Unbreathed Memories (2 page)

“Why don’t you quit?” I asked.

“I thought about applying for the organist position at Union Memorial downtown, but I’ve been Episcopal since forever, and All Hallows is so close to home.”

It seemed to cheer Georgina up to bitch about Lionel, so we spent some hilarious minutes trashing the jerk. I laughed out loud when Georgina told me how she’d sneak down to the fellowship hall for a Diet Coke during the sermon.

“How do you know when it’s time to come back?”

Georgina snickered. “When Lionel records the sermons, he turns the sound up full blast. Father Wylands doesn’t know it, but they’re probably debating his views on the Prodigal Son up on Mars.”

I heard the front door open. “Hannah!” My older sister was calling.

“Gotta go, babe. Ruth’s just arrived.”

By the time I said good-bye and made it to the entrance hall, Ruth was disappearing into my living room, leaving the front door gaping wide and all the heat pouring out onto Prince George Street. She was carrying an objet d’art about two feet tall, made of copper. I shut the door securely and followed her, wondering why I ever thought it would be a good idea to give my sister a house key. “What on earth is that?”

“It’s a fountain. Water represents prosperity, harmony, and peace.” Ruth set the fountain down on the floor, then surveyed the room, turning slowly in a complete circle. She looks a little like me, except her hair is long and gray, caught up at each side above her ears with silver butterfly clips. Neither one of us can figure out
how we’re related to Georgina, who has green eyes, hair the color of buttered sweet potatoes, and is drop-dead gorgeous, either a throwback to a great-grandmother on our mother’s side or simply delivered by the stork to the wrong house.

Ruth zeroed in on a vase, now filled with irises, that I had kept for years on an antique table between two windows. “Here.” She lifted the vase off the table and handed it to me. I stood there like a dummy, holding the arrangement, my mouth open, but no protest came out. I knew it would be a lost cause. I hated myself for allowing Ruth to steamroll me like that, but I told myself that if I really hated the darn fountain, I could put the irises back after she left.

Ruth keeps insisting that my health problems and past troubles with my marriage were related to poor feng shui. She’s made it her life’s work, or at least this year’s project, to bring my house into harmony. While Ruth went to the kitchen on some mysterious errand, I looked around for a new home for the silk flowers, finally stowing them under the dining room table to deal with later. Ruth returned in minutes with a saucepan of water, which she dumped into the base of the fountain. She yanked the cord attached to a pottery lamp out of the wall, plugged the fountain into the same receptacle, then stepped back to admire her handiwork. “There. Isn’t it pretty?”

I had to admit that it was. A graceful sculpture of bamboo stalks and leaves, down which water cascaded in a pleasantly gurgling spiral.

“Now for the mirror.” She extracted a tissue-wrapped object from her purse, an octagonal disk about the size of a saucer.

“Your shop must be doing well if you can take time off to come here at the drop of a hat to give me all this
stuff.” I waved my arm, beginning with the mirror still in her hand and including in its sweep the fountain, a red-tasseled bamboo flute hanging over the front door, some wind chimes she had brought over last November, and a crystal hanging between the front door and the stairs, all selected by Ruth to cure various deficiencies in my home environment.

Ruth surveyed the room critically, looking for the best place to hang the mirror. “Of course I can afford it.” She homed in on a watercolor, a particular favorite of mine, a painting of Emily cradling Sunshine, a calico cat long gone to that happy catnip garden in the sky.

“Now wait a minute!” I was suddenly tired of being a doormat. “I
love
that picture there! Leave it right where it is. Please!”

Ruth, her eyebrows thick and brushed straight up, scowled at me over her shoulder. “It’s the best place for the
ba gua
, my dear. We need to deflect the negative energy coming in through that window from the street.”

“Well, I don’t care. You can hang your
ba
whatzit up if you want, but it’ll have to deflect negative energy somewhere else.”

Ruth wandered into the dining room, finally selecting an alternate location over the stove in the kitchen. “Here. Come hold this up so I can see how it looks.”

I took the little mirror from her hands and positioned it at eye level against the floral wallpaper.

“Why waste time on me?” I asked. “Why not help Mom and Dad get settled in their new place?”

“I tried.” Ruth squinted at me, her head cocked to one side. “Up a bit,” she instructed.

I inched the mirror up the wall.

“Mom told me to stop fussing and come back in a couple of weeks when the movers were gone and things
were less hectic. Sort of kicked me out, if you want to know the truth.”

“Imagine my surprise,” I said.

“As it turns out, I won’t be around in two weeks. I’m going on a buying trip to Bali.”

“Bali! That sounds like a classic boondoggle.”

“Bali’s the feng shui capital of the world.”

“Seriously?” I was still standing at the stove holding her stupid mirror against the wall.

“Seriously.” She pulled up a chair and sat down. “First I’m taking a wood carving course, then I’m checking into a health resort in Ubud. I need to get rid of all the poisons in my system.” She moaned with pleasure. “Saunas, herbal wraps, meditation, vegetarian meals, mountain hikes—”

“And don’t forget the souvenir T-shirt.” I jerked my head toward the wall, just in case she had forgotten about the mirror. “How long will you be gone?”

“About a month. Sunnye is taking care of the store.”

“What about Eric?” Eric Gannon was Ruth’s ex-husband. He still owned a half interest in the shop and used that as an excuse to pop in from time to time and fiddle with the displays, just to annoy her.

“Mon-sewer zee artiste won’t even notice I’m gone. Last time I saw him he was walking down Main Street arm in arm with that Sylvia creature who used to work at Banana Republic.” She heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Thank God we didn’t have any children.” Ruth wiggled her fingers. “A little more to the right.”

I complied, although my arm was beginning to ache. You’d think she was building the space shuttle or something. When the telephone rang, seconds later, I made an eager move to answer it.

Ruth raised her hand, palm out. “You stay there, I’ll
get it.” She snatched the receiver off the wall. “Ives residence.” She turned and looked at me, head tilted, considering the present placement of the mirror. “Oh, hi. How’re you doing?”

She waved her hand, indicating that I should move the mirror a few centimeters to the left. I was praying she’d find a cosmically acceptable position soon.

“Sure. She’s right here. I’ll get her.” She extended the receiver in my direction. “It’s Georgina.” Ruth wore that puzzled look where her eyebrows nearly met. “Apparently she doesn’t want to talk to me.” She held the receiver by the cord with two fingers, as if it were dirty and she’d forgotten the Lysol.

I set the mirror down on a chair, walked to the phone, and took the receiver from where it hung from Ruth’s outstretched fingers. “What’s up, Georgina?”

“Sorry to trouble you again, Hannah, but I thought of a couple more questions I wanted to ask about when I was a kid.”

“Why don’t you ask Mother? Or Ruth? Ruth was nine when you were born. She might remember more than I do. I was only seven.”

“I can’t talk to Mother and I don’t want to ask Ruth. She’s so … judgmental.” Georgina was practically whispering, as if she thought Ruth might overhear.

“If it’s for therapy, I’m sure we’d
all
be willing to help.”

“Don’t give me a hard time, please, Hannah. I’d rather talk to you, is all, if that’s OK.”

I sighed. Might as well get it over with. “Sure. Shoot.”

It seemed forever before Georgina actually spoke. Strange, for someone so anxious to talk. “Why was I hospitalized in kindergarten?”

That was easy. “You had your tonsils taken out.” I remembered how jealous we’d been when Georgina’d been allowed all the ice cream she could eat.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“How long was I in the hospital?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe two days.”

“I seem to remember it being longer than two days.”

“Georgina, you were only five. Two days away from your family would seem like forever to a five-year-old.”

“I guess so.” Georgina paused. She didn’t sound convinced.

I made a brave effort to change the subject. “Speaking of children, how are the boys liking Hillside?”

Georgina ignored me. Her next question caught me completely by surprise. “Tell me. How did Mary Rose die?”

Mary Rose was our infant sister who died when I was barely three, long before Georgina was born. I felt guilty that the only memory I had of Mary Rose, other than photographs, was from the tantrum I threw when the new baby moved into my room and I had to share a bedroom with Ruth. But I will never forget my mother grieving over the empty crib. “It was SIDS,” I told her, not believing that she didn’t already know this.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure! If you don’t believe me, ask Mother.”

“I told you, I just can’t talk to Mother about this stuff. She wouldn’t understand.”

I turned my back to the stove where Ruth had her head under the exhaust hood and was using the heel of her shoe to pound a nail into the center of a white rose on the wallpaper. “I’m not sure I understand either,
Georgina.” I paused, waiting for her to reply. When she didn’t say anything I said, “Look, I’ve got to go help Ruth. She’s running amok in my house, feng shui-ing all over the place. Call me back later if you still want to talk.”

“I thought that you, at least, would understand,” she said in a small, sad voice; then she hung up abruptly, leaving me with a dial tone buzzing in my ear. I shrugged and returned the receiver to its cradle, feeling like I’d just bought a one-way ticket into the Twilight Zone.

Ruth stepped back to the kitchen table and surveyed her handiwork. “Good!” she said. Then after a few thoughtful seconds asked, “What’d Georgina want?”

“She was asking me some damn fool questions about when we were little.”

“Questions? Like what?” Ruth mumbled around a nail that wobbled between her lips.

“Like when she had her tonsils out and why Mary Rose died.”

“How odd.”

“She says it’s to help with her therapy.”

One eyebrow arched. “Therapy? What the hell’s she in therapy for?”

“She’s been depressed. Although what having one’s tonsils out has to do with depression, I have no idea.”

“I’m glad she’s getting help, Hannah, but why on earth didn’t somebody tell me about the therapy?
You
, for instance.”

I poured us each a fresh cup of jasmine tea and motioned for her to join me at the table. “I didn’t think it was important.” But in less than forty-eight hours, with my hands wrapped around a similar mug of tea, I would learn how very wrong I could be.

chapter
2

Other than to make an appointment with Dr.
Bergstrom, for the next few days I didn’t worry much about my reconstructive surgery. Or about Georgina and her imaginary problems. Instead, I spent my mornings engrossed in a project an old friend at St. John’s College had steered my way. I had been temping at a local law firm, filling in for a secretary on maternity leave. I confessed to my friend over lunch at El Toro Bravo that I was glad the woman was coming back. I was pretty damned tired of doing nothing more constructive than answering the telephone and filing updates as thin as Bible pages into fat black legal loose-leaf binders.

“Have you heard of L. K. Bromley?” my friend asked.

Of course
. Everybody had heard of L. K. Bromley, the famous mystery writer, who in her time was crowned “America’s Agatha Christie,” writing more than seventy mystery novels in a career that spanned fifty years. But few people knew that L. K. Bromley was also Nadine Smith Gray, that tweedy, straight-backed, white-haired Annapolitan who lived in a wee brick house on the corner
of College and North Streets and walked her dachshunds every day on the back campus. She looked more like a Navy widow or someone’s sweet old grandmother. So when she moved to the Ginger Cove retirement community at the ripe old age of eighty-two and left her entire library—or, rather, L. K. Bromley’s library—to the college, along with the money to process and maintain it, everyone was surprised. No one at the college could figure out why Ms. Bromley had singled out St. John’s for that honor. Maybe it was in gratitude for all the lectures she attended there, someone speculated, or the classic film series, or the privilege of letting her dogs poop on the well-manicured lawn. Ms. Bromley, as mysterious and tight-lipped as her protagonists, wasn’t saying.

A delighted St. John’s needed someone with experience to organize and catalog the collection. I had just spent an enjoyable and productive two days perched on a low stool in a bright workroom on the southeast side of the recently renovated college library. There I sorted through Ms. Bromley’s novels, putting plastic covers on to preserve the dust jackets and deciding what to do with the large number of books that she used as references. There were guidebooks, maps, train schedules, trial transcripts, and books on forensic evidence, just the thing if you live a quiet suburban life and need to know what a bullet can do to a person’s head at close range. I pored over
Coroner’s Quarterly
with the same morbid fascination that I used to give to my grandfather’s medical texts, delighted in the old maps of Savannah, Georgia, and Reno, Nevada, and marveled that in the 1950s you could catch a train from Annapolis to Baltimore every hour. In recent years the tracks had been torn up, and you were lucky if you could find a bus going there once or twice a day.