The Time Between

by Karen White

  Despite her appearance, I knew Finn’s daughter was about ten, although she could have easily passed for a six-year-old. The skin on her face was so pale it appeared translucent, and her stature small enough that I could probably span her waist with both of my hands. But her smile was broad and welcoming, and the hand she put into mine, though tiny, was warm.

  “Eleanor Murray?”

  “Yes,” I replied, startled at her firm grasp. She shook my hand, then let it go before pulling the door open farther to allow me inside.

  “And you must be Genevieve.” I smiled down at her.

  A round-faced woman with bright red hair and freckles came hurrying into the marble-floored foyer, wiping her hands on an apron. “Miss Murray?”

  I nodded. “Yes. Mr. Beaufain is expecting me.”

  “It’s so good to meet you. I’m Mrs. McKenna, the housekeeper. Mr. Beaufain called to say he’s running a bit late. He said he’d let you go ahead and take the car, but he has the keys in his briefcase. He wanted to know if you could wait.”

  I glanced at my watch, realizing I didn’t really have an alternative unless I wanted to call Lucy and make her come back and get me. “Sure, that’s fine. Is there someplace I can wait?”

  Before the housekeeper could say anything, Genevieve spoke up. “I can show you my room if you’d like.”

  Mrs. McKenna beamed. “That’s an excellent idea. If you don’t mind, Miss Murray?”

  Not really knowing what I should say, I shook my head. “Of course not. I’d love to see it.”

  Genevieve slid her hand into mine again and tugged me toward the graceful staircase that rose in a spiral to three levels from the foyer. Passing by a large floral centerpiece holding court on a round table in the middle of the marble foyer, I noted the antique furniture and custom draperies as we ascended the stairs, marveling at how perfectly beautiful it all was, how it looked like somebody had re-created it from a painting that showed the way an elegant home should be. But I found myself wanting to push aside the draperies to allow the light to shine into all the corners, to see the father with his collar unbuttoned or the mother reading a magazine in bed. But I neither saw nor felt either one.

  When we reached the first-floor landing, Genevieve led me down a long hallway covered with plush carpet toward an open bedroom door, keeping up a constant chatter. “You don’t have to call me Genevieve,” she said solemnly as she faced me on the threshold. “Madame LaFleur—my ballet teacher—calls me Genevieve, but everybody else calls me Gigi. Well, except for Mommy and Daddy.”

  “And he calls you Peanut,” I said, smiling at the memory of our conversation in the dark car.

  She looked surprised. “He told you? Mommy won’t call me anything but Genevieve because she says nicknames stick to people their whole lives until everybody forgets your real name. I like Gigi better, so it doesn’t matter. But when Mommy’s here, you need to call me Genevieve.”

  I nodded. “Of course. And you can call me Eleanor.”

  She frowned, her eyes serious. “You don’t look like an Eleanor.”

  “And what should an Eleanor look like?”

  She shrugged her small shoulders. “I don’t know. Somebody bigger, I think? Maybe with curly hair who knows how to play tennis really well.” She frowned again, thinking. “Somebody who doesn’t dream when they sleep at night.”

  Gigi dropped my hand and slid into the room. I wanted to ask her what she’d meant, but I stopped inside the room, my words temporarily deserting me. A large white four-poster canopied bed dominated one corner of the large room. It and the windows and the stuffed armchairs gathered in another cozy reading corner were covered in a whimsical pink lace fabric, yards and yards of it draped over the four posts and over the drapery finials, which were in the shape of ballet slippers. A ceramic chandelier, a replica of a fairy-tale castle, hung suspended by a rope of the same material in the center of the room. A mural covered the wall opposite the bed, what looked like a scene from The Nutcracker. On closer inspection, I realized that the little girl at the center of the stage was Gigi.

  “I like pink a lot,” she said, not apologetic at all.

  I realized that the walls had been painted a soft hue of her favorite color, and even the rug was the palest pink. I turned my back on the little girl, overwhelmed with . . . what? Anger? Jealousy? I couldn’t explain it, other than to admit to myself that this was the room I’d always wanted, the kind of room my own father had promised me I’d one day have once he’d saved enough money to send me to school and had a little extra left over. This was the kind of room a devoted parent created for a beloved daughter. A room that could have been mine if things had been different.

  I pretended to stare at the mural, keeping my back to Gigi while I tried to check my emotions, tried not to miss my father so much that being in this room felt like a blade sliding across my skin.

  “Do you like it?”

  I managed to nod. “Yes. I like pink, too,” I stammered. My gaze drifted to a bulletin board hanging on the wall adjacent to the mural. There were several photos of a tutu-wearing Gigi with her father and a single picture of her with a beautiful slender woman with dark hair who I assumed was her mother. I realized then that this was the first time I’d seen anything personal in the house. From what I could tell from my brief glance from the foyer, the downstairs was immaculate: no discarded shoes or backpacks or books splayed open as if the reader had just left. It was as if the heart of the house had been confined to this one room.

  Tacked along the edges of the bulletin board were neatly folded paisley scarves in every color—although there were several in varying shades of pink.

  “That’s my collection,” she said at my elbow, startling me. I hadn’t heard her approach. “I don’t wear them anymore, but they’re pretty so I keep them.”

  I looked down at her, feeling I was missing something. “They are very pretty. Which is your favorite?”

  A small finger with chipped pale pink polish pointed at a fuchsia scarf. “That one,” she said matter-of-factly as she unpinned it from the board and then handed it to me to examine more closely. “Mommy said I should venture out into different colors, but I keep coming back to pink. I do try, though. Last week I wore green tights with a pink leotard. Mommy said that didn’t count because the tights had pink polka dots on them. I think that the way we dress is as much a part of expressing ourselves as when we dance.”

  I found myself smiling down at her. There was something eminently likable about her. Although she was a child, she had a depth to her, a gravity to her movements and expressions that made me think she could have been years older.

  Facing her, I said, “And did you figure that out all by yourself?”

  An impish grin lit her face. “No. Madame LaFleur said it first. But I’m pretty sure I thought it even before she said it out loud.”

  Despite myself, I laughed. “I somehow don’t doubt it, Gigi.”

  “It’s time for your vitamins, Gigi. Mrs. McKenna’s waiting for you in the kitchen.”

  Finn looked like a shadow in his dark suit as he stood still against the doorframe, and I had no idea how long he’d been there.

  “Daddy!” Gigi ran to her father with outstretched arms, and he scooped her up. After kissing her on the forehead, he set her down.

  “I’m glad to see you two have met. Now, say good-bye to Eleanor and run on downstairs. You’ll see her again on Saturday when we go to Edisto.”

  Almost sedately, she walked back toward me and extended her hand. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Miss Eleanor, and I look forward to seeing you on Saturday.”

  Her eyes sparkled, belying her formality, as if to tell me she was performing for her father.

  I took her proffered hand and smiled back. “It was a pleasure meeting you, too, Genevieve, and I look forward to spending more time with you this weekend.”

 
; She grinned up at me, but instead of turning back to her father, she paused, a questioning look on her face. “Can I call you Ellie? You look much more like an Ellie than an Eleanor, don’t you think, Daddy?”

  I wondered if he could hear my quick intake of breath.

  “I think you may be right, Peanut.” His eyes, a calm and cool dark gray, stared back at me over his daughter’s head. “But it’s up to Eleanor to decide what she wants you to call her.”

  Ellie. Nobody had called me that since my father had said good-bye to me the morning he disappeared into the sea. And until this moment, I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed it.

  I smiled. “I like Ellie. If you’d like to call me that, it’s okay with me.”

  Her own grin widened. “Great! See you Saturday!” She skipped out of the room and, with a final wave, disappeared down the hallway.

  I found myself looking awkwardly down at the fuchsia scarf in my hand, the skin at the base of my skull beginning to prickle. “Why does Gigi have so many scarves?”

  “She was diagnosed with leukemia when she was five years old. She’s in remission now—almost four years. We’ve got another year to go before we’ll start breathing again.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know. . . .” I remembered how I’d felt when I first saw her bedroom, my misplaced anger at a little girl. She had leukemia.

  I turned abruptly back toward the bulletin board, blindly looking for the thumbtack that had held the scarf in place, afraid that if he saw my eyes he would know.

  “It’s not something I like to talk about. I was gone from work a lot when she was first diagnosed, but that was before you came to work there, so you wouldn’t have known.” He stopped. “Those were very dark days.”

  I found the tack and replaced the scarf before facing him again. “I understand. It’s just . . . I’m glad I know now. She’s a great kid.”

  He smiled his warm smile, the rare smile that made the sides of his eyes crinkle. “I think so, too.” He tilted his head toward the hallway. “Let’s go downstairs. All this pink makes me a little dizzy.”

  I nodded, relieved to leave the little girl’s bedroom behind me. I waited in the foyer while he collected his briefcase and set it on top of the hall table. After pulling out the Volvo’s keys, he handed them to me.

  “I had the people at Volvo give it a little tune-up and make sure everything was in working order, so it’s good to go. I’m sorry things took a little longer than I’d anticipated.”

  I clutched the keys in my hand. “It’s not a problem. I really appreciate the use of the car.” I smiled, feeling awkward again. “I guess I’d better go. Before the traffic . . .” My voice trailed away as I fumbled for the door latch.

  “Would you like to stay for dinner? Mrs. McKenna always makes plenty in case I have a client over. To make up for you missing your own dinner at home.”

  My hand paused on the doorknob as I looked back at Finn. “Thank you, but I need to get back. They’ll be waiting for me to make dinner.”

  His face remained impassively polite. “Well, then, you’ll need to get home. Sorry to have kept you.”

  I pulled open the door and stepped out onto the portico, then faced him again. “I’m curious. Did Gigi design her own room?”

  “No, actually. I did—with the help of a decorator friend. But I knew exactly what she’d want.”

  I nodded, trying not to smile at the image of Finn Beaufain sorting through rolls of pink tulle and lace.

  “Why?” he asked.

  I wasn’t really sure of the answer, only that the almost-forgotten edge of pushing my boundaries had suddenly poked its way up through the clouds of self-doubt and penitence. “Just wondering. It’s the kind of room every girl dreams of. And I thought maybe her mother had done it as a sort of homage to her own girlhood dreams.”

  His eyes darkened. “Harper wouldn’t have known even where to begin.”

  I felt chagrined, as if I’d been Bluebeard’s wife caught peeking into the locked room. I took a step backward. “About Saturday—I’m going to shoot for eleven o’clock. Traffic in the summer can be unpredictable.”

  “That’s fine. Peanut and I are going to be there Friday night, so no rush. We’ll see you when you get there.”

  “Well, good-bye, then,” I said.

  He nodded in response and then watched me walk through the gate to the parked car. I didn’t look back, not wanting to ruin the mental image of Finn Beaufain standing in a puddle of pink tulle as he created the dream bedroom for his little girl. I unlocked the door and paused for a moment, remembering how Gigi had called me Ellie, and wondering what she’d meant when she’d said that people named Eleanor didn’t dream when they slept at night.

  CHAPTER 9

  When I arrived home, Glen and Eve were sitting outside on the front porch swing. A pizza box sat on the table in front of them, and I felt a stab of guilt.

  “We were hungry,” Eve said, her eyes on me. “There’s another whole pizza in the fridge if you haven’t eaten.”

  Glen wiped his hands on a napkin and stood, making sure that the swing didn’t rock too much and disturb Eve. “Nice car, Eleanor. Where’d it come from?”

  I wondered if the hint of accusation I heard in his voice was real or imagined.

  He came down the steps toward the car, and I saw the way the sun hit his dark hair, turning the edges of it copper. It reminded me of the first time I’d ever seen him, wearing his Citadel cadet uniform and sitting with fellow cadets in the adjacent booth at Carolina’s restaurant in Charleston. His back was to me, and the sun through the window had lit his hair on fire just like a beacon. And then I’d turned to Eve and dared her to go say hello.

  But I didn’t fall in love with him until his first date with Eve. He’d come to pick her up in a friend’s borrowed Honda, and I’d been instructed to offer him something to drink on the front porch and keep him entertained while Mama helped Eve get dressed. The first thing he did when I answered the door was take off his hat, something no member of the opposite sex had ever done in my presence before. He’d been a first-year student at the Citadel—a knob—and his hair had been shorn so close that you could see his scalp. But his eyebrows were dark, with coppery edges, and nicely shaped, and his eyes were so brown they’d seemed almost black.

  He was probably the most handsome boy I’d ever seen—not that I’d seen many—which made me so nervous that when I returned to the porch with a Tupperware pitcher of lemonade and two plastic tumblers, I’d tripped, sending the tray and its contents down the steps.

  He hadn’t laughed, and his first concern was for me, to make sure I hadn’t been hurt. I might have fallen in love when he’d wiped the drip of lemonade off my nose and gave me a silly grin, or perhaps it was when he’d been the one to suggest making another pitcher while he cleaned up the mess so that I’d have nothing to explain to Eve and Mama. Or maybe it was when he’d escorted Eve down the porch to his car, her delicate hand tucked inside the elbow of his arm, and he’d turned around to wink at me.

  He was still the tall, lanky, and broad-shouldered young man he’d once been, but his eyes weren’t as bright, and his step was now heavier, as if the burden of years rested heavily on him like a yoke tethering him to the life he’d made for himself.

  “It’s for my new part-time job. I’ll be taking care of an elderly woman living on Edisto a couple of days a week. She’s Mr. Beaufain’s great-aunt, so he’s made a few allowances for my work schedule at his office downtown, and I have the use of the nanny’s car for now.”

  Glen leaned down to peer into the driver’s side window. “Looks like it’s brand-new.”

  I shrugged. “Could be—it smells new.”

  I climbed up the stairs and took the seat next to Eve, and she leaned back, almost imperceptibly. When we were children we’d sometimes shared a bed when I’d been afraid of
the dark or a storm and needed the comfort of a familiar touch. It had been at Eve’s request, telling our father it was part of her job as oldest sister to protect me.

  Clearing my throat, I said, “The days that I’m in Edisto, I’ll be staying there for dinner. I’ll try to make sure you have leftovers to reheat, or you can order pizza. The extra money I’ll be bringing in will make going to a restaurant once in a while a little more affordable.”

  I’d been staring at my hands, then slowly raised my gaze to meet Eve’s violet eyes. They’d been compared to Elizabeth Taylor’s, yet Eve’s were opaque, not allowing any light to shine through them. They hadn’t always been that way but had changed as she’d grown older, as if she’d chosen that to happen in the same manner she’d chosen to start wearing shorter dresses or to cut her hair.

  “How nice for you,” she said. “I’m sure we’ll be fine surviving on pizza and fast food.”

  “Eve.” Glen’s voice held a note of warning, but my sister and I both knew that whatever it was between us was impenetrable, a thick, dark place where we wallowed yet allowed no one else entry.

  I stood and walked toward the edge of the porch and looked out at the dried grass and dead flowers I’d planted earlier in the spring and then forgotten. Nobody had bothered to water them. “To start, I’ll be going to Edisto every Wednesday and Saturday, although we might add a day or two, depending on how it goes. If you need help getting to your doctor’s appointments, please schedule them on the days I’m here. Or maybe schedule them during Glen’s lunch hour so he can take you.”

  I didn’t turn around, afraid they’d both see my uncertainty, my unease with this person speaking and using my mouth. But all I had to do was focus on Eve’s pregnancy, and it all became so much easier.

  I heard Glen climbing the porch steps and then the sound of the porch swing straining from the ropes that held it to the ceiling. “That won’t be a problem,” he said, and I pictured him placing a restraining hand on top of Eve’s, and the thought made me want to cry.