The Time Between (19 page)

“What is that supposed to mean, and why are you telling me all this now?”

She tucked her chin into her neck in an attempt to appear affronted. “I told you when you first got the job offer that all wasn’t right in that house. I didn’t say any more because I knew you weren’t ready to listen. And maybe you’re still not. But I am your mother and I would be neglecting my responsibilities if I didn’t tell you what I thought.”

I focused on breathing slowly to control my anger. “Bernadett Szarka was eighty-eight years old, Mama. It’s not unusual for people of that age to die.”

“I know. It just seemed odd. And that Mr. Beaufain—he’s from a good family, and that little girl is just precious, but there was a lot of ugliness surrounding his divorce. Something not very nice about his wife.”

“Really, Mama? You know his ex-wife?”

“No, of course not. And I don’t mean to sound like a gossip, but Mrs. Reed’s cousin is a dental hygienist in the office where all three of them are patients. Again, I don’t usually listen to idle chatter, but you’re in contact with these people and I thought you should know.”

I stared at her, torn between asking for more information and wanting to be the adult and discourage gossip. Either way, I needed to be a better monitor of the sources of information my mother had access to.

“I’ve only met her once, so I really couldn’t say.”

“Well, the circumstances surrounding the divorce were very ugly.”

Unable to resist, I asked, “How ugly?”

“Haven’t you wondered why the father has custody instead of the mother? That never happens unless they can prove that the father would be a better parent.”

“Mama, I don’t think we should be talking about—”

“The little girl got really sick—cancer, I think—and her mother couldn’t deal with it. She took up with another man and moved out of the country for a little bit, only came back when it looked like the girl—Gigi, is it?—would survive.”

“It was leukemia,” I said softly.

“Well, from that one time I met her, it seems like she turned out all right despite all that.”

“Yes,” I said, exiting the car and then moving to the passenger side to open my mother’s door. “She’s a terrific kid, thanks mostly to her father. I think he’s doing a great job. You should see her room—it’s the kind of room I used to dream about.”

She’d turned and sat on the edge of the seat, looking up at me. “I remember you telling your father exactly what you wanted. I used to cut out pictures in magazines when I thought it looked like what you’d been talking about and stored them in a box for when we’d have the money. I think I still have them somewhere.”

While I tried to think of something to say, she reached into her handbag and held up a small gold tube. “Here, take this.”

I looked down at my mother’s tube of coral lipstick. “Why?”

She exhaled with exasperation. “Even the most beautiful women can always benefit from a little bit of color. I don’t know why you’ve always shied away from makeup. You don’t need a lot, but maybe a touch of powder and mascara would really enhance your natural features. They’re really quite lovely, you know. You take after your father’s side, and all the women in his family were always late bloomers.”

She stood while I just stared blankly at the tube of lipstick that had somehow ended up in my hand, wondering if it had been the first time my mother—even in an indirect way—had called me beautiful, and why it suddenly meant so much to me.

Leaning down toward the side-view mirror, I smoothed the lipstick over my lips and grudgingly admired the results.

We walked into the library and I settled my mother in the periodical section, while I made a beeline for the racks of paperback romances. I picked out one, then added a second for my mother. Then I found the history section, where I discovered several books on Hungary, waffling between two of them before finally settling on one that focused on the two world wars and the years behind the Iron Curtain. After a quick visit to the library’s reference computer, I found a photography book that featured Eastern European cities and had a photograph of the Buda Castle in Budapest on the cover.

Feeling satisfied, I made my way to the checkout desk, where an attractive woman in her mid-forties with short, curly dark hair sat behind a computer. A name tag in the shape of a tiara, complete with rhinestones, had the name
WANDA JEWELL
stamped on it. She was muttering under her breath as I approached, her fingers flying over the keyboard until she gave a final loud thump to the return key before focusing her attention on me.

“Sorry about that. It just makes me so angry when people can’t return their books on time. It’s not like we hide the due date from them or anything.”

My smile faded slightly. “Yes, um, I’d like to check out a few books, and I have one to renew as well.”

She smiled expectantly, and I slid the new books toward her. “I have a library card, but I haven’t used it in a while.”

Her smile dimmed perceptibly as I pulled the card from my wallet. Wanda took it, then typed something into the computer. “Is all of your information still current?”

“Yes, it is.”

Wanda glanced at the line of library patrons that was forming behind me. “You know, you could have gone online and done this at home.”

The overdue book I still clutched in my hand seemed to grow heavier, and I considered taking it back without renewing it. But when Wanda handed over my newly checked-out books to me, I slid
The Art of Origami
to her. “This is an elderly friend’s book who has recently suffered a death in the family. I was hoping I could renew this for her.”

Wanda removed the small receipt from the inside cover, and I watched as her eyes widened. “This book is almost four months overdue.”

I glanced at the people lined up behind me and smiled. “I know. I was just hoping to do this as a favor, considering the circumstances. . . .”

My voice trailed off as she started typing into the computer again. She leaned forward to read something before fishing for the reading glasses that hung on a chain around her neck and sticking them on her nose.

“Bernadett Szarka?” she asked.

“Yes,” I blurted out, not sure why I’d been thinking it had been Helena’s book.

She peered at me from over her reading glasses. “I’ll waive the fine because of the extenuating circumstances.” She was silent for a moment as she read from her screen. “This is interesting. Apparently your friend ordered a few books from another library as an interlibrary loan, but she didn’t want to be notified. She left very explicit instructions not to be called, but that she would be in to pick up the books.”

I leaned over the counter. “When was this?”

Wanda lifted her index finger and dragged it along the screen. “January. I don’t know why she didn’t renew the origami book when she was here then, since she probably would have known by then that she wouldn’t be done with it by the due date. That would have saved us all a lot of trouble.” She tapped her finger on the screen. “She has an address on Edisto. You could have gone to any of the Charleston County library branches to renew this, you know.”

I glanced blankly at her, unable to find the courage to tell her that I didn’t know because I rarely used the library anymore. There simply weren’t enough hours in the day. Instead, I said, “Do you still have the books on hold?”

“I’ll have to go check. Usually we return unclaimed books within thirty days, but we’ve been dealing with a lot of part-time help, so things have been overlooked. I’ll go see.”

There was an audible sigh from the woman standing directly behind me, and I sent her another apologetic smile.

Ms. Jewell reappeared from the back holding two books rubber-banded together with a piece of paper with Bernadett’s name written across it in bold black letters. I had no intention of telling the librarian that the person she’d been holding the books for had died nearly two months before. I figured I’d just take them home, see if Helena wanted to read them, then bring them back, except I wouldn’t drive all the way to Mount Pleasant to return them. Surely somebody had mentioned that to Bernadett. There was even a library in Edisto. It made no sense that she would have driven all this way.

Wanda dropped the books on the desk in front of me. “Do you have Miss Szarka’s library card?”

I quickly slid mine over to her. “Use mine.”

She took the card and added Bernadett’s books to my account. As I took the proffered books, she said, “Please tell Miss Szarka that if she wants to keep books for such a long time, she might consider purchasing them. We have a lot of fine bookstores in the area—including a very nice one right on Edisto.” She smiled broadly. “Have a nice day.”

“Thanks. And you, too.”

I found my mother poring over a current issue of
Charleston
magazine
.
“Did you find anything you wanted to check out?” On my walk over to her, I’d already decided that if she did, I was sending her through the line by herself.

“No, not really,” she said as she stood, giving the magazine a final, lingering glance.

“That’s all right,” I said as I led her toward the door. “I got a book for you that I think you might like.”

I handed her one of the romance novels.

“Eleanor! You know I don’t read this kind of thing.” She quickly pressed the book, cover first, into her chest. “What if somebody sees?”

“Nobody knows you here, Mama, and nobody would care, anyway.”

She scowled, but instead of giving the novel back to me, she stuck it in her purse.

When I opened the back door of the car to toss the books onto the backseat, the rubber band snapped on Bernadett’s books, spilling them onto the floor. I bent to pick them up, then froze as I read the two titles.
Great Art of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
and
The Dutch Masters
. A cool hand seemed to brush the back of my neck, as if somebody was leaning close to whisper in my ear. I replaced the books on the seat, then quickly slid behind the wheel.

My mother started reading her book on the way home, leaving me with more time than I wanted to picture her cutting out pictures from magazines for a girlhood room I would never have, and to ponder all the reasons why Bernadett would have ordered those particular books, and why she hadn’t wanted Helena to know.

T
he early-morning air held a coolness despite its being summer, and I had the sunroof of the Volvo opened to the sky. The drive down Highway 174 was one filled with color and light, passing the local restaurants and produce stands and the myriad white wooden churches that dotted the island. Growing up here, I’d never appreciated the beauty of the old highway, of the canopies of oaks that cast light and shadow over the road, and the way the road stretched over the winding creeks and marsh. You could smell the pluff mud through the open windows of the car as soon as you crossed the bridge over the Dawho River, a scent you never forgot no matter how hard you didn’t want to remember.

I recalled Eve and Lucy and me on our bicycles on the same road, without shoes or helmets or anything that would distract us from feeling the wind in our hair or going as fast as we could. I was always in the lead, always determined to go faster, to turn sharper. Even in those days before my daddy died, my need to agitate my senses always pushed at my back.

Although it was the middle of the week, Gigi accompanied me. Her head was tilted back so she could watch the passing limbs of the trees, her mouth open as if she was surprised that there was a world above her that she’d never suspected, as if no one had ever shown her before.

The canceled French immersion camp had apparently been a two-week deal, and Harper had already made plans during the second week that she couldn’t rearrange, so Finn had been left to juggle his work and Gigi. I hadn’t waited for him to ask me to help, volunteering to bring Gigi with me to Edisto. Although I enjoyed her company, I would be lying by saying I didn’t have ulterior motives—she was a lovely buffer between Helena and me. At the very least, it would give me the perfect opportunity to start her piano lessons.

As we neared the single sweetgrass basket stand on Edisto, I slowed to see if I recognized the woman seated to the side of the hut. Dah Georgie was long gone, as were all of the Edisto basket makers Lucy and I had known, and I knew that the women who infrequently inhabited this stand came all the way from Charleston. Still, I slowed, belatedly realizing the face I’d been wanting to see was the face of the woman from my dreams.

“Can we stop?” Gigi’s voice piped up from the backseat.

“Sure.” With a glance in the rearview mirror, I made a quick U-turn in the middle of the road, then drove up onto the grass near the basket stand.

The woman was humming a song I recognized, having heard Dah Georgie sing it many times. “Take Me to the Water” was used at riverside baptisms in Lucy’s family. It seemed their baptisms were more authentic than ours at the Presbyterian church, but I’d never mentioned that to my mother, knowing I’d probably have received a stiff punishment for even broaching the subject. But I still loved the song, and it was the words “take me to the water” that I heard when I thought of the myriad creeks and waterways of my childhood. It made my exile easier to accept, somehow, as if all I needed to do was find a boat and put it on a river to take me home.

Gigi held my hand as we approached the woman, who looked up and smiled at us, revealing bright white teeth with a gold tooth on the bottom. Her hair was steel gray threaded through with thin reeds of black, the pattern resembling those of some of her baskets. She wore a blue-and-white-checkered dress that threatened the integrity of the buttons holding the front together over her voluminous chest. We greeted each other while Gigi looked at the baskets. She stood on tiptoes to see the ones on the higher shelves, then squatted to see those closer to the ground, taking her time to examine each one carefully with her fingers.

I opened my mouth to tell her to look without touching, but the basket weaver put her hand on my arm. “It be okay,” she said, nodding in Gigi’s direction. “The milk still dry on her face.”

Gigi frowned up at me. “What does that mean?”

“It means you’re young. But you still need to be careful.”

“I know,” she said, sounding impatient. “She’s got almost as many baskets as Aunt Bernadett,” she said, running her fingers along the edge of a large tomb-shaped basket with a lid.

The old woman laughed, her fingers not pausing in her work. She was at the beginning stage of a basket, making the bottom, just past the seven rows of palmetto strips where she’d begun to weave in the sweetgrass. Dah Georgie had taught me that from this stage any basket of any design could be made, and it was up to the weaver to decide. Each strand, each leaf, would determine how it would look, making it impossible to go back and start again without unraveling the whole thing.

I watched her for a moment, relishing the power she held in her hands, and wondering what it would be like to start from scratch again, to determine the size and shape of your life with the benefit of hindsight.

Gigi was still staring at the large oval-shaped basket with a lid. “I could fit in that, don’t you think, Ellie?”

The old woman leaned over to see what Gigi was looking at. “That one called the Escape Hatch.”

Gigi tilted her head to the side. “Do they all have names?”

“Most. Some of the old designs, their names be forgotten with the names of the sweetgrass maker who make them.”

I watched as she slowly turned the round bottom of the unmade basket, the skin of her hands dark and worn like old leather. “Do you know what you’re making yet?”

She looked up at me and I saw that one of her eyes was cloudy with a cataract, but it didn’t seem to be slowing her down, as her nimble fingers manipulated her sewing bone and the grass as if they had eyes of their own. “Not yet. I feel the grass first, let it warm in my hands and let it tell me what it want to be. Sometimes you got to bend it and twist it and pull it hard before it knows.”

“What’s this one called?”

We looked at Gigi, who gingerly held a shallow basket with a narrow base and opening but with a wider middle. The handle was two to three times the height of the basket, with delicate loops and swirls decorating the sides.

“That an old one. They use it for an egg basket, but the pattern called Path of Tears.”

Gigi frowned, then delicately set it back on the shelf before picking up another. This one had no handle or lid and was wider on the bottom than at the top. “What about this one?”

The woman squinted for a moment. “Dreams of Rivers.”

I walked over to Gigi and she placed it in my hands. I felt the smooth, tightly woven grass tucked into the tightly wound palmetto frond binding. “How much for this one?”

“Are you going to buy it?” Gigi asked.

“For Helena,” I said before the thought had completely formed in my head.

“Because of the name?”

I looked down at this wise child, once again amazed that she was only ten. “Yes. She told me that she used to live by the Danube River when she was a girl. And now she lives by the Edisto River. I think she might appreciate the name.”

“And she doesn’t have any of her own baskets—they’re all Aunt Bernadett’s. Aunt Helena needs one by her bed, I think, to put her glasses and her watch and the TV controls in, even though she’s always asking me to turn it on and off and change the channels because she can’t figure it out.”

I smiled. “It’s settled, then.” I handed the basket to her while I reached for my wallet. The price was high, as I had predicted for a piece of handcrafted artwork, but I paid it with just a little bargaining down, since that was expected. I had a little more spending money, thanks to Finn’s generosity, and even though I couldn’t quite believe I was buying something for Helena, the basket with the name Dreams of Rivers had to belong to her.

Gigi was uncharacteristically silent as we made our way to the house, the basket held carefully on her lap. I drove extra slowly past the pecan tree orchard, thinking maybe she needed more time to get all her words together.

She finally spoke as I put the car in park. “There’s another basket.”

I looked at her in the rearview mirror. “Another basket?” I had no idea where this was leading.

“Remember how Aunt Helena wanted us to gather all the music from Aunt Bernadett’s baskets and we’ve been working on putting them together in those pink binders that we bought even though I tried to find another color that I liked as much?”

I shifted in my seat and turned to face her, giving me a moment to process the subject of her sentence. “Yes. I was hoping that since you’re here today we can work on that project a little after we have your first piano lesson.”

She looked at me earnestly. “Yes, ma’am. We can do that. But first I was wondering if we should go get that other basket.”

“You mean another basket with music in it? You know where there’s another one?”

Gigi nodded. “Yes. But I don’t know if there’s music in it. I was too afraid to look inside.”

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. “Where did you find this basket?”

She looked down at her hands. Almost mumbling, she said, “In Aunt Bernadett’s room.”

Oh.
I waited for her to continue.

“I know I’m not supposed to go in there, but sometimes when I’m here with my daddy and you’re not here and Aunt Helena is sleeping and Daddy’s busy on his computer or phone, I get bored and I’m not supposed to leave the house by myself so I sometimes walk around the house looking for something to do.”

I remembered doing the exact same thing, and the temptation of a closed door to a room I was told to stay out of. With a neutral voice, I said, “So you went into Aunt Bernadett’s room and saw the basket.”

She bit her lower lip.

“Where was the basket?” I prodded.

“Under her bed,” she said very quietly.

As somebody who’d been caught inside the armoire, I wasn’t about to castigate her for looking under the bed. “Is it still there?” I asked.

She shook her head.

When nothing else seemed forthcoming, I asked, “Do you know where it is?”

She nodded her head. “It’s under my bed.”

“At the Edisto house?” I asked hopefully.

“No.” Her voice sounded very small. “At my other house. I took it to look inside, but then my daddy called for me and I got scared so I stuck it in my bag to hide it and then I brought it home with me, but then I felt guilty about it so I just hid it under my bed.”

I sighed heavily. “All right. So all you need to do is bring it with you when you come on Saturday and then put it back.”

“I thought of that, too, but then I thought that maybe Aunt Helena doesn’t know about that basket and would like to know what’s inside it and maybe there’s music in there that needs to go in the binders and we’d be doing her a favor by looking inside of it.”

I paused for a moment to process what she was saying. “Yes, it’s certainly possible that there’s music we need in that basket, and that the basket was simply overlooked at some point or even accidentally shoved under the bed. I’m even thinking that Helena forgot there were a few baskets in Bernadett’s room, since she told us not to go in there.” I paused, thinking. “If you like, I can come over tomorrow after work and we can look in it together and then replace it when we come back on Saturday.”

She grinned broadly. “I knew you’d figure it out. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” I said as I climbed out of the car, eager to get to the house before I changed my mind and headed back to Charleston to find out what might be in Bernadett’s basket.

Nurse Kester was in the kitchen making photocopies of the more intact pieces of sheet music using the small copier Finn had brought from his office. The kitchen table was littered with die cuts, glue, and the purple see-through pocket folders. She looked up apologetically when we came through the doorway.

“Nurse Weber said that if I got caught up I could work on the music. Miss Szarka is resting right now and there’s nothing on television, so I figured why not?”

“Thank you,” I said, placing the Dreams of Rivers basket on the table. “I was hoping to use the piano, but I don’t want to disturb Miss Szarka.”

Nurse Kester shook her head. “Don’t worry about that. There are pocket doors that separate the music room from the hallway. There’s some good, sound construction in this house—which is why it’s been here for so long—and she won’t be able to hear anything back in her room.”

“Great. Then we’ll go ahead and get started. Could you please let us know when she awakens?”

Gigi skipped to the music room—a good sign that she hadn’t been coerced, I thought—and I followed her, gently sliding closed the pocket doors behind us. They were two inches thick of solid wood and I knew Nurse Kester had been right.

The curtains remained opened, the room now filled with light. None of the portraits were in direct sunlight, and the woman in the long red velvet dress on the wall facing the piano seemed to glow in her newfound view of the world.

I sat on the edge of the piano bench and motioned for Gigi to come sit beside me. I pointed to the M in the “Mason & Hamlin” written on the fall board. With my index finger, I slid it from the letter down to the keys, finding the white key directly to the left of the two black keys. “This is middle C. You should always position your bench so that you can sit right in front of this key. That’s a good starting place so that you can reach the entire keyboard.”

“Kind of like first position in ballet. Every step and position starts from there.”

“Exactly,” I said, making a mental note to use as many dance correlations as I could think of. “Before we start learning how to read music, I want you to get comfortable with your fingers on the keys.” I paused, hearing my words echo my father’s the first time he’d sat me on the piano bench. I’d been five and had grown tired of waiting to play myself and had simply crawled up to sit next to him. He’d had an electric keyboard at the time, but within a year my father had bought the Mason & Hamlin.

“Put your right hand up here on the keyboard with your thumb on middle C.”

“When do I get to use the pedals?”

I bit back a smile. “You have to wait for a while before we get to that. Using the pedals is like being put in pointe shoes. You’d hurt yourself if you tried it too early.”