize to Daddy then, but she didn’t even look at him. She bowed her head and stared at the floor, then positioned herself on the side of the bed nearest Ruth.

I crossed the room and stood on the opposite side of the bed with my father, watching until Georgina’s sobs subsided and Scott helped her settle into a chair he had dragged in from somewhere.

Mother’s eyelids fluttered closed. I panicked, thinking she had died. I laid my hand on her chest and was comforted to find that it still rose and fell beneath the blanket, however slightly. She was asleep.

Daddy had taken Mother’s hand and was rubbing it tenderly. Her skin was translucent and slipped easily, too easily over her bones. It was so thin, I worried it would tear. After a few moments, she awoke and beamed up at my father, a radiant smile reminiscent of happier times that quite took my breath away. “I’m
ready, George.” Her eyelids closed and I heard a shuddering sigh.

I didn’t need the machines to tell me that Mother was gone, leaving her body, still warm, beneath my hand. Her spirit simply departed, fleeing its broken-down body and soaring, I knew with confidence, toward heaven. I gazed up, imagining I would see it, a flickering light like Tinker Bell, hovering near the ceiling—
flick-flick-flick
—gazing down upon her family with love. All the clapping in the world—
I believe! I believe!
—wouldn’t bring Mother back now. Only her shell remained, pale and serene, the hint of a smile on its lips. What made Mother Mother had simply floated away.

One of the machines screamed; another bleated. Nurses rushed in from all points of the compass. One grabbed for the crash cart, but my father stayed her hand. “Not this time,” he said. The nurse complied. “I’m sorry, sir.” It was then that his face crumpled. Daddy’s knees buckled and he slumped, racked with sobs, over my mother’s body.

My tears wouldn’t come. I imagined I saw Mom still, hovering near the window. Any minute her gossamer wings would batter against the pane and I would lift up the sash and release her spirit into the night.

Georgina had been curled in a chair, her cheek resting against her arm. Her hair had escaped from its clip and cascaded over her arm, the color of rust in the subdued light. When the alarms began to sound she ground a fist into her eye, focused on the scene around the bed, and said, “Daddy?”

Daddy sucked in his lips, struggling for control. Huge tears coursed down his cheeks and glistened in the shadow of a beard that had sprouted on his face over the past few days. Georgina’s wail rent the night,
more piercing than the machine that the nurse had just silenced. She fell across the bed. “It’s my fault! It’s all my fault!”

I bent over my sister. Her skin felt hot and damp, as if she had a fever. “Georgina, you know it’s not your fault. Mother told you so herself.”

Georgina’s cheek was pressed against the blanket. I took her by both arms and pulled her away, but she laid a flat hand against my chest and shoved. “Leave me alone!”

The nurse drew the privacy curtains across the windows, leaving us to say our final farewells and give free rein to our grief. Ruth sat stiff as a mannequin, mascara-tinged tears marking crooked bluish paths along her cheeks. I turned to her as I had done as a child. “Oh, Ruth.” We clung desperately to one another, and I began to weep. After a few minutes, Paul’s embrace was large enough to encompass us both.

When I looked up again, Georgina was sobbing in Daddy’s arms, her flushed cheek pressed against his chest. He smoothed a wayward strand of hair back behind her ear. Fragments of a familiar tune danced at the edges of my consciousness—
Hush little baby, don’t you cry
—as if a TV were playing low somewhere in the next room. The song, in gravelly snatches, teased my ears until I realized that the familiar lullaby was coming from my father. Daddy was singing to Georgina, holding her securely in his arms and rocking, rocking, rocking.

In Memoriam
Lois Elizabeth Tuckerman Dutton
1917–1980

Mother

Acknowledgments

I owe special thanks to many people who generously helped in the writing of this book. All mistakes are mine alone and should not be attributed to any of the wonderful folks mentioned below.

To my husband, Barry, for his unqualified love and support.

To my daughters, Laura Geyer and Sarah Glass, for making me laugh whenever I’m in danger of taking myself too seriously.

To Carolyn, Pauline, Katherine, and especially to Gretchen, for their candor and courage.

To my editor, advocate, and friend, Jackie Cantor, and to the amazing Abby Zidle, who can do anything.

To my creative and indefatigable agent, Jimmy Vines.

To my writers’ groups—Sujata Massey, John Mann, Janice McLane, and Karen Diegmueller in Baltimore, and Christiane Carlson-Thies, Janet Benrey, Trish Marshall, Mary Ellen Hughes, Sherriel Mattingly, and Ray Flynt in Annapolis—I couldn’t have done it without you!

To Malice Domestic, Ltd., for the grant that opened the door, and to the members of Chesapeake Chapter of Sisters in Crime, for all they do to support newly published authors.

To Thomas Tracey, M.D., Shirley Aronson, and Donna Yates, for medical advice and background information.

To Barbara Parker, feng shui consultant and Web maven extraordinaire
(http://hometown.aol.com/mardtal/homepage.htm)
.

To Linda Sprenkle, location scout, intrepid guide, and dear friend.

To Vicki Cone, former Assistant Librarian at St. John’s College, for an insider’s tour of the renovated library and its special collections.

To Rear Admiral Robert McNitt and his wife, Pat, who invited me to dinner at Ginger Cove, little suspecting where it would lead.

To Ed and Donna Hudgins, who helped invent All Hallows Church, which might have been more Episcopally-correct, had it not been for all the wine.

To Kate Charles and Deborah Crombie, partners in crime and best of friends—Long live “Plot Fest”!—and to Ken and Angela Pritchard at Pickford House, Beckington, Somerset, for the British hospitality that made it possible.

And to Carol Chase, best of best friends, for her cyber-hugs and sympathetic ear, for St. Hilda’s and Edington and everything else.

Also by Marcia Talley

Sing It to Her Bones

About the Author

Marcia Talley’s first novel,
Sing It to Her Bones
, won the 1998 Malice Domestic Grant, was a Featured Alternate of the Mystery Guild, and was nominated for an Agatha Award for Best First Novel. Her short stories have been featured in mystery magazines and collections. A former librarian and computer specialist, she lives in Annapolis, Maryland, with her husband, a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy. When she isn’t traveling or sailing, she is busy writing the next Hannah Ives mystery.