Unbreathed Memories (9 page)

Customers weren’t exactly lining up at the door as if waiting to buy tickets to the next
Star Wars
movie—I was the only one, in fact—so I hoped we’d have time to talk before the tourists and day-trippers finished with their Sunday brunch specials and started wandering in.

Ruth finally noticed me. “Hannah! What a delight!”
She stuck the bagel bag under her arm, sorted through a collection of keys on a large ring, unlocked the door, and stood aside while I walked ahead of her into the shop. Once inside, she jiggled the bag enticingly under my nose, but I turned it down. I didn’t have any appetite, and Ruth didn’t, either, after I told her a few minutes later what Georgina had said about Daddy.

Ruth nearly choked on her bagel. “Bullshit!” she exploded. A speck of cream cheese clung to her lip. She threw the bagel down on the display case so hard that it bounced, landing cream-cheese-side down on the glass.

Even though I shared her anger, I was surprised to find myself playing devil’s advocate. “What if—”

“Don’t go there, Hannah. Our sister’s delusional.”

“But—”

“Didn’t happen. Never happened.”

“Can you be certain?”

“OK. Supposing, just supposing it were true. Don’t you think it odd that Daddy would abuse Georgina but not either one of us? And we didn’t notice a thing.” She sat down with a grunt in the wrought-iron chair behind the counter. “Sexual abuse! I can’t even think it. Makes me ill.”

“Me, too.” I pushed aside an elaborate kinetic clock made out of brass and sat down on the edge of a display table near the front of the shop. “Georgina keeps asking about Sicily, as if the key to this whole mess lies in Italy somewhere. Tell me about Sicily, Ruth.”

Ruth thought for a few moments. “I was nine when we lived in Sicily; you were seven. Georgina was just a baby, toddling around after the maid, thumb in her mouth.” She stared out the window toward the street, her face grim, then looked back at me. “You know, Mom and Dad were hardly ever home. They were out doing the social,
hands-across-the-sea sort of thing—receptions, cocktail parties—sometimes two in one night. Mom kept all the invitations in a scrapbook. Probably still has it somewhere.”

The chimes over the door jingled and a customer came in. Ruth suddenly noticed the wayward bagel, scraped it off the counter, and tossed it into the trash. I wiped the glass clean with a napkin while Ruth helped the woman pick out some natural bath salts especially designed to relieve stress. I could have used a few pounds of that just then.

“And besides,” Ruth continued as the chimes sounded as the door closed on the woman’s blue-jean-encased behind, “Daddy was often too drunk after parties to do anything more than fall into bed.”

I looked up in surprise. “I don’t remember that!”

“You were probably too young to notice.”

I considered what Ruth had told me. “Could he have done something during an alcoholic blackout?”

“Get real, Hannah. Georgina shared a room with the maid. A two-hundred-pound man crawling into bed with a toddler would hardly go unnoticed.”

My stomach lurched at the picture. I’d read about sickos like that in the newspapers. And my father was no sicko, I was certain of that. This had to be some ghastly misunderstanding. “What are we going to do about Georgina?”

Ruth turned a switch that started the water gurgling over the stones in a miniature rock garden. She shrugged. “I just don’t know.”

“Won’t Georgina have to
prove
Daddy abused her? And there’ll be no proof of that, will there, because it simply didn’t happen!”

I fell back against the counter. “I can’t decide which
is worse—Daddy being arrested for murder or Daddy being branded a child abuser.” I pressed my hand against my chest, as if to contain my heart, which was beating wildly. “Oh, my God! Or both!”

“Frankly, Hannah, I suspect the police aren’t particularly concerned about the sexual abuse angle.”

“Why not? Isn’t it against the law?”

“Sure, but I seem to remember reading that sexual abuse has to be reported within a certain amount of time. The statute of limitations may have run out a long time ago.” She chewed thoughtfully on her thumbnail. “Besides, if something happened in Sicily, the jurisdiction would be military, not civilian. I doubt that police in the States could touch him; and Daddy’s long out of the Navy.”

“Whether it’s true or not, it gives Daddy a powerful motive to have murdered Georgina’s therapist,” I suggested.

“If it were me, I’d have been so angry that I’d want to kill Georgina.”

“I think he blames the shrink, not Georgina. You should have seen his face, Ruth. He was crushed by what Georgina said. Absolutely numb.”

“Don’t the police suspect Georgina, then?”

“I have no idea what she told them, but they must realize how much she depended on Dr. Sturges just to get through the day. I think they consider her a witness, not a serious suspect.”

While I perched uncomfortably on the edge of the table, Ruth began to move nervously around the shop, realigning bottles of herbal shampoo, folding and refolding batik wall hangings, standing incense sticks up in ceramic Japanese bowls of powdered lime. She held a match to one of the sticks and soon the pleasant odor of sandalwood filled the shop. “By the time I get back from
Bali, the police will probably have arrested that therapist’s ex-husband or her spurned lover, or a vagrant maybe. Trust me. The whole thing will have blown over.”

I remembered how much I had wished the whole mess with Paul and that student had simply blown over, but it had never been satisfactorily resolved, and the doubt I had carried about with me like a heavy stone had nearly wrecked my marriage. Fortunately, Paul and I had moved beyond that a long time ago. Jennifer Goodall, the cause of so much unhappiness, was serving on some aircraft carrier in the middle of the Persian Gulf. She was the Navy’s problem now.

Ruth stood in the center of the store, her hands on her hips, glaring. At first I thought she was angry with me, but then I noticed she was staring at something behind me. “Oh damn. Just what I need. Here comes old S.H.”

“Who?”

“Old shithead. Brains in his crotch.”

“Eric?”

Ruth smirked. Eric was Ruth’s ex-husband, Eric Gannon, who still owned a half interest in Mother Earth. They had been married nine years when he began alleviating the painful onset of an early midlife crisis by taking a string of newer models out on test drives. The day Ruth realized he was of no more use to her than her Water Pik shower massage, she pitched him and his prize collection of 33⅓ records out on the street, but, being Ruth, kept the turntable he needed to play them. Eric had dyed his graying hair dark brown since I’d seen him last, but his face was young, unlined, and, despite it being January, incredibly tanned. Ruth, who had friends who kept her informed of Eric’s every move, would probably tell
me that the bimbo du jour was some sweet young thing he met at the tanning studio out on West Street.

“What’s he doing here?” I whispered.

“Drops in from time to time to rearrange the displays and generally annoy me.”

Eric breezed through the door, caught sight of me, and aimed a dazzling smile in my direction. “Hi, Han. How the hell are you?”

“Doing good,” I lied. Eric always called me “Han,” even though he knew I hated it. “Been worried about you, Han. Heard you’re facing additional surgery.”

I stared at him stupidly, wondering who’d blabbed. “I haven’t decided about that yet.”

“Well, good luck with it.” He ran the back of his hand along a set of brass wind chimes, setting them to dancing and singing.

Ruth emerged from behind the counter, grabbed me by the arm, and dragged me toward the street. “Watch the store for a bit, will you?” she called over her shoulder.

Eric shrugged and shook his head. “Can’t, I’m afraid. I’m meeting someone.”

“Get off it, Eric. As long as you continue to own part of Mother Earth, you can sit your buns down behind the counter every once in a while.”

“But—”

“Don’t you ‘but’ me. I’ll be back in an hour. Hannah and I need to talk.”

Ruth left Eric stammering useless protests and steered me down Main Street to the city dock. We bought decaf cappuccino at Starbucks and carried it to a bench overlooking the water. “So what are we going to do now?” I asked. I watched a red cigarette boat noisily exuding smoke, hops, and testosterone belch its way up the
narrow channel called Ego Alley, U-turn, and mosey back out to the bay. Thank God it was winter or we’d have been treated to the sight of the operator’s bare torso, with gold chains tangled in his chest hair. I wrapped my hands around my paper cup to warm them. “Is it possible to be cured of something that never happened?” I wondered aloud.

“You mean learn to live with something you believe happened when it actually didn’t?” She removed the plastic lid and sipped her coffee. “I don’t know.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes, watching the tourists stroll back and forth on the crosswalk between the city dock and the market house.

Suddenly I had a brainstorm. “Wait a minute! That’s the key! It’s not up to Georgina to prove it did happen. We have to prove to her that it didn’t.” I set my coffee down on the brick planter next to me and turned toward my sister. “Think about it, Ruth! If such a thing happened, wouldn’t there have been signs? Physical signs?”

“Possibly.”

“I wonder where Georgina’s medical records are?” I asked.

“Lord only knows, we’ve moved so many times. If Mother doesn’t have them, they must be at some Navy hospital somewhere. Where are yours? Or mine, for that matter?”

“Mine have been overtaken by events,” I said, thinking about the fat folder in Dr. Wilkins’s office with sheet after sheet detailing my cancer surgery, chemotherapy, and extensive follow-up treatment. Being able to lay my hands on a record of a tetanus shot I had back in 1959 seemed the least of my worries. “Help me put it together, Ruth.”

Ruth leaned back on her hands and stared into the
pale winter sky. “Georgina had her tonsils out when she was five …”

“But they wouldn’t necessarily have been looking …” I turned my head away. “… down there.”

“I vaguely remember a severe bladder infection …” Ruth’s voice trailed off and the silence was filled with the chatter of a group of boisterous tourists.

I couldn’t see any way around it. “Somebody needs to ask Mother, then.”

“Oh, sure!”

“Maybe I could inquire about my early records. Say I need the information for my reconstructive surgery.” The minute I said it, I realized what a stupid idea that was. Mother was no fool. In my eagerness to avoid talking to Mom about Georgina’s accusation, I was grasping at straws. I sat quietly and we stared at a seagull pecking energetically at a dirty pretzel.

I retrieved my coffee and took a grateful sip. “At this late date, I have a feeling it’s a case of ‘he said, she said.’ ”

“Hannah, I told you. Stop worrying. By the time I get back from Bali, this will all have blown over.”

This was the second time in less than an hour she’d mentioned her damn trip. How could she be going about business as usual when our world was coming apart around us? I turned to face her. “I can’t believe that you’re still talking about that trip!”

Ruth’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. “I’ve been planning this trip for over a year. Paid for it in advance. It’s a package deal, Hannah. Nonrefundable.”

“One might consider the situation at home somewhat in the nature of an emergency.”

“One certainly might, but it’s not going to do me or anybody else any good if I stay home moaning and groaning.”

“I need you, Ruth.”

“And I need this retreat! It’s something I’m doing for myself, Hannah. You, of all people, should understand the importance of that.” She slipped the plastic lid inside her empty cup and squashed the cup flat. “I need to be extra careful now that you’ve screwed up the odds.”

“Odds? What odds?” I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about.

“Having a sister or mother with breast cancer increases my risk of getting it by twenty-five percent.”

I leapt to my feet and glared down at Ruth, who frowned and shook her head slowly from side to side. “I always warned you that working in Washington—”

“It’s not
my
fault I got cancer! I can’t believe you’re laying this on me! Not here. Not now.”

I must have been shouting, because she grabbed my hand and pulled me down onto the bench beside her. “Shhh. I’m just trying to explain why I won’t give up my trip. It’s for my health, as much as for my business.”

At that point I felt like wishing her good-bye and good riddance, but as satisfying as it would have been to punch her in the nose, I really wanted Ruth to stay and I told her so. Begged her even. Said I’d run an ad myself offering to sell her reservations.

“I only regret I won’t be back in time to help out when you have your reconstruction.” She slipped her arm around my shoulder and drew me close.

I shrugged her arm away. “If I have it.” I didn’t even try to hide the anger in my voice. “Georgina’s certifiable, Daddy’s flirting with hard liquor again, one or both of them may have killed that damn therapist.” I grabbed my sister’s arm and squeezed. “Have you seen Mother? She looks like something the cat dragged in! The family’s
falling apart, Ruth, and you’re leaving me all alone to pick up the pieces.”

“Everything will be fine, Hannah. You’ll see.”

But I didn’t think so. What I thought was that Ruth or no Ruth, I would do whatever it took to uncover the truth. If only I knew where to begin.

chapter
7

Monday dawned clear and cold. I started the
coffee and put water for the oatmeal on to boil before dashing outside in my pajamas to pick up the newspapers. I walked back to the kitchen, preoccupied, scanning the headlines. Nothing new about the Sturges case in the Baltimore paper. I wondered if no news was good news, and told Paul that I would be holding my breath until someone I wasn’t even slightly related to was arrested for the crime.

Twenty minutes later, Paul left for the academy. I thought he’d be staying home on Martin Luther King Day, but he claimed he had work to catch up on. I was still sitting at the table over a cup of cooling coffee. I had no game plan; but I had promised Paul I’d think twice before going off half-cocked. So far I had thought no further than planning to put in a few hours at the library, then check in with my parents.