Unbreathed Memories

by Marcia Talley

  “How odd.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “I have to say that you seem fine now. Very confident.”

  “It’s ironic really, that I started using the tools she gave me to begin seeing the light.”

  Thinking about Georgina, I said, “Some of us didn’t get that far.”

  “I know.”

  We promised to meet for coffee sometime, but I think we both knew that after we hung up we’d never talk to each other again.

  I returned to my folder, wishing that Georgina, like Stephanie, would finally see the light.

  Before Mother’s heart attack, I had rummaged through back issues of the Sun until I found Diane Sturges’s obituary. The clipping stared up at me now. Where had she come from? Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1966, she’d moved to Baltimore, but it didn’t say when. In 1983 she graduated from the Garrison Forest school and attended college and graduate school at Johns Hopkins. The obituary said she was survived by her husband, Bradley Sturges, a Washington, D.C., architect, and her father, Dr. Mark Voorhis. Nothing new there. I sat back in my chair and studied Diane’s picture, looking so much like that other woman in the photograph in Dr. Voorhis’s office. Wait a minute! What about a mother? For the first time in many months, I longed for the reference section of the Whitworth & Sullivan library, where I could instantly lay my hands on reference books like the AMA Directory of Physicians whenever I wanted them. I consulted the computer, but the darn book didn’t appear to be online, so I reached for the telephone instead and called the public library on West Street. They didn’t have a copy. I shuffled things around on the desk, searching for the Naval Academy phone book, then called the Naval Academy library. The nice gentleman who answered the reference line apologized profusely and told me they didn’t have the book either. Pooh!

  I stared at the monitor for a while, then had a sudden vision of Penny Evans, Whitworth & Sullivan’s workaholic reference librarian, who was probably plowing her way through a pile of reference questions the height of the World Trade Center right then, not that anyone would appreciate it. Want something done, they say? Ask the busiest person you know. That was Penny.

  Amazingly, I hadn’t forgotten Whitworth & Sullivan’s telephone number. I was so proud after punching in all the numbers correctly that it was a big letdown to get Penny’s voice mail. “If you’re there, Penny, grab the AMA directory and call me back,” I recorded, then hung up in a grumpy mood.

  I rearranged my papers, putting them in a semblance of order, then played a game of computer solitaire. Suits of cards were cascading down the screen in victorious waves when the phone rang.

  Penny hadn’t changed a bit. The same chirpy voice. “Hi, Hannah. You can’t imagine how surprised I was to get your call. How the hell are you?”

  “Hanging in there, Pen. Just had my reconstructive surgery, so I’m stuck at home and feeling kind of punk.”

  “Jeez. My aunt had that done, so I’ve got some idea of how you must feel.”

  “Uncomfortable as hell and twice as bored.”

  “So, you decided to call me up for entertainment?” She burst into song, a hilarious off-key rendition of “Let Me Entertain You.” When I cheerfully protested she said, “I could use some diversion anyway. Fran’s got me working on the use-tax statistics.”

  I groaned. “Poor you.”

  “Keeps me off the streets. And speaking of off the streets and out of trouble, how about you, Hannah? Last time I heard, you’d been in some sort of boating accident and two people had drowned.”

  “Too true, I’m afraid.” I thought about those desperate moments last spring when someone I’d grown to care about had betrayed me, nearly costing Connie and me our lives.

  The ring of another telephone on her end filled the awkward silence. “Sorry.”

  “Do you need to get that?”

  “No. I’m not officially here. Say,” she chirped in a let’s-change-the-subject tone of voice, “what do you want me to do with this AMA directory I’ve lugged all the way over to the phone?”

  I could picture Penny, standing at the waist-high desk with the receiver tucked between her ear and shoulder, her left earring unclipped and resting on the counter in front of her. “I’d like you to look up somebody for me, a Doctor Diane Sturges.”

  “Sure.” I heard pages flipping. “Russell, Stanley, Sturges. Diane, did you say?”

  “Yup.”

  “Got a Charles Sturges, but no Diane.”

  Feeling foolish, I remembered what Mother had said about Diane not being a real doctor. “How about a Doctor Mark Voorhis?”

  “OK. Underwood, Victor … here we are, Voorhis. He graduated from John Hopkins in sixty-one, did residencies in Oklahoma and St. Louis. It lists an office address in Baltimore.” She rattled it off, but I didn’t need to write it down. It was the Greenspring Center where I had taken Julie.

  But I was interested in the time before Baltimore. He must have practiced somewhere. “Where did he go after his residency?”

  “Doesn’t say. There’s nothing between St. Louis and his present location in Baltimore.”

  “Damn.”

  “Wait a minute.” The receiver banged in my ear and I could hear Penny shoving books in and out on the metal shelves. In a minute she was back. “We’re in luck. He’s gotten himself listed in Who’s Who. Got a pencil? Here we go. Voorhis. Between sixty-nine and seventy-nine he was practicing at the Morgan Clinic in Waterville, Illinois. The next year, he shows up in Baltimore, practicing in pediatrics. Looks like he’s been there ever since.”

  I did a quick calculation. Diane would have been about thirteen when he picked up sticks and headed east. “I wonder why he left Illinois?”

  “Beyond the scope of this book, dah’link.”

  “Do you suppose Waterville has a newspaper I could check?”

  “Hold on a sec.” I heard the thud of the heavy book closing before I got an earful of the white noise that told me that Penny had put me on hold. While I waited, I pulled out Paul’s Rand McNally road atlas and looked up Waterville, a little town off I-74 about halfway between Bloomington and Peoria. I fiddled with my notes and the pages from Dr. Sturges’s appointment book, making experimental probes under my bandages with an index finger in an attempt to quell the itch. I’d found a particularly satisfying spot and was scratching away when Penny came back on the line. “Hannah? I’m looking at the Nexis listing. There’s the Waterville Gazette, but it’s only been online since ninety-two.”

  “Rats.”

  “But I did a quick check, and they’ve got the microfilm at the Library of Congress.”

  Great. The Library of Congress. Usually the thirty-five-mile drive between Annapolis and Capitol Hill wouldn’t have fazed me. But for the next several weeks of my recuperation, that microfilm might as well have been on the moon. “Say, Pen, in light of my present delicate condition, I don’t suppose you could …” I ventured.

  “Sorry, Han, but why do you think I’m burning the proverbial midnight oil? I’m outahere on the red-eye special tonight. You know how hard it is for Ken and me to get our schedules together. I finally talked him into a couple of weeks at my brother’s place in Tahoe.”

  “Lucky you,” I said, but truthfully, I couldn’t think of anything I’d like doing less than skiing. My son-in-law, Dante, had talked me into taking a skiing lesson while I was out in Colorado meeting my new granddaughter. After tumbling downhill in a pinwheel of skis and limbs and nearly being beheaded by a novice on his virgin Boogie board run, I didn’t take much to the sport. I maintain that one should grab a bathing suit and head Caribbean-ward in winter. I thought about my new breast quietly taking root under the bandages. Maybe next year.

  I thanked Penny profusely and was about to hang up when I remembered what had started me thinking about Voorhis’s background in the first place. “Penny, do me one more favor. Does Who’s Who say anything about a wife?”

  Penny sighed heavily. “Now you tell me. I just c
losed that book, Hannah.”

  “I’ll be forever in your debt.”

  Pages rustled. “It says he married a Fiona Shenker in 1965.”

  I scribbled the name down.

  “And someone named Loraine Hudson in 1986.”

  “Thanks again, Pen.”

  “Anything else you want to know? His mother? Father? Shoe size?”

  I chuckled. “No, I think that’s it. You’re the best!”

  I hung up and pouted. It would be weeks before I’d be well enough to drive into D.C. and look at that microfilm. I played another game of solitaire, lost, then drummed my fingers on the mouse pad. I was not noted for my patience. I could just hear Mother say, “Hold your horses, Hannah. Those microfilms aren’t going anywhere.” She’d be right, of course. Mother was usually right. She would have warned me about going against doctor’s orders and walking down the stairs, and she’d have been right about that, too. I sat in my chair, longing for my pain pills, and waited for Paul to return home and rescue me.

  chapter

  18

  When Mark Voorhis came up squeaky clean with Maryland Q and A, I wasn’t surprised. With Voorhis’s spotless reputation and charming bedside manner, which I had experienced firsthand, I hadn’t really expected Paul to uncover any dirt about the pediatrician. But Diane was another matter. I was sure that her controversial techniques must have disagreed with somebody, so it was a surprise when she, too, came up with a clean bill of health. Paul didn’t find her listed with Maryland Q and A, of course, since she wasn’t an M.D., but he’d thought to check the state licensing boards. None was aware of any complaints against the woman.

  I thought about what Stephanie had told me about her final session with Diane. I wondered what Stephanie had said that upset the therapist enough to cut the session short. Stephanie had been talking about her fear of memories coming back full-blown. What had Diane remembered? Something terrible in her own past? I was convinced that the answer lay in Waterville, Illinois.

  Paul needed only minimal arm-twisting before agreeing to go to the Library of Congress to look through the microfilm of the Waterville Gazette. “Who am I this time?” he teased. “Marta or Lewis?”

  “I’m rather partial to Lewis,” I said.

  Paul tipped my chin up and kissed me. “You know who gets my vote?”

  “Who?”

  “Jimmy Stewart.”

  “Why Jimmy Stewart?”

  “Because in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, old Jimmy had Grace Kelly do his legwork.”

  “Get out of here!” I bopped him over the head with my pillow.

  The rest of the day crawled by. At one o’clock I made the first of my twice-daily calls to Mother in the hospital and we compared health notes. Lately she had been making an effort to sound chipper when we talked, but I could tell it was all an act. Even though I kept our conversations short, toward the end her voice would fade and she’d hand the phone off to Dad, who rarely left her side. I’d ask the inevitable—how’s she doing—and we’d have strained, one-sided conversations where he’d try to answer my questions without upsetting Mother, who, knowing her, would be pretending not to listen.

  “She’s not much better, is she?” I’d ask.

  “You could say that.”

  “But not worse?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What did the doctor say?”

  “Good to hear you’re on the mend.” A glib non sequitur signaled that I’d better ask for details another time.

  “Thanks, Daddy. I’m still sore and positively itching to get out of the house, but I see the doctor on Friday. If it’s OK with her, Paul says he’ll drive me up to visit Mother this weekend.”

  “So soon?” His voice brightened. “She’ll be really glad to see you.” He took a deep breath. “And me, too, of course.”

  I could hear muffled conversation in the background. “What’s that?”

  “Your mom says don’t rush it.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not.”

  Paul returned home around six-thirty, bearing a bag of Chinese carryout. All day I’d been on my own in the food department, which meant whatever I could scrounge from the refrigerator. Lunch had been leftover spaghetti zapped in the microwave and a sorry-looking bowl of Caesar salad. Paul barely had time to lay the cartons out on the kitchen table before I tore the lid off the hot-and-sour soup container and began slurping down steaming mouthfuls between demands for a full report on his research.

  “Tell me what you found out.” I opened a waxed-paper envelope and munched on one of those crunchy noodles designed to throw on top of the soup.

  Paul speared a dumpling with his chopsticks. He waved it at me and I watched it wobble, fall, and splash into the dipping sauce, decorating the tablecloth with mahogany speckles. He picked it up with his fingers. “Eat your tofu,” he said. “Then I’ll tell you.”

  “Sadist.” I popped open a carton of steamed rice and inverted it over my plate. When I lifted the carton away, it left a rectangular block, which I draped with spicy green beans.

  “Nope. Masochist. That drive to D.C. is hell. Can’t understand how you put up with it for so many years.” The last dumpling disappeared down his throat.

  “I imagine we needed the money,” I teased. “Remember Emily? And all those paychecks I signed over to Bryn Mawr?”

  “There was that,” he admitted.

  I laid down my chopsticks, sat up straight in my chair, folded my hands primly in my lap, and said, “OK. Out with it.”

  “I guess I’ve tortured you long enough.” He leaned forward with his arms resting on the edge of the table. “OK, here’s the scoop. The Waterville Gazette comes out every Thursday. It’s a provincial rag reporting on local politics, school and church events, much like our Chesapeake Times down in Pearson’s Corner.”

  I remembered the Chesapeake Times. Once upon a time I’d made headlines there, when I discovered the body of a murdered teenager floating in an old cistern. I picked a green bean up with my fingers and nibbled it slowly while Paul continued.

  “Because Dr. Voorhis left Waterville sometime in 1979, I began looking in the December issues and worked backward. In November, there was an announcement that two doctors, a married couple, had bought the Morgan Clinic. And that led me backward to an even more interesting article.”

  While I held my breath, Paul shoved his chair back and reached for the battered briefcase he’d propped against a table leg. He extracted a sheaf of papers from the side pocket and held them out to me. “Here are photocopies of everything I found.”

  I snatched them from his outstretched hand. “You sweetheart!”

  “They’re roughly in order.”

  My heart began to pound as I shoved my plate away, flicked some grains of rice onto the floor, and arranged the photocopies on the table in front of me. The one on top showed a simple invitation-style announcement bordered with a Greek key design. It introduced Drs. Warner and Millicent Rickert to the Waterville community and invited patients to look to the clinic for all their medical needs. The next photocopy was from the society page. It described a farewell party held for Diane Voorhis at the Waterville Country Club, sponsored by someone in the Junior League, the mother of one of Diane’s little friends. The article was dry and about as interesting as reading the stock market quotes—I mean, who cares what kind of flowers decorated the tables—until the final paragraph:

  Diane, 13, will be relocating to Baltimore, Maryland, where her father, Dr. Mark Voorhis, is going into private practice. Fiona Voorhis, his wife of fifteen years, a popular member of the Junior League and an active member of St. Anthony’s church, died in August.

  I sensed Paul staring at me. I whistled and looked up.

  “What did she die of?”

  “Read on, McDuff,” he said with a twinkle.

  Since everything seemed to be arranged in reverse chronological order, I dived straight to the bottom of the stack. Under a picture of an attractive woman bearing an uncan
ny resemblance to Diane Sturges was the headline: LOCAL WOMAN FOUND DEAD OF CARBON MONOXIDE POISONING. I checked the date. On a Tuesday night in August of 1979, Fiona Voorhis had been discovered dead in her car, a Volvo station wagon, when her husband returned home following his rounds. He told police he had heard the engine running, but by the time he opened the garage and pulled his wife from the car, it was too late.

  “Where was Diane?” I asked Paul.

  He laid a finger on a photocopy featuring several pictures of a barn fire. It was from the following week’s paper, and it carried more details. The night her mother died, thirteen-year-old Diane had been attending a church camp in nearby Durham. Poor thing, I thought. No wonder she was so screwed up, losing her mother like that. And so young. The police had found a suicide note, but its contents had not been revealed. Family friends had reported that Fiona had been recently despondent. Again, no cause for that depression was given. The final article dealt with the inquest. Fiona Voorhis’s death was ruled a suicide. I counted on my fingers. Five months later, Dr. Voorhis had sold his practice and he and his daughter were on their way to Baltimore. I wondered why.

  I turned the photocopy over, as if expecting something to be printed on the back of it. “That’s it?”

  Paul nodded. “Isn’t that enough?”

  I paged through the articles again. “I would give my eyeteeth to know what was in that suicide note.”

  “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know.”

  I had to agree with him. “It’s an odd thing, though.”

  “What’s odd?”

  I shuffled through the photocopies. “Did you notice that the Gazette reports on everything under the sun—birthday parties for two-year-olds, high school dances, junior varsity basketball scores, the weekly menus at the school cafeteria …”

  “And your point is?”

  “There was a farewell party for Diane, but none for the good doctor.”