The Time Between (31 page)

“Could we not listen to music instead? I am in the mood for some Schubert. And I see you are just about finished organizing the music. I would like for you to show me what you have done and where you intend to file all of the books. Perhaps I can help you.”

I wanted to say yes and forget about the art book and my conversation with Jacob Isaacson. Forget about the Reichmanns and their stolen art and a painting that had been misplaced by history. But I could not. I knew what guilt without forgiveness did to a soul, and Helena was running out of time.

“Maybe later. Let me show you the book first.”

Her eyes showed no alarm as I walked from the room. Or maybe I mistook the lack of alarm for resignation.

I paused in the entranceway to the music room, taking in the tall windows, the stacks of music against the walls, and the beautiful piano. I thought of the music I’d played there and the way that Helena would sit with her eyes closed and a smile on her lips as she tried to disguise the fact that what I played wasn’t too horrible to listen to. And I thought of the simple songs I’d taught to Gigi and how Finn would sometimes slip into the back of the room when I played as if I wouldn’t notice. As I went to where I’d left the book, I couldn’t help but wonder if I would ever see the room the same way again. Or if I’d ever be allowed back in it.

My phone rang, jarring my thoughts. For a horrified moment, I thought it was Jacob Isaacson, calling to see if I’d spoken to Helena yet. I fumbled for the phone in my pocket and saw that it was a Charleston number I didn’t recognize. “Hello?”

“Hello, Eleanor? This is Harper Gibbes, Genevieve’s mother.”

“Yes, hello.”

“I’m sorry to bother you, but my daughter told me you were on Edisto babysitting that horrid old aunt of Finn’s, so I figured you’d need a reprieve.”

“Um, she’s not—”

She didn’t wait for me to finish. “Genevieve says she’s bored to death and wants to go to Edisto. She has no camps this week, so I have no objection, and neither does Finn. There’s just the matter of getting her there.”

My eyes fell on the painting of the woman in red velvet. “I’d be happy to come pick her up. I just have to wait until the nurse returns from the grocery store and then I can leave. Tell Gigi—Genevieve that I’ll be there within the hour.”

“Thank you, Eleanor. I’ll be sure to tell Finn how amenable you’ve been so he can put a bonus in your paycheck. We’ll see you in an hour, then.”

She ended the call before I could say good-bye.

I wasn’t sure if I was more disappointed or relieved at having to postpone my confrontation with Helena. Leaving the art book where it was, I made my way back to Helena’s room to tell her the change of plans.

She lay on her back with her hands folded on her chest in a pose one sees on medieval crypts. The bedcovers rose and fell in a steady rhythm designed to feign sleep, and as I approached she let out a small sigh, then turned her face toward the window.

I leaned down to whisper in her ear. “We’re not done with our conversation, Helena. And you can’t sleep forever.”

I slipped out of her room, passing Teri Weber on the way in, and climbed into the Volvo. Absently, I rubbed the cut on my thumb from the broken tail of the rooster, thinking about something Helena had said about choices and what people would do to survive.

Eleanor

G
igi’s small suitcase was already packed and waiting by the door when I arrived, dashing through the rain to the covered piazza, the front door thrown open before I could ring the bell. I heard the tap of high heels and waited for Harper to appear behind her daughter in the doorway.

Harper’s hair and makeup were perfect, as were her slim ankle pants and crisp blouse. I tried to remember the last time I’d looked in a mirror, realizing with some horror that it had been that morning when I’d brushed my teeth.

“Thank you so much for doing this, Eleanor. Finn’s actually finished a bit early and will be returning from New York this evening. He’ll probably drive right out to Edisto, regardless of the hour.” She shook her head and rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “I’ll never understand his love for that place.”

I bit my lip to prevent myself from saying what I wanted. “It’s not a problem, and it’s always more fun when Genevieve’s around.”

The little girl beamed up at me, then turned to her mother and threw her arms around Harper’s slim hips. “I love you, Mommy.” She kept her face tilted toward her mother, waiting.

A smile softened Harper’s angular face as she leaned down and kissed Gigi’s cheek. “You behave and don’t talk everybody’s ears off. We’ll go shopping for new school shoes next week.”

“Can they be pink?”

Harper actually laughed. “You know your school doesn’t allow that.” She bent to straighten the pink floral headband in Gigi’s fine hair. In a conspiratorial tone, she added, “But maybe we can find a way to stick a pink ribbon in the laces.”

“Thanks, Mommy,” Gigi said, giving her mother a final squeeze before racing down the piazza toward the car.

I picked up the suitcase. “You have my cell number if you need me.”

Harper nodded, a wistful look on her face as she watched Gigi disappear. “Yes, thanks.” She turned back to me. “She had a little cough this morning, but she seems to be totally fine now. Just keep an eye out for any other symptoms.”

“I will,” I promised, wondering what it must be like to interpret every cold symptom or ache or pain or even allergy as a potential precursor to a relapse.

“And drive carefully,” she added almost absently. “All those cruise-ship tourists are like palmetto bugs scurrying across the road and just begging to get hit.”

“I always do,” I said, repeating the same thing I told Finn every time he watched me drive away with his little girl.

I waited until Gigi had buckled her seat belt before putting the car in drive and heading down Queen Street. It was nearly five o’clock, so the cruise-ship passengers had mostly disappeared from the streets and sidewalks back into their mother ships—what Rich Kobylt at the office called the massive cruise liners—so now it was mostly rush-hour traffic as I headed out of the downtown area. Traffic seemed heavier than usual owing to the steady drizzle that burst into a heavy downpour at regular intervals.

Gigi started chattering as soon as we reached the first stop sign. “I got a birthday invitation from my best friend, Teensy Olsen. People always get our names confused because she’s really tall, but they call her Teensy anyway probably because she was tiny when she was a baby, but aren’t all babies? Anyway, Teensy’s been my best friend since kindergarten, although there was that time in second grade when she didn’t invite me to her ice-skating party. . . .”

I nodded and interjected syllables here and there, trying to concentrate on seeing the road with my wipers at full throttle. The driver behind me honked—obviously a Charleston transplant—because it took too long for me to turn right on Broad Street as I waited for an opening.

“. . . I just have no idea what to wear to a boy-girl party since I go to an all-girls school so I don’t get to hang out with boys too much unless you count my daddy since he’s a boy but not really. . . .”

I took the right and headed down Broad toward Lockwood and Highway 17, the rain so heavy now that I could barely see in front of the car. The obnoxious person behind me swerved around to cut in front and I saw the Fulton County, Georgia, license plate.
Atlanta.
“Figures,” I said under my breath as he sped away.

“. . . I’d wear jeans but I don’t have a pair since my mommy doesn’t think they send the right message and I’m kind of okay with that because I have never seen a pair of pink jeans and I wouldn’t want a pair unless they could be pink . . .”

The light on Lockwood turned yellow and I slowed to a stop while the three people in front of me sped through it. The younger me would have joined them, but then again the younger me wouldn’t have been driving a Volvo or have Gigi Beaufain in the backseat.

“. . . and since you’re so good at picking out birthday presents, I was really hoping you could go with Mommy and me to get one for Teensy because Mommy always gets the kind of present
she
would have liked as a little girl instead of what my friends would like and I don’t want to hurt her feelings so maybe if you and I both said we didn’t like something . . .”

The light for my lane turned green and I slowly depressed the accelerator, not always trusting myself with the V8 engine and erring on the side of caution. The sound of a car horn being held longer than necessary carried through the noise of my wipers, and I wondered absently if the obnoxious driver from Atlanta had somehow managed to circle around to antagonize me again.

Gigi asked me something and I turned my head slightly to ask her to repeat the question. The earth seemed to pause in its rotation, the rain frozen in midair, as I spotted the dark blue sedan, its headlights on, barreling toward us. A graduation hat tassel swayed from the rearview mirror, twisting, twisting. Gigi’s scream mixed with that of screeching tires and shattered glass and the sickening crunch of metal against metal. I jerked to the side, my arms reaching toward her, her mother’s voice coming from inside my head—
Please be extra careful with her
. Something hit me in the head, the pain so sudden that I was aware of it only as an afterthought, and then I was no longer aware of anything at all.

I was up in a tree and I looked across the road to see Eve, but it wasn’t Eve at all. It was my father, wearing his overalls and hat and beard, just as I remembered. He was far away, but I could see his eyes, and they were disappointed eyes. He didn’t open his mouth, but I heard the words he was saying to me, except they were Helena’s words.
And so you honor him by dismissing the music he taught you?

I tried to speak, to tell him that he was wrong, but no words came out. I looked down, expecting to see Eve but instead seeing only the rain-soaked asphalt of Lockwood Boulevard, the blue and red reflections of the emergency vehicles’ lights shimmering on the ground.

I was not in a tree at all, but hovering over my corner of the world.
I’ve been here before.
The words threaded through me like sunlight through fog, illuminating and warming.

A fireman pried the rear door off the Volvo and carefully leaned inside, and I was behind him, a passive bystander once again. Blood stained Gigi’s white-blond hair, her pink shirt and shorts, ran down her legs and into her pink sandals. Rain poured down on her, diluting red blood to pink.

But she had cancer,
I said, my words falling unheard with the rain, as if having survived one tragedy should make her immune to another.
It was worth it.
The words were in my head as I looked down to see a night-blooming cereus sprouting from the asphalt, its edges already starting to wilt. I stared at it, wanting to let it know that there were other flowers to put in my garden.

And then I was staring at my own body, laid on a gurney, a long gash on my forehead oozing blood as one of the paramedics pressed on my chest and forced air into my lungs. I turned away, and I was now on a dock that stretched far out into the ocean. And at the very end, my father stood, waiting for me. I knew it was him; I knew from the shape of his shoulders and the beard that would tickle my cheek when he kissed me.

I began to run toward him, but it was a dream-run, where the harder you tried to move your legs, the slower they became. When I looked again at the end of the dock, my father was walking away. Somebody else was there, somebody taller and younger, but I couldn’t see his face.

All shut-eye ain’t sleep; all good-bye ain’t gone.

I turned abruptly at the woman’s voice in my ear, expecting to see the old Gullah woman. Instead I saw Bernadett and Magda leaning over Gigi like guardian angels as her gurney was rolled into the ambulance.

You ready?

The Gullah woman held out a secret keeper toward me, the lid sealing the top. I didn’t recognize the pattern, an irregular zigzag of loops and lines that reversed on themselves and then simply stopped, the pattern unfinished. A vessel that could pour out or keep in. I looked in her wide eyes and knew she was handing me my life, the lid hiding what was to come.

What if it hurts?
My head shouted the words.

What if it don’t?
She smiled, her teeth shining light into the darkness.

I reached for the basket and I was floating toward my body, where the paramedic was leaning back on his heels and shaking his head.

I opened my mouth and sucked in a deep breath, feeling the cool, wet rain on my skin, hearing the startled shout from the paramedic. The pain came next, but I welcomed it as a reminder that I could still feel.

When I awoke, my head throbbed and a thick bandage covered most of my forehead. I was disoriented at first, wondering where I was and why Glen was sitting in a chair by my bed. And then I remembered.

I struggled to sit up, but Glen gently held me down. “It’s okay, Eleanor. You’re okay. It’s going to be okay.”

“Where’s Gigi?”

“At Children’s Hospital.”

“And Finn?”

“He’s with her.” He paused. “She’s hurt pretty bad.”

He didn’t look away, but I knew he was holding something back.

“What aren’t you telling me? Please, Glen. What aren’t you telling me?” My head throbbed, but the feeling of panic over Gigi overpowered the pain.

“You need to keep calm. . . .”

“I need to know about Gigi. And if you won’t tell me, I will yank these tubes out of me and go find out myself.”

A shadow of a smile crossed his face before he turned serious again. “She’s had severe head trauma. There’s swelling on the brain.” He swallowed. “They’ve put her in a medically induced coma to see if they can get the swelling down.”

The white fluorescent light above me seemed to intensify, increasing the pain in my head, pressing on my heart, and I had the image of Gigi looking at the night-blooming cereus and saying it was worth it. I struggled to sit up again. “Oh, God. No. No. I was driving, Glen. I was driving and we got hit. . . .”

He put a hand on my arm and made me lie down again. “I know, Eleanor. We all know. It wasn’t your fault. Some idiot ran the red light and couldn’t stop because of the rain. Finn told me to make sure you knew that. You did nothing wrong. Nothing. And she’s hanging in there—no change, which means she’s not improving yet, but she’s also not getting any worse. Finn said he’d keep us posted so you won’t worry.”

“How long has it been?”

“Almost a whole day. It’s almost four o’clock in the afternoon. They gave you some painkillers that made you sleep. You need to rest.”

I shook my head, feeling as if my brain was sloshing from side to side. “I’ve got to see her.” I struggled to sit up again, but Glen held me back.

“You can’t do anything for her right now. But you can take care of yourself so you can be strong for her. And for Finn.” He’d said Finn’s name with a forced reluctance, as if from an old habit instead of any real resentment.

I closed my eyes briefly. “How soon can I get out of here?”

“Probably tomorrow. All your vitals are fine and you don’t have any broken bones. Just a nasty cut on your forehead from the air bag. They’re just keeping you for observation, really. Your heart stopped.” His eyes met mine. “Like before. When you fell from the tree.”

“I remember . . . ,” I said slowly, seeing my father on the dock again, and Magda and Bernadett. “Glen?”