The Time Between

by Karen White

  He clenched his jaw, working hard to regain control, to find territory he recognized. “She’s . . . so small. Even with the side air bag . . .” He didn’t continue, and I willed him to cry, knowing, too, that he wouldn’t. He would have been taught that along with the proper way to address a senator and how making paper airplanes and camping outside were endeavors meant for other boys.

  I’d given up trying to hold back the tears, and I had to let go of Finn to reach into my purse for the wad of Kleenexes that I’d learned from my mother to always have on hand. For the first time I appreciated her words of wisdom.

  “She is small. But Gigi has the strongest spirit of anybody I’ve ever met. If anybody can get through this, it’s her. I think she inherited it from her aunt Helena.”

  A dark shadow passed behind his eyes, and an icy wave shuddered through my veins. “Don’t say that, Eleanor. Don’t say that Gigi is anything like Helena.”

  Sharp pins pricked my skin, as if I were freezing from the inside out. “What do you mean?”

  “There are things about Helena . . . things you don’t know.” He looked away, but not before I saw his eyes shutting me out. “Something dark. I don’t want to think Gigi has any of that in her. Not when we need to focus on the positive.”

  I thought of the painting in the music room and the Reichmann family. What does he know? I found myself pulling back from him, unable to meet his eyes, unable to forget his barrage of questions at the Waterfront restaurant. Unable to forget how the old woman’s hands shook as she’d held the Herend rooster.

  I recognized the cool, controlled voice when he spoke again. “I need to ask a favor.”

  “Anything,” I said without thinking. Just like the old Ellie would have.

  The two women in the waiting area stood, leaving their knitting on their chairs, and left the room, saying something about the cafeteria downstairs. We watched them until they were gone.

  Finn continued. “Helena doesn’t know yet—about Gigi. I can’t leave the hospital, but I don’t want to tell her over the phone.”

  “And you want me to tell her.”

  He nodded. “Yes. I have a car and driver standing by outside that you can use. He can take you to your house first if you need to pick up some things, and then take you to Edisto.”

  “Do you think telling Helena is wise? The whole reason I’m even in her life is because she broke down after her sister’s death. Maybe she’s not strong enough to know about Gigi.” My throat choked on Gigi’s name, even my words rejecting the thought of Gigi being hurt.

  Finn stood and walked away from me as if to study the abstract painting on the wall, a painting that looked like melted crayons had exploded on the canvas. “There was more to her breakdown than just Bernadett’s death.”

  I recalled my mother saying something about gossip on the island after Bernadett had died, how there hadn’t been an autopsy or a funeral announcement in the paper. About how family connections had kept details from the public. Yet all I could picture in my mind’s eye was a feverish Bernadett being smuggled out of Budapest during a bombing raid, and then through Europe, to save her life.

  “What?” I asked, afraid I already knew.

  He turned to face me. “Bernadett killed herself.”

  My wound began to throb even more, as if some unseen hand had pressed on it. “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I walked to where he stood, looking into his eyes to see if he was telling me the truth. But his eyes remained dark and shuttered, leaving my question unanswered.

  “I’ll tell her,” I said. “For you.”

  He pulled me into his arms, and I thought I felt his lips on the top of my head. “Thank you.”

  We both looked up, then stepped back as Harper walked in. She wore the same clothes she’d worn the last time I’d seen her, when I’d gone to pick up Gigi at her house, but her hair was undone, her mascara smeared under her eyes, her pants and blouse rumpled. As I watched, she used the heel of her hand to dry her cheek.

  I went to my purse and pulled out a clean Kleenex and handed it to her. She looked at it with surprise before taking it. “Thank you,” she said. She paused, and I waited for her to speak again, to accuse me of being responsible for hurting Gigi. But I was prepared, clinging to the ghost of the old Ellie, waiting to resurrect her.

  But any fire that Harper possessed was extinguished beneath a pile of guilt and anguish. She loved her daughter. I knew that. She’d simply been too selfish to show it, and now it might be too late. She regarded me with haunted eyes. “She had on her seat belt, right? And was in the backseat?”

  “Yes. Always.”

  She closed her eyes and took a deep, shuddering breath. “I know. It’s just . . . It’s just that I always need a reason. . . .” Her voice faded away, her confession halted when she realized whom she was speaking to, afraid to admit to me that it was hard living in a world where there aren’t always reasons.

  I moved to gather my purse and grocery bag to leave, but Harper held me back with a hand on my arm. “Gigi gave me this right before you picked her up today.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a folded picture. I froze, remembering the last time Gigi had drawn something for her mother.

  She handed it to me and I opened it. I recognized me first, most likely due to the navy shorts and striped shirt the woman wore in the picture. Except in this rendition I also wore a beautiful set of wings that arched over my back. I held hands with a small blond girl dressed all in pink with a wide, beautiful, red-crayoned smile. The background was filled with swirls of black, depicting night, and a large moon hovered in the top right corner near two angels—a redheaded one and a blond one—flying up near the stars. On the ground in front of us was a large, waxy-white flower, a night-blooming cereus, its petals like sunbursts.

  I wanted to cry and laugh simultaneously, but mostly I wanted to thank the little girl who’d drawn it.

  “Do you know what it means?” Harper asked.

  “I’m not sure.” My mind skipped over the events after the accident, like a stone across water, settling on the memory of the old Gullah woman and my father. I studied the picture. “I think it means that saying good-bye to someone doesn’t mean they’re gone from your life forever.” I touched the flower with my finger, feeling the wax of the crayon, its bloom as large as my crayoned head. “And that when all you’re given is one night to bloom, you should go for it.”

  I looked up and met the eyes of a woman trying to make sense of a universe that sometimes made no sense at all.

  I folded up the picture and handed it back to Harper. “Thank you for showing it to me.”

  She shook her head. “I want you to keep it. And we can ask her about it when she wakes up.”

  I smiled and nodded quickly, eager to leave before the dam holding back the tears broke. I was glad I couldn’t see Gigi in ICU. Because I didn’t want to think of her that way; I wanted to think of her as the little girl in pink holding the hand of an angel while two more watched over her.

  “I’ll go now and tell Helena. Please keep me posted.”

  “Thank you,” Finn said. And as Harper began to sob, he gathered her in his arms and I turned away, gathered my belongings, and left. The car was waiting where Finn had said it would be, and I climbed into the back.

  I was grateful for the throbbing in my head that wouldn’t let me sleep, allowing me time to resurrect old prayers I hadn’t uttered in more than seventeen years and to wonder why an old woman who had been through so much would suddenly decide to end her life.

  CHAPTER 32

  Eleanor

  It was after midnight by the time the car dropped me off at Luna Point. I had fallen into a fitful doze despite my headache, and dreamed of trees and angels and my father. I dropped my overnight bag and the Piggly Wiggly bag with my purse in the foyer, then walked through the sleeping hou
se to the sunroom.

  I threw open the door into the summer night and stepped out into a dark where not even the stars dared to show their light. The night sounds of the marsh and the smells of water and summer grass brought the old Ellie back to me in waves, the girl with the brave heart and fearless soul. I needed her now, more than ever. If I was going to be any use to Gigi and Finn, and even Helena, I needed Ellie to move back permanently. I felt her hovering, waiting for me to bring her back.

  There is no risk in wanting something you can never have. Helena’s words no longer made me angry, just ashamed. Ashamed that my father knew what I’d become, the father who’d risked his life on runs where other shrimpers wouldn’t because he believed in the dreams he had for our family. Because he believed I was good enough to go to Juilliard. Because he loved us. The only risks I’d taken since the day he’d died were simply stupid stunts to make me feel again. I’d been asleep all these years but hadn’t known it. All shut-eye ain’t sleep.

  “Come back to us, Gigi,” I whispered to the moonless night, hoping her angels would take the message to her. I needed her to come back so I could thank her for teaching me so much. I thought of her short life and her health struggles, but I knew that even if her life was short, she would say it had all been worth it. She lived each day with both eyes wide and an open heart, and I needed her to wake up so I could tell her she was right.

  I retreated back into the sunroom, closing the night behind me. I was too wound up to go to sleep, knowing that when Helena woke I’d need to tell her about the accident. All she knew now was that Finn had called to tell her that we’d be staying in Charleston for the night. I hoped the half-truth had at least granted the old woman a night of restful sleep.

  I sat down in one of the armchairs and picked up the television remote, then put it down again. I was in no mood for the late-night television of old reruns and white-toothed men shouting at me to buy food choppers and exercise machines. I wanted to call Finn, but I didn’t want to wake him just in case he’d managed to fall asleep. I had no claims to him or his daughter, but I could no longer deny that I wanted to.

  My gaze fell on the stack of unread library books by the chair. I picked through the thick history books, pausing at the small booklet I’d shoved at the last minute into my stack. The Catholic Church and the Holocaust in Hungary. I was more interested in it since finding out the name of the convent where Bernadett had taught, but I selected it now mostly because it was short enough to hold my attention when my thoughts threatened to veer off in dangerous directions.

  I fanned through the booklet, noting that it consisted of very little narrative and seemed to be just a listing of various Catholic institutions in Hungary during World War II. The words “Divine Redeemer” caught my attention, and I quickly flipped back pages until I saw the words again. The bold-faced header for the short paragraph that followed read: “Motherhouse of the Daughters of the Divine Redeemer.” Then, beneath it:

  The motherhouse sheltered 150 children in secret, mostly Jewish but many physically and mentally handicapped, relying on the underground resistance movement to supply them with food and medicine. In July 1944, following information supplied by an informant, the Nazis raided the home and took all of the children, including many of the Sisters who chose to stay with them. They were deported to Auschwitz. All believed to have perished.

  I stared at the words, all of my exhaustion vanished. My head throbbed harder, yet the pain seemed far away, disconnected from me somehow. The words moved on the page in front of me, twisting and turning, shifting positions like pieces in a puzzle. A puzzle in which the edges had suddenly formed, making the rest easier to place. July 1944. All believed to have perished.

  My mind jumped and leaped, then turned back again like a winding path around the truth. I ran through old conversations with Helena and Finn, about the night Helena left Budapest, about Gunter and Benjamin. About Helena and Bernadett’s trek to Switzerland and their tiny house above the bakery where they grew up. Yet nothing seemed connected except for the July date in 1944 and the convent where Bernadett worked. And the paintings. The paintings had come with them from Hungary, and at least one of them had belonged to a family who had also all perished in Auschwitz except for little Sarah Reichmann.

  The booklet slid from my fingers to my lap, and I let it fall to the floor. The throbbing in my head became real again, intensified by my growing sense of confusion and grief. Gigi lay in a coma, and I needed to break the news to Helena, an old woman who’d wanted to die following the death of her sister. Bernadett killed herself. It was as if all these pieces were like strings of yarn rolled in a tight ball. And at the center was an old woman with plenty of secrets.

  I dug in my purse for the pain pills I’d brought from the hospital but tossed them aside. I needed to have all my wits about me. Instead I took two extra-strength Advil that I found floating in the bottom of the inside pocket of my purse, then lay back against the chair and closed my eyes.

  Helena

  I dreamed again that the Danube was blue, and that I walked along the bridge with my arms linked with Magda’s and Bernadett’s. We were young again, with smooth skin and bright hair, and it seemed as if war and death and separation were very, very far away. Then the sky darkened, the bombs falling like rain, and I watched as the water turned red.

  “Helena?”

  It was Eleanor. It must have been early morning, and the sun broke through the sides of the curtains. When had she started calling me Helena? I didn’t mind it, I decided. I blinked my eyes to focus them and then felt her slide my eyeglasses onto my nose. I saw the bandage on her forehead, and I suddenly knew why the river in my dream had turned red. “Where is Gigi?”

  The look in her eyes answered my question. She moved forward and took my hand, her skin as cold as my own. “We were in an accident yesterday, on our way here. A driver ran a red light. . . .” She stopped, knowing that the details didn’t matter. None of the details would alter the end result.

  She continued. “She’s in the hospital. She has swelling on the brain, and they’ve had to put her into a coma. If the swelling comes down, she has a good chance of a complete recovery. But we won’t know for a few days. Finn and Harper are with her.”

  An icy cold settled around my heart, oddly soothing me so that I could no longer feel it beating in my chest. I expressed no emotion as I looked at Eleanor’s wounded face, the tear streaks she had tried to brush away, the light that had dimmed in her eyes. It is hard to feign surprise when the news has been expected for a long time, a patient panther waiting to pounce.

  Her expression changed and I realized she thought I was in shock, had not comprehended her words. Impatiently, I pulled my hand away. “I am hungry. Is Nurse Kester making my breakfast?”

  Eleanor drew back. “Didn’t you hear me? Gigi is in the hospital. She could die.”

  “I heard you. I am not deaf. But I am hungry.” I could not stomach food, but I wanted her to leave before I was forced to tell her how it was all my fault, that I had been waiting all these years for God to exact his punishment on me: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. A child for a child. I wanted to tell her how I had not wanted to love Gigi as much as I did, how I held back at first to protect her. And when she’d recovered from her cancer, I had felt the finger of God pass over me. But He had merely been waiting. “God giveth, and God taketh away,” I said, hoping she’d understand.

  “Do you not care?” she asked, her voice quiet and incredulous.

  I leaned back against my pillows, resigned now that I knew my fate. “Mindenki a maga szerencséjének kovácsa,” I whispered to the dark corners of my room and the ghosts who hovered there.

  “Everyone’s the blacksmith of their own fate,” she translated, saying each word slowly as if one of them would hold the answer to why I could not cry over my sweet Gigi.

  Her shoulders were rounded, her palms flat against
her pants, reminding me of the girl I’d first met—the odd mixture of defeated posture and fierce eyes. Even then, I had seen the hint of who she truly was, but I could see now that her true spirit had almost completely reemerged. I knew that if she sat down at the piano and played now, the music would be pure and exquisite and would make me weep for all the sorrows of the world. And if Gigi were here, she’d press her small hands against her heart.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, her voice tinted with anger and confusion. “How could this be Gigi’s fault?”

  I shook my head. “Not Gigi’s. Mine.”

  Her light blue eyes stared at me without really seeing me, and I could almost picture the pages of the history books she’d been reading flipping through her mind, the things Finn and I had told her, trying to draw conclusions to a story to which she did not want to know the end.

  She straightened, her eyes widening, our gazes meeting in a battle of wills neither of us wanted to lose. I felt the bonds of my web snapping strand by strand, and I flailed desperately, trying to hold on to what was left. And I did it with the only weapon I still had left.

  “How is Eve? Is her pregnancy going well?”

  Eleanor didn’t answer, but I had not expected her to. I continued. “I have a question for you—something that has been running around in my brain all these months.” I pretended to gather my thoughts for a moment. “Now that you have feelings for Finn—and do not say that you do not—do you no longer wish that she would die?”

  She jerked out of her chair. “I never said that.”

  “You did not have to. I had two sisters, remember. I would think it odd to go through life with a sister without having had that thought at least once. Love and hate are merely two sides of the same coin.”

  Eleanor stormed to the door, but until she left this house I knew that I had not yet won. She stopped, then slowly turned around, and one more strand popped, the sound as it hit the wall and slithered away loud in my ears.