Unbreathed Memories (6 page)

“You are silly boys,” announced Julie. “Granddaddy has a pool table.” That seemed to make all the difference. Julie, I decided, had a future in politics.

I left the boys arguing over which of their Star Wars action figures to pack in their bags while I wandered into my sister’s bedroom. I told myself I was searching for a hairbrush for Julie, but to be honest, I was snooping. As
I expected, the room was a mess. The clothes Georgina had worn the day before were heaped in a corner next to the dirty clothes hamper, as if someone with very poor aim had tossed them there. A dresser drawer stood open; another drawer had been hastily closed over some item of clothing, probably the corner of a T-shirt. Compulsively, I picked up the scattered clothing and laid it on the bed, then looked around the room for the missing hairbrush. I was about to give up when something caught my attention, propped up on my sister’s side of the bed between the box springs and the leg of her bedside table—a framed photograph of Georgina at the age of three. I recognized the pose. It was from a snapshot of us girls Dad took for our Christmas postcard the last year we lived in Sicily. But Georgina had cropped Ruth and me out of the picture altogether and blown herself up to a fuzzy eight-by-ten. I tried not to feel annoyed.

I studied the picture and was struck by how much Julie now resembled her mother at that age. I stroked the smooth mahogany of the frame with my fingers. The kids had certainly been handling the picture, poor little tykes. I hadn’t seen picture glass so smudgy with fingerprints since my photograph of Paul McCartney, the love of my life in junior high school.

I placed Georgina’s picture between a lamp and an alarm clock on her bedside table, then made a valiant stab at tidying up the rest of the room, but the clutter of soaps, cleansers, cosmetics, and vials of prescription drugs from three or four different doctors defeated me and I moved on to the less personal and more familiar territory of the family room and kitchen. While the kids took their sweet time packing, I folded up the hide-abed, reduced the scattered magazines to a single pile on the coffee table, moved the children’s breakfast dishes
from the sink to the dishwasher, and gave the kitchen table and countertops a badly needed swipe with a damp rag. Around eleven, I got the house locked, the kids loaded into the car, and my Le Baron headed east around I-695 toward Annapolis. On car trips when we were small, my sisters and I used to dream up irreverent lyrics to “Over the River and Through the Woods to Grandmother’s House We Go,” until Daddy, laughing, would threaten to pull over and leave us by the side of the road. Kids haven’t changed all that much. While I drove, Sean and Dylan lounged on one side of the backseat and butchered “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” while Julie, belted in behind me with Abby, pretended to ignore her brothers and wondered aloud why we couldn’t put the top on my convertible down.

“It’s winter,” I told her. “There’s snow on the ground.”

“The sun’s out,” she said, reasonably.

“It’s too cold.”

“You could put the heater on.”

I took my eyes off the beltway traffic for a second and looked at her in the rearview mirror. “I could, but our heads would freeze off.”

Julie giggled. “If we didn’t have heads, we couldn’t eat. Is Gramma going to have cookies?”

Julie must have been thinking of my mother’s famous soft, melt-in-your-mouth ginger cookies. I figured that Mom hadn’t even had time to unpack the cookie sheets, let alone bake anything on them. “I don’t know, Julie. But we could stop at the grocery store and get some pizza.”

“Yay, pizza!” Dylan lived for pizza.

“Pepperoni!” chimed in Sean. “No mushrooms.”

“Abby likes mushrooms,” said Julie. “Don’t you, Abby?”

I felt as if I’d stepped into a time capsule and been whisked back forty years. As I drove south on I-97 listening to the happy patter and good-natured squabbling of the children, I recalled wondrous cross-country trips as the U.S. Navy moved us from one duty station to another. Sometimes Daddy would hitch up a trailer to our big Chrysler and drag it behind. We’d camp in national parks along the way—Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, Yosemite. I smashed my finger in a door at the Tetons and bled all over my new plaid shirt. Mother washed it out in a tub of cold water, using an old-fashioned corrugated washboard. Funny the things you remember.

Sometimes we’d pull off the road where a flashing neon sign announced “Vacancy” and “Free TV,” and, if we were really lucky, “Heated Pool.” We loved staying in inexpensive motels where my sisters and I would get a room of our own. With our parents locked safely behind the connecting door, we’d watch TV late into the night, falling asleep while the black-and-white images still flickered on the cheap knotty-pine paneling.

“The Doorknob to Hell,” a small voice intoned from the backseat. We were heading east on Rowe Boulevard, just approaching the Naval Academy stadium where a water tower shaped like a golf ball on a tee towered over the parking lot.

I glanced into the rearview mirror and tried to catch Dylan’s eye. “Who told you that, Dylan?”

“Nobody. Looks like a doorknob is all.”

“Yeah,” Sean agreed. “There was this giant …” and the twins launched into an improbable story involving dinosaurs, devils, and underground caverns, interrupting each other to heap one extravagant detail upon another until Julie clamped both hands over her ears and even I screamed for mercy. But in the left-turn lane at
Taylor Avenue, waiting for the light, I looked back over my shoulder toward the stadium. The kid was right. Darn thing did look like a giant doorknob.

Ignoring our pleas, Sean reached the climax of his story and began making
woo woo
noises and waggling his fingers at his sister.

“Make him stop, Aunt Hannah! He’s scaring Abby!”

The light turned green just then, of course, so I couldn’t deal with Sean until we had pulled into the parking lot at Graul’s Market.

I unbuckled my seat belt and swiveled around. “If you can’t behave yourself, Sean Patrick, I’ll have to leave you in the car while the rest of us go shopping.”

I wouldn’t have, of course, but Sean didn’t know that. He hung his head until his dimpled chin touched his chest, tucked his hands snugly between his knees, then looked up at me through white-blond lashes. “Can I pick out the pizza?”

“You can
each
pick out a pizza.” Auntie Hannah wasn’t usually so generous. I just wasn’t in the mood for any hassles. Exhausted with worry and racked by guilt, I could focus only on getting to my parents’, anxious to find out if my passion for truth had ruined my sister’s life.

A few minutes later, I paraded into the supermarket, three perfectly behaved children in tow. It was too good to last. Dylan wanted to take the shopping cart and tear through the aisles like Mario Andretti, but I nipped his racing career in the bud by putting him in charge of my purse, a large bookbaglike satchel that contained everything I own. He hung it around his neck like a feedbag. At the checkout, he reached in and solemnly extracted a twenty-dollar bill from my coin purse and handed it to the cashier. Sean, meanwhile, correctly pegging me as a softie, had selected two candy bars and tried to slip
them into the shopping cart when he thought I wasn’t looking. Julie, ignoring us all, danced Abby up and down the tabloid magazine racks. Abby laid a noisy kiss on Leonardo DiCaprio, then moved on to smooch with Bill Clinton. Cheeky little rabbit. I had forgotten how it was, shopping with kids.

Back in the car, the children were strangely subdued, and I wondered if they were worrying about their mother or had simply run out of gas. By the time we reached the spot where the road forks left to Providence and right to the Naval Academy golf course, Sean and Dylan had fallen asleep with chocolate on their lips and the bag of groceries sandwiched between them.

I pulled into the drive behind my father’s black Lincoln and set the brake with relief. Paul’s blue Volvo was parked on the street in front of the house next door. “We’re here, sports fans!” I reached back to unbuckle Julie, stepped out onto the driveway, then pushed my seat forward so the kids could get out. As Sean started to run off, I grabbed him by the hood of his jacket. “Not so fast, big fella. Carry the bag for me, will you?”

He wrapped thin arms around the bag in a bear hug and plodded up the walk. “Help, Aunt Hannah! I can’t see!”

I flipped down the automatic door lock and smiled after my nephew, as he staggered with slow, exaggerated Frankenstein steps up the walk, acting for all the world as if the bag weighed fifty tons. How could someone as screwed up as my sister Georgina have managed to raise such sweet kids?
Oh, Lord!
What if she
had
killed her therapist? What if she went to jail? I couldn’t imagine Scott handling the kids. Especially Julie. Inside that clever head of hers wheels were turning, measuring, weighing, taking everything in. And that defiant little
chin, just like our Emily. At least Emily had turned out all right—eventually—although there had been times when she was in high school when I would gladly have strangled her. I shuddered, remembering Dr. Sturges’s distorted face.
Not nice, Hannah. You shouldn’t joke about stuff like that
.

I stepped through the door the kids had left open. Amid stacks of packing boxes still piled in the entrance hall, Paul greeted me with a hug and a soft kiss, his lips lingering on mine just long enough that I began to forget where I was and what brought me here. “Hold that thought,” I whispered against his ear. “Right now I have to cook up a few pizzas for lunch. Want some?”

“Pepperoni, no mushrooms?” Paul asked, hopefully.

“Pepperoni, no mushrooms.”

Paul touched my lips with his index finger. “I love it when you sweet-talk me like that.” A long, satisfying minute later, he followed me into the kitchen where Sean had abandoned the grocery sack, leaning crookedly against the refrigerator door.

Paul tore open the pizza boxes while I fiddled with the high-tech dials and buttons on Mother’s new stove, trying to get the oven to turn on. “Where are Mom and Dad?” I asked.

“In the living room. Watching TV. They were waiting for the news, at least that’s what they were doing until the recent invasion of adoring rug rats.”

I rummaged through the cabinets, looking for something to bake the pizzas on. “What a mess! How are they taking this?”

“Neither one’s saying much. Could be shock, I suppose. Your dad’s wearing a hole in the carpet with his pacing while your mother’s keeping a stiff upper lip. She’s confident it will all turn out to be a colossal mistake.”

I found the cookie sheets—Mother had unpacked them, after all—and Paul slid the rock-hard pizzas onto them. While we waited for them to bake, I quietly brought Paul up to speed on the events of the past twenty-four hours and my role in them. I was relieved when he hugged me and told me that he thought I had done the right thing by telling the officers the truth.

After pizza and Coca-Cola, consumed around the big coffee table in the living room, talking of everything else but, the children entertained us with a corrupted version of Monopoly. Even though they made up their own rules, which the boys kept changing to benefit themselves, it was Julie, I noticed with satisfaction, who ended up owning all the railroads, with hotels on both Boardwalk and Park Place. Paul eventually settled the kids in the basement recreation room with a bag of videos he had rented from Blockbuster, while the grown-ups waited upstairs for news from Scott. Mother sat in an upholstered Queen Anne armchair and kept trying to smile and make small talk—“I think the garden is going to be lovely once I get my roses in”—while Daddy busied himself between mugs of coffee by taking books out of boxes and arranging them in order by size on the bookshelves. How much coffee could my father drink before his blue eyes turned brown, I wondered.

Sitting next to Paul on the sofa, I threw out conversational tidbits—jokes I had read on the Internet—that glowed, then quickly died, like sparks from a campfire.

My mother laid aside the magazine she had been flipping through without actually reading anything in it. “Why doesn’t Scott call? He’s got to know that we’re worried sick.”

“I guess he’s got a lot on his mind right now, Mom.”

“But you’d think he’d at least check in to make sure the children are OK.”

“He knows the children are OK. They’re here with us.”

Mother sighed. “I suppose so.” She chewed on her thumbnail, a habit she had recently acquired when she finally gave up a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit.

I didn’t think I could stand one more minute of not knowing. I had to do something. Anything. Surprised I hadn’t thought of this before, I excused myself, went into the kitchen, and picked up the phone. My sister-in-law’s boyfriend, Dennis Rutherford, was a Chesapeake County police officer. Although Chesapeake was several counties to the south of Annapolis, I was convinced Dennis would have an inside track with his colleagues up in Baltimore. But Dennis wasn’t home. Disappointed, I left a detailed message, then rejoined the family broodfest.

When the phone finally rang, it wasn’t Dennis, just somebody selling a lawn care service. Mother screamed into the receiver, “We don’t want any!” slammed it back into the cradle, and burst into tears. Dad stood by the fireplace with a book in each hand, staring helplessly at his sobbing wife.

It was Paul who saved the day. “C’mon, Lois. I’m taking you shopping.”

Mother and I always enjoyed a little retail therapy now and then, but this was a new role for Paul.

Mother pulled a fresh tissue from the box on her lap, dabbed at her eyes, and looked up doubtfully. “Where to?”

Paul shrugged, palms up. “Home Depot?” The giant do-it-yourself store would carry many of the items on Mother’s list, things she needed for the house, such as towel bars, curtain rods, and lightbulbs. I was amazed at what the previous owners had taken away with them.
My parents had been operating for almost a week without toilet-paper holders. First things first. No wonder Mother had sent Ruth and her dandy little mirrors and wind chimes packing.