The Secret Women

by Sheila Williams

  “I think he was expecting to see either a very old lady, as in ninety plus, or else a lush with an empty Grey Goose bottle on the front seat,” Carmen recalled. “Poor thing.”

  The cop’s cheeks had been red from sunburn. “Ma’am . . . Are you all right?”

  Carmen had yawned and nodded. “Yes, I’m fine. Just a little . . . tired. Why did you pull me over?” she asked as she handed over her license in response to his request. She was sure she hadn’t been speeding. Pretty sure. Okay. Sort of sure. She sighed. “Was I speeding?”

  “Well, no.” He leaned close to the car, a slight frown forming across his forehead. “You were going forty in a sixty-five-mile-per-hour zone. That’s dangerous! You’re going to get run over if you keep that up! Have you been drinking?” He clicked on his flashlight.

  Carmen was annoyed but said nothing and only shook her head. “No. No drinking. And no sleeping either.” Her yawn was wide enough to pass as authentic.

  The policeman paused, then asked her a few more questions before handing over her license. “Okay. Ma’am . . . um, Miss Bradshaw. You’re going home now?”

  “Uh-huh,” Carmen answered, stifling another yawn with the back of her hand.

  The young man studied her for a moment.

  Good grief, get it over with.

  “Is there someone you could call? I don’t think you should be driving . . .”

  “I’m fine,” Carmen assured him, shaking her head a little. She picked up the bottled water sitting in the console. “I’ll splash a little water on my face, it’ll be good. Besides, I don’t have too far to go.”

  “All right . . . Look, I suggest that you exit at Pfeiffer, all right? You shouldn’t be on the freeway. Go straight home and go to bed. Okay?”

  Carmen had nodded. “Uh-huh. Sure.”

  Elise’s laughter filled the phone receiver.

  “Good Lord, Carmen. You can’t drive on 71 north doing forty! It’s a miracle you didn’t have a wreck! Everybody in Cincinnati knows that when the speed limit is sixty-five, that means seventy-five! Go to bed on time tonight, will ya? Whatever it is that’s keeping you up, it can wait until you’ve had some sleep.”

  What was “it”? “It” was everything. Carmen’s mantra was “Knowledge is power,” but now she thought that was bullshit. In less than one week she’d learned a whole encyclopedia of facts that she could have done without. And they were toxic. She felt off-balance, as if one leg were shorter than the other. Her mind was spinning around and around. That night she’d had an awful dream—a nightmare, really. That was what was now keeping her awake. Carmen saw herself in bed, then getting up and going into the bathroom. But when she looked in the bathroom mirror, the woman who stared back was a stranger. Not one feature on her face was familiar. The image was terrifying. And what was worse, she was awake.

  Carmen prepared tea, then reached for the honey and added a teaspoon to sweeten it. For a few seconds she was angry. This was Elise’s fault, this business of clearing out and sorting through and then finding out things that should have been left unfound. But as she stirred the honey and inhaled the warm scent of the tea that rose from her mug, she gently let the anger go. The blame game was the sleeplessness talking, looking to point a finger. This wasn’t Elise’s fault or anyone’s fault. “Fault” didn’t have a part in it.

  Carmen had thought she knew who her mother was and she’d been wrong. Now she didn’t know exactly who she was: her identity had been turned upside down like she was in a headstand pose, only she wasn’t in control of it and no puffing out of kidneys or tucking of tailbones would help. And she couldn’t go back. She couldn’t forget what she’d learned. The prologue and first chapter of her life had been irrevocably rewritten. Her name, her date of birth—both might be different from what she thought she knew. The research on adoptions had told her that was possible. And then there was her father . . .

  Carmen sipped her tea and stared off into the distance at the twinkling lights of the freeway and the city buildings, seeing them but not seeing them.

  Beside her computer, a website address was highlighted in neon yellow. She sat down and typed it into Google, the sister site of the one Elaine had mentioned at dinner. The cursor seemed to wink at her, but she didn’t see the humor. “Find-an-Obit.com.”

  She tapped ENTER. The wish flew off to its destination and could not be recalled. She had resisted taking this leap just as she was resisting talking with her father. She stared at the screen and bit her lip. It was 3:10 in the morning. The adoption records request could take weeks—would take weeks, according to the surly clerk she’d spoken with at the Bureau of Vital Statistics. This request could take a few moments.

  And it did.

  Topolosky, Richard Samuel.

  Age 30, died suddenly of a brain aneurysm at his home in Greenwich Village. Richard was an Army veteran . . . an instructor at . . . beloved son of Bella and Ira Topolosky, brother of David L. Topolosky. He is survived by his parents and brother, loving aunts, uncles, and cousins, and many friends. Services will be held Wednesday at Temple Israel, with burial at . . .

  The tears in Carmen’s eyes blurred the text. She blinked them away to read the date: November 1966.

  There was no “survived by loving wife,” no daughter mentioned. Loving aunts and uncles were referenced, cousins acknowledged, even friends. But the woman Richard had married? Nothing. And the child . . . Carmen felt sick. The announcement was written as if “we didn’t exist,” she said aloud.

  There would be no sleep for her tonight.

  Chapter 20

  Dee Dee

  There would be no sleep for Dee Dee. Yes, she was in bed, the lights were off, the room was cool (just as the sleep doctors recommended), and all of the electronics were either off or covered, including the 32-inch flat-screen that Lorenzo had thoughtfully installed on the wall opposite their bed. The sheets were soft, and the lavender aromatherapy spray was working: if Dee Dee had wanted to, she could have imagined herself skipping across a meadow of purple accented with a soothing soft green before drifting off to a restful sleep. Instead, she was staring at the ceiling, hands wrapped around her upper arms.

  Frances had ignored her Friday night curfew, “borrowed” Dee Dee’s favorite pair of nude heels, and gotten a D on her Spanish test. She’d told her parents that she was going to an Algebra II study group at Bea’s house. Instead, she and her friends Bea and Mei had changed clothes at Mei’s and attended a house party in Mei’s neighborhood: a blowout Animal House–style mega-gathering that had attracted kids from five high schools and police from two jurisdictions. For years to come, at least until Frances’s twentieth high school reunion, the event would be remembered with hazy fondness as “the party.” Lorenzo and Dee Dee had been totally unaware of any of this until called by the Mason Police Department to come and pick up their daughter. And all of this was after Dee Dee had received the text message from Frances’s teacher.

  Earlier that day, her phone had danced across the conference room table, and Dee Dee had chased it, provoking laughter from her colleagues in their meeting. It had been a welcome diversion from the facts and figures decorating the PowerPoint image, page 14 of the budget discussion.

  “Excuse me,” Dee Dee murmured, finally capturing the roaming phone and turning it over. She recognized the number of the high school. “Sorry.” She felt her cheeks reddening. “Just . . . one . . . minute.”

  A text message from Mr. Pettiford, Frances’s homeroom teacher and counselor, asking if he could have “a word.” Despite her concern, Dee Dee smiled. Pettiford was from Arkansas but had spent a year at Oxford, absorbing all things British. The kids said that he spoke like an unpursued fugitive from Downton Abbey. Dee Dee’s conversation with Mr. Pettiford lasted about fifteen minutes, and yes, he did sound as if he were auditioning for a British costume drama, but that was the only element of the meeting close to amusing.

  When Lorenzo responded to her “CALL NOW” message, he’d said, chuckling
, “Is it Armageddon yet?”

  Dee Dee’s answer was wrapped up in a low growl.

  “Oh,” he said, his deep voice stripped of amusement. “It’s like that.”

  Dee Dee refused to talk to her daughter in the car on the ride home from the pick-up point at the curb in front of her neighbors Lily and Ray’s house, but she and Frances made up for the electrically charged silence with an argument so volatile that it could have had its own Richter scale rating. Phoebe retreated to her bedroom. Pauly the cat and Dallas the puppy retreated to the safety of their safe houses, the center space on the rug beneath the dining room table.

  “Sit down, Frances,” Lorenzo said, pulling a stool out from the kitchen island.

  Frances flipped her hair over her shoulder but not quick enough to hide the smirk on her face as she plopped onto the seat. She slid her glasses to the top of her head.

  Dee Dee felt her temperature rising. “You think this is funny?”

  Her daughter shrugged. “No. Not funny exactly. Just . . . I don’t see what the big deal is. I am allowed to have fun once in a while, aren’t I?”

  Dee Dee imagined her hands around her daughter’s throat.

  “No, you are not,” she said as calmly as she could. “After the conversation I had with Mr. Pettiford this morning—in the middle of my department budget meeting, by the way—about your attitude issues, your ‘B minus, poor effort’ in Algebra II, your Spanish grade, your class cutting and disrespect of teachers? No. You are not allowed to have fun. You are on punishment.”

  Frances gasped. “Mom! For how long?”

  “Forever,” Lorenzo said. He glanced over at Dee Dee, who nodded.

  “That’s not fair,” Frances commented.

  “Fair?” Dee Dee exclaimed. She caught Lorenzo’s sideways glance out of the corner of her eye. “Was it fair for you to take my shoes without asking? Was it fair for you to lie? To say that you were at Mei’s house when you were somewhere else? Was that fair? To us? To Lily and Ray, was that fair to them? And what about the grades, and the behavior, Frances? What about that? Is that fair?”

  Frances exhaled a sound of disgust. “Really, Mom,” she said, her words dripping with contempt. “It’s not like we were doing anything. We were just listening to music.”

  “Just listening to . . .” Now Lorenzo’s temper boiling over. His baritone reverberated against the stone fireplace. “That music you were just listening to was turned up so loud that half the neighbors in that block called the police!”

  This time Frances said nothing.

  Dee Dee paced the floor. Okay. Teenagers. She and Deb had done things too. A wild ride in a Mustang down Towne Street, too thrilling for words and too terrifying when the police pulled the car over and discovered that nine people were in it. She pushed the memory to the back of her mind. That was then, this was now. It was Frances she had to deal with.

  Dee Dee’s voice was like ice. “I’m done with this too. Frances, this can’t go on. This won’t go on. You’re an intelligent girl; you have great experiences ahead of you. But you won’t get there if you keep on this way. You have an appointment with Dr. Appleton next week. Monday, four o’clock. Be. There.”

  Frances whirled around like the cartoon Tasmanian devil.

  “Appleton! The school shrink, Mom?” She snorted and whirled her head back. “Mom, I’m not crazy, and I’m not going to see Appleton.”

  “France . . .” Lorenzo’s growl was getting louder.

  Dee Dee pounded on the counter. “Yes. Yes, you are. Maybe talking with Dr. Appleton will help . . . what is the word Mr. Pettiford used? Maybe that will help get you sorted out.”

  “I don’t need sorting out!” Frances bellowed. “I’m not crazy like your mother. I don’t need a shrink, I don’t need a pill. I’m just fine.” Frances hopped off the tall stool, nearly toppling it over in the process. “God, Mom! I don’t know why you ever named me after her! She was crazy! Even you said so!”

  This time it was Dee Dee who said nothing.

  “I’m not going!” Frances marched out of the room, her father at her heels.

  “Frances . . .” Lorenzo called after her.

  Dee Dee stared after her husband and daughter, long after they both had stomped upstairs and down the hall. Long after Frances had slammed the door to her bedroom. Long after Lorenzo had returned to the kitchen, looking angry enough to have smoke coming of his ears.

  “Babe? You all right?” he asked.

  Dee Dee’s mind was spinning around and around. What did Frances say? How dare she say that? How dare she!

  “Dee?”

  She’s not crazy like my mother.

  Chapter 21

  Carmen

  Sleep deprived, Carmen struggled through the next yoga class. Her coordination was shot. Her bow pose crumbled and her crow pose was a disaster. Relief came when Sergeant Jasmine lowered the lights, lit candles, and coached her students to set up for shavasana, the final pose for the evening. Carmen settled herself on her mat, closed her eyes, relaxed her shoulders as Jasmine instructed, and took a long, deep breath. Lovely. A few seconds into the pose, she realized that someone was shaking her shoulder and calling her name. She swatted at the nuisance with a wild backhand.

  “Cut it out! Quit!” she snapped, opening her eyes.

  Elise sat back on her heels. “Finally! Welcome to the land of the living.”

  “W-what?” Carmen yawned and blinked. “What do you mean?”

  Dee Dee’s laughter caught her attention. “It is called corpse pose,” she said, extending her hand to help Carmen to her feet, “but I don’t think the old yogis meant it to be taken literally. You were snoring!” She was grinning. Her delight was almost infectious.

  Carmen was mortified. “I was not,” she said in a sharp tone, shrugging her shoulders and following the other women to the alcove where their shoes and bags were. She grabbed Dee Dee’s arm. “Was I?”

  “Sawing logs,” Dee Dee said with glee in her voice. “For the whole seven-minute shavasana.”

  Carmen felt the color rising to her cheeks. “Oh no . . .”

  Elise nudged her in the ribs. “Don’t worry, you sounded cute. Like a little buzz saw, feminine version, in hot pink. Anyway, it annoyed the sergeant to no end, and that was a joy for the rest of us.”

  Great . . . Carmen wanted the floor to just open and swallow her up. Now.

  “Come on,” Elise said as she handed Carmen her yoga mat carrier. “Let’s go eat and catch up.” She caught Carmen’s eye, then looked away. And then you can tell us what this is all about.

  * * *

  Carmen had heard Elise’s ESP message loud and clear, long before class. She’d even brought a copy of the obituary with her. She laid it on the table, where the two women could read it.

  For a few moments, no one said a word. Their island of silence was closed off, separate from the activity in the Millbank Street Pub. Then Dee Dee’s phone pinged, the server set down a tray of drinks, and the spell was broken.

  Dee Dee’s cheeks colored. “Sorry about that.” She picked up the phone, fumbled with a switch, then glanced at the glowing screen. Mr. Pettiford reporting that Frances had showed up to her appointment with the counselor; Frances reporting that the meeting was “totally pointless.”

  “A command from number one daughter,” she said with a slight smile.

  “How is Frances?” Carmen asked, glad to draw the spotlight away from herself.

  Dee Dee sighed. “Oh . . . she’s . . . Frances.”

  Elise smiled. “Teenagers. Can’t do without them, can’t kill them.”

  Dee Dee slid her phone into her bag. “Okay. Back to the present. So it looks as if . . . I guess we can assume that your mother didn’t attend the funeral.” Dee Dee frowned. “That’s rotten.”

  Carmen nodded. She had another word in mind.

  “No, it’s evil,” Elise said forcefully. She tapped the table lightly with her fingertips. She frowned, then looked up at Carmen. “Your mother
and Richard. They did actually get married, right?”

  Carmen nodded and took a sip of her beer, licking the foam away from her lip.

  “Remember . . . in one of the letters Dorothy wrote, Mom mentioned that there was resistance from Richard’s mother. His father was okay. And his brother helped put the crib together, but his mother . . .”

  Dee Dee nodded. “Right. I remember now. His mother acted as if he had died.”

  “Nasty bitch,” Elise growled.

  Carmen laughed. “Elise! I’m surprised at you! What a thing to say about my grandmother! That’s the kind of thing I would say! Or Dee Dee . . .”

  Dee Dee grinned. “Damn right.”

  “Yes, it is,” Elise said, smiling.

  “Okay. This is what we have,” Dee Dee interrupted, pulling a notebook out of her purse and opening it on the table in front of them. “Richard’s mother—what was her name, Belle? No, Bella. Bella was against the marriage and obviously was against Leah . . .” Dee Dee paused and glanced at Carmen. “You. So let’s assume she arranged for the obit, organized the services, and cut your mother off.” She shook her head. “He was Jewish, so the services were held practically the next day. She . . . your mom . . . probably didn’t even get to say goodbye.”

  The image of her young mother, grieving, cut off, and alone, was one that Carmen had tried to suppress over the past few days. She had tried and she failed.

  “I can’t imagine it. Except that I can.” Elise cleared her throat. “It’s beyond cruel.”

  “What have you learned about the rest of the family? Are any of them still alive? Even Bella? You know, evil never dies.”

  Carmen shrugged.

  “His father?” Elise asked.

  Carmen shook her head. “Only that he was a lawyer. He died in 1975. Bella died five years earlier so at least he had a few years of peace without that—”

  “Be careful. It’s your grandmother you’re talking about.”

  “—woman.” Carmen rolled her eyes.