The Time Between

by Karen White

  A collection of oil paintings of various sizes hung on the walls in the foyer, their colors protected from the sun and muted by shadows. These weren’t the typical paintings one found in a house, much less an island house. Knowing virtually nothing about art, I could still tell that these were very old. Stepping closer to what appeared to be a naked Greek god holding a trident and lounging on a cloud surrounded by cherubs, I could see small cracks in the paint. I could also tell that the paintings hadn’t been professionally stretched and framed. The canvases hung loosely in the frames, faint undulations still visible, as if the paintings had been kept rolled up for an extended period of time.

  As if anticipating my question, Finn said, “The aunts brought them from their home in Hungary. I’ve stopped begging them to allow me to get them restored and properly framed. Or even appraised. Aunt Helena didn’t want me to touch them.”

  I looked across the foyer to what appeared to be the dining room, where a large still life of a fruit bowl was centered by faded rectangular patches where other paintings had apparently hung.

  “She moves the paintings from time to time, taking some down and hanging new ones or not replacing them at all. I’ve spent virtually every summer of my childhood here and watched her move the paintings, but never once have I been able to encourage her to talk to me about them. I just gave up, figuring it was one of her eccentricities.”

  I raised my eyebrows. This was the first I’d heard about any “eccentricities.”

  “They’re all adorable, I assure you,” he said, a faint smile teasing his lips.

  I almost laughed, wondering if that was the first time he’d ever spoken the word “adorable” out loud. “What about Bernadett?” I asked. “Did she have any say about the paintings?”

  He shook his head. “Helena was the oldest and Bernadett deferred to her. I suppose if one had to die before the other, it happened the way it should have. As much as Helena would prefer not to live without her sister, Bernadett couldn’t have.” Something shifted behind his eyes. “I loved them both, but Bernadett just seemed . . . broken.”

  He stopped as if suddenly realizing he’d spoken aloud and regretted it.

  The sound of footsteps from the back of the house made us both turn. A mature redhead wearing a bright floral dress and sensible shoes came and stood at the bottom of the stairs. She was short and stout, and she had to look up as she approached. Her face brightened when she recognized Finn.

  “I thought I heard voices. Mr. Beaufain—it’s so good to see you.” She frowned, a deep V forming between her brows. “I’m afraid Miss Helena isn’t having a good day.” Her gaze slid to me in reproach. “I don’t think she’s up for visitors.”

  “Aunt Helena hasn’t had a good day in a while. I think it’s time we changed that, don’t you?” He indicated for me to step forward. “Nurse Kester, this is Eleanor Murray. She’ll be spending time with Miss Helena while she recuperates to give you and Nurse Weber a break and to assist in my aunt’s convalescence in any way that she can.” He smiled, but it wasn’t necessarily a pleasant one. It was more like the smile of a person used to getting his way. Or that of a talk-show host who already knew what was behind the curtain. This was the man I recognized.

  He continued. “Unless she’s having a medical emergency that I wasn’t informed of?”

  Nurse Kester flushed. “No, sir. She’s just being uncommunicative and wouldn’t eat. She’s finally sleeping.”

  Finn nodded. “We’ll let her rest for a bit, then, while I show Eleanor around. Please let me know when she wakes up.”

  The nurse left and I began wishing that I could open the drapes. I craved light. I had ever since I was a child. Maybe it was because I’d grown up beside the great Atlantic, where the sun touched us first every morning, the reflected light illuminating our world as if the dark had never been.

  “I’ve hired two full-time nurses for the time being, and they work out their schedule so that there’s always one of them here. There’s an old maid’s room off the kitchen that we’ve made into a little bedroom where they can sleep near Helena. I’m afraid she doesn’t allow them too much rest.” He stepped back. “Let me show you around.”

  Opposite the front door was the short hallway where Nurse Kester had come from, which appeared to lead into a kitchen and the back of the house. Across the hall from the dining room was another room, with a matching fluted arch painted a bright white that separated it from the foyer. From where I stood, I could see the back legs of what looked like a wooden bench with a padded seat. A small tingle began at the base of my spine.

  Finn’s cell phone rang and he excused himself for a moment to answer, leaving me to move forward on my own. I stopped in the room’s threshold, my fingers itching to throw open the drapes to allow in the light. The walls were papered in a bloodred floral pattern, making the room seem even darker. A large crystal chandelier dangled from the high ceiling. I searched the wall inside the doorway for a light switch and turned it on. The bulbs shone weakly through the crystal drops of the light fixture, their glow barely parting the dimness to illuminate several badly framed paintings. I didn’t look too closely at the art, as my attention was distracted by the large black piano that dominated the room.

  The tingle that had begun at the base of my spine edged out with little fingers, like a river slowly flooding its banks. The piano was ebony satin, like ours had been, and was a little over six feet long. Its elegant legs tapered at the bottom into brass casters. It sat on an oriental rug, undoubtedly to protect the wood floors from the weight of the instrument, but the rest of the floors were left bare. I could only imagine the sound it would create in this room of high ceilings and virtually no other furniture besides two small chairs and a love seat.

  But the top of the piano was closed, as was the fall board, and although it showed no sign of dust, it seemed to have been abandoned, its music silenced as if in mourning. I thought of the old women who’d lived here and of Bernadett’s death and Helena’s near death, and it occurred to me that the whole house was mourning along with the piano. I’d closed up my own piano after my father’s death, as if it contained all my good-byes. It had remained that way through our move to the North Charleston house and then until the new owners had come in a large truck to take it away.

  “When Helena’s better, I know she’ll welcome the sound of music in here again.”

  I turned, startled to hear Finn’s voice behind me. I nodded, my throat crowded with memories that blocked my voice. I stayed where I was, unwilling to move forward, as if by doing so I would somehow make the piano disappear. I seemed to do that with all the things I’d ever loved.

  Swallowing, I said, “Does Helena play?”

  His gray eyes seemed to be assessing me, and I found I couldn’t meet his gaze. It was as if he knew something I didn’t and was wondering if he should tell me or let me figure it out for myself.

  “She did,” he said. “She and Bernadett were wonderful musicians. They both sang and played piano. But Helena was the better pianist, although it’s hard to describe how.” He paused for a moment, thinking. “Bernadett was technically brilliant, but Helena became the music she played.”

  I looked away from him, ashamed to find my eyes stinging. I remembered my father saying the same thing about me, how it was possible to learn all the technical attributes of the music, but the way I felt when I played was something that couldn’t be taught.

  “Maybe she’d like to play for me,” I managed to say.

  He shook his head. “Her arthritis is too bad now. She hasn’t played for years. I’ve come to think of this as Bernadett’s piano, since she’s the only one who’s played it for as long as I can remember. She might not have been as gifted as Helena, but she loved to play.”

  I glanced back at the silent, closed piano, wondering whether this one held as many good-byes as mine had.

  “Come on,” h
e said, gently touching my elbow. “Let me show you the rest of the house.”

  I followed, eager to leave the room and all its possibilities behind me.

  The house was large, with four bedrooms, a dining room, a music room, and a nice-sized recently updated kitchen. A sunroom had been created along the northwest corner of the house to encompass the creek and river views and was accessed through the kitchen. As a child, I’d wondered about this room as I regarded it from the vantage point of my johnboat, what it must be like to be inside a place with glass walls.

  Two well-worn armchairs sat facing the river, the table between them littered with books; more books—including one that was opened and facedown—were piled on ottomans with worn fabric that matched the armchairs. The room had an air of abandonment, but it seemed as if the occupants had just put down a book and left, expecting to return soon. A small carriage clock ticked on a low shelf, keeping time for no one. On the wall with the door, the only wall not made of windows, were tall bookshelves overflowing with books and knickknacks and a large collection of sweetgrass baskets. Of all the rooms I had seen so far, this was my favorite.

  A shallow oval sweetgrass basket sat on top of one of the shelves, and as I looked around I saw that not only the shelves but most surfaces were full of the baskets, all in assorted shapes and sizes. I’d seen a few larger baskets in the rest of the house, but the sheer number of them in this one small room was almost overwhelming.

  “Aunt Bernadett collected them,” Finn explained. “She couldn’t drive down Highway Seventeen without stopping at a basket stand or visit the Charleston Market without buying one. She loved the stories that were woven into each basket.” He picked up a small round basket with a lid and examined it for a moment. “They’re probably worth a small fortune now, but I doubt Aunt Helena will ever get rid of them.”

  I touched a deep, round centerpiece basket on the floor filled with old catalogs. “My friend Lucy’s mother and grandmother had a stand on Highway Seventeen. I used to watch them create their baskets, and Lucy and I would try to memorize the patterns and guess which one they were making. And then I moved. . . .” My voice drifted away and I looked up to find him watching me intently. I walked past him, out of the room, eager to continue the tour.

  All of the bedrooms were upstairs, but the downstairs parlor, with access from the dining room and the kitchen, had been converted into a room for Helena. We walked quietly past the closed door as Finn led me toward the stairs and the upper level.

  “You probably won’t have much need to be up here, unless you decide to spend the night on occasion. I have a housekeeper, Mrs. Adler, who comes three times a week and cooks and cleans and stocks the refrigerator, so there are always fresh sheets on the beds. My daughter has a room since she comes here occasionally, too, although not lately.” I caught his frown as he turned back down the hall toward the staircase, past four doors, three of which were closed.

  “The guest bedroom is at the end of the hall—it was Helena’s room until about five years ago, when the arthritis in her knee got too bad and we had to move her downstairs. And Gigi’s room is next to that.” He paused in front of the remaining closed door. “This was Bernadett’s. Helena doesn’t want anybody in there.”

  I nodded, remembering how I’d wanted to keep the back hall with my father’s jackets and boots left alone like a shrine. But it had been the first area cleaned out when Mama had decided we needed to move.

  I moved to stand before the one door that stood ajar. “What’s in here?”

  Finn stopped directly behind me, his warm breath brushing the back of my hair. “A relic.”

  I pushed the door open wider and stood where I was, taking it all in. The twin-sized trundle bed was covered in a navy blue quilt with various astronomical bodies stitched precisely in brightly colored thread. Star charts and framed photographs of spaceships covered the walls, while what seemed like hundreds of tiny hooks dotted the ceiling, each holding a small fishing line attached to a flying object: model rockets, war planes and passenger jets, planets from the solar system, and elaborately folded paper airplanes.

  I turned to him, unable to hold back my grin. “This was your room.”

  His face remained unreadable. “Yes. Every summer from the time I was about nine until I went to college. The aunts never saw a reason to change it. To them I stayed that small boy.”

  I tried to reconcile the man I knew now with the boy who’d lived in this room, had made the airplane models and rockets, had folded each fold in each paper plane, but I couldn’t. That boy was long gone, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he saw holes, too, when he looked at his reflection in a mirror.

  “I wanted to be an astronaut,” he added quietly, his expression showing that he was as surprised as I was with his admission.

  I looked closely at him. “I saw you once. When you were about twelve, I think. I might have seen you before, but that was the first time I realized you were the nephew who stayed with the two old ladies in the house in the summer but wasn’t allowed to play with us.” I blushed, realizing what I’d just said. I kept speaking to hide my embarrassment. “You were playing with a paper airplane and you tossed it over the creek, but it turned and got stuck on the bank. I went looking for it the next day and found it.”

  “I know,” he said softly. “I saw you. From our dock. That’s as close as I was allowed to get.”

  It was my turn to frown. “Did you know who I was, then? When you hired me?”

  He shook his head. “Not until I saw you that night at that awful bar and you told me you’d grown up in Edisto. That’s when I realized I knew who you were. I remembered seeing you with your mother and sister in church.”

  You remember Eve, I wanted to say. I’d wear the same skirt and blouse every Sunday—the only dressy clothes I’d owned—but my mother would dress Eve up like she was competing in a pageant. Nobody noticed me at all.

  “What a small world,” I said, stepping back into the hallway, away from the ghost of the little boy who still lived in the room.

  His answer was the sound of the door snapping shut behind us. Nurse Kester appeared at the top of the stairs at the end of the hallway. “Miss Helena is awake, Mr. Beaufain. I told her you were here with Miss Murray, so she’s pretending to still be asleep.”

  Finn’s cool eyes met mine. “Are you ready for this?”

  I wasn’t sure if I was or not, but I seemed to have run out of options. “Yes. I’m ready.”

  I followed him and Nurse Kester down the stairs and toward the back of the house, sensing the waiting presence of the ghost boy who’d once wanted to be an astronaut and that of the silent piano waiting patiently for the music to start again.

  CHAPTER 7

  Helena

  I heard the girl’s voice from far away, probably because it sounded like my Bernadett’s—soft like the way a hurricane starts with the gentlest breeze. I turned my head, half-prepared to rise and greet her before I remembered. My sister was gone, vanished like morning frost that fades as you watch. I closed my eyes and turned my head toward the wall, wanting to imagine, just for a few more moments, that I was still in my bedroom in our little house on Uri Utca in the Buda hills, which overlooked the Danube, my beautiful Bernadett in the twin bed beside mine.

  “I can come back another time,” the girl said. But I heard Finn’s footsteps approaching, just as firm and purposeful as they had been since he was a five-year-old boy, and I knew he was not going to leave until he had done what he had come here to do.

  I felt them in the doorway, watching me, and I practiced slow, even breaths while remembering the grocer across the street—remembering him, not his name—shouting out in my native tongue to the Laszlo boys, who made it a game to steal Linzer cookies from the bin at the front of his store on their way home from school. I could almost smell the sweet honey scent of anyukám’s baking mézeskalács in the bakery on the fi
rst floor of our house, making me crave food for the first time in a very long while. I felt that if I kept my eyes closed a little longer, I would see Bernadett rise from her bed to begin her morning prayers. I was desperate to speak to her; did she not know that? Please hurry and wake up, Bernadett. Please.

  “Aunt Helena?”

  Finn’s voice rushed at me, erasing my old bedroom as quickly as a crashing wave takes over a sand castle. Slowly, I turned my head and looked up into my great-nephew’s face, the face with Bernadett’s eyes, framed by the same wide brow. I wondered sometimes if this was why I had always loved him so, if I somehow saw him as a second chance.

  “Aunt Helena?” he said again, taking my hand. I had not realized how cold I was until I felt the warmth of his skin against mine.

  “I am not dead, if that is what you are wondering.” My “g” still came out like a “k,” something I had not been able to stop even after all these years.

  His eyes smiled but without the rest of his face, something my sister had perfected, too. It was disconcerting at first, never knowing what they were really thinking.

  “I’ve brought Eleanor to meet you. I told you about her, remember?”

  I squinted as the slight figure beside him moved forward, and I felt Nurse Kester place my glasses on my face before tucking another pillow beneath my head so I could partially sit up.

  I frowned at the skinny girl with the light brown hair and wide blue eyes, wondering what Finn had been thinking to bring her here. I imagined she seemed timid to others, her shoulders curved forward as if bracing for a blow. But she moved forward and did not hover behind Finn, and her eyes met mine instead of staring at a place behind my head. She reminded me of the Russian stacking dolls my mother had given me for Christmas one year, a smaller doll nested inside each one, hidden from sight until you opened the larger one.